Letter from Semenanjung? Notes from Nowhere?

By Bunga Pakma

Even as we lie asleep in our beds or sit in our chairs we are moving, carried by the earth’s rotation at a thousand miles per hour. Then too, we all ride on the earth as it swings around the sun, the sun orbits the center of our galaxy, and the galaxy itself is moving out from some unknown centre.

We do not merely directly observe the first two of these grand circles, the deepest part of our beings are directly tuned to them.  A rhythm of day and night cycles inside us, and the seasons of the year touch instincts in us in the tropics or the higher latitudes just as they do in animals

So one might say that the normal condition of life, whether we like it or not, is motion.  That life is a voyage is one of the oldest metaphors.

Shifting scene for me

The scene has shifted for me.  Last week I left Sarawak to come to Kuala Lumpur.  I have been fortunate enough to find work, and I shall be teaching for a year at a large, respected institution of learning, never mind which one.  You, reader, may have conjectured that I had some connection with teaching.

I had taught at the same place for eight years starting twenty years ago, and so had not been back to KL in thirteen years.  Things have changed considerably.  In the early 1990s the internet was just beginning to arrive, and still only Datuks used hand-phones.

We lived in Petaling Jaya.  There had been plenty of building going on during my time there.  I go far enough back to remember the wet-market that was torn down and replaced by a department store, which in turn has been replaced by cyber-mall.

Building frenzy in PJ

But it seems that during my absence there has been a true frenzy of building everywhere—roads, high-rises, malls, the LRT, you name it.  The spaces of green that one used to see from the top of one of the few tall buildings now show as small fragments.

I don’t intend to go into the aesthetics.  Such growth is akin to a force of nature, and to clamour against it would be as wrong-headed as scolding a hurricane, particularly if I myself chose of free will to step into the storm.

I have had only a week to look for housing.  This time around I ran into a trouble that didn’t exist the first time I was here.

The places I liked were hard to get back and forth from, and the places on an easy commute were not terribly likable. While I was in the US, I occupied a dark basement.  The latest flat I saw (this afternoon) was at the tippy-top of a ritsy high-rise atop a shopping mall, and about as secure, solitary—and friendly—as Alcatraz.  What an irony!  Life from Underground to Below the Sky!  Mall, indeed.  If I were a woman who needed to buy a new pair of shoes each week I might love it, but a threadbare old man who wanders out to buy a pencil when he needs one is not attracted by retail excess.

Tough hunt for accommodation

I had viewed a terrace-house.  At first I quailed at the darkness.  I am a slow person to understand what my feelings tell me.  Our surest guide is our feelings, as they are our deepest wisdom.  Now I understand that a neigbourhood means a lot more than a picture-window.  Dumb as I am, I didn’t realise I could put a table and chair on the porch, and in pure ignorance and silly fear wondered whether the folks around would despise me.  Human failings, and these are typical of kampong people, who live among the Known.  Perhaps not liked, but Known.  Now, time has aroused the imagination in me of schmoozing with my fellows on the Lorong, and I’m calling the landlord tomorrow. I hear Yeshua saying to me, You of little faith!

Last time I lived those eight years without a car.  None was necessary.  Few cars were on the road anyway.  I have ancient video of my parents’ strolling across the street at PJ Old Town.  Mini-busses—remember them?–=went everywhere.  Between them, taxis, and “shanks’ mare” [bejalai kaki], I could get about.  What alarms me now on my re-settlement in PJ is that walking is not just difficult, one puts one’s life in others’ hands crossing the tiniest street.

KL and PJ unwalkable

A great city is always walkable.  New York, the world’s greatest city, is also the most walkable.  Cars are mere partners of the streets.  One would just as soon walk 20 blocks as take a cab, it’s so easy and entertaining.  KL and PJ are not merely unwalkable, these two boroughs seem designed as traps to kill as many foot-travellers as possible.  I’m talking of design by the Majlis-Majlis Bandar and their so-called engineers, not of the malignity of drivers.

I’m not excessively old, but I have to risk my knees as I “sprint” across the road.  How agèd matriarchs get up across the pedestrian bridges I feel pain to contemplate.

Historically, walking is what cities are all about. Look at the beginning of Plato’s Republic: “Yesterday Kritôn and I were walking down to Piraios [about 5 km away] to view the Festival.”  Dr. Johnson, the great Critic, walked all over London in the 18^th century.  A hundred years later Baudelaire walked the streets of Paris as a flâneur—an idle stroller—he described Paris as

“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,

Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!

“Am anthill city, a city full of dreams,

Where a ghost at midday accosts the passerby!”

We have all of 19^th century Paris here in KL, and have descended much, much farther into the abyss.  In walking a city in Malaysia one takes one’s life in one’s hands.  Cars are the cockroaches that have chewed the life out of cities everywhere.

Longing for stability

We are all on the move.  We travel through space, and through inexorable time.  Yet I think many of us retain a wish for stability and grounding. My parents-in-law in their house in the kampong had a crude painting on black velvet, showing a lovely kampong with a river and waterfall and rice-field.

There is such a thing as the Native Dream—to live secure in a house, with a rice-field and garden, among charming and pure nature—and I would be the last person to scoff at it.  There is no utopia upon earth, but we would all be the poorer and more vulnerable if no one longed for a simple, decent, healty, located way of life.

I would like to leave you with a poem by Claudian, a Roman poet of the 5^th century CE, which, I believe, encapsulates the wishes of many Sarawakians.

Happy he who has passed his life on his ancestral land!

The same house that saw him a child sees him an old man.

He leans his tungkat on the sand where he once crawled,

And recounts long decades in one dwelling.

Chance has not dragged him through its crazy tumult.

He has not been a vagabond drinking strange waters.

He never feared the sea, trading, nor battle as a soldier.

He has not suffered noisy politics and lawsuits.

Ignorant of “great” things, unfamiliar with the nearest city,

He enjoys the face of a freer sky.

By successive harvests, not elections, he numbers his years.

Autumn shows itself with fruit, spring with flowers.

He views the suns rising, and the suns setting,

And measures the day by the great circling above.

He remembers a huge oak sprung from its little acorn

And views the woods aging along with him.

Neighboring Verona to him is as far off as India

And Lake Garda is as strange as the Red Sea.

Yet the strength remains in his solid arms

His last stage sees him a healthy grandfather.

Let someone else go scrutinize far-away peoples:

He has more life.  The other more of tourism.