Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

At the foothills of the magnificent Taal Volcano, two hours drive south of Manila, there is a little two-story concrete building.  It is a building no different from any other local ones that stand densely across the highway from the luxuries resorts, restaurants, and private homes that crowd the Tagaytay Ridge offering perfect, unobstructed view of the Volcano's surrounding lake fromed from an ancient crater.  On the second floor of the building was a little sign: Hansung Vision Church (한성 비전 교회), pasted in strips of simple blue-colored plastic tape over a background picture of green field dotted with pink flowers.

The streets down below are steamy with fumes, all sorts of fumes.  One can almost smell all that as one gets off the crowded platform of the nearby train station.  It is, as many other places of humanity are, a chaotic symphony of sensory overload of any and every nature.  The smell is a combination of toxic exhaust fumes belched from inefficient jeepney engines, the heavily salted batter of fried chicken, fried fish, and fried God-knows-what-else.

Your blogger here has always considered himself above the typical racial stereotyping that goes on in societies around the world .  He tries to see only individuals and their unique personalities, some of which are component traits that can be observed in a diversity of different societies with little interaction (such as individualism, optimism, rebelliousness against the status quo).  But residing and bonding with people who are eager to resort to certain "national/ethnic characters" as the primary means of making sense of their own existences and their places in the world, he finds himself gradually succumbing to similar tendencies...

Every time another shooting rampage occurs in America, the first instinct of nearly anyone who hears about the tragic news is to blame the lack of gun control.  They somehow believe that more strict access to guns is the ultimate resolution of such problems.  While the author is just as much a proponent of gun control as the next leftist, he also believes that sort of random killing that occurred in a Connecticut elementary school says much more about how America's culture create lethal-minded deviants rather than how America's gun culture lead to lethal incidents.

For anyone moving in to the Philippines from any of its Muslim neighbors, the price of moral "sinning" becomes shockingly cheap.  Everywhere you look, there are prostitutes walking around seeking out potential clients , local bars with little restrictions on smoking indoors or televised lingerie models, or customers, both local and expat, mixing together, heartily laughing away at crude sexual jokes, while dancing to the latest hip-pop hits imported from the US.  Fluent English with American accents are sprinkled with Filipino on the streets, giving the place both a familiar and exotic feel simultaneously.

That is the term the real estate agent used when he shows foreign clients around the neighborhood for the first time.  Among the dense skyscraper-filled skyline of Makati, Manila's central business district, a whole new scene unravels on the street-level.  As one cuts into any one of the small side streets leading away from the impeccably maintained, tree lined, wide central boulevards of the country's premier financial district, a whole new world of dodgy entertainment and equally dodgy people hits the casual pedestrians unwittingly passing through, with a force that one simply cannot ignore.

Many a wise traveler met on the road have remarked as such, "every adventure with an abrupt beginning must have an abrupt end."  The wisdom of the words cannot be anymore appropriate for my five-month stay in Kuala Lumpur.  The whole episode started with a directionless grad student frantically seeking any opportunity anywhere in the world as he awaited the inevitably end of his one-year tenure in London .  A couple of 30-min Skype interviews and a few disjointed email communication with a landlord...all the sudden, he found himself on a 12-hour flight across the globe.

When it comes to understanding the everyday social mentality of East Asians, your writer ashamedly bills himself as a leading grassroots expert.  After five years in China, seven years in Japan, half year each in Korea and Malaysia, one would learn to make out some trends and generalizations about people there.  And after ten years in the US, one in UK, and a few months in Australia, one begins to see how such trends and generalizations are continued or discontinued when the Asians move into a Western environment .

Once again, Diwali, or the Hindu Festival of Lights, is upon on us, and just as Hindu community around the world does, the Malaysian Indian community is busy reuniting with families and friends while everyone in the country is enjoying a couple days of public holidays even though they have literally nothing to do with this particular religious event .  But while the Indosphere indulge in some wholesome family gatherings, something remarkable just happened in China: on Nov. 11th, ecommerce portal Tmall set an all-time world record for one-day sale by a single site by raking in 3.1 billion USD.

Looking at the published stats, the tiny Sultanate of Brunei in northern part of the island of Borneo, sandwiched between Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, is definitely one of the wealthiest states in the world.  Massive income from exporting oil and liquified natural gas have created a land where every citizen enjoys automatic enrollments in hefty and regular pension payments, near universal access to modern facilities, perhaps the highest per capita consumption of cars in Asia.  Many a travel guide out there refers to the country as the "Islamic Singapore. "

The late morning party at the poolside of the local tennis-cum-swimming-random-conference-hosting family club was reaching its climax: the little star of the party: a baby boy turning one-year-old tomorrow was about to blow the candle on his little birthday cake from the comfort of his mom's lap.  The entire attendance of the party, some two dozen family members, friends, and coworkers, gathered around the cake, the boy, and the happy parents, clapping and singing the birthday song.  They broke into spontaneous laughter every time the boy cooed or smiled, and captured all that on their cameras.

Consistent with Muslim traditions, Malaysia is again at a three-day weekend, celebrating the second Eid of the year to mark the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael to God (as detailed in the holy books of both Christianity and Islam).  Much as the first Eid of the year celebrated not that long ago , the occasion, for the Muslims, marks a time to travel to home villages/towns, get together with family, and have nice meals over nice stories.  Many, as in our company, took extended vacations before and after the actual three-day break to have more substantial trips.

That is the central question posed by the interviewer, picking off where the examination left off , as our conversation continued on the topic of Oriental ideologies in modern-day world affairs.  The interviewer's argument was not that Confucianism can be revised to be compatible with democratic values, but that it is fundamentally democratic from the day of its very inception...it is simply not conceived as so by anyone with excess "Western bias" because the idea of what is considered democratic under Confucian socio-economic system is completely different from the Western sense.

Finally, a day of endless sunshine sizzles the city after a week of endless monsoon rain turned its streets into rivers and ponds.  The countless puddles formed on the streets quickly evaporate into the air and the streets, so devoid of life during the rain quickly regains life, with families crowding into cars and outdoor shopping streets to enjoy a Sunday morning at its fullest tropical glory, thanks to the rain, feels freshly devoid of the smog that regularly blankets the city with just a few too many cars and jammed highways to facilitate (?) their use.

There are simply too many times living here in KL that I feel that "I cannot believe I am actually in Malaysia" moment.   The familiarity of certain events and situations would make any Western expat feel that there simply is not anything foreign at all in that moment in time.  Today, as I was sitting in the 16th floor of modern office building, shielded by comfy sofas and high-powered from the hustle and bustle of regular Chinatown activities a stone's throw away, I just entered another one of those "Malaysia feels so Western" moments.

My Malaysian Chinese girlfriend frequently speak of how pushy her parents can be.  Not only run errands for the house, force her to go to university to study what they dictate, and compel her to help out with the family business on a more permanent basis.  She tells me that she just want to get away from her family and move far far away to become independent  just like what I am currently doing by living and working in Malaysia.  While such complaints are common among Asians growing up in the West with its strong individualistic values, it is rather interesting to observe similar mentality in collectivist Asia .

Corporate denizens from around the world have an almost identical habit of getting absolutely wasted and hammered whenever they do not have to work the day after.  It is not because everyone is secretly alcoholics waiting for that right moment to get in touch with their dark side, nor even because most of these people are truly so fond of intoxicating beverages and equally intoxicated company of others that they must carry on such rowdy affairs week after week, year after year.  Instead, the motive is one of release, of even temporary escape from dark realities of bondage to stressful work and hierarchies .

Another little known anti-Islamic expression in the West triggers another anti-Western riot in the Muslim world, this time culminating in the disgraceful death of the highest-level American official in the hands of young extremist rioters, storming an American diplomatic compound supposedly protected both by heavy local police presence and international law that the newly formed democratic government in Libya surely have to and willingly abide by.  Ironically, the riots only made the previously unknown anti-Islamic film more famous among the common people in the West.

Walking down the streets of central Saigon has a tendency to bring one to other places in the (ex-) Francophone world.  At times, the shady boulevards littered with Neoclassical masterpieces, turned into museums, bars, and political institutions, reminded of the French Concession in Shanghai.  Some of these buildings feel so dilapidated that their plain sight brings one back the rundown yet previously elegant main streets of Casablanca.  Yet the well-manicured parks and horticultural street exhibits are just like those found in the central parts of Montpelier...

A previous post commented on the seemingly constant presence of inter-racial tension in Malaysia , where nearly equal numbers of Malays, Chinese, and Indians jostle for economic and political positions as they co-developed within the same, yet divided society for generations.  However, that post was written with the assumption that each of the three races mentioned tend to look and act as a unified bloc, with individuals that place their own racial identity above anything else as they strive to move upward in the social ladder of the complex multicultural society.