While wandering around the Jalan Masjid India area last December during my sisters’ brief visit, we stumbled on a live performance in a small plaza. The show was of traditional Malay song and dance. There was a large squad of men sitting crosslegged, some with drums, some clapping, some singing lead, some chorus. The dancers were men too, with a few playing female roles in full female attire. Whether they were real-life pondans or skilled actors I don’t know, but they were very convincing. My sisters and I went back and forth a bit before deciding they really must all be guys.
Gongs, drums and props
Laying nearby were the props and instruments waiting to be used. Among them was an enormous brass gong. The gong is a popular component of traditional music around here, perhaps the best known of which is Gamelan, the percussion orchestra. “Gong” itself is an English word taken directly from the Malaysian language. It comes from the Malay word gaung which means “echo”. I wonder if the object itself originates in Malaysia. It may very well have come from China, since the Chinese also use gongs and are a relatively older culture.
This afternoon, after returning from a day at the beach, my neighbor’s son comes to the house to say his father invites me to his house. This happens all the time – a lovely part of neighborhood life here is the various kenduris: get-togethers for weddings, graduations, funeral rememberances (tahlil) or often much smaller events. The whole neighborhood shows up to eat a meal and possibly zikir a bit, depending on the occasion. For weddings there are usually invite cards, but often a representative of the household will drop by to personally invite.
So when the guy’s son came by, I put my sarong and kufi on and went over, even though I know him not so well and he’s never thrown one before. No sooner had I stepped in the door when I realized something was wrong. There was no food to be seen, and there were only a few guys in the room, all in office casual attire. It was a trap! They were all CNI agents! And, worse, I was the only one foolish enough to show up. All the other neighbors must have gotten wind of the plot. I couldn’t just run out, and the four of them immediately drew me into polite conversation. How many kids do you have? So how do you like Malaysia? They sounded out my bahasa skills. Can he understand our presentation in melayu? Oh, were they happy that I could.
Nobody else was turning up, so they sprang into their routine. They had a whiteboard. They had a banner. They had a suitcase full of product demonstrations. It was excruciating. There was hardly a single word of truth in the entire speech:
False appeals to peity:
MLM is the way of the Prophet, peace be upon him, because the Prophet praised the businessman. When my man is preaching MLM, it feels to him as though it is ibadat, worship, because he’s just spreading the good news around.
False appeals to racial solidarity:
MLM is the one business where Malays can succeed without the Chinaman holding them back.
False appeals to books he’s never read and experts the audience has never heard of. False appeals to feelings of national inferiority:
MLM is famous and popular in the USA. CNI toothpaste is based on a Scandinavian formula.
Dubious personal testimonies:
He used to have mouth ulcers till he started using the amazing swedish CNI toothpaste. He used to feel tired when he came home from work. He went to see the doctor who told him there is no cure (undoubtedly because there is no disease). Then he drank CNI’s Tongkat Ali + Ginseng instant coffee. Now he’s so energetic that, with a packet a day, here he is on Sunday instead of home resting with his family just so he can give me this fantastic opportunity!
And finally, the brazen lie:
he derives no personal benefit from my decision to sell or not to sell my soul to CNI.
I tried to maintain consciousness by appreciating the technical aspects of the presentation: his hand gestures, his turns of phrase. At first I thought, maybe it will be brief, then I can beg off politely. It was not going to be brief. I tried to derail him by asking for the material in writing, to peruse at my leisure. He was not derailed. And he talked so fast, I couldn’t string my BM together fast enough to head him off. I tried a second time to throw him off his speech, but he was just too fast and too practiced.
Finally, his turn was over and he handed it off to his associate, who was, of course, his brother-in-law. Now, this guy was old enough to use a more avuncular style, with appeals to the authority of his decades of life experience. But his delivery was slow. First of all, it made me even more teeth-grindingly anxious to jump up out of there. Second, his pace allowed me to put together a suitable segue to extricate myself. I jumped up, shook hands through clenched teeth, and flew.
What a dirty trick. Sending your own kid out to mask your intentions. Wasting 30 minutes (they planned for 60) of your neighbors’ time in an attempt to exploit them for profit. I’ll never visit his house again.
Manggis, Garcinia mangosteena, is a lovely fruit. It has a thick purple rind with pure white fruit and bright yellow sap. Manggis is in season at the same time as Durian. It is apparently known as mangosteen in English, but this English speaker had never heard the word till I arrived here, so I just call it by it’s shorter local name, manggis.
Manggis has the distinction of being the next supposed miracle health food. It is being heavily promoted in the States as a cure-all, based on one part thin scientific research (Xanthones or some such) and one part on it’s equally dubious role in traditional medicine here in Malaysia. As far as I or anyone I know has heard of, manggis has no particular healing power except that it is believed to be “cooling”. The traditional food system, which is similar I guess to Indian ayurveda, is that all foods have some property, either hot, cool, windy, etc. Some foods are more strongly hot/cool/windy/etc than others. Durian is considered strongly heaty. Manggis is strongly cooling, and since they fruit at the same time, it is considered an “antidote” to Durian. That’s it for the word on the street.
The rind at the base of the fruit
Now, there is certainly more arcane knowledge than that about all the foods and plants around here. That is the province of the bomoh or dukun. What’s the difference between a bomoh and a dukun? That’s a great first line for a joke, but I don’t have the joke yet. The difference is that the bomoh deals more in maladies of the spirit world, curses, charms, jinn, things like that. The dukun is more of an herbal healer. According to the advertising brochures for these manggis products, FRIM, the Forest Research Institute in Malaysia published a bulletin on traditional use of various local plants. In it, they assert that manggis is in use by dukuns for treatment of a couple of different illnesses. I don’t doubt FRIM: they are a well respected organization. But the bulletin is merely documenting incidence of use by local witch doctors, nothing more. I should mention that I don’t have anything against witch doctors. Some of my best friends are witch doctors. I’m sure a good dukun knows when to use manggis and when not to. The problem is with these health food promoters who make every kind of claim about their product’s efficacy, as if it is a panacea for world suffering.
The inner rind
What makes the promotion of manggis more offensive is that it is sold through Multi-level Marketing (MLM) schemes, or “Network Marketing” if you prefer. There few things more distasteful than having your friends or relatives try to turn you out for a profit, which is exactly how MLM works. The Manggis MLM is not here in Malaysia yet, but every single other one under the sun is, from alpha to omega, or Amway to Omegatrend, if you like. MLM is so popular here in Malaysia I think because people have really large social networks. Families are big, extended families are close, and neighborhoods and villages are active and connected much more so than an American small town or neighborhood, in my opinion. So any MLM newbie has a huge pool of victims to pimp. Whole villages will fall to a new MLM scheme almost at once, with the head of the village or other influential member like the family matriarch introducing, and everyone else falling in to the downstream.
When I was newly arrived in Malaysia and casting about for work, a man in my wife’s faculty who was older than her and outranked her, invited us to his house for lunch in order to discuss a job possibility for me. We couldn’t refuse. Sure enough, it was a trap. He plied us with MLM tea and MLM biscuits while he went through the whole spiel, complete with flipchart. When I escaped to the bathroom, it was decorated like a department store display, with MLM soap, MLM lotion, and MLM air freshener. Wife, Daughter and hapless Son-in-law, his loyal downstream, were also on hand to offer their testimonials. We sat and smiled politely through gritted teeth for what seemed like forever. It was the single most awkward moment I’ve been through since I got here.
Careful, the sap will stain your clothes
When you combine the social coerciveness of MLM with the hysteria around fad medicines, you get a very potent money machine indeed. Tahitian Noni Juice, the last big one, was an extract of Morinda citrifolia. Morinda grows like a weed in Malaysia and has been used since forever for a variety of health problems by the Malays, who call it mengkudu. When Noni Juice was at its peak, my dear mother-in-law, normally nobody’s fool, was buying bottles at who knows how many Ringgit a pop, when she had the plant growing right in her own backyard.
If manggis hits the big time like Noni Juice did, I wonder where they will get their supply. Mangosteen is in the market for only a few weeks out of the year, and never in very big quantities. I don’t know how much is grown in our neighboring countries, but it seems to me they could exhaust their supply around here. And that would be a shame, because it is a lovely fruit, super sweet, colorful and fun. It sells for around 4RM/kilo around here. If there is a worldwide run on manggis, we’re the ones who will lose out.
Now that <abbr title=”Firstborn son”>Long</abbr> had graduated from kindergarten, the next step for us was to find a grade school for him. We decided the best option would be the Islamic public grade school, often called the madrassah around here. Lest we hastily jump to images of rows of boys rocking back and forth over Qurans all the livelong day, let me elaborate. It is a public school, supported by the government. It follows the standard goverment curriculum, which at the first grade level is Malaysian language, English, math, science, music, art, and phys ed, but in addition, the students also learn Arabic and Islam. Islam is taught in Malay using the Jawi script, so they get that too. Starting in second grade, there is an afternoon session that teaches fardhul ain. (Fardhul ain, often translated as obligatory knowledge, is all the basic stuff every muslim should know: how to pray, how to take wudhu, pillars of the faith, etc. which means I’ve got about a year and counting before I’m surpassed in knowledge by my kid.) It’s an integrated curriculum. The availability of a school like this is among the top reasons I am happy to raise my kids here in Malaysia.
To get in, Long had to take a test. An entrance exam for first grade! Good lord, what could they test him on? The day came, and I took him to the school. What a scene! There were kids in tears, kids clutching fearfully to their parent’s hands or pantlegs, kids racing like mad around the compound as everyone waited for the exam to begin. I left Long in the hands of his kindergarten teacher who was there coordinating her recent alumni for the test. After a quick sarapan pagi I came back and sat in the courtyard to wait. From where I sat, I could see all the classroom doors through the open-air corridors around me. There sure seemed to be a lot of commotion in the corridors. As I sat, I realized what it was: an unending stream of children running out of their exam rooms to the toilet. Kids were running out of every single classroom door and making for the john and running back, skirts hiked up to the knees, hands on their heads to keep their songkok from falling off. It was a riot. So I figured, that’s what they must be testing: if you can show up at the school without crying, hold your urine, and sit still in your chair for an hour, you’re in. Well, I’m happy to say he was up that much. He started school last month.
Abang Long has matriculated. In November, having successfully completed the necessary requirements of kindergarten, Long was graduated from Taski Abim, Seri Wangi branch. And, as befits such an accomplishment, a ceremony was held for him and his classmates at the Dewan Pustaka dan Bahasa.
Parents are of course suckers for seeing their kids in this kind of thing, so I, my wife, and the two toddling siblings took Long for his moment of glory. Little did we know just how long they would drag it out. Malaysians love a little pomp and ceremony, and are very particular about titles. Instead of a simple ladies and gentlemen, the MC will address every category of human in the audience. To make matters worse, the plural form in Malay is to repeat the word twice, so a typical conference will start with “Yang Berhormat-yang berhormat, datuk-datuk, professor-professor, doctor-doctor, tuan-tuan dan puan-puan sekalian, it is my pleasure to…” Then, each speaker before they begin will go through the litany again. The more dignataries at the event, the longer the litany, since their are a multitude of titles that roughly correspond to the British “Sir”. Well, Long’s graduation ceremony not only featured a local Member of Parliament (Yang Berhormat, The Honorable), but also was composed in the main of young kids. I kid you not, the litany included “abang-abang dan adik-adik”, that is, Big Brothers and Little Kids (younger sibling literally). The speeches were followed with skits performed by the various classes, including a reenactment of the Puteri Santubong legend. The afternoon concluded with each six-year-old, bedecked in juba (gown) and decorated songkok, having his name read aloud, walking the stage, and receiving a fake diploma in hand from the YB’s representative, which was promptly taken from him as he exited stage left to be used again for the next batch of kids. Despite the incredibly long drawn-out nature of the event, it was still good fun, because of course we too are suckers for seeing our kids in this kind of thing.
Check out the latest installment in the continuing adventures of Anak Alam! Now, if Anak Alam is not the first Malaysian to visit Macedonia, Albania, and Bulgaria, he must be among very select company. He describes his travels in beautiful detail, as he stops at mosques, tombs and tekkes along the way. It is interspersed with translations of inscriptions on the holy places he visits, local poetry, and historical asides, giving his story great color, better than a photograph.
Gardening With Nature by James van Sweden, the foremost american landscape architect of the day along with his partner Wolfgang Oehme. In the first chapter he describes his main influences then goes on to tell how he got started back in l971 when he asked Oehme to help him landscape the backyard of his old two-story victorian rowhouse in the Georgetown area of Washington DC. “Almost immediately my garden became a showplace. No one had ever seen anything quite like it… the high canopy of the Ailanthus altissima gives the space a tropical quality…” And a few pages later he says “the scent of Magnolia virginiana blossoms perfume the terrace in the cool of the evening while the cicadas sing from my Ailanthus altissima.”
John Steinbeck, the great American author, had occassion to notice Ailanthus. He describes them in his essay “The Making of a New Yorker” for the New York Times in 1943.
The very first time I came to the city [New York] and settled was engineered by a girl. Looking back from the cool position of middle age I can see that most of my heroic decisions somehow stemmed from a girl. I got an apartment on East 51st Street between First and Second Avenues, but even then I kept contact with my prejudices. My new home consisted of the first and second floors of a three-story house and the living room looked out on a small soot field called a garden. Two triumphant Brooklyn trees called ailanthus not only survived but thumbed their noses at the soft coal dust and nitric acid which passed for air in New York.I was going to live in New York but I was going to avoid it. I planted a lawn in the garden, bought huge pots and planted tomatoes, pollinating the blossoms with a water-color brush. But I can see now that a conspiracy was going on, of which I was not even aware. I walked miles through the streets for exercise, and began to know the butcher and the newsdealer and the liquor man, not as props or as enemies but as people.
[The webpage from which I originally swiped the passage is down or moved. You can read the whole essay at Google’s cache of the page.]
