Published April, 2006
My guise is up as soon as I reach into my pocket. It’s just too Lonely Planet-perfect to resist: the smoky coals, the roasting satay ayam, the Malay man’s skilful fanning wrist. As I gingerly ease the camera out into the open, two young girls behind the stall shriek and take cover, suddenly self-conscious of the foreigner in their midst. After purchasing five satay sticks for one ringgit, I quickly wander off to explore another part of the bustling Friday night market where, as long as I don’t attempt any verbal communication, my Chinese blood can temporarily bleed into the crowd, passing me off as simply another local.
I linger with unnecessary caution at Sri Lalang’s main intersection, a crossing traveled more commonly by motorbike than by car. Helmet-less mothers, sometimes with as many as three child passengers: two toddlers up front against the handles and the oldest clutching on from behind, chug by dutifully. Most of the storefronts have closed up, leaving oil palm bunches out front for collection and the quiet rumble of Cantonese telenovelas and buzzing games from Japan to fill the warm dusk. Laughter erupts from a couple of weathered Chinese men in wifebeaters, sipping pulled tea in the coffeehouse of a tired-looking Malay sporting a black songkok, the rotund hat commonly worn by Muslims throughout Malaysia.
I notice how much more overtly race-conscious this past few weeks here has made me. Sectatranism dominates political debate and social discourse throughout this small island state with even greater command than it does in the United States. There, political correctness has only managed to stifle and elongate discussion (largely through clarificatory qualifiers repeated unto meaningless redundancy, such as “Now I’m not a racist, but…”) on issues such as affirmative action and poverty measurement, rather than lend the clarity and dignity of debate which may have been its original intention. In Malaysia, the Anti-Sedition Act is well-known for its selective use, often employed to prevent criticism of contentious state policies which selectively target bumiputeras (non-Chinese and non-Indians) as recipients of a variety of benefits. In the former, minority rights are the target of liberal protection; in the latter, majority (Malay) rights are guarded by an incumbent party whose platform is rooted in ethnic assistance.
Sri Lalang, whose name starts off sounding like that of another small Asian country but finishes with a certain Sino-lyricism, has a short but interesting history. It was founded as a concentration camp of sorts for Chinese by the British during the “Emergency,” the 12 year long civil war between Chinese communist guerrillas entrenched deep in the interior jungle and the waning British authorities. In its original incarnation, the village was fenced off, and those leaving and returning to the compound had their possessions inspected to ensure no food or goods were being smuggled out to support the revolutionary “terrorists”, who had been fighting since prior to the departure of the Japanese following World War II for an independent republic. Even bicycle tyre tubes were routinely checked in order to ensure that air was not being replaced with grains of rice.
My mother reminisces occasionally about how the leftists would come marching around the village, singing catchy anti-imperialist songs and encouraging the children to follow them – a “Little Red Pied Pipers” fairytale mash-up, one might say. Some of the more adventurous children would take up the offer, joining the others in order to combat capitalist oppression before the Federation crushed what little resistance was left. Perhaps because her father was a proud member of the anti-insurgent Home Front, my mother focused her time on school prefecture, tapping rubber and the acquisition of a bachelor’s degree overseas, eventually leaving Sri Lalang far behind.
I recently returned to the village without her. A quick motorbike tour of its small streets provided a microcosmic insight into the current state of the country’s race relations. New low-income Malay settlements were popping up on land previously used for rubber plantation, augmenting the previously Chinese-dominated town. The distinction is not difficult to see: their homes use slightly different architecture (though the same concrete and stucco material) and lack the red lanterns and altars which adorn practically every Chinese home. Prayer houses and mosques can be found nearby, rather than Buddhist temples that Chinese women could be seen making morning offerings at. Though I witnessed a couple of Indian siblings playing soccer on one street, the majority of them can still be found in a separate Tamil settlement across the highway.
Ethnicity in Malaysia is a fascinatingly complex beast. Whereas the post-native populating of the United States can be spaced reasonably accurately through a series of events (British settlement, Slavery, Irish potato famine, etc.), the same cannot be said of Malaysia. The distinction between the bumiputeras (“Sons of the soil,” meaning Malays and Natives) and the Chinese and Indians may be validated by ethnicity but certainly not through chronology: swathes of Chinese-Malaysians arrived through trade relations long before many current bumiputeras arrived from other reaches of the Southeast. At the birth of its federation, the Chinese actually comprised Malaysia’s largest ethnic group, until Singapore’s secession in 1965, selective immigration and declining birth rates landed the Malays in the lead. Such ambiguities comprise a large part of the reason why legislation which quite obviously privileges Malays—95 percent of government contracts, for example, are distributed to Malays—ahead of minority groups is greatly resented by the remainding 40 percent of the population.
Whilst being carted about by one overly-generous set of relatives and family friends after the other, I found the parallel dimensions of their Chinese existence quite striking. A Chinese in Malaysia may be born in a Chinese Maternity Hospital, educated entirely in private Chinese-language schools, eat and shop at Chinese businesses, read and consume exclusively Chinese media and observe only Buddhist practices before finally being buried, naturally, in a Chinese public cemetery. Malay need only be spoken during brief public exchanges, whilst English remains almost exclusively the language of science and foreign business. It is only when taking a break from my well-intentioned but cloying family that I was able to observe life outside of this transplanted Sino existence, wandering through mosques and Hindu temples in Kuala Lumpur between delicious roti snacking in Malay hawker stalls, admiring the graceful movement of the women and smiling at the oddly endearing veil-to-head-size ratio of pint-sized schoolgirls.
It wasn’t always the case that ethnic groups lived in such separated parallel dimensions, walking the same streets but in virtually different planes as they do now. I recently visited a street in the old capitol of Melaka where two temples, a mosque and a Tamil church laid practically beside each other. It seemed a suitable symbol of a pre-Federation Malaysia that my parents’ childhoods can harbor only nostalgia for at this point. My mother played amongst Malays and Indians and my father the same, but with Kadazans and other indigenous children thrown into the mix. When inviting Malay neighbors over for dinner, they simply made sure not to cook pork separately. It was a multiculturalism through small town practicality: folks tolerated each other because they had little reason not to, nor to interrupt their mutually beneficial economic relations.
This changed dramatically following the ascent of the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) party to national leadership. Islam became the national religion, Bahasa Malaya the formally recognized language. Malays were by law Muslims, the Chinese and Indians classified as “minority groups” and a series of legislation involving quotas and business schemes were introduced, supposedly to “pull up” the bumiputeras. Perhaps because of this, minorities banded together, setting up private institutions or even moving overseas where state ones denied them access, and marrying amongst their own rather than face forced conversion. I find it sad yet understandable that the Chinese and Malays in Sri Lalang socialize at separate cafes on the weekends, though see glimpses of good will in the oft-colour blind commerce of the weekly market. I took hope in the “plural society” speeches my cousin’s classmates made during a school competition, though their lofty assertions also struck me as even hoarier than the naive multicultural grandstanding that hides far deeper problems for Aboriginal communities across Australia, and Dutch-Muslim relations in Western Europe.
Prime Minister Badawi has made claims that his moderate Islamic vision for Malaysia will successfully equip it for a planned technological and industrialized leapfrog toward Western standards of living while remaining true to Malaysian moral and religious standards. In Sri Lalang, I found rows of new “garden” developments, where hardworking families were moving into Western-standard homes purchased on the back of years of honest hard work. I was reminded of something my 22 year-old cousin said to me quietly: “What’s the point of (sectarianism) anyway? We’re all Malaysian.” I think it’s even simpler than that. By keeping religion out of state affairs and focusing on a merit-based system of advancement, a lot of this current ethnic distancing could easily be closed. Rather than existing as an officially united but in practice segregated society of Malays, Chinese and Indians, the country could serve as a timely example of successful Asian development and moderate Islamic practice. Unfortunately, with a comfortably entrenched bumiputera electorate and meddling Malay elite, ethnic relations in towns such as Sri Lalang throughout the country will likely remain as segregated as at present for some time to come.
i) Malay: Melayu, referring to the ethnic group which currently comprises the majority in Malaysia, that is: not of Indian, Chinese, or “indigenous” descent
ii) Malaysian: A citizen of the state of Malaysia, referring to nationality. Ex: Chinese-Malaysian, Australian-Malaysian, etc.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Squatter's Confessional
Published April, 2006.
Some cultural trade-offs are harder to accept than others. Take squat toilets for instance, which I used to hate with a passion. I loathed them as I do snakes. “How dare you pass yourself off as worthy of my sanctified toosh and it’s business!,” I might have sneered, if I hadn’t been so concerned with steering so far clear of them. Those two white tiles for traction, and that miserable little hole in place of where I expected not only a bowl, but also a comfortable seat and a cover to boot. During one particular trip home to my mother’s town of Sri Lalang, I reacted as any stubborn eight-year-old might: I just refused to use them. Full stop.
Now that only gets you so far. Before long, my parents tired of taking me out on exclusive journeys to the local shopping centre and its modern plumbing facilities. Thus began the famous conflict between Mark’s will and his lower intestine. An epic battle of attrition that lasted well into the fourth day -- most likely pushed over the edge by some sneakily placed tofu during the thirteenth confrontational meal – nature worked its unstoppable force and unsurprisingly my will eventually gave in (as my colon gave out). But not to the squat toilet. Oh no, it would take more than mere excrement to hole me up in such a dungeon, with its foul odour and icky wet concrete.
Now as with any resistance movement that faces uphill odds, I had gone on several scouting missions in the backyard of my grandmother’s house beforehand. My thoughts followed the approximate reasoning: So it has to come out. That variable was as fixed as Newton’s third law. The real question was “Where?” Other components of the issue at hand were the need for disguise, accessibility and speed. I couldn’t just leave my loaves on the front door step like a dog, nor could I drop them off at the base of a tree, which Po-Po would inevitably stumble across during her daily vegetable gardening. Digging a hole and then covering over the matter – camper style – might have been the way, but for the fact that the whole backyard was being cultivated and I would inevitably be destroying something she’d been growing. Even self-righteous guerillas have to think about their grandmothers.
The next option was to dash beyond the confines of the family land altogether and off into the thick jungle with its huge banana foliage and overgrown vine vegetation, perfect cover for all manner of rank deeds. And I probably would have gone with that method of release, but for the fact that I was eight and still genuinely fearful of the local terrain. Malaysia itself was a source of continuous mystery and frustration to me at the time; dropping my daks in the bush and leaving my behind privy to various snakes and leeches was something my creative imagination would not allow. This dilemma over the sanity of my sphincter and the frightful clutches of Mr. Squat had by this point reached truly explosive proportions.
It was around this stage, whilst urinating my way along in the stream that runs through our backyard, that I had my “Eureka” moment. Of course, I’d found much simpler means of relieving my bladder, and this waterhole was but one of a number of locales at which I’d spilled my own golden stream. Casually observing urine disperse into water, I noticed that this particular channel appeared to flow straight out of the house, down towards the deeply sunken, well-shaded river. Connecting the dots, I concluded that if timed correctly, a quick drop of the short pants, 180 degree rotation by the stream’s edge and speedy expunging of the digested remnants of four days worth of rice and Hainan cooking would set the battle straight. My Number Twos would waltz right on down the stream and into the river, probably disintegrating into lovely soil nourishing food for all I cared. The triumphant result: Mark – 1, Squatter – 0. I would walk away the bigger man, and nobody, especially not my parents, would ever know.
Almost immediately, the point of no return arrived, when all a child can do is plead to self: “Hang on a minute, just don’t do it in your pants.” As previously scripted, I carried out Operation Bomb the Stream in the backYard (OBeSitY) in meticulous fashion, seemingly without a snag. I’d even remembered a roll of toilet paper. The trouble came only after I had pulled up my trousers. Letting out a small but satisfied sigh of relief, I came to the nasty realization that there had been a hitch. Alas, the current’s strength would not move my recently deposited brownness downstream. It stayed put, exactly where I had dropped it, and not even several rather panicked pebble throws could cause it to dislodge.
I returned to the house a sad and disillusioned boy. Counting down the minutes before the inevitable discovery, angry finger pointing, and useless but plaintive denial process would begin, I tried to console myself with the refreshing return of lightness to my lower stomach. But oh the humility! I could have died with shame that night. I didn’t, and I return to the same house today, only to find that the squat toilet has been replaced with a lovely plastic seater. I’ve long since overcome my aversion to the former, but shall never forget the bemusement it caused my grandmother, who has passed away since I last visited this house, that sunny afternoon some years ago.
Some cultural trade-offs are harder to accept than others. Take squat toilets for instance, which I used to hate with a passion. I loathed them as I do snakes. “How dare you pass yourself off as worthy of my sanctified toosh and it’s business!,” I might have sneered, if I hadn’t been so concerned with steering so far clear of them. Those two white tiles for traction, and that miserable little hole in place of where I expected not only a bowl, but also a comfortable seat and a cover to boot. During one particular trip home to my mother’s town of Sri Lalang, I reacted as any stubborn eight-year-old might: I just refused to use them. Full stop.
Now that only gets you so far. Before long, my parents tired of taking me out on exclusive journeys to the local shopping centre and its modern plumbing facilities. Thus began the famous conflict between Mark’s will and his lower intestine. An epic battle of attrition that lasted well into the fourth day -- most likely pushed over the edge by some sneakily placed tofu during the thirteenth confrontational meal – nature worked its unstoppable force and unsurprisingly my will eventually gave in (as my colon gave out). But not to the squat toilet. Oh no, it would take more than mere excrement to hole me up in such a dungeon, with its foul odour and icky wet concrete.
Now as with any resistance movement that faces uphill odds, I had gone on several scouting missions in the backyard of my grandmother’s house beforehand. My thoughts followed the approximate reasoning: So it has to come out. That variable was as fixed as Newton’s third law. The real question was “Where?” Other components of the issue at hand were the need for disguise, accessibility and speed. I couldn’t just leave my loaves on the front door step like a dog, nor could I drop them off at the base of a tree, which Po-Po would inevitably stumble across during her daily vegetable gardening. Digging a hole and then covering over the matter – camper style – might have been the way, but for the fact that the whole backyard was being cultivated and I would inevitably be destroying something she’d been growing. Even self-righteous guerillas have to think about their grandmothers.
The next option was to dash beyond the confines of the family land altogether and off into the thick jungle with its huge banana foliage and overgrown vine vegetation, perfect cover for all manner of rank deeds. And I probably would have gone with that method of release, but for the fact that I was eight and still genuinely fearful of the local terrain. Malaysia itself was a source of continuous mystery and frustration to me at the time; dropping my daks in the bush and leaving my behind privy to various snakes and leeches was something my creative imagination would not allow. This dilemma over the sanity of my sphincter and the frightful clutches of Mr. Squat had by this point reached truly explosive proportions.
It was around this stage, whilst urinating my way along in the stream that runs through our backyard, that I had my “Eureka” moment. Of course, I’d found much simpler means of relieving my bladder, and this waterhole was but one of a number of locales at which I’d spilled my own golden stream. Casually observing urine disperse into water, I noticed that this particular channel appeared to flow straight out of the house, down towards the deeply sunken, well-shaded river. Connecting the dots, I concluded that if timed correctly, a quick drop of the short pants, 180 degree rotation by the stream’s edge and speedy expunging of the digested remnants of four days worth of rice and Hainan cooking would set the battle straight. My Number Twos would waltz right on down the stream and into the river, probably disintegrating into lovely soil nourishing food for all I cared. The triumphant result: Mark – 1, Squatter – 0. I would walk away the bigger man, and nobody, especially not my parents, would ever know.
Almost immediately, the point of no return arrived, when all a child can do is plead to self: “Hang on a minute, just don’t do it in your pants.” As previously scripted, I carried out Operation Bomb the Stream in the backYard (OBeSitY) in meticulous fashion, seemingly without a snag. I’d even remembered a roll of toilet paper. The trouble came only after I had pulled up my trousers. Letting out a small but satisfied sigh of relief, I came to the nasty realization that there had been a hitch. Alas, the current’s strength would not move my recently deposited brownness downstream. It stayed put, exactly where I had dropped it, and not even several rather panicked pebble throws could cause it to dislodge.
I returned to the house a sad and disillusioned boy. Counting down the minutes before the inevitable discovery, angry finger pointing, and useless but plaintive denial process would begin, I tried to console myself with the refreshing return of lightness to my lower stomach. But oh the humility! I could have died with shame that night. I didn’t, and I return to the same house today, only to find that the squat toilet has been replaced with a lovely plastic seater. I’ve long since overcome my aversion to the former, but shall never forget the bemusement it caused my grandmother, who has passed away since I last visited this house, that sunny afternoon some years ago.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
A Wild Man in Borneo
I recently purchased a book from the Sabah State Museum entitled With the Wild Men of Borneo by a missionary named Elizabeth Mershon. It begins thusly:
"Borneo! What does the name suggest in your minds? The first thing probably is the 'wild man from Borneo.'...All I knew about the country was that it was where the wild men lived, and I always imagined that they spent most of their time running around the island cutting off people's heads. Before you finish reading what I am going to tell you about distant Borneo and its people, I hope you will have learned that the 'wild man from Borneo' is not such a bad fellow after all."
That was written in 1922. I have just gotten back from a helter skelter two-day trek through the island's northern interior from west coast to east coast, Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan. And I can gladly report back that, 84 years on, and with a world which remains largely oblivious to its existence, the people of Borneo are still not such bad fellows after all.
The party—14 Hiews of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from Uncle Yun-Loi, a small, agile chap of about 70 to the ever-bouncy six-year-old, Hua—set out early enough from Beaufort, scooping me up in KK, as the capital city is known (thank goodness its not Kota Kota Kinabalu!; many Malay words are doubled so it might've been possible). The previous night, my cousin Yong, who lived with my family in Australia during our high school years and now works in the city for Ernst & Young, had taken me out to sample the local nightlife. It was quite surreal going from the rural jungle living I had just observed, where lifestyles remain largely removed from or incapable of affording modern technological and economic change, to the rather bangin' scene at Shenanigans nightclub, at which a lively Filipino cover band played renditions of "My Humps" and "You're Beautiful" to a demure crowd with its fair share of popped collars and grinding that wouldn't appear out of place in Soho or Adams Morgan.
The outward journey was long and trying, compounded by the lack of air conditioning in my uncle's people mover (van). This might have been bearable but for said uncle's driving methodology: best described as a mix of rally car driver and bank robbery escapee. Caked in multiple layers of sweat and grime and being jostled around incessantly from my back corner, I discovered a newfound sympathy for Shake N' Bake Chicken. So this is what it feels like to be seasoned and thrown into an oven, simultaneously even! Because of such conditions, I found my motivation to sight-see somewhat dampened (if not drenched), however, Mount Kinabalu, its rocky black peak appearing from behind a veil of consistent mist, remained a sight of untrammeled tranquility. For several reasons, I shall not be ascending its 1401 metres on this trip, having to make do with imagined sunrises over the South China Sea instead.
The Borneo jungle is at this point a very different affair in comparison to its pre-logging glory. Between the nineteen seventies and eighties, 90 percent of its natural wood was clear cut and shipped out, largely in joint ventures between the federal government and Japanese businesses. Most of my uncles were employed, sadly, in the all too efficient destruction of their homeland's natural habitat, operating bulldozers and clearing roads in often-miserly conditions. The result is a mixed picture: though still outright beautiful and humbling, with its hilly green lushness, steep cliffs and picturesque waterfalls, the jungle itself is almost entirely new regrowth or oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable cash crop for the state's inhabitants. Apparently, over 64 native mostly agrarian tribes once roamed the island--some of who used blowguns and darts, and a few of who were headhunters, which appeals greatly to the omnipresent eleven-year-old in me—but, during my trip, the only employment I saw them involved in was the selling of Orang-utan dolls and traditional weaves at tourist stands by the roadside, occasionally in their native attire (which is dazzling) but most often in western garb.
Along the way, my father pointed out the road to the copper mine at which he and my mother worked immediately before moving to Australia, adding that it was the place of my conception. Now there are several things that people should not do, regardless of culture or heritage. One of them is pissing on somebody's grave. You just don't do it! Another is providing your children with details about their conception: the imagery is uniformly disturbing in a Freudian nightmare reality sort of way. Besides learning extraneous proto-Mark details, along the road I observed numerous dilapidated, faded wooden shacks, often featuring green creepers at various stages of eventual natural reconquest of these homes, which belong to subsistence and cash crop farmers. In uber-stereotypical third world form, I saw several naked children standing in front of open windows. Construction remains a consistent eyesore. Illegal immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, their faces protected from the dust by makeshift cotton rags, hung from rickety wooden scaffolding.
We reached Sandakan not long before dark, greeted by a tacky Orang-utan statue in the town's entry roundabout. Blessed with potentially the least romantic name in history—it means "to be pawned" in Sulu, the Sultanate to which it used to belong—Sandakan successfully puts the "shit" in "hole," providing fresh new meaning to the word "fugly." Possessing none of the subtle majesty of traditional Malay architecture or any of the Hong Kong charm of its former major trading partner, it appears to have shuddered into the 21 st Century through an utterly indelicate shove from modern industry. A port for largely Chinese and Japanese-owned oil palm and fishing distributors, in its wake Sandakan makes Detroit look like Paris, Glasgow sound like Venice. Its main sights of interest involve a three-legged rock and a pungent fish market, the latter of which my seafood-adverse self was spared the odour. We stayed for only a short while, meeting up with my politician Aunt's fellow party cadre for a seafood restaurant dinner. (I had the venison.) We chose to stay outside of Sandakan for fear of desperate Filipino robbers, choosing a hotel at the more-suitably Chinese "Mile 4." Outlying suburbs, in keeping with the town's utilitarian spirit, are named according to their distance from downtown.
The following day, after a noodle soup breakfast at one of the local market stalls—where one enjoys the dubious pleasure of seeing your food cooked and dishes washed in quite squalid conditions—we set off on our return journey. Along the way, we passed shanty kampungs built over the bay, home to the absolute poorest of the poor. If Malaysia wishes to become a developed country by 2020, which its former Prime Minister announced several years ago—it must come up with a way to cope with the rural/urban divide, a pervasive problem certainly not limited to its borders. After revisiting the farmland where our family once lived, we stopped at a crocodile farm. Young Ah-Hua raised a bit of a ruckus amongst the largely immobile, sun baking reptiles when she stomped up and down excitedly on the wooden walkway above, allowing me to snap some quality Steve Irwin-without-Steve Irwin photos of the animals play-wrestling. One humorously straightforward description read:
"My name is TAKO from Lahad Datu, around 60 year old. My length is 17 feet and weigh 800 kg. Wild Life removed me to this place, because I ate 4 residents in the wild, Now I eat only one chicken everyday." (Sic)
Following, we visited the Sandakan War Memorial, the site at which thousands of Australian and British POWs were held towards the tail end of World War II. The Japanese forced my grandmother to work on construction of a new airfield, and the photographs of skeletal Aussie soldiers working away on the same war project brought home to me how easily the pendulum of history can change course. Interestingly enough, I learned that an underground network existed between Australians and locals, through which guerilla resistance fighters could plan ambush attacks. I walked along the wooden walkway which followed the identical path that the troops were once forced, along with my grandfather, to take during the Sandakan-Ranau death marches with Ah-Hua's hand in mine, attempting to visualize the scene some 61 years ago. Through terrible torture, measly rations and hellish labour, it's not difficult to see how so few Allied POWs survived out in this humid terrain, in conditions so far removed from the dry dust of the Australian plains or of grassy, temperate England.
We then set off back to KK, this time I was in the other, far more sensibly driven four-wheel-drive, and thus was able to read and reflect on the journey home. Close to home, the mists of Mount Kinabalu descended upon the road, and my uncle turned on the headlights. That night, it was back to Shenanigans for the same cover band's stirring rendition of "Y'all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind" by DMX. The bipolarism of Malaysia's urban-rural gap had never sounded more incongruous.
"Borneo! What does the name suggest in your minds? The first thing probably is the 'wild man from Borneo.'...All I knew about the country was that it was where the wild men lived, and I always imagined that they spent most of their time running around the island cutting off people's heads. Before you finish reading what I am going to tell you about distant Borneo and its people, I hope you will have learned that the 'wild man from Borneo' is not such a bad fellow after all."
That was written in 1922. I have just gotten back from a helter skelter two-day trek through the island's northern interior from west coast to east coast, Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan. And I can gladly report back that, 84 years on, and with a world which remains largely oblivious to its existence, the people of Borneo are still not such bad fellows after all.
The party—14 Hiews of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from Uncle Yun-Loi, a small, agile chap of about 70 to the ever-bouncy six-year-old, Hua—set out early enough from Beaufort, scooping me up in KK, as the capital city is known (thank goodness its not Kota Kota Kinabalu!; many Malay words are doubled so it might've been possible). The previous night, my cousin Yong, who lived with my family in Australia during our high school years and now works in the city for Ernst & Young, had taken me out to sample the local nightlife. It was quite surreal going from the rural jungle living I had just observed, where lifestyles remain largely removed from or incapable of affording modern technological and economic change, to the rather bangin' scene at Shenanigans nightclub, at which a lively Filipino cover band played renditions of "My Humps" and "You're Beautiful" to a demure crowd with its fair share of popped collars and grinding that wouldn't appear out of place in Soho or Adams Morgan.
The outward journey was long and trying, compounded by the lack of air conditioning in my uncle's people mover (van). This might have been bearable but for said uncle's driving methodology: best described as a mix of rally car driver and bank robbery escapee. Caked in multiple layers of sweat and grime and being jostled around incessantly from my back corner, I discovered a newfound sympathy for Shake N' Bake Chicken. So this is what it feels like to be seasoned and thrown into an oven, simultaneously even! Because of such conditions, I found my motivation to sight-see somewhat dampened (if not drenched), however, Mount Kinabalu, its rocky black peak appearing from behind a veil of consistent mist, remained a sight of untrammeled tranquility. For several reasons, I shall not be ascending its 1401 metres on this trip, having to make do with imagined sunrises over the South China Sea instead.
The Borneo jungle is at this point a very different affair in comparison to its pre-logging glory. Between the nineteen seventies and eighties, 90 percent of its natural wood was clear cut and shipped out, largely in joint ventures between the federal government and Japanese businesses. Most of my uncles were employed, sadly, in the all too efficient destruction of their homeland's natural habitat, operating bulldozers and clearing roads in often-miserly conditions. The result is a mixed picture: though still outright beautiful and humbling, with its hilly green lushness, steep cliffs and picturesque waterfalls, the jungle itself is almost entirely new regrowth or oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable cash crop for the state's inhabitants. Apparently, over 64 native mostly agrarian tribes once roamed the island--some of who used blowguns and darts, and a few of who were headhunters, which appeals greatly to the omnipresent eleven-year-old in me—but, during my trip, the only employment I saw them involved in was the selling of Orang-utan dolls and traditional weaves at tourist stands by the roadside, occasionally in their native attire (which is dazzling) but most often in western garb.
Along the way, my father pointed out the road to the copper mine at which he and my mother worked immediately before moving to Australia, adding that it was the place of my conception. Now there are several things that people should not do, regardless of culture or heritage. One of them is pissing on somebody's grave. You just don't do it! Another is providing your children with details about their conception: the imagery is uniformly disturbing in a Freudian nightmare reality sort of way. Besides learning extraneous proto-Mark details, along the road I observed numerous dilapidated, faded wooden shacks, often featuring green creepers at various stages of eventual natural reconquest of these homes, which belong to subsistence and cash crop farmers. In uber-stereotypical third world form, I saw several naked children standing in front of open windows. Construction remains a consistent eyesore. Illegal immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, their faces protected from the dust by makeshift cotton rags, hung from rickety wooden scaffolding.
We reached Sandakan not long before dark, greeted by a tacky Orang-utan statue in the town's entry roundabout. Blessed with potentially the least romantic name in history—it means "to be pawned" in Sulu, the Sultanate to which it used to belong—Sandakan successfully puts the "shit" in "hole," providing fresh new meaning to the word "fugly." Possessing none of the subtle majesty of traditional Malay architecture or any of the Hong Kong charm of its former major trading partner, it appears to have shuddered into the 21 st Century through an utterly indelicate shove from modern industry. A port for largely Chinese and Japanese-owned oil palm and fishing distributors, in its wake Sandakan makes Detroit look like Paris, Glasgow sound like Venice. Its main sights of interest involve a three-legged rock and a pungent fish market, the latter of which my seafood-adverse self was spared the odour. We stayed for only a short while, meeting up with my politician Aunt's fellow party cadre for a seafood restaurant dinner. (I had the venison.) We chose to stay outside of Sandakan for fear of desperate Filipino robbers, choosing a hotel at the more-suitably Chinese "Mile 4." Outlying suburbs, in keeping with the town's utilitarian spirit, are named according to their distance from downtown.
The following day, after a noodle soup breakfast at one of the local market stalls—where one enjoys the dubious pleasure of seeing your food cooked and dishes washed in quite squalid conditions—we set off on our return journey. Along the way, we passed shanty kampungs built over the bay, home to the absolute poorest of the poor. If Malaysia wishes to become a developed country by 2020, which its former Prime Minister announced several years ago—it must come up with a way to cope with the rural/urban divide, a pervasive problem certainly not limited to its borders. After revisiting the farmland where our family once lived, we stopped at a crocodile farm. Young Ah-Hua raised a bit of a ruckus amongst the largely immobile, sun baking reptiles when she stomped up and down excitedly on the wooden walkway above, allowing me to snap some quality Steve Irwin-without-Steve Irwin photos of the animals play-wrestling. One humorously straightforward description read:
"My name is TAKO from Lahad Datu, around 60 year old. My length is 17 feet and weigh 800 kg. Wild Life removed me to this place, because I ate 4 residents in the wild, Now I eat only one chicken everyday." (Sic)
Following, we visited the Sandakan War Memorial, the site at which thousands of Australian and British POWs were held towards the tail end of World War II. The Japanese forced my grandmother to work on construction of a new airfield, and the photographs of skeletal Aussie soldiers working away on the same war project brought home to me how easily the pendulum of history can change course. Interestingly enough, I learned that an underground network existed between Australians and locals, through which guerilla resistance fighters could plan ambush attacks. I walked along the wooden walkway which followed the identical path that the troops were once forced, along with my grandfather, to take during the Sandakan-Ranau death marches with Ah-Hua's hand in mine, attempting to visualize the scene some 61 years ago. Through terrible torture, measly rations and hellish labour, it's not difficult to see how so few Allied POWs survived out in this humid terrain, in conditions so far removed from the dry dust of the Australian plains or of grassy, temperate England.
We then set off back to KK, this time I was in the other, far more sensibly driven four-wheel-drive, and thus was able to read and reflect on the journey home. Close to home, the mists of Mount Kinabalu descended upon the road, and my uncle turned on the headlights. That night, it was back to Shenanigans for the same cover band's stirring rendition of "Y'all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind" by DMX. The bipolarism of Malaysia's urban-rural gap had never sounded more incongruous.
On Qingming and Family
I am the son of a Malaysian Hakka metallurgist who stepped through the cracks of a bipolar world, from the humble poverty of his kampong home and into the opportunity and upward mobility afforded by the progressive politics and anti-colonial sentiment of 1970s Australasia. In turn, he is the son of a fatherless farmer, who escaped the abject poverty of early 20th Century China and—as a teenager—entered into a binding three-year term as an indentured laborer for the British, tapping rubber at a plantation in North Borneo in exchange for a boat ride to a better life.
I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.
I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.
These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.
A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”
After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.
“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.
As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.
I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.
As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.
I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.
I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.
These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.
A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”
After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.
“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.
As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.
I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.
As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
