Observing from within- language and conversation

They're all speaking Cantonese. I can tell they're having fun- the smiles, the good-natured banter, the back-and-forward exchanges are universal language for good times and friendship. I'm sitting in the hairdressers, as this friendly yabber ebbs and flows around me, my hair shrouded in plastic and clips as the potion works its magic on the silver-and-brown-and-blonde mess of locks. I don't mind that I can't understand the words, because the other language I can understand- I've heard it in Australian salons. They're speaking of their kids, of the weather, of current events and politics. They're sharing happy occasions and joking about the strangeness of life.

Cantonese sounds nice to us. It isn't as harsh as Mandarin, and sometimes it flows so smoothly, I have to listen carefully to make sure they're not speaking Malay. The lady's voice is louder, higher and harsher, but the young man has a deep, soporific voice, and at this late stage of the afternoon, I close my eyes drowsily. I haven't heard many deep voices in Malaysia, and when I do, my attention is always drawn to them.

There is only one conversation now, and as all three of them laugh, I wonder what was said. I'm enjoying my separation, the detachment that comes from not being able to understand, and am appreciating the privilege of observing from outside. They don't expect me to join in, and I make no attempt to do so.

The same observation from within occurs at netball. Even though I can't play until I have my knee repaired, I still go now and then to see my friends. I sit amongst them, watching and listening as they yabber in Malay about family and home, schools and community. Unlike the Chinese, I pick up snippets of the Malay, usually only an isolated word or two, and rarely understanding enough to follow the gyst of the conversation. Unlike the conversation in the salon, however, I don't sit and observe contentedly. I am trying to learn more Malay, and I want to join in. I get frustrated at the speed they talk, and annoyed at myself for not understanding more. These are my friends and I want to know what is happening in their lives, and I want them to take the time to explain slowly and carefully. It's not that I get left out altogether- Asma will explain  in English when I ask- it's that I want to be a part of the conversation, not an aside to the conversation. For now, I'll keep doing our twice-weekly English/ Bahasa Melayu lessons (I teach the lab ladies English, they help me with Bahasa Melayu), and I'll keep practicing and learning, and maybe one day soon I will surprise them all when I join in. Until then, I'll be the privileged outsider observing from within.

Netball

On Wednesday afternoons, I play netball. I am trying to make it more often, as this is something that I really enjoy in my week, but it does unfortunately often clash with our English/ Bahasa Melayu lessons. I was invited to netball by Liza, and am grateful that the colonial English left the legacy of this great sport in Malaysia as well as Australia.

Our shared enjoyment transcends language and cultural barriers. We meet at a communal area in the kampong of Kuala Dipang and as we gather the children play around the court, mothers sit and share a durian while discussing the happenings of the day, and teenage girls cluster together by the motorcycles, chatting animatedly and eating fried banana. Few of the other players speak much English, and my command of Bahasa Melayu, seriously limited at the best of times, on more “senior” days becomes a basic command of grammar accompanied by a non-existent recall of vocabulary. 

Last week we had the most fun I can recall. I arrived first, having cycled the 15 minutes along the main road from home. The “court” is a once-marked-out area of grass in the middle of the kampong, next to a sealed and fenced court that appears to be reserved for the men to play soccer. The lines are all visible, at least in part, if one looks carefully, though the centre circle must be approximated by the player taking the centre pass. Patchy grass covers all but the most heavily-worn areas, which on other days would have been dusty and a bit slippery. When I arrived yesterday, however, the lower side of the court and one goal area were submerged as a result of the afternoon's downpour. The ladies started arriving and decided that a few hundred litres of water on the court should not stop us having fun, so proceeded to gather spades and buckets and move sand from the parking area to the puddle under the northern goal. We all pitched in, and soon the court was deemed suitable for play.

Liza and Mas speak some English, though not as confidently as Asma, who usually takes a lead in organising everybody and referees while she is playing. Asma usually talks to me in English a bit, though I love to sit back and listen to the conversation in Bahasa Melayu, grabbing what snippets I can understand, listening to the pronunciation, the different accents and the feel of the language. I enjoy just trying to fit in, not being a celebrity, enjoying the privilege of being allowed to just be there. Asma has tried hard to make me feel welcome, using her command of English to explain bits of the culture, the game, the social goings-on and the language, and has been a real blessing. Asma wasn't there on that day, and for some time, none of the English-speakers were there, so I just had to get by with BM. It is good to be thrown into talking in Bahasa Melayu, without the option of deferring to English and translators. I am particularly fond of Linda. Her gentle, caring face tells me that she want me to understand, and she speaks slowly, with little groups of words that I can decipher in bits. She speaks little English, but I understand her best, because she takes the time to patiently explain things and to wait for a response.

All the other players are Moslem, and wear clothes that cover themselves to varying degrees. The first few times I played, most had long sleeves and long trousers, though now most are wearing short-sleeved T-shirts with long sports trousers. Asma and I wear scarves over our hair, but all the other ladies, young and old, wear a tudung while playing. Wearing a tudung can introduce all sorts of challenges in an active game like netball, but generally they manage well. I don't even notice the headwear now, except when someone turns up to play in something particularly bejewelled or ornate. The modern Malaysian tudungs are mostly lycra or nylon in one piece, easy to wear, and, I assume, easy to launder, and the loose ends can be twisted and tucked into one's T-shirt if need be.

The teams are usually the younger girls and the older women. Most often, we oldies win by a good margin, but on the semi=submerged field the game was very close, possibly because the older ladies picked their way gingerly through the mud, protecting bodies and the families that rely on those bodies being whole and functional, while the young girls ran around with the abandon that can be enjoyed by the young and naïve. In our bare feet we slipped in the mud, sloshed in the sodden sand and splashed through the submerged part of the field. Every pair of feet and legs became an itchy, mosquito-bitten muddy mess, and soggy trousers were rolled up over ankles and calves. We fell in the mud, in the water, and onto each other. We screamed and cursed without swearing. We dropped the ball and scrambled in a mad, muddy mangle of bodies to regain it. But most of all we laughed. We laughed at ourselves and we laughed at each other. We laughed at the craziness of playing netball with the court like this, and we laughed at the difficulties. We made silly noises and pretend-whistle-sounds, as Asma-with-the-whistle was not there to referee. As always, the play was mostly fair and good-natured, and we refereed ourselves. Miraculously, no-one was hurt, and just before seven, all the Moslem ladies hurried to be home in time for prayers, leaving me to wait for my husband to arrive with the D-Max to carry me and my bike home to a warm shower and clean clothes. I waited, bitten, muddy and smelly, but satisfied, having truly had fun. On the netball court, culture, religion and language disappear, and what truly matters is integrity and a pure spirit.

If that was an unusual netball session, Saturday's was even more interesting. Unusually, not enough people turned up to play, and after some phone calls, Za and Linda discovered that a number of the ladies were at a party. This was conveyed to me in Linda's simple, telegraphic communication, punctuated with many, “Faham? Understand?” We apparently thenceforth invited ourselves to the party, or should I say, the ladies invited themselves and I was commanded to join them. Their motorcycles were parked undercover in case of rain while five children and two ladies piled into the D-Max with me. A few minutes later, we turned up to the party in the back-blocks of Kuala Dipang dressed in T-shirts and sports pants. Satay, rice, tom yam, chicken and lots of Bahasa Melayu later, we sloshed through the now-monsoonal rain back into the D-Max and I delivered the poor souls back to their motorcycles, from whence they would ride home. It was a somewhat surreal experience, a white English-speaker gate-crashing a party of Malays who spoke virtually no English and whom I had never met before, sitting barefoot on the floor of a humble home connected to the world by a tiny thread of bitumen that wove between houses and trees back to the main road. Netball is transpiring to be educational and an amazing cultural experience as well as great exercise.

The Good Samaritan

We were driving into town for an early dinner. It was a little after 6pm and the sky was starting to darken. Although it doesn't usualy get dark till around 7pm,  the rainy season has brought regular cloud cover, and last night the clouds were heavy and angry-looking, and every now and then flashed ominously, though the threatened thunder storm had not yet been delivered.

As we passed the old man, I commented on his bicycle. He didn't ride it, but was pushing it slowly up the hill, and we wondered if he walked because the ancient bicycle was broken, or if it was just too difficult to pedal up the incline into town with no gears and an unsteady load of cardboard for recycling balanced on the back. The bicycle was brown, the nondescript colour of the many bicycles in Kampar that possibly once wore paint but now wear the patina of age with pride. The skinny, twisted old body leaned on the frame, and his head rested on the handlebars as each foot in turn shuffled a little further forward than the one before it.

We were waiting to turn at the lights when the Inventor changed his mnd.

"I have to go back and see if he needs help- he looked tired."

He executed the U-turn where we should have turned for our comfortable air-conditioned restaurant, the anticipated dinner and an early night. We passed the ancient Chinese man again, but this time he was in the saddle, slowly making his way over the crest of the hill. Heading back in the direction of home, we paused briefly at the break in the concrete divider, before the Inventor pulled the D-Max into another U-turn and we returned along the road we had been driving when we saw the man a few minutes earlier. This time, as we neared the old man, he was stationary and was fiddling with the rubber straps that held the pile of folded boxes to the bike's rack. We pulled over and the old man looked up inquiringly. His wizened face was lined with wrinkles within wrinkles, and he didn't stand straight. I was simultaeously astounded that he could still ride a bicycle and saddened that he still had to collect recycling cardboard to sustain himself.

The Inventor got out of the car and walked around it to address the old man.

"Do you need some help?"

The man looked quizzically at him. We gestured at the bike, at the tray of the ute, at him, and the back seat. He didn't nod or imply understanding, but he helped the Inventor load his things into the ute tray, and hopped into the back seat. He hadn't even finished pulling his ancient body up into the seat before I cursed out aloud at my stupidity for not ginving him the front seat. The startled old man sat huddled in the back seat, unable to understand anything we said, and we unabe to comprehend his few uttered Chinese words. I twisted to look at him.

The Inventor tried some Malay, the little he knows, and badly pronounced.

"Tingle." The little old man looked confused.

"Tinggal," I repeated. "Rumah. Di rumah awak."

This time I think he understood, for he rattled a reply too fast for me to comprehend. This time it was my turn to look confused. I gestured, pointing left, right, straight ahead. He seemed unaware that if we were to take him home, we needed to know which way to go.

"Rumah?"

"Train station," he stumbled. So we drove to the train station. We figured he must live somewhere near here, though it was quite a drive from where we had picked him up. By now the man looked a little less shell-shocked and had worked out from our gestures that we needed him to indicate which way we should drive. He indicated back out onto the main road and out of town, so the inventor turned the D-Max and we continued to drive, then there was no mistaking the right-hand-turn he indicated next.

Now I was getting worried. We were some kilometres from town, and I doubted the old man was taking us to his house. Perhaps he doesn't understand, I suggested. I wondered if he had confused our intentions. As we turned right and continued to drive, I became even more worried. We had no option but to continue, however, as leaving him here was not an option. Some minutes up the road, he indicated a right turn. Now there was no mistaking his directions, and we turned, first right, through a small town, then left. We followed the tiny strip of bitumen around a corner, then the ancient Chinese man indicated we stop, and pointed to a house on the right. He climbed down from the back seat, and I noticed with pleasure the neat yards on each side of the narrow lane. In stark contrast to our own neighbourhood, the modest little houses sat low and alone, each surrounded by a small plot of land.  Also in stark contrast to our own neighbourhood, the laneway was tidy and clean, the yards neatly tended, and in a few cases, were being tidied as I watched.

The little man carried a pile of his folded boxes up the short driveway, and the Inventor helped with the boxes as I watched. As he lifted the bicycle down from the tray, I thought of our own sparkling white Raleigh bikes that are so easy to lift up into the back.

"Is it heavy?" I inquired.

"Uh-huh," he grunted, and I noticed the steel frame and solid wood platform on which the old man carried his papers. We agreed briefly that it would slow and difficult to ride and both felt guilty that our own bikes sit idle most of the week.

The old man called a woman to the door, and she thanked the Inventor. Her English was better than the man's, and at last we could see we had indeed brought him to the right place. It had been around 10km from the place we had picked him up, and we had still been concerned that we weren't actually taking him home, but now we had delivered him home, safe and sound, and, it seemed, grateful.

"God bless you," she called to the Inventor as he turned to leave. The Good Samaritan hopped back in the driver's seat and we left for our airconditioned restaurant.

Quite Interesting Quiz

You know I love quizzes! I've always loved quizzes, so it hasn't helped the Inventor's and my incurable, insatiable and sometimes indecent quest for knowledge and ridiculous facts, that one of the few things we have had to watch since we arrived in Malaysia, is a numerous episodes of QI from series G, H and I. The inventor and I love this British “quiz” show hosted by Stephen Fry, with another of our favourite actors, Alan Davis, as a regular panelist, and the 3 remaining positions on the “panel” (I dare not say competitors, for the only thing they seem to compete for is humiliation), being filled by a variety of British, and occasionally international, comedian and actors. The obscure “Quite Interesting” facts they discuss are often secondary to the hilarious banter that takes place, and sometimes I wonder if our concrete walls are thick enough to insulate our poor neighbours from the sound of our mirth.

I have made a quiz for you which is nothing like a QI quiz. Like QI, the quiz is themed, and is all about Malaysia and our experiences here. Unlike QI, it is not presented by a panel of hilarious and badly-behaved poms. It also does not involve rigged buzzers, disussion of answers or long-winded sidetracks. There is also no unfathomable scoring system or penalties for wrong answers. Most importantly, instead of the answers being extremely difficult and eschewing common knowledge and common sense, I am hoping the answers will, in many cases, be able to be logically derived. So, hands on buzzers, let's see how my guests go in a test of general ignorance.

1. What is on the Malaysian flag?
   a. red and white stripes.
   b. a moon
   c. a star
   d. all of the above
2. Which of the following is difficult to buy in Malaysia?
   a. fresh cream
   b. Vegemite
   c. glucose syrup
   d. all of the above
3. Which of the following is the current official price for fuel in Malaysia in October 2012?
   a. RM 1.90 (60c) per litre for unleaded
   b. RM 1.80 (55c) per litre for diesel
   c.there is no official price for low-octane (under 95 octane) fuels
   d. all of the above
4. Which of these religions is practised by significant numbers in Malaysia?
   a. Islam
   b. Hinduism
   c. Christianity
   d. all of the above
5. Which is a greeting in Bahasa Melayu?
   a. Salamat pagi
   b. Salamat tenggehari
   c. Salamat malam
   d. all of the above
6. Which of the following is NOT a drink?
   a. Coke Zero
   b. Ice blended
   c. Lipton Ice
   d. Limau ais
7. Which is not a Cadbury flavour?
   a. Old Gold Almond
   b. Black Forest
   c. Blueberry
   d. Dairy Milk
8. Which is NOT a popular sport in Malaysia?
   a. Australian Rules
   b. soccer
   c. netball
   d. badminton
9. Which is NOT commonly seen on Malaysian roads?
   a. Police cars patrolling the roads.
   b. Radar traps on the expressways.
   c. Policemen on a minor road pulling over anyone who appears to be able to afford an on-the-spot “fine”
   d. Teams of men doing roadworks
10. Which of the following do we NOT have in Kampar?
    a. Red Rooster
    b. KFC
    c. Pizza Hut
    d. McDonalds

For the remaining questions, you merely have to tell us the English equivalent of the following Bahasa Melayu words.

11. eksotik
12. hidrofobik
13. basikal
14. akuatik
15. cek
16. kek
17. birokrasi
18. ekspo
19. kualitatif
20. kad
21. kastam
22. fizikal

ANSWERS

The answers to questions 1-5 are all d. The price of diesel and unleaded 95 fuel is actually subsidised, not taxed, in Malaysia, and the price is set by the government. The price has been the same since December 2010. It costs us less in Ringgats to fill the diesel tank of the D-Max than it used to cost in dollars to fill the Statesman! There is a different greeting for very time of the day. If we were to heed Ismail's suggetions, we would be using ten or fifteen different greetings, based on Moslem prayer times! These ones- pagi for morning, tenggehari for daytime, and malam for night, are enough to get by, along with petang for evening. There are also the farewells, salamat tinggal (for the person who is going home) and salamat jalan (for the person staying behind). And welcome is salamat datang. It is finally unravelling and becoming less confusing.

The answers to questions 6-10 are all a. Believe it or not, we can get Diet Coke but not Coke Zero, and many varieties of locally-made Cadbury chocolate plus a few imported ones, but they are nearly all Dairy Milk varieties. Dark chocolate is obviously the far less preferred, and less available. I imagine you were not astounded to discover that Aussie Rules isn't played here, but the other three are popular as a result of the English influence. Believe it or not, roadworks are quite common, and so are the rogue cops gathering some pocket cash, but we don't often see police cars on the road, and when we do, they are not contributing to road safety. In addition to KFC, Pizza Hut and McDonalds, in Kampar we have a Dominoes Pizza, and as I have probably previously mentioned, hundreds of other restaurants serving Chinese, Malay and Indian food.

11. exotic

12. hydrophobic

13. bicycle

14. aquatic

15. cheque

16. cake

17. bureaucracy

18. expo

19. qualitative

20. card

21. custom

22. physical

I hope you found my quiz Quite Interesting! Tonight's episode of QI is now finished, so it's time to turn off the light and go to sleep (that's me, you can do whatever you like).