It Takes A Big Heart To Shape Little Minds
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And It Took The Whole Of Mine.
For the first year of our lives, we lived in the village where my mother was born and raised in. My brother is a bit younger than I am—he’s eight years old—and he had an English nanny who looked after him while my father worked.
We didn’t know what her name was, but she came from London with my dad. He had to take his work somewhere when we got there. That’s how we found ourselves living in the middle of nowhere, on a big estate where nobody else lived for hundreds of miles around.
There were two other villages nearby—one of them about five miles away along the road to town, and the other about thirty miles away up into the hills, near the border with Burma. So it wasn’t like we were out on a farm or anything like that: we lived in the middle of a city!
My father did odd jobs all over the place: if someone had a job that needed doing on their house, they’d call him and ask him to do it.
Sometimes he fixed stuff around the house or outside; sometimes he worked for other people doing things like digging ditches or clearing jungle and cutting down trees—things you might need to do for farming purposes, or just because they wanted to clear some space for whatever reason.
Sometimes he went hunting for the big game, too—tigers, elephants, rhinos. He used to take us out with him whenever he could: not always—it depended on whether there was any work for him at home or if he had to go off hunting. When he’d taken us out before, he usually took one of my brothers with him, but this time he decided that we should both go with him.
When we got there, he showed me around the village where he lived, then we walked around to look at the houses in the next village. Then he took me to see the house where he was working. He explained that it was built on stilts above the water level, so it would be safe during floods, which were common at that particular spot.
It seemed a very nice place—big gardens with flowers and fruit trees, big grassy lawns, lots of little paths through the flowerbeds and across the lawns. In places, there were long wooden tables under the shade of the big trees with benches set around them.
After he showed me around the village, he pointed to a big building and said it was the school. I asked if he knew any kids in the school, and he told me the names of three boys in my class. “I’ve taught them English before,” he said.
While he talked about all these different things, I started thinking about what it would be like to live here. There were plenty of interesting places to play around—there was the pond, for instance, and the river nearby. And lots of places where you could walk and climb and run.
But the most important thing to me at that age was the fact that we could ride our bicycles everywhere. My mother and father were really keen for us to learn to ride bikes early on, so we used to do lots of riding around the village until we got it right.
And even when we couldn’t ride properly yet, they let us ride around anyway, just as long as we weren’t out of sight of the house. We had a couple of bicycles each: mine was blue and my brothers were red. They were both pretty good quality bikes; ours belonged to our parents, but our friend Pong’s bicycle belonged to his father, so he rode it when we went round to their house.
We spent hours riding our bikes every day after school. Every morning Dad woke us up and made us get ready for school quickly. After breakfast, Pong would take us out on his bike, and after lunch, we’d take ours out.
It would usually be late afternoon before we got back, and Mum would be waiting for us by the front door. She’d make sure that we washed our hands and faces and changed into dry clothes. Then she’d say to us, “Now I’m going to wash your bikes and clean them up for tomorrow.” So we’d go outside with her and help her to wash our bikes and clean them up for the next day.
Pong’s father, whom he called Daddy Pong, was a big man in the village. Everybody knew him—everyone liked him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a full head of hair—his real name was Tint Hla Win, but everybody called him Daddy Pong because he used to have a little boy about the same age as I named Pong, so he was often known as Pong Daddy Pong.
Daddy Pong owned several pieces of land—about a dozen small plots dotted all around the area. Most of them were just a few acres, but a couple of them were bigger than most peoples’ whole farms. He also had a lot of cows, pigs, chickens, fish ponds, and a rice paddy.
He kept quite a few people employed working for him, but I don’t know how many exactly. Anyway, whenever Daddy Pong needed anything done—anything at all—he would tell my father to come along and help him out with it.
So Dad used to get called out to help Daddy Pong with all kinds of stuff: fixing the roof on his house or building a new fence around it or helping to dig ditches for a new well. Sometimes they worked together on a job, sometimes Daddy Pong did some work alone and asked my father to watch over it while he went off somewhere else doing other work, and sometimes my father didn’t do any work at all.
Whatever he did, Daddy Pong always sent us money for helping him. It was a great way for us to earn pocket money because it meant we didn’t need to worry about earning any ourselves.
Whenever Daddy Pong wanted any kind of help from Dad, he’d send him a message and then arrange for us to meet up with him somewhere so he could give us whatever task had been set. Usually, it involved taking one of our bikes and getting it fixed up.
The first time I met Daddy Pong, I was still very young—about six years old—so I can’t really remember much about him except that he was a big strong man who looked quite tough. I remember he had two big thick fingers with nails painted yellow.
He wore sandals and short trousers all year round, which showed off his legs really well. His upper lip stuck out slightly, too—it wasn’t much, but I can see it in my mind now and it makes him look really strange. When I think back on the things he said, though, there are certain words and phrases that stand out in my memory:
“The sky is falling!” he used to shout a lot, and “That’s terrible!” He’d also use the word “fascinating”—a lot. I guess they must be the kind of words you’d expect to hear from someone who’s so interested in things, especially when it comes to the science of everything. He was an engineer, after all.
Anyway, whenever I went to meet him, he’d usually ask me if I could ride my bike, so we’d go riding together. I’d cycle behind him, holding on to the handlebars as tight as possible so that I wouldn’t fall off. I never fell off once!
I’d ride behind him like that until we got to wherever he wanted me to go. Once we got there, Daddy Pong would stop riding his bike and get down to the ground to help me fix up my bike—and then we’d go home again.
I was still pretty young then, but already I thought about what might happen to me when I grew up and left the village. One night, lying awake in bed with my head under the mosquito netting, I suddenly thought of all sorts of things.
For one thing, I imagined how hard life would be without Pong Daddy Pong around to send me off to do odd jobs for him and Daddy Pong was a big powerful man, so I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt him or his family.
But that didn’t mean I wanted to move away from where I lived—that would just make things harder for both my parents. Besides, moving away would leave all the good things here—the fresh air, the water—behind. So I decided not to worry about it yet. There were plenty of years ahead of me to consider these problems.
***
“There is nothing more mysterious than the mind,” wrote Aldous Huxley, in his book Island, “which can invent such marvelous devices as reason and faith, yet be content to believe that this world was created by chance.”
Aldous Huxley knew something about the power of faith, for he spent many years of his life as a Christian missionary in Africa. And it was his experience of the power of belief that led him to write about the nature of religion and the role that faith plays in human affairs.
In the same vein, another writer named Philip K. Dick, who was himself a Catholic convert, wrote a series of novels called The Divine Invasion which explored the nature of religious belief and its relationship with humanity itself.
Philip K. Dick’s works have often been compared with those of Aldous Huxley, particularly Brave New World, in which he describes the dangers of creating a “perfect society” through scientific manipulation of the population.
However, the two writers shared no direct connection; their literary works are separated by nearly thirty years. Nevertheless, they share a similar theme: the power of belief to shape reality and, indeed, change the very concept of what it means to be human.
In The Divine Invasion, the aliens that visit our planet have a unique ability to enter into people’s minds and manipulate the thoughts and beliefs that drive them. Through their manipulation, the aliens ultimately destroy mankind, but at the same time, they reveal the true power of the human psyche.
In the story, the alien visitors’ real goal is to learn more about how human beings think and perceive their existence in order to better understand the meaning of life. As Philip K. Dick explains: “Their method of learning was to try to find out how the mind worked.
They found that it was an extremely complicated process. But that didn’t surprise them; for, although they knew little about us, they had a fair idea of the complexity of the brain.”
In Aldous Huxley’s Island, the characters who live on the island are driven by beliefs that have become so ingrained in their lives that they cannot escape from them, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of their falsity. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley puts it in the book’s opening line:
“Men did not believe in the sun simply because it was hot; men believed in the sun because their fathers had told them it was hot—and besides, it gave light, warmth, and everything else that made life worthwhile.”
The human psyche has always been a source of great fascination for science fiction writers. It is only natural that, given the vast array of different beliefs that exist among all of the peoples of the earth, a great many writers have taken on the challenge of trying to understand the nature of belief itself.
From ancient Greece to modern-day America, there exists a rich tradition of science fiction stories that explore the question of why people believe what they believe and how that belief impacts their own perception of the world around them.
These kinds of questions have also formed an important part of several well-known nonfiction books, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which looks at the ways in which the human mind is shaped through social conditioning and the various techniques used by governments to mold public opinion and behavior.
Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s Island explores the way in which people’s individual beliefs shape their understanding of themselves and their place within the universe. Similarly, Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion explores the power of belief to reshape reality.
All three of these works share much in common, not least being their exploration of the nature and purpose of belief. In each of these books, the author examines belief not as a matter of fact, but as a subjective, personal experience that shapes the way that people perceive and interact with reality.
This kind of examination of belief is not only relevant to science fiction writers; it also forms an important component of many well-known philosophical works, including Plato’s Republic, where the Greek philosopher discusses the nature of knowledge itself and its relation to the truth.
The End