Can't we all just not get along (reference: 30 Rock, Season 1)

Hello again! This is a blog I've wanted to do ever since we got cross cultural training back in October. One that is more about the country we're living in. It will be interspersed with some professional pics we had taken in early December. So the pictures won't remotely correspond to what's written, but it's an efficient way to do both, and I'm lazy.

Everyone here who blogs says the same thing, they get around to it so infrequently that it's always all about the kids. Don't get me wrong, the kids are great and all, but I do want to include things about what we're learning here, things that are unique to our experience. Another thing that's funny, you'll notice none of my blogs have had any sightseeing landmark pictures (example: The Petronas Towers). Every expat Mom with young children says the same thing about this. You don't go visit these sites yourself until someone comes to visit and you attend with them. That's kind of sad, but that's just the way it often goes.

Since my theme of this is cultural realizations and experiences I have to share a night we had last weekend. We were invited to a Scottish Society banquet of some sort celebrating the poetry of Robert Burns. He was a naughty poet, and his poetry has alot to do with womanizing, drinking and eating haggis. We had a great time with friends, got to hear Robert Burn's poetry, got to eat actual haggis, do some Scottish dancing (yes I was out there) and in general have a fun, drunk night away from the kids. We found it funny that we go to Southeast Asia to experience Scottish culture but this town has people from everywhere.

Random Rusie pic #1:

But there was another cultural experience that we did miss out on, the Hindu Festival Thaipusam. There is this big cave called The Batu Caves about 20 minutes from our house, a landmark that serves as a sort of Hindu shrine and gathering place of monkeys. There's about 250 steps to get inside so the thought of tackling this with small children has seemed less than appealing. But once a year, thousands of people come to the Batu Caves to celebrate this festival. It celebrates the anniversary of the wedding of a Hindu God to a gypsy girl.

Andy's out of town for work and I didn't have available babysitting but a friend of mine attended. A huge procession walks up the 250 steps, some "entranced" by various gods. There are men who have pierced their skin with big hooks that carry various bundles. They "take on" what they call Fierce Gods and don't feel the pain of the hooks. This part of the ritual is banned in India, assuming to avoid the inevitable infections from unclean hooks or untreated wounds. Other men are carrying huge platforms on their shoulders. All these carry offerings. My friend said seeing these people "entranced"was both freaky and interesting, to see them so overcome by their faith, one that differs from her own.

Random Rusie pics #2 & #3:

Men also shave their heads and paint them gold. It just sounded amazing and I have absolutely vowed, absent husband or not, to see it next year. It's experiences like that that you just simply can't be here and miss out on. If you do, then what's the point of being here.

They had a record number at this festival this year and it could be because Malaysian Indians have been in the news a lot lately. Tamil Indians make up about 8% of the population and they are the ethnic group with the least amount of power in the country. If there is any low level job here, it is done by Indians and they are probably paid very little.

To give some perspective, let me go back to our cross cultural training. We were hoping we would get a speaker who was very frank. When we had cross cultural training for Mexico, our speaker was very frank, told it how it was, and it's so much more helpful than if someone sugarcoats a country's situation. Malaysia is very proud of it's diverse, multi-cultural people. The country celebrated it's 50th anniversary of independence a couple weeks after we arrived in August (was once under British rule) and it's proud of the fact that there are different cultures that peacefully coexist together and their ecomony has been able to thrive.

Well we had a speaker who cut through the crap and admitted that there's a lot of animosity between the races in Malaysia. The diversity is due to a British strategy. They brought in Chinese to work the tin mines and Indians to work within the rubber industry and developed a "divide and rule" system between these two groups and the Malays. This divide and rule still exists today. The Chinese have all the economic power, the Malays have the political power as they're the 60% majority and Indians have little power.

You get the idea:

In fact, a lot of animosity has come from what the minority ethnic groups consider preferential treatment of Malays. Our speaker told us of a policy instituted back in the '70's, an affirmative action policy that allowed Malays to get into universities over Chinese Malaysians who had better scores academically. Someone pointed out to me once, "have you ever heard of affirmative action...for a majority?". True it seems a bit odd. What resulted to some degree were bitter Chinese and Indian Malaysians and some Malays who wound up with jobs they neither had the true skills for or the passion for.

What you see most often is that Chinese Malaysians still have all the professional jobs, Malays have the government jobs and Indians have the crap jobs. A person here doesn't describe themselves as Malaysian unless they're Malay. If they're not Malay, they will say Chinese Malaysian or Indian Malaysian, to differeniate themselves. There's quite a bit that separates them when you think of it: Different religions, different languages (although most people speak English as well as their "native" tongue). The people are just different too. You really start to appreciate this when you do a cross-cultural training course and you really try to understand how a culture differs from your own. The greatest challenge is to never label something different from your culture as bad or wrong, implying Americans are somehow superior in every way. If you have that attitude, you would be constantly pissed over stupid stuff and never see the world through any other lens than the one you grew up with.

That can be an enormous challenge. We come from a very efficient, deadline, task and time oriented society. It's amazingly easy to label people who don't meet our standards as lazy or incompetent. In experiencing your own frustrations you can see how the various groups here label each other. You can imagine how different things can be when you have one society valuing equality (more Western) and another society valuing hierarchy (more Asian). Neither bad, just extremely different.

Another thing that gives some non-Malays pause here is the growing influence of Islam. The religion of Malaysia has been Islam for a long time but apparently 30 years ago, very few women wore a head scarf. Now, all Muslim women wear a head scarf. Apparently religion didn't used to be included on a person's identity card and now it is. Our speaker told us that religions are arbitrarily written in depending on a person's ethnicity. A Malay automatically has Muslim and a Chinese automatically has Buddhist which is funny since there are many Chinese who are Christian here.

There are sharia courts here but they have historically only handled the Muslim population on family issues including marriage, divorce, etc. Right now those in office are moderate, but there are a few devout people in high positions that make our trainer nervous. And in areas of Malaysia outside of Kuala Lumpur, the local governments are more fundamentalist. As I type this I just read a Malaysian headline about 11 books that were just banned for portraying Islam as promoting terroism or mistreatment of women. I had to peruse the titles to ensure none were on our bookshelf and whew, none of them are.

As I mentioned earlier, some troubling situations have been in the news for the past few months concerning the Indian population. Back in November, a large Indian population gathered to peacefully march in downtown to bring awareness to the lack of rights for Indians. This demonstration was broken up violently by police with people injured and about 30 people arrested. The government's position was that the assembly was illegal, as a permit is required to "assemble" in such a way (a permit that would have never been approved), and they had the right to break it up. That was followed by a few other demonstrations that got broken up the same way. There are still Indian activists detained with no formal charges.

What's interesting is that it's hard to get an accurate depiction of what's going on in the press. The press is highly censored by the government. The day after the first Indian protest, CNN Asia described it as "peaceful demonstration suppressed" and the local Malaysian newspaper's headline described it as an "illegal assembly" and the whole tone of the article was very pro-government.

The whole situation with the Indians has really thrown the government off as there has not been this sort of unrest for decades. Keep in mind anyone who's reading this that in our little corner of our expat enclave, we aren't remotely touched by these things. In all these situations, some expat friend or another will say, "Did you hear about that protest over the weekend?". If it weren't for them saying that, we would never know.

And despite all that I've mentioned, and compared to many other countries, the different ethnic groups co-exist together very well. This is why Kuala Lumpur has been economically thriving for years now. The city just continues to grow. Apparently the area we live in just outside of downtown was jungle 15 years ago, now it's full of high-rise condos and development. There are just a few factors in there that could send things in a backward slide like the Islam involvement in government and the equality among the races.

We are about to enter February and experience our first Chinese New Year here. It's huge around here and all the malls are decorated in red and gold. Harrison has a Chinese New Year party tomorrow at school and he'll be wearing the red and gold Chinese outfit I bought for him (pictures for the next blog). Hopefully we'll learn even more about that holiday that we can then share with you.

We hope all of you are doing well and find all this at least a little interesting. Take care,

Rusie Family 4