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.