It was already close to 9pm. The race was on. We had exactly five minutes to drive to a secret location before the elderly Amma closed up for the night. We had to pick up our durian.
Let me set the scene: I was in Bangkok enjoying a much-needed catch-up with close family friends during Covid-19 curfew/lockdown. In Thailand that meant citizens must be home by 9pm. It seemed miraculous that the eternally buzzing metropolis obeyed this mandate, but not a vendor, an unnecessary vehicle nor pedestrian was spotted after this hour … except the few belligerent durian hunters. Such is the love for this extraordinary fruit.
But perhaps the most ominous feature of cram reading and super learning is that their popularity is inversely related to the type of society that spawns them. The commodification of knowledge, in other words, cannot thrive for long when those expected to consume its products don’t possess the time or money to do so.
I Talk Like a River is a bold book, a defiant book. I Talk Like a River is not a book in which the stutter is the main character; actually, there is no stuttering in the book at all. As a matter of fact, even the word "stutter" doesn't appear until the final page, and then, it is with great and deliberate ownership.