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2002-11-11 - 7:47 a.m. Ok Ok, I'm a wuss, something to nibble on, for the time being... Talking to Alin, who I adore most for unearthing those long-forgotten Malay aspects of my self (buried like the tunes to nursery rhymes, an instinctive deferential gesture in front of elders, a manner of passing things with my right hand), I realise how much rooted she is in what the Malays call 'adat', a constellation of customs and practises often embodied in proverbs, superstitions and a general code of conduct. This is not to say that Alin is a walking extravagant encyclopedia of Malay culture, but that she knows, almost by heart, the important entries, the essential definitions. As we discuss the personality of a certain journalist we are mutually acquainted to, I exclaim aloud that perhaps the problem with the journalist is that she needed to reacquaint herself with her own sense of being Malay. With unabashed enthusiasm (for I myself was a recent convert to this cultural aspect of my identity), we started outlining a plan for the journalist's rehabilitation. 'You know, Alin,' I said. 'What she needs is to be kidnapped by a Makcik Siput.' Just a few days earlier, Alin and I were discussing the character of the Makcik Siput. Siput, in Malay, refers to the bun at the back of the head, and somehow, this is a distinguishing feature of the Makcik Siput. She is also an Orang Pulau, or island-dweller, who would travel between the islands, carrying on the nomadic lifestyles of her ancestors (who were known as Orang Laut, or sea-dwellers--the transition from Orang Laut to Orang Pulau perhaps marks a certain inevitability in the history of migration). She is most likely to be old, illiterate, and her main occupation is as a rag-and-bone collector, where she would collect old clothes, usually from Singapore, to be sold or even bartered to the island-dwellers in the Riau cluster, islands such as Batam or Bintan. Unfailingly, her house, usually a one or two room HDB flat, will be crammed with junk: radios with scratchy reception, shoes with balding soles, stacks of yellowed newspapers. Her refrigerator, their legs long eroded by moisture, will rest on trapezoid bricks, and her table fan will have a neck brace improvised from raffia string. There is something very ancient about her, and in fact she is the Peking Man to the Malays, an artefact untouched by progress, the kind of phantom who haunts the dreams of Malay MP's who garland their speeches with optimistic talk of a 'New Malay'. Incidentally, 'siput' also means 'snail', and the metaphor is apt: we see a fossil, and something that moves along with excruciating slowness, coated with its own home-made, folk-remedy secretions. Alin, ever the dramaturg, had a better idea. 'No, the journalist will have an accident somewhere near the Makcik Siput's residence. She will have a bout of amnesia. And she will be rescued, and tended after by her new, almost toothless, foster mother!' A wise suggestion, because a Makcik Siput would never dream of abducting anyone. And so the journalist's culture shock would commence: in the morning, she would have to prepare tea for breakfast, in a big teapot. This same tea would be served later for lunch (it would then be cold), and for dinner (where it would be drunk with a bit of ice, the only way of making it taste fresh, and not as something left over after 12 hours). For her meals, the journalist will have to acclimatise her tongue to food laden with coconut milk, with soups and gravy in which all manner of village produce swim around: tapioca, bittergourd, pineapple. She will learn to pound chillies in a mortar and pestle and mix the paste with belacan. She will learn to eat ulam (bitter herbs, usually eaten raw) such as petai, kerdas, daun pegaga, ulam raja, pucuk gajus, kacang botor, pucuk betik and daun tenggek burung (the last one, literally, means: 'leaf where the bird rests'). In the afternoons, the journalist would sit by the Makcik Siput, either massaging her back (the Makcik Siput would belch incessantly, convinced that the 'wind' in her body was the cause of her many rheumatic afflictions), or otherwise plucking strands of white hair from the Makcik Siput's head. She would learn to grow her hair long, quilt from scraps of cloth, wear a sarong that will showcase that voluptuous Malay posterior, sleep in the afternoons, sit in a bertempoh fashion (that uncomfortable asymmetrical pose with knees folded and pointing in one lateral direction), feed stray cats, get accustomed to the lingering smell of fishy cooking oil in the kitchen, sleep on musty foam mattresses, ride ferries while attracting stares at her garish clothes (orange flowers on black blouse, skirt of pin-striped curtain material), fold betel leaves as weekend treats, get a sea-worthy weathered tan, walk barefoot to the void deck, ladle uncooked rice with a naked milk can, use a broom made from coconut leaf veins to clean her corridor, fry the Javanese delicacy--chicken backside or Bishop's nose, collect old cassette tapes to be played on their only workable cassette player, plait her hair (it has grown long enough), and observe the superstition never to sit near the door while resting, for fear of indefinite spinsterhood. Inevitably, the rehabilitated journalist will be traced by her original parents, necessitating a tearful separation with her cultural mentor, her teacher of antiquated lullabies and wickedly pungent expletives. As she is torn away, kicking and screaming, the journalist launches into a stream of invectives (sial puki mak kepala bapa kau anak sundal haram jadah babi binatang bangsat musibat lahanat perempuan murah tak ada maruah!) that turns her parents' ears scarlet. Her reunion with her Chinese boyfriend (gaunt, worried), becomes an anticlimatic affair, as the latter is startled at her unkempt hair and nails, and her tendency to call him 'Ah Chong' or 'Ah Seng', neither of which is his real name. And thus the wild-child, raised by the snail-witch, sarong-trained and siesta-oriented, is domesticated, brought back to civilisation. She will be groomed in the ways of the New Malay: progressive, modern in outlook, urban, denouncing a relationship with the agrarian, and hence, Nature, sold over to capitalism, believing in the myth of meritocracy. She stops eating with her hands, and starts discarding rice powder paste for more contemporary facial unguents. There will be one episode where on a trip to the Botanic Gardens, the journalist suddenly breaks a young papaya shoot and eats it raw, its sap running hungrily down her chin. After that embarrassing episode, her parents decide to take the journalist out only to places of sparse vegetation; hence their shopping trips to Orchard Road and various suburban malls of glossy escalators and polished floors. In retrospect, I am certain the punishment I had imagined for the journalist reflects my own unease with the 'Old Malay,' a category which though never explicitly addressed, has to exist for the concept of 'New Malay' to appear. And despite the kinds of exaggerated parody I employed in suggesting the Makcik Siput's lifestyle, I realised that I have a certain inescapable attraction to the notion of the 'Old Malay'. When I use the words 'So Melayu', as someone would say 'So Cheena', or 'So Mama', how much of it is immediate denunciation, how much is lingering affection? Ah, Makcik Siput, obstinate collector of items nobody wants anymore, who will come to collect you on the day we reinvent ourselves? We who do not have your hunchbacked patience in sorting the wisdom from the superstition, the tradition from the baggage, who don’t even have time to put a debated item aside, for future contemplation, when we can't make a decision today, right now, on the spot.
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