The Competition
By my third evening in the Cameron Highlands I was exhausted. The area fourteen hundred metres above sea level was known for its tea plantations, strawberry fields and, most notably, excellent hiking trails. I had taken full advantage of the latter, hiking all over the place in recent days.
By the time I returned to the hostel my shirt and shorts were covered in a mixture of water, from all the wet foliage I had passed through in the preceding hours, and sweat, from all the sweating I had done. My shoes were caked so heavily in mud that you would be excused if you thought they were originally coloured brown. Exhausted, I retired to a couch in the common area of the hostel to read a book and relax in my own company. That didn’t last long.
“Asher, are you in the Shit Shirt competition?” a voice asked me. My initial thought was that this was someone trying to insult me. Was I being dissed? I looked down at my t-shirt. It was a plain, off-white shirt, one of the many single-coloured t-shirts I had been travelling with and wearing for months. No one else ever seemed to have a problem with my choice in apparel. Why were my fashion choices being questioned at this juncture?
Maybe I had misunderstood. “What’s the Shit Shirt Competition?” I asked, unsure if I was taking the bait and setting myself up for further ridicule. I was told it wasn’t a joke. There was a real competition about to start with around fifteen people in the hostel taking part. Each person involved would draw a name from a hat and they would then have to buy a shirt for that person. We’d each have to wear that top to dinner. That was it.
Apparently this was not an uncommon activity at a hostel on an evening. I had never encountered this tradition so I begged to differ. But despite this, and despite the fact that the whole activity seemed quite wasteful and encouraged people to buy clothes that they’d then get rid of after a single use, I decided to take part. I thought I might even benefit from the whole exercise, I needed some warm clothes. After all, I had been freezing for the past few days.
The day I arrived in the highlands it was raining. A thermometer hanging on a cafe wall displayed the temperature. Twenty-four degrees. That was cold. The coldest temperature I’d experienced day or night for months. I shivered as the temperature dropped down to twenty-three and the rain became stronger. I didn’t have any warm clothes anymore. I’d sent them all home from South Korea twelve weeks ago. I shuddered when I read that it was likely to get down to eighteen overnight. How would I survive the night? All this while, on the other side of the world, the UK donned bikinis and speedos and headed for the coast as they endured a gruelling heatwave. It got up to twenty-four.
Back in the hostel in the highlands it was Shit Shirt Competition time. I was in the common room waiting for everyone to come back with their shirts. We’d spent forty minutes scouring the small market and a few clothing shops in town and were ready for the big reveal. The table was slowly being filled with black plastic bags, each with a name written on it. Amongst the bags, though, there was one bag who’s contents was a lot more noticeable. The bag was way too small for what it had inside, which to many didn’t look like a shirt.
“Who bought an umbrella?” Someone asked. I produced a quizzical face in response. “Uhhh it’s clearly a shirt,” I answered, “I don’t know what you’re on about.” This was the call and response that continued for each person that returned to the hostel and then looked at the table to see what I’d purchased.
But they were wrong. Sure, I had bought a children’s pink Hello Kitty umbrella, but that was in the past. It was no longer an umbrella, it was now a shirt. And it wasn’t just an umbrella. I’d also bought a fake leather belt which I’d painstakingly drilled a hole in at the end using a corkscrew and a kitchen knife. I’d threaded the belt through the spokes of the umbrella and also cut out a small section of the Hello Kitty fabric away from the frame. With the handle of the umbrella under the wearer’s arm, the cut-out section would sit snuggly under the wearer’s neck. This was no longer an umbrella, I had created a v-neck shirt. A shit v-neck shirt, and I was hoping it would be the shittest of all the shirts and that I would win. Surely the worst kind of shirt is a shirt that isn’t a shirt.
It seemed I had taken the competition a bit more seriously than others. To me, it felt like the competition had just been an opportunity to wear brightly-coloured pyjamas to dinner. To my dismay there was no judging panel and no decision as to whose shirt was the shittest. What was the point of it all? My malicious creativity had gone unrewarded, well besides the sight of a Dutch backpacker with a kids’ umbrella around his neck getting stuck into some mee goreng at dinnertime.
The person who got my name didn’t even buy me a shirt. I’d been given white and pink children’s pyjama bottoms, a Hello Kitty bucket hat that was a long way from fitting my head and yellow Angry Birds sunglasses. Did they think that the worst kind of shirt was no shirt? Maybe they were right. No, I was sure, a faux-leather belt threaded through a torn Hello Kitty umbrella was by far the shittest shirt. No one said who was the winner but in my mind I had won and that was enough for me.
