Chapter I — Every Journey Has Its Own Beginning
Memory is an unreliable travelling companion. It preserves what should have been forgotten and quietly disposes of what once seemed indispensable. Ask someone about the first journey of their life and they are unlikely to remember dates, airports or flight numbers. They may instead recall the smell of an aircraft cabin, the pattern of the carpet in a terminal that no longer exists, or a new friend that returned home in a suitcase and, for reasons nobody thought worth questioning, never truly left again.
This story begins with one of those friends.
Almost eighteen years ago, in fact 17, my parents travelled from Hong Kong to Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo, taking me with them despite my complete inability to appreciate either geography or aviation. We flew with Garuda Indonesia, whose aircraft at the time often carried small reminders that the country extends far beyond beaches and volcanoes, into forests inhabited by creatures that much of the world only knows through documentaries. Somewhere during that journey a tiny pluh orangutan wearing two high visibility jackets with the company logo joined our family. Whether he was handed to me by a member of the cabin crew or appeared by some other means has become impossible to establish with certainty; photographs prove only that, by the time we reached Borneo, he was already there. Well the only prove is him with my older sister Miffa Chan.
He did not arrive with a biography. That would come later.
His first name was Pelo Pelo.
The explanation is disappointingly simple. As a child I had concluded that every monkey, every ape and every orangutan shared the same defining characteristic: they possessed an unreasonable quantity of hair. Children rarely seek originality when naming things. They seek evidence. In my defence, the argument was difficult to refute.
Years later he would become known as Mr. Gutang, a name by which airline personnel, travelling companions, members of the Wild Bunch (TeddyLand) and assorted superheroes have addressed him ever since. At the time, however, he was merely another plush orangutan returning from South Asia with a family who could not possibly have imagined that he would one day accumulate more air miles than most people.
Nobody notices the beginning of these stories while they are happening. Only much later do they become obvious.