Part One.   The Tale of the Photos

Last week, I walked into the well-lit store with the big, bright and bitten apple logo, in my neighborhood mall. As usual, I was greeted by one of those confident-looking young attendants in blue t-shirts, name tags around their necks, and electronic tablets in hand. I said I had an appointment with the Genius Bar. I was seated at the Bar at the back of the store, and soon greeted by a Genius Bar expert. I explained when I was downloading photos, there was a warning note in my computer (a MacBook Air) that said my files were full, and I needed to delete some files.

He took a look at the little trash basket icon at the bottom of the computer screen, clicked on it, and saw all the unwanted files I had moved there. At this point, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he probably asked the question casually if he could empty the trash, to which I would have nodded consent, caught on the spur of the moment, and especially since I had wanted to delete those files in the trash in the first place.

With deft movements of his hand, too swift for my eyes, clicking, and crunching, he emptied the trash basket. Now, that would clear up a lot of space in my MacBook Air! It did! But my iPhoto application had disappeared from the computer, when we had both seen my photos neatly organized as albums and events in iPhoto before the emptying of the trash! My prized and treasured photos since 2007, from my travels, research trips for my novel-in-progress, weddings of my children, grandkids through their stages of development, all gone in a jiffy, like a wisp of smoke!

I was on the verge of tears. No worry. My Genius Bar expert connected my laptop to the external hard drive which I had been using to back up all my files, to retrieve my lost photos. But there were NO PHOTOS! According to the expert, the external hard drive had backed up all my files except for the photos! It would always remain a mystery. He took my computer into the secret back room behind the Genius Bar to search for the photos with their special equipment, but could not find them.  He then gave me the final diagnosis: the photos saved in the iPhoto application of my computer were all irretrievably lost.

Part Two.  The Tale of the Manuscript

The Genius Bar expert who tended to me at the Apple store back home in Toronto had reinstalled the iPhoto application into my laptop, after it disappeared along with all my photos stored and organized therein. Three days later, when I was visiting my parents in their town, I took my laptop again to the Genius Bar of the Apple store in their neighborhood, because there were still some glitches with the iPhoto application in my computer. The expert there gave a quick diagnosis of the problem, and said he needed just to restore the iPhoto application, and everything would be fixed. To me, the word ‘restore’ was a frightful word, evoking the wiping out of computer files.

“Will my documents be safe?” I asked.

“Oh yes, no documents will be touched. Only your iPhoto will be restored,” he reassured.

“My most important file is my novel manuscript. I can’t lose it. It’s backed up in my external hard drive, but to be safe, why don’t I buy a memory stick and back it up there as guarantee,” I said.

“You don’t have to do that. Just email the manuscript to yourself.” With that, he proceeded to send my manuscript file in my computer to my email account. “Go get a coffee. Come back in half an hour,” he said.

While I had coffee at the mall’s food court, I checked my email inbox from my phone the whole time, but the message with my manuscript attachment never arrived. Thirty minutes later, I went back to the Apple store. I asked to talk to my Genius Bar expert. After waiting for him to finish helping another customer, he went into the back room, and finally came out with my laptop. He came up to me. I sensed something was amiss.

“Something happened,” he began. “It was entirely my fault. I bear full responsibility for what happened. I pushed the wrong button, and all your files are gone. I am sorry.”

I broke into tears. Sorry? For wiping out the novel I was writing for two years, and about to finish? Did he realize what it meant? I never got the email that was supposed to have my manuscript attached. Now my only hope and salvation would be in the external hard drive that I had used to back up all my files. It had failed me with the photos. Let it not fail me with the almost completed first draft of my new novel.

Anxiously, I, and the Genius Bar expert, waited while the little external hard drive did its work, putting the backed-up files into the computer. It ran its course in ten minutes, the longest ten minutes ever. When the reinstalling was finished, we checked the restarted computer. And it was there…my manuscript, and I assumed everything else, except for the lost photos.

Epilogue

Days later, I was told by my computer savvy cousin that there was a way to retrieve deleted files, though not at Apple stores, as long as the computer was not reformatted, a fact which you’d think those Genius Bar experts would know, and should have told me. It also meant all my deleted photos could have been restored, if my entire computer hadn’t been cleaned out by the second Genius Bar expert who tended to me in my parents’ town.

It was a lesson learned. Always back up your important files in more places than one. I almost lost my novel-in-progress. I could not have rewritten, reconstructed a 75,000 word manuscript. In frustration and disappointment, I would have given up writing for good. 

As for my photos, I still have most of them stored in one of the photo services websites, Kodak Gallery. To add insult to injury, Kodak Gallery is closing in a month and a half. But that’s another story!

Led by a well-schooled guide no more than in his mid-twenties, who took us from the indoor prisoners’ blocks, cells and museums of Auschwitz to the mostly outdoor grounds of Birkenau, my group and I walked through one of the saddest times in human history. Through the entrance gate to Auschwitz, we filed in, past blocks of two and three-level red brick houses, identified by numbers, as were the prisoners who came to be just numbers.

The entrance gate to hell

Wall charts in the museum, housed in former prisoners’ blocks, told of 1.3 million, mostly Jews, but some from other ethnic groups too, deported to Auschwitz from various countries in Europe, of which 1.1 million died there, from overwork, starvation, torture, exhaustion from prolonged roll-calls in extreme outdoor weather, subjection to medical experiments, appalling living conditions, execution by firing squads or phenol injections, and most of all in the infamous gas chambers. Silently, in respect to the long dead, we filed through the rooms with glass encased displays of objects that once belonged to the prisoners who died in the camps: thousands of men’s, women’s, children’s shoes, clothing including children’s and babies’ overalls and smocks, hats and spectacles, suitcases, and, what struck me most, women’s hair, weighing hundreds of tons, collected in a display case that ran the length of one room, along with the fabrics that were woven with such. A painful ordeal to lay eyes on them, and yet they were there, to remind and shock. And when I walked through the narrow hall with photos of victims, some in their middle years, some too young to die, some drained and desperate, some with expressions still radiating hope, with their years of birth and death inscribed, I wept.

One of the prisoners' blocks at Auschwitz - on the right was an execution wall where prisoners were shot

At Birkenau, a short bus ride from Auschwitz, we saw low brick and wood buildings with chimney stacks, behind barbed wires. The chimneys were supposedly for furnaces used to heat up the prison cells. However, the cells were never heated, and living conditions remained most appalling. Led by our guide, we walked in the rain on muddy ground to the crossroad near the train tracks where the newly arrived prisoners had once stood. There, our guide described the scene of the arrival of one such train-load. The prisoners would be divided into two or three groups. Those too young or old or weak to work would be sent immediately to the shower, where they were ordered to strip and even told to remember the numbers on their clothing and belongings, for retrieval after the shower. Only in their last moments did they realize they were doomed inside the chamber of death, when the deadly gas, Zyclon B, descended from vents in the ceiling. Such a scene was to be repeated numerous times from the time the gas chamber was used for extermination of the prisoners in 1941 until 1945. By a forest at the far end of the camp, we saw ruins of the gas chambers and the crematorium, demolished by the Nazis before their surrender, to eliminate traces of their crimes.

Prisoners’ houses with chimney stacks at Birkenau behind barbed wire fences

Ruins of a gas chamber, blown up by the Nazis before their surrender

Finally, we stopped at the end of our route, where a modest stone monument to the dead at Auschwitz and Birkenau was erected, with a big arrangement of fresh white roses laid on its front step. On either side of the main monument were horizontal tablets at regular intervals, each with words in a different ethnic language cast on it, all a desperate, silent scream in the common language of humanity:    

The widest part of the Foster City lagoon system is called the Central Lake

A majestic egret perched by the edge of the lagoon

Concerts, and an occasional wedding, take place in the amphitheatre in the park by the Central Lake. Nearby, a wooden gazebo protrudes into the lake, peaceful by the light of dawn, romantic by the reflections of the rising moon. On sunny days -- and most days are sunny, except for some winter rain -- the lagoon is oftentimes a thoroughfare for pontoons, rowboats and canoes, as well as windsurfers. Dragonboat races are held too on weekends. 

I've had the privilege to return to Foster City many times, a home away from home. To me, it is one of the most peaceful areas in America, from my experience of having lived for a good number of years and traveled quite extensively in the country. I could harbor a sense of personal security strolling along the lagoon at night, or waiting by a curb for my taxi in the early morning hours. And the place boasts of a laudable public school system, and a busy, user-friendly public library. It even has good, authentic Chinese food! Some dream town in the midst of the concrete jungles of America, and with the best Californian weather. You just wonder: is it for real?

Townhouses on the edge of the lagoon

The mirror in the Central Lake

The Foster City lagoon at dawn

Refer to "Sarawak" in the Travel Section of this website for more photos from my 2008 trip there. 

The Astana, home of the White Rajahs in the 19th and 20th centuries when Sarawak was under the rule of the Brooke regime

A "five-foot way" in front of shophouses in the Main Market, Kuching

Atap Street, a Chinese bazaar in Kuching', where houses used to have atap (palm leaf) roofs in the 19th century 

The present-day riverfront boulevard in Kuching, capital city of Sarawak

The present-day Courthouse in Kuching facing the Sarawak River, where much of the action during the Chinese Miners' Rebellion of 1857 took place

Model of a Fish-Eye Junk at the Chinese Historical Museum in Kuching. Immigrants from southern China went on sea journeys in these boats to Borneo in the 19th century, where they made a living as miners, plantation workers, or merchants.

A kopitiam (local coffee shop or teahouse), a popular joint in towns and bazaars in Sarawak

Modern-day Bau, a mining town since the 19th century, about 22 miles from the capital Kuching. Its gold mines attracted many Hakka (Chinese) immigrants to its locale in the 19th century. Its former name was Mau San, named after the shape of the mountain shaped like a hat.

The remains of the famous flag pole in Mau San, perhaps the only remnant of the mining town that was destroyed after the failure of the Miners' Rebellion against the Brooke regime in 1857

Site of the miners' town of Mau San which was destroyed after the failure of the Miners' Rebellion in 1857

The temple in Jugan, where the leader of the Hakka miners and of their rebellion against the Brooke regime was buried after he was killed in the rebellion

Entrance to Ghost Cave in Bau, where widows and orphans of slain Hakka miners took refuge and were burnt or smoked to death following the failure of the Miners' Rebellion. An altar was erected at the entrance to appease the spirits of the dead in the cave.

Present-day Siniawan, a bazaar about 5 miles from Bau Town, the scene of the bloody battle between the Hakka miners and James Brooke's men on February 24th, 1857

A boat crossing between the banks of the Sarawak River at Siniawan, a riverside bazaar about 5 miles from Bau

Present-day Buso, another bazaar upriver about 5 miles from Bau, another scene of the massacre of Hakka miners as they fled from Kuching after their rebellion failed

Up the river from Kuching into Dayak territory, where this native tribe used to headhunt in days of old

Interior of a Dayak longhouse

The pain is in the story that's unfolding, the sadness and pathos it invokes, to the point that I cry whenever I reread the all too poignant and emotionally charged scenes. Placing myself in some situations in the story reduces me to tears. And yet, they have to be written. 

A good number of chapters in my novel in progress are set in a Bidayuh longhouse. The difficulty is in the remoteness of the subject matter. Writing about the Bidayuh Dayak tribe of Borneo, their customs and lifestyle, in the ninetheenth century is a challenge, to say the least. My sojourn to a Bidayuh kampong, Ana Rais, during my visit to Sarawak in February was helpful, but could not satisfy my story needs, and I came away with many unanswered questions, some of which had not come up until I actually got down to writing those chapters involving my Bidayuh characters. I found myself treading on thin ice. How could I write about these longhouse natives from pre-colonial days when I had only been briefly acquainted with a twenty-first century Bidayuh kampong? Seeking a mentor who could be a source of reference on the Bidayuhs has so far been futile. Books on the subject matter are next to zero. I therefore have resorted to the Internet, to find information on the many aspects of Bidayuh life in the nineteenth century. And I have not been disappointed. There is a wealth of knowledge out there on my subject matter. But how reliable is this pool of information? When the first draft of the novel is completed, I will have to negotiate someone who would be able and willing to read the draft and point out any errors regarding the Bidayuhs. But that will be another problem. 

Suffice it to say that the novel is taking shape. The first draft of many drafts to come is two-thirds down. It is a labour of love. I am confident the fruit will be sweet, whenever it ripens.