Let us not judge him too harshly he is a poor young man who should be left to deal with his problems in private, one magazine said, quoting a line from an interview with Vivian Woo, another Malaysian-born Taiwanese starlet who dated Gary for a few months. His heart is made of gold; its just that he has a bad temper and sometimes does not know how to control it, Vivian said. Thats why people think he is a disgusting person. When asked if he was ever violent with her, she replied, No comment. The picture they ran with the front-page interview was of Gary in the bar on the Bund in Shanghai, his beautiful profile revealing a man defeated by his weaknesses. How could such an innocent face be capable of such dark hatred? This is the question the papers ask time and time again a question that fascinates the general public, even people who are not interested in pop music.
It did not take long for the gutter press to find its way to Garys hometown in the north of Malaysia. Low-cost flights are so abundant nowadays that it is easy to send a small army of reporters from Hong Kong or Shanghai all the way to rural Malaysia. Within a week there were numerous stories of Garys troubled adolescence, all the fights he got into when he was a teenager, before he won his first talent contest. Various newspapers bore testimonies of local youths who supplied snippets of information that proved Garys waywardness even from a young age, his propensity for physical violence. One time, ah, I call him a bad name. Just joking only, what! That time, we all about thirteen year old, said one young man, a truck driver for a local cement company. Suddenly, ah, he just take a brick and whack my face, ha, like that. In the photo, the man points to his jawbone, his face creased in pain as if the act had been committed yesterday. From the cheap streaky yellow highlights in his hair and the gold bracelet on his wrist, it is obvious to most people that he is a small-town gangster, like many of the other people interviewed in connection with Garys scandalous life, but this fact is not relevant to the sensational story at hand. Readers do not want to know about those incidental lives: The truck driver drives his trucks; the ice-cream seller sells ice cream. People are interested only in those lives that are ruined. For when something is ruined, you can use the rubble to reconstruct something completely different, something that never really existed this is something that Gary is beginning to realize.
As he sits in his hotel room, looking at the newspapers spread out across the floor, Gary reads about himself with all the detached haziness of a dream: The reassembled fragments of his life add up to someone who is definitely him but also not him a half-imagined, half-genuine Gary, whom he has problems recognizing. It is exactly how he feels when he sees himself in his music videos. He remembers hitting the truck driver twelve, thirteen years ago, when they were both still boys. With a brick, it is true though it was only a fragment of a brick, so small that he could hold it concealed in his fist. And while Gary did make contact with the other boys face, the boy was able to dodge the full impact of Garys swing and was therefore not seriously hurt. He had lain on the ground for a long time after Gary hit him, the shock of Garys attack wounding him far more than the actual blow. It was the first real fight that Gary got into, and it emboldened him, made him feel strong. Gary remembers standing over his adversary, the other boys friends huddled in a semicircle around their fallen comrade. Some of their faces appear in the newspapers; Gary recognizes them older, bonier, the harshness of their faces accentuated by age, talking about how Gary was always armed with dangerous weapons, an iron bar, a penknife. He can remember, too, their endless taunts the bad words thirteen-year-olds call one another: bapok, chibai, kaneenabucan remember crouching in a fetal ball on the ground as they kicked and punched him; can remember the moment he saw the piece of broken brick and picked it up in his hand, swinging his arm as fast as he could; can remember the gang leaders open face, the confusion and shock; can remember the wild sensation of adrenaline pumping into his forehead, the soft crunch of the boys jawbone, the crazy exhilaration as the boy dropped to the floor, the knowledge that he could and would do this many times again in his life, that with every punch or kick he threw, he would feel this doped-up rush once more. Above all, he can remember the sad emptiness as the excitement later drained away from his veins, leaving him to realize that even his newfound source of ecstasy would truly never satisfy him, that it would always lift him to great heights before letting him plummet once more.
Of course, the newspapers managed to track down his foster father a wizened, leather-skinned man standing behind the metal-grille door of a small, badly kept single-story link house in a bad part of Kota Bharu. The photographs show the tiny cement yard in front of the house, the rusting, disassembled handlebars of an old motorbike, a pile of deflated tires, an empty cage that might once have contained a few chickens or a medium-size dog, and a clay pot full of weeds. The stories describe how, from behind the bars of the door, he shouts obscenities in Hokkien at every visitor. He is not used to company; he does not welcome strangers. One reporter recounts being physically chased from the house by this old grandfather wielding a broomstick. Now we know where Gary gets his tendency for confrontation! the journalist mocks. It is a hilarious image: a frail pensioner, barely five feet tall, chasing a young fashionable journalist from his shabby home, little more than a shack, wielding a broomstick. It makes readers laugh this whole affair is not very serious at all. Thats what these provincial people are like; their lives are hard but at the same time (lets admit it) slightly comic. The harshness of their meager existence makes them act in strange ways. You cant really blame Gary for behaving erratically, for he can never escape his roots. He is a superstar who drank $1,000 bottles of champagne at the age of twenty-two, but at heart he is still a small-town ruffian a miscreant who will never be able to change. His whole life from start to present has been ridiculous.
Gary tries to remember if this little old man ever used a broomstick to hit him: rattan cane, broken table leg, plastic bucket, worn canvas boot, strip of car tire consigned to scrap and, yes, a stump of a broomstick. He would use any banal domestic object that happened to be in his field of vision at the time of one of his tempers, but he never used his hands or fists, as if he was afraid of making contact with Gary directly, as if even a sharp blow with the back of his hand might involve a split-second touch of Garys skin. Gary had just turned eleven when his mother died and he came to live with this man, the skinny hunchback cousin of hers, a man who could barely support himself in retirement, never mind a hungry, growing child. At the age of sixty-six, he was still working part-time in a scrap yard to support himself, so it was no surprise that he did not take well to the arrival of a child in need of looking after. It was no surprise, too, that he beat Gary regularly, for he was already an alcoholic long before Gary arrived.
But this is not a tale of misery; it is a tale of comedy. Because there is something amusing in the gradual unearthing of Garys life, for sure there is. Everyone who reads these news articles says, Oh, how terrible, how sad, what a horrible boy he is, what a tragic story, but they laugh too. They snigger at the calendar of scantily clad girls that hangs on the porch of Garys foster fathers house, the kind of cheap freebie that you get when buying gas or beer, clearly several years out of date but still hanging there because its owner is a dirty old man can you imagine, a grandpa his age looking at pictures of young girls like that. When there is an interview with one of Garys childhood acquaintances on TV, viewers make fun of his accent, for it is very unsophisticated. When rural Chinese people speak English, it sounds as if they are speaking Hokkien. An den I got say him, ey, why you want lie me, I no money oso you like dat one, ah? Many people, ah, they don like him is because he no money ma, so he got steal people handphone, people money. One time I got say him, ey, why I don do anything oso you lai kacau wo? Just say like dat oso kena wallop one. The viewers dont mean to be rude, but even when this guy speaks Mandarin, it is so thick with Hokkien overtones and also mixed in with Malay words that it is really funny to listen to you dont even know what language he is speaking!
Once you have seen and heard these comic snippets from his past, Garys recent antics seem pretty hilarious too. Watch again the video of him beating up the man in the luxury bar in Shanghai: He is swaying and unsteady, raising his fists as drunk people do in films. When he lifts the wooden signboard overhead and brings it crashing down on the mans body, over and over again, he looks as if he is the villain in an old slapstick movie or even a cartoon, where people fall from great heights or get crushed by falling weights and all you do is laugh at them. His body is tiny compared to that of the inert fallen victims a seagull pecking at the corpse of a walrus. The single word on the sign flashes before you. WOW! WOW! WOW!
Gary himself feels like laughing when he sees these images. Surrounded by newspapers strewn across the floor of his hotel room his agent has every single newspaper and magazine delivered daily to his room as punishment for the mess he has gotten the whole company into he sees just how ridiculous this situation is. If he were not the subject of these stories, he would be eager to read all of them, because there is a sense of unreality about this whole affair no one could possibly be so idiotic. Every day he would want to get the cheap newspapers and magazines with colorful covers and ask himself, chuckling: How can someone so famous be so goddamn stupid? He would be fascinated but, frankly, he wouldnt take any of it seriously.
And when he zaps through the channels on TV and sees people he knew in past times, he begins to giggle. Here is one, a boy who extorted money from Gary for two years, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The money Gary had was not even worth the effort, but the boy did it anyway, he and his band of friends, until the day Gary pushed him into a monsoon drain. And now here he is, showing off his fat fleshy nose, which he claims Gary broke in a fight. He is wearing the uniform of a fast-food restaurant the first KFC to open in that small provincial town. When he speaks to the journalist, he tries to summon up long-suppressed pain, his eyes narrowed, his voice anguished, as if the event traumatized him, but the camera picks up a hint of a smile even as he talks about how Gary always had a dark soul and how everyone feared him. This guy who spends his days serving fried chicken and coleslaw and his nights racing scooters with his Ah Beng friends around a small town in the north of Malaysia he is so proud that someone has come all the way from Taipei to ask him questions and put him on TV. He is ridiculous; he makes Gary want to laugh out loud. LOL LOL LOL.