Tag: Malaysia

Young Asia.

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They were young when we boarded Singapore Airlines at LAX, bound for Tokyo. 22 men and women, flight attendants, smooth skinned, well mannered, and slim, women with hair pulled back wearing Sarong Kebaya. Graceful, smiling, polite, they maneuvered in and out of the aisles, pushing carts, pouring tea.

The flight left on time and touched down in Tokyo as silently and softly as a Kleenex falling on a pillow.

The airports were dazzling, slick, architectural and inviting: Tokyo Narita, Singapore Changi, and KLIA.  Customs officials in every nation were polite, well-spoken, welcoming. Everything they are not in Los Angeles.

The skyscrapers were young, newly built, tall, dropped into every corner of Kuala Lumpur: Icon Mount Kiara, Charigali Tower, 60 floors tall, St. Regis Hotel, 80 stories tall, Menara Tradewinds, Warisan Merdeka (118 Floors Tall!), KL Tower (Menara Kuala Lumpur) 1,381 feet tall, Ilham Baru Tower (62 floors).  They were clearing out jungles, paving over valleys, erecting vast suburban housing and vertical towers in Cyberjaya, Shah Alam, Bangsar, Petaling Jaya. Soon, a high-speed train will connect Singapore, KL and Bangkok.

The land was young, landfill on the west side of Melaka, thousands of acres of new commercial buildings lined up like soldiers in a future army of retail, uninhabited infants.  Old classical mansions that once stood on the shore were abandoned and empty, their contents stolen, their memories wiped clean.

The KL malls were new, full of shoppers, hordes of black haired boys and girls in bright scarves and long dresses, eyes glued in their smart phones, moving through vast air-conditioned, bright spaces. The Pavilion! KLCC Suria! Star Hill Gallery!

The Malaysian highways were new, and along the new landscaped lanes, billboards shouted advertising with smiling faces, multi-cultural Malay and Chinese faces beaming in Samsung, Jasmine Rice, Panasonic, Thai Airways, Telekom Malaysia, Air Asia, Hyundai.

The Malaysian born bride was young, effervescent, intelligent, ambitious, and well connected. She owned a condo, a house (under remodel) worked for a bank and travelled to Singapore, Bali, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, and Melbourne. She had a lot of friends, a lot of family, a lot of generosity and much love around her. She was the future, for just this moment, of a region where education and money are exploding exponentially.

And the trains in Tokyo, the intersections of Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, Ginza, Shinjuku, they were young, overwhelmingly so, populated with hundreds of thousands of post 1985 human beings pouring off the modern perfectly run trains, into stores and shops and cafes, hurrying everywhere, acquiring purses, shoes, makeup, perfume, suits, electronics.

Inside the endless shops of Tokyo Station, the bowing and the smiling, the serving and the selling, a furious, unabated, exhausting and exhilarating controlled carnival of commerce, this was Japan.

And everywhere, in every corner, the spirit, the energy, the optimism, the faith in tomorrow and the future, a region poised to take over the world, relentless in its work, socialized to harmonize, grouped en masse into money-making and modernism, this was young Asia.

I went here on holiday, for three weeks, to attend a wedding in Kuala Lumpur, to vacation in Phuket, Thailand and stop off in Tokyo for four days.

I came back to Los Angeles in culture shock. For what I saw back there made the Golden State seem dyspeptic, backward, self-congratulatory– without merit.  Our new international airport had dirty windows; the customs people were fat and shouted angrily at passport holders. The bus was late and the driver made jokes (“This bus isn’t going to Van Nuys. Long Beach! Just kidding!”) that delayed our trip.

And the news was that the government was shut down. I thought of that on the 405 bus ride home, having just seen, 10 hours earlier, postal workers at work at Tokyo Station, on Sunday afternoon.

America is no longer young, in outlook or output, and I wonder if we even have any dreams left in our national imagination.

Over There.

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Melaka, Malaysia

Photo by Andy Hurvitz

I just came back from two weeks in Malaysia, coinciding with the celebrations for the arrival of the Year of the Dragon.

I stayed with friends who are really family, and their extended group, which included some from Switzerland.

I had not been to Malaysia since 1997, a time that now seems so far in the past, before the smart phone or digital cameras or 9/11.

In Malaysia, in the old, historic, packed and thriving city of Melaka, we ate Chicken Rice and Nasi Lemak, Roti Canai, Fish Ball Soup, oranges and tiny bananas, shrimp sambal and fried noodles with chili and soy sauce, oysters and scrambled eggs, fish head curry and Rojak Buah Nyonya (Fruits and vegetable in peanut sauce).

The streets are full of bicycles, cars, scooters, trucks- and none of them will stop for pedestrians. When the rains come, as they do every afternoon, the sudden torrent of showers forces the bike riders to pull over and wait under bridges for the storm to pass.

The Malay women wear a colorful, printed Baju Kurung, the knee-length blouse over a long skirt, filling drab alleys and rundown streets with brightness and hue. In accordance with tradition and Islam, the women have a tropical gorgeousness that is unique to Malaysia.

We visited friends for the Chinese New Year, going to houses where people offered cookies and bowls of oranges and orange drinks, where people wore red shirts and red dresses and hung red lanterns and red curtains.

We went to the temple and brought food for spirits and lit incense sticks and burned paper money and threw it into an ash pit.

At night, every night, for many nights, the skies were smoky and lit up with fireworks and firecrackers and the festivities lasted well into the early morning.

And I was invited to the neighbors’ ear splitting, noisy dragon dance where a dozen young men put on costumes, banged drums, clashed symbols and danced around the marble floors while spectators fed them oranges.

Every house had a shrine, and on every street I walked in Malaysia, there was evidence of the Divine. The Mosque, the Chinese Temple, the many Christian churches, the Hindu temple; they are on every street and in every kampong, and in the morning, while it is still dark, one hears, before the birds chirp, the low melodic singing prayer of the adhān أَذَان‎, the Mosque calling the faithful.

What impressed me most was not the food or the architecture or the exoticism of Malaysia, it was the family who hosted us. They cooked for us, and took our laundered clothes and hung them out to dry, and they planned daily festive meals. Every member of the family came over every day and joined in the fun. And the children who came from Switzerland with their parents, they stayed with their aunts and cousins and slept on the floor and played games and charmed and amused everyone.

I saw not the bitchy and divisive melodramas that characterize family gatherings in America. Nobody stormed out or got drunk or ripped into their relatives. There was an elusive and seductive harmony and grace exhibited by all the family members who showed respect and care and genuine love for one another.

There is a lot more to say, but I need time to ingest it all, and hope that what I saw in Asia and felt over there, the good feelings, can last a bit longer.