Title: One And The Same
Topic Number: Class A: 3, Is The World Becoming Tribal Or Global?
Mr Brigham is slightly excited when the plane touches down. He has been promising himself a holiday for five years now, and this year he finally puts his foot down and shuts his wife up and packs his bags. By George he is going to have a holiday, he tells himself, he deserves it. And nevermind the mortgage for three days. Nevermind the travelling expenses. He needs a reprieve from the humdrum of daily life, so the month before he goes off to the travel agency and picks the most exotic location he has never heard of.
The brochure reads ‘Malaysia’. It has a picture of an Orangutan in the front, some leaves at the border, and a very fierce looking warrior-type man with a wooden shield. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He signs up to stay with a local family, because he is a Smart Man. Smart Men do not fall for tribal wish-wash on travel brochures: they want the Real Thing, and living with a Malaysian family for three days is as close to the Real Thing as Mr Brigham can possibly get.
So here he sits, a cup of peanuts in hand and awaiting his first gasp of Malaysian air. The airport is all sleek steel and shiny metal, but Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond. He sees a highway full of rushing cars: Mitsubishis and BMWs and local Protons. Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond still: ah! Dense tropical foliage! They did not have this in Britain!
Mr Brigham snaps a picture through his airplane window and chuckles to himself. It was quite a pity Mrs Brigham hated travelling, or she, too, would be enjoying this beautiful first glimpse of Alien Country.
Mr Brigham gets out of the plane at last and takes a deep breath. He wants to savour local oxygen, but what he gets instead is a solid blast of cold, dry air conditioner. It is much like the sharp sting after a spell of English rain.
Mr Brigham doesn't mind: he is sure the air outside the airport is warm and humid and nothing like London's. So off he goes to collect his bags at the carousel, out the whoosh of the sliding glass doors, and he finds himself in the midst of a bustling multi-racial world.
Mr Brigham is suddenly very happy to see so many different faces. There are sharp-featured Indians, slant-eyed Chinese and a brown-skinned people he supposes are Malay. He feels like he is in Canada again, where he cannot tell who is what. He taps a porter curiously and asks: "Excuse me sir, are you Malay?"
The porter smiles back and says: "Hello sir I am Chinese!"
"Oh!" Mr Brigham exclaims. He looks around the arrivals lounge and recovers quickly: "And that fellow there - he is Chinese, I suppose?"
"Tunku," the porter's mouth twitches, "is a Malay."
"But you look so alike!"
The porter frowns for a moment. He does not look pleased. "All of us sir - including you - are quite alike."
But Mr Brigham sees his family now, waving his name, and he excuses himself. He is bouncing with his bags by the time he reaches them.
Hello! Hello! Hello! they say, and he loads his bags into Mr Goh’s car. As they drive down the highway Mr Brigham acquaints himself with the family: Mr Goh is an insurance salesman, Mrs Goh is a housewife, and Michael is a teenager, a whole career in itself. Mr Brigham is pleased with his family; he does not notice the huge roadside billboards advertising everything from plasma televisions to perfume.
When they arrive in Kuala Lumpur Mr Brigham wants to eat. He sees all these interesting little coffee shops, tucked away in corners and populated by the uncles and aunties of the country. He supposes this is where the beating heart of Malaysia lies: over kaya toast and teh tarik; however, he cannot be sure. The Gohs take a turn and the old shophouses disappear behind a curtain of flyovers, skyscrapers and monorail lines.
They take him to eat in a food court in Midvalley Megamall. The mall is obvious; the valley is not. As Mr Brigham eats his five ringgit nasi lemak he sees a funny looking stall. To his consternation it reads ‘authentic Scottish Western traditional fish’. He tells the Gohs no such thing exists. Michael tells him the food there is very nice.
The Gohs bring him back to their home, and Mr Brigham finds his room very tolerable. He is tired after a long flight, so after watching 30 minutes of a Lost rerun with the family he goes to bed. The Ikea comforters the Gohs use are so comfortable they’re almost like the ones back home. Mr Brigham sleeps well.
The next day the Gohs take him out to the National Zoo, where the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys look exactly the same as the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys back in Twycross. Nothing escapes import, Mr Brigham says, and he feigns interest in a sleeping Bengal tiger.
After the zoo they eat at this trendy haute cuisine place, only trendy is subjective to preference. The Gohs dig into their food with gusto, but Mr Brigham’s moustache droops at the thought of how unoriginal his foie gras is. He makes a note to remind the Gohs to bring him to a traditional Malaysian coffee shop (‘mamak’, the glossy in-flight magazine calls it) for a taste of true local fare. Then he eats his foie gras and finds the dish to be international standard. He can close his eyes and imagine for a moment – almost – that he is in New York.
When they reach home the Gohs spring a surpirse on him: the Durian. With the smell of hell and the taste of high heaven the Durian is the King of Malaysian fruits. The Gohs tell him there is no middle ground with this one: he will either love it or hate it. Mr Brigham takes one, finds it remarkably better than the sample his Indonesian clients once opened in his office, and then finishes six pieces. He keeps up the act of a naïve foreigner throughout (oh my God it stinks!) and the Gohs smile and laugh with him. “Nothing escapes import,” repeats Mr Brigham, just before he goes to sleep – some part of his brain tells him he has tried nothing very different in this country, but he is too tired and collapses snoring onto his Swedish covers.
Mr Brigham has always been good with young people, so he goes out the next day with Michael and his friends. They strike up a lively conversation about football on the LRT to the shopping centre. Mr Brigham supports Liverpool; but Michael and Eric argue vehemently for Manchester United, and Navi is a Chelsea supporter.
“I once read somewhere that soccer is responsible for something akin to culture genocide.” Navi says.
“Oh really? Why so?”
“It’s like a virus: it spreads all over the world and wipes out the traditional games it comes into contact with. You never wondered? Malaysia, for instance – football is pretty much a part of our everyday life.”
“Oh you play it?”
“Sometimes.” Eric answers. “We watch it more.”
Mr Brigham keeps quiet for awhile. “And Malaysian football?” he asks, “Do you watch that?”
All three boys burst into laughter. “No! Absolutely not!” Michael says, and Eric cuts in: “English football is the best.”
They head for Berjaya Times Square, and Mr Brigham wants to know what music they listen to. He is – by now – completely unsurprised when they squeal ‘My Chemical Romance!’ – his nephew back in London has the exact same taste. He enquires about local bands, and they take him to Borders and pop headphones on him and play OAG. Mr Brigham yelps and tears it off: his ears are attuned to The Beatles, so this music is horrible in comparison. On top of that they sound exactly like MCR.
They go off for lunch. Mr Brigham asks them to take him to a local mamak, but they laugh him off and bring him excitedly to a McDonalds. “Even if you have eaten in one before,” Navi says, “You’ll love the Ayam Goreng McD – they won’t have that in England now, would they?”
Mr Brigham goes home that day staring at every coffee shop passing him by. The Malaysian night air is warm and unhealthy – the city is big enough and modern enough to have its own air pollution index – but he takes a deep breath at every station, when the doors electronically open and a crush of new passengers enter. Mr Brigham is reminded of his hitchhiking days, when smells announced new places: sea-smell for Cornwall, bread-smell for Paris, the sharp bite of coffee-smell for Rome. Here the air is marked by heat and rain, and the barest hints of spicy cooking, but it is also interwoven with the smells of Big City. Smoke and dust and sweat are whisked in with the people, and Mr Brigham coughs.
He reaches home to (finally!) some authentic Malaysian cooking – Mrs Goh sets the table as Michael and him relate their day, and Mr Goh folds his newspaper and laughs at all the right places. Dinner is a few stir-fried vegetable dishes and chicken, which Mrs Goh has cooked with rice wine. Mr Brigham enjoys this meal tremendously. After dinner he discusses global affairs with Mr Goh: Iraq, Iran, the US presidential elections, before retiring to bed. He chuckles to himself while brushing his teeth: “Mr Obama is spiffy, don’t you think?” Mr Goh had said, “Far more exciting lah than any Malaysian politician you’ll ever see.”
The next day is Mr Brigham’s last, and they are off for a traditional dance and orchestral ensemble at Istana Budaya. Mr Brigham looks forward to this: he can barely sit still as the lights dim and the clash of gongs announce the dancers.
As Mr Brigham gets his taste of Malaysian culture we should consider, for a moment, what the show represents. Dance was once the communal draw in the fishing villages of the country, and people grew up breathing in its beat … forgetting the fish, the weather and the sea in the trance of the Gamelan or the Joget. Now it is a preserved commodity, its collection of liquid moves and music on a lifeline of audiences like Mr Brigham, trapped on stages playing to expensive seats, nothing more than a left-behind, a relic made obsolete by modern entertainment. Soccer wiped out stick games and Two-Old-Cat; videogames and television swallowed dance. The lucky become global and the tribal die, or it changes – until what you get is a heady mix of both; a hybrid in-between.
This diatribe plays somewhere at the back of Mr Brigham’s head, but the dance is short and sweet – a spike of instant gratification. Two hour shadow puppet epics must wait for another day; the Gohs now rush him back to pack up and strap on his travelling implements.
Mr Brigham presents the Gohs with a bottle of red wine. He tells them he has enjoyed his stay, and he can’t wait to come back for another round. The Gohs twitter in approval, they load his bags into their car and send him to the airport.
It is only in the plane that Mr Brigham reviews his holiday. Mrs Brigham will surely demand a comprehensive report upon his return, of which he would lie and assure her it was very enjoyable, thank you very much, he did many New Things. But the truth is less cheerful: Mr Brigham finds Malaysia too much like the world, he is sick of fast food and zoos and copy-culture. He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes for the whole of ten seconds. Then his hand reaches up into his breast pocket, and he retrieves what he has picked up on his way to the departure terminal.
It is a purple brochure. It has a picture of a temple in the front, some leaves at the border, and an Indian dancer with ruby marriage spot and golden trinkets. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He loves the photos inside even more: there is no sign of a shopping mall anywhere and the people walking within are clad in sandals.
It might be three years or so before Mr Brigham can get away with another holiday. But he is a Smart Man, and Smart Men know what they want. This time he wants a tribal vacation, and – well now – India sounds like a good bet, doesn’t it? Mr Brigham closes his eyes once more. The plane shudders, it lifts him up into the air and past wispy clouds, back into the sky, where he really belongs.
*
When I was in Form Four I remember going through a strict submission process for the Commonwealth Essay competition in my school. The teacher in charge was a supposedly brilliant one, famous in 'the whole of Kuching' for teaching English and Literature. I did not like her. The first draft I submitted was entitiled 'The Experiment', and it involved God pressing the reset button on planet Earth.
The essay came back to me with a terse: "Typical cloak and dagger story with the Almighty at the end. Not original." Okay, I thought. I sat down and redid my essay, this time on another topic: "Tell us something you're good at, and what it means to you." I wrote about writing, because I loved it, was good at it, and had being doing it since I was seven. I got called to the staffroom.
The teacher sat me down at her table, took out my draft and looked me in the eye. "The judges," she said, "Are looking for something good. Something honest, maybe original. You should write about something you're really good at; something you can write honestly about. This topic you've chosen, about writing ... you're not very good at it."
Oh, I
loved that. I remember thinking to myself:
who are you to talk about writing? I left the staffroom, promptly quit the competition, and I didn't submit anything for the rest of my St Thom school life. St Thomas's won nothing that year, and had a draught for five.
Until now.
To that teacher, wherever you are (and God have mercy on your students): this essay is for you. People like you exist to make sure that not everyone becomes good in their respective fields: you are the shit filter and you ensure the weak never actualize their potential. You provide a necessary function in our society, much like the bottom feeder and the short trader, or perhaps the guy who boos at all the wrong moments in a football match.
God bless you.
