Some Southeast Asian Junk

Banana Leaf Rice and Other Food Pictures

When our friend Lindsey was visiting we took her to one of our favorite types of restaurants, a Tamil (southern Indian) restaurant that serves food known here as "banana leaf rice".  What it is, you see, is a big banana leaf covered with rice and other foods.  The restaurant that we took Lindsey to, in a part of town known as Bangsar, was good, but we are sad that we didn't take her to another one that we found yesterday.  This one is in Petaling Jaya, a neighboring city outside of KL proper but well with the metro area.  It's a place called Raju's, and it has a loyal following.  We think that it easily beats the place in Bangsar, the trendy area where we took Lindsey (sorry, Lindsey!). 

We have heard that sometimes you can see VIPs there, and that the current PM Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi used to go there a lot when he was still only Foreign Minister.  No VIPs there this time though.  But we shouldn't talk the place up too much because Malaysians have very strong opinions about what the best banana leaf rice places are.  Some people love Raju's, some people think it's good but too expensive, and some dismiss it as not spicy enough.

We got some pictures and have posted them in our Culinary Delights folder, along with some others.  These others include pictures of our attempts of popiah and cap cai, two dishes whose recipes we posted last week, and a bunch of others whose recipes we have not yet posted.  Our pictures from Raju's start here, and you can scroll forward to see what banana leaf rice looks like and to watch me (TP) give a demonstration of how to eat curry with your hands.  Please excuse the hair style: we decided to take showers after we went out into the heat of the day for lunch and errands.

MUI vs. JIL

The big news in Indonesia these days--so far not reported in the West, as far as we can tell--is the issuance of a set of fatwas by the Council of Indonesian Islamic Religious Teachers, or MUI (Majlis Ulama Indonesia).  The big doozy is this one, the translation of which we quote from the Jakarta Post: "Religious teachings influenced by pluralism, liberalism and secularism are against Islam. The fatwa states that Muslims must consider their religion to be the true one religion, and to consider other faiths as wrong." Despite its name, the MUI does not actually represent all or even most Islamic religious teachers in Indonesia, rather it is a conservative group well known for its intolerance.  It started out as a government body under Soeharto's New Order, and was relatively moderate, but has since gotten out of hand.

Indonesia is a plural place, so this fatwa has caused a bit of an uproar.  Every government that has ever ruled Indonesia (that's not too many, but still) has mandated that ethnic and religious pluralism is a fact of life in Indonesia that the government will protect.  Although governments have times oppressed certain ethnic communities (most often the Chinese), governments have always been tolerant of minority religions (except for Confucianism and animism, and even this was more like just pretending that they don't exist or don't count as religions).  Condemning Islamic religious teachings influenced by pluralism as anti-Islam throws down a big challenge to most Indonesians about their relationship to their religion.  These teachings have a long history in Indonesia.  Is Islam in Indonesia going to move towards the Middle East?

Happily (so far), the public reaction to the MUI ruling suggests otherwise.  Muslim scholars and Muslim public intellectuals have sharply criticized the MUI's fatwas in the past couple of days, calling them "heretical" and "anti-Islam" themselves.  Others have attacked the fact that the MUI could have issued a fatwa that says that violence against other religious communities is forbidden, but did not--the reference is on an attack by some fundamentalists on the compound owned by a deviationist Islamic sect (Ahmadiya) in West Java last month.  Some of these public intellectuals include former President of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid, current VP Jusuf Kalla, and other well-known Islamist thinkers, including our acquaintance Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, whom we know from the Freedom Institute, and who runs the influential Liberal Islam Network, or JIL (Jaringan Islam Liberal). They have been joined by leaders of interfaith groups, a surprisingly strong element in Indonesia's crowded post-Soeharto civil society.  A number of groups have called for the government to ban MUI, or at least stop giving it financial support.

Want to know more?  Unfortunately, the Jakarta Post's online edition has a dynamic link-changing thingy that makes directly linking to articles a bad idea, but you can browse around and find related articles.  You can also check out Ulil's writings at the JIL website, which expouses an attractive version of religious Islam that is strong in Indonesia and getting stronger with Ulil's popular commentary.  You'll see Ulil's picture too; he was always smiling like that.

A Big List of Words

Here is a big list of words that we have collected here as funny loan words from English, transliterated into the Malay version of English.  These are more than just the obvious ones like eksekutif and kaunter.  These are the good ones.  We especially like the ones that look like different words that are familiar to us.

akaun        Something that you open when you go to the bank
atlet        Someone who plays sports
banglo        A small house, perhaps in the country
boikot        Do this to American products after the Senate criticizes your PM
caj       What you have to pay someone for a service
ejen        The person from whom you buy tickets
eksesais        What two navies do for training
estet        A large plantation, usually that grows rubber
fail        What you do with a piece of paper
francais       There are over 100 McDonald's examples of this in Malaysia
jip        A rough-and-tumble car
kantin        Where you go to get your lunch
kastam        The guys who check your bags
lokap        Where you go when they throw you in jail; a Sly Stallone movie
mesingan        You might get shot a number of times with one of these
reman        If you do not make bail, this happens to you
saintis        Someone who knows lots of sains
simen       Used for building things
skuasy        I can't tell the difference between this and racquetball
tibi       A bad sickness to have, but curable

Pay Attention To This

One of the most important lessons that living in Indonesia and Malaysia has taught us is the following: all Muslims are not Arabs.  Of course, we certainly knew this in an academic sense before coming here, but we never really appreciated it fully and internally before living here.  Few people in the West talk about non-Arab Muslims at all, and the vision that you get when you here the word "Muslim" in the Western press is not one of Bangladeshi, Somali, Turkish, or Javanese Muslims, but of Arab or maybe a Pakistani or Afghani Muslims.

It turns out, most Muslims here do not like being lumped in with Arabs.  It's considered by many to be a bit offensive.  In fact, even though there are small but distinct Arab Malay and Arab Indonesian communities that you can find, they are a bit marginalized by the majority Muslim groups here.

We have had cause to think about this a lot in the past month.  Ever since our friend Lindsey got here, we have noticed a marked increase in the number of Arab tourists around town.  We used to see maybe one Arab couple a day here, these days we often see dozens.  It must be vacation time in the Middle East, and Arab tourists love to flock to Malaysia because the food is good but definitely halal, the infrastructure is pretty modern, the weather is comfortable, and their petrodollars go far.  We know that the tourists are from the Middle East because the women are completely covered in black, with only a tiny bit of their eyes showing.  While many women here do cover their hair, complete covering like this is almost entirely non-existent among Malays.

We have three anecdotes that speak volumes about many Malay views of Arabs.

1.   About two weeks ago I (TP) caught a cab from our local mall.  In front of me was an Arab couple, and the man was very mad, yelling at the cab driver and then at his wife.  They seemed to be negotiating where the couple wanted the taxi to go.  After about a minute, the cabbie just hit the gas and drove a dozen yards forward, then motioned for me to get in.  The couple was busy looking angry, but didn't pay attention to me, so I got in and we drove off.  The driver was a Malay guy named Othman bin Something.  He was livid, just seething with anger, and proceeded to tell me that he could not stand Arabs because they never wanted him to use the meter in his taxi and tried to screw him out of money.  He kept saying, "they are so rich with their tourist money but they never want to spend it for the regular people".

2.    About a week ago I was getting a bottle of water at the 7-11...yes they have them here too.  In front of me in line again was an Arab couple, and there were two cashiers, 20-something Malay women wearing headscarves.  The Arab man could not speak English and he wanted to buy some Fisherman's Friend cough drops, but he didn't know how to say it so he just pointed and said "buy! buy!"  The cashier helping him was a little frustrated and had a bit of an attitude.  She commented to her colleague "Si Arab ini tak tahu cakap Inggris"--Mr. Arab here doesn't know how to speak English, with the implication that she of course, like any good Malaysian, could.  Her friend snapped back "Tanya isterilah!"--Ask his wife!  UPDATE: I almost forgot, after this they both howled with laughter.  This was quite a dig, implying as far as I could tell her disapproval of a situation where a husband does not let his wife talk to the cashier and seems to pretend that she does not exist.  The wife, of course, was completely covered, and silent throughout the exchange.  This is some bitter social commentary.  You could read volumes from these two sentences from these two Malay women.

3.    Today we caught a cab together amidst several Arab families.  Like always we were waiting in line.  Apparently, one of the families had insisted in trying to hop in a cab a bit further back in the line, with no avail, for the driver knew that there were others waiting in line and he was a nice guy.  The same cab that he tried was the one who took us.  When we got in, we drove past the family, and our Malay cab driver smirked at them and said "these Arabs hate standing in line" to us.  His tone was utterly dismissive.  We got to talking in Malay and he gave us some classic commentary on terrorism and George Bush.

Cap Cai

Cap cai ("Chahp Chai") is best known as a Straits Chinese dish popular in Malaysia and Singapore, but more generally, most Southeast Asian cuisines have some sort of version of this dish.  Overseas Chinese immigrants settled all over the region, bringing a dish like this with them.  It is not surprising to
find something with a name like "chap chay" on the menu at Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Filipino, and Cambodian restaurants in the US.  Even in Indonesia, we often found cap cai available at restaurants that had no other discernable Chinese influence at all.  In many Cantonese or Shanghainese restaurants, you may also see this dish written as Char Chap Chye. 

Cap cai is a vegetable dish with just some noodles in it as well.  Done correctly, the dish is something between a soup and a stir-fry...it should be quite wet with a pretty thin sauce.  The taste depends very heavily on tauco and oyster sauce; please do not try to make this dish without using both of these, because it will taste like bland vegetables.  If you are a vegetarian who simply cannot eat oyster sauce, well, it won't taste right.  You can use water instead of chicken broth with no problem, though.  Many recipes include different kinds of vegetables, but the heavy mushroom component here is essential as well.  You shouldn't venture too far from this list of vegetables, although bamboo shoots or a couple baby corns or even some thinly sliced jicama probably wouldn't make too much of a difference.  We add a little bit of egg to thicken up the dish a little bit, but that's probably not authentic.  Leave it out if you like.

Fresh and dried shiitake mushrooms are available at most gourmet groceries, and black jelly mushrooms are normally available dried at Chinese groceries.  Black jelly mushroom is our English translation of the Malay term, which is probably a translation from a Chinese word.  It refers to the fungus Auricularia polytricha, sometimes called wood ear fungus in the US.  Us both mushrooms fresh if you can find them.

This makes enough for two dinner portions, or for four to six side dishes.

Cap Cai
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 inch fresh ginger, minced
2 Tbsp. tauco
2 Tbsp. oyster sauce
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 cups fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, halved
1 cup black jelly mushrooms
1 cup green beans, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 large carrot, cut into thin rounds
1 cup chicken stock or water
1 cup loosely packed broken bihun
1 large egg
1 block tofu, thinly sliced crosswise
2 cups Chinese cabbage, slice crosswise

Start by heating the oil in a large skillet over medium heat.  Add the minced ginger and garlic and stirfry, stirring constantly, until very fragrant, making sure that they do not brown.  Add the tauco and oyster sauce and stirfry for 1-2 minutes more, until very fragrant.  Add both groups of mushrooms, green beans, carrot, and water or stock, raise heat to high, and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat again and cook for 10 minutes, adding water to ensure a soupy consistency.  Add the broken bihun and cook for five minutes more, again adding water to maintain the consistency.  Crack the egg and add to the wok, and mix thoroughly so that the egg thickens the mixture.  Add the tofu and Chinese cabbage (again, adding water if necessary), and simmer for three minutes until the cabbage has wilted.  Ladle into soup bowls and serve, or into a serving dish as a side dish.

The New Economic Polic

In the news these days is Malaysia's New Economic Policy, the name for a political project that set to (1) reduce poverty across Malaysia and (2) eliminate the identification of race with economic status in Malaysia.  Originally, the NEP was supposed to run from 1971 to 1990.  Technically, the program did lapse in 1990, only to be replaced by the National Development Policy and then PM Mahathir Mohamad's Vision 2020, which sought to make Malaysia a fully developed country by 2020.  But everybody knows that the spirit of the NEP lives on, if not in name, then in the myriad laws and institutions still on the books that stem from the NEP period.  Indeed, the very way that government and society works reflects the NEP.  It is telling that politicians still say NEP when they mean NDP, as the NEP has fundamentally transformed the country.

If you are a regular reader of our blog, you'll be familiar with the main aspects of the NEP.  Bumiputras (basically, non-Indian and non-Chinese Malaysians) get favorable treatment in most matters that have any economic or political connection.  The government invests heavily in rural development schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Malays.  Malays can invest in special government-run unit trusts that always give high dividends.  When the government privatizes public services via the stock market, it reserves discounted shares for Malays.  It's easier to get into the universities here if you are a Malay, it's easier to get a government scholarship if you are a Malay, it is far easier to move up the ladder in the public service if you are a Malay; the list is endless.

So why is the NEP still in the news today?  Well, simply, its project has not worked.  The targets for bumiputra participation in the economy through equity ownership have not been met, even 15 years after the project was supposed to be finished.  There is a well-known, and oft-lamented, "subsidy mentality" among some Malays.  Rather than eliminating the identification of race with economic function, the NEP seems to have strengthened it.  In all, we have all of the problems that you'd expect to find with a coarse tool like race-based affirmative action.  The demands from some sections of the ruling party, though, are for more "positive discrimination", and a strengthening or re-establishment of the NEP.

JM and I, living in KL with its large population of Chinese and Indian Malaysians, have seen first hand evidence that, contrary to the government's claims, poor non-Malays do indeed lose out under this system.  We also see the Melayu Baru--New Malays--who have grown rich on government favoritism, and yet still get first crack at discounted shares because they are Malays.  We think it's time for Malaysia to scrap the NEP and "positive discrimination" based on race.  The government could still help poor Malays and intervene in the economy while doing so without the blatant racial favoritism that it shows.  (Let's bracket the question of whether or not government intervention to ensure equality of opportunity is a good idea for now.)  A non-racial policy would still overwhelmingly benefit Malays, but it would also pick up the large poor Indian Malaysian community, the true losers under the NEP, and the non-negligible numbers of Chinese Malaysians.  We also believe, by the way, that affirmative action in the US should be based on income, not race or ethnicity.

Just FYI: If we were Malaysians, what we just said would be seditious.  We are not kidding, even in the slightest, and the government's record of arresting people for criticizing the NEP is proof.  It is a violation of the Sedition Act of 1972 to criticize or even question the rights and privileges of Malays.  By extension, that includes the NEP.

Popiah

Popiah are a very popular Malaysian dish, the local version of an eggroll.  However, unlike almost all eggrolls and lumpia (the Indonesian wrapped snack), popiah are usually not fried.  In that sense, they are more like Vietnamese spring rolls, and are a refreshing snack when you aren't in the mood for something heavy and oily.  Of course, like Vietnamese spring rolls, popiah can be fried.  We never have had the fried kind, though, and the best popiah stands that we've seen do their briskest business with the non-fried kind.

Let us emphasize, though, that they are not just Vietnamese spring rolls in Malaysia.  They differ in two ways.  To begin, the wrapping is different.  Popiah, like lumpia, have a wheat-flour and egg wrapper that has a different text and taste than rice-flour and no-egg Vietnamese spring roll wrappers.  More than that, the filling is different.  As far as we know, most Vietnamese spring rolls contain chicken or beef or shrimp or pork, rice vermicelli, and usually some sort of herb like spicy basil and/or mint.  Sometimes they can have carrot and/or cucumber in them.  You serve them in a clear and sweet vinegar- peanut-chili dip.  Popiah are very different, beginning with a warm jicama-based filling and continuing with a thick soy and peanut sauce that is spread inside rather than served alongside as a dip.  In some versions, as you will see below, they also betray a silly British influence of mayonnaise.

We'll conclude with some etymology.  The word in Malay for jicama is sengkuang.  This, we believe, comes from singkamas, the Tagalog word, which in turn came from Spanish, jicama, which was appropriated from Nahuatl (a native Mexican language), which had the word xicama.  That's some nice colonial food history for you.  Jicamas are native to Central America, but that has not stopped it from becoming an integral part of local cuisine.  For some reason, in Indonesia, we also have seen the word bangkuang in addition sengkuang.  We don't know why this would be.

Popiah: Basic Recipe
20 popiah skins (or eggroll wrappers, if popiah skins are unavailable)
1 large jicama root, at least 1 lb, peeled and shredded
1 can bamboo shoots, chopped
2 Tbsp. kecap manis
1/2 tsp. salt
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 large carrot, julienned
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded, julienned
1 cup of shallots, thinly sliced and deep fried
1/2 cup roasted salted peanuts, finely (but not too finely) chopped

Popiah Sauce
1/2 cup kecap manis
6 cloves garlic, peeled
2 Tbsp. salted peanuts
4 large chilies (see note below)

Optional Additions (see end of recipe below)
1/2 lb boneless chicken (cut into strips), shrimp (peeled and deveined), or a mix of the two
1 cup fresh crab meat
1/2 cup mayonnaise (yes, mayonnaise)
1 cup loosely chopped Boston (a.k.a. bibb or butter) lettuce

For the basic recipe, start by heating the oil over low heat in a wok.  When hot, add the garlic and saute for a minute or so, making sure that the garlic does not brown.  Add the shredded jicama and the bamboo shoots and stir through, then add salt and stir through again.  Heat through until bubbly--if there's not enough liquid, add a bit of water.  Cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat for about 20 minutes.

To make the sauce, boil the garlic in water for about one minute until hot and just starting to soften.  This takes some of the edge off of the flavor.  In a food processor or with a mortar and pestle, mash the garlic with the peanuts until smooth.  Combine with the soy sauce and mix until smooth.  NOTE: You can make a spicy version of this by adding the four large chilies, stems removed, while mashing the garlic and peanuts.  A more authentically spicy version would also add a handful of Thai bird-eye chilies.  We have seen it served both in the phenomenally-spicy and the non-spicy versions, but our very spicy version is better for Western palates.

To construct, take a popiah skin and place it on a place.  Smear on about a teaspoon of the sauce.  Top with a small bit of carrots and cucumber, then sprinkle on about a half-teaspoon of chopped peanuts and shallots each.  Add a tablespoon of the warm jicama filling and roll up like a burrito.  Serve immediately with extra sauce for dipping.

This is the basic version that we normally get.  You can also get something called salad popiah.  To make salad popiah, remove the carrots and replace with a bit of crab meat and lettuce, and smear on a bit of mayonnaise in addition to the popiah sauce.  We know that this sounds kinda gross, but really, it's actually quite tasty, even if you leave the crab meat out.  There is also a version that has a bit of meat in it.  To make this, decrease the jicama by half, and add chicken/shrimp/both to the garlic first after it been frying, and then cook until done, and then add the jicama and bamboo shoots and proceed as before.

Managed Floats

The big news in the financial markets, of course, is that Chinese has moved from a pegged exchange rate to a managed floating exchange rate.  OK, first, EVERYBODY PANIC.  Now that that's out of our system, let's be clear that a managed float is a peg that the government allows to fluctuate a little bit.  When push comes to shove, it is a peg.  In the event of speculative pressure against the yuan, the People's Bank of China (their central bank, their Fed) will defend it just like they defend a hard peg.  In fact, the tools for managing a managed float vs. a peg (or a currency board or whatever) is precisely the same.  And while the PBC has announced that it has moved to a managed float against an "undisclosed basket of currencies", this reminds me of SE Asia before the Asian Financial Crisis, where this "basket of currencies" was composed of the 99% dollars.  I again think that people just like the term "managed float" instead of "peg" because they think that "float" sounds good.  This is a strategy on the part of the Chinese to buy a little time.

From the prospects of the US, there has been a little bit of an appreciation of the yuan, but not much.  There will not be much of an effect on either countries in the short term.  In the long term, this could signal changes to come, which would be more important.  I think that the conservative and liberal consensus on this one is that this is not enough of a revalution to solve any of the problems that the US has been, perhaps correctly, complaining about with regards to China.  There is also the nagging problem of what would happen if China actually let the yuan float, something which some rogue economists--mostly liberals, but some conservatives who are not in policy positions too--seem to believe could be tough for the US.

What has been lost in the brouhaha is that Malaysia also un-pegged its currency and moved to a managed float at the same time.  Again, EVERYBODY PANIC. This is a fascinating development.  People have been wondering when Malaysia was going to un-peg its currency (until yesterday, RM3.8 = US$1), which was pegged on September 1, 1998 along with the imposition of capital controls as a way to get out of the Asian Financial Crisis.  The plan looks to have been on the drawing board for some time, but still, the co-incidence of Malaysia's decision to un-peg with China's decision--like, three hours later--suggests something that students of international economics rarely discuss.  Why would China's decision affect Malaysia's decision?  Do we often find such regional contagion in exchange rate policy decisions?  One idea is that Malaysia and China might be export competitors in certain sectors.  If the Chinese allow dollar-denominated price of their goods move up, then Malaysia can do the same thing, with the effect that their competing dollar-denominated exports get just a little bit more expensive as well.  There might be a decision that they can offset the implicit increased revenue from a Chinese appreciation (because more people would by Malaysian exports) by greater revenue from higher prices that do not drive all of their customers away.  But really, I have no idea.

The ringgit has appreciated in the past day from 3.8 to the dollar to 3.775 or so.  It's only a bit of an appreciation, but our purchasing power here just declined a little bit.  And lest you Americans reading this think that this makes no difference to you, you might be interested to know that Malaysia is the US's 10th largest trading partner.  Semi-conductors and microchips just got that much more expensive for you.

While I have not been following developments in China, the Malaysian financial markets demonstrate how close a managed peg is to a real peg.  Currency traders and investors moved into Malaysia en masse, pushing pressure on the ringgit up to what should have been about 3.6 to the dollar, by most estimates.  Bank Negara Malaysia (the central bank here) intervened to keep the ringgit lower, just like it would have done with a secular increase in capital flowing to Malaysia under a hard peg.  So you see, not much of a difference at all.

A Dialogue

On Monday, we had a special event at MACEE.  There's a Malaysian woman who has been teaching at American University in DC for 10 or 15 years, and every other summer she brings a small class of masters students here to Malaysia for a really cool month-long summer program.  She brought her class of 11 students to our office, and there they met with about 15 Malaysian students from two of the local public universities.  The idea was to have a dialogue between young Americans and Malaysians about relations between the countries and perceptions that each group had about the other.

It was quite interesting, and I heard some unexpected answers, mostly from the Malaysians.  The professor moderated and asked questions that she had collected from the students.  They talked about things like the pre- and post- 9/11 perception of America, how relations can be improved between the two countries, and what makes people proud to be from their country.

That last question gave me (jm) some food for thought.  I was surprised that both the Americans and Malaysians had some answers in common when asked why they were proud of their respective homelands.  The main overlaps were how far each country has come in a relatively short time and the diverse populations and cultures in each country.  The diversity thing was funny.  They kept saying that they were proud that all three races live in harmony here.  It bugs me that they use the word "race" to differentiate between Indian, Chinese and Malay.  It's the same in Indonesia, they just don't use the word ethnicity.  Also, one kid said something about the "Malays, Chinese, and Hindus" coexisting together which I thought was weird.  Not all the  Indians here are Hindu, which I'd expect a college kid to realize.

It was nice to hear that these kids treasure the diversity in Malaysia.  But somehow it didn't quite sit right.  Every time TP gets a cab driver talking, we immediately start to hear about his problems with and stereotypes of the other two groups.  They often get quite worked up.  And this happens, without fail, every single time.  So yes, people here can be friends with people from different backgrounds and heritages, but it just doesn't seem like things are at all integrated below the surface.  And I also noticed that whereas in America, everyone is Indian-America, or Cuban-American, or Korean-American, here it doesn't work that way.  It's Malay, Chinese or Indian, period. It seems to me that this is a telling mentality (that's not to say that America doesn't have some room for improvement on minority issues too).

On a lighter note, several of the kids said they were proud of the great, cheap food here.  I'm definitely in agreement with that one.

A Taste of Indonesia in Malaysia

Today the guys in charge of the microfilm at the library really bothered me (TP).  I guess it's just the consequences of bureaucracy, but it was worse than normal today, in fact, Indonesia-style.  I have made something of a friend with Shahril (not his real name) who works at the microfilm counter.  I go tell him what I want, he gets it for me.  It's his job.  His job is to get up, walk to the shelves of microfilm, pick out the one I need, and bring it to me.  Sounds like a terrible job to me, but not one that should be hard.  It's clear that not many people stop by the microfilm department, so I am probably tripling his daily work load.

I should have known I was in for an adventure when he asked me the other day why I wanted to read these newspapers. "Because they are important to my research."  Why don't I read them at another library?  "Because this is the closest one to my house."  Really, asking why I don't go do my research somewhere else where I don't bother him is a little much.

Well, today, I learned that Shahril is not going to make it easy for me.  I learned my first day that 1:00 to 2:00 is "lunch hour", even though the entire office just sits there and acts the same anyway, when I tried to exchange a microfilm roll at 1:37.  Had to come back later.  So, when I finished my two rolls at 12:45, I thought I'd be OK.  I made downstairs by 12:46, and was in the office by 12:47.  I asked Shahril if he could get me two more rolls.  (This is all in Malay.)

Shahril: "No, it's lunch time, you come back at 2, maybe after 2 sometime."
Me: "Sorry?"
Shahril: "You know, lunch time, time for eating in the middle of the day".  He makes an eating motion with is hand.
Me: (Confused, but not by the concept of lunch; I have that down.)
Shahril: "Lunch here is from 1:00 to 2:00".  He then points at the wall clock behind him, which says 12:47, just like my watch and his computer screen.
Me: (Stares longingly at the racks of microfilm.  I can do his job, all I have to do is grab them.  It would take 2.5 seconds.)
Shahril: "So yes, you come back after 2:00."
Me: "So lunch is over at 2:00, right?  I should come back at 2:00?"
Shahril: "Maybe, well, 2:15."
Me: "OK."

Notice how I did not strangle Shahril, which I attribute to my peaceful and mild-mannered temperament.  Notice also how I did not argue with Shahril.  Just like in any bureaucracy, you should never burn your bridges with the one person who stands between you and what you need to accomplish.

You can probably find examples of bureaucracies like this in the US.  OK, you would be hard-pressed to find someone so purposefully unhelpful--did you notice how he said "no" to my request, he didn't just not do something because he wanted his lunch to start 15 minutes early?  Plus, his bosses and coworkers were all right there listening, and they didn't say anything, or even seem to notice.  But you could potentially find one of those in the US.  Still, Indonesia is the place where such bureaucratic unhelpfulness like this is the norm.  Sometimes you get a little taste of Indonesia in her little northern cousin.  Today was one of those days.