Freeways and Malls: Kuala Lumpur has allowed itself to be gobbled up by freeways. They criss-cross the city in every direction. I can see why mass transit patronage is not as high here as it is in other cities. The Malaysians have taken to the car in a big way. They have also taken to ‘The Mall’ in a big way. It seems like you are never very far from a shopping mall. My comfy little hotel, in an older part of the city, was a block away from ‘The Mall.’ That was its name and it was writ large in English on the side of the building. With it were offices and hotels. This is the form that new development takes in KL: lots of vertical development that seems divorced from its surrounding neighborhoods. In fact, getting from one old neighborhood to the next is a very pedestrian-unfriendly ordeal. The woman I met with her baby in a stroller was not too happy about the difficulty of taking a walk. And as she pointed out to me, motorbikes seem to think it is OK to park on the sidewalk, making her and her stroller descend to the street to get around the blockage.
Street Market: Early this morning, I discovered a street market not far from The Mall. Food for the family, some clothes, a newspaper vendor, and breakfast on the street: all there for the people of Putra. Eating breakfast from a vendor or a sidewalk shop seems to be popular here. This was not Chinatown, but there seemed to be lots of Chinese in the mix. One man told me his family had come from China four generations ago during a time of troubles (I asked what the troubles were about, but got no answer I could understand). He loved being a Malaysian and hated the Communists. He told me Malaysia was a poor country, so I pointed at the skyscrapers only three blocks away and said I disagreed. I am still not sure what he made of that, but I do think he was delighted to be speaking English to an American visitor. The image that will remain longest from my market morning? A live chicken getting his throat slit for a customer. I flinched and looked away.
Orang Asli: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Malaysia may be going through a cycle that all modernizing nations go through if they have an indigenous population. The tentacles of development are taking hold of every part of peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) and strangling the forest peoples out of existence. Of course, this has been going on for at least a century, but now the Malaysian government seems to feel bad about it (my interpretation), so they are anxious to publicize the nobility and wisdom of the Orang Asli (‘original peoples’), the collective term for dozens of different native tribes. I visited the National Museum which had both a permanent exhibit and a special exhibit on the country’s indigenes. The theme of the temporary exhibit was beliefs and traditions; it took you into the Orang Asli’s spiritual world in the setting of a recreated forest village. Animists, they are, but to some extent the earth might be better off if we were all animists: Malaya’s original peoples believe that large rocks and open spaces such as swamps, lakes, and water holes have their spirits and guardians who must be respected and appeased. Western religions have killed off the spirits of nature, and western civilizations have done a fine job of destroying so much of the natural earth. This may apply to eastern civilizations, too. How the Orang Asli see some of the spirits that co-inhabit their world is the subject of much contemporary sculptural art that was on display. It was some of the most creative I have seen. Orang Asli: I just love saying those words!
Geographically yours,
D.J.Z.
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