Finding Family in Malaysia

When Erik lived in the co-op his senior year of college, one of his neighbors and friends was Nat, a friendly, quirky, motivated, very smart student from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since we were in the neighborhood, relatively speaking, we were thrilled to make a trip from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur to spend a few days with him. We stayed with Nat and his family in their luxe but very homey house, which in itself felt great-- having a place to actually be able to unpack for a few days, and take a bath, and sit around chilling out without having to pay for the privilege is rare for us, and something we've come to value highly. On top of that, his parents, Bob and Sulumari, and sister, Cheryl, were warm and welcoming hosts, and we had a lot of fun spending time with them. We also got to hang out with his girlfriend, Lisin, a journalist. Eating was a central activity for all of us together (which we, obviously, love to do), and they introduced us to the full gamut of Malaysian food: Malay (similar to Indonesian, with lots of rice with different vegetables and sauces), Chinese, and southern Indian. Eating can take up a good percentage of the day in Malaysia, with long lunches, snacky afternoon teas, and late night dinners that can stretch on for hours of chatting (if you can stay awake!). We felt thoroughly spoiled, especially when Sulumari (an expert baker) made us brownies because we said we missed them from home. She put bananas in them, and rich rich chocolate-- delicious. They also had an amazing refrigerator drawer full of fabulous chocolates, which they got out one afternoon to eat as we watched one of my all-time favorite movies, "Fiddler on the Roof". It was one of the nicest days of bumming around we've had all year.

We were lucky to learn a lot about Malaysia in the short time we were there-- exponentially more than we would have learned had we not been staying with Nat and his family. The racial composition of Malaysia is a defining aspect of the country, not least of all because many politicians have, since independence in 1947, manipulated race (and racism) to control the government. The population is approximately 50-60% Malay (almost all of whom are Muslim), 20-30% Chinese (mainly Christian and Buddhist), and 10-20% Indian (mainly Hindu, Muslim, and Christian). Many, if not most, people are mixed, especially if their families have been in the country for more than a couple generations, but the identity cards that all Malaysians have to carry state only a single race (passed on patrilineally) and a single religion. The ruling government, unfortunately, has consistently racialized politics to try to garner favor with the Malay population; a couple of the opposition political parties are similarly race-based. Nat works for a different opposition party, one which stands firmly on a multi-racial platform and which is headed by Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy Prime Minister who is only recently out of jail after spending six years there on spurious charges. (The original charge was sodomy, which is indeed illegal in Malaysia; once that was shown to be too far-fetched for even the biased judges, he was jailed on another charge instead.) This gives a pretty good indication of the condition of opposition parties in Malaysia, which is basically just desperately trying to gain ground in an exceedingly oppressive political environment. The newspapers and other media are connected to the ruling party, which controls 92% of parliament seats as well as the ministries. There is an active community of bloggers, including Nat and Lisin, and apparently they are making the government a bit nervous, as one minister proposed making bloggers register. (The same minister also claimed that 80% of the 10,000 bloggers are "unemployed women" who are bored and trying to stir up trouble.) One night we got to attend a big fundraiser for Nat's party (for which he wrote the opening speech), an event that is much less frequent in Malaysia than in the U.S. Although the speeches were mostly in Malay, with some sprinklings of English (and Chinese), we were still impressed by the strength and charisma of both Nat's boss Tien and Anwar Ibrahim as speakers, and, from what we could understand, by the topics. (It didn't hurt that there was a never-ending supply of yummy Chinese food being served while they talked.) Hanging out with Nat's group of fellow activists and friends at a "mama" (a cheap, indoor-outdoor cafe where people can sit for hours) after the event, we felt similar energy as in our own group of activist-friends in Hartford; if these people have the chance to do their work, it seems like a lot of positive change could come to Malaysia.

On the more touristy side of things, we spent a couple days wandering around downtown Kuala Lumpur, a city fully surrounded by highways going every-which-direction (often without many signs), but with a pleasant and walkable downtown area. The mix of old and new buildings was striking, with mosques, temples, grand colonial buildings, and unusually attractive skyscrapers layered against each other. We were too late to get a ticket up the Petronas towers (the tallest buildings in the world up until a couple years ago), but we did walk around the fancy mall at their base, including a photojournalism exhibit tracing Malaysia's history since independence, and an aquarium with a cool tunnel to walk through with fish and sharks over and around you. We also took a day trip to Melaka, a city 2 hours south of KL, on the famous Strait of Melaka, that has an important history as a port from the days when globalization happened through ships. We went through the state house, which had fun exhibits of pottery and wedding costumes and the like, and through the history museum, which went painstakingly through the Melakan, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese periods of rule of the city. (The Portuguese-Dutch-English sequence felt very familiar from Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, and Indonesia!) We met one of Nat's uncles for lunch, the Melaka specialty of chicken-rice balls (as they sound like, they are balls of ground rice flavored and held together with chicken broth-- very tasty). We also toured through the Baba-Nonya house (the male and female names for people of Chinese-Malay heritage), which was filled with outstanding works of embroidery and mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture. Then we headed back to KL, for one last evening with Nat and his family before flying back to Bangkok and on to our last 'new' country of the trip (France doesn't count, since we've been there several times), India.