Imagine that you have a budding romantic interest in a person; you are just getting to know each other and all your feelings for this person are new and complicated and unspoken and intuitive and still taking shape. And then SOMEONE asks pointedly, “Well, are you dating?” Your squirmy desire not to answer that question is very like the feeling that has kept this blog dormant for lo these many weeks. I have wanted, for your sakes and my own, to try to pin down my experiences and express them here in hard solid words, but every time I have sat down to do it that squirmy feeling of unreadiness has held me back. Now, after a trip back to the States for Christmas, I have had some time and space to take stock and try to answer the question everyone asks: "How is Malaysia?"
What is Malaysia like?
Quite frankly, what isn’t it like? It is multisensory three dimensional surround sound real life; it is like everything. But if you want specifics, it is charcoal smoke drifting in over the top of my bedroom walls and soaking into all my clothes from where a huge pot of water is being boiled clean in the next room. It is goats and cows and sheep and little children and standing water on the roads. It is the magic of waking up cold on a monsoon morning. It is piecing things together slowly over time because I am never 100% sure that I have interpreted a situation correctly. It is kids jumping rope in the sandy yard, and playing hopscotch. It is going to the malls in KL. It is my impatience at priorities different from my own. It is running the empty beach at sunset (and counting my progress in kilometers). It is the unspeakable discomfort of having relatively but not absolutely large amounts of money. It is the fact that the call to prayer from speakers atop the masjid three houses away now seems utterly unremarkable. It is feeling adolescent as I wonder whether or when to cover my head, and how. It is being hopelessly conspicuous. It is explaining things I do not understand in a language not my mother tongue. It is questioning things that I never thought I would question. And it is normal enough now to permit occasional bouts of boredom.
I wake up one morning to the sound of unusually loud chicken squawks, and later eat fried chicken for lunch, slowly realizing that I had heard my dinner’s dying cries.
We buy my car on Thursday instead of Wednesday because that particular Wednesday is an inauspicious day for big purchases. And then on Friday we get my car blessed by the Imam with lime juice and palm fiber.
While helping me feed turtle hatchlings, my eleven-year-old host sister asks me in English, “Kak Meg, do you like science?” “Yes,” I reply, wondering where this is going. She grins proudly back, “I very very like!”
I whirl around in a market to mouth “I can hear you!” in Malay to the guy in the stall I just passed who shouted out, “White girl! Where?”
During a discussion of holidays, I attempt to explain the story of Easter in Malay to my host mother. At first she thinks I am saying that every American gets dug up from the grave three days after being buried. Luckily I manage to recall the name Muslims use for Jesus, Issa, and am able to clarify—“No, not all people, only Issa. He was dead and then he was not dead.” With a bemused smile and a jolly laugh she replies, “Impossible!” I can only laugh along and wish to know the Malay word for “miracle.”
Some Observations
In comparison to most people in the world, I own a lot of books and spend an unusually large amount of my time reading.
Children everywhere struggle with fractions, decimals, and percents.
I mark the passage of time in very Christian, temperate zone, American ways; in most of the world, Christmas day is hot and unremarkable. Thanksgiving at Angkor Wat certainly was.
In Islam, men can have more than one wife, and that makes me uncomfortable; open mindedness is much more difficult in practice than in theory.
From trying to explain why Americans do things the way we do, I have concluded that, from the outside, the most obvious American values are self-centered individualism and money. Can we work on that?
Assessments and Next Steps
Have I actually "saved" any turtles yet? Well, during my trip to Cambodia we released a Yellow Headed Temple Turtle that was being sold in a market in Phnom Penh into the beautiful Prek Toal Reserve on Lake Tonle Sap. So, that is at least one turtle that I was very directly involved in protecting, but the rest of the work is less clear cut than that. It is long-term protection in the form of education and working with people and trying to protect habitat, so it is harder to count the success in terms of turtles saved.
I think my greater successes so far are in what my fellow Fulbrighters and I have come to refer to as the "Soft Research" aspect of the Fulbright, that is, the context that we bring to our work by living here and staying for ten months instead of popping in to collect data and then scurrying back to the USA to analyze from afar. I am getting a much more complete sense of how things work here, what motivates people, how to work with people, what the long term conservation issues are, and how the turtles fit into all that than I would if I were, say, doing thesis research here for two months over summer break. And, turtles totally aside, every day that I spend here vastly expands my understanding of of how Malaysia, the United States, and I all fit into the world as a whole.
And though that all sounds quite dramatic and important written out, most days feel relatively mundane, and I have not written posts on the days when nothing seemed to be going right. Just like I stopped appreciating every moment of the majesty of the Alaskan mountains or the vibrant tangle of the Panamanian rain forest after a couple of months, I am no longer amazed by every tiny thing here. But the significance of the fact that I have gotten past the stage where everything feels new and amazing is that Malaysia is becoming one of my many homes: a place in the world where I have friends and favorite places and memories and dreams. And when I landed last night I knew the best way to get into the city from the airport, and I understood the announcements on the loudspeaker, and I had a friend's house to stay at instead of a hotel, and I am excited to get back to my house, see familiar faces, and start getting things done again. That is my progress.
When I first moved in with my family in Malaysia, I noticed they had a lot of trees and potted plants around the house, which I, seeing no recognizable fruits, assumed were decorative. But, one by one, each in its season, they reveal themselves to be jackfruit, mango, dragon fruit, turmeric, lemon grass, ginger, sour edible beans, and squash relatives. This is why it is important to stay in a place for months rather than weeks. How many other things in the next six months will humble me by turning out to be more than they first appeared to my untrained eye?
~Meg
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