A Day in Shah Alam

No matter how much you love your job, after days of an endless cycle of work, traffic and failed attempts at getting enough sleep, you need your day off on the weekends. A day without working overtime or worrying about cleaning the house or making appointments with important contacts. That’s why this week, we had our day off by leaving the busy neighborhood of Subung Jaya for the sleepy suburb of Shah Alam. There, we alternated between the doting comfort of grandparents and joining the homey bustle of morning markets and Malay weddings. It was a day far removed from our rush of aid work, and we needed it. But it was also a day that opened our eyes to an aspect of Malaysia that we were too busy to pay attention to before: the globalization, or perhaps Westernization, of Malaysian culture – especially outside the cosmopolitan capital of Kuala Lumpur.

At about nine in the morning, we stepped out of the car and into the parking lot that led to the Pasar Tani, or the Farmer’s Market. This Sunday morning tradition involves people setting up stalls with items as varied as traditional Malaysian clothes and shower curtains. Row after row of stalls led us through worlds of second-hand t-shirts, bright red prayer rugs, fake Guess jeans and traditional batik cloth in every color imaginable. The stalls reminded Khalisah a little bit of Iowan farmer’s markets, except instead of apples there were guavas, and instead of deep-fried ice-cream there were fried noodles. It’s amazing how two different markets – from Iowa to Shah Alam—can be equally unhealthy for the under prepared stomach.

The rest of the food in the stalls, like just about everything else in the market, completely fascinated Nour. There was kuih, a word that encompasses just about any sort of local sweet that involves coconut made gooey; durian, the overwhelmingly strong-scented fruit that should be made the symbol of Malaysia; and all sorts of rotis, the Indian word for bread. One of the most interesting rotis we came across was Roti John, which is the Malaysian version of a chicken sub. According to Khalisah, this particular food specimen was an attempt at copying “Western” cuisine, but with all the sauces and spices that were added to it over the years, it is now a fiery chicken sandwich that few Western palates can handle.

Although Pasar Tani is a typical Malaysian tradition, it was interesting to see how much non-Malaysian culture has seeped into it. We made a similar realization at the Malay wedding we attended later in the day.

We had hustled into the banquet hall just in time to hear the drums beat, a signal that the wedding couple are ready to walk together to the persandingan, a raised dais with two gilded chairs and a cloth canopy. Two little girls dressed in white with small green wreathes propped up on their white hijabs took the fore of the procession, scattering flower petals on the floor. This was a little surprising to Khalisah, whose previous exposure to Malay weddings assured her that these affairs don’t usually include flower girls.

But then the crowd parted and the wedding couple took a step forward in true Malay style. The theme of this Malay wedding was a soft peach beige, and though it sounds decidedly unmanly, the groom looked impressive in his delicately patterned pants and shirt, with an intricately sewn samping wrapped around his middle like a sarong and a kris knife secured on his hip. As each couple is celebrated as king and queen on their wedding day, the groom adorned his head with a Tengkolok, a folded piece of cloth that serves as a crown. The bride wore a crystal tiara over her beige hijab, and lace cloth flecked with gold thread cascaded down the sides of her peach wedding outfit, a baju kebaya.

A voice over the loudspeaker soon distracted us from the bride’s and groom’s outfits. “Salla allahu ala Muhammad,” the speaker said as he began to read a few select pieces from the Quran. Then the couple walked forward towards the dais, with the flower girls tossing their petals all over the floor (much to Khalisah’s annoyance). By the time the couple made it to their “thrones,” the speaker completed his reading and proceeded to recite different prayers to bless the couple and the new life they would share together. Later, the drum procession had settled down at the foot of the dais and began to play traditional Javanese music where lots of gamelans (brass chiming instruments) came into play. Khalisah pointed out that this isn’t a traditional aspect of the wedding, just like the flower girls, and Nour accused her of being a purist.

Being new to the experience, Nour enjoyed the Malay wedding and the slightly fermented rice served as a dessert. For Khalisah, the experience was pock-marked with adages from a western wedding: the flower girls, the alien-sounding gamelan dinner music, and the division of the hall into a groom-side and a bride-side (something she later discovered from her grandparents). It took away the more homey feeling of tradition Malay weddings used to evoke. These weddings were held at either the groom’s or bride’s driveway just outside their house, and tents would protect the buffet and the guests that pattered in off the streets. The drums would beat in tune with Malay wedding songs that were interspersed with Quranic verses and kids would run in between (and sometimes under) the tables throughout the whole ordeal.

Maybe the banquet hall wedding was a sign of shifting local culture, where the basics are given a new twist to keep the event from being another day in someone’s driveway, making it a truly unique affair. The same could be said of the “Western” products that were making their way into the Sunday morning market. What was boring and ordinary to Westerners was exciting and exotic to the people who lived here. We decided that as long as the batik cloth in the pasars and the kris and tiara in the weddings stay untouched, we can be comfortable with this changing culture that is emerging to accommodate a new generation of Malaysians. With this bizarre mix of new and old, local and “other,” who knows what will identify Malaysian culture in a few years’ time.

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The Mamak Chronicles documents the Malaysian summer of Nour Merza and Khalisah Stevens. With the convenient excuse of an internship, these two half Americans find their way into the heart of Kuala Lumpur, where, in between haggling over souvenirs and missing buses, they sustain themselves by frequenting the food stalls that line the streets of the city. It is in these Mamaks that they discover the lifeblood of all that is Malaysian.

Breaking Through Poverty: Chicken a la Carte

A little girl digging in a trashcan for spaghetti.

I couldn’t erase that image from my mind after a friend recently showed me a film on the poverty and hunger caused by globalization. Directed by Ferdinand Dimadura, the film Chicken a la Carte is a six-minute tour of the world of an impoverished Filipino community that lives in stark contrast to its country’s urban elite. Whereas well-off teens dine at the biggest international food-chains, this community lives off of the scraps left behind in trashcans after closing time.

This isn’t just happening in the Philippines, the film reminds the viewer in the end. Scenes like this can be found all over the globe, from the streets of Los Angeles to the slums of Bangladesh. Around the world, we have 25,000 people dying of hunger every single day. 25,000 people. What’s more scary is that this statistic is probably outdated, since Dimadura made the film back in 2005. With a global economic crisis on our hands, how much further will this number climb?

The whole economic crisis facing us today came about because of one very old human problem: greed. People in key decision-making positions wanted just another car, or just another house, or just the pleasure of knowing they have an extra million or so set aside. So they let things spiral out of control.

And let’s face it, this crisis is partly our fault as well. Those of us who live in a culture of consumption that doesn’t separate want from need, that throws aside the barely bought for the just released, and expects nothing less than free refills with our supersized meals while people are living off of a piece of bread a day. We are not innocent.

But it’s not because we’re evil. We all care about our kids, our neighbors and our friends. Heck, we even care about those people in far-off parts of the world that news broadcasts and films like Dimadura’s thrust in our faces every once in a while. We feel sorry, wish we could do something, and then drown back into our own lives until we are reminded of them again. A vicious cycle.

But one we can break. Although this global economic crisis is making things more difficult for a lot of us around the world, it also gives us an opportunity to reevaluate the culture of consumption we’ve awoken to find ourselves in. This is a culture that provides relative luxury for a minority at the expense of an impoverished majority. It is also a culture with a built-in time-bomb: things can only go so well for so long before the system implodes on itself. And when that happens, the circle of privilege shrinks even further, throwing many of us out to join those already in the fields of global poverty.

As we work towards a solution for our current crisis, we have the chance to recreate the culture we have found ourselves in.

But will we take that chance?

If we do, we have the power to transform films like Dimadura’s from stark portrayals of our current reality into fading images of a distant memory.

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This article originally appeared on WireTap Magazine.
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Chicken a la Carte