Some Southeast Asian Junk

Signing Off, Over Alice Springs

The wireless internet feature on Singapore Airlines is so cool.  As our trip has come to the end, the blog goes on hiatus indefinitely until we come back.  Hopefully it won't be too long.

One More Word List

Today is our last day in KL before heading off to a working vacation in Canberra followed by a real vacation in northern Queensland and Sydney.  In honor of this last day, another list of silly spellings.

aiskrim        A tasty treat on a hot day
canselori     Where the office of the canselor of your university is
fasad            The front of something, like a building. 
fesyen         It's important to be concerned with this if you want to have stail
mel              Letters and packages; synonymous with the pos
sosis             Like politik, you do not want to see this being made

Furthermore, we have found our new favorite idiom.  In Malay, to say "a day late and a dollar short," you say nasi telah menjadi bubur, which means literally "the rice has already become porridge."  Awesome.

New Suit

A friend of mine always says that when he travels to developing or transition economies, he goes to a tailor and gets a new suit.  Well, JM and I took his advice and checked out a tailor at a nice mall here.  We were in the market for a sport coat, but we decided upon looking at the prices that an entire suit was in order.  We picked it up yesterday, and boy, are we glad that we made this decision.  There really isn't anything like a suit that is made precisely for your own body.  There's also nothing quite like a suit made out of super-160s wool, either.  And you can't beat the price--cheaper than anything but the most basic suit available at Men's Wearhouse.  Fortunately, the guy at the store has my measurements, and swears that he will make me a new suit whenever I want and just put it in the mail for me.

Now, the next step is to never gain any weight.  That means no more travelling to Malaysia, a credit to how good the food is here.

Vietnamese Food and Motorcycle Kitties

We had two friends visit us while we were in Malaysia last time, and each of them was a cat fan.  So, we took each of them to see our favorite sight in Malaysia.  This is a guy named Jamil Ismail who keeps a harem of trained cats that he rescued from the streets of KL.  He brings them out to a busy street in the touristy neighborhood of Bukit Bintang, where they sleep on a motorcycle that is not only running, but also blaring really loud music.  Cheesy, perhaps, but whatever.  It's a little disturbing that we've been there so many times that he knows us, even enough to know that we speak Malay.

Anyway, Jamil is online now.  It seems that he updates his cat pictures about every single day.  This guy is no joke, he really like cats.  OK, maybe he's a little crazy, but who cares?

The point of this is that we saw the motorcycle kitties last night when we were out for dinner with friends at one of our favorite restaurants in Kuala Lumpur.  It's a Vietnamese restaurant called Sao Nam that has excellent dishes like mangosteen salad and duck with tamarind.  Last night we had (1) dragonfruit salad, (2) prawn and mangosteen salad, (3) duck with tamarind, (4) salmon with dill and fish sauce, (5) deep fried eggplant, (6) grilled chicken and herbs with rice noodles, (7) beef soup (pho), plus some desserts and a nice red wine.  The decor is "ironic Communist," with all sorts of prints of political posters all over the walls.  We took pictures both of the cat and of the restaurant (start here, click Next >> to scroll through other new ones).

Annalakshmi

Around Malaysia, India, Singapore, Australia, and now San Francisco, you can sometimes happen across one of a chain of restaurants known as Annalakshmi.  These are tasty vegetarian restaurants that serve all-you-can-eat buffets as well as a wide range of drinks and breads at a price that can't be beat: whatever you feel like paying.  If you check out the SF branch's website, you can find out all about its principles of athithi dhevo bhava (The Guest is God) and the fact that it's staffed only by volunteers.  What they don't tell you is that it's nice because it gives you Indian food off-the-beaten-path.  There are no standard veggie Indian dishes like regular dhal or vegetable samosas or whatever.  Instead, you get food that grandmothers cook, weird dishes without regular names or, oftentimes, identifiable ingredients.  But it's all vegetarian, so you know you can't get in too much trouble.

We went to the KL outlet last night for our dinner.  There is a woman who works there refilling the chafing dishes and stewpots who is very very nice, and who clearly has an interest in creating and nurturing vegetarians.  She always asks us "Do you take vegetarian food always?", to which we always answer "usually."  Last night she followed up with a new one: "Is it for compassionate reasons?"  Tough to figure out how to answer that, because in reality, it's not.  But we nodded politely and helped ourselves to an unidentified mushroomy fried thing.  We think that in the grand scheme of things, it's the ends that matter, not the means.

Remnants of Empire

We've had a good couple of days.  While interviewee confidentiality means that I cannot discuss precisely what we've been doing, suffice it to say that we've had a great introduction to the Malaysian upper classes.  It's very cool to see how these folks have really taken over from the British colonial administration in many of their education, mannerisms, and lifestyles.

This is best visible in the locations where I have been meeting people.  Kuala Lumpur has a series of clubs whose histories stretch back to the British colonial era.  The best known one of these is the Royal Selangor Club, right in the middle of town, which is right next to the field where the Brits used to play cricket (and which is now Independence Square).  Another famous one is the Royal Lake Club, which sits several kilometers from the Royal Selangor Club in KL's plush garden district.  I hung out there for a bit today, and really got a glimpse of what it must have been like in the early 1930s to be a British colonial administrator.  I had coffee by the pool, and watched bunches of fifty-somethings walking to the squash and tennis courts amidst the big old palm trees and the humid, just-not-quite-refreshing breeze.

And again, while there were all sorts of Feisals, Lims, and Anandas at these clubs, no one spoke anything other than English.  And this wasn't Minglish, full of little Malay suffixes, this was The Queen's Own.  I also noticed that there were no headscarves in evidence, even among the employees.  This probably reflects the difference between this old guard of established fortunes and the new Malay middle classes.

Now, if we can just finagle a sponsorship...

More on Parliament and Politics

People who study Malaysian politics often lament that the political system here is authoritarian.  The basis of this assessment is the simplest definition of authoritarianism that we have--the fact that the government never loses elections.  Since independence, the ruling coalition has always retained well over a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament, allowing it to amend the Constitution at will.  The only exception to this rule is the 1969 elections, when the coalition only won a simple majority.  When this happened, the government used the excuse of ethnic riots to suspend Parliament for two years and reform the country's political institutions to ensure the ascendancy of the ruling coalition.  Combine this with many of the odious anti-democratic laws that the regime could exercise if it felt like it, you get the picture that the government doesn't win elections simply because it is so popular, but because it ensures that it wins elections.  People normally term this "rule by law," in contrast to "rule of law."

What's really interesting is that despite the fact that foreign observers classify the regime as authoritarian, all of the institutions of democracy exist.  I saw this first hand at Parliament the other day.  MPs make speeches and have arguments; they vote on and pass bills; and Opposition MPs criticize the dominant coalition, have caucuses, and hold press conferences.  The big opposition parties here don't mount coups or foment revolutions or sponsor terrorism, and they never have, and it seems impossible that they ever would. I knew that this was all true, but like anything, your perceptions change when you see politics working first hand.  Part of me wondered before if it's all just a show, like people often allege that it is when the regime is being particularly repressive (i.e. 1969-1971, 1987-1990, 1998-2000).  I'm convinced more than ever now that it's not always just a show.

Political scientists often wonder what to make of "competitive authoritarian" or "electoral authoritarian" or "soft authoritarian" or "pseudo-democratic" regimes.  From the 1970s to the late 1990s, they were particularly common in places like Latin America (i.e. Mexico under the PRI, Brazil) and East Asia (i.e. Malaysia, Taiwan, etc).  In Latin America, one scholar liked to talk about democraduras and dictablandas as inhabiting the middle ground between liberal democracy and dictatorship.  There's a whole cottage industry that tries to figure out how to classify regimes.  There are more classificatory schemes than there are countries, and people have made their careers out of figuring out this particular issue in places like Mexico and Malaysia.  And it's not (always) just academic navel gazing: many argue (and their evidence is compelling) that countries like Malaysia and Mexico are systematically more able, because of their quasi-democratic procedures and institutions, to withstand pressures for real democratization than their more dictatorial counterparts.  In the past 10 years, this line of inquiry has become increasingly common in the field.

At any rate, it's fascinating stuff, and it gets more fascinating when you see it first hand.

For Future Reference

The Malaysian Parliament has free wireless.  It is also very luxurious inside, with a very modern Islamic architectural style, plush rugs, and delicious air conditioning (especially since I walked about a mile to get here in my wool pants and with my tweed jacket and computer bag).  Outside, the building is a bit more institutional-looking, displaying a style that my college friends and I used to refer to as "1950s institutional"; i.e. poured cement and weird window-facings with metal-rimmed windows.  It looks a lot like what your college library probably looks like.

Seeing as I'll be here for awhile, you may get additional updates.

UPDATE: They know how to do it up right here.  Tuxedo'd waiters in the canteen, along with tasty coffee.  I'm probably the only one here who brought my own lunch, but then again, I'm the only Mat Salleh here too and the only guy in a tweed jacket, so it's nothing new.

A note on the socio-economic classes here:  All of the speech in the actual Parliament sessions is extremely formal, textbook Malay that I can understand very well.  Then you see people here in the lobby chatting, and it's always in their home language: Chinese in Cantonese or Hokkienese or something, Indians in Tamil, and Malays in...English.  I wonder what percentage of the Malays MPs here were students at Malay College Kuala Kangsar, know as the Eton of the East.

The Economics of Taxis

One difference between life in Malaysia one year ago and life in Malaysia today is with regards to taxis.  Since we've arrived, we've noticed a big change in negotiations with taxi drivers.  It used to be that in Kuala Lumpur, if you flagged down a cab, the driver would *almost* always take you where you wanted to go, and use the meter.  There was an exception for the really touristy area of KL known as Bukit Bintang or in front of the Petronas Towers, but besides that, the driver would take you and use the meter, no questions asked.

That is not the case now.  Now, almost everywhere that we go after around 3PM or with the exception of when we get cabs actually at our hotel, taxi drivers refuse to use their meters.  Instead, they insist on negotiating some absurd price--often about four or five times the metered fare--for the trip.  This is a real problem.  You can often negotiate the price down to about twice the metered fare, but besides that, the drivers refuse to budge.

We cannot figure this one out.  In essence, this has produced an annoying feature of KL life that all over the city, their are cab drivers sitting around with no passengers, just hanging out at taxi stands and refusing to take people who don't pay inflated prices.  The reason that this doesn't make sense is that they are not making any money by just sitting around.  Taxis in KL operate on concessionary bases, like in New York, where they have to pay a fee for the right to use the cab and then they make any take-home pay after that cost.  So by sitting around at taxi stands and refusing to take passengers, or driving around, pulling over, and then refusing to pick you up, they are shooting themselves in the foot. 

There are two things that explain why there could be a difference between now and a year ago.  (1) Government-mandated gasoline prices have risen, but government-mandated metered taxi fares have not.  (2) Downtown KL is experiencing a construction boom that creates more traffic.  But neither of these can explain why cabbies would be willing to forgo all income by offering absurd prices that price passengers out of the market.  Remember, KL does have pretty good mass transit, so people have options even if they would prefer to take a taxi.  And we know that the market isn't clearing because there is a surplus of cab drivers waiting around and doing nothing as well as a surplus of passengers complaining that cabs are too expensive and therefore taking the subway even though they would prefer to take a cab.  Furthermore, Indonesia and Singapore have experienced the same construction booms, gas price rises, and steady taxi prices, yet in both countries, taxi drivers will pick you up and use the meter, no problem.

Any Malaysian readers who can explain this to us?

"Want to go for a beer and watch football?"

In the past 24 hours, three Malays have invited us out for drinks.  And I'm not talking soda or tea, I'm talking going out for a beer.  It can be difficult to square this with the fact that all three were also observant Muslims unless you understand how many Southeast Asian Muslims approach their faith.  For many, Islamic rules such as those that forbid the consumption of alcohol are very personal affairs, not something that has to be legislated or that can be mandated by a religious ruling.  Two of the people I was speaking to used the phrase "this decision is between me and God," and apparently, God is much more concerned with other things.

Of course, there is a tension here.  Many Malays are much more observant of rules such as those that prohibit the consumption of alcohol.  This is something that causes a bit of uncertainty within the Muslim community.  There exist bodies such as the Federal Territories Department of Islamic Affairs (known by its initials, Jawi) that go around trying to police the behavior of Muslims.  On occasion they have "arrested" Malays found to be drinking or dressing inappropriately at nightclubs.  On other occasions, they have detained Malay teenagers for sitting to close to each other at the mall.  But most urban Malays oppose Jawi's interference in daily affairs of Malays, and in fact, the federal government has clamped down on Jawi for overstepping its boundaries as of late.

At any rate, it's just interesting to see how this tension plays out in real life.  Malaysian Islam is in general so moderate that it's tough, when you get past the fact that there's no pork in non-Chinese restaurants and that women wear headscarves, to remember that you're actually in a majority-Muslim country.  Then you get the experience of Middle Eastern Muslims who visit Malaysia as tourists.  (This is apparently vacation time in the Middle East, as we mentioned about this time last year.)  One guy I was talking to today kept bringing up how different Middle Easterners were from Malays, using terms like "impolite" and kurang ajar (literally, "insufficiently taught") to describe their behavior.  For Americans (and we were two of them), for whom Islam is represented in the media essentially as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, the fact that there is so much variation within the Muslim world can be difficult to grasp.  Then you travel to Southeast Asia, and it becomes so clear.