THE first thing I do when I start conversing with wildlife biologist Chrishen Gomez is to teach him a few useful phrases I learnt during the years I was involved in conservation, to impress people. Useful pick-up lines but completely useless in the long run, mind you.
Never mind that; he's suitably impressed. "When you look at a monkey, you don't call it a monkey if you don't know what species it is. You call it a primate," I instruct him, continuing self-importantly: "When you see an eagle, you don't call it an eagle — even if it looks like one. You call it a raptor!"
The brief lesson ends when he nearly laughs his head off. "Thank you for that," he finally manages to say, grinning. "Yes, that sums up my years of being involved in conservation. Useless information!" I say ruefully.
"Not entirely useless. Very helpful. It was definitely time well spent!" he offers comfortingly — which I would've believed had it not been for that wide grin that completely belied his tongue-in-cheek commiseration.
I should've known better, but I can't help showing off to young fellows that I know a thing or two about wildlife. It's an ego trip, I admit, using my entire arsenal of admittedly useless knowledge to impress people. But a totally pointless excursion where Chrishen is concerned because while I'm curled up in my chair chatting to him via a Zoom call from the comforts of my city home, he's ensconced at a remote lodge in the middle of a primary forest.
"But I'm a city boy!" he protests good-naturedly before admitting: "It's embarrassing really. I look up and go 'Ooh look at that black and white bird', and someone else points out that it's a white tailed shama or something like that." "White rumped shama," I correct him immediately. I can't help myself. And he can't help chuckling at my response. "You see? Your knowledge is useful!" he replies placatingly, eyes twinkling.
He goes on to add apologetically: "I've read some of your interviews with other conservationists and all of them have exciting origin stories… living in the forests or oil palm estates and having childhood ambitions of saving the world. I hate to disappoint you but my origin story is very dull!"
Origins aside, his accomplishments hardly make for dull reading. The 26-year-old is part of the Malaysian team with the Wildlife Research and Conservation Unit at Oxford University, developing the first genetic-based research project on the Sunda clouded leopard.
He also manages the Bornean Carnivore Programme, leading a six-member team devoted to studying the entire Bornean mammalian carnivore guild. Chrishen was also one of the 2019 Merdeka Award Grant for International Attachment recipients, recently completing his research grant with the prestigious Ivy League Brown University to further his passion for the leopard in the midst of the global pandemic.
That hardly leaves any space for further storing of useless information I tried schooling him on earlier, I note dryly. And he laughs again.
ORIGINS STORY
"I really don't have a sexy origin story," he warns me again. He shares that he had a healthy interest in sciences growing up. "It was what I always knew I wanted to do. I was relatively good at it and loved it," he enthuses.
So you were a nerd? I tease him. Brows furrowing, he leans forward and begs to differ. "See, there's a difference," he points out seriously at first, before flashing a cheeky grin. "There's a difference between a 'normal' nerd and a cool nerd. I consider myself the latter. I love what I studied. I wasn't studying because it'd give me a scholarship or an A. The information I learnt actually excited me!"
He did well enough in his studies, as all respectable "cool" nerds do. But Chrishen wasn't about to walk the well-trodden path of becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer as most straight-A students would consider; or as most Indian parents would charter for their bright children.
"You mean the holy trinity of professions?" he asks, chuckling. He's quite fortunate, he says, to have parents who encouraged independence of thought. "They taught me that it wasn't necessary to follow the crowd and to not do things just because other people are doing it."
That being said, he confesses to toying with the idea of becoming a doctor. "It did cross my mind a couple of times because I loved biology. But I was lucky enough to know a couple of doctors and quickly realised early on that I didn't love the application of sciences to treat people — although it's definitely a noble thing to do. It just wasn't something I was passionate about," he explains.
The younger of two boys, Chrishen tells me with a grin that his older brother did his family proud by becoming a lawyer. "He did me a favour by becoming the family's 'insurance policy' while I got to go on my own little path!"
There's no elegant story trope of living in the wild as a young child. "I told you so!" he laughingly protests. He grew up in Sungai Buloh. "Well that's relatively green," I offer hopefully. He replies sheepishly: "There were green patches of forest, but nothing made me curious enough to want to explore them while growing up." He did grow up around long-tailed macaques, he counters. "You can see families of them around the parks in Taman Tun Dr Ismail!"
His love story with nature is akin to a slow romance, he confesses. "I read about people who knew from young that they wanted to be conservationists. It wasn't the case for me, to be honest." Like an arranged marriage? He breaks into laughter.
"Something like that. I committed to something that I fell in love with eventually!"
But the natural world did fascinate him as he got older. The family of four spent their holidays on islands off the coasts of Malaysia. The intrepid teenager dived into the oceans and discovered a fascinating world beneath the waters. We all have that one significant experience, he says, eyes sparkling behind his spectacles.
"For me, discovering the vibrancy of colours displayed in this other unearthly universe took my breath away. I could never get over it. Every time I jump into the ocean, I see life played out on the ocean floor. I don't think that sight would ever cease to amaze me. It helped build my curiosity to want to understand it all."
STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
A degree in biotechnology was his choice in his bid to pursue sciences. "It's not very sexy," I sniff. He laughs again before agreeing wryly: "It isn't. Pursuing biotechnology sounds like a wild card choice, but..." He leans forward again, looking intently at me. "It's an insanely interesting subject. What attracted me was genetics and DNA.
Understanding how DNA can be altered is both frightening and exhilarating. We're able to understand the very fabric of life, codes and life at its very fundamental. That's why I pursued it."
Biotechnology is the use of technology and biology to solve some of today's most urgent cultural and scientific issues. Biotechnologists help astronauts deal with effects of weightlessness, research medicines and pharmaceuticals, and create fabrics for the runways of New York and Milan. Biotechnology has transformed forensic science, as portrayed in TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
The science of biotechnology is based on the DNA molecules located in the cells of each living organism. Only in the second half of the 20th century did scientists begin to learn how DNA controls the characteristics of living organisms (including plants, animals and bacteria, and the viruses that infect them).
His studies landed him in Sarawak. Like a true millennial, he sums up his stay in Sarawak in one word: "Cool!", before blithely telling me that his campus was the place where famous wildlife conservationist David Attenborough filmed an episode for one of his documentaries.
Chrishen was exposed to his first wave of conservationism at his university. "A lot of people were studying the sciences to apply it to wildlife conservation. It occurred to me that this could be made into a career. You can be an academic, professor, lecturer or researcher and earn a living from unravelling the natural world."
He goes on to add impassionedly that when he first entered the forest, he saw "… a huge breathtaking painting waiting to be understood". We don't understand most of it, he laments. We've only uncovered a small percentage of the relationships that hold our world together, he points out, but we don't understand it.
"We're mindlessly chopping our forests down and moving our green spaces here and there, and making big decisions on something we honestly don't understand. That really pulled me in. I was immediately hooked."
What finally drove him to consider conservation was when he volunteered with his peers to carry out social-based community projects. He realised that most of his university mates grew in places that had no electricity. Spending time in remote villages exposed a different type of reality than he was used to back in Kuala Lumpur.
"I'm extremely thankful I studied in a local university," he says softly. "At the end of my studies I realised that there were so many problems out there."
He adds: "Poverty, lack of basic sanitation, depletion of forests… If I turned a blind eye to all of them and just want to make my money, have security, retire at an early age, then it would be a life badly spent and I would've failed."
The issues were many but he had to pick one. "I was equally interested in alleviating poverty but it was about competence and knowing the issues you're dealing with and having the skills to deal with them. Like I said, my journey was less of a romanticised path than it was a calculated, logical, step."
Practical too, I observe. "Oh I don't know about practical. Especially when I later find myself being rescued out of ditches and ravines, I doubt it was a practical move!" he laughs heartily.
BECOMING A CONSERVATIONIST
The idealistic lad was eager to play the swashbuckling hero. "I was ready to take big corporations down, stop deforesting, end unsustainable practices and reforest plantations. I mean I had big ideas!" he tells me ruefully.
A meeting with a long-time conservationist Dr Melvin Gumal of Wildlife Conservation Society changed it all. Chrishen was enthusiastic and brimming with great ideas. But the blunt conservationist shot down his ideas.
"I've spent too much time with people like you who have grand ambitions but no desire to do anything tangible" he told the crestfallen young graduate. "What you need to do now is get into the muck, get your hands dirty, get involved with research, work in the field for a while and then you'll understand what I've told you today."
It was painful, he confides. "What I wanted to hear, like all typical millennials, was certainty. I wanted him to tell me, 'Chrishen, conservation is the field for you. You're the best person for the job. You'll be extremely successful in this.'" I can't help but snigger at this because he has found out — as did I — that conservation is really a tough and thankless vocation.
"Yes, I know," he adds, sighing. Melvin was not having any of it. "He knew what I was looking for and he was quick to put me in my place and set my expectations right. To this day — I've repeated this story so many times — it was so necessary to have someone saying these hard things to me. He remains a mentor to me till today!"
The right opportunity came along eight months later. Oxford University was looking for researchers to study the Sunda clouded leopard. "That was the option available," he confesses, adding candidly: "If the project was about studying birds or frogs, it would have interested me all the same. My passion didn't evolve around wildlife but it was fixated upon the cause as a whole."
He confesses to knowing next to nothing about clouded leopards until he applied for the job. "It was a steep learning curve," he says wryly. "But I still think it's the perfect job for me."
It wasn't about the wildlife, he adds. It was looking at the larger questions as opposed to what's known about the species. "Instead of saying I'm studying the clouded leopard because I want to know why it's yellow in colour, the reason instead is that I'm studying the clouded leopard because forests are depleting and the animal will tell me something about the effect of that depletion. The animal is the indicator or a kind of litmus test. That's super cool because I didn't know we could do that. With science."
He packed up, moved to Sabah, where he met his boss Dr Andrew Hearn at the airport. They had dinner in town and drove into the forest. "It was raining, I had to juggle my bags and cross a narrow bridge (it was a board really and not much else!) to get to our research station!" he recalls.
Yet with all of that knowledge, with all of that insight he has received, no amount of information can compare with being in a place, and getting a sense of the work from the inside out.
"It's a tough job," he concedes. "Ask any conservation practitioner, and they'll suggest the same." He recounts some of the backbreaking work he and his team had to do, like tying big heavy frames of traps on their backs and hiking up the mountain to install these structures. "It takes the whole day. We leave at 7am and return at 2am!"
There were two occasions, he recounts, when they assembled the structure and realised the doors didn't fit. "So someone had to run down the mountain, get the doors and hike back up. That took another six hours. It's those experiences that can break you and make you wonder if it's all worth it."
Did you discover your inner Mowgli? I tease. "My research assistants would tell you otherwise!" he replies, chuckling. He's gotten lost in the forest many times. "I'd take one path and my assistants would take another. Then when I emerge out of the forest looking all gnarly, scratched and tracking mud, they'd ask: 'Apa kamu lalu (What did you go through)?'" he recalls half-exasperatedly.
Physical and biological risks present an array of challenges for wildlife and other natural resource professionals, and members of the public in their pursuit of outdoor recreation. Wildlife professionals, in particular, are often faced with natural hazards with great frequency as a routine part of their job requirements and duties.
"It comes with the job description," he agrees dryly. From gibbons flinging their faeces at him, having a stalker rhinoceros hornbill that insists on attacking him every time he visits the outhouse to driving his car into a ravine — some of these harrowing incidents did make him question his life choices.
But as he held the clouded leopard in his hands for the first time, he knew he had made the right decision. "That's why I say that getting into conservation was like an arranged marriage for me. Once I saw this creature in the wild and witnessed how it fits so perfectly within the ecosystem, I can no longer imagine, nor did I want to imagine a world without clouded leopards."
It's a different kind of "awesome" he tells me proudly. And he hasn't looked back since. "Conservation is the perfect fit for me," he concludes, smiling.
Despite being schooled on naming birds and primates, the young city boy has certainly made it good in the wilds of Borneo. The romance is real, Chrishen promises with a grin. And as with all great marriages, the journey has only begun.
The Merdeka Award Grant for International Attachment held biannually with the Merdeka Awards honours young Malaysians, between the ages 22 and 35, with the opportunity to participate in short-term collaborative projects/programmes of up to three months, with internationally-recognised host institution in select disciplines such as education, arts, sports, community/social work, environment, health, science and technology.
The next grant presentation will be held in 2021 while the winners for the 2020 Merdeka Awards held this year will be announced on Dec 10, 2020.
For details, visit www.merdekaaward.my.