Will The Real Malaysian Please Shut Up!

Cartoon by Lat for Malaysian Business


A Pseudo-Anthropological Introduction

Whenever I leave the country I'm a Malaysian - my passport says so. Back home, I'm a Non-Ethnic. Come on lah, you must be either Chinese or Malay. Let's see your identity card. Actually I'm Tibetan. Yak-yak! Don't bluff lah! Wah... really ah?

It's true my grandparents migrated here from China. But my mother was educated by English missionaries and my dad used to play drums in a ragtime combo. I grew up on a very strange diet of Hollywood movies, Pontianak, P. Ramlee, Wahid Satay, Xavier Cugat and his Latin Orchestra, Irene Goodnight, nasi beriani, lontong, chee cheong fun, and Stravinsky. Which is what makes me, essentially, a Non-Ethnic.

But I don't mind being called a Malaysian at all. Everybody needs an operational base, a place to call home, and this is beyond doubt a deliciously heterogeneous and culturally complex environment. The influence of all the major and minor civilizations has been felt on these shores: the Khmer, the Javanese, the Chinese, the Indian, the Middle Eastern, the Western European - and, more recently, the North American and the Japanese. And yet we remain stubbornly, undefinably, unhomogeneously Malaysian. Where else on earth do people have a choice of chicken porridge, nasi lemak, or cornflakes for breakfast? (Well, in Singapore they do - but, then, Singapore was once part of Malaysia, so we do have a few things in common.)

Now, all this is well and fine if one is only interested in food. However, what can a well-intentioned pseudo-anthropologist do when faced with such a bewildering rojak of ethnic varieties? Apart from the Malays, the Chinese, the Indians, the Eurasians, and the smattering of fully tropicalized Europeans, we have more than 50 distinct indigenous tribes in Sabah and Sarawak.* To further complicate matters, the Malays can be sub-divided into regional groups: Northern, Southern, West Coast, East Coast, Urban, Rural, Maritime, Riverine, Inland, and so on. The Chinese come in a noisy assortment of dialect groups: Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Hakka, Fookcheng, Hockcheng, Hockchew, Sianyou, and Whathaveyou. The Indians... well, this broad category encompasses Tamils, Malayalees, Bengalis, Punjabis, Kashmiris, Pakistanis, Singhalese, Jaffnese, Gujaratis, Godknowswhatelse. And the Eurasians - enough, enough! We haven't even mentioned the Babas and Nyonyas (Malay-speaking 'Straits-born' Chinese, found mainly in Malacca, Penang and Singapore, who constitute a community unto themselves). What more the original Sabahan and Sarawakian tribes - like the Iban, Bidayuh, Kenyah, Kelabit, Penan, Bajau, Murut, and Kadazan?

From the purely pseudo-anthropological viewpoint, then, Malaysia could either be Heaven or Hell (especially with the tumultuous socio-economic and political developments of the last couple of decades which have spawned so many new subspecies overnight). And, of course, it's really a bit of both - just like the rest of the planet.

Nevertheless, it definitely won't do to declare that we're the same as everyone else. People might immediately stop travelling or reading about the inhabitants of other lands - and then what would become of our tourism and publishing industries? Books we can live without (a recent survey indicated that Malaysians on the average read only half a page of literature per annum, apart from textbooks, newspapers, and magazines) - but tourists?

Yes, Virginia, The Typical Malaysian exists. But only according to national cartoonist laureate Lat, who takes a kind view of everyone. Since I've long given up the search for 'the typical Malaysian,' you won't find him or her in this book.

What you will find in this book is a pseudo-anthropological (meaning highly selective, intensely personal and totally prejudiced) survey of Malaysian types and situations. To simplify the procedure I had to re-define my parameters - or, rather, confine my task of character defamation to a specific part of Malaysia, where a fairly representative cross-section of the total population could be studied with relative ease and without incurring a hefty travel bill which the publisher would have had to foot.

The Klang Valley was the obvious and inevitable choice as my research site. Sounds exotic, doesn't it? The Klang Valley. Actually, when people say 'the Klang Valley' they're usually just referring to K.L. and P.J. - Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya - the hectic, smoggy, soggy hub of almost all political, commercial, and cultural activity in Malaysia. This is the prime target of the Urban Drift; this is where the Bright Lights are to be found, where it all happens - never mind if tourists prefer Penang, Malacca, and the lovely islands off the East Coast.

While the majority of the 'types' found in the Klang Valley can also be found elsewhere, some are endemic to the Big City. A few are very new types; a few have long been among us; and a few others, one hopes, will do us a big favour and go the way of the dodo as soon as possible.

I will not pretend that this is by any means a comprehensive inventory of Malaysian types. A few specimens are quite impossible to describe, verbally or visually; and some are positively dangerous, far too dangerous to describe with any degree of truthfulness. With this latter category the intrepid researcher runs a very real risk of summary banishment, or incarceration, or mutilation, or execution, or all of the above. Don't you be fooled by all the beautiful golf courses - it's a jungle out here!

None of the Malaysian characteristics examined in this survey will be found in any literature issued by the Tourist Development Corporation.** This does not mean that the TDC is prone to fibbing or exaggeration. Malaysians, as a whole, are extremely friendly, hospitable, charming and helpful. They only turn nasty when a 'foreigner' criticizes them. Luckily, I am no foreigner. Indeed, by making my fellow Malaysians look a bit laughable, I hope to show the world how lovable we can be.


GLOSSARY
Pontianak - vampiress in Malay folklore; also a popular horror film series in the 1960s.
P. Ramlee - late great actor-songwriter-filmmaker; patron saint of the Malaysian arts scene.
Wahid Satay - Malay comedian of the 1960s.
nasi beriani - see Gourmet's Glossary in blogpost titled 'The Cari Makan Ethic'
lontong - ditto
chee cheong fun - ditto
nasi lemak - ditto
rojak - ditto

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*Not to mention at least 18 distinct indigenous tribes of Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia, too often overlooked in our mad rush to "a fully industrialized future."

**Now known as Tourism Malaysia - but singing the same old songs of self-praise.

The Sungei Wang Jinjang

Click here to see an AI-enhanced version of this illustration!

If you're not in the habit of tuning in to Radio Young Hong Kong, you're in no danger of ever turning into a Sungei Wang Jinjang.

For the uninitiated, 'Jinjang' is a more polite variation of 'ching-chong' (as in Ching-Chong Chinaman). Jinjang also happens to be a district just beyond the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur: a not-particularly-picturesque agglomeration of small factories and not-so-new villages giving way grudgingly to nondescript housing estates. The area was once notorious as a spawning ground for kidnappers, bank robbers, and secret society members. Later the term 'Jinjang Joe' came into common use as a description for someone desperately trying to be fashionable (especially if he had the misfortune to be a Chinese primary school drop-out and had nothing to look forward to except a lifetime of nightshifts in 24-hour coffee shops or life imprisonment in Simpang Renggam*).

Sungei Wang (literally, River of Money) is a mammoth shopping complex built over the legendary B.B. Park where, in the good old days, people could go for a little cheap cabaret - $2 dancing girls and all - or pig out at the open-air steamboat stalls. There was even a tiny cinema called the Rialto which was the closest we've come to having an 'art film' outlet (I saw Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail there in 1972!)

Anyway, all that's gone now - but folks still flock to the bright lights of Sungei Wang and the adjoining Bukit Bintang Plaza (probably because the two connected complexes offer the greatest strolling area in town that's centrally air-conditioned); in fact, Bukit Bintang Plaza and Sungei Wang are so intimately connected the only way you can tell which one you're in is by studying the floor tiles - red means you're in Sungei Wang, green means B.B. Plaza.

On weekends the gaudily decked out 'River of Money' is invariably inundated with young Chinese boys and girls - also gaudily decked out in the latest styles dictated by the Hong Kong 'New Wave' magazines. And that means a bit of bleach and lots of gel on the hair; floppy, oversized shirts; and amazingly voluminous 180-pleat pants. If the Heavy Metal Kutus with their stretch jeans are our die-hard Rockers, then the Sungei Wang Jinjangs have to be our New Generation Mods.

Hong Kong is undoubtedly the Jinjang's Mecca, the Hollywood of the East - and it's no surprise that the city's largest and most ostentatious disco (or Dance Factory, as it is billed) was at one time called Hollywood East. Saturday nights and the eves of public holidays, the Jinjangs used to take their girls to Canton where they'd disco all night to Alan Tam hits spun by Cantonese-speaking DJs (though these days you're more likely to hear a lot of Canto rap).

A good number of Jinjangs are probably school drop-outs - which accounts for the fact that the underground carpark levels at Sungei Wang are marked with pictures of exotic animals instead of letters. Nevertheless, the Jinjang enjoys far greater career opportunities these days. He can get nice respectable jobs in McDonald's or 7-Eleven; he can work in video rental shops or (to bring this account up to date) sell pirate VCDs and DVDs; manage an amusement arcade or internet cafe; or (if he doesn't mind a dash of the gay lifestyle) he can enrol in a hairdressing institute and dream of meeting a sugar daddy and becoming a partner in some swank unisex salon.

The more privileged Jinjang might have a businessman uncle or two who could offer him a study loan to Canada or Australia; in a few years he'd be back with a business degree and work his way to eventual ownership of a shopping complex like... well, Sungei Wang or the more upmarket Yow Chuan Plaza. And if that doesn't work out, he can always befriend the Chief of Police and fall back on kidnapping, bank robbery, and syndicated vice.

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*Simpang Renggam is where a detention facility has been built for hardcore criminals, especially members of secret societies without a well-connected patron and protector in the Home ministry.