Penang -- Week 27 -- Lost in Translation

MONDAY - TUESDAY, September 15th - 16th
Monday it's family shopping day this week.  Regin and I hop in a cab and go and meet George at the mall down by work.  We can walk to Gurney Plaza by the apartment, and it's a nicer mall, but Queensbay, down by Agilent, has more of the cool stores. 

Our cabbie is not our regular guy.  This one is a practically a Penang tour guide and points out every school and police living quarters and every other mundane sight you could imagine.  He also refers to our dear own Mr. Prez., G. W., as "King of the World" whose successor, he predicts, will be Obama.  I'm not sure whether I should encourage the disdain towards our current head jefe, so though I'm generally always up for G. W. bashing, I keep quiet and let him go back to rambling on about the places that policemen live and why he's so proud to be a Malaysian.  In case you're curious, the answer apparently has largely to do with the fact that there is mutual tolerance and respect between the followers of all the various religions.  He believes any man's religion to be sacred and untouchable. 

People talk a lot about the harmony between the various culture groups here.  I'm not sure I buy it.  Outwardly, sure.  But there are undertones of discordance.  Thing is, in this culture, you don't speak out against the group.  The peace of the group comes first.  So that makes it difficult, if not implicitly forbidden, for anyone to express any real intercultural frustrations. Though, even if it weren't taboo, I'm not sure if anyone would even be able to say anything.

Tuesday a couple of our most vital air-conditioning units have stopped working, and we're melting in little puddles all over the apartment.  So some guys are in to fix the things.  First of all they show up at an unexpected time.  George had asked them to confirm with him and they didn't.  He had told them I would be home, so that was good enough for them.  I had no warning.  The place was the most embarrassing wreck that an overtired mother of an active toddler couldn't scramble enough to hide.  I wouldn't even let our maid see it (or me) like this.  I try to refuse them, but they look at me with the familiar blank stare that speakers of a different language give when you are obviously saying something in Martian.  They call our mutual contact and hand the phone to me.  She insists I let them in.  Ugh.

Before I know it, they are tearing down units and taking them away.  They're out on my balcony (laundry room) removing a unit there, and no one can tell me why.  I never said anything about that one.  All they can manage is something not quite so advanced or clear as "need to take" and when I keep insisting on receiving an answer to my, "WHY?!!!??" I get more blank stares.  I'm on the phone again with the apartment representative who tells me to let them take the units, they are broken and need to be fixed/replaced.  She won't listen when I try to tell her over and over that there is an additional unit they are taking that no one complained about. 

I give up and indicate that there is something wrong with another unit.  The head guy takes a look.  He doesn't say anything to me and then he climbs out on the ledge outside my bathroom window and starts disassembling more stuff.  I have no idea if the unit I just asked about is fixed or if my problem is being ignored.  So I try to ask.  This is, after all, our most intensely used air con unit in the apartment, without it we might as well be baking in the sun all day.  The head guy says something like, "OK." 
"Can use?" I ask. 
"Can."
I indicate with my hands that one of the lights keeps flashing.  When I press him to tell me what that means, he says, "cannot talk."  And flat out ignores me the rest of the time he's there.  Doesn't even let me know he's finished and leaving!  And he leaves greasy white (paint or what I don't know) footprints all over my dark red bath tub and two on my black scales before he leaves. 

Jerk.  I know he did that on purpose.  All his little subordinates were crammed in that bathroom with him.  He seriously had to weigh himself with all of them there before he left?  No.  He knew he was leaving me little, impossible to remove reminders of his visit.  This is infuriating!  And most of this is because not one of these guys, air con boss or air con minions, speaks any English.  I want to be angry and say that this is proof that we should have been given Malay lessons, but these guys probably don't even speak much Malay.  They all looked ethnically Chinese.  And as I've already found out, the relationship between the Chinese here and the Malay language is not all that dissimilar to that high school French that you forgot as soon as the memory of school-enforced learning faded away into "real life."

Malaysian really don't necessarily know how to speak Malay!  Do you know, there is this story in the news about an ethnic Indian Malaysian (pregnant) girl who gave birth in prison because when she was stopped by police and asked for her identification (which she didn't have on her) her Malay was so broken that they were certain she was a foreigner, and therefore an illegal alien! It wasn't until a doctor check up for the baby that someone heard and understood her story.  And this is not some child of illegal immigrants, we're talking someone who is as Malaysian as the Malay-Malaysians are, whose family has been here for generations.  And she ended up being imprisoned for 11 months before the truth was discovered!

It's a wonder that any real discourse of any kind can go on here.  Or does it even?  I mean, most of the Chinese youth seem to speak broken English to each other, and we hear broken English being spoken between parents and children as well.  They're articulacy in English is so limited, I have to wonder how much depth their discussions can possibly have.    And if their minds aren't exercised in critical thinking and rhetorical discourse, how much intellect is fostered?  Maybe they speak a much higher level of Hokkien and can argue till the end about the connotation and denotation of various semantic choices, but then why do they seem to always speak amongst themselves and raise their children in their weaker language? 

And what about the discourse that should be going on between culture groups?  Does the language barrier make it impossible for it to even happen?  I mean, imagine if you were limited to very rudimentary language when trying to discuss the marginalization of various ethnic groups in the US!  Of course there are plenty here who are more articulate in English, but not good enough for George and I to exercise our debate muscles with them a whole lot.  And it's not that they understand each other better than I understand them (although that too is true), I have overheard locals not understanding each other's English.  And yet they shop in English, gossip in English, and discipline their children in English.  And they see no reason to do it any other way.  Some of them are absolutely baffled when someone we know wants her half-Chinese kids to learn Chinese and can't comprehend why we might be working so hard to make sure that Regin retains his father's language.

But what I want to know is, how to receive important maintenance instructions from the air con installers, or get any help from our night security guard without having a full-time, live-in translator in my employ?  Anyone know where I can pick up a C-3PO in Penang?