PLOT SYNOPSIS & TIMELINE

Facing the economic recession in 1997 Malaysia, 16 year old Lestari gets kicked out of her youthful rock band, which also consists of her friends, contributing to her already dwindling social life, and cracking the images of herself she tries to put together. However, Lestari doesn’t get the opportunity to mourn this development for long before she is forcibly ripped from her reality, tearing the matter of everything surrounding her into an infinite pool of possibilities that she equally infinitely exists in. As her mind splits apart, the ordered timeline of events that is meant to occur splits apart as well, causing a plethora of uninvited and unpredictable issues that might rival the fact that she was kicked out of her band.

DETAILS & CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT NOTES

Berkembang takes place during November to December 1997 in the city of Klang, the royal capital of Selangor, Malaysia. Berkembang, the title of this story, is an Indonesian word, and translated it has several meanings, but the general description is to progress, develop, bloom, or evolve.

Lestari among other students attend a National Secondary School, and her band specializes in rock, but the majority of the adult/older cast is involved in STEM careers. The reason for this is to contrast the youth and older cast and interests, but also, it’s used as a metaphor for the concept of aging and social assimilation. Not to say that the older characters are incapable of consuming and analyzing media & entertainment, and same for the younger cast, they also have interest in their respective maths and sciences, but I want a broad generalization that I could further expand on.

Initially, the story wasn’t meant to be written like this or contain the contents that it currently has now and in fact was a majority white cast in America, but as I got older I became more curious about my home country and why most of my family didn’t live there, but instead spread out throughout the globe. So I went down a rabbit hole of research. And you might wonder, why then, does this story take place in Malaysia and not Indonesia, and simply, because I chose it to be that way. I believed that back then my characters were applicable to any location and culture, but with the way the story was structured, it felt fitting to put them in Klang.

I also desired to learn more about the politics and individual cultures in Southeast Asia, especially their relationship with political ideologies (more specifically communism and socialism), especially since so much of the tragic events involved with those in the region seemed to be secretly backed by U.S. forces and their own interests. It’s also interesting to contrast pre colonial Southeast Asia to post colonial society, seeing how previously socially acceptable things turn into crimes, or become stigmatized.