As Lyle Lanley told the citizens of Springfield, "You know a town with money is a little like the mule with a spinning wheel. No-one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!"Lanley's sold monorails to the towns of Ogdenville and North Haverbrook, which really put them on the map. What he neglected to say that he'd also sold a monorail to Muddy Confluence, Malaysia. So as soon as we saw a monorail in Muddy Confluence, we knew we were in for comedy fun. We were wrong, but Lanley was right.
Muddy Confluence sure has money- they've got oil, electronics, Formula One Racing, and Michael Bolton playing at the Genting Highlands resort in November. MC also shares with Springfield a real desire to get noticed by the world- they've got the world's second tallest building (stupid Taiwan), the world's fifth highest communications tower (stupid China, Canada, Russia and Iran), the world's longest apple strudel (80metres), and the world's largest replica camel collection (200). Reports that they will challenge Springfield for the largest pile of burning tyres remain unconfirmed.
But it's not all records and monorails in Kuala Lumpur, which is the Malay name of Muddy Confluence. For all its money, Kuala Lumpur has about as much idea what to do with it as that mule mentioned above. Put another way, Malaysia knows EXACTLY what to do with all that money, and that’s spending it on huge construction projects which will shine brighter and better than any before. Add that to the fact that the Malaysian national pastime is shopping, and you have a recipe for more malls than the eye can see. Malaysia claims to have the world's largest mall, and this is all too plausible. The Times Square complex has eleven stories, including an indoor amusement park and an IMAX theatre. Suria KLCC is embedded into the feet of the Petronas Towers, and has six stories of shopping and an aquarium. There are many more.
Not unlike Beijing, Kuala Lumpur is strongly focused on making and spending of cashmoney. Unlike Beijing, the process of turning the place into one big shopping centre is so far completed that it is wholly possible to lose all sense of where you are- you are standing outside the Debenham's and might have a snack at Baskin Robbins or Famous Amos on your way to Marks & Spencer. Welcome to AnyMall, Planet Earth. Buy buy buy. The whole consumerist experience has been hermetically designed that no unpleasant indigenous variations seep in; in some cases quite literally, as malls have no windows to the outside world and are air conditioned to sub-arctic temperatures. Walk by a mall entrance at ten yards, and a blast of cold air hits you sideways, as Malaysia attempts to cool down the tropics from the inside out.
This nonstop shopping might has some explanation if prices were anything to shout about, if bargains might be had. But no, the similarity between western malls does not end with the choice of shopping outlets; the prices are comparable as well. Despite this, and despite the presence of cheaper prices in Bangkok and rock bottom prices in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur overflows with Aussies, Kiwis and Brits on shopping holidays, whatever circle of hell that may be. You can buy city maps which chart the smoothest passage from one mall to the next, without having to tread in any culture by mistake. Some of the monorail stops disgorge passengers directly into malls, without having to touch the street.
The tourists are far outnumbered by locals in the throng. Sporting the slickest phones, bluetooth headgear, watches, flashdrive accessories and sunglasses, the aspirational model of today's Malaysian youth seems entirely western, derived from mass media arbiters of cool, and forms a homogenous uniform appearance, in lockstep with their US and UK contemporaries. They behave just as badly, and sad to say, are just as fat. Kids today, viewers. I tell you.
None of this is to begrudge Malaysia any of the success it apparently enjoys. But surely there is a more useful way to spend all of this money in a way which does not simply add more malls to the world? Everyone has the right to shop in the same places, I suppose. Is shopping a human right? Discuss. On the other hand, making the whole thing so indistinguishable from its western counterparts that walking into such places is an empty, eviscerating experience isn't a good thing either. Presumably, there will one day a reckoning, as people realize that there's more to life than Sunglass Hut and Accessorize, and new money will no longer be poured into building more and more caves of shopping. Until that day, we have the KL experience.
Kuala Lumpur's residents are serious about making it in today's capitalist world, and are prepared to work very hard to do so. The business pages of the Straits Times takes up at least half the daily paper. The front displays of any bookstore are filled with management handbooks with titles like How to Make Your First Million, and Secrets of Microsoft: The Bill Gates Approach to Management. The payoff to all this is that Malaysia has tremendous human capital, and is a major Asian economic contender.
One suspects that this highly organized business approach is congruent to that of Singapore, Malaysia's neighbour to the south, and member of the federation of Malaysia until 1965. Like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur is very clean and very well organized, and its citizens generally are well behaved and law abiding. Ambition is obviously much valued by the Malaysians, both in terms of the individual pursuit of success, and in demonstrating to the world just how much Malaysia can accomplish if it sets its mind to it. Petronas Towers is perhaps the most obvious example, and features as the icon of the country on the currency, in advertising, and as the logo for the ASEAN conference scheduled for December 05. Globally speaking, Malaysia is fully expecting to join the 'G-9' in 2020. The government is nearing completion of a private city from which to conduct its business, the ten billion dollar Xanadu called Putrajaya, which comes replete with ministries, offices and residences for the Prime Minister and the King, a vast pink mosque and a stocked artificial lake for the PM and the Cabinet to commute up and down in special boats. Oh, and an air conditioned shopping plaza, naturally. Putrajaya is adjacent to the high tech exclusive suburb of Cyberjaya, which has wifi internet access from every toilet and breakfast hutch.
So far, so sterile. Rabid shopping, white elephant architecture, too much air conditioning, and high prices. Add to that the sin taxes the government exacts on beer (four bucks for a bottle of Tiger), and Malaysia is shaping up to be the fishbone in the trachea of south east Asia.
And yet.
Scratch the surface even a little bit, and Malaysia is a fascinating country. This is perhaps what is so frustrating about the whole way that Kuala Lumpur has been developed, is that it does the complexity of Malaysian society such a disservice. First off, Malaysia is an ethnic and cultural hybrid comprised of its own indigenous elements with strong inputs from China and the Indian subcontinent. Fifty odd percent of the population is Malay, twenty five percent Chinese, and the remainder are of various south Asian origins, plus others from Malaysian Borneo and farther afield. While avowedly a Muslim state, Malaysia nonetheless has significant Hindu and Buddhist populations, as well as Christians and animists, and maintains a climate of considerable freedom of worship.
Over the centuries, Malaysia has developed a cultural absorptive capacity that allows it to incorporate significant populations from China and India without having its own identity overwhelmed. Granted, this has not always been a flawless process, but it has unfolded comparatively bloodlessly, and diversity is strongly valued by Malaysians. Our visit coincided with Aidalfitri and Deepavalii, and the town overflowed with public celebrations of all kinds to celebrate the culmination of the Muslim and Hindu holy days. Over the decades since independence, there have been consistent dark mutterings that the Malaysian socio-cultural equation is too delicately balanced, and could collapse into chaos at any point as a result of independence, communism, Indonesian influence, Malay-Chinese desire for dominance, extremist Islam, and so on. Nevertheless, Malaysia has held firm, and shows no signs of splintering into its base components, if indeed anyone could reverse the process.
This ethnic diversity is so interwoven that it is impossible to determine at a glance whether someone is Malaysian or not based on physical appearance. Like riding a train in New York or London, riding the monorail in Kuala Lumpur it is impossible to determine who is local and who is visiting. Waiting for the ferry in Port Klang, two chaps who looked Tamil sat down with another two guys who could have stepped off the streets of Beijing and their pal who could have been (maybe was) Filipino. The five of them have a coffee and smoke (everyone smokes in Malaysia), jabbered away in one language, answered their mobiles in English, switched to another language, back to the first language, and all carried on. On Pelau Ketam island, the same variety of appearance continued, but all the signage was written in Chinese, although everyone spoke English. Muslim teenage schoolgirls wear tight jeans and tiny tops, but with a tundung headscarf over their heads. I saw one such outfit in which the tundung was pinned at the shoulder with a smiley face button. Business as Malaysian usual.
This plurality of influence and heritage is also deliciously evident that in the available eating options in KL. Indian buffet restaurants specializing in tandoor stand right next to (or share tables with) stalls specializing in Penang prawn fried noodles, which in turn are next a place doing grilled chicken fish with ginger and soy sauce. Single meals consist of great dishes from all over the place, and ingredients are borrowed and then lent back across the various cuisines. Even against the greatness of Thai or Beijing foodie options, Malaysia has such extraordinary variety of choice that eating well is well and truly one of the prime attractions of Kuala Lumpur.
Malaysia is not, per se, a global Great Culture, in the way that China or the United States exude influence across the world. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Malaysia seems rather to be able to take up what is on offer from other cultures, and fold it into its own mix. While the wholesale inhalation of consumer culture leads to the homogeneity of the malls, it also allows for the people who shop in them to be part of a dynamic and vibrant multiculture. That's why it's such a disappointment to see the youth getting cloned to look like every other teen on the planet. Kids today, viewers.
All is not forever rosy in the land, and there is a darker side to the Malaysian profile. The ruthless drive to succeed takes place within an autocratic state that regularly represses 'unfavourable' elements, especially southern Islamic political parties, a catspaw media, and is dependent on exploited migrant labour. A rigid social hierarchy, enshrined in the constitution, ensures that everyone knows their place. Within the Indian population, inherited caste systems from the subcontinent delineate just who's who and why they'll stay that way. Populations in Borneo are significantly less attended to that those on the Peninsula. In addition to the cast off migrant labourers adrift in Malaysia, refugees from Thailand, Burma and the Philippines waft in and out with regularity.
For all the carefully planted parks and manicured architecture, real life is far more interesting in Malaysia than it lets on. Far removed from the gleaming marble of the mall floors, there's a whole country out there waiting to be tasted, walked in and discussed. So next time you're there, please remember to ride the monorail to the end of the line, and start walking from there.
On which impractical advice we shall close. If you've read this far, you probably deserve a southeast Asian holiday all of your own.
No further travel is slated anytime soon, so relax in the knowledge that the next dispatch will be back on the freezing solid ground of Mongolia.
Selamat jalan,
Jannie
No comments:
Post a Comment