A Grasp of Things

In our time in Malaysia I was struck, as I always am there, by how little I felt I understood what was going on in that society. This is not a language thing. English is very widely spoken and my Malay, though pathetic, allows me to grasp a fair amount of what people are talking about. No, I'm referring here to that instinctive grasp we tend to build up of the fabric of what is taking place around us, such that we can comfortably inhabit the illusion we know what's going on. After almost two decades in Singapore I no longer feel the sense of being adrift that haunted me in my first months here, and when I go back to England although some aspects of life are now disturbingly different I generally grasp why things are as they are. But Malaysia, though in many ways very familiar to me, remains foreign.

A simple point to illustrate this. One afternoon we went to Taman Melawati, a district near to Ampang where we live, just to look around and see what the area had to offer. We parked on a sort of square, one of several, where lots of shops were. The buildings around weren't terribly old and, I suppose, made up the commercial centre of the township. We were there on a Sunday and things were fairly quiet - that I understood. But what I couldn't get hold of was how incredibly filthy the streets were. Not the kind of squalor of real poverty that is obviously unavoidable, but a sort of just letting things go to dreary ruin. In case this all sounds like western judgementalism let me tell you that my wife, a Malaysian, was far more vocal about the state of the area and refused to finish her drink in a café we went into on the grounds that everything smelled. What fascinated me was why the people there were ready to let this happen. Frankly it wouldn't have needed a massive effort to make the place look fairly respectable.

Now I know areas of Manchester and Sheffield and Liverpool that look a lot more run down than Taman Melawati. But I know why this is, whereas the state of the taman centre made no economic or social sense to me. How innocent I am.

Having said all that, the missus and I were just walking back home from Parkway Parade and a chap came by holding a parrot. A fine green and red one. That was something way outside my experience - not so much the parrot per se but the nonchalance with which the bird was being taking for a stroll. I pointed this out to Noi and asked if she didn't find it mildly disturbing, as she had just walked past the guy without comment. She told me she might have said something had he been carrying a tiger, but she hadn't found anything particularly worthy of comment in the scene. And I thought I understood life here!