The taxi to Kuala Lumpur speeds past huge apartment blocks and patches of tropical forest.
Morena and her mom are in the backseat.
I’m up front, trying to get a first impression of this new country.
The radio is playing a remix of the “Looking for a Man in Finance” song.
If you haven’t heard, “Looking for a Man in Finance” is a TikTok meme, a parody (I assume) of some women’s insane expectations on the dating market.
The composer is one Megan Boni, known online as Girl on Couch, and the complete lyrics are as follows: “Looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5″, blue eyes.”
After that it repeats.
Maybe that’s my first impression of Malaysia.
How a techno remix of this song, which is barely even a song at all, made it onto the radio in Southeast Asia is one of those little miracles of globalization I like to contemplate from time to time.
Luckily, the airport is 60km from the city, so I have a lot of time to do so.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur is a city I never gave a second thought to – until about three weeks ago it sounded like a vaguely made-up place I’d probably never visit.
But Morena’s mom has never before left India, and wanted to try some of that “international travel” that people talk about. Morena obliged by booking us an overnight flight to Malaysia, and here we are, a couple of degrees north of the equator, speeding along a highway through another Asian forest.
I try to imagine what it might be like if I were used to chaotic Indian cityscapes, only to find myself in a place like this. It must seem so clean and well-organized. Everybody driving between the lines, nobody selling coconuts or tea by the roadside.
After checking into the hotel, we head out for lunch, and end up eating chicken biryani in an open-air restaurant that serves a mix of Tamil and Malay cuisine. It’s a pretty minimal place, with a clientele that looks like they’re mostly taxi drivers and construction workers. They biryani is dry, but I scarf it down anyway.
I haven’t eaten since yesterday in Kerala, and protein is protein.
A bit of background on Kuala Lumpur
According to my very minimal reading, there wasn’t much going on in Kuala Lumpur until relatively recently – it doesn’t have the long history of a city like Bangkok, for example.
Kuala Lumpur (KL to locals) was established as a tin mining town in 1857, and populated by Chinese miners. Now, though, it’s the capital of Malaysia, and has an urban area with around 9 million people.
Of those, about 48 percent are ethnic Malay, 42 percent are Chinese and 10 percent are Indian (mostly Tamil, from the southern state next to Morena’s).
Malaysia, in another form, became independent from the British in 1957. The current state was constituted in 1963, and in 1965 they voted to expel Singapore, which became its own independent country.
One of the most-visited countries in Asia, it occupies part of a peninsula to the south of Thailand, as well as a strip of land on the north coast of the island of Borneo. It’s now home to some of the world’s biggest shopping malls.
Later, walking down toward the Petronas Towers, we find one of them. One of the shopping malls, that is. I don’t know where it is in the ranking, but it’s huge – six stories located in the foot of the iconic towers – and crowded with young people dressed up as anime characters.
Morena’s mom isn’t sure what to make of all these kids, and honestly, neither am I.
Is there some anime-kid event? Or is this just normal behavior around here?
Indian Parenting Styles
One of the interesting things I’ve learned from marrying an Indian is that their style of parenting is totally different – it’s mostly based on unquestioning obedience to your elders.
Even after several years living in Europe, Morena is absolutely shocked by the idea that teenagers in other countries are encouraged to develop their own preferences and personalities.
The question of personal and group identity was dealt with in a completely different way when she was growing up. In India, people belong to a religion, and (if that religion is Hindu) a caste. But they don’t have subcultures like we do – you can’t just go out at age fifteen and decide that you’re an anime kid, or a metalhead.
(In a sense, being Christian or Muslim or Hindu is your subculture. Your religion tells you what to wear – you’re not going out and choosing a personal style at the mall. And most of your identity seems to come from your family or the group you were born into.)
All this to say: as strange as I find the anime kids, Morena’s mom must find them to be much stranger.
Another thing I’ve noticed about Indian family life is the type of expectations that apparently exist between parents and children. Just for example, Morena’s mom busted her (metaphorical) hump for a couple of decades so that Morena could get an education and move abroad.
Now, when Morena comes home, the expectation is that she’ll pay for everything, and bring gifts for the whole extended family. Morena is funding this trip to Malaysia, and all the shopping at the giant malls is coming out of Morena’s pocket.
This system sometimes seems a bit unfair. But we’re also aware that the other option was for Morena to have an arranged marriage with a guy from Kerala (probably one living in Dubai or Oman) and to become a housewife in the Middle East.
So, unfair or not, Morena bites her tongue and reaches for her wallet.
Asian Food Markets
That evening we’re at an outdoor food market.
We’ve arrived here very slowly. Morena’s mom isn’t used to walking this much.
I figure, if we’re going to get good Chinese food anywhere, a city that’s over 40% Chinese is probably a good place to do it. The names of the foods advertised in the different stalls are a bit strange and unappetizing, though.
They’ve got sheets of dried chicken meat, duck necks, and “authentic” frog porridge. Wash it down with some ying yong: that’s a mix of coffee, condensed milk and black tea.
We sit at a large restaurant and get a meal that’s remarkably like something we’d have in one of the better Chinese places in Barcelona. It’s better than the biryani, at least.
Back out at the food market, Morena and her mom buy strange tropical fruits (mangosteen and rambutan) to eat back at the hotel room.
A lot of the stalls proudly display durian – that fruit that smells so badly like rotting sewage that many airlines have banned people from brining it on board flights.
Drunken Clam Noodles in Chinatown
The next day we go to Chinatown.
Chinatown’s main attraction is an outdoor market where they’re selling all kinds of counterfeit goods. Morena and her mom look at handbags.
Like I explained in my last article about Kerala, Indians are happy to wear gold necklaces and bangles everywhere they go. But they’re often unfamiliar with luxury as it’s practiced in other countries.
Morena’s mom is unaware, therefore, that a Michael Kors bag from a market stall in Kuala Lumpur is just a low-quality imitation of a much more expensive product. When Morena tries to explain the concept, Mom doesn’t believe any of it. Thirty-four thousand rupees for a handbag! Who would pay that?
Still, she walks away with a few cheap plastic handbags to give to people back home, and the distinct impression that she’s getting a good deal.
We get sweet barbecue pork bao buns from a stall on the street. Then beef roti from another. That’s just a warmup. Lunch is at a place that specializes in “drunken clam noodles”.
There’s some pretty questionable hygiene at the restaurant, but the food is good. Also, they’re selling ladies’ dresses in the back – it’s not clear if this place wants to be a clothing shop, or a clam noodle restaurant.
I head to the bathroom and find a stack of coconuts in front of the door. Inside, water drips on my back from a leaky pipe overhead. Drip, drip.
Sikh Temple
We leave Chinatown, visiting a big Buddhist temple on our way to Independence Square.
At Independence Square two TikTokkers want to interview me: What’s your name? Where are you from? Square root of nine? I happen to know that the square root of nine is three.
They wander off, probably to find someone slightly dumber to use in their social experiment.
Hiding from a brief rainstorm, we duck into the central market to look at trinkets. Some guy in one of the shops is buying a tiger eye bracelet, but only after the seller charges its magical powers by putting it one of those brass bowls that’s also a bell. Apparently, the sound gives it power.
Waiting for a taxi to take us back to the hotel, we go into a Sikh temple. I don’t know much about the Sikhs, but their emblem looks a bit like the logo of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. A guy with a turban and a long beard puts a scarf over my head – no uncovered heads in Sikh temples – and we sit barefoot inside, contemplating.
There’s no god on the altar. The Sikhs worship a god they call Waheguru, who is formless and indescribable, hence the lack of imagery. In a minute the guy in the turban comes back and drops two sugar crystals in my hand.
The Sikhs have to give you something if you go to their temple, says Morena. “I used to go to one in Delhi that would give out kada prashad” she explains. Kada prasad is a thick dough made of ghee, flour and sugar. “I’d go for the vibe, and also the food.”
In the meantime, we’ve missed our taxi. We call another one.
Back at the hotel – which is inside a shopping mall – we eat dinner at Grandmama’s, an upscale Malay restaurant. The cuisine around here is a bit random. For example, here’s a pile of rice, some chicken, some peanuts, a few fried anchovies and an egg sitting on top of it all. That’s nasi goreng, a popular dish in southeast Asia.
Morena’s mom hasn’t had a lot of food that’s not South Indian, and she’s not convinced by what she’s seeing here. She’s also not used to using a fork. She picks up a whole fried egg with her fingers and puts it in her mouth, then comments that for Christmas day, she’d prefer to have KFC up in her hotel room.
The end of the Pax Americana
We head out to the Batu Caves, but once we get there, it won’t stop raining. The driver drops us under a highway overpass nearby. Ever the optimist, I imagine some enterprising local will walk by and sell us an umbrella if we wait a bit. But it doesn’t happen.
We stand under the highway overpass for half an hour before deciding to do something else. “Something else” turns out to be another trip to the mall.
Just then a taxi drives up, so we hop in.
The taxi driver is named Foo, and he’s third generation Chinese Malaysian. Morena wants to chat with him. I just try to stay out of the whole thing. He’s talking about the various kinds of customers he gets – imitating an Australian accent, for example.
After a minute of that, he starts doing exaggerated American accent. “Hey, what’s up man? Oh wow, that’s awesome!” His American accent isn’t bad, but his base accent is thickly Chinese, and the effect is hilarious.
On to more serious topics, he explains that the king here changes every 5 years… the sultans arrange it among themselves, and the kingship rotates from sultan to sultan. The king is also the head of Malaysian Islam, apparently.
He explains that the rotating kingship works because of religious principles: God won’t let an empire last forever. Just look at the British empire. And the Americans, they’re finished. High inflation, people sleeping in the streets.
In the future, he says, it’s all going to be about the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China. Of course, America has good people… but its controlled by Zionists.
“The Jews…” he says.
Thankfully, Morena decides to changes the subject right before he goes further, asking if he has kids.
(He does. Two.)
Pardon me, do you speak Globish?
Finally, we get to the mall. “Ok” says Foo, pulling up to the entrance. “Shop here till you drop.”
As a former English teacher and still-professional grammar nerd, I enjoy hearing how people from different countries deal with the complexities of the English language.
Here in Kuala Lumpur, for example, people get around the similarity in pronunciation between fifteen and fifty by saying the number, then naming the digits. So you’ve got “fifteen, one-five” or you’ve got “fifty, five-zero”.
And I don’t know what’s so hard about the question “Where are you from?” but either way I keep hearing people ask “You are coming from?” with a bit of upward intonation.
Not quite standard English. I’ve got a gripe with the use of present continuous. But the point of language is to communicate, and basically, this seems to work.
(Back in the day, some linguist made waves among the several dozen nerds who care about these things by proposing a lingua franca he called Globish, which is a sort of simplified English as spoken by non-“native” speakers. Often, they speak it among themselves, without any “real” English speakers around to correct or judge them. He said a lot of people were already speaking it, and that the “natives” would need to adapt. Well, I don’t know if people are still talking about Globish, but it’s definitely happening, exactly as he said, out here in Asia.)
Meanwhile, we’re at Mid Valley Mega Mall, or more accurately, The Garden – an upscale annex of the Mega Mall I quickly decide to dub the Mecca of Douche. Or maybe the Woodstock of Asshole.
Not that anybody’s being an asshole – I just think that luxury is dumb.
Morena and her mom go shopping for clothes, I walk around bored. Eventually we eat unimpressive Thai food in the mall food court.
No toilets in heaven
The National Mosque is very quiet at mid-afternoon, between the designated prayer times. Morena and Mom get hooded robes to put on at the gate, I get another sarong to put on over my shorts.
God created the male calf and ankle, but apparently He doesn’t want to see them in His houses of worship. He does want to see our feet, though: we leave our shoes in a plastic tub and head inside.
There are some stands selling mobile phone cases inside the mosque complex, and people handing out pamphlets about Islam near the door.
Some old guy comes up to us once we’re inside and explains that Jesus couldn’t have been the son of God because he ate and slept… he was merely a prophet, a man like anyone else.
Mohammad – also a prophet – continued Jesus’ teaching (according to this guy) and said, for example, that in heaven women will be 18 years old forever and men will be eternally 33.
Also, there won’t be any toilets. You eat and drink and it all turns to sweat… but sweat is perfume. Also, the prohibition of alcohol in Islam is only for this world – in heaven, there are rivers of wine.
This all sounds like a pretty good deal. I certainly wouldn’t mind being 33 again.
We’re off to see the Buddhists
At a nearby Buddhist temple, images of princes fight with devils at the feet of the Buddha statues.
People leave offerings of apples. Someone has given the Buddha a jumbo bag of Munchy’s Assorted Biscuits, as well. The air is full of incense from the large bowl out front. Drop a coin in the box, light an incense stick and put it in the sand.
I get a bad fortune from the game of drawing numbered sticks out of a box. “Know the limit of your ability; don’t overstretch yourself. Financial Result: Meagre gain. Honour & Merit: Far from the desired goal.”
Oops. Good thing I’m not overly superstitious.
Out back, there are life-sized stone statues of the the 24 Chinese Filial Exemplars, with descriptions of the great lengths old-timey Chinese people would go to pay respect to their aging parents. These are sometimes pretty gross: “He emptied his mother’s bedpan”, etc. But like I said, Asian parenting is different.
We get Morena’s mom a bag of KFC to eat in the hotel room, and then go off on our own to find some Korean food. Fermented cabbage, sweet potato noodles, squid with pork belly. It’s one of the best Korean meals I’ve had. (Although the Korean barbecue in Japan last summer was good too.)
After dinner, we walk out of downtown, to a regular sort of neighborhood with simple-looking restaurants, barbers open at 10pm, and lots of one-story houses.
The skyscrapers are lit up in the distance. We get wet in the rain.
Hindu Temples in Batu Caves
The day after Christmas, we make another attempt at the Batu Cave temple complex.
Inside, we’re greeted by monkeys. They’re sitting there eating bananas, under the giant statue of Hanuman, the monkey god. A little bit further along, authentic Tamil grannies are begging for spare change.
Dotted around the temple are several stalls selling bottles of milk – not for drinking, but as an offering to the gods.
The largest of the temples, at the top of a long flight of stairs up the hillside, is dedicated to Kartikeya, the unofficial patron of the Tamil people and the Hindu god of war.
Morena’s mom doesn’t want to climb the stairs, so she stays in the lower temples. Morena and I go up, sweating a bit in the tropical heat. The temples up the hill are in a series of limestone caves – former guano mines, actually – and the central part is at the bottom of a sinkhole with light coming in from above.
Water drips down from the edge of the sinkhole onto the temple floor.
One of the temple workers flags down Morena for some reason and guides us behind roped-off area to an undeveloped edge of the cave.
“Ganapati”, he says, pointing to something in the dark. “Ganapati!”
Ganapati is a friendly nickname for Ganesh, the elephant god. But the guy is pointing to a stalagmite on the cave floor. I guess it’s sort of elephant-shaped. Morena kneels down, puts her hands together in prayer, and leaves some local currency as an offering.
In another room the brahmin ties a piece of red thread around our wrists – thread that’s been blessed by the idols. “You are coming from?” he asks Morena.
He then asks if she’s part of “the trend” – this is in Tamil, so I get it secondhand, later.
In any case, “the trend” seems to be moving abroad and marrying a white guy. (About 90% of Indians are in arranged marriages, so marrying someone because you like them is a small enough trend that people are still commenting on it.)
Islamic Art Museum and Bird Park
The next day, Morena and her mom are visiting the botanical garden.
I find botanical gardens to be among the most boring places on earth – much like shopping malls, actually – so I end up at the nearby Islamic Art Museum.
The relationship between Islam and Hinduism in this part of the world is something I know next to nothing about. India had (and has) a sphere of influence in East Asia, so the museum has paintings of Mughal princes hunting, riding elephants, sitting at court – doing typical Indian things, in other words.
After the museum, I meet the womenfolk at the Bird Park. They have some endangered hornbills, some parrots, and lots of peacocks. Morena and her mom pay to be photographed with large blue and yellow parrots on their arms, which mom seems quite happy about.
We eat lunch (more nasi goreng) at the bird park restaurant.
At this point, Morena and her mom have some other plans – shopping of some kind, I assume – so I decide to walk back across town to the hotel. Kuala Lumpur is a busy and somewhat chaotic city, although of course, that’s relative.
It strikes me that I’ve been to enough places in Asia at this point that I have clear preferences. For example, Kuala Lumpur would be below Bangkok and above Mumbai on my list of favorite Asian cities. But if I’d come here my first time in Asia, I’d probably think it was more interesting than I do now.
Mom decides to eat bread in the hotel room for dinner. Morena wants to go to an upscale Malay place at the mall under the Petronas towers. The mackerel in spicy tomato sauce is great. The yellow beef curry less good.
I always seem to lose weight on holiday, probably because I walk 25 thousand steps a day. Knowing this, we stop for ice cream on our way out of the mall.
Last plane to Trivandrum
Our last day, Mom wants to go back to the Tamil restaurant by the highway for a dosa breakfast. I get the idea she’s only moderately impressed by international travel.
Behind the counter at the restaurant, a guy in a hairnet is cracking several dozen eggs into a plastic tub. When it’s time to scramble them, he just reaches his whole hand in and moves the eggs around.
If you’re obsessed with hygiene, a lot of places in Asia aren’t going to be much fun. Good thing I have a strong stomach.
A bit later, we’re back in Chinatown to revisit the counterfeit handbags.
I look around at the random foods. A paper cone full of honey-glazed bacon is even better than it sounds. They’ve also got braised abalone in cans, and birds’ nests with collagen, which is apparently a drink.
Morena and her mom argue over how much haggling is appropriate in order to save 2 euros on a cheap knockoff handbag. Morena would rather just pay it, but mom wants to haggle.
We have lunch in a random Chinese restaurant, with plastic chairs and tables. The noodles are cooked way past al dente, and there’s a big TV playing videos of cute girls eating dumplings in the background.
After lunch, we get a taxi back to the hotel to pick up our suitcases – and from there, we’re off to the airport. That’s it. Kuala Lumpur, in all its glory. A place I’d barely heard of previously, which I’ll probably never go back to.
Rise of the Asian Tiger Cubs
For a long time, economists assumed that human rights, civil liberties and a free-market economy worked together to create economic growth. It certainly seemed to work in the US, the UK and elsewhere.
Without the civil liberties, a strong, modern economy just couldn’t form, it was thought.
Then all these Asian countries started rising out of poverty, with systems of government that largely ignored civil liberties (at least in the Western sense), but still managed to create powerful growth.
First it was the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) building export-based economies with low taxes and minimal welfare states. Then came the Tiger Cubs (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand) which are trying to follow in the footsteps of the Tigers – often with the help of overseas Chinese entrepreneurs in what is known as the “bamboo network“.
Malaysia, for example, has a press that’s controlled by the government, and has been known to prevent TV and radio stations from broadcasting speeches by the opposition. Since independence, they’ve mostly had one-party rule. Still, they’re experiencing a lot of success.
What’s the future going to look like for the Asian Tigers – and their cubs?
I guess we’ll see.
European history has shown over and over again that almost any country can have a couple of good kings, or develop some important technology before anyone else, and so string together several decades of progress.
But things can eventually change, and the same countries lose power as quick as they got it.
Spain is an example, and so is Portugal: briefly-powerful nations that are now a shadow of their former selves.
And as our taxi-driver Foo pointed out, it can happen anywhere: the British Empire is long gone, the US seems to be admitting that the future is multipolar – that our days of being the global superpower are over.
At the airport we have one last plate of nasi goreng. It’s not as good as most other Asian food, but way better than most other airport food.
After dinner, I trade my stack of Malaysian money in for some rupees and we catch the plane back to India.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. I’ve been exploring similar issues in previous articles – the geopolitical scene has gotten a lot more interesting in the last several months. So, for example, I’ve got one about Europe preparing for war, one about the booming Spanish economy, and one about Trump’s tariffs and the potential decline of Europe. Some of these ideas openly conflict with each other, but of course, it’s easier to write an article like this than it is to actually predict the future. What do you think? Let me know, right here in the comments…
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