Category: Malaysia

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Giving Back to Southeast Asia

I was very fortunate to be able to take time off and travel for 202 days in Southeast Asia in 2015-2016 — mostly in countries where the dollar stretches pretty far because of the disparity in wealth between the country where I happened to be born and the places I was visiting. I decided to give back, in a small way, by pledging a certain amount of money to charity for each day I spent in each country.

Thailand: 72 days

Because I spent the most days in Thailand, I split my donation between two charities.

My closest Thai friend was, like many Thais, reverent toward the royal family. I have my own outsider opinions about all that, but I respect my friend and her values for her own country. The Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women, under royal patronage, provides emergency shelter, health services, vocational training, and many other services to women in Thailand.

 The SET Foundation gives scholarships to those in need, with the unique principle of supporting students for a full twelve years, from elementary through collegiate studies, rather than just for a semester or two.

Malaysia: 11 days

As you travel Malaysia, it’s hard not to notice the oil palms: acres and acres of them, a giant monoculture dominating the landscape. I didn’t visit Malaysian Borneo on my trip, but I went there recently, and I discovered the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which helps orangutans who’ve lost their mothers to recover and prepare for reintegration into the wild. Malaysia’s unique wildlife is precious and under threat — the oil palm plantations are pressing in, and the lumber industry wants what trees are left — but places like the Sepilok Centre have the potential to drive up the economic value of conservation and diversify the local economy by bringing tourism. And in the meantime, the preservation and restoration work they do is saving unique animals in a unique environment.

Vietnam: 44 days

I met my friend Christina Bui in Myanmar through a chain of travel connections, and ran into her again in Saigon and Hanoi. She works at Pacific Links Foundation, which helps to protect people in Vietnam from human trafficking — being forced into factory work, domestic work, and the like — and empowers women and communities in Vietnam. Slavery is bad and Christina is good, so this was a pretty easy choice.

Myanmar: 23 days

Yangon is a time capsule. Decades of misrule have had the perverse effect of preserving the older part of the city much as it was under British colonial rule. Yangon Heritage Trust is working to preserve and restore the city’s remarkable architecture before it all gets torn down and turned into KFCs, and I hope they succeed in making Yangon the gem of a city that it deserves to be, like today’s Hoi An or Penang but on a much larger scale. (Nothing specific against KFC, by the way. I threw up in the bathroom of the Yangon KFC and they were very polite about it.)

Cambodia: 8 days

Cambodia is rife with terrible NGOs and scammy voluntourism projects, so I wanted to find an organization with a good rating on Charity Navigator, and Cambodia Children’s Fund has that. They take “a holistic, family-based approach” to childhood education, which is sorely needed in this poor and damaged country. They recognize that there are root problems like hunger and violence that can undermine education, so they try to deal with all of these issues as they help young people get the schooling they need and deserve.

Laos: 23 days

Perhaps the most dangerous thing I did in Southeast Asia was go for a walk in Laos.

Laos has more unexploded ordnance (UXO) per capita than anywhere else on earth, a sorry result of a decade of American bombing during the Vietnam War. On a tour of the Plain of Jars, on a trail that was supposed to be cleared, my guide suddenly jumped back and pointed. “That’s a cluster bomb detonator.” He then told me how his brother died: he’d gone fishing and was cooking up his catch in a rice field when the heat triggered an old pineapple bomb that took his head off.

I split my Laos donations between two organizations that deal with the ongoing disaster my country left behind. COPE gives people their lives back by providing prosthetics and rehabilitation to UXO survivors and others with mobility-related disabilities, while the Mine Awareness Group (MAG) works to demine Laos (and other places) and educate the local people about how to avoid UXO accidents, thereby reducing COPE’s potential clientele. I saw both organizations at work in Laos, and at one point even had to stop driving while MAG blew up some UXO they’d found in a field — a field that, when cleared, could provide food and income to a Laotian family.

Indonesia: 18 days

Yayasan Usaha Mulia (YUM) – Foundation for Noble Work has been around a long time and does holistic community work focused on education and alleviating poverty. Finding a good charity in Indonesia — especially one that wasn’t religiously based — was a bit difficult, but YUM seems to have a decent track record.

Singapore: 3 days

For Singapore, I cheated. Singapore is a wealthy country, so there’s not a tremendous need to give there. Instead, I donated to Singapore-based Choson Exchange, an innovative NGO that supports North Koreans with hands-on entrepreneurship training, helping to create an ownership culture and a better standard of living for North Koreans. I’ve met the founder and some of the team, and they’re passionate but not naive about what they’re up against. I admire what they do and wish them success.

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Like a Bowl of Laksa

Da Nang, Vietnam

Once you get beyond Kuala Lumpur, peninsular Malaysia offers tourists three things: mountain highlands, beaches, and historical trade cities. I opted for the latter. There are beaches and mountains elsewhere in the region — I’d just spent a good bit of time on both — but what’s unique to Malaysia is the melange of cultures created by its strategic geographical location and its history. Like a bowl of laksa, Malaysia is a mix of cultural influences that can sometimes be a bit sour or strange, but is worth tasting.

Melaka and Penang

In my brief visit to Malaysia, I visited just two destinations beyond Kuala Lumpur: Melaka City, the capital of Melaka State, and George Town, on the island of Penang. Each is a historic trading city that has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and each is a mixture of European, Indian, Malay, and Chinese influences, with the Baba Nyonya — the local term for the Malaysian Chinese — leaving the strongest mark in each place.

Melaka (Malacca) (photos) is the smaller of the two, an old Dutch trading port whose importance has long since faded. The old city has been restored and decked out in murals, but there are traces of earlier, less heritage-driven attempts to drum up tourism: a defunct monorail, an abandoned pirate-themed amusement park, an unfortunate thing of overdecorated trishaws — cycle rickshaws — done up in LED lights and Hello Kitty or Doraemon and blasting music. George Town, on the island of Penang, is larger and more vibrant, and there’s still a major working port on the mainland nearby, in Butterworth. But Georgetown, too, shows signs of misguided early development: the highest building, just beyond the heritage area, is a soaring tower, now in a state of disrepair, whose lower floors house one of the most depressing malls I have ever been to.

I enjoyed my time in both cities. In Melaka, it was thrilling just to gaze out at the sea and realize I was looking across one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The old city is beautiful and evocative, and it came alive with the Friday night market on Jonker Street. And I met fascinating people, like the Chinese Eurasian proprietor of a restored Dutch heritage house, who told me about Catholics he knows with Jewish surnames like Menasseh, and also seemed to believe that though you can’t come into Malaysia on an Israeli passport, there are secretly Israeli advisors at the highest levels of government.

In Penang (photos), I stayed in an elegant bed and breakfast, You Le Yuen, in a restored building on Love Lane, supposedly so called because that’s where the rich Chinese merchants kept their mistresses (I stayed in the North Studio Suite). My arrival happened to be the night of the Chingay Parade, which centered on teams that carried great banners on enormous bamboo poles, which they would toss or kick into the air so that one member of the team could catch the pole on his forehead and run with it for a while.

Penang is known for its food, and everyone says to go to the hawker stalls, so I did. The food was good, and varied, and often delicious, but I’m not sure it’s travel-across-the-world delicious.

Penang is also where I had my most extensive interactions with someone who was Malay, as opposed to Indian or Chinese, which is mostly who I ended up talking to in Malaysia. It was at the mosque, where a young man beside a banner about Muslims respecting Jesus roped me into a theological discussion involving several faiths I don’t believe in. He was gracious if passionate — at one point, he tried to inspire me by beginning a recitation of the Koran — and invited me into the mosque at prayer time. I watched him wash, but when he invited me to pray with him, I declined.

Fruitful misunderstandings

On Christmas, I went on my own to watch a movie (the new Star Wars!) and eat some Chinese food, as is the way of my people. Then, in the evening, my Indian friend took me to his brother’s Christian “open house” gathering, under some party tents in a vacant lot between a highway overpass and an elevated rail line. We ate Indian food that was too spicy even for the Indians, and then dessert was some sort of porridgey thing with noodles and beans, served in a cup. My hosts asked me what I thought of it.

“At first it was weird,” I said. “Then it was OK in the middle, and now that it’s gone, I kind of want more.”

The same could be said for my visit to Malaysia. After the warmth and ease of Thailand, Malaysia was prickly, strange, difficult. But it was difficult in a way that I found compelling on some level. I think Malaysia will stick in my mind. It’s an awkward country, cobbled together out of disparate cultures and in grave danger of exploding, yet it’s wealthier than most of its neighbors. It’s an oil state, and also a palm oil state — so much oil palm is planted that Malaysia has to import coconuts from Thailand — but it has the potential to be much more. Unlike Thailand or Vietnam, it has no real ancient roots; it was created as British and Dutch tin mines and rubber plantations, and its peoples and cultures are immigrants. It’s complex and messy enough that I could imagine staying interested in it, the way I stayed interested in Korea — which I also didn’t love after my first experience there. I wouldn’t put Malaysia at the top of your tourist list, but I wouldn’t put Korea there either, and I plan to live there.

My host told me the story of a Chinese Malaysian woman who got set up with an Australian man for a dinner date. As they were ordering, the woman asked, “Do you like me?” It was a forward question, but the man answered, “Yes, I suppose I do.” Eventually they married.

Except that she was asking, “Do you like mee?” — noodles. Malaysia feels like a country built out of such misunderstandings, a country where the locals have trouble talking to each other but muddle through anyway.

Bonus: What Malaysia gets right that the world gets wrong

At Kuala Lumpur International Airport, you check in, drop off your bags, and then go to the departure gates — and not through security. Instead, your security screening happens at the gate, when the flight is just about ready for boarding. You then wait in a sort of holding pen, for just a few minutes, between security screening and actual boarding.

This system means you’re not on a security line with everyone else coming to the airport, regardless of when their flights are and when yours is. It means that there’s far less time between your security check and your boarding — and far fewer opportunities to, say, slip into the back of a restaurant and get a knife. Your security line is just a part of your boarding process, not a separate waiting period.

Other airports should do it this way. It might require extra security staff, and it definitely requires the construction of secure holding areas by each gate. Not every airport has the capacity. But new airports should adopt the KLIA model.

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Latest Travel Photos

Here are the latest travel photos to get updated.

Malaysia (December 2015)

Back in Bangkok (December 2015)

There are still a couple more Thailand galleries on the way. Also, there are updates to the NEWYORN and STORYstory galleries. But for now, enjoy.

In addition, I have updated The Plan with details of my past and current travels as I now know or expect them to be.

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Truly Asia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (photos)

Malaysia’s tourism slogan is “Truly Asia,” which is meant to encapsulate the way that Malaysia brings together so many different varieties of Asian life: Chinese, Austronesian, South Asian; Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. The downside of the slogan is that it can leave you wondering, if you’re already going to other parts of Asia, why you need to come to this country at all.

At times, the ethnic mix works well. It gives you delicious foods and a sense of energy and possibility. At other times, it combines in unfortunate ways: you get the Chinese sense of personal space (none), the Indian approach to salesmanship (yelling at passersby), and the Southeast Asian concept of sidewalks (non-continuous surfaces full of holes). 

The language, too, is a fascinating pidgin. The underlying Malay is an Austronesian language, but it’s full of loanwords from English and Arabic and Hindi, all written in a peculiar romanization that spells everything rationally. So you get words like menara for tower, from the Arabic, and also words like butik and restoran, teksi and bas, polis, klinik, and so on. (Weirdly, the word for eating is makan*, which sounds a lot like meok-da, the Korean word for eating, but I don’t know if that’s a real cognate.)

Muslims and Indians and Ewoks

Today I went to the Petronas Towers and felt a twinge of resentment that this Muslim country still has its twin towers and New York City doesn’t.

This is my first time in a Muslim country. The closest I’ve come is India, which is a secular country with an enormous number of Muslims and some legal recognition of Islamic family law. But this is different. Malaysia is multiethnic and multireligious, a point that official Malaysian tourist information makes repeatedly, and Hindu and Chinese temples are a part of the cityscape, as are endless Christmas displays. Still, I have been warned by several people not to mention that I’m Jewish — always followed by the caveat that it’s fine with the Chinese and the Indians, but just don’t mention it to the Malays. Like all the other Muslim countries, Malaysia has no diplomatic ties with Israel, and Israelis can’t travel here. Walking a side street in the tourist center of Bukit Bintang, I saw a Nazi swastika tank top for sale. Multiethnic, multireligious tolerance has its limits. (It’s also worth noting that though Malaysia is far more tolerant and openminded than, say, Saudi Arabia, it’s still a Muslim country whose most famous emblem is a tower built by the national oil company, Petrolium Nasional Berhad.)

Along with its Muslim side, Kuala Lumpur also has a strong Indian presence, which makes it much more like India than the other parts of East Asia I’ve been to, often in distressing ways: more yelling, more hawking, more beggars displaying horrific disease and injury.

And I keep thinking that the Malay women, short and round-faced in headscarves, look like Ewoks.

KL is just OK

To be fair, there are nice parts of the city. The malls are elegant and vast and there are multitudes of them. Last night I met up with a Chinese Malaysian friend in Bangsar, a stylish neighborhood of cafes and bars for the upper-middle class. And on my first night in town, I was welcomed into a lovely home and fed delicious, home-cooked roti canai and other delicacies by the large Indian Malaysian family of a friend from Landmark in New York.

But I haven’t found KL to be especially appealing. It’s a car city, and I don’t tend to like car cities. The people I’ve met directly have been lovely, but merchants and shopkeepers and passersby have been taciturn. The mix of wealth and poverty, development and decay, is messy and uncomfortable.

It’s also hard to write off the bad vibes that come from the anti-Semitism. I’m lucky to have been born in America at a time when anti-Semitism was rare and socially unacceptable; being here, I’m reminded of how often, and in how many places, casual hatred of Jews has been the norm.

And yes, people are right say that the food is great, but I’m discovering that that’s a thing you say about places where there’s not much else good to say about them (Singapore, I’m looking at you). There’s a lot of good food, but that was true in Bangkok and Saigon and New York too. There’s just more to say about those cities.

On beyond Kuala

Tomorrow I’ll venture beyond the capital, south to Melaka/Malacca, a historic port city. It will be interesting to see how Malaysia feels outside of Kuala Lumpur, and good to give it a chance.

Still, I have already come to the sad sense that whatever possibilities exist for me in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is not somewhere I’ll ever feel wholly welcome.

*Originally I had it as makar.

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Sunset on Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand

After 47 days in the Land of Smiles, I am finally moving on to my next country. Tomorrow I head for Malaysia.

I’m tired and wrung out right now. Traveling means making and breaking connections, and that can be hard. It means being far from your friends and networks of support, too, and that’s also hard.

A week at home would be fantastic, before I plunge into my next adventure. I don’t know where I mean by “at home,” but it would be nice anyway. Somewhere where everything is familiar, I suppose, and where there are people who love me and it’s not a big deal that they love me and we can just be.

Instead, I will get up tomorrow and get on a plane to a new country that I’ve never visited. On the plus side, I’ll be met in Kuala Lumpur by the brother of someone I know through Landmark. And the adventure will continue.

***

I still have things to say about Thailand — there’s the king’s birthday to tell you about, and a summary of my experience, I suppose — and maybe I’ll get to those things, and maybe I won’t. I don’t know.

I have also just spent some time on the beach, about which I don’t have much to say. You’ve been to the beach? It was like that.

The specifics, for those planning travel in the region: Ko Kut (or Koh Kut, or Koh Kood) is a gorgeous island of palm trees, waterfalls, fishing villages, forest monkeys, limited development, relatively few tourists, and somewhat high prices compared to the rest of Thailand. If you want parties, this is not the place. If you want a relaxing, reggae-free getaway, go for it. It’s only the second time I’ve ever snorkeled, but the snorkeling was pretty awesome, even if I did slice up my feet on the coral. Pro tip: order the seafood.

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The Lunatics

At Le Fenix Hotel, where I’ve stayed on my visits to Bangkok, this is usually what’s playing when you step into the elevator: a swanky bossa nova warning that the lunatics are in the hall. Yes, this is precisely the segment that gets played. Sometimes it’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” and now and again it’s a whispery “Hey You,” but mostly it’s “Brain Damage.” Fitting in its way for a hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 11, but it’s surprising for the elevator to just come right out and say it. (And actually this hotel, which tries very hard to be hip, seems to be popular with Indian families.)

Then there’s the weirdnes of the view I see every time I walk down the long hallway to my room: a bunch of people sitting around a table in a parking garage, usually eating, and a gracefully illuminated toilet. Followers of artist Gina DeNaia know that hotels have odd corners that just might be worth examining, so I’ve started to pay attention to my little parking garage gang. They’re like my secret friends now. Once they had some pretty girls in fancy dresses with them. Now and again they’re just gone, and that’s a little sad.

*

Today is 40 days that I’ve been in Asia, 40 days in Thailand. That puts me at 20% done, assuming my trip is 200 days long, which it might well end up being. It’s a little milestone, I suppose. I’ve been here long enough that I’m into the flow of it, but there’s still a lot more ahead of me than behind. In those 40 days, I’ve been to eleven destinations — an average of a new place every 3.6 days, though it didn’t happen like that. I have moved 15 times, and I have stayed in 13 different places. Three hotels got repeat visits.

I have much to catch you up on: my time driving a rental car around the north of Thailand and the king’s birthday here in Bangkok, among other things. I’ll get to them, I hope soon. And there are more photos coming as well.

Also, I am headed for Malaysia after Thailand — I’ll be there on December 15. If you know what’s good in Peninsular Malaysia, do let me know!