Malaysia: Afterwords

by Mindy McAdams

It's not easy to write about the experience of living abroad. What has changed? What has stayed the same? How am I different? I am still discovering the answers to these questions.

22 Oct 2005

Three months ago, I came home. In some ways, it seems much longer. I think of Malaysia almost every day. When it rains hard (which it has often lately here in Florida; it's our hurricane season). When I eat rice (which is at least once a week now, but there it was daily). The other night when I saw a flower on a banana tree, growing incongruously this far north. When I saw the nearly full moon hanging low near the horizon, huge and creamy white. Now it is puasa Ramadan. The Southwest monsoon has ended, and soon the Northeast monsoon will begin. I wish I could eat a bowl of laksa Sarawak this morning.

19 Nov 2005

Yesterday the International Center at the University of Florida had a reception for Fulbright Scholars. The occasion: A visit by Steve Uhlfelder, chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (and a Gator!). While the room was packed with students from Iraq, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, etc., all attending UF on Fulbrights, it occurred to me later that most of the U.S. scholars in the room were older (60-plus) white men. These are the professors who had received Fulbright awards to go abroad in the past. While I was in Malaysia, two of the other U.S. Fulbright professors were white men (younger than 60), but one was an American of South Asian descent, a Muslim and scholar of Islamic literature. I always felt pleased at the thought that Malaysians would meet him and know him as an American. I want to encourage more diverse Americans to apply for Fulbrights. I don't want people in other countries to assume that all our best professors are older white men.

22 Dec 2005

Reading a book of pantuns that I found in The Red Bookshop, in Kuching, I was struck by the absence of the word cinta (cheen-ta). I used to joke with my Malaysian friends that every Malay song on the radio was cinta, cinta, cinta -- it's the word for love. Pantuns are four-line poems, possibly the greatest verbal art form of the Malay civilization, and they are largely about love (and longing for love, and unrequitted love, dan lain lain -- etc., etc.). The book (The Romance of Sarawak Malay Pantun, by Maimunah Daud) includes the Bahasa Melayu and an English translation. The verses share something with Japanese haiku, I think, in their extreme brevity and the cleverness a writer most employ to evoke a feeling in so few words. Unlike the sappy lyrics of popular singers, the pantuns never hit you with a hammer. They also illustrate the complexity of interpretation in Bahasa, a language by no means as explicit as English. I think some of the translations to English do not do justice to the feeling in the original.

29 Jan 2006

Lunar New Year. At Universiti Teknologi MARA, it's a two-day holiday. Last year I was eating the honey-sweet teensy oranges that Chinese families give by the boxful as good luck gifts. The day before the holiday, my motorbike broke down. I managed to get it to the shop before they closed, but they really didn't want to fix it while I waited. I begged with exceeding politeness, knowing the owners are Chinese and wanted to get home and start the party. I felt so relieved when they finally said okay.

Today as I watched the movie "The New World," I kept remembering the two days I spent in the Iban longhouse in the jungle in Borneo. The movie shows the lifestyle of a group of American Indians who confront the English colonists who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1600s. I couldn't help remembering the Iban women coming down the hillside with their huge baskets full of vegetables strapped to their back, the men coming up from the river with their roosters under their arms, the wooden longboats, the endless calm of the river and the banks thickly lined with trees. It's a more difficult life than the one in the movie.

In Mulu, in Sabah, I asked a local man, now a park ranger, whether the dense green surrounding us was a forest ... or a jungle. He thought for just a moment, then said, "What is the difference?" I didn't know. He smiled. He didn't know either.

9 March 2006

I read a short story by Joseph Conrad this week: "Karain: A Memory." A European man (Conrad's alter ego) narrates how he remembers his last encounter with a Malay man, the headman of three villages. The memory involves two other European men who, on their schooner one night with the narrator, listen as the Malay, Karain, tells a tale of how he came to be haunted by the ghost of his best friend.

Years later, the narrator runs into one of the other Europeans on a street in London. That man brings up Karain and his ghost story. He often wonders, he says ... he wonders if all of it might have been true. The narrator's response:

"My dear chap," I cried, "you have been too long away from home."

I didn't come to believe any ghost stories -- although I heard a few. But there's something I know now that I didn't know before. I can't really say what it is. It's many things, but altogether, it is one thing that cannot be described. It's a shadow, an undercurrent, a past from which Malaysia comes. It came home with me because now I know it. I don't know it the way a Malaysian knows it, of course. For a Malaysian, it is inside. For me, it is external, invisible, slightly disquieting. A ghost.

"They had an independent bearing, resolute eyes, a restrained manner; and we seem yet to hear their soft voices speaking of battles, travels, and escapes; boasting with composure, joking quietly, sometimes in well-bred murmurs extolling their own valor, our generosity; or celebrating with loyal enthusiasm the virtues of their ruler. We remember the faces, the eyes, the voices, we see again the gleam of metal; the murmuring stir of that crowd, brilliant, festive, and martial; and we seem to feel the touch of friendly brown hands that, after one short grasp, return to rest on a chased hilt."

10 November 2006

I'm ready to go back. I think of the jungle, the heat, the language. I think of the teenagers holding hands in KLCC, the glamorous multi-story shopping mall in the center of Kuala Lumpur. The smell of satay on a charcoal grill. The call to prayer singing from the minarets five times every day. The babel of Hokkien, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil in the train station. The buzz of mosquitos. People slap your face. Your friends, I mean -- not strangers. To kill the mosquito before it punctures you.

My mouth waters for a real roti canai -- I ate a wonderful roti canai at a restaurant in San Francisco in August, in the Singapore Malaysian Restaurant (run by some Malaysians from Penang) -- all of their dishes were fantastic. In October I ate two times at Malaysia Kopitiam in Washington, D.C. -- excellent food, except for the roti canai, which came with yummy curry, but the roti itself was tak baik. Another puasa Ramadan has come and gone. I looked at the huge airfares and thought, "What the heck am I doing?" I need to go back. I miss so many things.

"When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle."
-- Capt. Benjamin L. Willard, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Yeah, well, I don't know if I really want to go back into the jungle. But the kampungs and the cities and the beaches? The markets and the restorans mamak? Yes, I do want to go back.

31 August 2007

Bintang. Bulan. Cinta. Why do I think so often of these words? Star, moon, love. In the heat of August, in Florida, I think constantly of Malaysia.

Selamat Hari Merdeka, Malaysia! Today is the 50th anniversary of national independence. Not my country. Not my struggle. But from this far distance I watch and feel deep concern about what appears to be growing unrest. At 50 years old, and with a GDP per capita of $12,900 (compare with neighbor Indonesia and a GDP per capita of only $3,900), Malaysia should be dismantling the inequalities of two-tier citizenship. Instead, the prime minister and the ruling party seem bent on dividing the population even further.