REMEMBERING COLUMBIA: SCHOOL, TUMOR, TRAUMA AND SKETCHES…

By Mansor bin Puteh

In short this is a story about how anyone could be belittled, chided, criticized and denied a scholarship for getting into Columbia… Only in Malaysia, it can.

I was supposed to have enrolled at the Film Division, School of the Arts for the Fall of 1977; however, because I had failed to secure a Malaysian government scholarship, I had to work as a journalist when my appeal was approved but as a study loan.

It was fun and exciting to be able to gain admission into Columbia while still a student who was in his final semester at the School of Mass Communications, Mara Institute of Technology (ITM), majoring in Advertising and not yet finished school.

And especially when ITM was such a young institute of higher learning in Malaysia and who had not yet have any international reputation, save for the fact that many of the lecturers at the School were American Peace Corps volunteers so it was like an American academic institution, too, in many ways.

So I was off to Columbia as a student for the Masters of Fine Art in the Film Directing track starting in the Fall of 1978 instead.

I left Malaysia on 13 August, 1978 and stopped at Brussels for eight hours before going to London for twelve days and back at Brussels for another eight hours transit, and arriving at Kennedy Airport in New York City on 27 August and at night.

I stayed at Sloan House near the Madison Square Garden and post office from where I took the Number 1 Local train to go to Columbia to register with school starting in early September.

It has been forty years since all this happened. But it does not feel this long ago that all this happened.

I did some sketches of the campus and also of my Room 602, Harmony Hall, other than to take photo of them. Unfortunately, I did not take many photos at the Film Division and of the students who attended the same classes as I did.

But I have been back to the campus a few times, the last was in March/April of this year.

It is always an emotional experience for me when I am back at Columbia. And unlike other students then, I was inflicted with ‘a benign tumor of the upper left tibia’ that forced me to undergo a biopsy at the St. Luke’s Hospital and two surgeries at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, all made possible with the student health insurance for which students then paid US$40 per semester to get a coverage of US$100,000 to cover all medical expenses.

I was in my second semester and it was in winter, when I felt a sensation in both my knees; the right knee had a worse sensation. I thought it being winter and I was not familiar with such weather, coming from Malaysia, which is halfway around the world and as far as New York City could be, that the sensation I felt would be due to the weather.

It was not. I went to the health center and was told by Dr George Unis who suspected that I might have a tumor; but he was not sure if it was benign or malignant. He guessed that it could be benign.

I was admitted into St Luke’s Hospital where a biopsy confirmed that the tumor was benign. I was relieved. And I was on two crutches afterwards.

I was given a one-year medical leave by the then co-chairman, Milos Forman and went to Boston to recuperate after the first surgery at Sloan-Kettering conducted by Dr Ralph C Marcove, and I decided to return to Malaysia for three months before flying back to New York City to resume class.

Most of the time when immediately after I was diagnoses as having the tumor, life changed a lot for me; but no one knew what I was feeling inside.

The threat of metastasis when the tumor would go to the chest was the most damning experience I had to endure.

And the doctor said I would need to wait fifteen years before I would know if the threat had gone.

I had to take chest x-rays every year, and each time the result was good. I felt relieved, but that the result of the x-ray was only good for that moment, did not make me totally relieved.

Fortunately, nothing happened fifteen years after the last surgery I had at Sloan-Kettering in July, 1981, after I had finished school and was waiting to return to Malaysia to an uncertain future in film since the industry in Malaysia was non-existent so to speak.

Milos had won Oscars for Best Director for ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ before I went to Columbia and was in college in Malaysia for a degree in Advertising, and won another Oscar in the same category for ‘Amadeus’ which he won after I had left Columbia.

So the three years I was at Columbia was not good for him Oscar-wise.

Because of my unusual experience and the trauma I had experienced that I had neglected to work on my master’s thesis, a chore which was not so difficult for me to work on over a weekend to come up with a ten to fifteen minutes of film, so this is going to add to the new trauma I have to bear until the time comes when I finally graduate from Columbia…

It was not easy for me to get a government grant to produce my master’s thesis film which I decided to do in Malaysia, and in the form of a Malaysian feature film, that I was certain could be substantial, and introduced Malaysian films to the faculty, too, and wherever it would be shown, in film festivals and special screenings, etc.

Maybe there is a good reason for all that I had to experience and the things that had happened to me. Only time will tell if this is so.

(On 2 July, I donated blood for 500 times and it was covered by the Malaysian media. And I could be the filmmaker in the world to have donated blood this many times, if this matters!)