Penang -- Week 20 -- Native Tongue

MONDAY - THURSDAY, July 28th - July 31st

This is what happens when you put two procrastinators (poor planners) overseas.  Late Monday night, both of us are on our respective phones, making calls to the United States regarding notices that we've been sent to collections.  Ok, both were in error, but when it takes you a while to receive mail, it takes you a while to respond, so an unexpected bill for a fraudulent charge or similar becomes a collections agency notice.  Great.  I spend a couple of hours clearing it up and this is all still to do with the mess I'm working on with Compass Bank.  With all the international calls I'm making, and especially when they mistakenly sent me to collections, I'm thinking of billing them for my phone charges.

Life is so mundane now.  I no longer feel like I'm on an adventure somewhere.  I'm now, finally, just where I am, living where I live, doing what I do, and so why bother telling you about it?  I came to sort of a realization that I need to work harder to get myself out more when I decided that I could no longer photograph the same two views from my windows any more.  Ok, I never tire of seeing the variations of light and how the sea literally changes color like a mood ring, but I am tired of seeing it through the lens.  So... it's time to stop looking for my adventure at home and roam a little more.  We'll see how it goes.

The internet is crummy again.  Just when we cancelled our previous service (which we'd already paid for like 6 months for), then this one basically stops functioning.  Bummer.

Interesting little nugget:  you can't buy index cards here.  I'm developing an idea (finally) that may or may not become a screenplay.  Index cards are useful for developing something like this.  I've looked and no such thing here.  My first thought is, "wow! No index cards?  How do they do all those things you need index cards for?  They're ubiquitous in the States!" Then I think, "What do we really need index cards for?"  Still, they would be useful to me right now though I could figure out an alternative if need be.  I bought a bunch of note cards to use instead, but I don't know.  Buying them was funny though.  I brought over a big old stack to the cashier, but she says it's done by weight, and I either have to remove two (out of a BIG stack) for it to weigh a certain amount, or I have to add three for it to cost a certain amount.  I'm like, "I can't just pay for the ones I have?"  Who cares if it's an odd number?  But she looks lost, so I say, "nevermind, take two away."  It's not like it really matters.

I saw this on Blogger's site:

         Here’s a quick summary of recent fixes and changes we’ve made to Blogger:

• -Blogger is now available in Malay! Blogger has a large base of users in Malaysia and we are excited to now bring them Blogger in their native language...

It's an interesting thing here.  "Native language."  Whose?  One day when I was chatting with Rachel, I was telling her about this conversation we'd had with our cultural trainer.  He'd told us that school here used to be taught in English, but then they switched to Malay.  After studying post-colonialism I was excited for Malaysia.  Teaching school in your own language is a huge and important step in reclaiming one's true cultural heritage and is generally a part of developing a nation's identity and cultural pride.  But then we learn that many people here think it's a terrible mistake.  That "in their day" they studied Shakespeare and now the kids could barely communicate in English.  George and I thought they were just not getting the bigger importance of reclaiming and legitimizing your own language.  Then Rachel clues me in:  who's own language.  Malay is hardly the national "mother tongue."  That would be like saying the US is finally breaking away and developing its pride by finally teaching in English.  Malay is not the language of the native people (the Orang Asli) it is the language of the first group that came after the original natives and colonized and marginalized the indigenous.  Then came the Chinese and other cultures all with their own languages.  

And furthermore, not everyone here really speaks Malay.  The various minority groups have held on to their ancestor's languages.  The ethnic Chinese speak Hokkien, the Indians speak Hindi (I believe), to communicate with each other they speak English.  Recently (at a babywearing group) we even heard one of the locals confess that they struggled to give their flight number in Malay because they just don't use the language. So when Blogger thinks it is giving Malaysians the ability to blog in their "native language", the reality is, it's only a certain segment of Malaysians who are native speakers.