An author at last!

On the third day of the Standard Chess competition at the 23rd ASEAN+ age-group chess championships, I received a message from a friend—obviously not a chess-playing one—telling me that someone from Kelantan had posted a picture of my old chess book on Facebook.

“Buku catur pertama yang ambo baca 29 tahun lepas ditulis oleh Mr Quah Seng Sun,” he’d written. And right there, beside a photo of me playing chess at the Berjaya Penang Hotel, was the book itself: CATUR. “Buku Bahasa Melayu pertama ni,” someone commented. “Legend,” wrote another. Aiyah, I’m so embarrassed to be called a legend.

There’s actually a story behind this book that I’ve never told anyone before—at least not until a few days ago when that same picture started circulating on WhatsApp too, and other people began noticing it. So finally, here’s the inside story of how CATUR came about.

It was way back in 1990 when two old friends, former classmates from our Penang Free School days, came to visit me at home. After some catching up, one of them raised the idea of me writing a chess book in Bahasa Malaysia. As far as we knew, nothing like it existed yet. Since I was already writing chess columns for The Star newspaper, they told me I’d be the most logical person to write such a book. By then, my columns had already been running for about 10 years. I’d also been the editor of a local chess magazine in English—also called CATUR—so they felt a book was a natural continuation.

But I protested: my command of Bahasa Malaysia wasn’t that great, and besides, I didn’t know any publisher. “No problem,” one of them said. He knew someone who wrote textbooks and workbooks for schools—and he was a chess player too. I asked who, and it turned out to be Saw Boo Pheng, whom I knew very well since 1972 when we both played for our respective schools (he was from Technical Institute) in the first-ever Penang Schools Sports Council (MSSPP) chess team competition.

The idea was that I’d write the manuscript in English, and Boo Pheng would translate it into BM. Once he agreed and the publisher came on board, we were on our way!

I spent weeks piecing the book together manually. This was pre-Internet, pre-chess software. Fortunately, desktop computers had already appeared, and I worked on an Intel x286 machine using an early version of Microsoft Word. I’d write one chapter at a time, print it, deliver it to Boo Pheng for translation, then retype the BM version into the computer. It was painstaking work.

The second challenge was creating the chess diagrams manually. I managed to get ready-made diagram stickers from a friend in Singapore. I’d sit with a tweezer in hand, peeling off the miniscule chess pieces and placing them on a blank board. Everything had to be labelled precisely so the publisher could match diagrams with the correct text.

Once the manuscript was done, I sent it to the publisher to be retyped into their system, which was another headache. What if the type-setters made mistakes? What if the mistakes were not spotted by the proof-readers? And sure enough, all that happened. I had to go through draft after draft—first, second, third—making corrections everywhere. Eventually, we cleaned up all the obvious mistakes. If there were any left, well, not intentional lah. We really did try our best.

When CATUR finally went to print, I was thrilled to see it on bookstore shelves despite having some trepidation about the cover design. I had not known at all that the publisher had planned to use a picture of Jimmy Liew who was at that time Malaysia's foremost chess player. Did they contact Jimmy for permission? I don’t remember how well it sold, but for the next three or four years, Boo Pheng and I received our modest royalty cheques. It didn't make us rich though. Lim Eng Siang was also credited as a third contributor, though in truth, his only role was to propose the idea in the first place! But I couldn't leave him out. For old times sake, I couldn't do that.

Then in 1994, the publisher came back and asked for an English version of CATUR. But alamak, I no longer had my original English manuscript! Back then, we stored everything on floppy diskettes and mine had gotten corrupted. So what to do? I had to retranslate the BM version back into English. The irony of it. Of course, the job was so much easier and Boo Pheng didn’t need to be involved at all. This was also a chance for me to correct mistakes spotted after the Bahasa Malaysia version had come out.

I finished the retranslation and emailed everything to the publisher. Since the manuscript was now fully digital, production became much easier. The English version, Taking Up Chess, came out in 1995 with all three of us still credited as authors.

Looking back now, I never imagined that CATUR would still be remembered after all these years, let alone spoken of fondly by people I’ve never met. It was just something I did with a couple of old friends, cobbled together with stickers, printouts and a lot of patience. A labour of love, we didn’t have grand ambitions....just the hope that it might be useful to someone starting out in chess, especially Malay-speaking students in schools.

That it turned out to be the first local chess book in Bahasa Malaysia was, in some ways, secondary to the experience of making it. But now, to hear that someone in Kelantan picked up the game from this book nearly three decades ago, and still remembers it, is both humbling and gratifying. We never know which of our efforts will last or leave an impression. Sometimes, we just do what needs to be done at the moment. If it happens to light a spark in someone else’s journey, that’s a bonus.

So yes, CATUR might’ve started small, but it seems to have travelled far in its own quiet way. I’m thankful for that.

ADDENDUM: As can be read from the glossary in the book (glosari in BM), the translations of the chess terms from English to Bahasa Malaysia were fairly straightforward except for one term. What should we call the Bishop in BM? To us, Gajah (elephant) didn’t feel quite right, despite its historical origins. The modern-day chess piece clearly depicts a bishop’s hat, not an elephant. Even chess diagrams use the bishop’s mitre to represent the piece. So we decided to go with Biskop instead. We felt it would cause less confusion for the readers. And after all these years, I still wonder whether we made the right call.