Doing Lifework in Malaysia 9811920869, 9789811920868

Citation preview

Doing Lifework in Malaysia Souchou Yao

Doing Lifework in Malaysia

Souchou Yao

Doing Lifework in Malaysia

Souchou Yao Marrickville, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-19-2086-8 ISBN 978-981-19-2087-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the help provided by the following: Michael D. Jackson, as always. Tom Sankey for the stimulating conversations and for correcting some of the awkward expressions in the text. Deborah Nixon for reading the first chapter and the pleasant meetings at Sydney’s Enmore Park. Eugene Ward for the careful copyediting.

v

Author’s Note

Looking back at these essays written during the height of the COVID pandemic, I detect a melancholy, a sense of the uncertainty of life. Isolation is a public health ruling, but for a writer it is almost a blessing. You no longer need an explanation as to why you are not out of the house, why you are spending long hours in your room. There are other dispensations: old friendships are reconnected (‘I am shutdown in Adelaide, I thought I’d give you a call’), and your mind loosens and wanders off to new bookish terrains. And you are given to take risks: why not go around the preoccupations—and methods of exegesis—that have loyally served you and hitch the wagon to another locomotive. In these circumstances, existential anthropology, with its profound philosophic doubt and literary qualities, seems to be a perfect fit with the wavering precariousness of the world outside my study. Still, I wonder why I have taken to it so keenly. The COVID life is one reason; the other is that the basic tenets of the philosophic work that drive the narratives in the book. The existentialist thoughts of writers like Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus seem to have the power to dig deep into my unconscious, into my upbringing in China and in Malaysia. Even if it risks over-rationalization and crosscultural misreading, I have felt as I wrote, that the ancient East and the modern West are united on the subject of life’s contingency and chanciness. On the embodiment of knowledge and skill, for example, here is a parable of the butcher as told by the philosopher Zhuangzi (369 BC–286 BC):

vii

viii

AUTHOR’S NOTE

… I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are.1

I ponder on much of all this as I write. While culture defines and structures human habits and practices, the power of the senses is shared by all people as they go about their lives. This may well be the cosmopolitanism we know and experience. Rereading Zhuangzi after so many years, I am struck by the intimate tryst of thoughts and bodily experiences—the core of European existentialism—that featured in the ancient philosopher’s texts. Protocol and modesty make sure I do not venture off and show my ignorance, as the Chinese would say. Yet, the wisdom and admonition of the Chinese classic texts have—as do the works of existentialist thought—guided my pen as I laboured in self-imposed isolation in my little room in Sydney.

Note 1. From Burton Watson’s crisp translation; Zhuangzi Basic Writings, Translated by Burton Watson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 49.

Contents

Part I You, Me, and Others 3

1

On Writing Ethnography

2

Doing Lunch with Jasmin Ahmad

23

3

A Lowborn Life

39

4

The Education of J. Kuna Rajah Naidu

57

5

Appetite

77

6

Ethnic Crossover

99

Part II Under the Sign of China 7

Hotel Belaga

117

8

Solitude

133

9

The Diaspora Returns

151

10

Scars of Memory

167

Index

187

ix

PART I

You, Me, and Others

CHAPTER 1

On Writing Ethnography

In The Yage Letters , William Burroughs declares simply, ‘I read about a drug called yagé [ayahuasca] used by Indians in the headwaters of the Amazon. … I decided to go down to Colombia and score for yagé.’1 It was January 1953, he was on a trip to the Amazon in search of the potent hallucinogenic to add to his drug experiences. The beginning feels right. Like the phrase ‘Call me Ishmael’ that opens Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, an almost hackneyed first-liner that hauls the reader, like an unwilling witness, to the dreams and delirium of a search. Recounting social life in Malaysia, my ethnographic sketch is more banal; there is no hallucinogenic, it features no white whale to mess up a fairly straightforward narrative. If writing is a journey, mine begins each morning with the search for breakfast. I am working from my house in Port Dickson, a seaside town south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; here breakfast is crusty dosai with potato fillings and strong teh tarik at the Nivassh Curry House down the hill on Jalan Pantai. In the early morning, you feel groggy, your body yearns for the caffeine kick. You walk past the municipal council office, at the carpark men and women chatter amicably, waiting for the offices to open. Some are drinking and smoking, some finishing their breakfast—nasi lemak, coconut rice wrapped in banana leaf. Their voices sound sharp and inflected, with a strange diction. But they are speaking Malay, the national language which you knew since childhood. The path leads you to the top of a set of stairs. You make the climb down, holding © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_1

3

4

S. YAO

on the railings for safety, and reach a short stretch of bricked pathing. You take a breather; five minutes’ walk on the right is the eating place. The Nivassh Curry House is run by Mr Murugan, an Indian Muslim; all manner of people come to eat here. The place is a modest ten tables, with a couple of cooks from Chennai, and waitresses of young Tamil women. The breakfast menu is simple: roti canai fried bread, dosai pancake of chickpea flour, both halal and enjoyed by Muslims and nonMuslim alike. The tables are taken up by men in boiler suits with yellow Velcro tapes on their chests—engineers and workers at the Shell Oil Refinery, mothers with their children waiting for their roti canai to take away, pensioners reading the Star newspaper and looking for company for the long day ahead. Mr Murugan sits behind the counter. The television is off. The ancient mirror behind the cash register brings the soft early morning light, and turns gleaming the rows of cellophane-lined cigarette packs. Mr Murugan is fenced in by a bowl of rubber bands, jars of candies, and a frame of glittering verse from the Koran in ornate Arabic calligraphy. Absorbed in cleaning the counter top, he moves his hand with matronly efficiency, pausing only to open the cash register when a customer fronts up to pay the bill. Sitting at the table you share with other patrons, you are faced with the prattle of multi-ethnic exchanges. The Malay, Chinese, and Indian customers are all eating the same offerings from this Indian-Muslim restaurant, making the place an establishment of ethnic peace. Actually, it is nothing remarkable—just people starting their day. Only the sly note-taker cares for the sociological significance of what is before him. Out on Jalan Pantai the air is prickly as the heat rises, and sunlight glosses the cars and lorries and motorbikes rushing by. Across the road is Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple—a chunky white building with concrete lattices and flat roof—and beyond it the beach. After breakfast it is your habit to take a short stroll by the sea. There is no zebra crossing, so you walk to the stoplight further on. The traffic makes you dizzy. You wait for the light to turn green, but it goes red again just when you have reached the traffic island. Safely stranded, you are still halfway across. You try to brave the traffic; you step forward and turn back from the onrush of traffic. You try again. From where you are, your nostrils pick up the diesel fumes, the odour of the roadside drain, and surprisingly, a whiff of jasmine. Everything is in motion, like shifting sand. You remind yourself: a short walk on the beach would be nice. But twenty minutes later, you are still in the hazardous zone, hemmed in by the morning traffic on both

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

5

sides. Suddenly you are seized by a vertiginous torpor. For a moment you don’t know where you are. Why is the traffic going that way? Is the shopfilled town centre in that direction or way back? Why am I alone, why is there no one to share my anxious wait to get to the other side? What am I doing here? But this is where you live, where you keep a house on the cap of the hilly Jalan Toh Kee Kah. This is the town where Susi your maid lives with her extended family, this is where your informant Rajah the driver and handyman works to support his wife and three children, this is where Adam the recalcitrant Malay finds sympathetic ears for his rant about Islam in which he is losing faith. And the weather-worn roadside poster: Vote Keadilan! reminds you this is the constituency of Anwar Ibrahim, the tragic, charismatic politician of the opposition coalition, who contested here in the 2018 election and won. However, social facts and political allegiance do not tether you down. It is your town, it is my town, it is the town of others. At the stoplight, the dust-stirring world is like an untamed beast that has taken residence inside you. There is no escape; the subjectobject demarcation has vanished. And you are left with a question: How do you secure yourself in a world full of puzzlement and uncertainty, a world in which you need to make a claim? The book marks a point in an anthropologist’s journey through the methodological bog holes to an epistemological arrival. It is a journey that begins with the participant-observation fieldwork made famous by Malinowski. You check the notes you have written, and are alerted to the common themes. In fieldwork, you are involved with the people you study in all kinds of ways: they share your tobacco, you bring gifts to their weddings, you attend their rituals and festivals, you unwittingly become entangled in local feuds. These, quite apart from the interviews and observations, complicate the investigator-informant relationship. The fact is, the ethnographic encounter happens in a particular locale—be it a tribal village, a rural community, a township, an urban neighbourhood— with its own cultural and historical setting. For the anthropologist—and the informant, too—that makes for an encounter of existential import. What faces the anthropologist is the dilemma of how to strike a balance between personal commitment and detachment, while embracing the idiosyncrasies and inconsistences of a social world into which they are gradually being drawn. Ethnography, I believe, is less a scientific investigation and more an art. And ethnography is inescapably self-ethnography.

6

S. YAO

The participant-observation method demands the ethnographer to be physically there, in the place chosen for the fieldwork. A lot of ethnographic work, from the first page, takes the reader right into the field: a healing ritual, a tribal festival, or a yam harvest. But a certain formalism— a certain decorum—makes the anthropologist write themselves out. In the past, this had been very much the norm but there were exceptions. Clifford Geertz begins his 1973 essay ‘Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight’: ‘Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended as anthropologists, to study.’2 A quotidian, personal note that opens up a study of a social practice at the heart of Balinese culture. One might ask: the date (‘Early in April of 1958’), the health and mood of Geertzes (‘malarial and diffident’)— do they matter in a social science undertaking? The insertion of the self in ethnography poses less of a controversy now. But this has not been a totally liberating experience for the anthropologist. For self-ethnography imposes its own strictures. The appropriate form and expression, the issue of truth and what one has recorded, what one remembers: they are reminders of how ethnography should be written. Self-ethnography is not a freedom partly because there is a good deal of the awkwardness of emotional exposure. At times, it seems a bad taste to talk about oneself in forbiddingly intimate details. Why put it on the poor reader? At worst, it is a case of the ethnographer presuming too much. They must believe that their field experiences are worth reporting, that their personal take on what they have witnessed demonstrates a social and philosophic truth, and thus, if they are daring, contributes to the advancement of an academic discipline. But then every ethnographic writing is personal and a kind of presumption. For one that begins with ‘Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident …,’ or more conventionally, as Daryll Forde does in ‘Death and Succession: an analysis of Yoko mortuary ceremony’ that opens with, ‘Complex and protracted mortuary ceremonies follow the deaths of senior men among the Yako of Eastern Nigeria’3 ; both feature personal, autobiographical elements. We know from the Preface the University of Manchester’s Simon Fund had financed Forde’s fieldwork, and alone or accompanied by his wife, Forde would have risked disease and isolation as did the Geertzes. Thus, the issue: the autobiographical elements are not a matter of writing style, or even of an anthropologist’s aptitude for emotional expression, but the heart of the ethnographic art itself. Among other things, self-ethnography

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

7

adds realism to an abstractive academic undertaking. Geertz’s mood and emotions give ‘Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight’ an intimacy, a palpable sense of him actually being there, making it one of the most memorable ethnographies in anthropology. The point is, for the Balinese as for other societies, lives, and daily dealings do not make for the neat formalism of conventional social science. An undertaking free from the subjective does not do justice to the harsh reality and happy lyricism of everyday life. And this implies a particular philosophic attitude, a perhaps less conventional approach to the vindication of truth. For Merleau-Ponty, truth has its own force of validation, but how we are to arrive at a ‘truthful position’ is something of the mind and body. If I am conscious of the world around me, that consciousness is rooted not only in the mind, but also in the bodily senses. Mind and body—thinking and the hard materiality of existence—both affirm the truthfulness of what I perceive. In Merleau-Ponty’s words: Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.4

Anthropology aside, few nowadays can be oblivious to what is happening in other disciplines. In cultural theory, Walter Benjamin shuns the view of the past as consisting of a series of movements in an inevitable march towards the future: a critique of historicism.5 There is also Foucault’s argument that, in the contemporary liberal State, governance takes on a wide range of responsibilities: ‘wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility,’ ‘customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking,’ ‘accidents and misfortunes such as famines, epidemics, death.’6 Everything is fragmented, void of a centre. Note that the French thinker has included in the ground-shift ‘customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking,’ the raison d’etre of anthropology as a discipline. Outside philosophy and cultural theory, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, his study of the rise of nationalism in modern Southeast Asia, is replete with terms like dream, sleep, awakening, invention, and collective

8

S. YAO

fantasy. Echoing Benjamin, Anderson asks: ‘If nationalism was the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own [false] narrative?’.7 The intellectual turn raises important questions about metaphysics, and about methods and interpretation. For anthropology, the aim may well be about how to lend truth to the fieldwork experience which is, like the life of informants, often chaotic and constantly in a flux. One figure who has made a consistent effort to untangle this puzzle is Michael Jackson of Harvard University. In what he calls existential anthropology, Jackson draws from a wide arc for his inspirations. Fathers of American pragmatism—William James, James Dewey—make their appearance in much of his work, so does the nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche, and a slew of contemporary thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. He asks rhetorically, [Since] truth is a word we retrospectively assign to events whose outcome has proved positive for us, why not locate our thinking in the here and now, immersing ourselves in the quotidian situations of others, taking our intellectual cues from their concerns, and conversing on terms that they decide?8

And he puts it to his fellow professionals: Whereas philosophers have typically sought a standpoint that frees the mind from its bodily, sensory and practical embroilments in everyday life … anthropologists [should] insist that thought is always tied to mundane interests, material matters, cultural preoccupations and everyday situations.9

The mind, the bodily senses, and the everyday practices are locked into each other like Lego blocks. The effect is to elevate the carnal materiality of people’s lives as worthy of philosophy. The separation of mind and the bodily senses is an illusion, akin to the alienation that follows the separation of product from process, text from context, capital from labor. … To fully recognize the eventfulness of being is to discover that what emerges in the course of any human interaction overflows, confounds and goes beyond the forms that initially frame the interaction as well as the reflections and rationalizations that follow from it.

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

9

Though this indeterminate relationship between experience and episteme may not be readily apparent, it becomes dramatically obvious in critical events and limit situations when little in one’s experience can be grasped or explained by reference to what is already known and named, or what can be thought and spoken.10

Many of Jackson’s writings reveal a commitment to make the flow of the everyday communicable to the reader. To delve into his texts is to be rewarded with eloquent and concise prose, where the play of ideas is a constant surprise and joy. It gives the impression of an author deep in the barque convolution of the ideas he brings to the fore. In this, he cannot help but to mimic, and thus to recreate, the giddiness of his own mental process as much as the rich occurrences of the people’s lives he studies. The literary quality is distinct, so is the personal style. The lyricism, the poetic excess, lends veracity to the situations in which he finds himself. In general terms, Jackson’s ethnographies tend to break free of academic formalism, just as they breach the divide between the thinking subject and its objects, between the anthropologist’s discernments and the lifeworld of his informants. Jackson names his major influences, besides the American pragmatists like John Dewey and William James, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Sartre, and Heidegger. The whirl of Jackson’s deep reading and exegesis culminates in Heidegger’s Being and Time, it seems to me. From the Greeks to the Enlightenment, the self is the sovereign subject that comprehends and puzzles out the mysteries of the world. For Heidegger, though, what defines us as human subjects, what makes up the passions that drive our lives, is the fact that we are inescapably a part of this world. And this is a key moment in Being and Time: an individual is immersed in themselves, just as they cannot position themselves outside the world of which they are physically and existentially a part. As Jackson clarifies, [T]he presence of the singular ‘‘I’’ is never completely eclipsed in any collective activity, and the collective has no reality apart from the persons who comprise it. … Thus, human beings everywhere oscillate spontaneously and situationally between egocentric and sociocentric modes of being without necessarily experiencing these as mutually antithetical.11

10

S. YAO

All this raises the question: What is it like to be in a world where the world and I are one? And how do you live when the customary divide between ‘the egocentric and sociocentric modes of being’ is blurred? Heidegger calls this state of ‘being-in-the-world’ Dasein. Of the concept’s many divergences, it is the loss of ontological certainty that is most troubling yet philosophically fruitful. Here you see the possibility of a thought that eventually leads to Sartre’s existentialism—and Jackson’s existential anthropology. Being and Time is monumental, stuporous in reading—it mimics the qualities of the lifeworld whose mystery it tries to unravel.12 In the same spirit, if I make much of the uncertainty of an informant’s existence, this is to suggest a general philosophic validation. Like Jackson, I believe that academic concepts often fail to capture the rich happenings in people’s lives. This has been my experience: people’s thinking and doing are full of contingencies, a mixture of coincidences, lucky breaks, and the ruling of fate. Often they make decisions on the go, because it is the most sensible way. Running parallel to the hard decision-making are responses seemingly without reason: contingency is a large element in their existence. This has alerted me to a way of thinking, a way of writing about the ethnographic encounter with relative lucidity. If Heidegger is forbiddingly complex, we can turn to the writing of the French existentialists, say Camus’ The Stranger; it begins enigmatically: Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW, DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.13

Then the narrator’s indecisiveness: The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the twoo’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.”14

He takes the two-o’clock bus. The afternoon is hot. He has lunch at his usual restaurant, and everyone is kind. There is no one like a mother,

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

11

they say, as they come to the door to say goodbye. He is in a rush; he has to call at his uncle’s place to borrow his black tie and mourning band. His uncle has died a few months ago. The Stranger is commonly regarded as a master text of existentialism. What underlines the narrator Meursault’s action—and non-action—is an enactment of life’s absurdity, an idea at the centre of existentialist thought. Meursault is a character who does not rely on God or destiny, or indeed the conventional morality, to guide him. His thinking without thought, his dream-walk though his mother’s funeral, his aimless wandering after the funeral, his senseless killing of an Arab: they illustrate life’s choices are often void of reason and purpose. Yet if the lifeworld is brimful of contingencies, then what is unexpected is also the opportunity for the making of the authentic self. It is a man not without self-awareness who says, ‘I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy,’ and who, as a murderer, wishes ‘that there will be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution….’15 So we are tempted to strike a moderately positive note on one bore down with the predicament of life’s choices, to say the least. Taking a leap from French Algeria to a fishing island in the South China Sea, French existentialist thought still claims its relevance. My first anthropological fieldwork was carried out on Cheung Chau, one of the outer islands of Hong Kong. My interest was colonialism and Hong Kong was then under British rule, so the choice of field site made sense. I arrived on a winter morning, after spending a week in Hong Kong where I bought stationery and medicine, not forgetting the Pantoprazole tablets for my upset stomach. I was keen to get started. I had breakfast on the waterfront and went to Sai Wan Village where the District Office had found me a flat. The Islands District Office had sponsored my research, made introductions, and allowed me access to the open files. The fieldwork situation, so I found out, duplicated that of the anthropological ancestors in Africa: colonial divide-and-rule, the official sponsorship of local leadership, a government amicable to researchers set to study the people under its rule. On Cheung Chau the District Office picked its leaders and official patronage was a source of power and influence. Nonetheless, the power structure and economic relationships were shifting. No one could ignore the Chinese takeover in 1997, nor the Cultural Revolution that had caused riots and chaos in Hong Kong a few years back. On the island township, China, Taiwan—the Republic of

12

S. YAO

China—and British colonial rule were the essential sources of power and social-economic opportunities. The place is too small for cars, so research was a lot of leg-work. I surveyed the township and the fishing village, and I set about visiting anyone willing to talk to me. I was unwavering in sorting out the who’s who in the Rural Committee, the body that represented the local interests; and once in a couple of months I would take the ferry to Hong Kong Central to read the files at the District Office. When the relationships of power and influence emerged, they took the form of a two-part structure overseen by the officialdom. At the apex sat the Rural Committee. The Rural Committee was the voice of the merchant-shopkeepers and the wealthier fishermen, and it liaised with the District Office and the New Territories Administration. The locals, with wry humour, called the people girdled around the Rural Committee the Right-wing Faction, youpai tuan. Symmetry demanded an opposite, and those snubbed by the government were the Left-wing Faction, zoupai tuan. The left-wingers were again merchants and wealthy fishermen, but they did business with the giant wholesalers China had established in Hong Kong. The powerful islanders were demarcated, not by wealth, but by whether they were pro-British-Taiwan or pro-Beijing. Lucky for the anthropologist, the township’s social-political relationships were clarified by a simple line of dividing allegiances. The Right-wing-Left-wing polarity explained a lot. A person’s position in the community, an informant’s attitude towards China, one’s connection—or lack of it—with the officialdom: each was determined by their slot in one of the two ‘factions.’ Once you found out which ‘faction’ they belonged to, you could, with reasonable accuracy, tell the charities they supported, the old age home they gave money to, the newspaper they subscribed to, the bank they did business with, and most notably, which Chinese national day they would celebrate. The two Chinas have their respective national days—October first for the People’s Republic of China, the Double-Ten (October tenth) for the Nationalist Republic in Taiwan. Thus, the lifeworld of Cheung Chau folk felt like an open book. All I had to do was get a fix on people’s affiliation with one of the two Chinas—those in the Rural Committee were Taiwan supporters—and the rest would fall into place. But it was a folly, I soon realized. The order of social life is not so easily discernible. It is no intellectual wisdom to squeeze the wavering complexity, the competing passions into a system of hierarchy and social

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

13

grading. Like people everywhere, the Cheung Chau folk were full of subterfuge in their dealings and behaviour. It is easy to say they belonged to one of the two ‘factions’; but some escaped the categorization, and still more wilfully confounded the signs and meanings of the groupings in which they had put themselves. In a sense, the Beijing-Taipei bifurcation had not much to do with people’s political allegiances. It may simply express a personal preference for one of the two regimes, but it could also be a way of saying, ‘I belong to this group, you belong to the other; we are of opposite interests.’ Behind all that, everyone knew that the District Office was the kingmaker: official patronage gave life to the right-wingers, and by shunning the Beijing supporters diverted them to the leftist camp. And since official patronage was the route of government contracts and subsidies, the bifurcation would appear to decide—to a large measure—one’s status and economic fortune. This, again, is not quite the case. For ‘Communist China’ had its own legitimacy and support in Hong Kong, and the left-wingers had their economic connections, namely, the giant Chinese trading firms that imported from across the border a whole range of goods, from diesel to engine grease, from fresh meat and vegetables to dried goods. The right-wingers were all show, they were the justices of peace, the recipients of Queen’s Birthday honours; but their wealth and income were as nothing when compared with those who sourced their goods from the Chinese wholesalers. Understandably, whatever their allegiance, the local shop bought their goods from distributors from both ‘factions.’ The two national days are nine days apart. The People’s Republic celebration came first, followed by commemoration of the founding of Nationalist China. During the first two weeks of October, the waterfront would be full of activities. Plaques of wreaths flanked by the appropriate national flags would greet the ferry passengers as they stepped down on the jetty. As the days passed, one set would be put up then pulled down, another set repeated the installation and the casting aside. And most likely, you would be blind to the changes: the same jumble of floral arrangements, the same set of green fern and stems that covered the bamboo arch; only the flags had been changed but you were not sure. Still, you could not ignore the ‘in your face’ transmutations, as the wreaths fell apart, as the wind turned the florid decoration into tatters, as the rain smudged the calligraphy. The most pragmatic of business people, the florist would salvage arrangements from one national day and carefully

14

S. YAO

re-install them to mark the other. But who could blame the creativity of the installer? Good business sense dictated that the same floral plaque, with some modifications, could be sold to two sets of customers, only the flags and the banners had to be changed. For the anthropologist, it was a moment of loss of innocence. Actually, you had been struggling with the problem the first time you talked with your informants. They spoke hesitantly, what they told of their lives was baffling, the explanation of their dealings often made little sense. You dutifully wrote everything down. Fieldnotes are a record of what you have observed and what was told to you, as well as your comments and analysis. With fieldnotes, I discovered, it was prudent to keep two sets of books. As a Ph.D. student, I was obliged to send a monthly report back to the university, describing my diligence, hinting at the successes in pursuing a lead, and generally convincing the supervisor that all was well and I was not wasting my time and squandering the scholarship. What I wrote in the monthly report was tidy and formal, worthy of a soon-to-be-academic. The other notebook was filled with jottings, observations, and freewheeling thoughts. Even as a young student, I had a sense these jottings and meditations would lend a kind of realism, a truthfulness, to the final writing. The homesickness, the typhoon that stranded me in my flat, the despair when a Rural Committee man refused my request for an interview, the idle downtime when I read crime novels for solace: they are, I believed then as I do now, vital experiences that would enrich an ethnography. By the end of eighteen months’ fieldwork, my information had mainly come from one person. Jimmy Fung was a small-time hood and a drug dealer. When I met him, I had thought I was winding down, that I had enough to write my thesis. But Jimmy Fung brought new insights to the dark dealings on the island I was only half aware of. The fieldwork legend says that a person at the margin, one who is at the border of social acceptability and estrangement, makes the best informant, because such a person would have the knowledge and the inclination to spill the beans. True to form, Jimmy Fung knew all kinds of scandals and infightings, which he was keen to tell a listener. I took them down, and checked and rechecked and made sure they gelled with what other informants told me. His profession, such as it was, left him with plenty of time on his hands. However, I did not put what he told me in the monthly report. Neither did I report on the drug-taking he and his followers partook of in the sitting room of my flat, fearing that it would cause a scandal in

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

15

the common room back at the university. In any case, who would be interested in such undertakings? On the same score, who would care to know our expedition to the topless bar in Kowloon where Jimmy Fung’s girlfriend Jenny was a manager, with me finding the bare breasts next to my beer mug disconcerting? These experiences were part and parcel of fieldwork, but they did not go into the field report or the final writing. Jimmy Fung’s world of petty criminality and topless bars is, when I think about it, in tandem with the world of the narrator of Camus’ The Stranger. I cannot get over the fact that both, despite their antisocial acts, are full of the potential for redemption. The murder in The Stranger has other significations than the taking of life, and Jimmy Fung’s unsavoury acts are likewise charged with rich significance. Both are bad men who eventually find themselves. The term ‘chasing the dragon’ is derived from a mode of taking heroin in an allegedly efficient manner. A few flakes of the white power are spooned onto an aluminium foil and placed over a cigarette lighter; the substance soon melts into beads that emits, enticingly, the pale smoke the addict seeks. The beads thicken, and his trembling hand holds onto the foil, moves the drinking straw in their mouth and begins to ‘chase’ the cooking. ‘Chasing the dragon’ depicts a delicate manoeuvre and gives hint to the powerful sensation the substance delivers to a user. A longtime user can execute the delicate manoeuvres and leave little to waste. However, for most this is hard to achieve. And since drug-taking is often shared, ‘chasing the dragon’ is passing the broiling foil from hand to hand; a second of idling smoke is a wastage that brings anxiety to the company present. Actually, the more methodical, more frugal mode of taking heroin is by injection. An addict boils the substance—an even smaller amount than used in ‘dragon chasing’—and the whole amount is siphoned into a syringe and injected into the vein. There is little fuss, and there is practically no wastage. It is a modern, almost scientific approach to drug-taking. It lacks glamour, yet needle use has its own social meaning. The drug-taking and gatherings in my flat constituted a world of existential possibilities, I would put it. Camus’ character, Meursault, through his homicidal act, gains an awareness of his authentic self—the prize of the existentialist search. His arrival is a return to a social order which his killing has threatened to disrupt, and I rather believe ‘chasing the dragon’ would grant the heroin-takers a similar sense of arrival.

16

S. YAO

As I witnessed the proceeding, it struck me that what took place was not without order or social meaning. To a large measure, the social differences of those present were signalled by the two modes of heroin consumption. Injection is super-efficient and non-wasteful; the ‘rubbish guys’—the lowly ranked fighters and hangers-on in the gang—did it on the toilet floor, away from disapproving eyes. Thus, a social hierarchy emerged. Jimmy Fung never shot up. And he did his ‘dragon chasing’ alone, leisurely, while resting on the sofa; the ‘cooking’ was the duty of one of his lieutenants who edged the foil reverently towards his leader. The ‘rubbish guys’ had already shot up and came out to watch. Jimmy Fung took his time, with long pauses between the pulls on the straw, the whirling smoke caressing the ceiling. It was a eureka moment for the anthropologist: what took place was a display of conspicuous consumption that marked social status, that gave form to the differentiation of social ranking. Jimmy Fung and his men were in their own world, which they had inscribed with their customary order of status differences. His followers paid allegiance to their leader by witnessing in rapt attention his ‘wastefulness,’ just as they had accepted their position by the frugality of their drug-taking. They believed that any outside circumstances, full of opportunities, would never work for them. Being ‘rubbish men,’ they had turned to a mode of drug-taking consistent with what they were. In the flat, they had stuck to the ritual and observance that slotted them in a social order in which they found a sense of belonging. They and their leader were social outcasts. But in the evening, at the place of a ‘friend,’ things were turned around, so they imagined and saved them. The ‘dragon chasers’ were proud of their unsavoury dealings and petty criminality. Colourful and arresting, it is hard to know where to place them in a study of British colonialism in the last years before the Chinese takeover. Fieldwork on Cheung Chau had produced a rich harvest; some of it went to the writing, much of it was winnowed out by the academic guideline. It was a matter of focus and specialization; now I believe otherwise. For surely what is useful or relevant is also decided by the overall emotional texture, the personal and social impulses that lie within the circuit of human existence. As for colonialism in Hong Kong, the texture and impulses had created a broad canopy under which people negotiated their needs and transactions with the officialdom. Recalling Michael Jackson’s philosophic insight, the island life is indeed made up of things that

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

17

cannot be easily put into words or made legible by formal intellectual concepts. Cheung Chau’s livelihood relied on seafaring. Sai Wan village, the township and its shops, the marine engine dealers and diesel pumps at the seafront; all depended on fishing. Not surprisingly, the many temples on the island are devoted to gods and goddesses with powers to calm the storm and ensure fishing folk’s safety. The Pak Tai Temple on the esplanade and the Tin Hou Temple (‘Temple of the Heavenly Queen’) on Peak Road are temples of patrons of fishermen. The community worship held on their birthdays pleaded for their mercy, that they would keep on an eye on the junks that sailed as far as the Gulf of Tonkin in north Vietnam. Once a year, in August, the deities were removed from their dusty altars to join the grand parade through the streets and neighbourhoods. Since it is a community event, everyone got involved, even Jimmy Fung and his followers. All manner of hoodlums and freeloaders were employed as flag-carriers, cymbal players—Jimmy Fung was the parade marshal—as the deities made their rounds along the main street. Eager to gain a bit of face—though the money helped, too—Jimmy Fung looked forward to the festival, and Jenny and some of her ‘sisters’ would come in their best and stayed a few days. The gang members and their leader had some of their best days at those parades. On the risk of seagoing life and the fortunes ruled by the gods, the islanders said, ‘life is unpredictable, at sea or on land.’ Their fond expression was, ‘Heaven has eyes.’ It is an expression of fact, and it serves as a warning to wrong-doers. You twist your tongue when you say it, drawing out the consonant in each word. Tian is ‘heaven,’ and it also means ‘sky,’ which gives the saying both a transcendental and secular tint. Heaven is simply the most reliable witness to the joy and despair of life. And since the gods’ all-seeing eyes register the good and the bad conduct, punishments are meted out and rewards are delivered. People said ‘Heaven has eyes’ a lot on Cheung Chau. They said it when they felt wrong had been done to them, when they pleaded to the gods for justice. For the fishing folk, there were many reasons for their rage and sense of injury: the government being meagre with its assistance and subsidies, the moneygrabbing marine engine dealers, the diesel merchants given to jacking up prices, the greed of the shopkeepers. Against all this, Heaven, as witness, offers the assurance that things would be put right, that there is still justice in the world.

18

S. YAO

But did people actually believe the gods would do this? Did they actually think Heaven would offer certainties when life does not? The most practical of people, they knew, in their heart of hearts, the key to their problems lay in their own hands. For that reason, some fishing junks were being fitted with navigational gear and most had bought sonar sounder fish detectors; they did not totally turn to the gods for safety and good harvest. And perhaps urged by the busy money-making around him, Jimmy Fung was thinking of a way out; he planned to open a small corner shop or, more imaginatively, to get to the United States and join the mass of undocumented immigrants. Either way, his belief in the efficacy of Pak Tai or the ‘Heavenly Queen’ did not kill his will to build a life for himself and Jenny. Nonetheless, the Cheung Chau people were poor self-determinists. They believed in fate, Heaven’s will, and life’s unpredictability. To describe their feeling, the rustic folks on Cheung Chau more often used the term mingyun, fate. When a fishing boat returned empty, when a marine engine broke down in the midst of a storm, people ranted and cursed everyone and everything; cognizance of the unexpected did little to calm the fishermen and their families. They blamed the engine dealer who had, they were sure, sold them a dud; since weather is Heaven’s domain, so too was Heaven held responsible. But this is a tricky move. The gods could be bribed, their anger assuaged, but you still had to rely on your own initiative and judgement. They might throw their hands in the air and say, ‘I am leaving everything to fate, to Heaven’s will,’ but the gesture does not renounce the need for human intervention. I have been trying to get a handle on the nature of the Cheung Chau lifeworld. The question is one of philosophy as much as it is one of the everyday practices. For me it is: How does one stay true to the realities that are like a moving target, constantly shifting? It is an impossible question until one recognizes that truth is a matter of the structure of thought, as much as what is out in the world. In this sense, the existentialist enquiry is really less radical than it may appear. For there had been Kant before Heidegger, who thought reason and human experience are the parents of morality and aesthetic judgement. Indeed, from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, there is a discernible thread in philosophic thought that upholds both the rational mind and the empirical world as the pillars of human perception. Still, the matters of lifeworld are but everywhere lodged in the cavern of secrets. We know the life we lead, but its form and purposes remain

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

19

a mystery. We have all, at one time or another, struggled with the question: ‘Why do things happen this way?’, or ‘What is the point of our busy striving?’ Philosophers are trained to tackle such questions. Nonetheless, doubt remains: What happens if the lifeworld, brimful of desires and obsessive needs, is not easily explained and explained away? Here it is necessary to bear in mind that the idea that human existence is uncertain is not the purview of the likes of Heidegger and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty whose radical departures tried to undo the foundation of the Enlightenment thought; the religious teachings of much of Asia and the Middle East emphasize much the same thing. My Malaysian informant, Mr Mok, a devout Buddhist, would not find strange this talk of the paradoxes of life that underpins the existentialist enquiry. He would surely say these paradoxes are the foundation of life, like food and sex. What defines existence is not the curtain we open in order to reveal what is true and valid. For there is nothing to reveal when truth is settled on the superficial, on what is felt and experienced. The subject of analysis is chaos and uncertainties themselves, a direction to which we, with circumspection, take as our writerly task. Thomas Mann declares that the realism of fiction is invariably a matter of ‘not quite’: To the artist, new experiences of ‘truth’ are new incentives to the game, new possibilities of expression, no more. He believes in them, he takes them seriously, just so far as he needs to in order to give them the fullest and profoundest expression. In all that he is very serious, serious even to tears—but yet not quite—and by consequence, not at all.16

What he means is that fiction is a work of imagination made believable by the writer. What is imagined is not false, but what is experienced as real is an artful recreation of scenes and passions readers recognize in their own lives. Thus, a ‘not quite’ quality, a blend of artifice and realism, prevails over fiction. This ‘not quite’ quality exists not only in literature; it features prominently in our daily lives. The Cheung Chau fishing folk believed in the gods, almost. When my Malaysian friend, Adam, rejects the Islamic teaching he has grown up with, his thinking and decisions are, well, not quite absolute. His ranting is full of bluster, ‘I have been fooled all my life; it is all Arab conspiracy.’ At the same time, he is wracked with guilt when he risks alienating his parents and his community. But what he finds

20

S. YAO

more troubling is the finality of it all: the rejection of Islam is without reprieve; his new personhood is a point of no return. The Cheung Chau folk, too, are full of ‘half measures’ in their daily judgements. For them, events good and bad are due to the gods’ will and to their own doing. Adam’s half de-conversion is a rehash of the same principle. Following the great German writer, it seems to me the spirit of ethnography is rarely about striking a balance between realities in the field and the certitude of intellectual understanding; it is not even about how to harmonize the flux and the solidity in social life. Rather, the task of the ethnographer is to push the realism and the analysis as far as they can go, always remembering to stage a return when tactically necessary. Existential anthropology is an approach that takes risks. It invites innovation in writing, a ‘not quite’ conceptualization, yet stays true to the empirical situations as we find them. This is the heart of existential anthropology and what drives the narrative in the following pages.

Notes 1. William Burroughs, Junky. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 75. 2. Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, Daedalus 134 (4), 2005, p. 56. 3. Daryll Forde, ‘Death and Succession: An Analysis of Yoko Mortuary Ceremony’, in Max Gluckman (ed), Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962, p. 89. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 1962, p. xv. 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed), Illuminations. New York: Stocken Books, 1969, pp. 253– 264. 6. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Colin Gordon (ed), The Foucault Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 93. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983, p. 1. 8. Michael D. Jackson, Lifeworlds: Essays on Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 254. 9. Michael D. Jackson, ‘Where Thought Belongs’, Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 235–251, 2009, p. 237. 10. Ibid., p. 237. 11. Michael D. Jackson, and Albert Piette, ‘Introduction: Anthropology and the Existential Turn’, in Michael D. Jackson and Albert Piette (eds), What Is Existential Anthropology? New York: Berghahn Books, 2015, p. 2.

1

ON WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

21

12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. My reading is greatly aided by Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (1984) and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). 13. Albert Camus, 1958. The Stranger. New York: Vintage, 1958, p. 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 59. 16. Thomas Mann, ‘To the Artist, New Experiences of Truth’, in Thomas Mann (ed), Essays of Three Decades. New York: Knopf, 1976, p. 330.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed) Illuminations. New York: Stocken Books. Burroughs, William S. 2003. Junky. New York: Penguin Books. Camus, Albert. 1958. The Stranger. New York: Vintage. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ——— 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Forde, Daryll. 1962. ‘Death and Succession: An Analysis of Yoko Mortuary Ceremony’, in Max Gluckman (ed) Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. ‘Governmentality’, in Colin Gordon (ed) The Foucault Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, Clifford. 2005. ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.’ Daedalus 134 (4): 56–86. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Jackson, Michael D. 2009. ‘Where Thought Belongs’. Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 235–51. ——— 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays on Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Michael D., and Albert Piette. 2015. What Is Existential Anthropology? New York: Berghahn Books. Mann, Thomas. 1976. ‘To the Artist, New Experiences of Truth’, in Thomas Mann (ed) Essays of Three Decades. New York: Knopf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Doing Lunch with Jasmin Ahmad

I met up with Jasmin Ahmad at the Japanese restaurant on the second floor of the Hotel Niko, Kuala Lumpur. ‘She is a striking lady. You can’t miss her,’ my friend had said, then sent me her picture over the phone just to make sure. It was twelve-thirty when I eyed her across the restaurant floor. There could be no mistaking her: her strong, angular face, her searching eyes, her short, and vivacious curls. Her head was naked of headscarf, and she wore a blouse of white cotton lace. I got up and accepted the offer of her hand, and said suavely, ‘How good of you to come,’ and got her to sit down. But inside I didn’t feel suave at all. ‘She is a remarkable woman, you would enjoy talking films and books with her,’ said the friend who had brought us together. In any case, here I was doing lunch with the brilliant, scandalously self-revealing Malaysian filmmaker Jasmin Ahmad—to talk about Sepet, her film of cross-racial young love in urban Malaysia. ‘You have to watch it for yourself,’ she said as she handed me the DVD. I thanked her; perhaps she thought by watching it at my leisure I would dwell on the film and avoid a facile judgement over a conversation. Actually, I had already seen the film; a pirated version circulating among Malaysian fans in Sydney. Sepet gives an indelible sense of the ‘crosscultural difficulties’ in the country by plotting the relationship between a young Chinese DVD vendor and a Malay schoolgirl. At the video stall, among dealers of fake Nike sneakers and Adidas sweatshirts, love has © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_2

23

24

S. YAO

mysteriously struck. Their eyes meet, they exchange a few words. She asks for Takeshi Kitano’s latest gangster fare, but it is all sold out. He runs his fingers through the DVD tray and turns around to give her his recommendation: ‘Try this.’ Instead of a Takeshi Kitano action flick, she walks away with Chungking Express, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai’s study of urban ennui. It is a hushed, tender scene; for a few moments the music stops so as not to break the mood. And you wonder what the girl, Orked, would make of the film she has purchased, for Chungking Express too is a story of chance meetings and crossed paths—and of stolen kisses. I told her I had enjoyed the film. I said I appreciated the many ‘cross-cultural moments’: the Chinese character Jason’s parents speaking in Malay and Cantonese to each other; the Chinese gangster’s assault on Jason for doing the moves of the hip-swing Malay dance; the young Muslim girl, Orked, all starry-eyed about the Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. These scenes feel cobbled together, but affecting and fair-minded. For that alone, I told its director, Sepet well-deserved the awards it had received—Best Film in the 2005 Malaysian Film Festival and Best Asian Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival in the same year. Jasmin Ahmad, who passed away in 2009, was very good at reminding you of the power, the grandeur, of the passionate feeling between a man and a woman. Sepet is a very personal film for her. The cross-cultural relationship was drawn from her own experience, though she was coy with the details. ‘Relationships across communities happen all the time,’ she said, ‘but people don’t talk about it much.’ Elaborating, she started to sprinkle our conversation with the subjects of love, marriage, and sex. Her words were urbane, witty, and occasionally bawdy. But there was no compromise in taste when she talked of bodily needs, and the necessary blend of sentiment and sexual contentment in marriage, which made me think she was testing her male listener. For she was not your everyday dyed-in-the wool Malay-Muslim woman, one who wears her piety on her sleeve. I was fascinated, for I had looked at her with a conventional eye, and she had caught me out. Her handsomeness and quick laughter felt like an affirmation of her true character. She was a lady with a touch of the old pro, one who knew all the games in town. In her short life, she was an object of much media gossip, what with her personality and her films dealing with the subjects of communal divide and the racial prejudices which the government has a role in enflaming. She was sensitive to the peculiarities of inter-ethnic relationships, and communal disapproval is the least of it.

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

25

She was once married to an Indian man, and her current husband was Chinese. I volunteered that I too had married outside ‘my race.’ At the wedding dinner, my Punjabi in-laws, no great meat eaters, had left mostly untouched the roast pork and the four-season ham and partook eagerly of the vegetable dishes. In any case, the culinary habits, the Sunday worship at the Gurdwara were, for a while, a challenge to this Chinese groom. In the end, the cultural differences have been an adventure for both my wife and me. Jasmin put a lid on my narrative. ‘Things are not that difficult, even among a couple of different cultures,’ she said. Behind the difficulties is love and sympathy, she added. She spoke like a person barely able to contain the vast mystery of marriage. Someone (was it Woody Allen?) once said marriage is the bravest act to which a man and a woman could ever commit themselves, which puts an Antarctica expedition or climbing Mount Everest to the wayside. In Malaysia, on the other hand, a crossrace couple has the government and communal disapproval to deal with— besides the ruling of the heart. Jasmin Ahmad felt dejected about the current state of communal division. She remembered when race did not affect people’s lives in the way it does today. Making friends with people of other races was easy in the schoolyard, at work, in daily life. She could mark the point at which things began to radically change: the May 1969 race riots. I was a teenager during the May-Thirteen riots. I came home from school and found my mother crying. The riots had started, she heard it on the radio; people were killing each other. It was shocking, because we have lived peacefully with each other for so long. You know what? The riots also brought out the best in us. My mother asked our Chinese neighbours to come and hide in our house. Many people were doing that all over the country, Malays and Chinese protecting each other.

In Sepet there is a scene that mirrors this yearning for ethnic peace. Jason is reading love poems—in Chinese—to a Malay woman. She reclines on a rattan chair, and her sarong kebaya catches the soft light in the dim kitchen. ‘It must be a Mainland Chinese who writes like this,’ she remarks approvingly in Malay, then she pulls him to her bosom and tussles his hair in affectionate teasing. We learn later that the woman is Jason’s mother, a Malay-speaking Peranakan Chinese from Malacca. Is the director playing tricks on us? Race relations, volatile and intemperate, are transmuted

26

S. YAO

into another form, into a mother-and-son relationship. There is a keen emotion between the two: incest is merely living dangerously. Sepet is filled with such difference-busting scenes. They hurry us along, each scene crackles with insinuations. There is the Malay-speaking mother of a Chinese family, the chest-baring Jason dancing joget to a Malay song, Orked with her pasar-Cantonese in search of a Takeshi Kitano DVD, Orked’s parents lament about Jason’s failure in to get a government scholarship. There’s no badness, no calculated evil in anyone, so it seems; everyone is responding to the circumstances inscribed by the State. Except James, the Chinese gang boss and loan shark. He is killed by an Indian gang out to encroach on his turf; death, as we know, counts as redemption. With scenes like these, Sepet wants to soften your heart, to make you believe that to get to the other side of the racial divide is viable if you want it bad enough. All it takes is daring and a measure of luck. In spite of its subject, there is no courting of controversy in Sepet. In the treatment of a transgressive relationship, it is enough for the film to show the lovers going about their courtship, meeting in a fast-food joint, taking funky photos of each other, low-key necking in the park in fear of the police out to find offenders of khalwat, the Islamic law of proximity.1 Every artist likes to think of their life as being in some way exemplary. Sepet strikes me this way. The forlorn glow whenever the lovers appear on the screen; the bedroom play, to the sound of a Thai pop song, of Orked’s parents; Jason’s rapport with his mother: these make up Jasmin Ahmad’s discourse on love that she has related to me. Nonetheless, Sepet feels restrained. The film is replete with reconciling sentiment in regards to the difficult circumstances that face young people like Orked and Jason. Love triumphs, we are given to think, even in a race-charged social situation. As I watched the film, I wondered what kind of film Jasmin Ahmad would have made if she had given free rein to her imagination about love’s liberating joy; the result might well have been a Malaysian remake of Oshima’s The Realm of the Senses with a sarong-clad Malay woman languidly castrating her Chinese lover on a coconut mat. All that is the working of a particular kind of imagination, an injured imagination. With such an imagination, love becomes a remedy, marriage a rescue mission, for much of Malaysia’s social and political life is so damaged, so racially tinted, that any riposte to the State regulations is a critical counterpoint. For me anyhow, the viewing pleasure of Sepet is

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

27

the way it foments the feeling, the fantasy, that love—and lust—do carry such redemptive power. In 2009 Jasmin Ahmad suffered a stroke during a business meeting; she was rushed to the hospital and died after surgery to reduce the swelling in her brain. Over the years since her passing, film studies and discussions of her work have kept her alive across social media (Sepet is on YouTube). On the internet, she looks young, bursting with energy. It is as if, in some dreadful way, her death has been a node in her short life; the rest is the ordinariness of a rich, joyful life. Here she is doing a TEDx Talk, testing the microphone, launching into her subject: film as storytelling. Here she is, squinting her eyes before the cameras in a media event, filling the place with her presence. Here she is, sitting in on an NGO conference on one of her many causes, her fans and colleagues among the attendees. We struggle to hold on to these events, to fill in the gap in the dates, 1958 to 2009, so that we may think only of the immutable in between. Why is Jasmin Ahmad so unforgettable? The reason is as facile as it is profound. In the first place her fame seems to lie in a certain political gesture she invested in her work—though her personality helped. For the Malaysian viewers, the subject of a film like Sepet is instantly recognizable; it is a Malaysian film, it speaks to the locals with familiar candour. The film is brim-full of the distress of crossing the race divide, of which the Orked-Jason liaison is loaded with, on reflection. And since race relations are heavily patrolled by the State and religious authorities, a heroic status is granted to the lovers, and to the viewing audience. Yet, the defiance is without depth; it stays on the surface. The joining of the affair of the heart with politics never goes beyond the mildly troubling. If this were a local treatment of Romeo and Juliet , as the DVD cover proclaims, there is no suicide and death, no martyrdom of grave injustice. Martyrdom is made meaningful when there is something that warrants sacrifice; for all their obstacles and heartache, it cannot be said that the characters have given up much. At times it feels Sepet has set out to belittle almost every aspect of itself. The gravity of the love affair, the State regulation of race relations, the Islamic rulings: they stay meekly like a sideshow, waiting for the more astute viewers to pick them up and amplify them into full recognition. One wishes that the film would nudge the State measures towards the centre stage. Regarding its subject, the boy-meets-girl racial crossover, it is also—more importantly—about the form and aesthetic design of a film which Malaysian viewers recognize as political, as critical

28

S. YAO

of the State. Thus, the question: How is an artist to approach their work that is politically engaged, yet retains their individual vision and thought? This question is really a flaky one about the separation of form and content. For form can be itself the content, the theme of engagement. For a work of art, the aesthetic is not a mere shell that captures and realizes an artist’s intention; it is an aesthetic form that has achieved an identity of its own. Or to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin: we should regard the aesthetic form ‘not merely as a sign of what is to be known but [as] … in itself an object worthy of knowledge.’2 To the film maker Jean-Luc Godard, ‘[S]tyle is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.’ Political art means many things to many people. Picasso’s Guernica is political art, so is Ai Weiwei’s recreation of the drowned Syrian infant on a pebbled beach on the Greek island of Lesbos. One a work of enormous ethical power, the other geekily sensational and exploitative, or so it has been commented upon.3 If Sepet is regarded as a political film, the label sits uncomfortably on it. 4 The last word on art and politics may well belong to the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn who writes, A form which comes from me, from myself only, which can only come from me because I see the form that way, I understand it that way and because I am the only one to know that form.5

But this is not a sentiment of bourgeoise individualism; Hirschhorn continues, I want to try to confront the great artistic challenge: How can I give a form which takes a position? How can I give a form that resists facts? I want to understand the question of form as the most important question for an artist.6

Hirschhorn’s is a position that moves away from noisy agenda-setting and the righting the wrongs, yet the wrongs are a fact of the world. And he offers a resolution of a sort: in the giving of form, one never forgets the importance of individual vision that drives all art practices: ‘I am, artistically and intellectually, responsible for what I do.’ Doing art politically requires one to be ‘existentially authentic,’ which means asserting and defending one’s position, and at the same time, opening oneself to

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

29

scrutiny. My mind keeps going to Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), a selfconscious enactment of a film-in-the-making, less concerned with the end product. Like the Godard film, Sepet could have been a work of auto-critique but is not. It seems like overkill to align Jasmin Ahmad with the master of the French New Wave in the same critical vision. But this is so only if you think that film criticism—and philosophy, for that matter—should deal only with the ethereal and the abstract, less with the mundane everyday. Malaysian film scholars have tended to view Sepet as a film with a political edge, despite its mawkish sentimentality. That the love it portrays does not run smoothly is largely due to State race policy. What stands between the lovers is not parental or communal disapproval, but a government that takes upon itself to intervene in its citizens’ most intimate affairs. It is hard to think of the film as free from polemics. Yet it is a polemic that vanishes as soon as it appears. Literature allows us to play God, the critic James Wood suggests.7 Literature is devoted to the art of similitude, of make-believe. Through the creation of life’s copy, of another version of a living event, literature is granted a God-like power. The notion that in literature ‘anything can be thought, anything written, that thought is utterly free’ is anything but ‘a tame license.’8 Not only literature—art, in engaging with an idea, in memorializing a historical event, in the expression of an artist’s personal vision, similarly takes on the power of omniscience. This God-like power, Wood believes, should be seized for our own ends, to advance our causes. ‘At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama,’ and we do this to ameliorate ‘the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence.’9 To ‘hurl down the script’ is exactly right. For to do this is to rewrite that script, to recast a familiar story under a fresh light. In a strange way, Sepet is a missed opportunity; for the film could have been, in a nutshell, an exercise in national soul-searching. Talking about Malaya gives rise to images and desires of another era. At the mention of it, no castle-dotted plain or wind-swept desert comes to mind, but the sweat-glistened faces of coolies, the swirl of smoke from smelting plants, the whamming and cranking of machines in rubber sheet pressing sheds. In the East, European imperial rivalry had defined British policy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the mid-nineteenth century British interests in Malaya came to rest on two commodities: tin and rubber. Tin and rubber told a story

30

S. YAO

of immigrant labour and the rise of British and European capital. The commodities fed Western industrial needs—in canning and in the manufacturing of car tyres—and were huge foreign currency earners for Britain. They explained the British imperial interests in Malaya, and the need to hold on to the territory after the end of the Second World War. And for that, independence had been a violent, messy affair.10 In Britain’s postwar realism, the granting of independence was to achieve two major aims: to protect British assets and to ensure the transfer of power to pro-British, capital-friendly local elites, mainly the Malays. The British sponsorship of the Malay elite had an impeccable logic. It ensured the upholding of the traditional Malay political structure on which the British rule had been built. It was politically expedient; it was an Orientalist romance that wedded British rule to the idea of Malays as a gentle people living in their tranquil kampung existence under their chiefs and customary rulers. In contrast, the immigrants were foreign-born and alien to the indigenous culture and society. Considered hard-working and commercially astute, they were to a large degree left to themselves. The political division of indigenous and immigrant communities, the perceptions of the tradition-bound Malays and the commercially talented Chinese: these are the foundation of racial politics that beset Malaysian society today. A modish postcolonial critique would have put blame on British rule for every sin of the postcolonial state. In Malaysia, there has been a remarkable continuity from the old to the new, most evidently in the race-driven government policies. However, it is also true that these policies are, in many aspects, a reworking and consolidation of the colonial setup. The colonial origin is one thing; the truer, more veracious delineation of racial division is found in the present, in the way old practices have been indigenized. And in the same regards, one can hardly ignore the effects of nationalism. Nationalism, Benedict Anderson submits, oftentimes leads to racism.11 Nationalism does not cause racism as such; rather racism finds a fertile ground in the language—the passion—of nationalism. We are sentimental about our nation, and patriotism easily sets us up against real or imaginary enemies. Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities is replete with terms like dream, sleep, awakening, invention, and fantasy, as it explores the way we take the nation for real, particularly in modern Southeast Asia. Indeed, the idea of the nation is invariably associated with a certain legerdemain, a shadow play of mystification. As it makes its claim on our

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

31

imagination, nationalism delivers a set of munificent feelings: collective identity, the joy of communal belonging, the virtues of patriotism, and personal sacrifice. The nation may be a fantasy, but for its citizens it is real and morally affirming. The nation is always married to a particular history, a particular event in the past. The work of nationalism is to reimagine the nation’s rising by rekindling the passion—the fervour—invested in a heroic undertaking, be it revolution, war, the fall of the old regime, the end of empire, the opening of the country by hardy pioneers. Alongside history, nationalism always hauls in its secret partner: the state. The state is the other half of the unholy union that is the nationstate. And the state too is magical, adept in the art of concealment.12 As the nation provides the unifying sentiment, the state offers the black hand of legitimate violence and law enforcement. In Malaysia, race policy is hoisted up as the key to achieving communal peace. What we have to reckon with is the pure allurement that elevates race to the realm of fetishism, a fetishism that blinds us to the policy’s all-embracing aims, that shrouds its rebirth from the colonial divide-and-rule. You don’t want to be race-obsessive, with this talk of one community versus another. Yet, you are faced with the reality: Malaysia is actually two nations in one; one nativist and based on the claim of ‘the original people,’ the other consisting of people of immigrant ancestry. The result is an atavistic tribal nationalism for the Malays, a banal nationalism for the Chinese and Indians. The term tribal nationalism appears in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.13 Nazi totalitarianism, Arendt argues, had been the ideological offspring of European imperialism. In the Age of Empire, European racial thinking in the form of eighteenth-century scientific racism was transported to the colonized territories; German colonies in Southwest Africa and the Belgian Congo all practiced genocide on the African tribes under their rule. At the same time, it was also the pathology of imperialism to classify African peoples into tribal groupings that mirrored the European notion of the nation-state. Each colonial territory was not a nation, but it had most of the trappings of one: a bounded territory, a collection of people, a sovereign government authority, and so on. And the innards of European racism demanded each tribe to develop its own sense of cohesion and ancestral origin vis-à-vis other tribes: the notion of tribalism. In a word, colonial territories had been the testing ground for the final flowering of race and racism. By the mid-twentieth century, Hannah Arendt argues, it was from this racial

32

S. YAO

thinking that Nazism drew succour and made blood and racial purity the cornerstone of its ideology. Race became the most efficient, most virulent means of fomenting nationalist feeling and loyalty in a modern state of National-Socialism. Malaysia is not Nazi Germany, but people face daily the baroque emanations of the form of nationalism The Origins of Totalitarianism describes. In the way the Malay ruling party, the United Malay National Organization (UMNO), has been at pains to promote, the Malays are blessed with a cultural bond based on the Malay Rulers, Malay language and culture, and Islam. The so-called pillars of Malayness are so pernicious, so self-legitimizing, that it is akin to tribalism. The ghosts of blood and race cast a spell on the Malay identity and self-perception. Not only the Malays—the Chinese, Indians, and other non-Malays, each community is a race. In the State discourse, race is the preferred term for community. The use of race, however, does not equalize; some people are more of a race than others. People in the street are cluey to the difference, a difference that carries real social and legal consequences. Since it is a term of honour, denoting cultural cohesion and descent by blood, race most compellingly describes the community whose elite dominate the State power, less so the non-Malays. In other words, race—and its attendant tribal nationalism—provides a comprehensive justification of the ‘special position’ of one community, and a means of exclusion for the others. The voice in your head is like a vice: it tightens, it grips on your senses. The way to find relief is to give over to the uncontrolled ranting. You want to keep to your customary civility; you don’t want to be called a racist. Why be a Chinaman, why talk of the marginalization of your community alone? We—Malay, Chinese, Indians—are all victims of State oppression. But the feeling runs deep. In the hubbub of agitation, you come to realize something: that we are all damaged subjects of State racism. The workings of Malaysia’s race relations are baroque and sibylline. And we need something like Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to open up the dark mechanism, the wretched effect of the State policy. For Lacan, the imaginary is that strange, puzzling state in which the subject ‘I’ and the objects are constantly trading places. You see yourself from within yourself, but also from the vantage point of something, some figure outside yourself. Lacan has in mind here the stage in child development where the infant impishly imitates the facial expression of its parents or its carer, or of the image of itself in a mirror. As Lacan describes it,

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

33

This act [of mimicry], far from exhausting itself, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him.14

The sense of mastery (‘I can make the other person move!’) is enabled by mimicry. Everything about the imaginary entails an infant’s appropriation as its own, of something external, something foreign: the mother’s breast, the hand of the nursemaid, the father’s looming face, its own mirror reflection. For the infant, these are bits of itself reaching out to the world. This is Lacan’s metaphor for a subject’s self-making which turns out to be just as strange and alienating. To search for selfhood is to plunge oneself in an ocean of images and fantastic reflections. Like an infant, each person believes themselves to be at one with the image of the Other, such that self and Other are fatefully tied. And this is the key take of Lacanian psychoanalytical thought: What we are—how we perceive ourselves—has to take account of the power of projection; a project that brings home the real and the fantasized. In Lacanian terms, the self is tragic, parasitic. What the others mean to you, how they have robbed you of your enjoyment is based on the relationship you have with an image made real by your pathological needs. For some this is a strange and overwhelming realization. You are confronted with the fact you and your desires are made by the Other; you are real because of the figure of phantasmagorical projection. Everything is on the move; the subject and the Other are constantly having a go at each other; the ‘I’ is no more the rational, sovereign subject of the Enlightenment; the self and Other are like adolescents at a loss as to their origin, their true identity. If I am uncertain about myself, the Other is responsible for it. If I am not totally my own doing, then the realization is: I am made by the Other. As soon as I think I know who I am the answer slips away. Isn’t this the wretched character of racial relations in Malaysia? With Lacanian thought, our understanding is turned around: the disaffiliation of the races is actually mutual dependence. The hostility and distrust hide envy and infantile longing. And these are matters of everyday life, not only of philosophy. The mirror stage of child development is sharpwitted and pertinent: as the Malay subject sees its deprivation as caused

34

S. YAO

by the Chinese and their economic rapaciousness, the Chinese subject would hold the Malays responsible for their political powerlessness. In a national election, you are pulled by your communal loyalty and you vote accordingly. Your vote is to express your resentment against the State that favours the other community, and does little for your own people. When you rejected a fellowship at the Malay Studies Centre in a local university, you believed you were making a point, you feared being a token in a near-exclusively Malay institution. In all this, the reason for one’s distress is never far to find: it hails from the Other. The country’s race relations are merely an expression of the politics of envy. Sepet ends with Orked preparing to go to England to study at a university on a government scholarship. In the sitting room, father and daughter are spending quality time together, declaring mutual affection, exchanging a few tender words at the daughter’s departure, when the future of the young Chinese DVD vendor enters the conversation. Parental approval of the relationship has long been given, and now sympathy is directed to an apparent injustice: Jason, after scoring high marks in the exam, fails to get a State scholarship, while Orked, less academically accomplished, is given one. For the Malaysian viewers, the tropes are hard to miss. Government scholarships are granted not on merit, but on racial lines; and we see the selfless judgement of Orked’s father: the scholarship should have gone to one who deserves it, not his own daughter! These are tropes of the liberal tint, righteous, and racialboundary busting. There are others, more subtle and more ambiguous. Even a film like Sepet cannot help falling for the cliché. A young street vendor from a working-class family has strived hard and ends up passing the exam with flying colours. It is the familiar motif of personal drive and talent for book learning for which the Chinese are renowned, even among the working poor. Still, if Orked and Jason have to deal with the obstacles of race and class, they must also deal with the general vicissitudes, the changing fortunes that befall all lovers. When the plot finally has Jason meet a car accident (his motorcycle is crushed by a lorry), it seems an attempt to tie loose ends. The injured well-deserved cannot leave and take up the government grant even if it had been offered; only destiny is to be blamed. A moral conundrum is resolved. Despite Orked and her father’s misgivings, things have worked themselves out.15 It is a poor conceptualization, but it is also an issue of life’s contingency. It is the film’s significant slippage. The resolution has come too easily. With the communal divide remaining salient, the plotting feels

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

35

compromised. For the national psyche, infected as it is by the parasitic race relations, can only make sense with a clear-eyed view of the damage it has caused. I have in mind here Adorno’s Minima Moralia which carries the subtitle Reflections from Damaged Life.16 The book is less a systematic argument and more of a collection of aphorisms and reflections about life in mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Adorno’s thought moves from the alienation of the family, shopping and consumption, speaking French, to health and death, the gala dinner, and good manners and tact in social dealings. The everyday events, some small, some momentous, stand alongside the calamitous events of the twentieth century. (This is the man who has famously said, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’) Each of Adorno’s reflections finds modern life damaged and morally stained; just as he finds his own exile in the United States ‘mutilated without exception.’17 Deep in his mind are, inevitably, the Holocaust and the Nazi atrocities. To this most astute of European thinkers, after the horrors of the Second World War, the moral normalcy of existence and the standards of aesthetic judgement are forever changed. Minima Moralia appears to the reader as a work of unremitting despair. The smallest daily undertaking is poked and checked to reveal its social and moral defects. Here is aphorism #5, How nice of you, Doctor, about social greetings. It begins with a devastating negativity and carries it to the end: There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite.18 The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth.19

One can make a similar stab at the apparent civility that prevails in Malaysian social life; at the coffee shop, no one bemoans the luck of the Malays for their privileges, while others fare less well. But this civility—and Sepet ’s reconciliatory sentiment—are bereft of the possibility of redemption. With Adorno, the negativity with which he glosses the daily events is a serial negativity that eventually turns things around. Hegel is both Adorno’s inspiration and intellectual foe. With Hegel, things contain

36

S. YAO

their opposites, their own negation—love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, the master-and-slave pairing; the result is something positive, something redemptive. Through the dialectical struggle, the parts are transformed into a larger whole that signals something of a higher order. Adorno’s major departure is his idea of ‘negative dialectics,’ a term with which he names one of his major works. Negative dialectics would suggest realizing something positive by means of relentless negation—the method of Minima Moralia. The negativity is still a system of denial, but it has the power of ‘determinacy,’ of projecting ‘an image of utopia.’20 I suppose when I say the Malaysian national psyche is damaged, I am expressing a philosophic attitude, as much as a concern for the social life in which my informants and I are enmeshed. The failings and occasional victories we experience seem in accord with the play of negativity upon negativity in Adorno’s Minima Moralia. It is a strange form of optimism, if it is optimism at all. And I believe it is the same unsettling sense of hopefulness we experience each time we gaze without remorse at the country’s racial realities. One’s major grudge with Jasmin Ahmad is the overwhelming sentimentality which she injects into the film. Sentimentality is the thick inundation that diminishes the theme of racial injustice with which Sepet has the ambition to engage. Love’s gain and love’s loss, individual desire and parental endorsement, not to say the mawkish love affair itself: the expansive emotionalism deflates and invalidates them. You think the multiple obstacles facing the young couple would have led to a kind of existential brooding. They have not; what gets in the way is a prim resolve to be positive. And the resolve, when you think about it, is the Malaysian way of coming to terms with the pained experience of racial antagonism. Taking a page from Minima Moralia, we ask the question that the film has not asked: is it not more honest, more of a heroic undertaking, if people can start with the negatives in Malaysian social and political life? Courtesy and inter-ethnic good manners have done their worst—producing, as Adorno would say, the inauthenticity of a damaged life. Nonetheless, Adorno’s idea of negative dialectics is not meant to suggest that a good would come out of an unabating series of bads. Unlike with so much of Malaysian life, what negativity inscribes is not optimism as such, but a search for the light that might—just might—come out of the persistent gloom and despair. If encouragement be needed, we can turn to a writer like Joseph Conrad: his novel Heart of Darkness would grant Kurtz, the villain, redemption for having bravely peered into the abyss. In the game

2

DOING LUNCH WITH JASMIN AHMAD

37

of moral salvation, shaking hands with the devil may not be a bad thing. We should offer Sepet and its director the similar honour of acting as an existential paladin. We want our beloved, charming Jasmin Ahmad to stare down at racism’s evil and corruption not only to save the film but also to save her viewers.

Notes 1. For khalwat and dating of Muslim men and women, see Krzysztof Nawratek, Asma Mehan, ‘De-colonizing Public Spaces in Malaysia: Dating in Kuala Lumpur’, Cultural Geography 27(4): 615–629. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by J. Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1997, p. 184. 3. See, for example, Niru Ratnam, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Aylan Kurdi image is crude, thoughtless and egotistical’, The Spectator, 1 February, 2016. 4. See, for example, Yusoff Norman, ‘Sepet, Mukhism, and Talentime: Yasmin Ahmad’s Melodrama of the Melancholic Boy-in-Love’, Asian Cinema, 2011, 22 (2): 20–46. 5. Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Doing Political Art: What Does this Mean?’, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/fullap01.html; accessed 4 August, 2016. 6. Ibid. 7. James Wood. The Nearest Thing to Life. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2015. 8. Ibid., p. 20. 9. Ibid., p. 11. 10. See Souchou Yao, Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016. 11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1981, p. 152. 12. Michael Taussig, ‘Maleficium: State Fetishism’, in E. S. Apter and W. Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 218. 13. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 1976. 14. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 1. 15. In the sequel, Gubra, Jason is shown to have survived the accident. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 2005. 17. Ibid., p. 33. 18. Ibid., p. 25. 19. Ibid. 20. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 1990, p. xix.

38

S. YAO

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge. ——— 2005. Minima Moralia. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah. 1976. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken. Benjamin, W. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by J. Osbome. London: New Left Books. Lacan, J. 2001. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge. Nawratek, Krzysztof, and Asma Mehan. 2020. ‘De-colonizing Public Spaces in Malaysia: Dating in Kuala Lumpur’, Cultural Geography 27(4): 615–629. Ratnam, Niru, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Aylan Kurdi Image Is Crude, Thoughtless and Egotistical’, The Spectator, 1 February, 2016. Taussig, Michael. 1993. “‘Maleficium: State Fetishism’, in E. S. Apter and W. Pietz (ed) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wood, James. 2015. The Nearest Thing to Life. Lebanon NH: Brandeis University Press. Yao, Souchou. Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016.

Internet Resources Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Doing Political Art: What Does This Mean?’, http://www. artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/fullap01.html; accessed 4 August, 2021

CHAPTER 3

A Lowborn Life

Like most people, I find Susi our cleaner downright confusing. She is a woman who has raised her five nieces and nephews after their father died in a car accident. She herself has stayed single, working as a housecleaner and looking after her aged mother and her sister’s children. Tough, sensible, a paragon of virtue; that is one side of her character. The other side is, despite her diabetes and being overweight, she does not exercise (‘My work is my exercise’), and she refuses to say no to deep-fried food and oily roti canai flat bread. Most of all, it is her frequent gifts and donations to the temple that cause me unease. For Susi is a devout worshipper of the goddess Ambal, the deity of health and good weather, whom she seeks out at the first sign of trouble. The gifts and donations she offers Ambal invariably draw in her employers. After her temple visits, she would bring Simryn and I puja temple food, sharing the blessing. At our house, she would unpack the dhal, vegetable curry, and jalebis from her motorbike pillion, spreading each dish out over the table at the back porch. We make tea, and we dip into the food and talk. Then she would bring up the subject: Can I ask for an advance, just to tide me over for the month? She has been working for us for over three years now, and her money problem is constant. She needs the money to meet the many expenses of a poor working family, but a large amount is for the temple. When there is fundraising—a call for donations for a renovation, for example—she cannot help but dig deep into her pockets. And © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_3

39

40

S. YAO

during a Hindu festival, she will invite all manner of guests—including her employers—to her house, and we sit in the courtyard with a plate of food on our lap to join in the celebration. It is religious piety, but it is also an extravagance she cannot afford. I would mull over this, but when payday arrives the debt is settled by deducting the amount from her salary. True to her word, she borrows but the debt does not accumulate. All the same, I can’t help thinking of what we often accuse of the poor: their bad financial mismanagement, their search for solace in religion. Shall I lead out from the stable the tired, old horse, ‘Religion is the opium of the people’? Religion is a folly, a mind-numbing mystification, when the poor beseech the God who never delivers. This judgement has come fast and easy, and I immediately regret it. The response is patronising, it subjects a lowborn life to boorish scrutiny. If we cannot uplift the poor, can we at least register the rich complexity of their lives? Susi is a housecleaner, a single woman, and the sole breadwinner of her extended family, and she is a devotee of the goddess Ambal, but she is also more than that. I have always felt that although Susi is deep in personal troubles and financial worries, she nonetheless is magnificently her own person. Wednesday is cleaning day. Susi has finished tidying the study, there are still the bathrooms and the kitchen to do. She says, I have done your study, you can go in now. I have been working in there since early morning, and I am sick of the oppressive wordiness of the place. I get her to put down her vacuum cleaner and take a break. Susi is so far removed from my middle-class world of moderate comfort that she comes across as burdened with tribulations I cannot imagine. Each time we talk, she reveals more of herself, more of the existence I am keen to find out about. Before me is a picture of placidity. She brushes off a few biscuit crumbs from her blouse when she speaks. There is no befuddling with gratitude as she is not asking for an advance; just the pleasure of expressing what is on her mind. She starts to tell me about Harry, her second nephew. Harry is working in a shipyard in Singapore. Like thousands of Malaysians, he travels each day across the causeway from Johore Bahru on the Malaysian side where the housing is cheaper and the cost of living more affordable. He gets up at four-thirty in the morning to catch the packed early bus to reach the island republic. Harry is doing well, and he sends money each month to help support the family, she says. Susi is sure I would not remember him. But I do, I remind her, Harry once came to the house and helped

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

41

me to paint the shelves I salvaged from an abandoned shop. Harry is a responsible boy, I assure her, he will do well. Then her voice quivers, a grave, worrying look comes over her face: You remember Devika, don’t you? As an anthropologist my life is drawn to Susi and her family. Harry’s daily border crossing I know, and Devika’s story is just emerging. I recall she sometimes drives her little Perodua Kancil, the Malaysian-made ‘people’s car,’ and drops her aunt to my house when her motorbike is being repaired. The young woman is nearly eighteen, shy but fun-loving and full of spirit. I know she has a job at the Oceanside Resort, where she is a keeper at a small zoo for kids. Her pay is modest, but a good start for someone who has just finished high school. Devika has met a young man on Facebook, Susi begins to tell me, a Sikh student from India studying marketing at a college in Nilai, a small town near Port Dickson. Her niece has tried to keep it a secret, but it leaked out somehow. When she skips work, the resort manager rings Susi and asks her about Devika’s whereabouts. She is often moody and keeps herself in her room after dinner. Confronting her has resulted in a lot of tears, a lot of ‘I know what I am doing’ insistence on independence. She is in love, and she has hidden the news from the family because the boy is a Sikh and she fears the family would not approve. They plan to get married and get a job in Singapore like her brother Harry, she declares. To Susi, this is puppy love, a Facebook romance. She has had it out with Devika a couple of times, and it was like a soap opera, full of tears and protestation. She is angry with her young niece: What do you know about men, about love and marriage? We don’t know if he is from a good family; and maybe he is only taking advantage of you to get a residence permit? The words are words of a caring aunt. After all, she has practically brought her up like the daughter she never had. Still, the rant about Facebook and the folly of young love sounds to me excessive, unsympathetic. But for Susi, she does not want Devika to be like her, her and her siblings to be like her, cleaning houses, living from pay-packet to paypacket, worrying about all manners of problems. She wants her niece to delay marriage and think about doing a secretary course which she is prepared to finance. The listing of woes comes naturally to the anthropologist. It expresses the liberal instinct to be at one with the powerless and the downtrodden. Class analysis raises its head, but it is constraining; Susi’s class position

42

S. YAO

does not describe her multiple deprivations. If anything, class analysis tends to leave out a good deal. Susi may come across as financially irresponsible and a habitual worrier, but she is no victim of her circumstances. She takes to fast food because, so she tells me, her level of blood sugar is under control and she needs her occasional treats. She may rave about the Facebook romance, but she herself is an avid watcher of Mexican soap operas (dubbed in Malay) on television. As though taking a hint from her niece’s sartorial sense, she is a snappy dresser—cotton blouse and jeans when she works, colourful sarees during the festivals. When Susi was young she was engaged to a railway worker, as her sister once told me. Her life is not exactly an open book; but it is a life defined by the things she likes, and by the longing she cannot hope to fulfil—rather than by her class position as such. Susi’s house is in a small community behind a row of shops—car repairs, second-hand tyres, a welder’s workshop, and a score of kedai runcit sundry stores. The shops define the neighbourhood. Driving to the house, you want to stop by and pick up a second-hand air-conditioner, or a set of near-new tyres, or a few packs of Marlboro with ‘duty-unpaid’ still stamped on them. There are signs of lawlessness, yet you feel safe. It is said that a youth gang owns the place, and no burglary or petty theft can take place without the gang’s knowing. Susi’s house is at the far end of a broad street. It has two bedrooms, she and her mother use one, her sister and Devika the other; the rest of the family sleep on mattresses laid out in the sitting room at night. From the gate, the view is a long stretch of more squat, single-storied dwellings. Motorbikes and the cheap, ubiquitous Perodua Kancil are parked in the driveways, giving the place the look of modest prosperity. During Deepavali or Hari Raya or Chinese New Year, at each house awning table and chairs would be set up, and friends and neighbours are invited to celebrate the festival. Each is a lively gathering and the guests include an Indian taxi driver, a couple of Chinese labourers and their wives, a Malay civil servant and his family. Hard to achieve in the nation, an ethnic peace—and perhaps working-class solidarity—has taken root in the poor neighbourhood. This is where Susi, her sister, and their mother moved to after their father died. This is where Susi’s nieces and nephews grew up. Susi and Devika have low-paid jobs, Harry is soon to leave his job at the Singapore dockyard as he finds the work too hard, Susi’s sister only works occasionally because of her depression and dizziness. They do not starve, but there is a lot of financial juggling and it falls on Susi to borrow from

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

43

her employers when money is short. Despite the minor indulgences—the Deepavali feast, the 42-inch Chinese-made Hisense television, the cable television channel, the laptop for Devika—the family life is a replay of the existence of Susi’s parents in another time and place. In the fifties, there was an argument about the culture of poverty made popular by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis.1 All kinds of sins were attributed to its cause: the lack of work ethic, the bad domestic budgeting, and the inheritance of deprivation across generations. The multiple problems of Susi’s family seem to fit these old notions. By some measure, the culture of poverty makes sense. If you are born poor, you are likely to pass on your lethargy and lack of ambition to your children—an awful legacy. Culture is here an unhappy word; it is too determining, moulding people’s future mercilessly like predestination. And certainly, the theory of a culture of poverty does little to account for what may be its real causes—the exploitation and neglect that defined the working poor like Susi’s parents. The impoverishment of Tamil workers is textbook stuff in Malaysian sociology. It is primarily a story of the rubber plantation and British colonial political economy. The coming of Tamil labourers to Malaya took place at the dawn of the nineteenth century.2 Unlike Chinese immigration, the import of Indian labour was planned and directed by the colonial authorities. It was understood that Tamil labourers were cheaper to recruit and to employ than Chinese labourers, and the impoverished peasants in the Madras Presidency were keen to leave for a foreign land free of caste oppression and which would promise them a better livelihood.3 To this was added the cultural baggage: Tamils were thought docile and adept in agricultural work, which made them easy to govern and quick to adjust to the working conditions at the estates.4 At Malaya’s rubber plantations, the sociologist R.K. Jain writes that there was a ‘three-tiered class structure—the managerial class made up of the Europeans, the Asian supervisory class … and the proletariat Tamil class.’5 The supervisors were Indians—Malayali and Ceylonese, or Chinese. The European planters and managers did not deal directly with the labourers, but through the supervisors. The supervisors were ‘labour aristocracy,’ straddling above those at the lowest rung of the hierarchy and allied with the bosses. The Tamil labourers, on the other hand, were victims of race and class. And this is the argument: the complex race and class divide, including the divide between the Asian workers themselves, created the conditions for the mass impoverishment of the

44

S. YAO

Tamil labourers. The historian David Roediger’s remark about American immigrant labour as ‘beaten men from beaten races,’ and the ‘deficient individuals, as a class, and as a race, they represented the worst failure in the struggle for existence,’ could well be applied to the South Indian estate workers in colonial Malaya.6 Rubber plantations used to surround the Port Dickson and Seremban area. The best way to gain a sense of the past is to take a bus that plies the backroad from Seremban to the seaside township. Avoiding the highway toll, the drive is jerky with frequent stops at small settlements fronted by clusters of shops (‘Cheap Welding Done Here,’ ‘Genuine Hakka Stuffed Tofu’). Along the route, as they reach their stops, the Tamil boys and girls in school uniform ring the bell and get off to walk the rest of the way home. Home is deep inside the estate. One day you strike up a conversation with one of the older boys and get yourself invited to his home. Standing outside his family house, you realize the rubber estate as you know it has gone. All around the land is planted with oil palm, the major crop of Malaysia’s agribusiness. As former estate workers, my young friend’s grandparents had passed on to the family the wooden house bequeathed to them by their employer. The boy’s father has taken up work at the oil palm plantation, while some former estate workers have moved to town and found jobs there. The Chinese trading stores that used to serve the estate workers are gone; the shops along the side of the road have taken their place. You are guided to the oil palm that gradually engulfs the huts and houses, and the unignorable signs of the new industry: the Indonesian and Bangladeshi workers toiling among rows of palm trees, and the trackers that haul the fruits to the extracting plant. Back at home, you go through your notes, and you get Susi to fill in the gaps; for she had grown up in one such rubber estate. The estate is about five miles from Lukut, north of Port Dickson. It was a place with the jungle pressing in at all sides, she recalls. Over the years, the jungle receded as land was cleared and rubber trees were planted. By the time she started school, the clump of estate houses was like an island in a sea of wild grass and tall trees. The family was up when it was still dark; breakfast was heated-up chapati and hot sweet tea. The father rode to work on his bicycle, and the children—the two sisters, the elder brother—got dressed for a twenty-minute walk to the main road to catch the bus. After school the bus dropped them by the road and they took the same path home. It was their whole world: the jungle,

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

45

the dusty path, the rickety bus rides, the home of tin roof and walls of cut timber, kids they played with from the neighbourhood. We didn’t go anywhere, she says. Our father took us to the temple, and the cinema (in Port Dickson) a few times, that was it. Her mother had a small vegetable patch in front of the house where she planted snake bean, bayam (amaranth), Chinese cabbage, four-cornered beans—fast-growing vegetables of the tropics. She went to town once a month to buy what she needed, but most of the daily items—rice, oil, canned food, soap, tooth brushes, and tooth paste—were made available to them on credit by the trading store run by the Chinese supervisor and his family. And for her father, there were cigarettes, beer, and samsu, the local rotgut, available on credit too. The convenience was a curse—a hard squeeze on the family budget—but they could not manage without it. We are deep into Susi’s childhood, and the recollection has made her pause. She turns to me and says, it was too easy for my father to get his drinks and cigarettes at the store. He drank and smoked too much which killed him. He fell sick and died early. The story of the estate worker. Susi is the second among her siblings, her brother two years older than her. She experienced early the special positions men enjoyed in the family. Like all Tamil boys, her brother was spoiled on day one. She and her sisters were expected home after school; they did their homework, they washed and cleaned and helped with cooking. Her brother went to play with other boys and did poorly at school. He was rarely reprimanded for his many misdeeds, while the sisters were punished for the slightest wrongdoing. The pattern of family life stays in her mind. My sister and I were beaten for burning the rice, or forgetting to feed the dog or the chicken, she remembers. But I wish they had been equally tough with us when we did badly at school, when we brought back a bad report card. Her parents were separate figures. Her father worked, and he drank— which estate men didn’t? He provided for the family in the way he knew, and later in his life, he saved the deposit and bought the single-storied terrace where his family now live; it took Susi almost twenty years to pay off the mortgage. Susi was, in spite of everything, close to her father. She loved it when he told her old Hindu legends about gods and warriors in chariots fighting against the demons. And he told her about plantation work: the endless battle with weed and lalang grass, the rush to collect the latex before sunrise, the fright when the scythe disturbed a snake in the grass, the cold mornings, and the long hours. Hearing him talking so

46

S. YAO

made her forgive him and his drinking. He was killed on the road when a lorry struck his bicycle. Ever since she was young, Susi hated facing her parents together. Her mother deferred to her husband; she supported him on every score about the children’s wrongdoing. They were two of a team when it came to dishing out punishment. When her father got upset about something, when he was irritated and drunk, her mother would scold and beat the children to placate him. The children’s sin was often nothing more than talking back or a show of defiance. Sensing the trouble brewing, her brother would escape to the neighbours; it was the sisters who felt their father’s wrath. After the beating, when the parents’ anger subsided, the children were full of pity for themselves and even for their punishers. Their father was the main instigator, Susi had thought, and it must have hurt her mother to raise the stick and strike them, as her husband looked on in drunken stupor. I really can’t be sure of many things. My father’s drinking got worse towards the end of his life. Yet he seemed to have held the family together, and provided for the family in the best way he could. I think he was secretly proud of his family. My mother for all her weaknesses was devoted to her husband. My sympathy with my parents never lasted, and growing up for me was to become aware of the injustices the family had done to itself. Everyone—my parents, us children—was damaged, one way or the other. Beating was my mother’s way of pleasing her husband. I don’t know, maybe they really didn’t want to beat us—but for the stress of their life, and the idea that a Tamil wife must obey her husband. Now, I am at the same age as my father when he died. I have forgiven my parents, but the pain has left its mark. As elder daughter I had borne the brunt of their mistreatment; but I managed not to bear grudges. My mother now lives with me, and I feel for her pity and love, I suppose. When I look at my sister, meek and long-suffering, can I blame it on our mother? My brother was the favourite and escaped what we suffered. Like his father, he was the first one to pass out when drinking with friends. I asked him why he drank, he gave me a grunt. ‘I like the taste’ [of samsu]. A commemoration of his father’s habit. He ended up with a lousy life too, worse than his sisters. He didn’t finish school, he did odd jobs, he died in his mid-thirties—cirrhosis of the liver, the doctor said.

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

47

Susi is rooted in a working-class upbringing, but she seems to have escaped the worst of it. You start to think: perhaps the cultural baggage of estate life is only half the story, the other half is her personality and good sense—not to mention unexpected and occasional luck—that helped to defy the awful legacy. Susi’s tale calls to mind the British historian Carolyn Steedman’s remarkable Landscape of a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives: both are unflinching, tragic, and indomitable. The book begins with the death of Steedman’s mother. She died like this. I didn’t witness it. My niece told me this. She’d moved everything down into the kitchen: a single bed, the television, the calor-gas heater. She said it was to save fuel. The rest of the house was dark and shrouded. Through the window was only the fence and the kitchen wall of the house next door. Her quilt was sewn into a piece of pink flannelette. Afterwards, there were bags and bags of washing to do. She had cancer, [she had] talked to me about curing it when I paid my first visit in nine years, two weeks before she died: my last visit. She complained of pains, but wouldn’t take the morphine tablets. … It wasn’t the cancer that killed: a blood clot travelled from her leg and stopped her heart. Afterwards, the doctor said she’s been out of touch with reality.7

Her mother’s illness and death are the tail-end of a narrative about a working-class life of which both mother and daughter have been, in different ways, casualties. The author declares at the beginning her daunting task. The ‘conventional interpretative devices … don’t quite work,’ she declares.8 The telling of the ‘marginal and secret stories’ of the likes of Steedman and her mother calls for interpretative verve in order to lend truth not only to their impoverishment but also to their dreams and fantasies in post-war South London. The past has a ‘social specificity,’ so has the understanding and interpretation of it. To make sense of the past is to grasp the social world where it happened, where people had lodged their lives and emotional investments. As self-ethnography, Landscape of a Good Woman is nothing but full of subjectivities—Steedman’s own, her mother’s, those of their neighbours, the heath visitors’, and the doctor’s. Much of the book is devoted to describing the childhood of young girls like herself, a childhood which conventional studies tend to ‘pathologise.’

48

S. YAO

In the romantic construction of childhood, which propelled the earliest child-study and within which the psychoanalytic enterprise must place itself, the children of the poor are only a measure of what they lack as children: they are a falling-short of a more complicated and richly endowed ‘real’ child; though a real child may suffer all the vicissitudes of neurosis.9

And often social historians are so keen to record the conditions of working-class women that they end up making the women a metaphor, a vehicle for conveying what is seen as evidence of social and cultural decay. By making much of the disenabling social conditions, by describing the monotonous sameness of working women’s lives, the result has been to brush off their, in the writer’s phrase, ‘emotional or psycho-sexual existence.’10 And with that their very personalities—as wives, mothers, and daughters—are nullified. Nonetheless, the book has a strong sense of redemption about it. As she grew up, Steedman realized the effects of her mother’s insatiable wants had passed on to her. She too desired the ‘little luxuries’ that would give her mother dignity and self-respect. In her own self-fashioning, she was duplicating those feelings and desires that had brought havoc to her mother’s life. Steedman was saved by the State education system. At university she began to examine her dreams, the dreams of ‘the past that lies at the heart of my presence: it is my interpretative device, the means by which I can tell a story.’11 Her life in South London was hand-to-mouth penury, but there were libraries filled with books of fairy tales, like those of Hans Christian Anderson. The fairy tales flamed her fantasy of a world where good triumphs over evil, where the line between the law and lawlessness is clearly drawn. Steedman’s journey from a working-class waif to an academic shows that the culture of poverty does not universally pass from generation to generation. Mired in their impoverishment, each person struggles to find a way out. And this has to do with their own strength, their ability to free themselves from the grip of the parental legacy—and, along the way, allowing chance and luck do their work. Much of what Steedman describes is Susi’s story also—when you take away South London and the prodigious cravings of the mother and daughter. Landscape of a Good Woman speaks directly to the working woman I know in Port Dickson. She struggles with the past, but cari makan, the task of making a living—as much as her single-mindedness— has kept her going. The estate existence has dug deep in her memory.

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

49

She talks about it feelingly, yet gives the impression she is treating it like something outside herself. Perhaps it is the survival instinct; the distancing lightens the psychological force of a damaging experience. Or perhaps it is a habit that gives clarity to her unhappiness and her dim understanding of her parents. Either way, she recognizes in her family the differential treatment of the son and the daughters, the subservience of her mother. And almost everything can be blamed on her father. Now, in her middle-age, other insights have come to her and becloud the issue. Life is uncertain and full of irony, Hindu worship and the daily dealings with life and work have taught her. Her assessment of the parental legacy is philosophic. If she and her sister had suffered abuse, the fear of it had kept them in school and they were toughened and learned to rely on themselves. Their brother did not benefit from this wretched principle. It is the rule of the tragic: the despised are saved, the favoured are doomed. About her mother Susi has said, My mother was weak, she put up with my father even when he was wrong. Most of the time, she didn’t know what to do with us. Her mother is a casualty, less a villain. As for her father, he was a mostly absent, invisible figure—like Steedman’s father. She cannot forgive his drinking, but she admits it was probably less serious than what she remembers. In spite of herself, she has begun to re-evaluate the lives and misdeeds of her parents and to seek a means to come to terms with the past. It was her father who took Susi and her siblings to the temple and thrilled them with tales of gods and demons. The temple was the Sree Durgai Ambal Temple in Lukut, a short distance from Port Dickson. It is a set of biscuit-coloured buildings dating from the 1890s when it was a place of worship for estate workers from the area. Ambal is a Hindu goddess popular among Tamils. In Susi’s telling, Ambal is the Mother who protects worshippers from sickness. Ambal is the goddess of smallpox; she is also worshipped for her power to bring rain to the farmers. Susi remembers the days when it was a busy place that attracted droves of devotees during the festival time. People made offerings of flowers, and food cooked in clay pots. There were grand parades, featuring skin-piercing and firewalking that tested the truly devout, terrifying yet fascinating to watch for a child. She took me for a tour one day. The temple has gone through a series of upgrades over the years. The compound at the front has been concreted over; this is where worshippers would gather to pay homage to the goddess. The kitchen with a large cooking area has been moved to the

50

S. YAO

back, under a large awning, and away from the visitors. The temple was surrounded by a ring of low green hedges, they have been cut back and tidied up. Regular clipping has spurred the growth of tiny, white flowers that crown the top: evidence of a gardener’s care. Inside nothing much has changed. As we walked in, a bare-chested priest came forward to greet us and accept Susi’s offerings: a small bunch of bananas, garlands of jasmine, pieces of sandalwood, which were laid at the altar. The goddess Ambal and her many-handed incarnations looked down. The rising vapour of sandalwood added to the sombre atmosphere. Susi clasps her hands before the assembly of deities, her meditation looks like a trance, divine passion. Outside the temple, the transition from the inner sanctum is confounding. Under the bright sunlight, the renovation is crude, and the horticultural good sense has lost its charm. I looked around. Sections of the fences are broken; the dripping taps at the washing area make pools of grimy water; the dwarf evergreens at the gate, looking tired and neglected. Sree Durgai Ambal Temple may be a grand temple, but it attracts few rich patrons and still less government funding. ‘It is about MIC connection,’ Susi explained; the electoral politics has dictated the financial sponsorship. It was dusk: the sun receding and the street filled with traffic from people leaving work. A car drives past, its windows down, and two tetra drink packs leap out and hit us as we stand on the kerb. Still dazed by the incense and the prayer, we saw a stab of figures gradually coming into view: Tamil women with bright flowing saris and braided hair, carrying a basket of fruits and garlands of flowers, their singing voices becoming distinct as they neared. We stopped and let them pass, as though to prod them on their way. You see, I’m uneasy about what I see as Susi’s over-zealous religious devotion. The temple that she frequents and that extracts money from her appears tawdry. I have to confess here a degree of self-interest. Each fundraising, the call for donations would reach her and in turn her employers. Her finance woes have somehow become ours. We are a group of academics, British Council teachers, Westerner retirees. We are kind to her, and perhaps out of our liberal guilt, we pay her more than the local rate for domestic help. We instinctively want to protect her. The door-to-door cable TV subscription agents are one thing, donations to a temple are clearly an extravagance that eats into her already stringent budget. Some say she is being duped, she has been made to spend on

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

51

what she cannot afford. For me, I reach too easily for ‘Religion is the opium of the people,’ the old Marxist admonition of the dim-wittedness of the poor. With such thoughts, we feel the tussle rising between us and our employee. I would like her to be financially sensible, to approach her devotion with more circumspection. But knowing her well, I also suspect she has other thoughts. For her, the veneration is to ensure bad luck would be reversed, the chaos and disruption in her family remedied; religion is all functional. Her thought would be: What’s a few ringgits against goddess Ambal’s boundless mercy and blessing? A sense of doubt comes to me. Her financial habits are not my business, not really. Still, a question lingers: What are we to make of her piety when it is ‘result-focused,’ when it is blandly ‘useful’? Can we even describe this piety as religious? The anthropologist Michael Jackson once remarked, It fascinates me that what is recognized in the official worldview of a particular culture does not necessarily capture the full spectrum of human experience within that culture. In the West, family bonds are as important as in Africa or the East, and this includes bonds with forebears and ancestors. But we don’t, as a rule, place the same vital cultural value on ancestral bonds, making daily sacrifices to the dead, regarding the dead as living influences on our lives, distributors of blessings or causes of misfortune. God, yes, but ancestors far less.12

And he said about the people in Sierra Leone, [P]eople in Sierra Leone didn’t see limits as a problem to be pushed back, as a boundary that you want to break down like the Berlin Wall, but as something that you accept and find a way of living and moving within. It’s a compelling idea of freedom, very cybernetic, of working within given parameters rather than going beyond them.13

It’s a lot to take in. The flow of life, the rich social and cultural relations in people’s dealings with each other: it is hard to press them into the iron cage of academic concepts. The task of making sense of others and ourselves is daunting. In a strange way, if the ‘tribal people’ are bound by their superstitions and irrational thoughts, the anthropologists, too, have their crosses to bear. The point is the false grounding of conceptual categories that explain and explain too much. There is also the nature of lifework, as elusive and

52

S. YAO

contradictory as it often is. Lifework, even without the awkward hyphen, describes the twin, the two-parts-in-one notion of spheres of our existence. Leisure and labour, spontaneity and calculation, chanciness and predictions: they are as two partners executing a tango, body to body one moment, feigned uncoupling the next. Religion for my employee is a tool with multiple uses, designed to remedy social ills as much as to give spiritual solace. In this, she has made strange the anthropologist’s approach that has—from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Clifford Geertz—tended to place religion in the ethereal realms of culture and the symbolic. Such an approach, if a criticism can be raised, overlooks that religion is at one with social practices, not separate from them. It is not only Jackson, but also the anthropologist of religion Talal Asad who makes a similar point.14 What is regarded as a universal idea, is that religion is something of tradition and is traceable to the past. In truth, religion’s moral reasoning is often rooted in the practical question of how to live, how to lead a productive life sanctioned by God. In this vein, Susi’s temple worship is harnessing piety to the hard-headed expediency of lifework. Her devotion to the goddess Ambal may be an escape, yet the escape is to reach both a practical and spiritual goal. And the escape calls for financial sacrifice which, like a bribe for the jailer, is an arduous transaction. Susi is not a reductionist. We must grant her the talent to approach religious worship as it is, for its spiritual fulfilment. I recall her exuberance and satisfaction when she brought me the prasad, the temple food: her needs were met, her longing satiated—like Steedman’s mother with her dresses. However, while the British woman had caved in to consumption, Susi has taken a different path, by going to the Source. Befitting of the Facebook generation, they agreed to meet me at PD Centrepoint, Port Dickson’s claim to beachside chic. It’s an errand for Susi; I am to talk Devika and her boyfriend Ranjit out of their juvenile affair. You are the ‘uncle,’ they’ll listen to you, she says, which makes me feel like the protagonist in a Henry James novel who has set out to bring back a young man lost in the seductive charm of old Europe. Mine is a rescue mission, too, of sorts, except one far more mundane. The Lagato Floral Café, true to its name, is covered with flowers—on the wall, in vases of different shapes, flanking the awning at the entrance. The lovers, sitting at a table at the far end, wave as they see me coming in. I sit down, brushing aside the flower stem threatening to scratch my face. We order and begin to talk. Like a modern couple, it is Devika leading, the boy Ranjit following and adding comments. It is an onrush of words

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

53

and explanations; they knew what they were doing, they are in love, they want to get married and get jobs in Singapore after Ranjit finishes his marketing course. This is not news to me, as I have heard the plans from Susi before. I listen, but much goes past me. All the same, while Susi has tagged the affair as impulsive and irresponsible, I am sympathetic. I remember telling her: We were young once, why can’t we give the young people a break? But I was thinking of my circumstances which are so different from hers. When financial security is everything, Devika’s marital future must somehow fit into the overall scheme of things. Seeing the couple in the flesh firms my resolution. Facebook romance is not as frivolous as Susi sees it, after all, even some of my university colleagues have used Tinder and done internet dating. There seems little else to say. The young lovers are saved by their good sense; it is the rescuers, Susi and I with our staid outlook and conservative notions, who need rescuing. Yes, Susi has known this about herself. But her sympathetic bent dwindles away when she thinks of her past. If the culture of poverty does not pass on across generations, it nonetheless infects her views and inclinations towards the present. Marxism is not totally wrong; take away the determinism, class analysis is still effectively illuminating. Susi and her siblings’ deprivations are deprivations of class, so wretched as to justify the term ‘trauma.’ Susi and her sister have survived, but they bear the scars of an experience which they are given to revisit time and time again. Her sister’s depression and dizziness bears evidence of this, so does Susi’s overwhelming fear of penury and losing control of her life. On a more clinical note, for Susi at least, it is the irrepressible unconscious that has made her so. Everything about her seems to echo the words of Cathy Caruth, ‘The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.’15 Susi has been struggling to live without desire, which she willy nilly imposes on Devika; this may well be the crux of the contention. But ‘without’ does not mean ‘absence’; it is a negotiation of what is to come and what is possible. Her heart is like her home at the rubber estate: imperfect, derelict, and in need of repair. I have in mind Gillian Rose’s magnificent Love’s Work. The book is nothing but a study of desires: desires that shape the British philosopher as a woman, as a lover, as a writer and critical thinker, as a cancer patient. Home for her is a powerful metaphor of belonging; home and belonging, however, are not a point of arrival or of satiation. Home has its double; the ‘precipitous fortress

54

S. YAO

of the family’ has a parallel, a transient home.16 Rose explains, ‘Whereas the idea of the original home would arouse an agon of bitter ambivalence in me, the redoubled home has no colour or cathexis of pain inseparable from its welcome.’17 For Susi, too, her two homes—one the past, one where she now lives—are houses of ambivalence and painful memory; yet their welcome and comfort are real and irresistible. As for love, Rose has written, ‘Love is the submission of power’18 ; love makes demands of you. Susi’s care for her family, for the children that are not hers, is a submission to the charity and the burden that love imposes. This, I believe, Susi faces each day as the past in the present chips away at her.

Notes 1. Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1959. 2. Michael R. Stenson, Class, Race and Colonialism in West Malaysia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980, p. 16. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 57–59. 5. Ravindra K. Jain, South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, p. 157. 6. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 2007, p. 12. 7. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 102. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 127. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 28. 12. Jackson, Michael D. Palm at the End of the Mind. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009a, p. 231. 13. Ibid., p. 201. 14. Talal Asad, ‘Introduction’, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 15. C. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 5. 16. Rose, Gillian. Love’s Work. New York: Schocken. 1996, p. 37. 17. Ibid., p. 10. 18. Ibid., p. 61.

3

A LOWBORN LIFE

55

Bibliography Asad, Talal. 1993. ‘ Introduction’, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Caruth, C. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jackson, Michael D. 2009. Palm at the End of the Mind. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Jain, Ravindra K. 1970. South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lewis, Oscar. 1959. Five Families; Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Roediger, David R. 2007. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso. Rose, Gillian. 1996. Love’s Work. New York: Schocken. Sandhu, Kernial Singh. 1969. Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 1987. Landscape for a Good Woman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Stenson, Michael R. 1980. Class, Race and Colonialism in West Malaysia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Education of J. Kuna Rajah Naidu

Malaysia is one of the top destinations in Southeast Asia for aged, asset-rich Westerners to go and retire. There are quite a few in my neighbourhood in Jalan Toh Kee Kah. Thailand’s beaches are fantastic, they say, and Thai people are friendly; but the traffic and the seedy night life take the country down a notch. Bali is great too—the beaches are legendary and a medium-size house outside Denpasar can be had for about 500 million rupiah (US$35,000)—but Denpasar is noisy and spoiled by tourism and the drug trade. Malaysia is more expensive: an apartment in Penang near Batu Ferringhi Beach costs more than a million ringgit or about US$250,000. Meanwhile, the country is modern with good communications and public infrastructure, and English is commonly spoken. The Malaysian scheme, Malaysia My Second Home Scheme (MM2H)—like those elsewhere in Southeast Asia—aims to exploit the foreigners’ spending power.1 The eligibility is pretty straightforward: an applicant has to be fifty or above; they must have liquid assets of at least RM350,000 and a monthly income of RM10,000 or more, and they must make a fixed deposit of RM150,000 into a Malaysian bank. The applicant and their dependents have to pass a health check at a Malaysian clinic and hold international health insurance. If they were to buy a house, it must cost at least a million ringgit. It is a win–win for both sides. Malaysia receives a steady flow of hard currency, and MM2H retirees get a piece of the tropical paradise. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_4

57

58

S. YAO

The foreign retirees in Port Dickson are a jumble of nationalities and backgrounds. An ex-RAF man and his wife live opposite us. He was subcontracted to the Saudi Airforce to service its fleet of British fighters and made a good deal of money. In their early sixties, Jonathan and Cecily Houseman keep busy by volunteering at an animal rescue centre. They have added a swimming pool to their garden, where they give swimming lessons to local kids, and where they hold their legendary poolside parties. Next to the Housemans lives James Stephens, an environmental scientist from the United Kingdom specializing in wetland restoration, and his Malaysian wife with their two children. Busy and committed to their environmental causes, James and Ng have nonetheless made themselves a part of the expatriate community. Further down the road is the Swiss couple, Bernard and Marié. They are in their mid-fifties and made a small fortune selling tattooing equipment in Europe. What attracted them to Malaysia is the year-round light and warm weather, and Marié is wont to declare. Invited to a social bash, Bernard and Marié would arrive on a Harley Davidson, both in black leather jackets, their necks and forearms heavily tattooed like members of a Japanese yakuza clan. There are other foreign retirees in the gated community near the town, and in the row of white, glistening McMansion bungalows at the Port Dickson Marina. These bungalows are lavish and sea-fronted, with docking facilities for boats and ocean-going yachts. Here live the Swedish couple, the Karlssons, who have set up a factory in Kajang, a couple of hours’ drive away, manufacturing rubberwood furniture for export. Hospitable and rich, their parties too are legendary. Everyone from the MM2H crowd— as well as a few locals—would be invited to enjoy the generous spread of food and drinks at the front porch that looks out across the Straits of Malacca. I know the Karlssons; my wife and I have been their guests and our cleaner Susi and her friend Rajah both work for them. We speak of globalization, and here is a case of international traffic that has brought foreigners to our shore. They share our neighbourhood, we hear their unfamiliar languages—French, Swedish, German, Italian, and Spanish—in social gatherings. Our minds are broadened by the news of their families in London, Paris, Stockholm, Berne, and Heidelberg. There are anxious talks of terrorism in Paris and Brussels, of Trump’s United States, of Brexit and the future relations of Britain with the EU. The MM2H retirees are mostly conservatives, nonetheless the rise of populism—in Hungary, in Poland, and in the United States— worries them, though the Housemans want to let Boris Johnson have a

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

59

go at regaining Britain’s sovereignty and national pride. After such talk, however, the conversation would soon shift to more practical matters, as they compare health insurance premiums, report on deep-sea diving at the east coast, the latest on the pound or the euro against the ringgit. For those of us admitted to their circles, the world has got smaller and life in the township is given a cosmopolitan air. Without doubt, the foreign retirees spend lavishly. Their lifestyle calls for support and services of all kinds. They send the children, if they have any, to the international school in Seremban; they purchase imported food—cheeses, Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, Birds Eye Fishfingers, New Zealand frozen beef, Dutch chicken; and they employ an army of builders, maids, gardeners, and handymen. Structurally, you might say, they enable a slew of brokers and go-betweens who connect the high and the low, the society of consumption and luxurious living with the modest, self-deprecating locals. The foreign retirees are the new colonials, people say. Still, while wealthy and well cashed-up, they are, on the whole, kind and affable, and they make good employers. At most they are white colonials of the contemporary, globalized times, whose qualities, good and bad, the townspeople have to learn to deal with. J. Kuna Rajah Naidu is in his early forties, married and with four children. The best way to describe him is: he is one of the new working poor, choosy with the jobs they take, and valuing leisure and lifestyle over earning. We know his money problems, but he has given over to the town’s slow-paced, seaside existence. Instead of full-time work, he relies on his skill as an unlicensed electrician and a general repairman. The Housemans once got him a job in a car repair workshop in Seremban, but he turned it down. ‘I rather stay in Port Dickson, I earn enough here and there is no traffic jam,’ he had said. We all thought it was a bad decision. How could he do that? How he could defy the financial sense even his foreign friends are able to observe? For, besides his domestic expenses, his eldest daughter had got a scholarship and was about to start university in Sabah, East Malaysia, and money was needed to set her up. I remember we had driven to Seremban to purchase a suitcase for her. At the shop, the blithe, carefree man was turned into a frugal and meticulous shopper; he scrutinized every aspect of the merchandise—the material, the quality of the lining, the sturdiness of the wheels—and bargained hard. He stabbed his finger at the saleslady, ‘You got to give me discount!’ He got his discount, so it appeared. A triumphant air followed him to the cash register where he dished out his hard-earned money. For all that

60

S. YAO

effort, he walked out of the shop with an Eagle Brand suitcase made in Indonesia: the shop’s cheap bestseller. ‘It will last you a long time,’ the saleslady said and sent us on our way. Outside on the street, I was ready to sneer at his shoddy buy, at his miserliness. Yet I should know better; a purchase is never merely an economic exchange, even with a working poor like Rajah. It is about outmanoeuvring the salesperson, about squeezing the maximum value out of the money spent, about keeping one’s dignity at a place out to drain the last ringgit out of your pocket. For all purposes, Rajah had made a sensible purchase. He had, to his own mind, struck a bargain, and kept his personal pride. It presents a logic which allows us to see things from his point of view. And it is the same logic that drives his behaviour among the Western retirees. He knows he is living in near penury, yet he would measure that against the loss of independence were he to take on a full-time job. We do not normally grant the poor such freedom—such insistence on dignity, but here he is. When asked about his employment, Rajah invariably turns to a swaggering mixture of optimism and an unrealistic assessment of things. One can even detect a touch of the bohemianism that is a gift of the MM2H retirees. The bohemianism adds a doubleness to his life: to witness the abundance of others is to share their sense of possession, for he knows in some magical ways the goods will come his way, and with that, some of their freedom and daily pleasures would become his too. The world of the Westerners is infectious, and everything of his life is charged with a vertiginous feeling of possibility. After turning down the Seremban job, Rajah begins to chalk up the hours working for the Karlssons. Rajah and his family live in a rickety timber house with a tin roof, surrounded by tall bushes and abandoned rubber trees that seem to be closing in on them. They have lived here since his father died and passed on the house to him, the eldest son. The motorbike journey from his house to the marina is a journey from dilapidation to unimaginable luxury. The Swedish couple had employed an architectural firm from Kuala Lumpur to design and build their dream home. It features Italian marble floors, Malaysian hardwood banisters, and in the kitchen a German-made Miele gas oven and cooktop, with Ikea cupboards and dining table. The swimming pool was subcontracted to Mr Mok the local builder, and Rajah had been a part of the work team. On completion, Rajah was taken on as a grass cutter and handyman; not a full-time job, but the pay was enough to pay the bills.

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

61

Rajah has taken easily to the Karlsson household. ‘They treat me like a friend, not like a worker,’ he says proudly. He is not boasting; during one of my visits, iced-tea was served at the back porch, and Rajah had turned off the lawnmower to join us. The mistress of the house came over and chatted a bit before returning to her easel (Brigitte Karlsson is a water colourist of tropical plants). The hospitality was unexpected and showy which Rajah took as if it were the most common thing in the world. ‘She is like that,’ Rajah said, then proceeded to tell me about the Karlsson family: Eric’s and Brigitte’s generosity, their uncomplicated relationship with their workers, their eight-year-old daughter’s easy friendship with Rajah. The Karlssons also express their kindliness in other ways. They do not forget the local festivals; during a Chinese New Year, or Thaipusam Hindu festival, or Hari Raya, each of the staff gets a microwave oven, or a juicer, or a Philips multicooker. When the Indonesian maid leaves for a home visit, a bonus would be added: chocolate, children’s clothes, joggers, and other gifts. Rajah’s gifts are equally useful daily items. On one occasion he was shown Eric Karlsson’s power tool collection—jigsaw, power drills, angle grinder, all imported and cordless with replaceable batteries. Eric had hoped to carry on his hobby in carpentry, building book cases and dollhouses for his daughter. But what with the furniture factory and the tropical heat, he soon gave up. During a Thaipusam festival, he invited Rajah to the storeroom: ‘Pick one you like; Happy Thaipusam!’ The gift he had picked was a Black and Decker power drill. His instinct had homed in on that particular item, almost new and hardly used. I remember he had brought it to show me, talking excitedly and oiling the parts with sewing machine oil, polishing the surface to its original lustre. He was thrilled. But I could not share his good spirit. It was just something your boss no longer needed, I said. I instantly regretted what I had said: I was being a spoilsport; I was being ungracious. Mrs Lim at the Ever Prosperous Hardware store once told me a story. She had sent her relatives in China what she thought would be a treat, genuine Levi’s Jeans and Adidas sweatshirts and Johnson & Johnson baby oil. But they caused an uproar, as spite and envy ran through the neighbourhood (it was during the pre-Deng days). The relatives wrote back: the gifts were fine, but could she send something cheaper, something less flashy? Mrs Lim was outraged: they wanted something cheaper? Are they ever satisfied? Never again will I send them anything! It was ingratitude and unwarranted pickiness. And it made manifest a sociological principle:

62

S. YAO

gifts create and sustain status distinctions, the Levi’s Jeans and Adidas sweatshirts and Johnson & Johnson baby oil broke the facade of equality of Maoist China. Thinking about Rajah, I ask myself: Would his gifts prove similarly damaging for him and his family? Would they create a sense of envy and longing they could not contain? The Karlssons are indeed kind and generous. But it is also a fact that the house is burdened with cast-offs they don’t know what to do with. The husband and wife change their iPhone each year as work and security requires. They are busy people. When an appliance is broken, it is more convenient to replace it than to send it in for repairs. And appliances always seem to running out of warranty, in each case a new purchase is a wiser decision. In short, a lot of goods were often looking for new owners. Beside the iPhones, there would be the tabletop cooker, the lawnmower, the vacuum cleaner, the cutlery set, the Ikea chairs—some out of date and no longer working, some out of fashion. But they are not totally dead; in the hands of a talented handyman, they can be, with some persistence and labour, resurrected back to life. A cast-off when given as a gift changes its meaning: the Tamil man, not in so many words, recognizes. To him, each gift expresses the Karlssons’ graciousness and egalitarian spirit, and each gift-exchange consolidates their complex relationship. The Karlsson’s latest cast-off is a Husqvarna cordless hedge trimmer which rightly went to Rajah, being the grass cutter. The teeth are a bit blunt, and the battery barely holds the charge. But it is an expensive European brand; he knows this because his wife uses a Husqvarna sewing machine and vouches for its reliability. It is quite a gift when all his electric tools are cheap and Chinese-made. At the table at my house, he gets me to share in his pride and latest possession. Once again, he goes through the routine: he dusts the machine, he pokes it here and there with a screw driver, he opens the casing and degreases the inside with WD40, he takes out the battery and gives a shake as though to awake it from ‘sleep’. Pulling the trigger, he is rewarded with a whizz-whizz sound of workability, then it stops. No matter, the expression on his face is that of a child who has, by some magical gesture, got a broken train set running. He is hot, perspiring; his eyes gleam with excitement. The amateur engineer has met his match and won, and something financially out of reach has become his. How magical, how intriguing is a gift! It is given to you for free, with no strings attached; it involves no monetary payment. Already we are in

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

63

a zone of uncertainty. Strictly speaking, a gift is never free, and despite being ‘no strings attached’ you are tied to the donor in some way. And this has been the legacy of social anthropology: a gift creates obligation on the part of the receiver, an obligation they are bound to acknowledge and to repay in some form. In the language of Marcel Mauss, whose work The Gift lays out the principle of gift exchange in all cultures: a gift embodies the heart and soul of the donor and gives force to social relationships with all the attendant qualities of sentiment, loyalty, and mutual bond.2 And a gift patches up a bad relationship, just as it signals the contracting of a new one. Enemies accepting a gift from each other cease to be enemies; a dowry or bride price accepted is as good as giving one’s word in a marriage contract, as in India or Old China. A gift has consequences; it is rarely, in the social and ethical sense, totally free. Thus the bafflement: Rajah knows that a gift from the Karlssons is free; they would not ask him to give it back. As he fusses over the family’s latest cast-off, as he puts the Husqvarna hedge trimmer to another round of oiling and tweaking, he cannot help but sing the praises of his benefactor. It is as if he needs to convince himself he really owns it, and saying the good words seals the deal; the trimmer would never be taken away from him. ‘Eric is such a nice man. This is near brand-new, only a generous man would give it away.’ ‘Yes, Raj.’ ‘I work for him, but he is a friend.’ ‘But this is old; the battery is at the end of its recharge cycles.’ ‘I can fix it—I can get a new battery. Why are you so negative?’ I am negative because I am thinking of the Chinese world I grew up in. It is a world full of kindliness and betrayal. The means of anchoring things down, the questions about determinism, are found in the ‘way of Heaven,’ as my grandmother put it. She liked to give me counsel, when my exams were coming up: ‘You study hard and listen to your teachers, and I’ll pray to the gods in Heaven to give you their blessing.’ She was taking a page from Chinese traditional philosophy. When life is uncertain, you must fight against the odds, and that means working hard and appealing to the gods and the deities. One grew up with the strange idea of determinism, always a mixture of personal effort, Heaven’s way, luck, and destiny. In any case, this manner of thinking wreaks havoc on the search for certainty, on result-focused human actions. Regarding the gift and what befuddles Rajah, a similar fault line infects the promises, the

64

S. YAO

relationship-building power that a gift delivers. At worst, there is betrayal and bad faith, at best a gift generates opportunities, and nurtures the dream that your life is not closed off by the limited circumstances you were born into. In Absentees , the philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen speaks of the many ways people can become non-persons—by going missing, by being stripped of their social status, by being forced to go into exile and to seek refuge in another land.3 A non-person is that tragical figure forever living in the margin, at the threshold between two lives, two statuses. They have left their old existence and have yet to establish their new home and new identity. And this is the most wretched thing: an absentee is not even a non-person, for a non-person can at least make a claim for their lack of identity, for the figure of what they used to be now made irrelevant in the new circumstances. When you think about it, isn’t a gift like that? Like Heller-Roazen’s absentee, who is both a person and a non-person, a gift shares this figuring of doubleness. A gift may vanish into insignificance, or it can just as well be charged with meaning that haunts both donor and receiver. A good has a ‘social life,’ Appadurai says: a good can be bought and sold and is thus a commodity, and when given as a gift it becomes charged with sentiment and personal feelings.4 As it travels from hand to hand, from one social context to another, a good morphs into different beasts of contrasting meanings. Money or the market determines the meaning of one; society decides on the significance of the other. In this mobility, commodity and gift are not so much different as taking on new forms in social exchange and the generation of meaning. All this is to say a gift can take on a strange quality of vulnerability, not because the donor might change their mind, but because the aura of commodity has never left it. If you treasure it, and want desperately to keep it, the feeling is akin to suspicion or paranoia: you think that with their power and resources, the owner might reclaim it any time they choose to. The gift may not belong to you after all. A gift imposes an obligation on the receiver. However, the Karlssons are Europeans, and wealthy owners of a furniture factory, and Rajah a Tamil handyman and casual labourer: with such disparity what does obligation and its fulfilment really mean? Given his circumstances, a feeling of indebtedness is one thing, quite another the ability—or the intention— to repay. Between the moral force of receiving a gift and the denial of

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

65

obligation lies a whole range of decisions and responses. We have reconsidered the anthropological insights, and we have imposed this on our poor recipient. Still, many questions remain open. I turn again to ask him, why make such a fuss over a discarded hedge trimmer? But he is tired of questions. As if to stall the agitation in his mind, Rajah returns to his gift with unwarranted fascination. The scrutiny is conducted with intense self-consciousness; the look on his face is the look of someone who, for the life of him, cannot fathom the mysteries of something ordinary, something banal. To the observer, the self-obsession feels like an escape, a means to remedy the sense of bewilderment he holds in his head. Thus, Rajah looks, and looks intensely, at the gift he has received. Anthropologists talk about gift’s multiple meanings, about gift’s changing ‘social life.’ But it is safe to say they rarely look at the thing itself. Significance and analytical import are accrued, meanings are inscribed, but the gift’s very thinghood lies outside one’s attention. Perhaps, the gift’s true essence resides in itself, in its superficiality and aesthetic form. The truth of the gift is, as it were, for all to see. It is a slight exaggeration to say Rajah is lost in his gift, until we recall what Sartre writes in his novel Nausea.5 In a classic existentialist moment, the character Roquentin describes the exquisite ‘thinghood’ of a tree he is looking at. He is obsessively observant: he sees the ‘compact sea-lion skin,’ ‘that oily, horny, stubborn look’ of the roots.6 And this intense regard, a regard where everything—including himself—dissolves, leads to a revelation. What exists ‘lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it.’7 With this revelation, Roquentin says of his experience, ‘I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was all consciousness of its existence. Still detached from it—since I was conscious of it—and yet lost in it, nothing but it.’8 To Roquentin, the root insists on its existence, so does his selfhood; yet they are merged in a single node of connection. It is not too much to say similarly for Rajah; a thing, a gift always moves beyond its initial allure to a state where it simply exists. We may bring into it all kinds of social meaning, but, secure in its ownership, the hedge trimmer claims the significance in itself, for itself. However, for Rajah, as much as for Sartre’s character, the sense of rapture that one feels is only the beginning. The thinghood moves on, taking itself on a strange journey where everything is what it is, and yet is not. For Sartre, this is the existentialist search itself, and for the Tamil handyman, it is the feeling that the Swedish family’s gifts are a part of what makes up

66

S. YAO

his life. In Sartre’s language, the gift is him, and he is imbedded in its very allurement, less in its usefulness. And since he desires more from the donors—whose goodwill he can rely upon—a cycle of giving and receiving, of generosity and gratitude, ensues. It is a cycle that only a critical event, an unforgivable betrayal, can prevent from continuing. For the moment, Rajah and his gift meld into a single relationship of desire— like Roquentin’s vertiginous feeling at the merging of his self and what he observes. Rajah wants to escape, to break the spell of the things he desires and which have miraculously become his. It has been a kind of education. From the gifts, he has gone on to the Infotainment channels on cable television and has been bedazzled by the Air-dry cooker, the ‘twenty pieces in one box’ screwdriver set, the stay-sharp Japanese kitchen knife. These too work on him, but cash strapped and without a credit card, he has yet to make any purchases. But the temptation is real; and he tells me what is on his mind. He is not going to reject another gift from the Karlssons, he says, but how amazing it would be if he could acquire it in his own way, through his own means. For buying it himself would make a thing truly his. Paying for it himself is a final act that not only firms up the idea of ownership, but also, in the remarkable way of consumptive desire, places a commodity and its owner in an intimate tryst, a common bond. The MM2H retirees have, without doubt, changed Rajah’s life. They have taught him how the world works. Being their employee has made familiar a lifestyle beyond his imagination. It is for him Hollywood—or Bollywood—stuff. The learning has been, as they say, a journey. From the poolside conversations, he heard talk about foreign currencies—the Pounds, the Euros, the Kroners—and their rise and fall against the ringgit. Working on the lawn, snippets of words about international health insurance have come to his ears. Then, there was the almost magical internet transfer that brings money from a city in Europe to the ATM at a bank in Port Dickson, the workings of which I have helped him to unravel. The white folk, the mat sallehs, have been figures in movies, among the tourists who brave the midday sun in their t-shirts and joggers, now they are his employers, who serve him iced drinks during his break, and give him old power tools and out-of-date iPhones. When Ann Laura Stoler gives her study of colonialism in the Dutch Indies the title Race and the Education of Desire, education takes on the character of a transitive verb.9 Something, someone is changed and transformed. And education in this sense is about the sharpening of passion

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

67

and the alteration of imagination, which impact on people’s practical affairs. Or take Flaubert’s novel, Sentimental Education.10 Sentimental here does not mean emotional; it is closer to what resides in the heart: the sensibility that shapes our sense of social and aesthetic refinement. Sentimental education is about the ‘enhancement’ of feelings and wisdom. And in his adventure, the young Frédéric Moreau is full of excitement for the new horizons and deep feelings that blessed his generation in nineteenthcentury Europe. Sentimental education thus suggests the way it pries open the old world, and the search for new experiences and new sensations. Rajah is a member of the working poor in the tropics, nonetheless, he, too, has pitched a tent in a new terrain of experiences, but one that is global and consumption driven. Consumption has the power to corrupt, to make you succumb to its allure, but that is not the only part of it. You might say the negative story of consumption is told by the liberal-minded who are satiated with goods, like Rajah’s benefactors. For the working poor, consumer goods are convenient and labour-saving, a source of pride when you actually own one. For them, the enigma of a gift is about its usefulness, as much as it is about its brand name and wonderful foreignness. Rajah’s need to endlessly examine the gift of a power tool feels to us like giving over to his own entrapment. However, it is also true that the more he pokes at it, the more he gets a glimpse at its innards, the quicker he reaches a ‘stasis’ where fetishism loses its power. At the end, the Tamil handyman is neither a victim of consumption nor a subaltern resister of globalization as articulated in the MM2H scheme. And I believe he has gained more than he has lost. The May 2018 general election was remarkable, almost miraculous. It brought down the Prime Minister Najib Razak and his government, after massive losses for the coalition Barisan Nasional (BN) under the major Malay party, United Malays National Organization (UMNO).11 After a night of ballot counting, the tally showed the opposition Pakatan Harapan, Alliance of Hope, together with an allied party in Sabah, had won 121 seats, against BN’s 79 seats. The challenger had safely crossed the threshold and took power from BN which had dominated Malaysian politics since independence in 1957. Pakatan Harapan consisted of Bersatu, the Malaysian United Indigenous Party; People’s Justice Party (PKR); Democratic Action Party (DAP), and National Trust Party (AMANAH). Their constituents varied: Bersatu is pro-Malay and led by the former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir and disaffected ex-leaders

68

S. YAO

of UMNO; PKR is reformist and multiracial, the party of Anwar Ibrahim; DAP, founded in 1965, is multiracial and under ethnic Chinese and Indian leadership; AMANAH is a party of reformist Islamists whose leaders broke rank with the orthodox Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS. A rickety coalition for sure, Pakatan Harapan is nonetheless in name and in agenda multi-ethnic and democratic. It was the multi-ethnic and democratic character, as much as the united effort to oppose the rampant corruption of Barisan, and the prime minister, Najib, in particular, that captured the voters’ imagination and won power for the opposition. There was such hatred for Najib that Dr Mahathir left retirement to take the helm of the opposition. Dr Mahathir was at the time 92 years old, and he made it clear that the election was for him, personal, and he vowed to take down Najib Razak, the prime minister in power since 2009.12 Najib was once Dr Mahathir’s protégé, who had been groomed for high office. After becoming PM in April 2009, Najib’s performance had been lacklustre, dogged by allegations of corruption coming from countries including the US and Singapore, who were investigating the US$4.5 billion missing from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the state investment fund. The US Justice Department had declared that some US$30 million from the fund was used to buy jewellery for Najib’s wife. To bring down Najib and his government, Dr Mahathir had formed BERSATU and led the opposition.13 I remember the great excitement of the 2018 general election. For years people had been suffering from political fatigue and had become resigned to the State’s oppressive policies and corruption. Together with corruption, there was now money grifting on an immense scale. It captured the voters’ imagination; money was the dominant electoral issue, the main issue being Najib’s greed. And money was everywhere, billions lost from the 1MDB, the millions deposited to Najib’s personal account in a Malaysian bank, the bags and suitcases of cash the police found in the apartment of the Prime Minister and his wife. Money politics is no longer an aphorism. The opposition’s election slogan was, ‘The corruption money is people’s money,’ which made the impossible claim that you and I had a claim on all that loot. It was all a bit too much, what you knew befogged your mind, and it was hard to separate the truth from the rumours and gossip. You read up and went through the notes, but it did not clear your head. First the money: a total US$4.5 billion had gone missing from 1MDB, the state investment fund—but this is in US dollars—how much would it

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

69

be in ringgit? And by the way, how much is a billion; they are a bunch of small shopkeepers and grass cutters and lorry drivers: is a billion a fancy way of saying million? There was the US$1 billion that had been deposited in the Prime Minister’s account in AMBank, and there was the paltry 3,320,670.65 ringgit (US$1,039,369.91) overdrawn from Najib’s Visa and Mastercard, and not to mention the US$30 million the Prime Minister’s wife spent on diamond jewellery and designer handbags.14 And lest we forget, Najib’s stepson, Riziz, has a film company in Los Angeles that financed Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a film about greed and corruption in high places; the funding was allegedly siphoned off from the 1MDB.15 Then, there is the scandal. In 2006, a Mongolian national Altantuya Shaariibuu was murdered in a forest area in Kuala Lumpur. A 28-yearold woman, a mother of two, Altantuya was a lover of Abdul Razak Baginda, a defence analyst and an adviser to Najib, the then Defence Minister.16 Four years earlier, Abdul Razak had brokered a US$1.1 billion deal for the Malaysian Defence Ministry to buy two French Scorpèneclass submarines. Bribes were paid to facilitate the deal, and Abdul Razak and some in the Defence Ministry, presumably including Najib, benefited handsomely, so it was alleged. Altantuya had demanded US$500,000 to keep mum on the corruption in the deal, which led to her murder. The Mongolian woman had accompanied Abdul Razak on business trips and knew about the US$200 million bribe paid to the Malaysians. It is all alleged, mind you. But let us follow the plot. Before she went missing, Altantuya had filed a police report where she wrote: Maybe it’s my fault but now I really understand he doesn’t love me any more. But when I come I did something stupid. I write letter where I said I’ll kill myself and things like that. But now he got letters of mine and [is] trying to scare me or kill me.17

The Mongolian woman disappeared outside Abdul Razak’s house on 19 October 2006 and was never seen again: we knew this because of the police investigation. Three weeks later, her remains were found in a forest in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur. She had been shot twice and her body was blown up by explosives. According to one of the two killers involved, she had pleaded for her life, and the life of her unborn child. In any case, Abdul Razak was charged with abetting and planning

70

S. YAO

the murder, but was later acquitted. The prosecutors did not appeal the verdict, citing a lack of evidence. He now lives in the UK. Like the big money Najib had laid his hands on, this too involved political connections, the giving and taking of bribes, and people with no moral conscience; the sex and the murder were just a footnote to an already wretched narrative. Months before the voting day in May, videos and internet postings about Najib’s misdeeds were circulating over the phones, thanks to the internet and Whatsapp Messaging. It was big news; Al Jazeera reported on it, so did the ABC, the Australian broadcaster, and other foreign media. The video reporting made tantalizing viewing. Rajah and his friends were mesmerized, as they gathered at my house to watch. But they already knew the details and rolled out them out in familiar snippets: the money, lots and lots of it; the Prime Minister’s wife Rosmah Mansor’s designer handbags and jewellery and Botox treatment; Altantuya and her murder: ‘They blew up her body, poor woman,’ ‘Did she sleep with Najib also?’ They didn’t know about the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the US Justice Department investigation: these were outside their world, except for Rajah. For the MM2H retirees too were caught up with the story. Najib’s money entered their conversation, and they discussed it with their cleaners and handymen. US$4.5 billion is a lot of money and its loss was a major scandal, even for these men and women familiar with wealth and businesses. Money matters concern them greatly. They have no lack of it, but the point is to watch it grow while living in Malaysia. That means keeping an eye on the share market, keeping abreast of the foreign exchange rate and international finance. These topics they talk about and pass on willy-nilly to their employees. We were sitting in my study as he helped me to replace the cartridge in my printer. ‘A lot of money was stolen from 1MDB. Four and half billion US dollars. Do you know how much that is in ringgit, Rajah?’ ‘I don’t know. How should I know?’ ‘Take a guess. Let me ask you: How much is a billion?’ ‘Ten million? A hundred million?’ ‘You are way off. It is a thousand million. There are 9 zeros after 1,’ I explained and wrote 1 and nine 0’s on my notepad to show him. Then, I multiplied the figure by 4 to render, more or less, the sum in ringgit: 18 billion.

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

71

Actually, none of my informants, neither Rajah nor Susi nor Mr Murugan of the Nivash Curry House knew how much a billion was. The figure is too enormous, too fantastic; it does not feature in their lives. A billion is like some place of legendary riches which people have heard about but never hope to visit, an El Dorado of the unknown. Their eyes rolled up, and they tongued their lips as they sought to grasp the enormity of 4.5 billion US dollars, or the equally alienating 18 billion ringgits. They were moved; and they let the sums sink in. The figure ‘billions’ is incomprehensible, and the mystery of it helped to secure their resentment against Najib and his government. For Rajah, the extent of Najib’s corruption is an education, and eye-opener. And it is an education on the go, as he picks up the tail ends of the conversations of the MM2H retirees, and from the internet full of rage and gossip and conspiracy theories. To firm up what I know about the working poor, I have made a habit of spending time at the office of the opposition party, Parti Keadilan, situated in town. It was less an office than a small, dusty room with a telephone and a computer and a few plastic chairs in the waiting area. The member of parliament himself was rarely around, so serving the constituents was left to his assistant, the amicable Peter De Souza, an ex-English teacher. I would visit the office once a week to talk to people, to watch Peter try to solve their problems. A Tamil woman said, ‘I have diabetes, I need money for medicine.’ A Malay man with a young child said, ‘We get the government money for school uniform and books. But it is not enough.’ It was all crying for help, sometimes literally; they needed money, not social work services. Peter knew this, and in each case he would take out from his wallet a twenty or fifty ringgit bill and pass it over. This, I recognize, is money politics, too, but it’s a more ethical version. Parti Keadilan office is not the place to talk about the moral hollowness of money, but rather its practicalities, its power to solve the banal but crucial problems of survival. And among the beseeching crowd at the office, I am sure, would be those who had voted for the opposition in protest of the corruption of Najib and his cronies. And all this is an education for the anthropologist as well. It is almost too easy to disparage the way Rajah has taken to his Western employers and their generosity and gifts. You went through the twisting metaphysics of a gift: its allure, the power it grants the giver, its corrupting potency. A gift is not free, and Rajah certainly cannot afford the item were he to try to pay for it himself: he seems to realize this, yet he does not. He is a Tamil grass cutter, and you are a middle-class professional. You

72

S. YAO

are educated, you have read the key texts: Conrad’s Nostromo, Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, David Graeber’s 1000 Years of Debt. Whether it is the silver mine in South America, the family legacy as it played out in the capitalism of Victorian England, the modernizing effect of money, or the devasting effect of debts of the past and present: each settles in your mind the erosion of all that is good in social community. You take the ideas—and the books too—with you to the field. You don’t quite remember the first time the thought came to you: the reality is not in what you think, or what the books describe. The working people have their way of handling life’s issues, and their resentment against Najib is not, I believe, due to a rejection of money politics, as they understand it. They certainly do not think making money from one’s position is wrong; that has been going on since Independence. It is just how it is. Najib’s grift, revealed with near mythical figures, brings into relief a measure of wealth they cannot imagine. However, as the billions gradually begin to settle in their minds, they become real—a figure that affected their decisions at the ballot box. For all its allure, its foreignness, the fantastic figure is something with which they hedge their understanding of how politics really works and what should be the remedies. But why stop there? For some analytical thoughts are too ideological, too suggestive of intention. You feel deflated: you miss the Conrad, the Dickens, the class analysis of Marxist political economy. The best reconciliatory position to take is: the working poor have another rationality, another means of assessment, in the way they manage their lifework. Politics is one thing, there is also their attitude towards work: the need to balance leisure and work. You think this is the preserve of the middle-class professionals, but there is plenty of such thinking among the people in Port Dickson. Rajah is not the only one. Our cleaner Susi thinks this way and so does the builder Mr Mok, a new convert to Buddhism and vegetarianism, an advocate of ‘slow living.’ This—the valuing of leisure over earning—promises another, perhaps more fruitful way ahead in understanding these folks. It is best to keep an open mind. For the suspicion is that even this path may take you through the thicket of over-analysis, of over-guessing people’s intentions and calculations. Who are we to trap them in ‘shopworn terms, devalued and dulled by the tasks we have assigned to them, the meanings we have made them carry.’18 To talk about subaltern resistance is to attribute to Rajah and his likes what we would not attribute to ourselves. Malaysia’s money politics and the sense

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

73

of bewitchment as people experience it is part and parcel of what Michael Taussig calls the ‘magical state.’19 If the Malaysian State is indeed a ‘magical state,’ then the task is not to turn history into a fetish, with which everything can be explained and explained away. Against the fetishism of history, ‘it is we, with our specific conventions, convictions, and curiosity, who provide that light (of intelligibility)—and thereby continue to puzzle about the connections between meaning … and power,’ Taussig writes.20 Understanding is at best a half-way house. With Rajah, his troubled yet realistic assessment of his gifts, his yearning and half-satiated desire for them—they reflect a realization of how to exist in a globalized world with its new opportunities and new modes of exploitation and corruption. This half-way house of understanding seems to me a type of wisdom, a means of carrying on at the edge of language, of hugging the shoreline where things are still enticingly possible.

Notes 1. See Malaysian government website http://www.mm2h.gov.my/. Accessed 27 January 2022. 2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift. London: Routledge, 2002. 3. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 4. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea. New York: New Directions, 1963. 6. Ibid., pp. 185–186. 7. Ibid., p. 143. 8. Ibid., p. 144. 9. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 10. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 11. The 2018 election was widely reported in the international press. See for example, ‘Malaysia Election 2018: Everything You Need to Know’. The Guardian, 8 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ may/08/mala.sia-election-2018-everything-you-need-to-know. Accessed 28 January 2022. 12. ‘Modern Malaysia’s Founding Father Should Clean Out the Stables of Sleaze in His Country—But He Will Have to Give Up Power to Do So’. The Guardian, 10 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2018/may/02/mahathir-mohamad-92-vows-to-stop-corrupt-protegemalaysia. Accessed 28 January 2022.

74

S. YAO

13. Ibid. 14. ‘Wife of Former Malaysian PM Najib Razak Sued Over Jewellery Worth $14.8m’. The Guardian, 11 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/jul/11/wife-of-former-malaysian-pm-najib-razak-sued-overjewellery-worth-148m. Accessed 28 January 2022. 15. ‘“Wolf of Wall Street” Producer Named in $250 Million 1MDB Suit’. Bloomberg, 8 June 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ 2021-06-08/-wolf-of-wall-street-producer-named-in-250-million-1mdbsuit. Accessed 28 January 2022. 16. ‘The Murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu: Scandal That Haunts Malaysia’s Former PM Najib Razak’. South China Morning Post, 17 December 2019. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/explained/article/3042437/ murder-altantuya-shaariibuu-and-allegations-against-malaysias. Accessed 28 January 2022. 17. Ibid. 18. Michael D. Jackson, Palm at the End of the Mind. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 51. 19. Michael Taussig, ‘Maleficium: State Fetishism’, in E. S. Apter and W. Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. 20. Ibid., p. 221.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. 2021. Absentees. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jackson, Michael D. 2009. Palm at the End of the Mind. Durham: Duke University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift. London: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. Nausea, translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. ‘Maleficium: State Fetishism’, in E. S. Apter and W. Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 217–247.

4

THE EDUCATION OF J. KUNA RAJAH NAIDU

75

Internet Resources http://www.mm2h.gov.my/. Accessed 27 January 2022. ‘Malaysia Election 2018: Everything You Need To Know’. The Guardian, 8 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/08/mala.siaelection-2018-everything-you-need-to-know. Accessed 28 January 2022. ‘Modern Malaysia’s Founding Father Should Clean Out the Stables of Sleaze in His Country—But He Will Have to Give Up Power to Do So’. The Guardian, 10 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/ 02/mahathir-mohamad-92-vows-to-stop-corrupt-protege-malaysia. Accessed 28 January 2022. ‘“Wolf of Wall Street” Producer Named in $250 Million 1MDB Suit’. Bloomberg, 8 June 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ 2021-06-08/-wolf-of-wall-street-producer-named-in-250-million-1mdb-suit. Accessed 28 January 2022. ‘The Murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu: Scandal That Haunts Malaysia’s Former PM Najib Razak’. South China Morning Post, 17 December 2019. https:// www.scmp.com/week-asia/explained/article/3042437/murder-altantuya-sha ariibuu-and-allegations-against-malaysias. Accessed 28 January 2022.

CHAPTER 5

Appetite

When Adam Zakri and his wife Sophia came to visit us in Sydney, we held a backyard barbeque in their honour. It was after Christmas, the height of the Australian summer. The garden was filled with light, and the Japanese bamboo bush bursting into leaves, promising a fortuitous year ahead. I laid out chops by the charcoal grill, checked the drinks in the ice tub, while a salad of wild rocket and cherry tomato was being prepared in the kitchen. As I was chatting with the guests who had arrived, a rustle came from the door, and the voice: ‘Where is that man, come and greet this Professor!’ ‘Professor’ was the code for our friendship, I of the booklearning sort, Adam of ‘Islamic theology.’ I perked up—the heart of the party had arrived. Sophia put the cheesecake on the table and went to talk to the other guests, while Adam gave me a bearhug and said, ‘Where is the wine?’ ‘Bring out the good stuff. No South African rubbish like you get at home.’ Not a wine connoisseur myself, I had sought advice and bought three bottles of Merlot, two bottles of Sauternes for dessert, and a carton of Coopers pale ale. It was unusual for us to be so wellprovisioned. But the guests would be thirsty in the summer heat, and we were welcoming a couple of Malay friends from home. When Adam told us he and Sophia were coming, we were determined to give them a good time. We did not scrimp on the food—we bought fresh strawberries to be served with cream, we made a big bowl of salad, we bought the wine, and at Adam’s request we would grill pork chops © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_5

77

78

S. YAO

with bacon; you know where this is going. The charcoal was glowing; on the grill, the chops, moistened with extra virgin olive oil, were sizzling. I watched over the grill, while Simryn looked after the guests, leaving the drinks department to Adam. Corks popped, and glasses were filled and passed around. The Merlot was cold and dry, and the fruitiness hinted at the good weather and moderate rain in the Hunter Valley where it came from. Adam held up his glass, and did some mock speechifying, ‘It is an impetuous little wine, with a touch of…’ The rest was lost in all the jolliness. We liked to indulge him, more so for him to fill us in on the latest goings-on in Malaysia. Prime Minister Najib had been accused of pilfering from the Malaysian sovereign fund the 1MDB, and the trial was just about to start. A brazen corruption, what a legacy for a man who is the son of Malaysia’s second prime minister, Adam called out. ‘And don’t forget his wife Rosmah. There were all those Prada handbags and jewellery and cash in shopping bags the police had found when they raided their apartments.’ We listened, and we said to ourselves, ‘It’s the same corruption and greed. That’s why we left in the first place.’ But we were not immune from the immigrant’s longing. Adam had brought news from home, and he was just the person to tell it. He was loud, candid. And he is a Malay, an insider to the Malay-Islamic world we are not privy to. He was enjoying himself, and his words came fast and easy, without restraint. Our guests had not met Adam before, and they were fascinated by the remarkable man. Everything about him was marked by a boundless appetite for enjoyment, and by the recalcitrance of a straight shooter. Adam Zakri is a 35-year-old structural engineer who works for a construction company in Kuala Lumpur. He is medium built, with a vivid smiling face and a head of thick bushy hair that threatens to fall over like a premature comb-over. Nothing of his appearance gives any hint to his double life. From nine to five weekdays, he is a suit-wearing—the airconditioning makes possible the sartorial elegance—business executive, his head filled with engineering calculations and environmental feasibility studies; on the weekends, he changes into his cargo pants and t-shirt underneath a black jacket and morphs into a figure from Easy Rider. With Sophia on the back pillion, he would make the first stop at Seremban where his parents live. The filial visit done; they would continue on and spend the rest of the time in Port Dickson. They are a muchwelcomed couple to the circle of ‘bohemians’—a slew of journalists, NGO activists, British Council English teachers, Western retirees, an assortment

5

APPETITE

79

of artists and hangers-on. Tiger Beer would flow, and Sophia would let her husband talk. Boisterous and full of high spirits, he would venture to expand on any subject asked of him: the grift of the Mentri Besar, the state governor, the latest scandal in the UMNO leadership, the conservatism of Islam. The locals among us, in the habit of self-censorship, would normally keep clear of these subjects. But here is a privileged voice that can say the things we non-Malays cannot. So we drank and listened; it is worth putting up with his blustering, just to get the inside dope on what is happening—the corruption, the scandals, the rumours. Adam came from a background of the Malay elite. His father had served in the Royal Malay Regiment, who fought against the Communist insurgents and retired with a Colonel’s rank. Like his father, Adam went to the all-boys Malay College Kuala Kangsar, ‘the Eton of the East,’ that has educated the sons of Malay Royalty and the social elite since its founding in 1905, as it does today. He did well at college and won a government scholarship to study engineering at the University of Manchester, England. It was the end of the 1980s: Carnaby Street and the long-haired boys and short-skirted girls were gone. But for a student, Thatcher’s England still offered the sort of pleasures and temptations a young Malay found hard to resist. He went to the pubs and the dances and he and a couple of friends formed a band. And he bought a 1965 Norton motorcycle and took his new girlfriend Sophia for rides in the English countryside. It was an idyllic existence. Still, meeting Sophia had put a check on his wild ways. By the last year of university, he and Sophia were engaged. It was a signal that his life had to change; he gave up his band, sold the bike, and studied hard. Adam returned home a golden boy: a graduate with a British engineering degree, an Anglophile who had kept his Malay identity; a MalayMuslim fiancé with a sociology degree added to his parents’ approval. Adam and Sofia got married soon after. As a government scholar, he was required to work for the public service for a few years. For his first posting, he was sent to the planning department of the Kuala Lumpur City Council. His job was to go through the building applications, and after visiting the sites, make his recommendations. He was a fast learner who earned the trust of the senior planners. Promotion came quickly which gave him the authority to make his own decisions. The position promised freedom and a wide range of contacts in the construction industry.

80

S. YAO

‘I was a sheltered young man; my conservative parents had been my model. Now at work, I met and dealt with all kinds of people. My co-workers, the senior bureaucrats, the builders and construction executives—Malay, Indian and Chinese. The City Council was okay; the work not too demanding, I went to work at nine. Everyone took morning tea at ten, and soon it was lunch. You worked, took afternoon tea at 3, then it was time to go home. I was in shock. But it was public service, not a place for the ambitious.’ His next phase of life began when he was headhunted by a consulting firm specializing in building design. He headed a small team of engineers who prepared environmental impact statements for clients who were registering their building applications with the City Council. His old contacts proved useful. The senior officers he knew helped to expedite things. His list of clients expanded, and he found himself deep in the world of big projects and big money—the world of builders and developers and bankers who dominated the over-heated property market around the capital. For the construction industry, land is critical, and so is quick approval of planning applications. The largest source of land is state land, and land deals involve the corporations, the State’s bureaucracy and the politicians. One may own a piece of forest land, or agricultural land, but spectacular money can be made when converting it to building land. Land conversion lies in the hands of the State’s authorities, and political connections are needed to expedite the process. Money greases the process and along the chain, everyone gets rich—the land owner, the State authorities, the politicians, the City Council officials, the builders, the consultants. It is a quite a world that Adam described—a gravy train that fed the greedy and tempted the weak-hearted. ‘What are you saying, Adam? Are you saying that you took bribes like everybody?’ ‘Sure, I took money. You have to understand that everyone was in it, you couldn’t function without greasing the palms one way or the other. You could say to yourself: I am clean, I won’t take bribes. Then you would be treated like an outcast by your colleagues. There’s no way around it.’ What Adam is pointing to is the corruption, and also the normalcy of it. There were other forms of mischief besides accepting bribes. At the City Council, he would at times stay on to tidy up the backlog of applications. But this was seen as an affront by his less industrious colleagues, and he soon stopped so as not to upset anyone. The consultancy firm

5

APPETITE

81

had its own wrongdoings. Adam is a Datuk, an honorific title given by the State Sultan which his company had ‘bought’ for him. Such a feudal custom is not for him; but he became accustomed to its usefulness. The Datukship opens the doors to government offices, people would see him without an appointment; a Datuk does not wait in a queue. Adam is a man of confidence and great social intelligence. He had not taken easily to the malpractices at work. Nonetheless, the culture of corruption worked on him, slowly chipping away at his resistance. He had struggled with his conscience and tried to adhere to his ideals. A few years after graduating from university, his father’s connections and the government’s pro-Malay measures had brought him to a professional height both dazzling and bewildering. So he has given in, gradually and inevitably. He could not hold out against the pressure coming from all quarters and chose to be a team player. It is a folksy saying in Malaysia that people enter politics to get rich. Certainly, senior politicians in the government get rich, some spectacularly. Just when you think it’s all hearsay, news comes that the parliamentary speaker of the house has just built a multi-million-ringgit house and moved in with his family, or that the minister of industry owns a portfolio of shares across major corporations, which makes you wonder how she could afford them with her salary. And it has been said that the former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir has racehorse breeding farms in Argentina and Brazil, and he underwrites the Bank of Maldives. It is only a rumour, mind you. You are not sure about the Bank of Maldives, and yet it is true about his horses, as evident from the 40-acre stud farm he owns in Langkawi, in north Malaysia.1 The temptations Adam faces appear to have taken a page from State corruption practice. In a sense, Adam is merely following the culture of the political elite. Everything from his background—schooling at the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, a government scholar, a British education, a Malay-Muslim—seems to have prepared him for his position and privileges. And certainly, he is a member of the New Malays, the Melayu Baru, who are direct beneficiaries of the policy designed to uplift the Malays. The New Malays are technocrats, doctors, engineers, university professors, corporate wheelers, and dealers, who alloy their confidence with an unmistakable sense of entitlement. The Melayu Baru are the classic professional middle-class—innovative, rational-minded on one hand, selfserving, ideologically driven on the other. For all their contradictions, they are a part of the political structure that has produced them.

82

S. YAO

Adam is a beneficiary of the culture of corruption, but he is also its victim. Many Malaysians have gone overseas each year to study; he is not the only one who returned a changed person. For most, to keep faith with the new and the old is a balancing act. To his parents, he is a filial son who has kept his Malay identity—the guitar-playing and motorbike-riding just a part of his quirky, boyish charm. And Adam himself believes he has not fundamentally changed, not really. Still, the transition from foreign sojourn to home is never straightforward for anyone. Some of his friends had gone to universities in Egypt and became Islamic fundamentalists; the parents waiting at the airport could not pick out their sons or daughters among the arrivals, draped as they were in grey kurta or in long dark abaya that ensure neck-to-toes modesty. The way to describe the transition is to see the new self as safely nestled in under the busy goings-on of work and family life, but waiting, like a hibernating insect, for the right conditions in order to emerge. When that happens, the sensation is one of both freedom and distress. For the Malay engineer, coming home has made him give up some of the habits and liberal thinking he picked up living in England—save the wine, the occasional pot, and the pork chop and bacon which he turns into a kind of anti-Islamic statement, emblematic of the doubt he feels towards a faith he was brought up with. He wants us to talk about the office practices, leaving Islam aside. I rather believe they are the same issue. But I let him be. He is full of regret about the sorry business he has found himself sliding into. He does not remember when he first became aware of the folly of his actions, but it has been a slip here, a minor realization there. At the City Council and later at the consultancy firm, his dominant feeling was one of pride and embarrassment. Pride because the money was good, the opportunity dazzling. And embarrassment, because of the sense of shame that was slowly eating into him. Some happenings at the consultancy firm hover in his memory. Often when a client came for a meeting, they would be accompanied by the corporate legend, ‘the man with the briefcase.’ After the meeting, the briefcase would be left at the reception and passed on to the deserving. At his office, Adam would open it and reveal its contents: a bundle of cash, a golf-club membership, and business class air tickets for two to Europe or to the United States. There were other gestures of corporate largesse. He got married during his last year at the City Council. At his wedding, among the gifts were a few fat packets of cash, each containing five to

5

APPETITE

83

ten thousand ringgit. There were no business cards in them, but he knew who the donors were; it is easy enough to guess they were the builders whose applications he had been working on. And there is an episode of gift-giving he relishes in telling. He remembers once reading a motorcycle magazine that carried an advertisement of the latest Ducati motorbike. He had been riding a Yamaha, one of the RI series, powerful and built on a light aluminium frame. But a Ducati is something else, a killer bike, made in Italy, the Rolls-Royce of motorbikes, priced at more than 100,000 ringgit when imported. The morning’s meeting was with a company planning to build a twenty-story residence with a shopping mall at the ground level. A big project, and Adam’s firm was the consultant structural engineer. Mr Ong the senior executive and his assistants were waiting when he turned up. They started to chat, and he peeled off the leather gloves and placed the motorbike helmet on the boardroom table. He was all geared up, but everyone was familiar with his way and said nothing. They went through the drawings, ironed out a few details, and adjusted the costs here and there. They took a break, and Adam invited everyone to gather around to admire the latest Ducati featured in the magazine. Mr Ong and his staff played along, admiring the marvel of Italian engineering, dazzled by the cost of it. The meeting resumed, by the end of it, the magazine had gone into the briefcase of one of the visitors. ‘Have I done this before? No. Not something like this. Actually, there were paid holidays in the US, and a farm stay for the family in New Zealand, but this is different. You have been given this and that, then you reached a plateau, and you said to yourself, I am going to ask for something I shouldn’t, something expensive. And you tell yourself there is no return after this. I knew it was uncool. But it’s funny, you know. Inside myself I felt I deserved it; the bike was mine when I first saw it [in the magazine]. I just needed to get someone to pay for it.’ A few weeks later, the agency called: he had to go to their office to sign a few papers. They were going to import the motorbike directly from Bologna. He went and did that and brought a brochure home. It sat on the coffee table, staring at him as he walked by, and Sophia totally ignored it. ‘It’s like a piece of dog shit we couldn’t ignore.’ By the end of the week, the excitement was gone. Sophia said, Make up your mind and ring that guy. But he had already made up his mind. It was a bad decision, he realized. He rang the agent and cancelled the order.

84

S. YAO

To say something about corruption brings to mind an array of factors and situations. In both the government and the private sector, corruption covers graft, bribery, nepotism, kickbacks, clientelism, favouritism, misappropriation and stealing of funds, and gift-giving to ensure a favourable outcome in government dealings. In the literature, political corruption is ‘any illegal, unethical, or unauthorised exploitation of one’s official position for personal or sectional gain or advantage.’2 Africa turns up a lot in this discussion. The political scientist Dhikru A. Yagboyaju of University of Ibadan, Nigeria, begins his examination of the political corruption in his country with a series of questions. ‘What constitutes political corruption? How did it become such a huge problem in Africa, but particularly in Nigeria under military rule?’ he asks. And: ‘Why is it still so endemic in the country despite the reintroduction of civil rule and democratisation that has, so far, since 1999 been ongoing for 17 years?’ Then, ‘What are the probable interconnections between the bold character of political corruption and the gift culture and other similar traditional practices across the country?’ Malaysia is not that different, when you think about it. State corruption is taking state funds by using one’s political position: the case of the ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak. And the law and the courts—both inherited from the British—have evidently failed to rein in the bribes and the corruption. But it is the last question that is the most intriguing, which can be rephrased this way: what is the nature of the local gift culture that aggravates the political grift in a country? Or: Does Malaysia have a gift culture at all? When asked one of these questions, people are likely to respond thus: Everyone is doing it, from the politicians to the garbage collectors. The powerful want money, they say, and garbage collectors expect a few bottles of beer or lucky money during the Thaipusam Festival or the Chinese New Year. That settles it; ‘everyone is doing it’ normalizes the practice. As to whether Malaysia has a gift culture, in response, no one has turned to tradition or religion. People do not bring in Confucianism, or Hinduism, or Islam, or Christianity which actually has a good deal to say about gift-exchange and social cooperation. Instead, unlike the experts, the informants have hedged their answers on what people do, on what they themselves may have committed. They have given a bribe to the traffic police at the road block—politicians are beyond their league— and, during festival time, they have put a few bottles of beer next to the garbage bin as a way of spreading the blessing around. Gift culture

5

APPETITE

85

undoubtedly exists, if these practices are anything to go by. Yet, what drives grift is less gift culture as such but a blend of social custom and practical reason. The operating term is common sense, a common sense that is confirmed by what people witness in the streets and at their workplaces, by what they read in the papers, by the once-a-year graciousness towards the garbage collectors. In the way Gramsci has laid it out, common sense has a powerful sense of givenness, a ‘taken-for-granted’ quality.3 And it operates as a ‘folk philosophy’—the phrase is Gramsci’s—in spite of its contradiction, fragmentation and incoherence.4 With the Malay engineer, to all these features must be added time: corruption’s slow and gradual effects, as it sets him down in the pit of unease and suspicion, before reaching a kind of moral awakening. The anthropologist, almost out of habit, has turned to the State and its practices. These matter, because the State is the powerful backdrop that enables—and legitimizes—the pervasive bribetaking in social life. But common sense takes a shorter view, it has an immediacy, it is a testimony to what is true and carnally felt. In the onrush of narrative, it is easy to make light of Adam’s detours and dilemmas. Things did not happen in a straightforward fashion. He cancelled the Ducati bike order, but the business class air tickets and other gifts continued to come his way. His rejection of corporate gifts comes across as a half-hearted measure. In his mind, perhaps the package tour to Disneyland was less morally harmful—and harder to refuse—than an expensive Italian motorbike or a bundle of cash. The changes in him took place gradually, it is not as if one day he woke up and realized his wrongdoing. In his inner struggle, victories were hard to come by and defeats frequent. If Adam’s story is one about individual ethical choices, it invariably touches on the issue of desire. For a believer, religious faith enters the realm of desire when it is imbedded in their values, their habits and instincts. The issue of consumption and pleasure hovers over our narrative. For no matter how many historical and ideological connections we make around ‘gift culture,’ our curiosities and convictions hold fast. Adam’s moral misdeed may be a reflection of the State practices, it is also a puzzlement as we ponder on its strange origins and effects as they play on their ‘victims.’ The pleasure that a bribe offers, the State politics that enables it, the consuming desire it promises to fulfil call to mind Marx’s dictum: ‘Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking but with

86

S. YAO

all his senses. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.’5 Of course, with matters of human desire, social and historical influences are only partially the determining factors. The problem is how to show up pleasure’s insidious propensity to embody and hide in the senses, yet bring into consideration Marx’s great insight. Pleasure has a private and a public domain, and one writer who sharply underscores this point is Fredric Jameson. For Jameson, the problem can be traced back to Adorno—and the Frankfurt School—with their profound ambivalence towards the ‘culture industry’ in capitalism. With a Marxist, liberatory agenda, Jameson could hardly make himself celebrate the enjoyment of the effusive culture of late capitalism without being reminded of the devastating effects of commodity on human consciousness. While Adorno’s vision is uncompromisingly bleak, Jameson would see capitalism’s pleasure as having a redemptive side as well. In ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue,’ he writes: It is at any rate that the problematic of new revolutionary needs and demands and that of the commodification of desire and pleasure are dialectically at one with each other.... On a more populist view, indeed, the question might be raised as to whether all that mindless consumption of television images, that self-perpetuating ingestion of the advertising ‘images’ of things rather than the things themselves, is really all that pleasurable—whether the consumer’s consciousness is really so false and so little reflexive as it dutifully treads the rotating mills of its civic responsibility to consume.6

When Jameson queries whether the ‘consumer’s consciousness is really so false and so little reflexive,’ he gives the enjoyments of capitalism a degree of saving grace. We need not give in to the orthodoxy of ‘leftist puritanism’ that puts all pleasures of consumption under suspicion. However, Jameson is not willing to go along with celebration of consumption typical of our postmodern age. For Jameson, neither ‘leftist puritanism’ nor postmodernism’s collusion with capitalism will do; and his solution is to turn to the French critic Roland Barthes. For Jameson, Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text offers a powerful lesson. It reminds the reader that ‘literary languages’ are often signs of power, and all literary practices are ‘symbolic endorsement of the class violence of this or that group against others.’7 Barthes’ solution is to advocate

5

APPETITE

87

a kind of ‘white or bleached writing,’ a form of writing free from the utopian fantasy and longing that inspires class violence in the first place. In [the] attempt towards disengaging literary language, here is another solution: to create a colourless writing, free from all bondage to a preordained state of language. … The new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of all those ejaculations and judgments, without becoming involved in any of them; it consists precisely of their absence.8

This ‘new neutral writing’ is free of history yet does not reject literature’s social character. Writing of ‘zero degree,’ as Barthes calls it, cannot be easily harnessed to serve ‘a triumphant ideology’ or revolutionary cause. Yet, it allows the rewriting of history in a text free of the burden of ‘original significance.’ And this is how Jameson sees the ‘political significance’ of the unique pleasure—jouissance—of ‘text of zero degree’: It is now through reception rather than production that History may be suspended, and the social function of that fragmentary, punctual jouissance which can break through any text will be more effectively to achieve that freedom from all ideologies and all engagement (of the Left as much as of the Right), which the zero degree of literary signs had once seemed to promise.9

Jameson ends by showing pleasure’s inevitable link to the dilemma of politics: [E]ven the flight from history and politics is a reaction to those realities and a way of registering their omni-presence, and the immense merit of Barthes’s essay is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, and to make it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma, whatever position one chooses (Puritanism/hedonism) to take about that response itself.10

For Jameson, the textual jouissance free of the nightmare of history has a special power precisely because it is untainted by ideologies of opposing persuasions. Text of zero degree resists becoming another text of conventional political import, and in the process offers a clean slate on which readers can ‘rewrite’ their engagement with the social and political surrounds.

88

S. YAO

Ever since I first read Jameson’s dazzling treatment of the Barthesian jouissance, I have been pondering on the significance of it. In my own understanding, Jameson’s polemics have two strands. Jameson advocates writing and confronting the bleakness of capitalism with unflinching realism. And in doing so, it sustains a degree of utopian hope without giving in to solipsistic despair. Progressive politics has to allow for an imaginary future which provides solace for the oppressive workings of capitalism. In this sense, enjoyment of all sorts—including, I suspect, consumption—acts like a kind of gratification by blunting the gruesomeness of the present. As pleasure incites the subject to ceaselessly return to the site of satisfaction, the present is made more liveable, more congenial, than a more realistic appraisal would allow it. It is a strange yet hopeful dialectic—capitalism has to be resisted and yet the pleasures it offers still have the potency of utopian hope. Adorno’s profound scepticism of popular culture, and Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, are taken a notch down from the heights of the power of mystification. Consumption may not be all mind-numbing, and consumers are not all dupes of the market. Meanwhile, my own reflection on pleasure’s paradox moves to and fro; it is hard to know where it will end. Like a baby with colic, it will not rest. In my mind, Adam is back at my Sydney house, in the garden, eating and talking to excess. Not only our Malay friend, all of us are deep in the double pleasure of the mouth. We eat and give over to the luxuriant ‘talk’ that estranges every subject from its normal meaning. We are caught in the pleasure of food and drinks as much as our own loquacity. As the evening recedes, our visceral experience binds each of us to our senses, yet divides us in our individual discernments. Thinking of our Malay friend, I think I know what is on his mind, yet I have little sense of the actual impact, the utter mystery of his inner struggle. To an unbeliever, his taking to wine and pork is a banal anti-Islamic gesture, almost a cliché. Islam is absent from one’s awareness, yet it is constantly visible and present if only because more than half of the population in Malaysia profess that faith. Islam exacts an exotic hold on one’s imagination; its peculiarity, its difference, and its frustrating taboos fascinate me. I can be glib about Adam’s bribe-taking (‘Everyone is doing it’) and his ostensible rebelliousness; but I am not dumb about Islam’s hold on his life, nor about the way that his nascent agnosticism has made him re-evaluate the pleasures and enjoyments that life richly offers.

5

APPETITE

89

In Malaysia, as in many Muslim countries, Islam is deeply entrenched in the State. And since it is one of the major pillars of Malay identity, Islam is also a matter of lifestyle and private conscience for each Malay person. The political scientist Joseph Chinyong Liow puts it this way: [The fact is] Islam is the religion of the Federation, Malays are constitutionally defined as Muslims, and, notwithstanding the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, no Muslim can opt out of the jurisdiction of shari’a laws, administered by state religious authorities. … Given the historical, cultural, constitutional, and functional factors that codify Malay dominance in Malaysia, it follows that Malay-Muslim identity must determine the shapes, contours, and trajectories of Malaysian politics. Hence the entanglement: Islam is embedded in the Malay identity, it is an exclusively Malay affair, yet as the State religion, Islam invariably affects the lives of non-Malays. The result is that the State and the ‘trajectories of Malaysian politics’ find themselves coming under the sway of Islamic rulings and strictures.11

For the State and the Malay elite, the merging of the State-sponsored Islam and Malay identity is designed to ensure Malay hegemony in a nation made up of a multi-ethnic mix. A Malay is privileged in many aspects. But it is a Faustian deal, actually. For when your religion is also the State religion, when your community is the object of State sponsorship, your social relations and personal life invariably invite official intervention and scrutiny. In this regard, Islam as a way of life became public and predominantly political: Islam is ad-din, a way of life that encompasses din wa dawla, or faith along with polity—religion and state. At the same time, Islam is also tawhid, oneness and unity in the name of Allah. … [T]he hallmark of political Islam is its quintessentially political agenda; it is a political order that is articulated in religious terms, the politicization of Islam through the aligning of structures of governance and society with Islamic strictures.12

Everyone—Malays and non-Malays alike—knows of the dietary taboo, of the strict observation of Ramadan and fasting, of khalwat—‘the law against close proximity’—for unmarried men and women under Shariah law, of the sensitivities about cross-race contact and socializing. For progressive Malays like Adam, the Islamic faith embodies a system of State-enforced prohibitions and restrictions that limit personal freedom

90

S. YAO

of all sorts. They know, too, Islam’s vehement nature has its roots in the power of the State which insists the problem facing Malays has to do with the rapaciousness of non-Malays. To turn to Jameson’s phrasing, the remedial policy is to question—even deny—the enjoyment of the nonMalay Other, while, in a kind of zero-sum game, enhancing the pleasures and privileges that a Malay subject is entitled to. ‘The question: Is Malaysia an Islamic or secular State?’ I ask him. ‘The government certainly want you to think Malaysia is an Islamic State.’ ‘If Malaysia is an Islamic State, then legally and constitutionally the Islamic Shariah law would be applied to all citizens—the Chinese, the Indians, the Malays. This has not happened.’ ‘So what do you see as the main problem [regarding Islam in Malaysia]?’ ‘For me and my family, over the years Islam has become increasingly intrusive. I used to think Islam is a path to virtue and moderation, and finally to the grace of Allah. I still do to a large extent. But Islam has become politicized, and it can intervene in all aspects of life—sex, personal piety, relationships with non-Muslims.’ I have rarely had this kind of conversation with a Malay person, one who talks about religious faith with such doubt, with such mental anguish, almost. At times, I think much of Adam’s breaching of the dietary taboo is just showing off, an expression of the freedom he has granted himself. Yet, the swagger and the bluster are also a game of concealment that hides the more complex aspects of Islam as he experiences them. So I remind him that Islam need not be conservative and traditional. If Islam is easily politicized, I say, then it could also offer itself as a rally cry for social change, for revolution even. In the Middle East, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism has come out of the failure of panArab nationalism to challenge the existing autocratic regimes. This failure was seen as the major cause of the lack of economic growth and social mobility. In Malaysia, fundamentalist Islam has not risen from resistance to the State. Instead, it has been co-opted by the State in the 1980s by deploying its discourses and idioms in order to garner the support of the conservative Malays. Unlike in the Middle East, fundamentalist Islam was not driven by massive poverty and the bankruptcy of modernization and industrialization. And it appears as a significant contradiction: Islamization has ridden to dominance on the back of the State industrialization and development policies, policies which identified Malay-Muslims as the main beneficiaries.

5

APPETITE

91

We talk like this for hours. He wants to explain to me about the New Malays: educated middle-class professionals who support the Islamization of the State. He tries to enlighten me on the history of Islam that led to the Sunni–Shiite divide. Malay are Sunnis, who believe Prophet Muhammad designated Abu Bakr as his successor, the first caliph. Abu Bakr was one of Muhammad’s closest companions, the father of Muhammad’s second wife Fatima. We discuss the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s which was fought over other reasons than the Shiite-Sunni differences. And he talks, in prodigiously personal terms, about how Islam has taken hold of his life and how this is a hold from which he seeks escape. Like most of us, Adam is a complicated person. For him, the trouble with Islam is the manner in which it straddles the spiritual and the political, the worldly and the transcendental. Islam as ad-din, a way of life, is so comprehensive as to put all aspects of human existence under its sway. Islamic orthodoxy demands faith—an all-consuming trust, actually—that protects against self-doubt and deviationist thoughts. It is a dialogue, an exchange, but the speakers are of separate worlds. I would speak in my university language, while Adam would return again and again to his primary enjoyments and their prohibitions. But we are united by our bafflement at the mystery of pleasure, which Jameson has heroically tried to unravel. The culinary pleasures, the religion that firms up the Malay man’s identity and moral values: they cover a wide terrain of yearnings and prohibitions in his life. He has, like the existentialists, called on the bodily experiences to be the arbiter of truth and reason. Though he does not know it, his eating and talking illustrates the philosophic truth that mental processes are not what take place in the skull alone, perception relies on ‘the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities.’13 What does this suggest except the deep immersion in the senses both as carnal experiences and as a source of reflection? I want to root for the corporate turncoat and the Islamic revisionist, and I certainly do not belittle the gravity of his doubts and moral awakening. Actually, besides the existentialist thinkers, there are writers who approach the subject of the senses with equal panache. What unites them is their positive take on carnal sensuality, not their condemnation of it. Take Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical Tropic of Cancer. His womanizing and pornographic meanderings are in-your-face revelations about the joy of living among artists and writers, dreamers and adventurers who gathered in Paris in the 1930s. Most lived on little, going hungry and

92

S. YAO

moving from one seedy hotel to another. Yet, Paris was a stimulating place—to write, to make love and art, or simply to live. Miller writes, ‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.’ And he addresses his lover Tania: It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date. Would you say—my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away. … I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos.14

What Henry Miller says is nothing less than how it feels to be at the sharp end of life. It is a life dark, sensuous, chaotic, a form that neither pleasure nor enjoyment seems to truly capture. Pleasure and enjoyment we can still talk and write about, but to move from Jameson to Miller is to move to a discursive terrain of unreason, of craving undermined by its own futility and the prospect of unfulfillment. Henry Miller’s description of the Parisian life is a brilliant counterpoint to Jameson’s intellectual certitude. The wordy exuberance of Tropic of Cancer makes you rethink: Miller’s depiction is an enactment of appetite—not so much of pleasure or enjoyment—that had been his life in 1930s Paris. And it is a depiction that defies the conventional approach that tends to take appetite as something of history, customs, and the social context. Judith Farquhar, in her book Appetite: Food And Sex in Postsocialist China, begins with the Confucian saying, shi se xing ye, which may be translated, more polemically, as: Food and sex are but instincts (The other meanings of xing in Chinese are habits, impulses, and what we may call the ‘sixth sense’.). She writes, Certainly, appetites are real experiences of actual bodies. But we become aware of desire only as it wraps itself around things (particular foods or bodily activities, objects we wish to hold, remembered or imagined situations); our wants draw specificity from the very conditions we have generated while pursuing, sometimes blindly, diverse goals.15

5

APPETITE

93

Farquhar is almost a fan of Merleau-Ponty. Yet, for her the senses bear no ontological integrity except through their social significance, the ‘things’ we do, and the instinctual bodily appetites always need to be ‘interrogated and challenged’—a position which Sartre, Camus, or Heidegger may find hard to agree with. In the Chinese literature class at the Confucius Middle School in Kuala Lumpur, the expression shi se xing ye never failed to raise a giggle among the pupils. We were fifteen-year-old adolescents; to us, sex being as natural and instinctive as the intake of food poked fun at the prudery of Confucian teaching. If such appetites are ‘natural,’ then coitus too should be enjoyed free of guilt or awkwardness. This is clearly not what Confucius or his pupil-scriber had in mind. What the long-suffering Mr Chang our teacher made clear was the persistence of appetite. And he told us a story. A Confucian scholar is so observant of propriety that he says to his wife each time before they make love, ‘Madam, this unworthy self shall impose himself on you now’ (in Chinese, it is literally, ‘I am going to abandon my manners now’). To which she replies, ‘My Honourable Sir, please yourself.’ Even the ritual of modesty enters the bedchamber. We took the story to mean: social propriety is at its most insidious when it is merged with the senses, and in this union both social ritual and appetite are resilient and undefeatable, as they lurch towards the non-rational. Thinking thus, it is tempting to view Adam as a kind of existentialist hero. For the excesses of his enjoyment have not befogged his thinking and perception, but have made him realize certain truths about himself. And he has done this less with intellectual and moral self-scrutiny than by searching deep within his own experience and doings. I am thinking of the messianic, fetish-worshipping Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an existentialist figure if ever there was one. You need to be knee-deep in the mud of evil in order the gain insight about people’s—including your own—moral frailty and redemption. Toning down the Conradian language, it is safe to say the Malay engineer has plunged into the depths and come up for air. Redemption is not too splendid a word to describe his emergent self-awareness, his feeling of having escaped a way of existence he no longer cares for. Adam’s new business venture is located in a patch of wooded area a couple of miles from the Port Dickson town centre. The Organic Supplies Company sits in a large yard; entering the gate you see the office of tin-roof and wood cladding, the mounds of sand and earth, the smouldering piles of compost, the Indonesian workers pottering about. Adam

94

S. YAO

rushes out from the office to greet me, but spares me the bear hug. Since resigning from the engineering firm, he has been busy and the Organic Supplies Company is the result. He looks cheerful and efficient in his orange high-visibility overall, but it is the same friendly smirk on his face, the same quick leap to laughter. We get into an electric golf cart and drive around and talk. As it turns out, he has not left the corporate world so much as having found a niche in an innovative business. Organic vegetables are all the rage, as fear of chemicals in food has begun to catch on with the city folk. Adam has chosen his target well, his customers are not the organic farms, but the suburban green fingers, a more profitable, more value-added niche of the market. The Organic Supplies Company makes compost on a large scale, bags it, and delivers it to the suburban gardeners. It is a chain operation. The company supplies the Chinese-made, metal growers and the compost that fills them; the exhausted soil will be replenished by the drivers trained in horticultural skills. There is money in compost making, and in servicing the ambitions of the amateur gardeners. At the yard, grass is piling high as each day grass cutters come and dump their cuttings. To each pile is added a layer or two of dried leaves, and workers turn over the heap once in a fortnight—time and patience take care of the rest. ‘It goes through fermentation, it calls for moisture and the right temperature, like wine making.’ In any case, here he is: a former corporate wheeler-and-dealer turned horticulturist, enthusing about composting and aiding the aged hobby farmers in the suburbs. Sophia is in the office; she is the ‘executive secretary’ and Excel guru who organizes delivery, keeps the accounts, and updates the company website. Adam has left us to talk. She comes forward to shake my hand, taking my tea and Dutch biscuits, fussing to find a place for them on her desk. We talk about the children, her new job in an immeasurably more modest business than public relations, her profession since coming back from the UK. I feel the soft brush of her calm repose, free from the fury of her husband’s inner life. I try to skirt around the subject, but then I simply ask, ‘How is Adam doing?’ He is fine, Sophia says. It has been difficult for both of them, changing jobs and taking a new direction in life. The money is short, and work is hard. Sophia has done her best to get her husband to leave the corporate sector. She has helped to build his optimism, while she herself has little of it.

5

APPETITE

95

I ask her if it has really been as much of a struggle for her husband as I have thought. The corporate world is indeed full of bribery and double-dealing, she replies. She knows this from her experience with the PR business. And the strain and worries have borne heavily on her husband and the family. Talking with Sophia, it strikes me that the effects of our experiences, good or bad, are not easily erased from us. They have a way of sneaking up on you and nudging you off your axis when you least expect it. Everything embraces a doubleness: joy and pain, punishment and reward. And speaking of pleasure: it pampers your senses, it delivers an affirmative experience hard to resist; yet it corrupts through the excessiveness in its enjoyment. For the lucky ones, immoral swindling does not leave its mark, and the coping mechanisms, strength and dignity, and daily practicalities help take care of much of the damaging effects. In this regard, doubtless there are many people like Adam. He is of the few who have risen with such pluck to the challenges of our era. In a sense, he is way ahead of the critique of capitalist modernity and the crushing religious orthodoxy. Certainly, he is not entirely free of the seductive pull of consumption and the spiritual solace that Islam offers. But his responses are loud and vehement when expressed through the body, through the struggle with his conscience. And I wonder what troubles him more: the corporate and government corruption, or the oppressiveness of fundamentalist Islam. I cannot help thinking that the great act of the man is his passionate insight that the corruption of the business world, and the corruption of the religion he was brought up with, are alike, and intermingled. I rather believe it is this insight that has helped him with his lifework and guided him in his self-making.

Notes 1. https://www.langkawihorses.com/about-island-horses-langkawi/islandhorses-langkawi-perdana-stables. Accessed 28 January 2022. 2. Dhikru A. Yagboyaju, ‘Religion, Culture and Political Corruption in Nigeria.’ Africa’s Public Service Delivery and Performance Review, 5 (1), 2017, p. 2. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, p. 422.

96

S. YAO

4. Ibid., p. 423. For a vigorous discussion on this point, see Kate Crehan, ‘Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: A Useful Concept for Anthropologists?’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16 (2), 2011, pp. 273–87. 5. K. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, edited by D. J. Struik. New York: International Publishers, 1972, pp. 140–141. 6. F. Jameson, ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue’, in Formations Collective (ed.), Formations of Pleasure, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 3. 7. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968, pp. 76–77. 8. Ibid., 76. 9. Jameson, ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue’, p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 9. 11. Liow, Joseph Chinyong, Piety and Politics. New York: OUP USA, 2009, p. vii. 12. Ibid., p. 5. 13. Francisco J. Varela and Others, The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 173. 14. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961, pp. 86–87. 15. Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 9.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1968. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. Crehan, Kate. 2001. ‘Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: A Useful Concept for Anthropologists?’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16 (2): 273–287. Dhikru A. Yagboyaju, 2017. ‘Religion, Culture and Political Corruption in Nigeria’. Africa’s Public Service Delivery and Performance Review 5 (1): 2 Farquhar, Judith. 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jameson, F. 1983. ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue’, in Formations Collective (ed) Formations of Pleasure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Liow, Joseph Chinyong. 2009. Piety and Politics. New York: OUP. Miller, Henry. 1961. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press. Varela, Francisco J., and Others. 1991. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5

APPETITE

97

Internet Sources https://www.langkawihorses.com/about-island-horses-langkawi/island-horseslangkawi-perdana-stables. Accessed 28 January 2022.

CHAPTER 6

Ethnic Crossover

We are driving to Pengkalan Kempas, a small town by the bank of Sungei Linggi, some twenty miles from Port Dickson. I have been there many times, to talk to the Hakka farmers at the coffee shop, to walk along the waterfront and try to imagine the boats and sampans, manned by hardy Malay and Chinese boatmen, that used to ply along the river. At the centre of town is an old ruin: the tomb of the Muslim theologian Sheikh Ahmad Majnun, believed to have been killed in a battle against Sultan Mansor, Shah of Malacca in 1476. Pengkalan Kempas could have been a place of Conradian grandeur, with its riverine trade and internecine struggle of the Malay states. But it is a forsaken place with a junkyard smell and diminishing population, which neither fantasy nor the Conradian romance could save from oblivion. Still, something of an anthropological curiosity always brings me back. At the far end of town, among a cluster of trees at a low hill, is a shrine, where, on the rows of wooden benches Malay, Chinese, and Indian devotees have installed their favourite deities. The place of worship is housed in an old factory. The rusty roof rattles when the wind picks up, and the holes are as skylights streaming streaks of sunshine to the floor. In a crude attempt at renovation, the sides of the factory have been torn down, leaving the northern wall as the shrine. The site embraces good feng shui, I notice: it looks over a valley, flanked by wooded hills on both

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_6

99

100

S. YAO

sides to channel the flow of qi: a classic position of the tiger’s seat. Stepping up to the factory floor, your vision is led to the Supreme God, and below him a clump of minor gods and deities that are like supplicants beseeching him for his blessing. These minor gods and deities are figured in clay statues, each in the crude likeness of a man, a woman, an animal— the head or top torso of a monkey, an elephant, a tiger, and a lion. Red or green robes drape over them, some tied with silk ribbons, and all topped with a cap of some sort. It is a jumble of shapes and colours, a baroque intermingling of celestial beings without focus. Your vision is dazed until you come to the Supreme God. From his height, he presides over his ‘courtiers’ of deities and heavenly guards. The Supreme God, the Datuk Kung, as the Chinese call him, looks stern and alert; the shrine has been built in his honour, and he is truly multi-cultural—his blessing is sought by Malay, Chinese, and Indian believers alike. It was the farmers at the coffee shop who first told me of Datuk Kung’s Chinese origin. And after that, I duly take notice of the wooden tablet next to him which announces him as Datuk Kung, written in both Chinese and Romanized script. And one can tell His Chinese nature by the red mandarin gown and the magistrate’s cap on his head. Datuk Kung is a local variant of the earth god, Tu-ti Kung, who embodies godly power and secular authority as he rules over our existence. Datuk Kung may indeed be Chinese, but attempts have been made to render him a god for the Malays and Indians, as well. Datuk Kung is a Chinese deity localized and indigenized. And you can tell this by the sleeveless blouse of green silk—green is the holy colour of Islam—draped over his chest, and by having for a chief guard the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. Above all, it is the array of minor gods and deities that are emblematic of the cross-ethnic character of Datuk Kung and the shrine that pays homage to him. Your attention may be slack by now, but your eyes are drawn to the rough-hewn clay figurines—a Guan Ying statue here, a glass frame of Koranic verses there, and still more, the goddess Kali and the monkey god Hanuman. If this is indeed a site of multi-cultural worship, what ‘moods and depositions’—to use a phrase of Clifford Geertz—are created among the believers?1 Living in Malaysia one picks up quickly this tabernacle of the common folk. That we live in a multi-ethnic society does not diminish the fascination. Each time I come here, I sit on the steps before the shrine and try to fathom its mystery, its enchantment. There are the mundane questions: Who were the people who have put it up? How do the different

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

101

worshippers work out the ownership? And what of the bricolage—the artful deployment of diverse spiritual sources and belief systems? It is indeed a thing of wonder, a dark beauty to behold. It reminds me of a more innocent time when cultural and religious crossovers were less contentious than they are now. The elderly people like to tell me: ‘You know, before the May ‘69 riots, we were the Switzerland of Southeast Asia!’ By that they mean the mountainous nation’s ethnic harmony, not its watchmaking or the banks. In people’s minds, the May 1969 race riots signalled the fall of the ideal of multi-racial co-existence. After that, among other things, the race-based policies were hardened, and the State turned hegemonic and tightened its control of many aspects of social life. And like a traumatized subject, Malaysians are given to embellish the heat of the May ‘69 riots, while at the same time eulogizing the real or imagined fact of racial harmony. Then there is this marvel: the shrine appears to assure that the past of racial peace is still here—if you know where to look. Who says nostalgia is pure indulgence? For there is a great deal to prove for the people of Pengkalan Kempas. They need to believe ethnic cooperation is still possible, and set out to show this to themselves. The anthropologist, on the other hand, has his professional axes to grind. He is keen to demonstrate the State interference, the divisive religious passions, and the fraught personal freedom and identity that pervade our nation; so the cross-ethnic traffic at the shrine is a fluke, an exception to the norm. But I confess the place has evoked in me an excitement, an enthusiasm I rarely feel with religious worship except as pertains to philosophy. Now as I confront the rickety site of veneration, the idea comes to me that perhaps it is this excitement, this enthusiasm that I have to reckon with, less the abstract theological reasonings. At the Eternal Spring coffee shop, my driver Ali and I have listened to the owner Mr Fook as he talked about the shrine’s origin. It has not been easy to get Mr Fook to agree to meet, let alone to talk and make introductions. His muffled voice on the phone was not welcoming, but I somehow managed to turn him around. I have patched together his remarks from my Sony digital recorder: It used to be a warehouse, it was built to store rubber sheets and machinery. But the rubber plantation had gone, and for many years [the warehouse] was abandoned. Then one day people noticed the place was cleared, and a few statues of Datuk Kung were placed there. No one knew

102

S. YAO

who did this. People said it’s good feng shui, it sits on a hill and overlooks at a valley [actually the dip of the road to Malacca]. The Chinese came first, then Indian people brought their gods and figures, and Islamic writing in glass frames appeared. People said the shrine would protect us, and we should look after it. People got together—Chinese, Indians and Inche Ismail who lives down the valley. We cleaned up the place, we built wooden shelving and turned them into an altar. And everyone put their statues on the altars. I and a few people collected money and installed the Grand Datuk Kung that you saw, He oversees the shrine and brings blessing to everyone.

It is pretty informative, but bloodless and lacking the drama and conflict we expect from such an undertaking. Where is the argument about which god or deity should be at the centre of the shrine? Where is the protest about the food and alcohol being placed before the altar? Why has everyone so readily given in to the evidently Chinese Datuk Kung as the Supreme God of the place? However, at one point he did say, when I asked him about the management of the place, ‘No, we didn’t form a committee or something. We didn’t want to attract the government’s attention.’ In truth, he has wanted to keep the shrine a secret, known only to the township folk. ‘What would happen if people, you know, those journalists who say bad things about the government, come and poke around?’

I was partly thinking of myself when I replied, ‘Maybe you are right, but I don’t think too many people would be interested.’ ‘But you never know, the government, the police, the Islamic people—they would be interested.’

Back at my house, my mind is unsettled. I want to hold on to my curiosities and convictions, despite Mr Fook’s quick dismissal of my interest. There is indeed a lot in the shrine that is puzzling and spellbinding for anyone. There is, before anything else, the creative intermingling of materials and ideas in the making of the shrine, a process that Lévi-Strauss calls bricolage. The concept appears in his work The Savage Mind in which he lays out the tribal, the ‘wild’ way of thinking. In his argument, the French anthropologist refers to the use by the Siberian people of the woodpecker’s beak,

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

103

or blood, or its mummified body, as a cure for toothache. The healing is the purpose, but it is more than that. The ‘real question,’ Levi-Strauss writes, ‘is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as “going together”.’2 ‘Going together’ is a means of classification, putting elements into groupings to create a conceptual order. By putting a bird peak and a person’s tooth next to each other, it creates a grouping by the things’ likeness. In this classification, ‘therapeutic purposes’ are ‘only one of its possible uses;’ the ‘going together … has a value of its own.’3 Thus, it makes sense for the Siberians to put a bird’s beak and tooth in a single group, and the common quality as things ‘of the mouth’ enables the classification, just as it defines the healing principle for toothache. The cultural logic of ‘going together,’ however, does not mean there are predetermined ways of grouping things. The beak-and-tooth pairing is based on the similitude of physiology. But similitude is just one principle, in fact classification by the tribal people is often done in a free and innovative way in the creating of a conceptual order. This is especially evident in the language of myth. ‘The characteristic feature of mythical thought,’ Levi-Strauss writes, is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’.4

The narrator of myth is as a craftsman, the diversity of ideas in the myth of one mirrors the diversity of materials of the craftsmen, the bricoleurs; both innovative and ingenuous in their undertaking. There is a feeling of surprise, of thrilling sensation, in Levi-Strauss’s treatment of bricolage.5 For me, anyhow, the shrine’s aesthetic charm lies not in the unity—for there is not much of it—of the deities, but in the boldness of vision, in the baroque mingling of spiritual beings and their allied belief systems. And out of the disarray, a conceptual order emerges that is both conspicuous and hidden. And this obscurantism is but the bricoleur-adventurer’s bold design that lends mystery and secrecy to the worshippers. We have been there all day, by five in afternoon the heat has softened. We say goodbye to Mr Fook and his friends and begin to make

104

S. YAO

our journey home. In the car, Ali is unusually quiet; his morning chattiness gone. It has been our lengthiest visit so far; I went to the shrine and counted the latest additions, while Ali took the pictures. At the shop we had met Inche Ismail, one of the shrine’s founders, and we asked him about his interest in such an apparently un-Islamic undertaking. In all this, Ali has been a companion and assistant. Now, as he grips on the steering wheel, he is stoic and wordless like one of the Buddha statues at the shrine. The string of worry beads tied to the rear-view mirror sways listlessly. Tired, I am also dogged by a self-consciousness for setting him up, making him visit the site when his background is as varied as the deities that have been installed there. In a sense, the place is his discovery too. However, when he starts to talk, it is to put the place down. I don’t see the point of it, all these cheap clay statues, the place is not a proper temple. People do this all the time. You city people see the temples, the mosques. But in the countryside, people see an anthill mound and believe Datuk Kung or Kali has taken up residence there. So they put offerings: the Chinese give incense, the Indians bring milk and sandalwood. Some Malays come at night and leave bananas or a pineapple. I have done this myself.

He sucks on his cigarette and continues, Muslims are not allowed to do that, they can only worship in a mosque. Screw the government, I say. You think Allah is so stupid he would only hear you if you pray in a mosque of golden dome? No. God can hear you anywhere if you are pious. You can pray in a hut, in a house with leaking roof and Allah will hear you. And what’s wrong with all the people coming together and worshipping their Gods (in the same place)?’

It was half ranting, half explanation. A Muslim himself, yet he is against the grand mosques the State has built, like the Blue Mosque in Shah Alam, Selangor, with the tallest minarets and largest dome in the world, and a capacity for 24,000 worshippers. He is giving the view of one who positions themselves outside the official Islam, who believes in blending Islamic teachings with the wisdom of the street. ‘God can hear you anywhere if you are pious’ is Ali’s voice of doubt and protest of Statesponsored Islam. Like Mr Fook, Ali too needs to belittle what he finds at the shrine, though I believe he is as moved by it as I have been, albeit in

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

105

a different fashion. For the shrine marks a space outside the purview of the State; and here there is no attempt to foster its power and shackle the private conscience of the Malay subjects. But then, Ali is a special Malay, an Indian-Chinese person who has taken the formal steps of ‘becoming Malay.’ Like Susi, my housecleaner, whose story appears in other pages of the book, Ali was born to Tamil parents in a rubber plantation in Seremban. His too is a background of the serial disadvantages of the sociological textbook: the pitfalls of race and class, the multiple deprivations, the grinding poverty. It echoes what I have heard from other Tamil people: the dismal wages and working conditions at the plantation, the indebtedness to the Chinese-run company store, and a pervasive culture of poverty. Malaysia is a modern industrialized state, where agriculture is agri-business, growing palm oil and other produce using modern management and technology. The plantations of old were devoted to rubber, the largest US dollar earners for post-war Britain, over which it fought a costly counterinsurgency to protect its holdings. The rubber estates are mostly gone, but the descendants of the estate workers still live there. On the road between Port Dickson and Lukut, you can get off the bus and follow the school children and come upon a world out of place, out of time. You set your feet on the edge of the old plantation: the planting and tapping has long ceased, being near a town, the land is now more valuable for building shops and houses. Everything looks shoddy and at its last breath, waiting for the greed of developers. It is hard to believe the zinc-roofed huts are still there, where people live and bring up their children. Ali and his family no longer live in an old rubber estate, for they have escaped and made a life for themselves elsewhere. Of himself, Ali says: After my father died I left and found a job in a machine shop in Lukut. How did he die? He drank himself to death, what else? I grew up hating everything: the plantation, the miserable hut, water seeping in during the rain. We had no money, my brothers and I wore shoes to school until they were broken and with holes [in them]. And I blamed everyone—my father, my mother who prayed and believed Gods would help us. We were poor, and poverty was like a bad smell; it glued to your clothes, it stuck to you wherever you go. Like a friend you don’t need.

We are speaking in a blend of Cantonese, English, and Malay, a kind of Malaysian creole. The ‘smell of poverty’ is Ali at his most poetic. When

106

S. YAO

penury sticks to your clothes—when it is like an unwanted friend—the term captures the pervasiveness and the lasting quality of it. As with other Tamil people I know, he fears the poverty that may be inflicted on his children. The terror of poverty is the terror of an awful legacy, a legacy that, in his imagination, would never leave him and his descendants. For Ali, this terror would take the form of his IC: the accursed identity card that rules the life of every Malaysian, a card without which one does not legally exist. When Ali talks about the estate existence, he never leaves out his bungling father. Perhaps it was an instance of the Oedipal struggle. But the son’s resentment is real: the father drank and neglected the family; he was often late for work, sometimes not turning up; he was given to brooding and self-pity; he forgot to pay the rent and settle the debts with the company store. Ali was born a year after the independence that took place in 1957. In preparation for nationhood, the British had set up a committee to iron out a constitution, one of its major recommendations was regarding the granting of citizenship. Local-born Malayans and their children would be qualified, and people would need to register with the government. Everyone knew what was at stake: citizenship was crucial for gaining security in a country that had regarded immigrants as aliens and outsiders. The granting of citizenship was a major concession from the Malay party UMNO, in return for its leadership in the multi-racial coalition that eventually inherited power from the British. All over the peninsula, there was a scramble to sort out papers and birth certificates in order to apply for citizenship. Urban people registered in droves; and the MCA, the Malayan Chinese Association, and the MIC, the Malayan Indian Congress, both coalition partners, set up centres to help and encourage those qualified. At the plantations and villages, some lingered: there was always China or India to go back to if things didn’t work out in Malaya; while some were simply negligent—like Ali’s father. He didn’t register himself and his wife, or their three children. The man was too busy, he forgot, he was drinking too much, so Ali explains. Failing to register, the family were not made citizens, they became aliens in their own country. And without citizenship, the family could not obtain their identity cards. The IC, first issued in 1949 by the colonial government, carried one’s personal details—full name, date of birth, place of birth, including a photo and a fingerprint. Originally used to combat the communist insurgency, it has now morphed into an all-purpose card. The current MyKad has a

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

107

smart chip and biometric technology to store personal data and to aid identification. The purposes have expanded. You need an IC to buy a sim card for your new phone, to identify yourself at a government office, to open a bank account and to buy shares, to register your child for school. Citizens are given a blue IC, and permanent residents without citizenship get a red IC, which is what Ali held for many years. A red IC puts you in a state of limbo: you reside in your country, but you are denied the privileges and protections a citizen enjoys. You are considered an alien, but you have no other homeland but Malaysia. To get himself out of the bind, Ali took the extraordinary step of giving up his Indian ethnicity and became a Muslim-Malay as officially prescribed. This, in any case, has been the context of Ali’s ethnic crossover. Over the years, cultural and literary theory has tended to react against the ‘iron cage’ notion of ethnic identification. There are, of course, problems in seeing ethnicity as fixed, as something you are born with. Certainly in Malaysia, one ethnicity is formalized by the IC. Your personal origins are carried over from the birth registry, though race has given place to ethnicity through its efficient indicators, religion and one’s name at birth. Like race, religion and the name imply no flexibility. Race or ethnicity, it embodies a complex system of division and partisanship. Among other things, this division and partisanship are aimed at realizing the policy of protecting the Malays vis-à-vis the non-Malays. One’s ethnicity as officially designated is recorded in all government documents and registrations. In this manner, access to a whole series of entitlements—concessions on housing loan interest rates, special allotments of IPO shares, university placements, business assistance grants, ‘race quotas’ in corporate employment—are patrolled and managed. Viewing it this way, an official instrument like the IC looks remarkably as though it is creating an iron-cage ethnic identification. The State strictures cast a pall on many things. For someone like Ali, it is hard to find much relevance in the idea of hybridity or identity performance that grants unfettered freedom in self-fashioning. In Malaysia, there are radical social and political implications in such mobility and freedom. The fluidity of self-making turns out to be an exaggeration, a fantasy. And here it is enough to quote Talal who writes, ‘Neither the invention of an expressive youth culture (music, dance, street fashions, etc.), as Gilroy seems to think, nor the making of hybrid cultural forms, as Bhabha supposes, holds any anxieties

108

S. YAO

for defenders of the status quo.’6 Thinking of the situation in Malaysia, one tends to agree. Still, for all that, masuk Melayu, ‘becoming Malay,’ seems to belie the woeful strictures on ethnic interaction. So it does. However, masuk Melayu is a State policy, one invested with a political and ideological intent—not a licence for cross-ethnic intercourse. In legal terms, masuk Melayu involves a fairly straightforward set of obligations: the conversion to Islam, the professing of a Malay-Islamic way of life, the allegiance to the pillars of Malay identity. Masuk Melayu has, in a single stroke, allowed Ali to rid himself of the problem inherited from his father; with the State’s blessing, he has gained citizenship for himself and his family, the additional prize the much-treasured blue identity card. However, what he has gained makes for a Faustian bargain. The benefits are not free; they carry significant personal and social costs. When becoming Malay means also becoming Muslim, masuk Melayu becomes a clear expression of State hegemony. It is a less innocent State measure when we remember that Malayization of national culture has been going on since independence.7 The 1971 National Culture Policy declared the national culture as based on Malay culture and Islam; the national culture is synonymous with Malay culture. Leaving out the subtleties and qualifications, masuk Melayu is invested with significant doubleness: becoming Malay places you in the majority allied with the State, but acquiring a Malay-Islamic identity carries its own constraints and obligations. It is easy to see what is at stake for someone like Ali. Taking the move to a new identity involves no postmodern lyricism. Article 160 of the Constitution defines a Malay as a person who follows the religion of Islam, who habitually speaks the Malay language and conforms to Malay custom. He and his family speak Malay, the national language, as most Malaysians do who also recognize Malay customs so as not to give offence; it is taking up the Islamic religion that he finds most daunting. Speaking Malay and respecting the Malay customs requires no government sanction, but Islamic conversion calls for the approval of the State and the Islamic authorities and changes one’s life irreversibly. If Ali had been an economist rationalist, he would have had much to celebrate. Officially a Malay, he is legally entitled to various forms of assistance under the pro-Malay Bumiputera policy. Some of these are useful, like subsidies for school fees for their children, others are beyond his reach, like the discounted allotment of new IPOs and concession prices

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

109

for purchasing shares. At the taxi stand, his fellow drivers would jest, ‘Well, now your children are guaranteed jobs in the government, you lucky man!’ Ali wants to carry on as before, but the teasing jokes and the new rules of behaviour put a dent on his daily existence. After work at the coffee shop, he sips a pack of soya milk, while his colleagues celebrate the tropical end-of-day with bottles of Tiger beer. When driving, he feels self-conscious with a Malay passenger in the backseat: Can I still play a Michael Jackson CD (‘Beat it! Beat it!’)? Should I turn to the Koran recital on a government radio station? And then there are the dietary taboos and fasting during Ramadan. Masuk Melayu has been for him a practical move, but nothing seemed straightforward. He only wanted himself and his family to have blue identity cards, but things have gone far beyond this. If the Islamic conversion has altered his daily life, it has also made him revalue his needs and desires and his past begins to take on a new meaning and relevance. I remember once when he was taking me to Kuala Lumpur to spend Chinese New Year with my family. I settled in the backseat and looked forward to the journey. Ali turned on the engine, and as he was about to drive off, he turned his head and gave me a deflating look, ‘It is Chinese New Year, and look at yourself. You should have a haircut and put on some new clothes. How long since you have seen your mother?’ He was like a servant who dares to reprimand their master, and I was taken back by the forwardness. A Tamil-Malay, he was teaching me about Chinese manners. Where did the confidence come from? He saw me entering his taxi empty-handed: Where were the presents and the flowers? I told him I would go to the supermarket to pick up something. Instead he took me to Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown and made me purchase half a dozen pomelos, a basket of mandarins, a couple of roast ducks, a set of candles and joss sticks, and got me to change some fresh currency notes for the hung bao ‘lucky money’ to give to children—while he waited in his car as if to make sure I executed the mission. We packed the purchases in the backseat, and in the city’s crawling afternoon traffic he began to tell me about his ‘adoption’ by a Chinese family in Seremban. During the last of his primary school days, it was his habit after school to hang around the shops to delay going home. For a 10-year-old child, everything at the shops was fascinating—the toys and trinkets at the provision stores, the comics at the stationers, the sweets and chewing gums at the mini-marts; his meandering eventually took him to Mr Tong’s china shop. It is not as if the Tamil boy had a special interest in rice

110

S. YAO

bowls and bamboo chopsticks and aluminium kettles, it is just that the elderly Chinese shopkeeper had one day got him to come in and asked about where he came from. Contact was made: his boyish charm, Tong’s welcome, and the strange chemistry between the old man and his young Tamil friend completed the circuit of the friendship. After that, Ali would often linger at the china shop, accepting the offered meals, helping to bring down an article from the shelf, and sweeping the floor before the shop closed. His parents didn’t seem to mind and barely noticed his absence after school, so Ali believes. When he finished primary school, it was logical that he should move in with the Tongs—a helper in a busy shop, a black-faced mascot to the customers. He was never adopted as such, but he boarded with the family, learned to speak their dialect Cantonese, and at night slept on a camper bed laid out on the shop floor. It was, you might say, an amenable form of ethnic crossover. He had wanted to leave his parents and the estate existence, and the Tongs had made it possible. And no demands were made on him to follow the Chinese cultural ways, and he occasionally went to Hindu temple to meet up with his family. Nonetheless, he had, in his own reckoning, been transformed and had come to identify himself as Chinese. So assured he was of his Chineseness that when he got married he had chosen a Cantonese woman for a bride. I know he and his wife keep a Chinese kitchen from which pork dishes and rib stews are prepared for the family of two adults and three children. They go to the Friday prayer at the local mosque, but more often than not they miss it. And the whole family take to the Chinese New Year with a vengeance: scrubbing and cleaning in preparation, shopping ahead before the big rush, anointing the kitchen god with a fresh set of candles and incense sticks. Ali and his family are acting out their Chinese identity; they do it without the neighbours knowing. And if they are skilfully mobile, moving freely between their multiple ethnic attachments, it is truer to say they are leading a kind of double life. In public—and at the mosque—they are a family of MalayMuslims, observing the appropriate behaviour as law requires. While at home, in private, they regard themselves as Chinese and conduct themselves accordingly. This mode of living allows for a degree of choice and freedom, but only because the family has escaped the purview of the State and the neighbourly surveillance. The dilemma of Ali and his family put me in mind of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘the ethics of authenticity’ in a book so entitled. The book is meditative and rhetorical in tone, warning against modern

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

111

society’s drift towards extreme individualism. By ‘the ethics of authenticity,’ he means the general principle of moral excellence that is at once individual and attached to some community standards. The double obligation is at the root of Taylor’s ethical ideal. For you cannot be true to yourself if you are not also a member of a community, just as a community of good has to enhance an individual’s spiritual freedom and fulfilment. The enemy of this self-community dialogue is extreme individualism or narcissism. ‘At a broader social level, [extreme individualism] is antithetical to any strong commitment to a community,’ Taylor puts it.8 In contrast, ‘the ethics of authenticity’ is aligned with certain ideals of oneself—truth, sincerity, genuineness, acts of good faith. However, these can turn obsessive, elevating a person to the giddy height of selfgratification and entrench anthropocentrism.9 The identity so formed has done away with the external reference, contexts, and origin, as the self is busily ‘shutting out … the greater issues or concerns that transcend the self, be they religious, political, historical.’10 This is a form of folly, Taylor makes clear; self-fashioning cannot be achieved by adhering to our private desires and aspirations. Hence Taylor’s reasoning: Our existence is as much a dialogue with ourselves as it is with others. Dialogue with ourselves clarifies our inner needs in coming to terms with what is truly our own, our good faith. But this is also to recognize that our identity is nothing without the transactions we have with others. In this sense, the ethics of authenticity is that powerful means of intervention that immunizes one from self-obsession while giving over to the larger communal judgments. There is a lot more in The Ethics of Authenticity. Besides the problems of self- referentiality and the duplicity of social relationships, the book is at pains to give vent to the tension between authenticity and social responsibilities, between personal freedom and one’s communal obligations. In arts and literature, Taylor suggests, the social is often coupled with personal visions and expressions. And you can come to terms with the social by being yourself in your own space. Just as authenticity can be morphed into extreme individualism, community judgement, too, can go rogue and become oppressive. If the self, half-formed and vulnerable, is dependent on others, then we are putting ourselves at their mercy; as their values intrude upon us and become ours. But this sacrifice to communal demands risks the tyranny of others, or as Taylor puts it: At the ‘intimate level,’ ‘we can see how much an original identity needs, and is vulnerable to, the recognition given or withheld by significant others.’11

112

S. YAO

From the Taylorian perspective, and speaking of Ali and his family, masuk Melayu imposes harsh demands and obligations they have not bargained for. You can say the bad faith—the lack of authenticity—is evident in the practicality with which he has approached his ethnic conversion. But this practicality also has its root in the systematic agendas of the State. The neglect of a marginal community, the aim of bringing non-Malays into the Islamic fold, the consolidation of the power and demographics of the Malay majority—they had all impelled Ali towards his unhappy choice of action. Whatever the benefits of his new identity, he is unable to regard his new self with languid objectivity. Knowing his despair, it is not too much to suggest that he doesn’t find much of a spiritual uplift in his Malay-Muslim identity. At the end of our conversation, he could not help look back with nostalgia on the family that had taken him in at a time when he was a footloose teenager, uncertain of his future. And I rather think that his uneasiness with my poor Chinese New Year observance had been a memorial to his former self, a self at risk of being annulled by his current identities brimful of State intentions and designs. In spite of my abiding interest, I have tried to keep the Pengkalan Kempas shrine to myself. Like the town folks, I do not want a lot of people to know about it; I want to keep it out of the gaze of intruders. And like Mr Fook, I believe the secrecy is the site’s charm, its source of mystery and power. Nevertheless, I am proud of my discovery, and I would bring my colleagues to see it when they came to visit. And there is no question of including Ali on such a journey. The visitors already know the story of the shrine through my emails, and they instantly recognize the man with muddled ethnic backgrounds, one cut from the same cloth as the shrine. Upon arriving at the shrine, they tend to get a bit rhapsodical, too zealous about what we are witnessing, and Ali would play along. It is easy for them to see the shrine as a sign of subaltern resistance, of calling the State’s bluff. My friends and I have read our Taylor—and Nietzsche and Homi Bhabha, and it is easy for us to make much of the boundary busting and hybridized cross-ethnic identity in Ali’s undertaking. Yet, for me anyhow, I need to hold back my freewheeling theorizing. Is the shrine really a site of cultural invention? Is Ali a person of double or triple ethnic identities in the Homi Bhabha mode? The problem, I feel, is about viewing a phenomenon with the universalizing eye of Western philosophy. To reconfigure Ali and his bewildering cultural attachments into one of postmodern mobility is to add to the

6

ETHNIC CROSSOVER

113

confusion. At worst, this is not quite Ali’s own experience of ‘becoming Malay,’ as he tries to carve out a new life from the State obstructionism. My last visitors were the Fosters, husband and wife, and both anthropologists from New York. As they prepared to leave, they told me they had a good time and were impressed with our discovery. ‘There is a book there for you!,’ they said as they vanished into the belly of the airport passengers’ area. It had been a hectic day—Steve Foster, a fast talker, had kept us on our toes with his quick commentary and incisive exegesis. The shrine is rich in suggestion, and the little town is a great place for fieldwork, he had enthused. And the Fosters were impressed with Ali—a great informant, a figure of anthropological peculiarity, which made the Tamil man self-conscious. Listening to him relate his story to a new audience, I was moved by the clarity, the sense of emotional fair-mindedness in his telling. He has lost the need to blame others—his parents particularly—for his troubled life. On his stay in the Tong family shop, he adds a conciliatory note, ‘There are kind Malays and Indians too, but I was not lucky enough to have met them.’ And in all this, he has not forgotten to mention the good luck, the serendipity that has also helped to shape his destiny. As with most people, the vicissitudes of Ali’s life do not stand much looking into. As we get to know each other better, I begin to confide in him my paltry academic career, while he, once in a while, erupts into rage on the circumstances of his life. It is hard to watch as he rants about the estate existence and his father’s drinking and moral lassitude. When that happens, I fear he would, in failing to put a lid on his anger, be distraught and overwhelmed. But at the same time, I also come to recognize an important fact: His fury has been a positive force that gives him a resilience, and a sense of moral clarity about what ‘becoming Malay’ has meant to him and his family. The blather at the taxi stand is about what he can get for free now that he is a Malay-Muslim. Nonetheless, he is not blind to the compromises he has had to make for such a gain. In spite of his multiple ethnicities, he treasures the old ways and the former loyalties into which he had been inducted. At the end, I wonder: Memories, regrets, and past sufferings—what do they amount to for him? And regarding the shrine in Pengkalan Kempas: the incongruity of it, he surely must realize, clearly mirrors the swerving uncertainty in his own mind. In the ethnic crossover, the State has imposed its virulent logic, yet for his fury and sense of injustice, he has remained true to himself.

114

S. YAO

Notes 1. Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The interpretation of cultures, Fontana Press, 1993, p. 90. 2. Claude Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966, p. 9. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 17. 5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari see bricolage as a feature of schizophrenic behaviour. See their Anti-Oedipus. London: A&C Black, 2004, p. 18. 6. Talal Asad. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University, 1993, p. 265. 7. Masuk Melayu can be regarded as a part of the process of building Malay-Islamic hegemony, by increasing the numbers of Malay-Muslims in a country where they dominate. See Asiyah Az-Zahra Ahmad Kumpoh. ‘“Masuk Melayu” in The Context of Conversion to Islam’. BITARA International Journal of Civilizational Studies and Human Sciences 3 (3), 2020, pp. 83–94. 8. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 64. 9. Ibid., p. 70. 10. Ibid., p. 25. 11. Ibid., p. 49.

Bibliography Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Anti-Oedipus. London: A&C Black. Geertz, Clifford. 1993. ‘Religion as a cultural system’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Kumpoh, Asiyah Az-Zahra Ahmad. 2020. “‘Masuk Melayu’ in The Context of Conversion to Islam’. BITARA International Journal of Civilizational Studies and Human Sciences 3 (3): 83–94. Taylor, Charles. 2018. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PART II

Under the Sign of China

CHAPTER 7

Hotel Belaga

In Kuching, Sarawak, making my way to Belaga, I witnessed a theft taking place before my eyes. On the bus, the midday crowd hovered over me at my seat. From where I was, the standing passengers were like old fencing that opened from time to time to admit my vision. The bus was a host of motion, swaying and quivering, the passengers pressed bodyto-body, and my eyes were alerted to a man standing before me. He was a bulky middle-age Chinese, his left hand held on to the handrail, his right hand clutched a thick file holder with the label: Wing On Life Insurance. Once in a while, to ease the discomfort, he would shift his body to reveal his back trousers-pocket. A tan leather wallet sat snuggly in it, but each rocking motion seemed to ease it out, bit by bit. Such carelessness in a crowded bus; but things happened too rapidly for me to register my thoughts. Before me it was like a mise-en-scène from a film. A young man, tough and unwashed-looking, was edging his way towards his victim. He leaned closer; his body shielded his act. The bus’s motion made it a struggle, he could not concentrate on his art. He tried again his stealth advance, in a poor synchrony of forward moves and retreats. I watched with intense fascination. The pickpocket had detected a witness. A signal was sent to his accomplice; a man began to move towards us and stood strategically before me. My vision was blocked. The bus stopped, the pickpockets got out with other passengers. The insurance man had not moved, but his back pocket was free of his wallet. By © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_7

117

118

S. YAO

not intervening, I suddenly felt, I had made myself the third member of the thieving gang. But I felt perversely proud, almost philosophic. Like the character in the French director Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, I had been confronted with an existential situation and made my resolve. I had admitted myself to the Dostoevskian world of passionate criminality. What audacity, what a performance of the ancient art. Leaving aside the question of ethics, I cheered for them and for their success. Who wouldn’t bet on a couple of street-wise smooth operators, who had picked for their victim a greasy salesman type. The bus reached the stop at the jetty. I got out and boarded the Kuching-Sibu ferry for the first stretch of the journey to Belaga. Sarawak, rich in natural resources, is a place of carpetbagger greed, and there would be plenty of that where I was heading. Travelling from Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, to Belaga is a two-day journey by boat. At the Kuching ferry terminal, you catch the hydrofoil to Sibu, a six-hour trip. Sibu is a town of some 160,000 people, mostly descendants of the Foo Chow people who migrated to Sarawak from southern China in the early 1900s during the Brooke regime. After spending a night in Sibu, you board the early morning ferry to Kapit where a connecting launch—a Chinese longboat—awaits to take you to Belaga. The towns—Sibu, Kapit, Belaga—take you ever deeper into the interior, where Belaga is the last outpost town of the Rajang River. The Kuching-Sibu ferry ride is an impression of speed, boiling surf and earsplitting engine noise. The Sibu-Kapit run, made on a slower boat, is in contrast a tranquil affair. You are travelling upriver against the current, but the river is wide and deep on which the boat manoeuvres with ease. You arrive at Kapit at ten in the morning; it is still early, but you do not meander, you are anxious to reach the mythical town further on. You step on another longboat. Leaving Kapit, breakfastless and groggy, you are not prepared for the change of scene. Half an hour after Kapit, the river narrows; the boat is moving along thick mangroves, with aerial roots twisting and curling on the shallow muddy banks. The captain guns the engine. Gliding away from the sandbar, the boat struggles to stay on the river. It is around noon; we are still four hours from Belaga. The waterway has changed; the river is now clearer but faster, as the mangroves along the banks give way to a forest of sky-reaching trees. All around is sheer beauty, and a sense of mystery the massive jungle growth evokes. The spectacle never fails to make this my favourite part of the river journey.

7

HOTEL BELAGA

119

Fast-flowing eddies make you sit on the edge of your seat and watch the turbulent white surf. It has been a busy morning, you got up early, you are tired, and your mood changes. … You retrieve your notebook from your backpack and read. The 350-mile-long Rajang River is the longest river system in Malaysia. Its headwaters are located in the Nieuwenhuis mountains at the border between East Malaysia and Indonesian Kalimantan. It flows through the length of Sarawak to reach the estuary at Kuching, then empties itself into the South China Sea. To the south, two major tributaries—the Balui and Balleh Rivers—take the water to Kalimantan. ‘The main structure of the Sarawak cannot be appreciated from the existing maps,’ the anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote. ‘The interior frontier of Sarawak is everywhere the central Borneo watershed … Most of these Sarawak rivers are navigable and provide the principle means of communication throughout the country.’1 The Rajang is that, and also the dramatic geography. An hour or so after Kapit, as the launch finds itself moving through the rapids— the Pelagus, the Bikiei, the Bungun—and through huge boulders, some are submerged. Larger boats are useless at this part of the river: the boulders chop up the flow and divide the river, forming whirlpools of raging current. In the past, during the Brooke regime, the rapids had been a barrier against incursion by all manner of people. Now, Chinese tongkang boats, agile and motorized, take goods and passengers upriver, and contribute to the opening of the interior. The captain is keeping a keen eye on the waterway. The boat tosses and plunges as he expertly guides it across the boulders. The forward part of the boat is covered for the comfort of passengers, and I stay on after reading my notes. Across my seat a Chinese man is holding on to his sewing machine, securing it to his lap like a prized gift. A Kayan mother is feeding her young child with sweet corn and candies. Some kids, cheeryfaced and with glistening olive-colour skin, sit on the floor and munch on potato chips. The television on a high shelf has just been switched on. Everyone turns their eyes to watch. On offer is Japanese women’s mud wrestling, the Cute Girl Championship. Even in Japanese, it is easy to catch the drama and be carried way with the theatrics. The slippery arm holds and the thump, thump of doughy landing makes avid watching for the children, while the adults look at the screen with dumb passivity. The boat reaches Belaga around three in the afternoon, six hours after leaving Kapit. From the jetty, the township is a short walk over wooden

120

S. YAO

planks laid over a stretch of mud. You reach the landing, and on the high ground stands a row of shops and ramshackle huts, and in the middle a bleak wooden building—the Hotel Belaga. Facing the wide brown water below, the Chinese shops are the social and economic centre of the township. The shops are stocked with clothing, plastic wares, stationery, canned foods, beer and soft drinks, farming tools, fertilizer. Each is a place of busy striving, with its owner and his family living at the back. In the far distance, other dramas and social dealings take place at the longhouses along the riverbanks. Tribal communities—the Keyahs, the Kayans—are settled here. Belaga is actually two stories in one; two pieces of a single ethnographic encounter. The shops, the hotel, the Chinese traders, the few government offices: they define Belaga and its economic functions. Its sense of place is the great river, the jungle, and the longhouse communities. It is a complex world that I have found myself in. Standing at the hotel balcony, looking at the immense jungle across the river, I feel daunted by the task ahead. I know that in order to grasp the true nature of the town and its people, I would have to travel upriver, to the longhouses and perhaps beyond. For a while, I am stalled by the Conradian romance: I would leave the social safety of Belaga and journey upriver where a Kurtz-like figure awaits to reveal the heart of darkness in all humanity. Sarawak was not the Belgian Congo: its exploitation had not been, by comparison, as naked and rapacious. Still, since the days of the Brooke regime, predatory greed and economic adventurism typified the opening of the Upper Rajang. Human activities continue to shape and reshape the region, making it a mesmerizing place of myth and imagination. At midnight the rain is smacking on the roof. The hotel is rattled with noise. I get out of bed and sit on the chair to write my notes. From my room—a wash basin, a tiny bedside table, a cane chair, no inside toilet—I can feel the gloom of the rain-soaked world outside. I give up my task, and walk out to the verandah. At this ungodly hour, there is no one around. I lean against the railing: the great expanse of water below is shrouded in darkness, but a sprinkle of light shimmers in the longhouses: I am not alone. The rain is thinning out, the occasional droplets feel cool on my face. I am awake now, and my mind is in a reverie of thoughts. I am thinking: it is the rainy season, the Kapit-Belaga ferry would be late and people planning to leave would be stranded; I am lucky to have got here. Nonetheless, you can’t blame it on the wet season; isolation is built into Belaga’s character. People make much of the remoteness of

7

HOTEL BELAGA

121

the Upper Rajang, and what wonderful imaginings are implanted in their minds! For the isolation is not only loneliness, but also a source of trading opportunities waiting to be exploited. For the hardy men and their wives, isolation is not something that pegs them down, but something to be overcome—the aim of a heroic endeavour. My mind follows the river to its upper reaches—the forests, the string of longhouses, and further on the snake-writhe of waterways that ends in the Nieuwenhuis mountains to the northeast. It is all myth and unexplored territory at the Rajang’s headwaters; the Punan Bah, a people of hunters and gatherers, live there. On a good day, you can think of the Rajang as a place of brave endeavours. Along the river, the tribal people—the Iban at the lower reaches, the Kenyah, the Kayan, and the Penan people at the top end—work their land or practise slash-and-burn planting and build their communities. And the Chinese set up stores and trade with the tribal people along the river; theirs is a mythical story of indefatigable spirit and commercial ambition. Now, at night and silent, the river is but a metaphor. The oily sleek of the water is an intimation of human incursion. The movement of people and commerce corrupts and benefits the native customers in equal measure. As for the Chinese themselves, they face the nefarious effects of their own doing. In moneymaking, their appetite is unassuaged, and their triumphant feelings easily fall into self-doubt and despair. With such thoughts, the river that has so excited one’s imagination begins to turn oppressive. This is pioneer country. From Belaga it is easy to visualize the flow of goods and people along the hierarchies of places: capital, goods, and government monies for development and schools move upriver to Belaga; local produce (rubber, pepper, coffee, cocoa, fish, and game), woven mats and baskets, government licensing fees, the cash earnings of businesses travel downriver to Kapit, Sibu, and Kuching. Belaga used to be the centre of Sarawak’s seventh division that covers the Upper Rajang; the district office has since moved to Kapit, but the post office and the primary school attended by children from the longhouses remain. The government services help bolster the economy, but the financial lifeline is the stores, the marine engine repairs and the petrol pumps at the waterfront, and the twice-daily Belaga-Kapit boat service, all Chinese owned and operated. ‘These shops—there are fifteen of them—are in fact new shops,’ the affable Mr Ong explains:

122

S. YAO

Previously there were just wooden sheds, very run down. The State government built these new lot in 1978 and offered them for sale. They were all sold to the Chinese, and one or two to the Kenyahs. … This is Belaga Bazaar. Over there [on the right a few steps from the hotel] used to be another 20 odd shops, they were burnt down in 1995 and never rebuilt. There is a small section of town behind the bazaar; a few of the old shops have moved there; these are small shops, run by some Malay and Kayan people.

The old shops are derelict, sad-looking. I often go there to pick up an exercise book or two, a bottle of beer, or a pack of batteries; a young Kayan couple keeps a stall that serves passable pork noodle soup. Modest enterprises were squeezed out by the Chinese. Ong is the owner of the Ong Yen Fatt sundry shop, the largest and most prosperous in Belaga. It is a bright and cheerful place, with painted walls and doorway, an old shop sign in calligraphy of gold to lend the shop luck and dignity. The shop is taken up by rows of steel shelves filled with rubber sandals, clothes, stationery, canned food, cosmetics. The shoes, clothes, and cosmetics are all shoddy brands from Thailand and Malaysia; but to the government servants and longhouse people who shop there they are the latest and the brightest of what is available at the bazaar. Ong is in his early seventies. He has a tight, square face; when he smiles his eyelids droop and his mouth opens to reveal his white teeth, like a village dentist displaying his trade. Like most shopkeepers, he gives the impression he is too busy to talk, to waste time with an idler. But you have to catch him in the right mood. And there is no reticence in him in the late evening at the hotel balcony; with the mosquito coil glowing at our feet, the vista of the dark water below us, he cannot help but open up. Ong has another business besides the sundry shop. He is the largest dealer in fish and game in the Belaga area. The business calls for capital, and a trading network stretching from the longhouses to Belaga and Sibu, then Kuching. A store with a diesel-powered refrigerator has been established in Long Jawi, a Kenyah longhouse village an hour’s ride by motorized longboat from Belaga. There the appointed agent buys from the hunters and fishermen and keeps the purchases in cold storage. Once a fortnight, Ong sends a longboat to Long Jawi, and goods are packed in ice blocks and sent down to Sibu. Wholesalers come from Kuching,

7

HOTEL BELAGA

123

and sometimes as far as Kuala Lumpur, for the wild boar and deer much sought after by the restaurants. The wild game business has been so successful that his eldest son has given up his job at a timber camp to take over the sundry shop, giving Ong the time to look after the immensely more profitable business. In his off times, he can be seen sitting on his cane chair at the shopfront, watching the passers-by and trying to get people to join him for Oolong tea and boiled groundnuts. He is not old enough to retire, he says, but he wants to slow down, to take it easy after decades of hard work. But this kind of talk is a conceit. If retirement is idleness, it is an idleness that signals enviable privilege, a display by one who has done well and made money. Already I am overreading the man and his inclinations. All this superambition and economic drive is a cliché; without knowing I am caught by the fantasy of the place. I have been a couple of months in Belaga, and I feel I am overwhelmed by the stories told to me: the same themes of pioneering undertakings, the same narratives of heroic enterprise and money-making. Each time I felt this way, I would, as I do now, retrace my steps and go back to the prodigious myth with which people have invested the place and their undertakings. You ask around: What is Ong really like? Why is he so successful when many have failed? To these questions, people say he is honest, he is greedy, he is fair, he cheats on the longhouse folks, he is tough, he is lazy, he is business-astute, he has made mistakes; and it goes on. Yet, the untruth or veracity does not matter; these are elements of a myth, a myth that communicates to the listener Ong’s ‘character,’ as Roland Barthes would say.2 A more reasonable narrative goes like this. Ong has the reputation of being reckless and ambitious. In his young days, people say, he had started one business after another. Most failed, but the locals grudgingly admit that his shop and wild meat business have been a real success. It was luck, they believe, and it was due to his bull-headedness. He did not give up, and his brothers in Sibu had helped him with capital and business connections; talent had mattered less. He liked taking risks, he was a bit of a gambler. Actually, when people talk so, they give the impression they are also talking about themselves. On the whole, though, Ong had been more adventurous than reckless, more ingenious than rash—like the storytellers themselves.

124

S. YAO

At any rate, Ong is a business pioneer who has made his money along the Upper Rajang, as they have made theirs. Their stories are actionpacked, full of adventure and occasional violence. And you never fail to note the common theme: you can make it even in a jungle township if you are smart, if you are quick to seize the opportunity at the next bend of the river. I am not alone in making much of the Chinese traders’ mythic recollections. ‘A recurring theme which ran through the interviews was that of pioneering hardship,’ the historian Daniel Chew writes, ‘which most of the interviewees tried to impress upon me.’ The hardship is not all myth, however; in Chew’s own experience: Sarawak is a physically harsh country … Sometimes, interviews had to be carried out with my feet stuck ankle-deep in mud along a river bank, ... or by the dim light of a kerosene lamp at night, ... [giving me] a feel of what the past could have been like for Sarawak’s Chinese pioneers.’3

The result is a fatal blend of myth and reality. It is hard to know what to believe, and your doubt lingers. Ng Ah Long is another trader who has made it. He came from a farming family in Sarikei, near Sibu. They grew vegetables—Chinese cabbage, sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers—and kept pigs and some chickens. His father was a drinking man, a source of heartache and strife in the family. He mistreated his wife and punished their children at the first sign of mischief. But he was an able provider, the family lived well, though they were not rich. When he died of cancer, they were left to themselves. Ng’s mother worked on the farm; the children helped after school. ‘The small patch of land, and a miserable house of tin-roof and vinyl floor—that was all we had,’ he says sourly, now a man of relative wealth. ‘That was it; there was nothing worth talking about.’ But there is a lot more in the narrative. Their father’s death brought Ng and his brother together; they tried their best to support their mother and to keep their young sister at school. Knowing their mother could not support the four of them, the brothers got jobs at the village bakery. The bakery paid an apprentice’s wage; much of it was given to their mother, keeping little for themselves. At the same, they enjoyed the feeling of having their own money, however little it was, and were thrilled with their freedom from the drudgery of the farm. They talked and conspired. The plan, they decided, was to have their own shop and bakery business.

7

HOTEL BELAGA

125

For that, they had to save up and find a place where they could set up their business. Shopkeepers are the classic petite capitalists. The anthropologist James Scott roots for them and believes in their sense of autonomy. He casts a wide net: petite capitalists include shopkeepers, smallholding peasants, hawkers and peddlers, self-employed professionals. To his mind, their need for independence and the freedom to work in their own time, in their own place, makes them ‘anarchist heroes’.4 ‘The first time I heard about Belaga, I was struck by the good news,’ Ng remembers. ‘We had to get there quick, they hadn’t got a bakery there! We were fired up.’

By 1971, they had spent a few years in Belaga. The bakery was doing well, everyone loved their cakes and coconut cookies. The business grew, and their families got on well, living and working in the same premises. The Ng brothers got to know the older shopkeepers who told them riveting tales of adventure: the longboat stranded on a sandbank, the night attack by bandits, the danger, the risk … before vanishing in a trail of nostalgia. ‘We listened and were impressed. We looked at each other: We had our bakery, what next? Their stories egged us on. We knew we had to go upriver to buy up the jungle goods [from the tribal people].’ They couldn’t stop; it was like a fever. They got their wives to look after the shop, bought a longboat, and followed the river into the interior. The Ng brothers remember those years. The river was wild during the rainy season, and the longboat sometimes capsized and all the goods would be lost. They heard people had been drowned, but they had skilful boatmen and were safe. There were other dangers. Sometimes the Kayan men would lay in ambush on the bank, waiting for their boat to pass. The assault would take place at the river’s bend where the current was weak, from where the Kayan bandits would wait and leap into the water to attack. The bandits had good intelligence, they knew when the longboat left the Belaga jetty and where it would be heading. The fight was a splashing of surf and clashing of bodies; the Kayan men wanted the goods, and the Ng brothers were determined to stop them. Both sides fought with determined fury, but the results were uneven. The bandits would get away with the goods when their intelligence was good, when the men

126

S. YAO

were fierce with their war cries and weapons. Just as often the Ngs and their team would win when they refused to back down and fought. Victory was less assured for the Ng brothers and their men during the night. By the close of the day, they would camp by the riverbank. There they would find a dry spot and pitch the tents with the longboat safely tied to a nearby tree. With their backs to the river, the jungle before them: it was a good defence position. They would sleep on ground sheets, next to the fire, keeping close to hand their parangs and long knives. A couple of guards would be posted. But the young ones were unreliable; cold and frightened, they would often sneak back to sleep in their tents. One night around ten, the men had eaten and gathered around the fire to talk and smoke. Someone heard a rustle from the bush and raised the alarm. Distinct cries, ‘mati, mati’ (‘die, die’), reached them and they grabbed their weapons and scrambled. A set of tough-looking men rushed at the camp. But the Ng brothers stood their ground: ‘Stand behind us!’ Everyone followed and started swinging their swords and spears. The bandits ran and tried to melt into the jungle. But the brothers refused to let go. Leading their men, they gave chase. Most of the bandits had escaped, but they found a youngster and a couple of older men writhing in fright behind some trees. Someone said, ‘Let them go; they are scared, they won’t attack again.’ But the brothers had other ideas. The moon was up, and people could see clearly the crouching figures poking their weapons at the pursuers in faint bravery. The elder Ng brother pointed a finger at a cold-faced man, a defiant look stood him out from his companions: ‘You come here, the others can go’. Standing before him, the victorious Ng brother jabbed his spear at the man’s belly. In pain, the man fell to the ground. Another jab, deeper this time. The man dropped among the grass, the deep gush visible in the moon light, he was bleeding profusely. … The narrative of pioneering trading at the Rajang ends with a brisk telling of thieving and bloodletting; James Scott’s ‘anarchist heroes’ have excelled themselves. It is as if the violence was an expression of their stressful undertaking, blood an indication of their commitment to moneymaking. I believe the Ng brothers’ story, I have no reason not to. On the other hand, such stories are expected of them, though they might have diluted the truth somewhat. But each time we met, they would tell me, in different variations, of the homicide, as if to impress me, or to relive the triumph, or express lament for their guilty past.

7

HOTEL BELAGA

127

Michael Jackson’s The Politics of Storytelling is based on the work of Hannah Arendt, her comment on the power of storytelling is quoted in the Preface: Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling ...5

Stories have a private and a public face, she intimates. The most passionate stories are ones we tell of our passions and our despairs. However, the very act of our telling transforms a personal story into one we share with others: ‘That is my story, too!’. Storytelling is ultimately a social act which, like all social acts, ‘always involves more than a singular subject; it occurs within fields of interaction,’ Jackson puts it. ‘Accordingly, whatever anyone does or says is immediately out-stripped by what others do or say in return.’6 Through a reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition, Jackson injects a sense of redemption in what storytelling delivers. In rural China during the Land Reform period (1946–1953), to bring up a grimmer social scene, at a ‘struggling session,’ peasants went up to the stage and ‘spoke bitterness,’ chi guo, about their suffering and exploitation at the hands of the landlords. Chi guo built the collectivist ideology of Socialist China, it also opened the inner wound that the public revelation hoped to heal. This is the liberating effect of storytelling. Of course, we tell stories about our happiness and satisfaction as well. Thus, storytelling builds agency and restores a damaged sensibility. Is that why there is a lot of ‘no one listens to us’ grievances when the Chinese traders gather at the hotel balcony and tell their stories? You feel their urge to talk, to revisit the past—in order to calm their panic, and to make meaningful what they went through. Or take another sharp-witted thinker on storytelling, Walter Benjamin. ‘In every case,’ he writes, ‘the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. … After all, a counsel is less an answer than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story that is unfolding.’7 For the story to offer itself as ‘counsel,’ however, the storyteller and the listeners must have a sympathetic rapport. For the craft of the storyteller is to ‘make [his experience] the experience of those who are listening to his tale’.8 Storytelling makes

128

S. YAO

a society of sorts, creating a bond between the narrator and the listener. And there is meaning and enjoyment for both. In Benjamin’s words, ‘A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship.’9 A shopkeeper once said to me: ‘Lowlife of all sorts used to come to Belaga, now they want to take over the whole of Sarawak.’ He did not include himself in the disparagement. Benjamin is right; there is a sense of solidarity in storytelling; just as in the impossible tales of heroic endeavours and scrambling that circulate at the Belaga Hotel. But this solidarity is also built on a discrimination against the unworthy, against the unprincipled—not uncommon in this part of Sarawak. Throughout history, the marginal geography has attracted, and still does to an extent, all kinds of people: get-rich-quick carpetbaggers, mostly. And when people look back, wasn’t the opening of the Upper Rajang by the ‘old government’—the Brooke regime—a kind of thievery? Few new settlers have heard about what happened in the old days— government expeditions to punish the rebels, the collection of poll tax from the longhouses. But in regards to thievery, they naturally exclude themselves. For they believe their treatment of the tribal people has been, on the whole, fair and just; well, you have to make your money, somehow. With such thinking, it is easy to identity the true intruders when they came, their presence both a threat and a new set of opportunities. The Bakun Hydroelectric Dam is the largest in Southeast Asia. Located in Balui River, a tributary of the Rajang, east of Belaga, it has a water catchment of some 14,000 square kilometres, the size of Singapore, putting a large area of primary and secondary forests under water. Bakun is a story of many strands. It is a remarkable engineering feat; the highlight of the development of the Sarawak interior. But it has caused unprecedented environmental damage, social disruption, and the relocation of communities. And it became a foundation for corruption when it brought local and foreign capital, and state and federal government funding—a total of USD $2.4 billion—to the project.10 The tribal people were resentful for having to move, and in having their land and crops drowned by water. A typical story of hydroelectric dams in the Third World. Nonetheless, the news of the Bakun dam lifted the spirits of Belaga town. It rekindled the entrepreneurial dream just when one thought there’s nothing more to exploit in the Upper Rajang. Construction began in 1996, and the town was seized by a new economic fever. The Belaga

7

HOTEL BELAGA

129

Hotel laid out more tables on the balcony, offering drinks and à la carte dishes at lunch and at dinner. On the way to the dam, workers and engineers stopped by to have a meal and pick up supplies before journeying upriver. Those who arrived late would spend the night—a much-welcomed injection of cash for the hotel. Belaga began to resemble a frontier boom town. At the dining table, you might find yourself sitting next to a Malay man, talkable and easy with information. He had political connections, he said, and he had secured a big loan from a bank in Kuching. His plan was to purchase a pool of Toyota 4 × 4s to be rented out to the construction companies working at the dam. There was money to be made for everyone. He was like that worn cliché: a child spoiled for choice in a sweet shop. He was only staying a single night. He was anxious to reach the dam. With the fresh set of customers, the shops started to stock luxuries and quality goods that they never had to before. Mild-Seven and Benson & Hedges cigarettes, Johnny Walker Black Label whiskey, French cognac, San Miguel beer were available for the first time, and chainsaw parts, heavy engine grease, steel ropes were added to the ordinary fare of plastic wares and laundry detergents. The gloss of prosperity was like a blessing from the gods. And everyone felt secure. Belaga would be saved, it was not to be submerged. The nearest town to Bakun is Bintulu, but Bintulu is about 75 miles away through a bone-shaking logging road by four-wheel drive. For a long time, people had felt the decline and predicted Belaga’s last days. But Bakun had breathed a new life into the remote township. After completing the paved road connecting Bakun with Bintulu, it was felt Belaga had been left out and deserved a consolation prize. The jungle path between Belaga and Bintulu was cleared and improved, the result is a logging road that joins the two places. The local stores can now get supplies from Bintulu, a shorter and less costly route than the Kapit– Sibu-Belaga river journey. Once again, the geography offers Belaga some protection. One may go to Bintulu in search of bargains, of course. But the journey takes four hours on a Toyota Land Cruiser and the RM50 per passenger is unaffordable for most longhouse people. So the Belaga traders settle back; perhaps after Bakun another opportunity may come. But this one would last for a while, everyone believes. It had happened before: a new kind of luck would come and then vanish, but they did not despair, they held on to their customary optimism. I have

130

S. YAO

been going up there for a long time, and somehow my life—in Singapore, in Sydney—has been tied up with theirs. They welcome me back each time I go up, buying me beer and seafood and asking about my family. Their drive and never-give-up outlook I recognize as something shared with my shopkeeper parents. A buy-cheap-sell-dear thievery unites the petite capitalists of different times and places. The truth is, the way of petite capitalism calls for a pickpocket’s dexterity—in order to survive and provide for the family, in order to balance the existential choice of exploitation and self-enrichment. For its Conradian grandeur, I continue to take the longboat up the river to Belaga. The Bintulu-Belaga road is for the tourists. After visiting the Bakun Dam, they would come to the outpost town to gape at the ancient shops and the aged men and women sitting by their shops as though guarding their possessions. The visitors are mostly from Europe and the States, with a dribble from Malaysia and Singapore. Ecotourism is the latest craze in the Sarawak interior. There have been renovations and rebuilding of the old shops—and the jetty has been enlarged to accommodate the string of motorized longboats. But the old spirit remains, so it seems: the same restlessness, the same reveries of the past, the same loneliness, that remain with the shopkeepers like an unwanted guest. The hotel boy knocks at my door and calls out, ‘Come, mister, come.’ I put away the book I have been reading and follow him. He leads me to the back of the bazaar where, before a row of shops, people have gathered. The boy and I squeeze in to watch the proceedings. The beast is all tied up, the rope eating into its ankles and its fat thighs. It struggles frantically, knowing the fate that awaits. The butcher runs his knife through the sharpening stone, to and fro, to and fro, as though a ritual to entice the audience. With any expert slaughterer, there would be a knife for stabbing, a knife for cutting and slicing, a knife for boning. In a rustic town, it is a single broadsided knife that slits open the throat, as the boar fights and kicks, squealing uncontrollably. This goes on for a while. And you can tell the boar is in his death throes by the quivering flesh as he shivers with his last breaths. But already the butcher is preparing for the next stage of the spectacle. He gives the throat a final stab, the blood gushes out and falls on a tray placed underneath. The tray filled, it is taken away. We watch, and our silent stare goads him on. With his left hand resting firmly on the carcass, his right hand griping the knife, he runs the blade over the skin in a broad sweeping movement. The body is turned over and goes through another round of shaving and scraping.

7

HOTEL BELAGA

131

The boy and I have come to watch; the others have come to buy some of the freshly killed meat. They look expectantly at the butcher’s continuing labour: the knife cuts and slices, and further exertion produces the meat and bones which are put on the ground in orderly piles. It is a kind of bloody drama not often found in the town bazaar. But what I have witnessed is another business innovation; it provides fresh meat that customers want, without the need for health inspections. Frozen pork and steak are available at the stores, but this is wild boar. While some may grimace at the proceedings, in the evening they will be on the hotel balcony enjoying the wild boar in curry sauce. Who would not welcome such culinary fare when all they have been eating is frozen Dutch chicken and tough Indian beef? The dishes aside, I am pleased to have watched the slaughtering. It has seized on my soft-padded bookishness and flipped me over. The butchering in the raw is a performance, a play that affords a view of the moral quandary that faces the Belaga traders: how to manage the uncertainty, the ever-changing circumstances of their commercial opportunities. As their stories have told to the point of tedium, they have achieved successes, such as they are, not without a good deal of risk-taking, not without occasional homicide to add a dash of heroism. The butchering at the bazaar brings things out into the open, as it were; the striving, the sacrifices, the danger, the cruelty are there for all to see. Perhaps there is a future for Belaga beyond the current vogue of ecotourism, I don’t know. There is always the thought in the back of my mind that its future remains precarious. But that may not be the predictive power of intellectual reflection, or even the changing nature of the Upper Rajang that the town people have witnessed over the decades. For the Chinese traders, what happens at the bazaar, what they talk about at the hotel balcony, these are elements of their everyday life, full of successes along with greed and avarice.

Notes 1. Edmund Leach. Social Science Research in Sarawak, London: HMSO, 1950, p. 9. 2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, NY: Noonday Press, 1972, p. 107. 3. Daniel Chew, Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontiers, 1841-194I . New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 3.

132

S. YAO

4. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 85. 5. Michael D. Jackson. Politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression and intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. 2013; p. ii. 6. Ibid., p. 18. 7. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflection on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 86. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 100. 10. See the INSAN NGO report, Power Play: Why We Condemn the Bakun Hydroelectric Project. Kuala Lumpur: INSAN.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies, Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. ‘The Storyteller: Reflection on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’. In Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Stocken Books. Chew, Daniel. 1990. Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontiers, 1841-194I . New York: Oxford University Press. INSAN. 1996. Power Play: Why We Condemn the Bakun Hydroelectric Project. Kuala Lumpur: INSAN. Jackson, Michael D. 2013. Politics of Storytelling: Violence, transgression and intersubjectivity, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Leach, Edmund. 1950. Social Science Research in Sarawak. London: HMSO. Scott, James C. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Solitude

The Belaga traders believe themselves to be self-reliant, that they are their own persons, but there is a great deal on the other side of this selfappraisal. For all their blustering, they feel lonely. In their young years, when the place still had few people, they realized the situation worked in their favour: isolation discouraged competition, it justified the relative high prices of their goods; their jungle produce enjoyed a healthy profit margin. But the loneliness was harder to navigate than the buying and selling. The lucky ones got married and brought their wives upriver, but more than a few stayed single. Even today, an air of dejection brushes the Belaga township like shame. The singlehood of the elderly, the departure of the young, everyone getting older: the natural attrition of time is hard to ignore. The common lament is: ‘I have four sons but none is with me,’ and the wives would add: ‘The grandchildren, we miss them most.’ They speak in a tone akin to despair. During the monsoon season, when the rain is heavy and the ferry would halt until the water level recedes, the men and women would sit at the shopfronts waiting for the customers that never came. Another day wanes. There is time to think, and nurse the sense of regret that besets them. Going through my notes, I become aware of the hints and insinuations about the long years being single and wifeless, the sexual needs and where to find solace; and among the women, about finding a suitable match, about following the men to a strange, forsaken place where they would settle and build their families. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_8

133

134

S. YAO

The subject, so it appears, has been taken up by political philosophers. Thomas Dumm writes in Loneliness as A Way of Life, We can never experience the world as a whole because we are mortal. We are fated to seek assurances for our existence, even though such assurances can never overcome our basic doubt. We negotiate a path through this life with others, both with those who are far outside of us and with those who have penetrated our interiors. We hear voices composed of the fragments of those others, we speak, we listen, we touch and are touched, and we always fail to achieve an understanding that would allow us to rest. Our unending desires remain unsatisfied. Yet our failures, as inevitable as they are, also shape whatever our successes may be. We move through life, and our lives are shaped by these movements.1

Loneliness is ‘the experience of unhappy removal from a life lived in common with others.’2 Still, we must also reckon with the fact of our basic incommunicability. A philosopher like Dumm is wont to inject a positive note in social relationships, to which Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot offers a useful corrective. In our social life, we touch others and are touched by them, but just as often this fails to happen, leaving us fractured, and without a centre. In the Belaga region, isolation was, and still is, a geographical fact. The hand-paddled boats were laborious, and few people travelled upriver and beyond. The lives of the shopkeepers have the logic of dreams, which they accepted with weary resignation. But most recognized the irony: that the isolation was also a business opportunity. The emotional effect and lure of profit-making make for a fatal combination, ambiguous and uncertain in consequence. In this sense, the Belaga men may begin to think like a Sartre or a Heidegger. For here was a situation of the human condition, and they had to face the fact this was where they would make a life, there was no God, no overarching meaning, in the jungly world. And they lived with the realization that their lives were of their own making—the present, the result of life choices they had to deal with. No wonder then, for the Belaga men, getting a wife was a decision of existential import. The pioneering trade is made more heroic when undertaken by hardy men, in a world without women. When they sought a wife, they would think hard about the practical reasons. Like the Marxist economists, they believed in the idea that a hardworking wife is part of the ‘strategy’ of

8

SOLITUDE

135

gaining useful labour and maximizing gain. This is a cliché, I know. But then, of course, petite capitalists also fall in love, as do the Belaga men. The Belaga men rarely talk about their marriages. You need to seek them out and get them to reveal their intimate lives. With undisguised practicality, they say: marriage is a serious business, a wife is a business partner, she helps to run the shop; she bears children without which life is nothing but work. A wife turns a solitary life into one of comfort and blessing. There is love, except that love has to fit into the overall scheme of things. As for women, they also take seriously the practical side of marriage. The shophouse existence is built on the family, in which the wife invests heavily. You ask the women about love; love is complicated, they say in Cantonese, spitting out each word as though a complaint; love is full of heartache. My mother, wary of the freedom of my student’s life in Australia, once wrote to me about love and marriage, and ended with the old aphorism: Luoye guigen, women in marriage are as fallen leaves returning to the soil; Chingjia liye, men’s destiny is to be married and build a career.

It is a cultural aphorism, it is a platitude, it is the apotheosis of the petite bourgeoise outlook. The philosophic gloss is starkly one-sided. Marriage is women’s fate; it is as natural for leaves to return to the soil as it is for women to belong to their marital homes. Fallen leaves, luoye, is a gardening metaphor; the phrase makes one think of composting, natural and beneficial for the soil. And guigen, returning to the soil, describes a woman’s sense of arrival; it bestows on her the primordial root of home-making. Addressing men, chingjia liye, extols too the virtue of marriage but with a materialist twist. If women’s destiny is home-making, for a man, marriage gathers his splintered needs and ambitions into a single place of responsibilities and male privilege. Taking a wife is serious business because for him, home-making is career-making. As marriage is aligned to a man’s ambition, a well-chosen wife helps to build an economically successful life. For a petite capitalist, a good wife is a working wife, one who shares her husband’s labour and economic vision. So much for marriage as the sharing of a productive life. And the Belaga Chinese have their own versions of the saying. I married my wife when she was twenty-two, and I was thirty. I came to Belaga when I was twenty-five from Batang Ai. When I saved enough to

136

S. YAO

start my own business, my father said ‘You are now thirty, and must settle down and stop living in your wild ways. A house is not a home without a woman’. I agreed with the old man. I was getting on, and besides I need a wife to help in the shop—to cook, to serve the counter, to watch over the business when I am not around. As they say: Luoye guigen …

The voice belongs to Lee Sum Chun, owner of Chop Tai Yuan Provision Store in the bazaar. I have asked him, ‘When did you get married?,’ which opens a floodgate of the familiar clichés. Lee came from a family of vegetable farmers in Batang Ai where he had a small sundries shop. Batang Ai is a small town, southwest of Kuching. His business was small. One day, in a flash of inspiration, he sold his business and bought a second-hand Ford Transit van and became a travelling vendor. For seven days a week he packed his van with a variety of goods— stationery, plastic sandals, soap and shampoo, canned food, Ajinomoto food flavouring, soft drinks, and Chinese medicine—and made his tour around the longhouses. Most of the longhouses are about a half day walk to town, so I thought why not buy a van and take the goods to them? I was on my own, I was free. To do business with Iban people, you have to be friendly and flexible. You have to spend time with them, drinking and eating with them, especially during the Kwai harvest festival, and you have to offer credit when they are short of cash. I did all this, and I got on well with them. After I deducted the petrol, I could make about M$300 to M$500 each trip.’

And the Iban people were generous hosts who returned his friendship. When it was too late to drive back, he would be asked to stay the night. A small feast would be organized, and he would purchase a piglet to be roasted and added to the dishes. Lee remembers those times fondly. They ate and drank and the old men would dust the spears and shields and do a tribal dance, tipsy and thrashing about at each move, while the women would giggle and goad them on, laughing and teasing and remembering their own younger years. And Lee recalls fondly the young Iban women. Each trip was an opportunity for liaison, and courtship was cemented with the gift of a radio-cassette player or a piece of batik sarong, and illicit meetings were consummated in the jungle beyond the longhouses. When he came to Belaga in 1985 and bought a store at the main bazaar, he had left all that

8

SOLITUDE

137

behind. He was determined to settle down and make a go at creating a more stable, equally successful business. When Lee asked his parents to find him a bride, they chose Wong Ah Eng, a daughter of a coffee shop owner in Kuching. A believer in education, her father did not want his children to carry on the coffee shop business, but to branch out and choose another way of making a living. Wong Ah Eng attended three years of high school. On graduation, as a present for herself, she used the Chinese New Year money she had saved up and joined a group tour to Hong Kong. The bright lights, the bustle of a metropolis, the seedy glamour of Kowloon left a deep impression on her. Later she returned to Hong Kong and enrolled in a dressmaking school. After she came back to Kuching, with a loan from her father, she started a small dress shop. The premises were on top of a shophouse, where she installed a few second-hand sewing machines and made dresses and ran evening dressmaking classes. She was happy, and almost twenty. She always had a restless streak, she confesses. She enjoyed travelling, and in Kowloon she had walked the streets and bought dresses, magazines, and trinkets. She took a bus to the New Territories: the same rural folk, the same villages, the same vegetable plots as she found near their coffee shop at home. And the idea came to her: you are not young forever, you have to get married eventually. Having her own tailoring business was life-changing. She had had to make her own decisions, she learned patience and about finance and planning. But in the end she had to let the business go. The competition was getting tougher, other dressmakers sprang up, and everyone was cost-cutting by subcontracting the finishing to others. She felt that she was ready to move on. Her uncle, a fertilizer dealer, had done business with Lee and spoke highly of him. He praised his character, his daring; and he was single and had his own shop. The two met and talked, and each time he came to town he would take her to the cinema, and afterwards, as they shared a supper, he would tell her about Belaga and the life along the river. She was intrigued, fascinated. They fell in love. He proposed and was accepted. They got married and moved to Belaga: he, ambitious and experienced with the ways of the world, and she, a young bride keen to make herself a good wife and start a family. She is now a mother of three young children. As she goes about her business at the shop, caring for the children and attending to the sales counter, it is hard not to see her as the apotheosis of the virtuous wife that even a modern woman like her aspires to. The marriage is, in all

138

S. YAO

appearances, a happy one. They are devoted to each other, and they have made their marriage work. There is love in the family; they fight over this and that, but they are a team in raising the family and in running the shop. The fly in the ointment has to do with a singular fact. A leftover from his bachelor days, Lee has continued his liaisons with a Kayan woman—we shall call her Sarah—that he started before he got married. He has to live up to his reputation somehow, so some would gossip. Sarah lives with their child in a longhouse community about a mile or so upriver. And so it is easy to turn the situation into a parody: Lee is determined to keep up with the old practice of keeping two households, one in Belaga, one in a longhouse with a ‘native mistress.’ Some men secretly envy him, others, mostly the women, believe that a man, once married, is no longer entitled to the boundless enjoyment offered by the longhouses. Lee and I are travelling upriver to visit Sarah and her family. On the boat, Lee is solemn, not saying much. I felt I had been prying when I asked him about Sarah, and the trip is his way of explanation. At the longhouse I am greeted by a picture of domestic normalcy. Sarah’s apartment is at the far end of the longhouse. Burdened with presents and food, we picked our way past the communal corridor littered with halffinished bamboo mats and rattan baskets, past the prying eyes from other apartments, to reach where we are going. Like the rest, Sarah’s apartment has no windows, the only light comes from the door that opens to the corridor. Standing by the door, she is a light emanating from the gloomy interior. A stout figure slowly takes shape and fronts up to us, and my immediate thought is: this is no ill-treated woman of male lust, a man’s kept mistress in a longhouse. A little boy comes out and clings to her skirt, then rushes into the father’s embrace. When Lee came to Belaga, Sarah was already working as a cook in one of the shops. Her employment had followed the fluctuating fortunes of the shops; each shop’s change of hands would see her moving to another premises. When Lee purchased Chop Tai Yuan, Sarah had sort of come with the shop. Single and in need of someone in the kitchen, he was happy to take her on. She helped out in the shop, she did the laundry, and she turned out simple rice and fried vegetable dishes which they shared in small dinners in front of the shop. Lee grew fond of her; she was pretty and quick with her smile, and she was happy in her chores. ‘The way she smiles, it lifts up my spirit,’ Lee tells me. ‘What is there not to like for any man?’ They soon began to live as husband and wife. A year later, when she was pregnant, they thought it best she move back to the longhouse

8

SOLITUDE

139

to be near her parents, and after the birth, the mother and child would be looked after. All this took place two years before Lee married the young seamstress and brought her to Belaga. For the anthropologist, this is a mangled narrative of several threads: marriage, carnal enjoyment, male privilege, the shophouse life. Yet, for the persons involved, this is simply lifework, something to be managed and navigated through with a mixture of hard calculation and resignation. In Lee’s mind, there has never been any doubt that he would continue to support Sarah and their child while they live with her parents. He has brushed aside the scandal-mongering, he knows what he has done was morally responsible. The Chinese men in Belaga saw the world in pragmatic terms; they were agents of obsessive calculation, uncomplicated by personal needs and self-doubt, so I am led to believe. And pragmatism also rules their decision in choosing a wife. But the matter of marriage and desire, as much as the existential situation itself, can never be so straightforward. Reasonably enough, Wong Ah Eng also holds impeccable judgements of her own. She may be a wife of the traditional mould, but she insists on the two things she believes every woman would want in a marriage: economic security for herself and her children, and a husband who keeps his affection within the bounds of the martial relationship. A wife is there to support the husband, to be his ‘better half’ in running the business. ‘I am happy to be a shop-wife, but nowadays women expect their husbands to be faithful, women want more from marriage than those from the older generation,’ she declares, sounding distinctively modern. She is a traditional, virtuous wife, yet she also demands her needs and freedom be recognized. In Marxist political economy, when production is organized around the family, the relations between family members are production relations. Power and exploitation cast a pall over everyone, particularly women. In the literature, the debate tends to hover around a version of Engels’ argument in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The Origin traces the human evolution that led to what we recognize as features of the modern bourgeois family: monogamy, men’s authority, and men’s control of property. The tone is archaic and polemical. The modern bourgeois family, Engels argues, is packed full of ideological predilections. The values of the bourgeois family hold up men’s power and privileges, and the final evolution takes the form of the privatization of the family. Each family is a hallowed place of intimacy and

140

S. YAO

emotional and economic security. In modern liberal society, the family warrants safeguarding because family values are the classic bourgeoise values of property ownership, the triumph of the individual, the family as a consuming unit. The women’s role is to contribute to the making of the bourgeois family in this mould. Marxist historians would seize on this idea in examining the positions of women in traditional China. The anthropologist Hill Gates writes: In late Imperial China, women were expected to work hard and live cheaply. … The subordination of women meant that the wealth they produced above and beyond necessary for her own reproduction was channelled to her fathers and brothers, husbands and sons. Women’s low status in the Chinese world was not an accident or feudal peculiarity; it was an integral part of a complex economic pattern.3

Reading this, one asks: Are the Belaga wives similarly exploited? Are the productive lives at the shops organized along a similar line? Gates’ is a materialist argument. In China’s old silk cottage industry, she argues, labour almost totally relied on the women in the family: the wives, the daughters-in-law, the unmarried daughters. They greased the wheel of silk production in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The industry was organized in the classic petite capitalist mode: home-based, serviced by women’s labour, with men making the major decisions. And it was ideological to boot. Since silk production relied on home-bound wives and daughters and daughters-in-law, domestic confinement became a primary feminine virtue. The Confucian propriety that dictated the feminine propriety of women turned out to be one of significant economic logic. The Marxist analysis is at its weakest when it deals with private sentiments and sensations—love, sex, appetite, pleasure. Family and marriage are nothing if not these things as well. And the home and marriage create mutual dependencies and common interests that propel family life. This was as true in Imperial China as it is among the Belaga shops. Speaking of the Belaga wives, the rule is that, as in most marriages, it is not easy to exploit one’s marital partner in the way you can exploit strangers and distant kin. The carnal tenderness and gracious negotiations give the husband-and-wife bond a real emotional depth. The Lee-Wong marriage was almost an arranged marriage, but there is love, and not everything between them is unredeemable. This is also true of other

8

SOLITUDE

141

marriages in Belaga. The culture of sharing prevails. Most of them have some sort of will drawn up, I found out. Some are properly witnessed, some have it done by a law office in Kuching. For all the stuff about getting a virtuous wife, the social arrangement gives women their due in all kinds of ways. Patriarchy is not undone, but substantially moderated. At the Chop Tai Yuan Provision Store, the husband and wife appeared to have chiselled out a closeness in the stress and chaos of shop life. They talk, they wrangle, they parley. And for Wong, marriage has made her invest in an institution arguably designed to repress and exploit her. She is sensible to the privileges of men, not the least her husband’s. Yet, it is hard for her to accept the situation she was married into. The two women never met. Perhaps she felt sympathetic when told by others of Sarah and her child. Certainly, over time, her anger has cooled, and she has accepted the situation. With tact and carefully chosen phrases, one can approach her and be rewarded with a reply, ‘Women always suffer. My mother told me, a woman’s life is full of tears. You better get used to it.’ She asks for no resolution, just Heaven’s will that she and her family will be happy and prosper. But I am not done with the stay in a longhouse, with thinking about marriage and the chanciness of actual life. Kampong Balan consists of a single tilted longhouse, and a series of detached huts and stores that dips and pushes towards the river. From the boat’s landing, the path to the longhouse is a sodden flat of mud and deep puddles that threaten to suck your feet in, boots and all. Moving up the steps, as you look up, you see the jungle and before it a building of sun-baked timber. ‘During the rainy season, all this is filled with water,’ my companion Jau says. ‘It makes a hard climb for the old folks.’ It is an experience of sunken footprints, mud-spattered pants, and soiled feet, yet the morning air is soft and velvety, and the hog wallows signal life. Jau is a student studying in Kuala Lumpur, whom I met and decided to employ as an assistant. Kampong Balan is his home, where his parents and four siblings live. Jau made the arrangement, and I would stay for a time—to get the feel of a longhouse, to poke my nose in to the social dealings and contentions. And here at the Kampong Balan, I would meet Richard Ong, who married into a Kayan family. A longhouse is a wonder of form and functionality. This one has thirtytwo apartments, or amins, extending lengthwise; Jau’s family’s apartment is the last one at the far end. In principle, the next longhouse would be built in parallel either at the back or at the front; or people would move

142

S. YAO

to a new site and start a new settlement. Topography as much as kinship dictates the siting. Installed on a series of wooden pilings some 15 feet above ground, the Balan longhouse is dominated by a long corridor. One side of the corridor faces a long drop to the ground, the other side is corralled in by a row of doors, each leading to a family amin. Standing outside Jau’s apartment, you face the corridor: the communal living space that connects the shaded verandah and the family apartments. Jau gets me to put my backpack and the gift of pickled cabbage and Ajinomoto on the floor: this is the sitting room. Going past the kitchen— a small wood stove, an array of utensils hanging from a railing, a piped water tap, a cupboard—is the living area. It is dark, but the dim light adds a feeling of cosiness, like a hunter’s lodge in winter. The parents’ bed is raised and curtained-off, and their three children would sleep on a bamboo mat on the floor. At night Jau and I would lay a large mat and sleep outside the door. The Kayan people are one of the original settlers in the Belaga region. They are a part of the ‘Orang Ulu,’ the ‘people of the interior’ of Sarawak. Some 26,000 are found in the Belaga area and the Baram district near the Baram River.4 The Kayan people are experts in a form of storytelling, the ‘tekna’—its favourite subject the epic of travelling and migration, told by people ‘gifted in poetic expression.’5 They sing songs, the lakuh, of love and longing, which they occasionally do at the gallery for their amusement; the lyrics are in a blend of Malay and Kayan and with Jau’s translation I get a sense of joy and freedom in the singing. … Days pass. I listen to the singing, I record oral history about the Kayan people’s epic migration from the homeland in Kalimantan, I join Jau and his parents at their rice paddy, sharing their labour and lunch of cold rice and chilli sambal. Jau is a scholarship student at MARA college, a government tertiary institution for bumiputeras, the Malays and the tribal people in East Malaysia. His experience of college life is bleak and joyless. (‘The canteen serves halal dishes, and we Kayan are pork eaters!’). He is typical of the young people who have attended school and returned home. Educated, they become restless; they want to move to Kuching where the jobs and the bright lights are; they are unhappy with the home-bound life at the longhouse. I may enthuse about the communal existence, about the functional aesthetics of the longhouse, but in their mind, they have already moved on. To my questions about his future, Jau hints at my naivety. There is no privacy in the longhouse, he says, people are always gaping

8

SOLITUDE

143

at each other. The architectural splendour is reduced to a single issue of space and privacy. And at the longhouse, his city manners are for all to see: his Japanese Mild Seven cigarette pack tucked in the t-shirt sleeve, his cell phone and constant texting, his fondness for Korean instant noodles which he consumes at the gallery. He makes himself stand apart from his mates. They are not worth meeting, he says, let me take you to see my friend, Richard. Richard Ong lives with his wife Florence a few doors from Jau’s family. We knock, and a woman with small watchful eyes comes to the doorway, ‘Richard is not here, he is at the farm.’ What she means is that he is at the lepau, the hut adjacent to their farm and he has been staying there for a couple of days. I am about to ask her how to get there, but my assistant stops me: ‘I know the place, I’ll take you there.’ It is the Kayan people’s custom to keep a place near the farm where people can stay during planting or harvesting. The lepau can be a wooden platform with an attap roof, or a hut with wood cladding where a farmer and their helpers can cook a meal after work and sleep. Richard’s hut has a mud floor, the outside is a pattern of aged wood and flattened kerosene tins that cover the gaps. It feels steady, steady enough to withstand a heavy rain on a windy day, I am told. Inside, as my eyes get used to the dark, I notice the rustic décor: a small bed, a few chairs, and a table, darkened aluminium saucepans by the clay oven, a movie star calendar on the wall, well-worn t-shirts and pairs of khaki pants on wire hangers in an open wardrobe. Richard is at the farm, and Jau volunteers to fetch him. Full of clutter, and surrounded by the jungle, the hut nonetheless has a curious charm—it exudes honest labour, and a quaint architectural aesthetic. Sitting on a wooden stool, I muse at the prospect of staying for a few days—to rid myself of the commercial stink, the self-serving narratives of the Belaga men. ‘Is this your friend?’ Richard asks as he twists his head to take a good look at me. I step out, and Jau introduces us. We size each other up, and when I tell him I am a Hakka, he opens up with the guttural cacophony of our dialect. ‘I heard you are a scholar, a reader of books.’ He lingers at the door, his face half-turned to the drab dinginess of the hut. I take a good look at him: he is tired, with eyes of the old or the infirm, even though he is only in his mid-thirties. It is almost one o’clock in the afternoon. A good host, he is taking the rest of the day off. Knowing his young friend has to go back, he begins to prepare lunch—Maggi instant noodles with fried eggs which we eat with

144

S. YAO

relish. Left to ourselves, Richard and I drift in and out of conversations, clusters of words clear our awkwardness. Some of my questions he does not reply to, and the silence makes me look out at pepper bushes, the field of rice, the muddy paths, and beyond—the patches of jungle waiting to be cleared. ‘These are mine, and that bit of the jungle too. Actually they are my wife’s, she is the owner.’ And he starts to tell me how he, an ethnic Chinese, got married to a Kayan woman and ended up living in a longhouse. They had met in a logging camp, where Florence was a cook and Richard a crane-driver trainee. Remote from any town, the nearest place reachable by 4X4s, the camp was a world in itself. Friendships and liaisons were made by the sharing of isolation. Florence, the daughter of a Kayan headman, was pretty but serious, not given over to the abundant male attention at the camp. And Richard was driven to get his crane-driver’s license. ‘When we first met,’ he says, ‘all she talked about was how to save up and go back to her family. I liked her for that. For I, too, wanted to get a better job and save, and for that I must get a better job.’ After work, there was not much to do except to take a walk in the nearby jungle, where, they would find a clearing and sit and talk. Their feelings for each other grew, and he took as evidence of her affection when, at the canteen, an additional piece of stewed pork or fried chicken was ladled on his plate while she was serving. Richard explains: Let me put it this way; I was not happy living with my family. We ran a small sundry shop in Kapit, and all my parent’s attention was given to my eldest brother. He did well in school, and he was to take over the business. I was being pushed out. It’s not only the family; I felt hemmed in, I wanted to break away from the town and the miserable shop. The logging camp was freedom for me. I met people and learned new useful skills. I had not counted on meeting someone; but there it was, a nice Kayan lady who loved me. … She would take me in and give me a home.

Florence’s father was a Kayan headman and an elite member of the miran or aristocratic caste.6 Though he didn’t know it at the time, Florence was to connect him to a family of influence, to a father-inlaw whose traditional authority was a part of the State administration of the native peoples. They went to the marriage registry, got the form and signed it. They didn’t have a wedding ceremony, though Florence’s parents had come to Kapit for a dinner with the newly married couple,

8

SOLITUDE

145

while his own family stayed away. A year later, he passed the exam and got his crane-driving licence and received a promotion. After finishing their work at the camp, the husband and wife moved to the Balan Kampong longhouse. The Kayan people have a kinship system of bilateral descent—you trace your descent through both your male and female ancestors.7 And they follow the uxorilocal residence rule, according to which the son-inlaw would live with his wife’s family. Florence’s family has adhered to these rules, and it should not be a problem for Richard to move in with her family. However, Richard is Chinese and under State regulation it is forbidden for a non-native person to reside in a longhouse. It is a legacy from the Rajah Brooke era designed to protect the tribal peoples from incursions by outsiders.8 This is another story of the Chinese in the Sarawak interior. As you venture upriver, you find Chinese residing in longhouses where they should not be. The man would be the owner of a sundry store, or a dealer in fertilizers and farm tools. Some have wriggled their way in by knowing and bribing the headman, the penghulu. Some have moved in with a tribal woman; the de facto relationship would, over time, come to be accepted as marriage. These are unruly—and at times destructive— social arrangements. The wives risk being abandoned when the men leave; the stores sell goods on credit, thus getting the longhouse people into debt. The fairest thing to say is that the relationships are a mixed blessing. The Chinese stores and their owners, in a way, open up the longhouse to outside forces, something that young people like Jau keenly welcome. On the other hand, it is an intrusion of debt and obligations the longhouse people are not always adept at managing. Richard’s entry into the Kayan community is a more congenial affair. There is love and decency in the marriage, which had the blessing of Florence’s parents. It is a rare light in the gloom of illicit relationships and bland materialism typical of the social reality of the Upper Rajang. The marriage has worked; they have a boisterous two-year-old boy, and they hope their next child will be a girl. And Richard works hard. Coming from a family of shopkeepers, he didn’t want to start a store as Florence’s father had suggested. Instead, he has chosen to work on the land that his wife has come into. Over the years, he has cleared the land and enlarged the cultivated area.9 On the plot close to the hut, he has planted pepper, cocoa, and rubber, on the adjacent patch fruit trees. Before they had their first child, Florence had come each day to work at the farm. They weeded

146

S. YAO

and cleared the fallen debris, they ploughed and fertilized. Since then, Richard has been coming on his own, with occasional help when he needs it. Further on, a twenty-minute walk away, they own a field of hill rice. It is a dry rice paddy, which they leave to fallow after each season of planting and harvesting. Hill rice gives lesser yields but requires little water and fertilizer. All this Richard explains to me as we tread our way through the dusty paths, stopping occasionally to check on a paddy, him rubbing an ear of rice stalk to check its ripeness. Each time we stop, I see the fruits of a joint effort of husband and wife, devoted to each other as much as to their farmland. That day, after Jau’s departure, I spent the night at the hut, sleeping well in spite of the mosquitoes. The morning came; I stayed in to write my notes. The following day, to break the routine, I asked my host if I could tag along—to see how he worked, to hear his story beyond the timber camp. He agreed, and from then on the days are a hazy memory of walks under the sun, my struggling with the farm tools, my meek attempt to share his labour, Richard’s friendly encouragement and lunches of cold fried rice and warm Pepsi. After a day’s work, at the hut, there is only the poor recompense of tea and rice and occasionally a bottle of Tiger beer between the two of us. We have walked to the hill rice paddy today, going from plant to plant, bending our backs, ladling at the root of each plant a spoonful of fertilizer. It has been hard work. We settle in our chairs in front of the hut, recounting the day’s work, barely touching the dinner Richard has cooked. Earlier, walking back from the field, Richard suggested perhaps I would like to spend the next day at the hut. A good anthropologist, I know it is a sin to sit in a hut and read when the grandeur of human effort is outside, in the soggy fields near the jungle. Besides, to admit the hardship would be a form of self-pity. I explain this to him, and Richard nods his head: ‘I understand.’ He is leaving things as they are, he accepts that I will continue to tag along. And he gives no hint that I am overstaying, which eases my self-consciousness. The dinner over, we take a tray of tea and biscuits outside to watch the night fall. As is our wont, we are both loquacious and reticent, exuberant and shy, when we begin to talk with each other. Once again, I get him to talk about his marriage, about Florence and their child. I get him to fill me in on the planting and the songs people sing in the fields to celebrate a new season. And to avoid a one-sided conversation, I tell him about my

8

SOLITUDE

147

marriage—‘My wife is an outsider, too!’—and the hard work and meagre wages of my profession. We hold on to each other’s words. And like other evenings, we shut down after a couple of hours. We have gone through the subject before, we have said all we have wanted to say. Mostly, it is the instinct for silence from two satiated with talk and wordiness. The moon is up; darkness an hour or so away. On our rickety chairs, we are like two people facing a question with no immediate answer. A lone star sparkles, the jungle dusky and expansive, and the silence—the solitude—seems like a relief. When I was getting ready to join her husband at the farm, Florence and I had sat in the kitchen where she told me a few things. She said Richard is often ‘moody’; there are days when he would eat little but smoke and stare into the distance. The emotional downtime does not last long, and his spirit picks up in a couple of days. ‘I don’t know what happened to him, I don’t think he knew either. But when this happens, our boy gets upset, and it’s hell for me.’ I did not make too much of what she said. Maybe it is just mood swings, a mild depression that hits everybody once in a while, I told her. But in my mind, I was not sure. I take a side glance at Richard. He is a man, I am thinking, who has taken upon himself the burden of a particular history: the opening of the Upper Rajang, the trade forever linked to the Chinese and their greed, the baroque rules and regulations that govern the native communities. However, I am certain that for someone like Richard, lifework is no mere appendage to these circumstances and bureaucratic aims. Perhaps, like all modes of self-making, his has taken on a life of its own, driven by a set of private needs and desire. Loneliness, writes David Vincent in A History of Solitude, is ‘failed solitude.’10 ‘Failed solitude’ implies there’s a desirable solitude that is not the crushing state of being on your own, feeling abandoned and bereft of friends. Some people choose to be alone—the solitary walker, the hermit, the Romantic poets, the writers. They are genuine in their desire for solitude, without which they cannot be themselves, and do what they do. In this sense, unlike loneliness, solitude is a state you choose to be in. For the Romantics solitude is not a curse, but a way to get in touch with Nature in the way of nurturing one’s true self. When Wordsworth writes about his long walks in the Lake District, how he wanders ‘as lonely as a cloud,’ he means that solitude is a means of self-exploration and spiritual meditation. No one gets sick or falls into bitterness for solitude.

148

S. YAO

Yet, this positive spin on solitude feels like grasping at straws. It is reasonable enough to think that Richard at his hut, days away from another visit from Florence, is seeking solitude as he desires it. And it is easy to say that he is working things out, that he is struggling against a history that puts him and other Chinese in the same circuit of blame and corruption. In the same vein, the neglect he experienced in his childhood has also left a mark. If depression is what he suffers from, he shows all the familiar symptoms: the descent into despair, the gloominess, the alienation from others. The best we can say is that emotional support has helped to level out the highs and lows of his psychological state, and in the process turns loneliness into solitude. These bookish conjectures seem to me both valid and overstated. For Richard and Florence, history is just that: something that has happened, with its aftermath and social effects. Mood swings and depression are not their terms, but everyday matters and their joy and unhappiness. This is a question of perception, as well as one of philosophy. Against the strictures of formalism is the relative freedom of existentialist thought. We speak of the everyday, but what is the everyday but ‘a platitude, a banality that escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity … of all possible signification,’ as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot puts it.11 At the end, the best bet is to see Richard as a figure of the existential search, the man who seeks solitude, burdened with the wrong doings of his fellow-adventurers at the upper reaches of a muddy river. In the two ethnographic encounters, two men have ventured from their homes to the longhouses. One alone stays on and does not leave; he immerses himself in what is to him a strange and foreign culture. And for that, Richard is more interesting philosophically than Lee, the shopkeeper with a ‘native mistress.’ I often think of Richard as one of the ‘men of the ulu,’ the ‘Eastern figures’ as Douglas Kerr calls them, commonly found in the literature on the East.12 The young George Orwell trying to kill an elephant to impress the Burmese natives, the feeble schoolteacher Crabbe in Anthony Burgess’ The Malayan Trilogy, and of course, Conrad’s Lord Jim and Almayer of Malaya—and Kurtz of the Congo in Heart of Darkness: these are characters who are morally and socially stranded in an alien world. In Heart of Darkness , the narrator Marlow is sickened by the behaviour of his fellow passengers—their avarice, their self-justifying colonial attitude, their idleness on board. Later, on his own riverboat, facing the dark

8

SOLITUDE

149

forest along the River Congo, he feels a sense of man’s inner corruptibility, signalled by the jungly gloom threatening to lure him in. What saves him is his duty on the boat. As captain, he cannot ‘abandon ship’— Conrad’s great metaphor of bad faith—to indulge in a bit of howling and grovelling before the fetish ashore. The solidity of work keeps at bay the imagination always lurching towards excessive, unbridled thoughts. It is a situation not unlike that in which Richard finds himself. He may be married and secured in his domestic comfort, but he is stricken by a melancholy that makes him want to shut down, to live in solitude—if only to examine his existence in a longhouse. If he is a Marlow-like character with his customary solidities, he is also a Kurtz-like figure who descends into a foreign place in order to explore its depth and possibilities. It is foolhardy to speculate whether Richard regrets his being married into a longhouse; on that count we would never know. Nonetheless, I permit myself to invest in the man’s dark mood and melancholy a degree of tragic grandeur. Perhaps he is more like the brilliant and messianic Kurtz who reveals to us the depth of human evil and moral debauchery. The evenings we spent in the hut, as we ruminated on our separate lives, seemed like a slow stripping of illusions. I have my usual discontentment, but his mind lunges deep—to understanding the situation in which he has found himself, to atone for the Belaga men’s materialist sins. His depression, his almost pathological need for solitude: they are the costs of gaining for us a moral insight about the capriciousness of trade, and the avarice of capitalist undertakings.

Notes 1. Thomas L. Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 28. 2. Ibid. 3. Hill Gates, ‘The Commodification of Chinese Women’, Signs, 14(4), 1989, p. 802. See also the same author, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, p. 19. 4. For Kayan social life and customs, see Jerome Rousseau, ‘Kayan Stratification’, Man 14 (2), 1979, pp. 215–236, and by the same author, ‘Kayan Religion: Ritual Life and Religious Reform in Central Borneo,’ 1998, Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-Land-En Volkenkunde. 5. Wan Roselind, Sumathi Renganathan, and Inge Kral, ‘Tekná—A Vanishing Oral Tradition Among the Kayan People of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo’, Indonesia and the Malay World 46 (135), 2018, p. 112.

150

S. YAO

6. For Kayan social structure, see Jerome Rousseau, ‘Kayan Stratification’, Man 14 (2), 1979, pp. 215–236. 7. Ibid. 8. For the Brooke Regime and its native policies, see Walker, J. H. Power and Prowess. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin Australia, 2002. 9. Under Customary Land Law, cultivation is the evidence of ownership. In the event of reclaiming by the State for public use, compensation would be paid for the cultivated land and the productive trees on it. Much of this is carried over from the Brooke regime. See Amarjit Kaur, Economic Change in East Malaysia. London: Palgrave, 1998, especially pp. 33–37. 10. David Vincent, History of Solitude. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020, p. 127. 11. Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Everyday Speech’, Yale French Studies 73, 1987, p. 13. 12. Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. 1987. “Everyday Speech.” Translated by Susan Hanson. Yale French Studies, no. 73. Dumm, Thomas L. 2009. Loneliness as a Way of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gates, Hill. 1989. “‘The Commodification of Chinese Women.” Signs 14 (4): 799–832. ———. 1996. China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Kaur, Amarjit. 1998. Economic Change in East Malaysia. London: Palgrave. Kerr, Douglas. 2008. Eastern Figures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Rousseau, Jerome. 1979. “Kayan Stratification.” Man 14 (2): 215–236. ———. 1998. “Kayan Religion: Ritual Life and Religious Reform in Central Borneo.” Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-Land-En Volkenkunde. Vincent, David. 2020. History of Solitude. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Walker, J. H. 2002. Power and Prowess. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin Australia. Wan, Roselind, Sumathi Renganathan, and Inge Kral. 2018. “Tekná—A Vanishing Oral Tradition Among the Kayan People of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo.” Indonesia and the Malay World 46 (135): 218–234.

CHAPTER 9

The Diaspora Returns

Back in Port Dickson I begin to settle in. One of my first tasks is to call Mok the builder; I need to give him a cheque for the kitchen renovation he has completed and to get him to pick up the copies of my book on the Malayan Emergency I have ordered from the publisher. At the gate he honks from his Mitsubishi 4 × 4 utility and drives expertly through; the load of sand and cement, spades and wheelbarrows staying securely at the back. ‘How was the trip?’ he says as he walks into the house. He may be work-obsessed and miserly with time, but inquisitiveness gets the better of him. At the front porch, we sit down and I give him the cheque which travels swiftly to his pocket. ‘Tell me about Sarawak, I like to know.’ In Belaga I often thought of Mok—another petite capitalist, another small business owner trying to make it in a small town. Like the Belaga traders he too is ambitious, profit-minded. So I describe Belaga, half thinking of the man before me. ‘People there talk a lot of being business pioneers,’ I say. They talk big, they boast, always scheming at something or the other. They have been years in the area, with their stores. Make them a bit crazy, I think. A bit out of their minds. You should’ve been there: the river smelled, at night when we gathered at the hotel balcony. The smell spoils everything, but no one seemed to mind.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_9

151

152

S. YAO

It is a bit unfair; the Belaga folk are more than that. But it’s the first thing that comes to my mind. Mok listens. ‘It is any surprise they are a bit out of their mind? They are men who hide their soul.’ He says it like a declaration, terse and to the point. I have thought he would be sympathetic. But then petite capitalists are not all alike. I think of the gregarious Lee and his two spouses, the homicidal Ng brothers in their youth, the solitude-seeking Richard Ong: each has his secrets and private needs. Why has Mok so quickly dismissed the men he hardly knows? I am on the verge of asking him, but he cuts me short: ‘I got to go.’ He has had enough of such talk, people at the worksite are waiting. I begin to fuss over the parcels at my feet. They have arrived quite some time ago, but I was not here to give them to him. The books have travelled a long way, the ropes slackened by the journey and the customs inspection. I tie a few cords over them and help him to load them in his truck. The mood has changed, he is anxious to get to the worksite. He reverses the utility, eyes at me briefly and is gone. To look into a person is like peeling an onion. Pare off a layer, there is another layer; each layer holds a secret, and you eventually reach the centre. But what do you find at the centre? In Goddard’s Vivre Sa Vie, the narrator says: ‘A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Take away the outside, the inside is left. Take away the inside, you see the soul.’ Is it that simple, is the soul really so accessible? The narrator is reporting the view of a child, which bears a certain philosophic doubt. A living creature is complex, and the soul is a shorthand that expresses the mystery, the unknowable, that greets the investigator of personhood. Even when you have plied open the soul’s casing, the self remains an enigma: it is virtuous, it is evil; it is goodness, it is morally fraudulent; it is cruel, it is just. Rousseau and the Romantic poets believed people are born good and free, fostered by nature’s benevolent influences. Since then, existentialist thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre hold the view that our lives are contingent, complicated by their inherent chanciness. At the end, we are left with the question: how do we fully understand anyone, anything? Regarding Mok, he is, to my mind, up to his neck with anomalies. He is a petite capitalist who cares about books and learning. He is a cultural nationalist devoted to China when such a position is risky in racially sensitive Malaysia. More mundanely, since being diagnosed with high blood sugar some years back, he has taken up vegetarianism with all the zealousness of the newly converted. And since vegetarianism is allied with the

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

153

idea of shashen, the Buddhist taboo of taking life, he has added Buddhism to his Christian worship. For all that, I confess I have a good deal of affection for Mok. Maybe what endears me is the efficiency with which he has repaired the roof and renovated the kitchen of our house, both on time and within budget. Maybe it is due to his charming small-town ways: he does not do Facebook or internet banking, and his dust-smeared Samsung mobile does not suggest a lifestyle accessory. Or perhaps it is because he has purchased some fifty copies of an academic book, a sale that even solicited a comment from the publisher. The sale feels like it was designed to flatter my ego. But there is also the fact that, ever since I’ve known him, he has displayed an almost unnatural curiosity about things outside the building business. Each time we met, he would ask me to tell him about my work, how much the university pays me, who has financed my Sarawak trips. He listens and is befuddled: ‘All the years of studying … you are not being paid enough.’ I have, for fear of boasting, toned down my scholarly bent and the not inconsiderable joy of thinking and writing. For I want to get close to his world in the way of understanding his outlook. So I say lamely, using a Chinese expression, ‘It is the chalk-eating work of a teacher…,’ and leave it at that. Actually, an interest in the ‘scholarly life’ has been in him all along. The endeavour of a du shu ren, a ‘reader of books,’ is alien to the domain of cement mixers and muddy 4 × 4 vehicles. He is sympathetic when I tell him of the teaching life, and believes people like us should be paid more, deserve more respect. The cultural legacy runs deep. His generous appraisal—and his own ‘I am making a small living’ self-deprecation— affirm the status of scholars and book learning in traditional China. Regarding the books: though cash-strapped and frugal, he has spent more than a thousand US dollars on fifty copies of something he cannot read. I remember the day the FedEx van arrived and dropped off the packages; Mok was refitting the old stormwater pipe of our house. Over lunch, I apologized for my undisguised satisfaction: the book, two years in the making, had finally arrived from the publisher. The Malayan Emergency tells of the British success in defeating a communist insurgency, and the Malayan Communist Party’s strategic failure in the uprising.1 It was my effort to set the record straight, I told Mok. The insurgents were mostly Chinese, so were the victims; the Emergency is essentially a Chinese story. Much of this Mok already knew, but there is nothing like seeing it in print, with a picture of a dead insurgent trussed up like a hunter’s trophy

154

S. YAO

on the cover. The Chinese role in the Emergency ensnared him on the spot. He asked me to order fifty copies for him which he would distribute to the Chinese schools. The students should know about this part of the nation’s history—our people’s fight against British colonialism. Besides the cultural approval, what else should I make of this? Perhaps the splashing out on the books satisfies something in him, giving meaning to his life as a small builder-renovator. Mok is a petite capitalist, he is stable, he is matter-of-fact in his dealing. But he is also restless and imaginative. Mok is all that, but the most remarkable thing about him is his attachment to the ancestral land, as he calls it. At the age of fifty-seven, he was born here and he has been living in Malaysia all his life. Nonetheless, his feeling towards China is so tenacious, so indefatigable, that brings up the term ‘diaspora.’ Diaspora is an unhappy word to use in Malaysia; the academics shun it, the journalists avoid it—if they have ever heard of it. For the term establishes one’s connection to the original homeland, a perilous move in a nation of febrile ethnic resentment. A diaspora has two homelands, which makes them a person of questionable loyalty. The concept invites ethnic malevolence. In Malaysia, the ethnic Chinese and Indians are often referred to as ‘immigrants’ by Malay politicians when they want to fire up their base. Diaspora, on the other hand, would have aligned the nonMalays with their original homes as a source of identification beyond the nation. But then this is a country where the State speaks of ‘race,’ and the equally fraudulent ‘sons of the soil,’ bumiputera, the indigenous people. The concept of diaspora may be in vogue in the university circles elsewhere; it is a poisonous concept when used locally. If ‘diaspora’ is controversial, so is the more familiar Overseas Chinese. No matter that the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait had, since the fifties, renounced their jurisdiction over the ‘sons and daughters’ living abroad. Change of policy is one thing; the other is diplomatic realism—the need to assure the countries with a substantial Chinese population of the allegiance of their ethnic Chinese citizens. It is a messaging of intentions, an attempt at appeasement, a smoothening of a rough discourse of resentment by the parties concerned. Wang Gungwu’s article ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas,’ published nearly three decades ago, remains influential today.2 Wang gives an elegant typology that breaks up the ethnic Chinese into three groups.

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

155

Group A Chinese, a relatively small group that had become smaller; they maintained links with the politics of China, either directly or indirectly, and were concerned always to identify with the destiny of China. Group B Chinese formed the majority group everywhere; they were hard-headed and realistic and concentrated on making a living in occupations which allowed them to behave openly as ethnic Chinese. In the political sphere, they tended to limit their activities to the low posture and indirect politics of trade, professional and community associations. Group C Chinese were generally committed to the new nation-building politics, even though they remained uncertain of their future as ethnic Chinese and were never sure whether they would ever be fully accepted as loyal nationals.3

Wang also mentions the minority outside these groupings: those who ‘had accepted assimilation and no longer insisted on being known as Chinese.’4 Note that these groups all hold—in varying degrees, with different emotional intensity—a sense of identification with China. The sign of China looms large. What is of concern, though, is Group B Chinese, the most numerous of the three groups. They are local-based, hard-nosed, and pragmatic; their attitude to China is uncertain. They work hard, they are politically docile. The wealthy among them would invest in China, but their hearts and loyalties are with the countries where they have settled. In Malaysia, this is the position of most of the ethnic Chinese. It is not surprising that Wang should reject the term diaspora, for its use is likely ‘to bring tragedy to the Chinese overseas.’5 ‘Diaspora’ and the Overseas Chinese are both inadequate, their sin the insinuation of the ancestral country as the primordial place of belonging. And the tragedy Wang has in mind is political reprisal by the State or worse anti-Chinese riots. Wang’s preferred term is Chinese overseas, which does away with China as a place of cultural and political—especially political—attachment; it emphasizes instead local loyalty so as to allay the fear and resentment of the State and non-Chinese. In all this, China operates as a sign, as a means of communication. The distinguished historian has a point. Chinese Overseas are pragmatic, and ‘Chinese’ is in the phrase an ethnic label, not a fateful notion of the original homeland as diaspora implies. Thus, there is a strong sense of political expediency in the rejection of the term ‘diaspora’ and the adoption of Chinese Overseas. Everyone, include Wang himself, wants their concepts to convey some meaning, to achieve a certain communicative

156

S. YAO

end. Thinking of Mok the builder, he too is aware of the risk of talking about China in a wrong way. So what is China to him, really? I dare say, to him China is a sign that doubles as a figure of desire, and as such is not easily erased. The efforts to blot it out would be like blotting out the Freudian repressed, it would unfailingly return to one’s unconscious. For desire is irrepressible; faced with prohibition it does not go away; desire repressed invariably returns (in another form). But you don’t need to get into the unconscious to know China’s persistent and stubborn presence in his mind. He talks about it; he devotes a good deal of his time to it. This is where I jump off the cliff and land in the choppy waters of doubt and confusion. Everything about the subject is tangled up and hard to unravel. For with someone like Mok, China’s rich connotations tease and titillate, they scorn stability and categorization. As a figure of desire, China cannot be pinned down, yet this is where Mok has invested a powerful sense of belonging. The stage dominates the assembly hall of the Chung Wah Chinese High School, like the pulpit overlooking a congregation. Lit up by a set of fluorescent lights is a large sign, the Chinese word zhong, the first half of Middle-Kingdom. At the floor, curtains are half drawn to cut off the morning glare, and the swish, swish, swish of the ceiling fans sounds like anger. People have been arriving since morning, and they gather in small groups to talk. On the stage, a dozen men and women are moving to their chairs, before them a large table with neatly wrapped books and stationery. Today is the annual prize-giving day, and the school has invited parents and supporters to come and witness the ceremony. Chung Wah Chinese High School is a private school, it does not receive government funding, which gives it a somewhat pariah-like status in the education system. This does not deter the parents, however. Supported by community donors, the school has recruited keen and qualified teachers and that, plus the hard-working students, ensures a high academic standard. Chung Wah is popular among Chinese parents who want their children to have a good education, and to socialize them in the culture of the ancestors. Mok is the chairman of the school board; he gets up and gives his report for the year. His voice quivers with pride; the painting and the overall maintenance have been completed, their costs have stayed within budget; last year has shown an upswing in the demand for places in the boarding school, the number of boarders has increased by almost fifteen

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

157

per cent. And he is pleased with the school team winning the state interschool maths championship, waving the cup in the air for emphasis. The board plans to recruit three more teachers—two for science and one for Chinese language and literature—for the coming year. He finishes by reading a list of donors who have given money and other gifts to the school library. Among the books on the desk are copies of The Malayan Emergency; two copies would go to the library, the rest to other Chinese schools in Kuala Lumpur. … It is an unostentatious event. The fifty or so parents and supporters, the board members who share their drab attire and modest backgrounds, the sensible school report: they say much about the school and its students. Chung Wah School’s donors are shopkeepers, hawkers, hair-salon operators, tradespeople, workers, and labourers. The school, located in Lukut near Port Dickson, is too modest to attract wealthy donors out to buy face and gain social status. Free from such predators, Chung Wah School has kept to its frugal ways: expenses for renovation are argued over at a board meeting, the indoor gym has been approved but is waiting for donations, the basketball court is to be cemented, but the cost would not draw from the reserve fund. The management typifies how Chinese independent schools on the whole are run, and reflects the spirit of the Chinese education movement itself.6 Education is a major story of the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. Since the colonial days, they have had the reputation of investing in their children’s education to the point of obsession. The story of the community-funded Chinese school began with British colonialism, in which the English missionary schools enjoyed a special position.7 At the time—and for some years after independence—to have a child in an English school was a source of pride for the parents. Finishing at an English school more or less guaranteed a job in the government services and in the European firms. Certainly, an English education was the only way to matriculate and enter a local or overseas university. The English schools had tell-tale names: Victoria Institution, Raffles Institution (in Singapore), Methodist Boys’ School, Methodist Girls’ School, Bukit Nanas Convent School, and the various Anglo-Chinese Schools across the peninsula. Run by churches, they turned out young men and women of Christian outlook and proBritish views. British rule even founded in 1905 a Malayan Eton, the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, which admitted, and still does, children of the Malay elite.

158

S. YAO

The British made the education system a part of the system of divide and rule. Besides the English schools, there were the schools that taught in Chinese or in Tamil. Speaking of the Chinese schools, they enjoyed no official patronage. They were funded by the community whose members, rich and poor alike, regarded education with near reverence. This, together with the Chinese talent for self-help, enabled the Chinese schools to enjoy a large degree of autonomy; they were left to decide on the curriculum, the recruitment of teachers, and how the schools were managed. Not surprisingly, the schools were ‘China-focused’; they saw themselves as upholders of Chinese values and traditions. And from the anti-Qing revolution through to the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the subsequent civil war, the schools played their part in transmitting the message of national salvation to the Chinese communities in Malaya and across the South Seas. After Independence in 1957, the cry was for national integration. The education reforms turned the English schools into national-type schools, with full state funding and Malay as the language of instruction and the teaching of a state curriculum. As a concession to community petitions, the national-type primary schools included those taught in Chinese and Tamil. Those secondary schools that opted out of the state system became independent schools; they received no state assistance and relied on community funding as in the old days. That, briefly, is the origin of the two-tiered school system found in Malaysia today. The Chinese independent school tells a fascinating story of British colonialism, the ethnic politics of the postcolonial state, the struggle for cultural and educational rights and, inevitably, the elite competition for the leadership of the Chinese education movement. The speeches at the Chung Wah Chinese High School have been compelling, almost visceral in uniting the speakers and audience in common purpose. Mok has peppered his talk with, ‘We must not forget our culture!,’ ‘We must protect the right to educate our children!’ Other speakers have expressed similar sentiments. The audience clap; some raise their voice, ‘Yes! Yes! We have the right to educate our children!.’ A clandestine sentiment has risen from a board meeting devoted to reporting the mundane tasks of running a school. For Roland Barthes, history writes itself (in the manner of ‘facts speak for themselves’).8 A literary theorist, he saw history as narrative, one that keeps company with fiction, myth, and the ancient epics. And history, in every aspect, carries the author’s presence. If history, Barthes would

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

159

argue, is to be read as discourse, as a literary form, then it cannot be but a thing of the author’s labour and desire. The apparent objectivity, the transparency of historical truth, is achieved by the artful concealment of the writer’s design and purpose. On the whole, though, Barthes avoids this talk of the aims and designs of a historical discourse. For the authorial presence features in traces, in shards of signs, not in formal, recognizable intimations. Since history conceals, the best approach is to make historical referents stand outside the discourse that shape them. Historical discourse supposes, one might say, a double operation, one that is extremely complex. In the first phase, at one point (this decomposition is, of course, only metaphorical), the referent is detached from the discourse, it becomes exterior to it, grounds it and is supposed to ground it … but in a second phase, it is the signified itself which is repulsed, merged in the referent; the referent enters into direct relation with the signifier, and the discourse, meant only to express the real, believes it elides the fundamental term of imaginary structures, which is the signified.9

Historical events have to be wrenched out of the womb of discourse, so that they appear in the world innocent, naked. Note the two-stepped manoeuvre. First the referent’s detachment from what authorizes its meaning and significations. Next the referent’s return to its signifier in the system of discourse; and discourse, lest we forget, is ‘solely charged with expressing the real.’ The result is that ‘“objective” history, the “real” is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent.’10 Against these manoeuvres, Barthes would return to the philosophic suspicion of conventional epistemology. He quoted Nietzsche who said: ‘There are no facts in themselves. It is always necessary to begin by introducing a meaning in order that there can be a fact.’11 To which Barthes adds: In history as discourse, ‘what is noted derives from the notable, … from what is worthy of being noted.’12 What chance of understanding history do we stand against discourse’s elaborate conceit? Or, for that matter, how do we penetrate the depth of Mok’s diasporic longing, a longing that implicates the sign of China pathetically out of place in contemporary Malaysia? It is easy to think of Mok’s ‘return to China’ as antiquated, even Quixotic. But we do that only when we have decided on the redundancy of ‘China,’ a redundancy forged to sharpness by the conventional historical discourse. Mok’s yearning is

160

S. YAO

out of sync with current geopolitics, it defies the local national ethos: these are the ‘real’ torn from the womb of ‘objective history,’ to mimic Barthes. This is the heart of it: When the discourse of Overseas Chinese or Chinese Overseas is ‘solely charged with expressing the real,’ the horse has already bolted, the real has been going through another round of transmutation. The real does not wait passively for the deadly hand of empirical verification. I cannot forget how, in a conversation, Mok is wont to take me to revisit the ‘timeless China’ of the Orientalist cliché. It is a cliché of his own invention, as much as one garnered from the time-tested narrative of ancient China. We both attended Chinese independent schools; I in Kuala Lumpur, he in Penang at the Chung Ling High School. What we learned consisted of large measures of Chinese culture and literature, both modern and classical. We learnt by heart the geography of the Chinese provinces, we read passages from Sima Qian’s monumental Record of History that chronicled the courtly intrigues and the changes of dynasties, and we were made to memorize sections of the Confucius Analects, Dao De Qing, the poetry of the Sung and Tang periods. The anthology we studied in the literature class also included the modern voices: selected readings from works from the May Fourth movement of 1919—Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary, Ba Jin’s Family, Spring, Autumn Trilogy, Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia’s Diary. Mok tells me he has forgotten much of what he read. But I dare say the classic texts have left their mark on the modest builder. He may not have remembered the ancient classics, but he can easily recite a line or two of a Tu Fu poem, and certainly Li Bai’s classroom staple, ‘Thought on a Quiet Night.’ His dusty voice would ‘sing’: Chuáng qián míngyuè gu¯ang, Yí shì dìshang shu¯ang, ‘A pool of moonlight before my bed; I give in to the thought it is frost on the floor …’. His eyes dim as he struggles to call up the last two stanzas. There is pleasure in his voice, and a sense of pride for being able to remember the poem after all these years. Listening to Mok, it makes me think that our inclination for things Chinese is both a delight and an ideological trap. We are humbled by the narrative of timeless China, by the idea that, from dynasty to dynasty, the single polity, China, remained undauntedly supreme under Heaven. And what it tells, shapes and defines us. This is the wonderment of the sign of China, if less so the real thing. I am not sure if Mok has an image of China ‘as a static empire congenitally unsuited both to the political form of the modern nation-state and to

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

161

modern capitalism,’ as the historian Hui Wang puts it.13 But that is the academic take, what fills his thoughts is ‘cultural China,’ the China of cultural and civilizational power and influence. On China and the South Seas, Mok has this to say: China has imposed its power on its people overseas thorough culture, not through military force. You know when the Ming Admiral Cheng Ho visited Southeast Asia but never conquered any land and made them colonies like the British. He showed the prestige of the empire, and sought the local Sultan’s submission. For the Chinese emperor it was enough that the Sultans would acknowledge him as the First Emperor Under Heaven.

Chinese hegemony was all diplomacy and soft power, so he intimates. You feel like launching into protest. You feel like reminding him: What about Xinjiang which had to be conquered and pacified by troops of farmer-soldiers under tough, legendary commanders? Tibet was a story of military occupation and population control. Let us not even talk about the genocidal violence in the suppression of rebellions and uprisings throughout Chinese history. Thinking so, the interrogator turns out to be equally rhetorical, equally polemical. Mok is a small-town house builder, he is merely retelling what he learned, which he glosses with his folksy interpretation. He has been too good a product of the Chinese school, for what he rehearses is a major strand of the ideology of the traditional Chinese State. Hui Wang also writes in China from Empire to Nation-State: [The] majority of Chinese scholars do not agree that it is possible to discuss European empires and Chinese dynasties on the same terms, and argue that China and its world model largely depend on a model of assimilation through culture and ritual and “kingly transformation” (wang hua), through the virtue of the sovereign, of peoples from afar. According to this argument, China is different from empires based on military conquest such as the Roman Empire, Mongol Empire, or Ottoman Empire.14

Call it Chinese exceptionalism, the view that the Chinese empire ruled by culture and ritual, and by the moral excellence of the sovereign. The result is the prominent view that ‘Chinese dynasties utilize Confucian scholars and the gentry class as a unique set of intermediaries for State rule, and “culture” plays a far more powerful role than military conquest.’15

162

S. YAO

What Mok holds true is a mirror of the orthodox Chinese statecraft. For a Chinese cultural nationalist, this is the only position to take. You want to believe this legacy of the ancestral country, which gives pride to one looking from afar. In this sense, the question of whether this is true or a self-willed delusion matters less than the emotional power it carries. They say the best time to visit China is autumn, around October and November; the sultry summer heat would be over, the air fresh and cool. I plan to go to Dabu county to visit my elder sister and to interview folks of our lineage, and Mok hopes to attend the Canton Trade Fair held each year in mid-October. For both of us it is very much mixing work with pleasure. And we agree, almost daring ourselves, to meet up in a place in western China—a foreign, exotic place for us southerners from the tropics. We pick Xi’an, the city of terracotta warriors and the capital of the Qin empire, and go our separate ways. In Dabu, my sister is ecstatic with her stepbrother’s return and reminds me of the pork lard in a sealed kerosene tin we sent from Malaysia that had kept her family alive during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Our relatives are busy renovating their houses, some turning them into mini-McMansions. They are rich in cash, and government subsidies are especially generous this year. I go from house to house, in each is an uncle or aunt who remembers the illustrious branch of the Yao clan who went to the South Seas and brought wealth back to the village. At the ancestral home, I retrace my steps and follow what my grandmother told me of the place. The rooms at the western wing: this must be where secondgrandmother lived, childless—my eldest sister was born of the adopted son—and tainting the house with her magnificent discontentment. My own grandmother’s quarters were at the eastern wing; they are dusty and derelict and no one lives there. In the old pictures, the open courtyard before the house looks grand and spacious, but it is actually small. My kinfolks tell me stories of great suffering and periodic peace and happiness. And they reminisce about my grandfather’s house, its walls and chambers marked with the disgruntlement of his two wives, his two households— while revolution and violence were closing in. The era of hunger and brutal collectivization has been over for a long time. But my mind, almost by instinct, goes back to those years my grandmother told me about. And what she told me is confirmed by my eldest sister from grandfather’s other family, sobbing as she tells me of what she had gone through. Mok calls on WeChat and sends me texts and images. He too has gone to his ancestral home, his is in Fuzhou city, in Fujian province. And

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

163

his feeling I share and understand: the exuberant welcoming, looking for oneself on the lineage chart, the overdosing of sentiment followed by a feeling of deflation. His family home, I notice, is unrenovated: an image of broken tiles, age-worn roofing, and dust-smeared ancestral hall. So his ancestral home has fared less well than ours. His relatives had not looked after it, he texts, letting chickens roost at the ancestral hall. Nonetheless he is happy to be back. It has been three years since his last visit. ‘You know what they say, a year away is a minute in China’; things change in a blink of the eye in the old country. It is wonderful to meet again his relatives—wage-earners, shopkeepers, prosperous small factory owners; a nephew works for the tech giant Tencent in Shenzhen. His place is too far away from the city, but he is sure Fuzhou’s real estate prices would eventually catch up and make everyone in the small town rich. The Xi’an City Wall has stood so well the ravages of time that it has taken on the look of a movie set. In the distance, it is a plump, craggy hunk of stones and mortar. Up close you almost expect to see Chow Yun Fatt clad in armour leaving the gate on a chariot, wind sweeping his handsome face, while thousands of PLA extras cheer and wait for the signal to march on the marauding horsemen an arrow’s flight away. The city wall is the outer shell of a fortress-city, which gives Xi’an a cold, martial air. Standing on the rampart, you look down on the grand city road leading to the gate, a monstrous structure of awe and defence. There are eight of these gates, below me is the Heping Gate, the gate of keeping peace. Xi’an is steeped in the practicalities of war and unflinching action. Soft power and rule by moral influence are as distant as ever. And Xi’an was worth defending. One of the first cities of the Silk Road on the central plain, it was rich and a major trading centre in ancient China. A tour group passes by, the guide’s voice drones on: that set of buildings were granaries that sustained life during a siege; the slew of low houses over there—these were government stations from which health inspectors and sanitation engineers left each morning to carry out their duties; the grand examination hall is at the far end of the city gate, thousands of candidates had come to try their luck, some for the umpteenth times, to get a shot at entering the bureaucratic services. The boutique hotels, the cafes, and restaurants near the city gate, the office buildings—they do not erase the city’s ancient, antiquated look. On the rampart, I recognize the gaunt figure and the jaunting steps of one not given to leisurely meandering. Mok and I find a bench and sit down to talk and compare notes. It is easy for us to delve into the

164

S. YAO

joy of homecoming and other more uncertain feelings. My eldest sister’s family told me about the food parcels and medicine we sent back, but her letters had asked for more—ginseng, vitamin tablets, a camera, a sewing machine, a few luxuries to make the hard life bearable, and my mother had replied, ‘You think we are a gold mine that pours out its wealth?’ At times it felt like we were suffering from mercy fatigue, I remember. ‘Now they don’t need us anymore, not really. It is a different time, and I never knew what to bring each time I came back—except perhaps durian biscuits. I dare say our folks have fewer financial worries then us,’ he observes. He is glad to be back, to revisit the ancestral home and the wholesale tea business his great grandfather started. But there is a troubling feeling that his relatives, prosperous and well-looked after, have cast him aside. His offer to pay for the renovation of the local primary school was gently brushed aside; the county office would take care of it. He feels the presents he has brought back are never grand enough for his relatives who have sons and daughter working in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. And then he confesses that his Malaysian Putonghua, with its sprinkle of Malay and English expressions, makes him uncomfortable when conversing with the locals. He is gradually being made a stranger in his ancestral homeland, he implies. There seems no way out of it. Diasporic regrets and longings work on our heart and urge our return. Yet, when we return, we face a new reality which alters your sense of longing and the meaning of ‘China’ itself. Perversely, we almost miss those difficult days when the folk at home wanted all kinds of things, when they regarded us a fount of abundant wealth. ‘Are our gifts not good enough, when in the past you had begged and beseeched for things even we couldn’t afford?.’ But soon the truth hits us: the demands for things had made us feel wanted, and being wanted had filled the vacuity of our yearning. Mok’s complicated life and needs demonstrate that a diaspora can love and blame the homeland in equal measures. China and the sign of it have reached out and enticed him with their siren call, promising to deliver what he sorely misses. People are made by what they desire, including the desires of others. For Mok, each time he goes back, his sense of longing is diminished by the realities of post-Deng China. The experience fills us with dismay: those at the homeland no longer need him, they have moved on while he is stalled in the past. But, of course, Mok too has moved on, though he does not quite know it. His chairmanship at the Chung Wah

9

THE DIASPORA RETURNS

165

School, his involvement in the Chinese education movement, his nostalgia for things of Cultural China have sustained him. Yet, they have allied him with a set of values that are politically risky in Malaysia, outmoded in some quarters of contemporary China. The ancestral as a foreign country: it is a thought he finds near impossible to reconcile with. Then he remembers: he has prepared the ground and built a home in the South Seas. It is a positive step, the backtracking, he knows he has a life in Malaysia, and he is his own person with his work and his family. The other homeland is a place of occasional visits, and that is good enough.

Notes 1. Souchou Yao, Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016. 2. Wang Gungwu, ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas’, The China Quarterly, 136, 1993, pp. 926–948. 3. Ibid., p. 940. 4. Ibid. 5. Shelly Chan, ‘The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience’, Journal of Asian Studies 74 (1), 2015, pp. 107–128. 6. See Ang Ming Chee, The Chinese Education Movement in Malaysia. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales - CLACSO, 2009. A fluent account of the current language school in Malaysia can be found in Saran Kaur Gill, Language Policy Challenges in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia. New York: Springer, 2014. 7. See Leslie N. O’Brien, ‘Education and Colonialism: The Case of Malaya’, ANZJS 16 (2), 1980, pp. 53–61. 8. Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, in Rustle of Language, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 9. Ibid., pp. 138–139. 10. Ibid. p. 139. 11. Ibid., p. 138; Barthes gave no bibliographical details for the quote. 12. Ibid. 13. Wang Hui, China from Empire to Nation-State. Translated by Michael Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. viii. 14. Ibid., p. 35. 15. Ibid, pp. 35–36.

Bibliography Ang, Ming Chee. 2009. The Chinese Education Movement in Malaysia. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales - CLACSO.

166

S. YAO

Barthes, Roland. 1989. ‘The Discourse of History’, in Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 127–141. Chan, Shelly. 2015. ‘The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience.’ Journal of Asian Studies 74 (1): 107–128. Gill, Saran Kaur. 2014. Language Policy Challenges in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia. New York: Springer. O’Brien, Leslie N. 1980. ‘Education and Colonialism: The Case of Malaya.’ ANZJS 16 (2): 53–61. Wang, Gungwu. 1993. ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas.’ The China Quarterly 136: 926–948. Yao, Souchou. 2016. Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

CHAPTER 10

Scars of Memory

We had met before in her terrace house in Ampang, near Kuala Lumpur. That was a short visit, and since then, I have been thinking through what she had said—some of it startling, some of it rehearsing the familiar themes of anti-colonial revolution and the great sacrifice of her comrades. So this is an anthropologist revisiting the field. The last visit took up an afternoon, now we’ve agreed that we would spend a day, or two if necessary. At greater leisure, we would take a peek at her inner life, to re-examine her experience as a jungle fighter. In my mind, I fear what I have written about her was too tidy, too well stitched up, and does not do justice to her eventful life. There’s something else. With her age and aliments, I feel a sense of urgency. I decided I should see her sooner rather than later—to make a record of her remarkable life, to share some time with her perhaps for the last time. I rang her and she agreed to see me. We planned to take our time, and the interview actually ended up taking a whole weekend—from Saturday till Monday morning. I got a room in a hotel nearby, and each morning would lug my laptop and a Sony digital recorder and took a taxi to her house. In her sitting room, going from question to question, answer to answer, the interview had the sensation of flight. But we were disciplined and soon returned to our discussion. After our first morning together, I began to feel encumbered by the laptop and the recording device—clumsy electronic bricks on the coffee table—and gave them up. Thus we talked © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5_10

167

168

S. YAO

freely, pausing only for tea and a short break. We spoke in Putonghua (Mandarin), with a sprinkling of English and Malay. In the late afternoon, when there seemed little else to say, we stopped. Back in the hotel I would write a summary of the day’s conversation, and the next day we would read it together to make sure it got to the heart of our discussion. On each transcript, I would add my comments and clarifications. The result is the following, with my translation. I arrive in the morning, and in the early light her house is a place of bourgeois solidity. After the signing of the 1989 Peace Agreement between the MCP (the Malayan Communist Party) and the Thai and the Malaysian Governments, Xiao Hong was allowed to return to Malaysia, and her niece, a wealthy real estate broker, has let her stay in a house she owns in a gated community.1 It is quite a transition from the Peace Village in southern Thailand where the ex-communists settled, to the terrace house in Ampang, with marble flooring and air-conditioning and a balcony overlooking the garden. She has never married, and lives alone save for the maid Maria, from Timor. Her relatives are scattered over the city—some come to visit but most, uneasy with her background, stay away. The maid takes me to the large, cluttered sitting room. My eyes catch once more the floral cushions on the sofa, the rattan chairs, the glasstopped desk with a small pile of writing paper, a copy of the Chinese daily the Nanyang Siang Pao, some opened letters. Pressed against the wall is a display cabinet filled with books, souvenirs, and bottles of Chinese white spirit. The Haier television on top of the entertainment centre is new. On the wall above the entertainment centre is a red silk embroidered picture of a horse in gallop, a gift her friend brought back from Xinjiang, China. I tell her, in the way of making conversation, ‘I saw a lot of these embroideries in the market in Kashgar, but I didn’t buy one.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ Xiao Hong says, laughing, ‘It’s a gift, Maria had hung it up—to remind me of China, she said.’ We sit down and begin our interview. Yao: One of your great sacrifices as a communist is that you had to break contacts with your family and friends. You had to sever the connections in order to protect them. And things like your birthplace, your parents and siblings, even places where you had worked were of great interest to the Special Branch. As a revolutionary, you were a new person and you had to think about—to reassess—the old attachments. Was this how you felt when you joined the movement? The great cause was one thing, there was also the separation from normal social relationships. I

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

169

mean, when you think about it, the revolution had been for you and your comrades a series of alienations: alienation from ordinary life, from you family, and finally from the national history itself. Communists like you have been torn out of the nation’s story. Xiao Hong: You are not wrong in thinking personal sacrifices have been for us a major cost of revolution. Certainly, the alienation, the breaking of contacts with our parents, the clandestine life were painful and bitter. Looking back, I think these had struck as deep in the heart as the fear of being captured or the starvation at the camps. We did not talk about these things, not openly anyhow. But the first months in the jungle, I cried most nights, lying on the mattress and pressing my face against the pillow. It was self-pity and poor discipline, I told myself. Still, the tears and self-pity were more real to me than the lectures and the study sessions. You have to remember I was only in my late teens when I went into the jungle. The thinking was, there’s the party, and there were my private thoughts and feelings. Like all young recruits, we soon learned discipline, and tried to quash these feelings as soon as they arose. I have never seriously tried to analyse my thoughts and doubts. I had accused myself of being weak, of being sentimental, and I was aware if the party knew about how I felt, I would be reprimanded, or put before the struggling session. Now I think the party should allow such personal feelings, rather than accuse people of petite bourgeoise behaviour. At least in the conscious level, we believed in the party, and in putting aside our private needs. How would the opening of private feelings impact on revolutionary work? The question was never discussed. To be torn out of history—it was on every level our experience. The government prosecution and killing erased you from the living, from a society too quick to forget you and the cause you had given your life to. The revolution had its logic and tactics. It demanded commitment and sacrifices, which was like tearing you out of history, out of the ordinary life. I have never thought of it in these terms. Perhaps too much of the personal life has been neglected, forbidden even, by the movement. I don’t know; the revolution shouldn’t have come to that. Yao: There’s an Italian writer, his name is Primo Levi, who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Let me read you what he said; ‘I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work … gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.

170

S. YAO

At Auschwitz I quite often observed a curious phenomenon. The need for lavoro ben fatto—“work properly done”—is so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores “properly.” The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months hated Germans, their food, their language, their war; but when they sent him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out of obedience but out of professional dignity.’2 Perhaps the Italian writer’s observation would help to explain the kind of dilemma you were facing. The party demanded commitment and sacrifices, and giving one’s life is the final expression of one’s revolutionary fervour. The Cause before the personal. This was built in Lenin’s model of the party cadres. They were professionals, well-indoctrinated and committed to lead the rank and file; a party cadre had no personal life. I know this is very much a communist legend, a romantic ideal. So personal sacrifice is as much a matter of tactics as it is a matter of ideology. Like Primo Levi’s Italian bricklayer, professionalism would save a revolutionary from dithering, so to speak, from wayward thinking and actions. Xiao Hong: I know about the special position of a party cadre. At the camp, they were the first who volunteered for any dangerous mission; they led the study sessions and they drilled in our head the idea of revolution and sacrifice. Lenin was not mentioned; I think they were trying to keep the subject local. In any case, there was little revolutionary theory as such; everything was directed to how to fight the British, how to improve people’s living when we gained independence. ‘To seize history’ was something practical, something to be achieved. We were fighting a rice bowl revolution, the party told us. We were busy with studying, with drills and weapon maintenance, and making patrols. But there were also plenty of downtimes. We talked, always careful not to say things that would be construed as ‘petite bourgeoise.’ Some of us were unhappy with the lack of food, the hardship, the tedium of daily drills, and the waiting. But we kept that to ourselves. I remember at night in the tent I shared with others, my head was full of thoughts: how I missed my family, panic when we sighted a bomber that flew over us deep in the jungle. And there were things that concerned us young women: the sanitary pads of rough paper, the fear that we would end up like some of the older comrades, unmarried and childless. Your mind never stopped, so it felt at times.

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

171

No, there were plenty of private thoughts. Later, when I got older I read Mao Zedong’s work on the peasants and how to fight a guerrilla war. But that was for the party leadership who were concerned with tactics and organization. But we were more concerned with ordinary things: how to get news from outside, sharing food with others, how to keep our spirits. At the end, I think, that is what revolution meant to us—the basic, decent everyday things that would help us to survive. Yao: It is interesting that you talked of hardship, the fear of the enemy, the tedium of camp life; the issue of survival you have raised in passing. But the issue of survival must be overwhelming for you and your comrades. I mean survival in both the physical and psychological sense. Let’s talk about food and supplies. Did the civilian support team reach you at the camp? You grew vegetables, I suppose, and people would shoot a deer or an elephant when they had the chance. I assume food must be a top priority. That’s one thing. But survival is also about how to draw on your inner strength and resources. What struck me with your story is the inward looking, the sense of solitude, that must have affected you greatly. I mean, you were people from the outside world. You and your comrades were in a society of your own. You were under threat, you had to be vigilant about army patrols and ambushes. Not only the camp life, the communist movement itself was full of secrets. It sent agents out to collect information, to seek supplies. And the police had their informants in the villages, some even infiltrated the camps. To survive you had to be a bit paranoid and imagine enemies were everywhere. Let me ask you: What was it like living like this day in and day out? Did your existence make you look deeply into yourself and ask yourself: ‘The sacrifices, the hardship, the isolation—are they worth it?’ Xiao Hong: I guess I know what you mean. About food supply: yes, we rarely had enough. It was semi-starvation much of the time. The civil support brought food—rice, beans, and dried salted fish that went bad in the humidity. Yes, we grew vegetables, fast-growing crops like sweet potatoes, you fried the leaves—awful, mushy stuff on your plate. When we killed an elephant—we had to be careful with the gunshot—it would be a feast. We cut the meat into strips and dried them in the sun. It’s always a battle to preserve any food in the jungle. Yes, it was clear to me our survival was more than a matter of food, of keeping healthy. Food and survival were important, but you had to keep the wider perspective. We were helping to bring about a new society, we

172

S. YAO

were trying to beat the British. These too were our aims. Our lives were ruled by a singular purpose: to build a socialist Malaya. Talk about food and survival were a distraction, but who didn’t think about these things? Sometimes I said to myself, ‘You are thinking too much,’ and then the idea came to me: ‘Will the future go the way the Party had planned?’. And a flicker of doubt came to your mind—and that was a big deal. Someone in a study session once said: ‘What is the point of survival when the revolution fails?’ She was immediately corrected; revolution was also about faith—faith in the party, faith in the future the party would bring about. The revolution was everything and personal survival a minor issue. Against the party’s success, our own survival was as nothing. You asked me how do I assess my life, if I regret the sacrifices. Regret is not the right word. For I cannot change the past. I was eighteen when I went to the jungle, we wanted to fight the British, we were also swept up by the circumstances of the time. We were angry with our poverty and feeling powerless before the government and the capitalists. Mostly it was just pure anger, an anger without a cause. Something gnawing you inside. That’s how I felt a lot of the time. It was as if fate, or some mysterious force had put a finger on you—for no reason at all. Now, in my old age, the thoughts come full circle. There are nights when the mind goes over and over what we had gone through. Perhaps it is unworthy of me. For me and my women comrades, our sacrifices are in terms of a series of denials: we had been shut off from society, we had missed the opportunities to live a young woman’s existence; we were denied the opportunities of courtship, of falling in love, of having children. If you ask my friends, they would say the same thing. They would say: Our great regret was to spend our youth in the jungle. By the time we left, we were in our fifties or even sixties. We were denied marriage and childbirth; the revolution had failed us. Yao: You were politicized in the sixties. By ‘politicized’ I mean something more than thinking about power and government or being an activist. I mean a general awareness of the society and the oppressive forces that bore down on people’s lives. I am asking you about something personal, an attitude. The fifties and sixties were tumultuous times. Over the period, Malaya got independence, the Emergency was going on; there were the anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, there was the Vietnam War. Did these events affect you and your thinking? Did they contribute to your decision on joining the party and becoming a revolutionary?

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

173

Xiao Hong: I was born in 1937, I was eighteen when I joined the party. I had just finished three years of high school at the Kuen Cheng Girls’ School. My first job was as a seamstress, I left when I felt I had learned the skill. My mother said, ‘It is best working for yourself, there’s more money in it and you own your business.’ I took her advice and bought a sewing machine and set up shop in the rented room on top of a shophouse. The upstairs was divided by wooden boards, each room had a single bed and a few simple furniture, and just enough room to set up something like a sewing machine. The other tenants were like me, young working women trying to make a living, to seek a direction in life. They went to work in the morning and left me. I was happy being alone, working on my sewing machine, with the radio to keep me company. When they came home, they brought happiness to the place of closequarter living. Some went out to get something from the food stall, others cooked rice and a few dishes at the kitchen near the balcony. We ate and talked and laughed and exchanged news; how glad we were for being alive! If one of us met a young man or was about to go out on a date after dinner, no one kept it a secret. And we listened to the radio, we shared the film magazines and newspapers. We were all movie fans, and the magazines from Hong Kong were full of news of our favourite stars and their latest films. Our English was poor, so we were not into Hollywood movies. Yao: So having been educated in the Chinese school, and not knowing English had put you in a different world … Xiao Hong: You have to understand education in a Chinese school was a whole different experience that changed you, made you what you were. On cinema: we were drawn to the Great Wall and Feng Huang Film Studios that produced leftist, progressive films. There the ‘patriotic’ directors turned out film with realistic treatment of life in an office or in a factory in the British colony. We never went to see Shaw Brothers’ sickly sentimental melodramas or the kungfu fighting films. The Great Wall films were full of soul-searching by a factory worker, or a young secretary in an office played by one of Great Wall’s glamorous stars. You would not know her; Xia Meng was beautiful and feisty, Great Wall’s most celebrated star. I remember when she came to Kuala Lumpur, I took a day off to join the fans at the airport. I elbowed in and got her to sign my autograph book. When I got home I showed the proud trophy to my friends. … You see in those days, the Emergency laws forbade demonstrations and leftist publications. But public demonstrations and labour protests took

174

S. YAO

place with or without a police permit, and there were simply too many leftist books and newspaper articles propounding ‘progressive views’ for the authorities to keep track of. In May 1954, I recall, there were student demonstrations in Singapore against the introduction of national service. I didn’t go as I didn’t want to cause trouble for my parents, but my heart was with the students. How shall I put it: it was an intense feeling, the students and I were of similar age, they were engaging in a great cause and I wanted to be a part of it. It is remarkable that a young, educated woman like Xiao Hong should have at the time accessible to her a literary culture both modern and progressive. The Chinese schools had a frugal and modest foundation. Funded by the Chinese community, they taught a curriculum of modern learning and a mixture of contemporary literature and traditional Chinese classics. Children of small shopkeepers, hawkers, and labourers went to the Chinese schools. If a Chinese education shut them off from the world of Connie Francis and Elvis Presley, and the Anglophilia of Sunday School and novels of John Buchan, John Blackmore, and Rudyard Kipling, it nonetheless gave the students a medley of cultural nationalism, Chinese identity, and a sense of life’s grave purposes. Besides the magazines and newspapers, so she told me, Xiao Hong also read and enjoyed immensely the modern Western classics—Gogol, Turgenev, Jack London, Ibsen, Zola—that came out of the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and were available at the New World Bookshop at Petaling Street near where she lived. It is nice to think that a work like Ba Jin’s Family, Spring, Autumn Trilogy would find a powerful echo in Madam Bovary; they share the protagonists’ cry for personal freedom, for making their own existential choices. How wonderful it is to think that a young Malayan-Chinese woman, a simple seamstress, was moved to tears by Chekov or Flaubert rendered into the Chinese language. The Great Wall Studio films were enjoyable and slyly instructive, as were the newspapers. In the leisure hours after dinner, she would pore over a copy of the China Press or the Nanyang Siang Pao, picking through the headline news, the local scandals, the movie star gossip, and finishing up with the supplement. The supplement—fuzhang—was one or more pages inserted in the paper, dealing with light, practical issues. It offered business advice, tips on personal grooming, film reviews, and it included a literary forum which published essays, poems, and short stories written by in-house writers and sent in by readers. Xiao Hong was captivated by the literary

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

175

forum. These writings were full of distinctive, leftist themes of the workers’ plight, of public protests over harsh government actions of one form or another. Often they took a critical stance against both Chinese tradition and colonial society. In the dusty hold of the National University of Singapore library, ‘patriotism,’ ‘new cultural movement,’ ‘enlightenment,’ and ‘freedom’ leapt from the pages of these newspapers like sleeping insects disturbed. This fair example appeared in the fuzhang pages in the Nanyang Siang Pao of 13th May 1954. (p. 5). May May, the piteous May. The hot breath blowing across the land Makes me remember the ‘May Fourth’ of another time. Why did people stand up to the guns? Why did people fill the prisons? They are the sparks of the Chinese race – the eternal brilliance of our race! May, the piteous May. Windless, it will not unsettle and disturb. This is the ancient wisdom of the Great Wall; This is the revival of the Chinese national spirit. May, the piteous May. The sun of midsummer makes for a miserable life My dear one: In the dark recess against the wall Let us talk about our own story of May.3

Typical of the leftist Malayan-Chinese writing of the time, May is full of naïve lyricism and nationalist longing, with barely disguised references to the other May event in China, the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Chinese modernity was the inspiration for the struggle in the colony.4 And here is a poem that calls for blood and confrontation, with a feminist thrust. Girls in White Skirts The girls are dancing, the girls are singing. This one is running, that one is leaping. Bodies as agile as eagles. The girls with long pleated hair. The red smiling faces. Like a red ripe apple. In the hearts flow hot blood

176

S. YAO

of justice, passion and unrivalled strength. The blood on your feet stains the mud and sand you walk on. Sending consoling words to the miserable farmer. Your bold cries pierce the cloud and touch the wounded souls. On the stage of candlelight. In the voices that behold the glory of our culture and race. Among the people thirsting for hope. The girls in white skirts, how glorious you are. You say that a comfortable life puts a chain on progressive ideas. Glorious learning comes from the people, their pain, their misfortune, their sickness, their death. You will sweep these sufferings from the world. You have thrust your bodies to the furnace. Bravely endured the heat and the refining fire. You say that fish cannot separate from water, a person cannot leave the people. We march forward, and break the cage of individualism. You walk the glorious path of martyrs. In the tropics the bright sun and evening stars are like the torch of liberty and happiness – reflections in your eyes.5

Here also is the code for socialism and the cry for political change, in which Mao’s ‘fish and water’ metaphor for guerrilla tactics makes a sly appearance. The argument for a new position for women is made, but the call for revolutionary violence is unmistakable—all the bloody feet and red-stained sand and mud. Putting the body to the furnace refers to the refinement of personal commitment in the fire of revolutionary action, an echo of Nikolay Ostrovsky’s 1932 novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, regarded at the time as the iconic novel of socialist realism. Yao: The students were in the forefront of anti-government demonstrations. The May 1954 demonstration was against the national service; if put in place it would bid the young students against the Communist insurgents. It would be like a kind of ‘civil war,’ ‘a war between brothers.’ The students’ feelings were understandable. You studied three years in high school, you were fifteen or so when you finished. What was student life like? Can you say it affected you politically? The British and the Malayan governments had accused the Chinese schools of being a hotbed of subversion. The Chinese schools were a part of the network that spread propaganda and turned the students into terrorists, so the official lines went.

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

177

Xiao Hong: We never thought of what we did at school as ‘political activities,’ they were what we did as young people. In picking the movies, my friends and I always went for the Great Wall movies because they were ‘serious,’ they dealt with subjects that meant something to us. When recommended a film or a book, we asked, ‘Is it a serious film? or ‘Is it a meaningful book?’. Serious, meaningful: they suggest the film or the book is not frivolous, sentimental, or deals with an erotic subject, what we called Yellow Culture in those days. We were young, naïve. Looking back, perhaps some of the things we got ourselves into were not too innocent. Let me tell you about my school days. Each month the US Embassy used to send us magazines to be distributed at school. I was the class monitor, when a bundle came to our class I would, without thought, throw the magazine over the floor. I did this in the recess time, and the students would pick them up and did mock fights with them, treating them as trash. Why did I do this? Because they came from the US Embassy, which was sign enough the magazines were not ‘serious,’ they were imperialistic propaganda. And, of course, they were full of pictures of American soldiers on a ‘hearts and minds’ mission in a village, building a well or giving medical aid to villagers. Or they would show the Vietnamese President opening a highway or inspecting troops on parade. I suppose we were protesting against the American action in Southeast Asia. In the school holidays, the whole class would go for an outing. Mostly we went to Port Dickson, because it was near the sea and not too far from Kuala Lumpur. We would rent a bungalow, and our activities were all about team building. I led a team that organized the cooking, the sing-song sessions, and the study groups. There were no teachers, we did all this ourselves. And someone suggested we should have a ‘criticism session’ each day to correct students’ bad behaviour. The worst were disobeying house rules and generally lacking in team spirit. Afternoon was free, but one must not miss lunch. Once, after the morning study session I went to the beach and met some Malay students and joined them for nasi lemak—coconut rice—in their tent; I didn’t come back for lunch and had to confess to my individualistic behaviour in the ‘criticism session.’ And I was the class monitor! Yao: The outing was full of programmes, study sessions. What were they about? Xiao Hong: I was deep in the games, even the ‘self-criticism’ sessions. As a leader I just went with the flow. I made sure the sing-songs and

178

S. YAO

games stuck to appropriate subjects. The songs were usually Great Wall movie tunes. The quiz games took some thinking. I made sure they would focus on the ‘progressive writers.’ We had already read, in Chinese translation, passages from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island at school. The quizzes would ask about the characters and the plots of these novels. When I put in a question, it was usually on a novel I’d just read: ‘Who wrote Around the World in Eighty Days ?’ Only the nerdy and excitable San Ling got the right answer: ‘Jules Verne! Jules Verne!’. If these were consciousness raising, there was no talk of Mao or Marx. We were young, but we were not so naïve as not to know these were taboo subjects. I can’t say if we were really being politicized. There was always a lot of talk, a lot of whispers about the students and how they behaved. I remember during the Port Dickson outing, how the inner and outer groups were quickly formed. The inner group consisted of those who were deemed ‘serious’—they led and soon took over the quiz and the scheduling of programmes. They sussed out the suitable members and rejected those who lacked earnestness. I would often find a small group in an upstairs room, looking sheepish when I opened the door, giving me a ‘get away’ look. I let them be, feeling hurt I was not included, whatever the gathering was for. Many years after, I heard Ai Ling, the leader of that gathering, had gone to the jungle. So I guess there was some truth about the communist influence, that the party was using the Chinese school to seek out recruits. Yao: You did not join the movement during your school years. When you did, you were out of school—about sixteen or seventeen. How did you come to join the revolution and end up in a jungle camp? Xiao Hong: It happened fairly quickly, actually. One day, my mother phoned. I was to come back immediately, she said, it was something very urgent. The family—my parents, and elder sister and two younger brothers—lived on a small farm in Kajang. When I reached home, everyone was crying; my elder sister had been arrested by the police for working with the communists. My sister was a shop assistant, a fan of Xia Meng like me, and she was a communist? I couldn’t believe it. Then it began to make sense to me: her frequent trips away, the exhausted look when she returned, her foraging in the back garden for something she had put away. She was a courier, a member of the civilian support network in Kajang. But none of us had suspected that. And the police had come to look for her; she and I, a year younger and her mostly likely ‘coconspirator,’ were to report to the police station. The party had already

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

179

advised Mei Huang—that’s my sister’s name given by the party—to take to the jungle for safety, and I was to go with her to avoid arrest. There was not much time, the police were sure to come back soon. It was all in a rush; we packed a few things, freed ourselves from our mother’s embrace, and went outside to a small lorry waiting for us. It was the dead of the night, the lorry drove deep into the bushes, stopped and we continued the journey on foot. We—my sister and I, and two comrades who were our guides—walked for hours until we reached the camp. There I began the next phase of my life. My sister later returned to carry out revolutionary work in the New Villages and saw the family occasionally. I stayed in the camp …. Yao: You know the camps—the guerrilla bases—are a legend in revolutions. Here a movement builds its strength and morale and educates their fighters, and sends out patrols and lays ambushes. Each base is for the fighters home. I visited Yenan a few years back with a group of PLA soldiers on leave. We were steeped into the place, it stirred up our imagination. I don’t mean the physical environment, the primitive dwellings dug into the hill. We said to ourselves: this was the place where Mao and other CCP leaders planned the coming war with the Nationalists—a place to dream about a different world. How would you describe your camp life? Was it, like I said, a place where you dreamt of building a new society? Xiao Hong: We stayed in our first camp for about six months, then my sister and I were separated. I was sent to a different camp. It was a longer trek to get there for the group of us, some from the old camp, a few new people. We reached the new camp, feeling relieved and secure. I didn’t know it was to be the first of many camps we would move to. To my mind, it seemed we were constantly on the move; the building and breaking of camps, settling in, and moving on. Each camp took us deeper and deeper into the jungle. The cost of security was to find ourselves in a jungle of thick vegetation and sky-reaching trees. The party would find a suitable spot for us, and we would make a clearing, where we built a kitchen, a hut for the leaders, raised bamboo platforms for sleeping quarters, perhaps a stage for speeches and drama performances. However, danger never failed to follow us. A jungle clearing was a sure sign of human activity and easily detected by planes. I remember the first bomber raid. It was a single plane, at first a grey dot among the clouds, then descending rapidly. Fire broke out in the camp and along the tree lines. Our air raid shelter was a couple of dugouts with roofs of flattened

180

S. YAO

earth, and we were packed in, body to body. Most of the time no one got killed, but it was mayhem. The old comrades said you could smell the government soldiers in an ambush; but a bomber is like a ghost, high up, and hard to see. In the seventies, we moved north to the Thai border. We moved once or twice after that, then settled in a permanent camp in Thailand. The Emergency was still going on, but both sides had scaled down their activities. We still sent out patrols and worked with the people—mainly Chinese farmers and shopkeepers who were our supporters. Life at the camp in Thailand was a great improvement. Food and supplies came from towns and villages where the party had built support and collected tax and invested in businesses. Our rifles and Sten guns were replaced by American weapons—a lot of them had come our way with the communist victory in Vietnam. How shall I put it: we have never thought of leaving for Thailand as a retreat. And everything was intense and inspiring, the study sessions, the lectures, and talks given by senior leaders and visitors. I have sharp memories of the camps in Thailand. We worked with the Thai communists, and our leaders had a sort of agreement with the Thai forces. Malaysian patrols sometimes crossed the border and harassed us. But it was a relatively peaceful time, we felt secure, and there was no more near-starvation. Yao: In the seventies, the conflict had scaled down, as you said. Compared with the fifties and sixties, you were safe in Thailand. All the same, the seventies were still a tumultuous decade. The Thai Communist Party had started its insurgency against the military junta a few years back in 1965, and the Vietnam War was at its height. 1975 must have been a critical year for the Malayan communists when the Vietnam War ended with communist victory. Let me draw up the datelines. We know that the General Secretary Chin Peng left for Beijing in 1961 and remained in China for three decades. The government declared the Emergency over in July 1960, but in 1969 the party stepped up the armed struggle in response to the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. By the end of the sixties, it would have moved most of the bases to southern Thailand. What else happened? Xiao Hong: I became very sick in the seventies, was it ‘72? I caught tuberculosis—I had no appetite, I was lethargic and coughing blood. I must have caught the disease from one of the comrades visiting our camp, or perhaps it was just from living in the jungle for a long time. The party decided to send me to China for treatment. There was a small group

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

181

of us: me, two women going to Hanoi to study nursing, one going to Guangzhou to be trained as a radio operator and the leader in charge. From Thailand a lorry took us to Bangkok, there at the port a fishing boat was waiting for us and took us to north Vietnam. We had close cooperation with Thai comrades who gave us intelligence and helped us to look after our sick. We travelled at night and huddled in the hull next to the diesel engine. I was nauseous and seasick throughout the voyage. I don’t remember much but the gloom in the hull, days without a bath, the rice gruel with vegetables three times a day. We landed in a small harbour in north Vietnam and continued the journey by lorry. When we arrived in Hanoi a day later, we must have been quite a sight: unwashed, with our grimy clothes. But we were treated as honoured guests from another revolution; we received new sets of clothes, feasted, and were given a tour of the city. Hanoi had been heavily bombed, broken streets, and ruined buildings were everywhere. We didn’t stay long and after saying goodbye to the comrades staying behind, we were put on a plane to Beijing. Some people from the OCAO (the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office) came to meet us, and I was taken to a hotel before preparations were made for my admission to a sanatorium. Yao: What was it like then in China? You arrived in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. You were witnessing history. I know people with foreign connections were targeted by the Red Guards, accusing them of being spies. Were you caught up with the turmoil in any way? Xiao Hong: The sanatorium was being run normally; there were no Red Guards taking over and overriding the doctors’ orders, as happened in some places. The sanatorium had a large lawn with trees and bushes all around, with patients in white pyjamas taking their strolls accompanied by nurses. It was not what I imagined; the buildings were well-kept; the facilities were modern. I ate, slept, and received my treatment—I was well looked after. I can’t say I enjoyed the stay; I was sick and wanted to get well so I could rejoin my comrades. But the place was pleasant, I read and relaxed and I was getting better. The month before I was discharged, an MCP representative came and suggested I might want to stay in China to do some training; the party would make the arrangements. Without much hesitation, I said I would want to study English so I could help with the propaganda work when I returned. Thus, I found myself in a university campus in the middle of the Cultural Revolution.

182

S. YAO

The Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beiwai, is located in the city’s north; the large, pleasant campus was built in the 1940s. When I was there, there were demonstrations all over the city, though Beiwai managed to be kept free from the rebel-students. I had a room in a hostel nearby run by the OCAO. Each morning when I left the hostel, I would be confronted by students at the gate. There was no direct threat to the ‘foreign Chinese,’ but you sensed the hostility. We were safe once inside the campus. Our lecturer was Miss Chen, herself an overseas Chinese. She and her family had arrived in Beijing from Indonesia during the antiChinese riots in 1965. We became friends, both of us from the South Seas. She kept us at the hostel informed of the demonstrations, and she would let us know when things were getting violent. Some days, I would keep to my room for my own safety. Inevitably we were caught in the conflict, when someone was sent to the hostel to keep an eye on us. My guard was a scrawny 18-year-old, Liu Bing, who stayed in my room, eyeing at me nervously as though I would rush to the door and escape. ‘Why would I want to escape, where would I go?’ I said to him. That seemed to assure him and he softened his prison-guard role. He would bring me fresh mantou and snacks. He became my co-conspirator in witnessing ‘history in the making.’ When there was a rowdy demonstration outside, he would open the curtain and say, ‘Come and see, these are my co-workers from the printing shop.’ Later when he began to trust me, he would go down to talk to his friends or to buy them cigarettes and newspapers. Left alone, I would leave the window open and take photos of what went on in the street below, making me a ‘spy’ as I had been accused of. I took these pictures—and the diary I started in the sanatorium—back to the camp in Thailand, reminders of the year I spent in the ancestral country during a troubling time. Yao: With your revolutionary background, surely you must have been tempted to stay on. You could have, like Miss Chen at the university, contributed to the building of new China. You must have asked yourself: Why go back? Why not stay in China? Xiao Hong: It was not up to me whether I was to leave or to stay. The MCP made such decisions and I was to follow. The Chinese government had to agree, too. So that was that. In any case, it had never occurred to me that I should stay. The more interesting question is: What I thought of China, the ancestral country. To be honest, I felt a stranger there half of the time. Though I speak Mandarin and am familiar with Chinese ways, China was not a home for me. I was full of the idea of a socialist Malaya,

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

183

but the system and social existence in China was not what I had in mind.6 Malaysia is a smaller country, and Chin Peng was not Mao. We were still in the middle of a revolutionary struggle; we had yet worked out what kind of system we would put in place in Malaysia. There were a lot of ‘ifs’ and uncertainties. In China, there was a great health system, cost of living was cheap; the country was rapidly developing. But I was not so sure about the demonstrations and the violence, and where it would take the country. You know that in 1970 there was an internal struggle within our own party; some were accused of spying for the police, put on trial and executed.7 I thought about it a lot after I came back. The prosecutions and violence seemed like what I had witnessed in the streets in Beijing. And I asked myself: Do we want the same happening in Malaya once we achieved liberation? What I saw in China made me think that we should not look to China as the only model for our future. That is the gist of the interview. In my fieldnotes, I have written: I get up from my chair and say goodbye, and she, leaning herself on the arm of the Indonesian maid, walks me to the door. At the gate facing the sun-drenched road, for a while I don’t know what to say. I hear her polite words thanking me for coming to see her, and in my heart I feel foolishly, uncontrollably, sentimental towards the old woman who has lived a life whose magic and sacrifice I can barely comprehend. She has let free her thoughts and they have touched mine, a miracle of connection that occasionally blesses the anthropologist-researcher. Her reminiscences have hooked me up to my student days when the war in Vietnam and the anticolonial struggles still had the innocence of political hope, their violence, and bloodshed redeemable by the rightness of their causes. But now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the moral venality of communist regimes had changed everything. And in that afternoon in her room, we have been united by our own irrelevance. I look at her as her eyes turn to a soft glistening. To cover the embarrassment, I do all the talking. I say I’ll come back to see her and I hope that her health will hold up for years to come. She looks tired and yet exudes a certain dignity of one who has lived through and done great things. She has taken part in a great adventure, and the romantic aura of this will never leave her. As I read what I have written, the sentiment felt right. I was caught up with what she told of her life, and the tumultuous events made real by her telling. It is the power of storytelling—and of ethnography; what has happened is reborn as a narrative. Nostalgia hovered over us as we talked, and I was reminded of the communist apparatchik mother in the

184

S. YAO

film Goodbye Lenin (2003). She has fallen into a coma just before the unification of the two Germanys and wakes up to a post-communist world while her mind is marooned in the past. Xiao Hong has her ‘Ostalgie’— nostalgia for the East—except for her the ‘East’ was the Socialist Malaya that never came about. The best thing one can say about nostalgia is its potency in keeping an issue alive in our minds, and the way it allows the sharing among a group of people. Xiao Hong was eighty-one, and the sense of her advancing years was like an open secret that need not be said. And, when you think about it, there is nothing more nostalgic than a failed revolution. For the ex-communists like Xiao Hong and those I talked to in southern Thailand, the feeling of abjection is like a self-inflected wound, painful but worthwhile. There’s nothing like an aborted revolution to coddle romantic nostalgia for those who had fought for a good cause and lost. For them, the Emergency has become the roost of many things: heroic endeavour betrayed, a failed revolution, the ethnic Chinese’s role in the struggle. In Malaysia the communist uprising is the only revolution we’ve got; those in the left have hung on to it, and tried to keep it alive as a part of the national history. For this reason, it is somewhat inevitable that the ex-insurgents should be turned into nationalist heroes. This is the project of writing an alternative history in Malaysia. It is clear to me, however, that this alternative history should not be concerned only with redeeming these men and women and their reputation. More expansively, we should also appraise the political ambitions and tactical failures of the communist movement itself. We have to reckon with the fact that history has few kind words to say about communism in general. In our assessment, what happened in Stalin’s Soviet Union and the catastrophes of Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea have dug the grave of Malaysian communism. Who is to say Socialist Malaysia, once established, would not have held massive struggling sessions to rid the country of bloodsucking capitalists, greedy petite capitalists among the shopkeepers, the feudal-minded Malay elite? Still, historical hindsight may clarify too much. It easily compares the communist states and highlights their achievements and failures. All the same, the questions haunt us on the left: How can we project with certainty that ‘Socialist Malaya’ would not have gone the way of murderous communist regimes elsewhere? Maybe a victorious communist revolution in Malaysia would not be something to celebrate.

10

SCARS OF MEMORY

185

Perhaps it is our modern sensibility. Nostalgia holds sway, and the mind turns away from what it sees as a flawed, corrupted present in order to seek solace in some lost illusionary Eden in the future. In this Eden, life is secure, ideas and values spiritually rewarding, the leaders wise. We look towards the future as a firm piece of ground on which to rest our feet after a hard slog through the mud of moral confusion. And I think of my former insurgent-heroine: for her communism must have been the most eloquent expression of modernity, to which she has devoted her life to bring it about. And she is right. With the end of communism, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman believes, the world is left without an alternative to capitalism.8 But the point is that we cannot live without an alternative, and we need a leftist critique to examine the sins and moral viciousness of the liberal democratic state. In Malaysia and elsewhere, this may well be the significance of the communist past: for all its moral foundering, when shorn of its ideological orthodoxy, communism could offer a lesson in the way of mass mobilization, in the fomenting of an anti-capitalist, radical dissent.

Notes 1. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP), disbanded in 1989, was the largest of the communist parties in Malaysia. Its splintered groups were the Malayan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and The Communist Party of Malaya/Revolutionary Faction, in 1983 the two formed the Malaysian Communist Party which, like the MCP, accepted the cease-fire. Those who used ‘Malaya’ in their party names traced their struggle to the British times when the peninsula was known as Malaya; the Federation of Malaysia was formed in 1963. The interviewee uses the term Malayan to suggest the neo-colonial illegitimacy of the federation. 2. Philip Roth. Shop Talk. New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 23. 3. Nanyang Siang Pao, 13 May 1955, p. 5. 4. For the influence of the May Fourth Movement in Malaya, see David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: the May Fourth Movement in Singapore, 1919–1932. New York: Routledge, 2003. 5. Cheah See Kian, Malayan Chinese Left Wing Literature: Its influence by China (sic) Revolutionary Literature (1926–1976). Penang, Malaysia: Han Chiang College, 2009, pp. 160–161; my translation. 6. Malaya and Malaysia, see note 1. 7. The MCP carried out its own ‘Cultural Revolution’ in 1970 purging alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries thought to have infiltrated the MCP, some 200 men and women were executed and more stripped of

186

S. YAO

their ranks. See Karl Hack and C. C. Chin, Dialogue with Chin Peng: New light on the Malayan Communist Party. Singapore: NUS Press, p. 24. 8. Zygmunt Bauman ‘Living Without an Alternative’, The Political Quarterly, 62 (1), 1991, pp. 35–44.

Bibliography Cheah, See Kian. 2009. Malayan Chinese Left Wing Literature: Its Influence by China (Sic) Revolutionary Literature (1926–1976). Penang, Malaysia: Han Chiang College. Hack, Karl and C. C. Chin. 2004. Dialogue with Chin Peng: New light on the Malayan Communist Party, Singapore: NUS Press. Kenley, David. 2004. New Culture in a New World. New York: Routledge. Roth, Philip. 2002. Shop Talk. New York: Vintage Books.

Index

A Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia, 34–36 Ahmad, Jasmin Sepet , 24, 25–27 Sepet and ‘Romeo and Juliet’, 27 Anderson, Benedict nationalism and racism, 30 nationalism and the state, 31 Appadurai, Arjun, 64 the social life of things, 64 Arendt, Hannah The Origins of Totalitarianism, 31 tribal nationalism and European racism, 31–32 Asad, Talal, 114 B Barthes, Roland The Pleasure of the Text , 86–87 ‘Text of zero degree’, 87 Barthes, Roland, ‘history as discourse’, 158–159 Belaga

and Bakun hydro-electric project, 128–130 and development of Sarawak, 121, 128 and geography, 128, 129 river journey to, 118 township of, 119, 120 Belaga, the Chinese traders in and business opportunities, 122–123 and Chinese aphorism on marriage, 135–136 and loneliness, 133 and longhouse community, 138 and marital choice, 135 storytelling, 123–126 Benjamin, Walter critique of historicism, 7 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 37 Benjamin, Walter–on storytelling, 127–128 British colonialism in Malaya racial legacy in Malaysia, 30–32

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Yao, Doing Lifework in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2087-5

187

188

INDEX

and rubber and tin, 29 Burroughs, William The Yage Letters , 3 C Camus, Albert The Stranger, 11 Capitalism as thievery, 118, 128 Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong colonial sponsorship and power, 11–13 local leadership, 11 political factions, 13–14 ritual and religious belief, 16–18 Chew, Daniel, 124 Chinese independent school Chung Wah Chinese High School, 156–157 colonial legacy of, 157–158 in post-dependence era, 158 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness , 148 Culture of bribe, 80–81, 83–85 and government, 84–85 Culture of poverty, 43 critique of, 43 D Diaspora, concept of dispute in Malaysia, 154 and Wang Gungwu’s ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas’, 154–156 Diasporic longing, 155, 159 ambivalence of, 164–165 see also Sign of China Dumm, Thomas, Loneliness as A Way of Life, 134 E Ethnography

and self-ethnography, 5–7 F Farquhar, Judith Appetite: Food And Sex In Postsocialist China, 92 Foreign retirees, 57–58 social impact of, 58–59, 64, 66–67, 71 Foucault, Michel state and governance, 7 G Gates, Hill, 140 on old Chinese silk cottage industry, 140 on women’s labour in Imperial China, 140 Gift and anthropology the aesthetics of gift, 65–66 gift and obligations, 64–65 Godard, Jean-Luc La Chinoise, 29 on political art, 28 Goddard, Jean-Luc, Vivre Sa Vie, 152 Goodbye Lenin, 184 Gramsci, Antonio on common-sense, 85 H Heidegger, Martin Being and Time, 9–11 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 64 Absentees , 64 Hirschhorn, Thomas on political art, 28 J Jackson, Michael–The Politics of Storytelling, 127

INDEX

Jain, R.K., 43 Jameson, Federic ‘Pleasure: A Political Issue’, 86

K Kayan people epic tale of, 142 kinship system, 145 origin of, 142

L Lacan, Jacques, 32–33 Laura Stoler, Ann, 66 Levi, Primo, 169 Levi-Strauss, Claude on bricolage, 102, 103 on mythical thought, 103 The Savage Mind, 102 Longhouse architecture of, 141 lack of privacy, 142 spatial division, 142

M Malayan communism and Chinese school, 173, 176–178 internal purge, 183 and progressive literature, 174–176 Malayan communism–insurgents emotional life, 169 life at jungle camp, 170–172, 178, 179 sojourn in China, 181–183 travel to China, 181 Malaysia Altantuya Shaariibuu, killing of, 69–70 citizenship, 106 2018 general election, 67–68 identity card (IC), 106–107

189

Islam and the State, 89 Islam as a way of life, 89–90 Malay subjectivity, 32–34 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Berhad) corruption, 68–70 race relations, 32 ‘Switzerland of Southeast Asia’, 101 Mann, Thomas, 19 Marxist political economy Engels, Friedrich, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 139 family and production relations, 139–141 Marx, Karl, 85 Masuk Melayu, (‘becoming Malay’), 108–109 Mauss, Marcel, 63 Melayu Baru, The New Malays , 81 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7 Michael Jackson nature of existential anthropology, 8–9 Miller, Henry, 91–92 P Participant-observation fieldwork, 5–8 criminal gang and drug taking, 14–17 keeping fieldnotes, 14–15 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 65 Nausea, 65 Sign of China wonderment of, 160–161 Sree Durgai Ambal Temple, 50 worship at, 50–51 Steedman, Carolyn, 47 Landscape of a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives , 47–49

190

INDEX

T Tamil labour in Malaysia family life of, 45–47 history of, 43–44 rubber estate, 44–45 Taussig, Michael, 73 the ‘magical state’, 73 Taylor, Charles, 110 ‘the ethics of identity’, 111–112

V Vincent, David, A History of Solitude, 147 W Wang, Hui, China from Empire to Nation-State, 161 Wood, James on literature as God-like power, 29