Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Bathrooms in SE Asia

    (Nota Bene: This post will not be particularly gross or anything, but it will discuss toilets.  So, avert your eyes if you sensitive.)

    The traditional toilet in Southeast Asia is not the kind that Americans are used to.  Rather, the traditional toilet (at least in Indonesia and Malaysia) is a hole in the floor with two footprints next to it.  The idea is that you put your feet on the footprints, squat, and do your business.  For us as Americans, it’s really not our favorite experience.  It’s really the squatting part–unless you are very flexible, it’s not really that easy.  Very hard on the knees, you know.  And it’s also kind of difficult if you are wearing pants.  Just try it, you’ll see what we mean.  In fact, we have not really figured how to make sure that you don’t get a little messy without just taking off your pants entirely and hanging them somewhere.  Maybe that’s the explanation for the breeziness of local clothes, sarongs and stuff.

    We should note that such toilets are not particularly Southeast Asian.  I (TP) have seen them in Turkey and even in Greece.

    Interestingly, for all of our discomfort at using them, many people in Malaysia and Indonesia are uncomfortable using the Western style of toilet.  We had never given this much thought before we came here, but it is kind of gross to let your legs rest on a toilet seat.  I’m sure that all of us have felt the need, some time or another, to lay down a little toilet paper liner.  So we’ve had some silly experiences.  For example, most bathrooms in Malaysia have one of each kind of toilet: one Western, one local.  When the Western one is occupied, we have a dilemma, because we’d normally just prefer to wait until it’s free rather than use the local kind.  So unless it’s an emergency, we normally end up just hanging out in the bathroom looking like fools while locals come and go.  What is really silly is when Malays do not want to use the Western style.  JM, being a woman, has more experience at this than I do…you’re more likely to get a line in a ladies’ room, you know.  It ends up that both she and a Malay woman will be waiting for a toilet, neither one wanting to use the one that the other one wants to use.  (Also complicating matters is the fact that here women line up for the particular stall, and don’t have a general line like we are used to in the States.  So it becomes quite a guessing game because the different stalls are not labelled.  If you get in the wrong line, you lose!  -jm)

    OK, but here’s the funniest part.  Sometimes a local will use a Western toilet like a local toilet, squatting while perched precariously on the seat.  This leads to very very dirty, and scuffed, toilet seats.  In the bathroom at UM, there’s a funny sign.  (Can’t take a picture, no cameras allowed in the library.)  It says, "Please do not stand on the toilet when using, you might fall and break the seat and your head."  That’s classic.

  • The Benign Face of Power

    Yesterday I (TP) spent two hours interviewing Tan Sri Abu Talib bin Othman, the Chairman of SUHAKAM (Suruhanjaya Hak Asasi Manusia; Human Rights Commission of Malaysia).  With an organizational name like that, you’d figure that this is a pretty good group.  In fact, it is.  The problem is that the group has an "advisory role" for the government, and the government responds to this advice by saying "thanks, but we’re not interested in your reforms".  It is widely known that the Malaysian Parliament (Dewan Negara Dewan Rakyat) does not even read the reports that they mandate that SUHAKAM produce. 

    OK, that’s not surprising.  And to be honest, I didn’t have high expectations of my conversation with Tan Sri Abu Talib.  I was interested in his views on a couple of other matters.  Tan Sri Abu Talib–a barrister by profession–was the Attorney General of Malaysia from 1980 to 1993, and in 1999 he headed the Royal Commission to investigate the savage beating that former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim received when first detained under charges of corruption and sodomy.  This is a man who has been at the center of the regime’s authority, and an instrument of its power over society.  I wanted to know his views of judicial independence in Malaysia.  This is a particularly relevant question for him.  In 1988, as Attorney General, he was the person who charged the then-Lord President Tun Salleh of "not acting properly" for criticizing (in a private letter to the King) the Prime Minister’s view that the judiciary should not question government decisions.  Tun Salleh and two other judges were eventually convicted of improper conduct by an independent Tribunal with no legal standing appointed by the Attorney General and the Prime Minister, and subsequently removed.  This has been widely interpreted as Mahathir Mohammad’s most important move in consolidating a regime with no institutional checks on his personal authority, as well as the end of the always-tenuous independence of the Malaysian judiciary.

    Tan Sri Abu Talib is quite a nice man.  We had a very nice conversation, and he was more than willing to speak in his capacity as a private citizen.  At one time, he rattled of a list of requirements of the judicial branch that would please any democrat or lawyer: the judicial branch of government "must be independent, fair, and impartial."  Yet I have to wonder how he could honestly hold such views given his personal involvement in the Tun Salleh affair.  He was very clear that he believed that Tun Salleh had acted improperly by stating that the judiciary branch of government must be independent.  How can he reconcile these views?

    Tan Sri Abu Talib, as Chairman of SUHAKAM, is an ardent supporter of
    freedom of the press ("with responsibility," of course) and a strident
    opponent of Malaysian laws which allow the police to detain indefinitely
    suspects without trial, evidence, or legal counsel.  Speaking of his own experience as Attorney General, though, he claims that he never used these laws unfairly.  Things were different then, he says.  And I think that he believes that as well.  Anwar Ibrahim, in his view, received a fair trial.  Tan Sri Abu Talib argues that the judiciary must be independent, but in the same breath stipulates that the role of the judiciary is not to get bogged down in procedure and principles, but to dispense "justice".

    So here we have the benign face, or perhaps the Janus face, of power in Malaysia.  Tan Sri Abu Talib, a very friendly and obviously intelligent man, who genuinely supports true human rights causes in Malaysia, does not believe that his role in Mahathir Mohammad’s regime constituted a violation of the very principles for which he now advocates.