Chocolate for Independence Day

A short film for the 15Malaysia project by a bold Malaysian filmmaker, the late Yasmin Ahmad. This is my favorite in the series so far.

“People like us don’t get opportunities here. If you go there you’ll have opportunities. This land is only for their kind [i.e. Malays].” The unceasing mantra of my parents’ generation. Here, I think, it closes a door that could’ve led to new possibilities.

For more, visit the 15Malaysia website. Again, happy Independence Day, Malaysia.

Independence Day

The Malay Peninsula, with the climate of a perpetual Turkish bath.

Sir Frank Swettenham, British Malaya, 1906

The Malayan countryside is rather like a rich feast, with a little too much of everything good.

George Woodcock, Asia, Gods and Cities, 1966

Eve of Independence Day.

It’s been over a year since my return to Malaysia, and still the same:

“Why did you come back? Why didn’t you just stay in the US?”

“Life is so much better there.”

“There are more opportunities there.”

Let’s be clear: I’m no patriot. I came back, not for any noble reason but because my mom died and the only way to attend her funeral involved chucking my chances at a green card out the window. Besides, I’d been in a deadlock with the United States immigration for over 3 years anyway and it was time to throw in the towel.

My homeland, like all other countries, has its own set of problems—unique in some ways, but fairly standard for a Third World nation trying to get to First. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve alternated between hope and despair about our future since my return last May, so I guess at this point it depends on what day one catches me.

What I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, though, is how much my students here–past and present–seem to think of the United States as a Promised Land of sorts. In this they are merely indicative of a widespread sentiment among Malaysians, especially non-Malay Malaysians, that a better life is to be found elsewhere, which is to say, just about anywhere except here.

I lived for 11 years in what is undoubtedly one of the freest, most powerful, wealthiest, and most opportunity-filled nation in the world. Like it or not, the US has got to be doing something right to have so many clamoring to get through its borders. Yet even after all those years, it’s very clear to me that America the Great is not without its ailments. Whether its problems are better or worse than those here in Malaysia I cannot say, but what I do know is that the America imagined by my students, friends and relatives is not quite the America I’ve known. They imagine that its citizens are uniformly supermodel-like (thanks to Hollywood), that everyone can get a job and get rich if they only worked hard enough, that anyone can climb the ceiling-less socio-economic pyramid. The cars are bigger, the air is cleaner and the laws are more just. This is the America they imagine.

Perhaps it is simply the case that in my view the grapes have turned sour, but when I look back to my time in the United States, I don’t feel as though I’ve left the third heaven. What I do feel is that I’ve left one beautiful country for another.

I love Malaysia. I don’t think or say that enough.

It’s not perfect–not by a long shot. There’s ethnic discrimination both de facto and de jure. Corruption permeates every level of its bureaucratic political and economic structures. We breed all manner of lies and stereotypes about the very immigrants who are the backbone of our economy, shortchange them on the paycheck and make them work like dogs round the clock. Just to name a few.

But there is also beauty. People still have time for each other here. Our coffee shops open till the wee hours of the morning to serve tea and roti canai to chatty locals. Our social mix is a storehouse of innumerable traditions. We’re obsessed with food the way I imagine some other ancient peoples might’ve been. We have rainforests and rivers and beaches and mountains. Many people here still remember what a simple life was or can be. Without too much trouble, one can still find a village complete with fruit orchards, fire ants and goats. Just to name a few.

My American friends often ask me, “When are you coming back?” I’m not sure I can or want to. There is much that I love and like here. Though I miss my friends in the US very much and every day, this has become my home again. A strange twist in God’s plan—but a happy one, I think, and I feel no need to alter its course. So, even on days when I border on thinking that this country is going to hell in a handbasket, I’m content—maybe even thankful—to be here.

I love you, Malaysia. I don’t think or say that enough.

And happy Independence Day.

Moo Point #4: “Mr. President, were you talking to us?”

Two readers of the local online daily Malaysiakini wondered:

Vijay: Like the rest of the world, I could not but feel inspired and heartened by Barack Obama’s presidential address.

Just as he did in his acceptance speech just a few weeks ago, he fired up all of us with the confidence born out of knowing that change is at hand with hope and triumph over fear.

Yet as a Malaysian, I am even more prouder [sic] and stand even taller. This pride comes from the realisation that of the countless countries in the world, Obama chose only Malaysia to speak directly to, from the steps of the Capital, before the billions around the globe.

We have to acknowledge and respond, as virtue demands, to his call and perhaps warning to Malaysia that:

‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’

No doubt Umno will hearken to this reminder and invitation.

HL Ooi: ‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’ – excerpt from Obama’s inaugural speech.

‘The 23 people who were detained at the PJ anti-ISA candlelight vigil on Nov 9, 2008 will be charged in the Petaling Jaya court at 2pm on Thursday, January 22, 2009. – article in ‘Malaysia Today’, Jan 20, 2009.

Does the statement from President Obama serve as a warning to those who are running the federal government in Malaysia?

I really doubt the President of the United States specifically had us in mind, but that at least some Malaysians heard his words this way says something about the state of affairs in this country, doesn’t it? Americans aren’t the only people in danger of thinking of him as the Messiah, apparently.

Fifty-one years after independence, we’re still waiting for the West to help solve our problems. If this isn’t a symptom of the colonization of the mind, I don’t know what is.

But Malaysian complexes aside, may God grant to the President many blessed years.

Things American professors can never say #246

You have to get better at establishing eye contact. Your eyes are already…uhm…almond-shaped, and when you smile during your speech—which is quite a bit, good for you—, from where I’m sitting, they virtually disappear.

The professor was sitting in the back of the classroom, in case you’re wondering.

Stutter, memory

For the first time since I’ve been home, I went grocery shopping all by myself today. I had to drive to the gigantic mall nearby because that’s where the nearest grocery store is. Don’t ask why—it’s just the way it is.

Anyway, I was looking for ingredients to make pasta carbonara (one of the 7 meals in my culinary repertoire) and had trouble finding, of all things, pasta. I finally gave up and asked a girl in a smart gray uniform and navy blue vest.  She was moving boxes that didn’t look too heavy.

“Try Aisle 10,” she replied, pointing me a few aisles down.

I looked at the sign above Aisle 10. “WESTERN FOOD,” it said in large white letters.

Funny, because everything in King Soopers and Safeway in Denver was “Western food” and it went without saying. If you wanted jasmine rice, sesame seed oil or a good curry sauce you had to go to the “Asian/Mexican food” aisle to get it.

I couldn’t find the bacon either, until I stumbled upon a small store within the bigger store with a sign at the entrance that said: “NON-HALAL”. Inside, I found all kinds of things my Muslim friends would’ve deemed abominable: pork sausages, smoked bacon, non-smoked bacon, honey-roasted ham.

The salespeople on behind the display counter of unkosher delights gave me puzzled looks when I asked them how many grams there were in a pound. I practically burned my brains out trying to translate 1 lb. of bacon into damned metric grams until one of them (an alpha female of sorts, by my reckoning) finally said politely but sternly, “You get about 3 slices for every 100 grams, but we have no idea what a pound is.” I picked up 600 grams of it because I remembered that 1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs. = 1000 grams. Or something like that.

I put the package neatly in the corner of my green basket and when I got to the real counter where I checked out all my other items, I was mindful to take the already-paid-for package of bacon out so it wouldn’t accidentally render unclean the Muslim boy sacking my groceries. Something about the whole process made me feel a bit sheepish for buying a pork product.

Later, at the barber’s near my house, I found myself staring at a picture of Ganesh while the barber, a man from India in his late 30’s, hovered a pair of unstoppable scissors and a large white comb over my head. I marvelled at his blue skin and elephant head—Ganesh’s, that is, not my barber’s—and tried to recall the story one of my Hindu students told in my World Religions class last semester about how he (Ganesh, again) lost his human head and got replaced with an elephant one instead.

My attempt at remembering was interrupted by a new thump-thump beat exploding from a small radio on the shelf. The song made me think of OneRepublic and that ubiquitous song they used to play at Rude gym off Federal Boulevard in Denver. It’s too late to apologize, it’s too laaaate…. Except it wasn’t that song exactly. Plus it was in Tamil.

Just then a man came into the shop with two small children. Conversation between him and my anonymous (to me, at least) barber took place in reams of unfurling Tamil syllables, at the end of which the man turned to his son and said, “Wait here. I have to go home and get some money.” The toddler obediently sat down and looked at my barber with some measure of awe at the unrelenting scissors still grazing off my hair at the edge of the white comb. His dad took his sister by the hand and walked out. It made me happy to live in a country where, in some places at least, you could still trust a barber to watch your kid for a bit.

Then I got to thinking what I was doing this time last year, when 2007 was coming to an end.

I remember a fantastic Christmas-octave dinner (of fish, I’m quite sure) at Brian and Sarah’s during which we finished a bottle of wine, which undoubtedly caused me to doze off while we were watching Elf afterwards. I remember the fireplace and the crackling fire that was really just their last starter log because they’d run out of real firewood. I (vaguely) remember Brian giving me a blanket to keep me warm since I was already crashed out on their couch, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night on that couch in their living room and being comforted by the warm glow of lights on the Christmas tree and a luminous moon pouring in through the east window.

I remember waking up the next morning to the smell of coffee which Sarah had made, a light breakfast afterwards, and driving home happy about this: though none of us had stayed up late enough to greet the new year (we were all in bed by 11!), I’d started it off in good company.