Category: General

So I (jm) am still really enjoying my new job.  It’s amazing how busy the office is, yesterday I saw 6 people and today I saw 5.  That’s just me, there’s another voluteer and our boss who see people all day long too.  It’s also funny how the questions you hear come in trends.  Two days ago, there were three people interested in going to community colleges (lots of people who have a friend or relative in the states try to do this and then transfer to a four-year college after two years- a good idea and cheaper but they often won’t be able to get a visa).  Yesterday everyone was only interested in the Ivy League Schools. Oh, and of course they were not just interested, but wanting to know how to go about getting a full scholarship. 

It’s a busy time of year for MACEE because exam results are just coming out here for high school kids.  The education system here is quite different, and I’ve been trying to sort out how it works.  Kids go to school through the equivalent of 11th grade and then take tests in 10 or so subjects called the "SPM" tests (I still get very confused about this- in Indonesia school is referred to as SMP).  These are the results which are coming out now, so many students are coming in and asking if their grades are good enough to go to college in the States.  Some then apply directly to college, either here or in the States, and others go on to do "A Levels" , another two years of college prep work.  They can get into American schools without this extra training but not into the best schools.  So it can be very confusing when they come in and are not sure what they want to do because there are several options.

Some of the people who come in are really nice and truly interested in figuring out what the best idea is for their situation.  Some come in and want you to do their research for them.  I had a guy today looking at Hotel Management programs, and he decided he wanted to go to New York City or to LA.  I unfortunately let it slip that I’m from near LA, so he peppered me with irrelevant questions about living there.  He said "it’s cheap to live there, right?" and I said no.  He said "food is cheap there, right?" and after I said no again he said "what about if you just eat at Taco Bell?"  I grudgingly conceded that yes, it would be cheap to only eat at Taco Bell, but I restrained myself from asking if he’d heard of the movie "Super Size Me". Basically, after 30 minutes of nonsense he told me I had to tell him what city to go to.  So I politely told him that it wasn’t my job, and that he needed to find out where he thought he’d rather live.  Oh yeah, and worry about getting admitted somewhere.

I visited one of the local private colleges on Monday with a co-worker to do a presentation on studying in the US.  Basically I just went to watch her give her spiel.  The place is called the HELP University College (yes, it stands for Higher Education Learning Programs) and it does nothing to hide the fact that it is a business first and a college second.  They have a customer service desk instead of an information desk at the front.  And in the brochure they have a message from the CEO, not the president.  Weird.  There are dozens of these places around Malaysia, and it seems to strange to me, but I guess American private colleges are businesses too.  They just do a better job of disguising it.  All you have to do is read about their financial aid policies, which I started doing today. I’m gathering material for a rant on that some other time…

As promised, a discursus about Malaysian cultures.

For those of you who went to college, did you ever take an anthropology class where you spent the first couple of weeks dismissing the entire premise of "culture" and "ethnicity" as something that was real, fixed, analyzable, and so on?  Where you realize that the fluidity of definitions regarding the properties of a culture render most interpretations of it useless?  Like a Serb can magically become Croat by going to a Catholic church instead of an Orthodox one, or a Moldovan can turn into a Romanian by stepping across a border and using Latin instead of Cyrillic letters?  Or a Russian with a Ukranian last name has "Ukranian" children, but by changing her last name to a Russian one can start having "Russian" children?  Remember how it was enlightening for about two seconds, and after that became quickly tiresome and boring?  Prepare to be exasperated.

How many cultures and ethnic groups are there in Malaysia?  Depends on who counts and what the point of reference is.  The simplest answer is three: bumiputra ("son of the earth"), Chinese, and Indian.  But that’s not quite right.  Bumiputra is supposed to refer to all "indigenous" Malaysians, but normally refers to Malays.  That ignores the dozens and dozens of other groups speaking different languages, following different religions, and having different lifestyles.  Chinese is no easier.  In Malaysia, there is a very real difference between Straits Chinese (peranakan–"half caste") and other Chinese.  The former settled around Malacca and present-day Singapore during the 1500s to 1600s, the latter were imported from China by the British in the late 19th and 20th centuries to work in the tin mines.  The former speak Malay and intermarried with local Malays, the latter some form of Chinese, but even that gets complicated with at least seven distinct and mutually unintelligible dialects floating around.  The Indian community fares little better.  Most were brought by the British to work on the rubber plantations, but from very different parts of the subcontinent.  The largest group is the Tamils, but there are significant Tegulu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Pakistani, and Bengali communities as well.  Then there is the distinct Chettiar or "Chitty" community descended from Indians that have intermarried with Malays in a way similar to the peranakan Chinese.

We’re not done yet.  In Malacca there is a very strong Portuguese (yes, Portuguese) community that is a remnant of Malacca’s days as a Portuguese trading center.  The guy who sells spices at our grocery store is Portugis.  Then there is another distinct Eurasian community made up of the descendants of intermarriages between English men and Chinese or Malay women.  And the whole Bumiputra thing is more confusing than it looks.  There are Bumiputras that live in Peninsular Malaysia who are not Malay, and are lumped together under the term Orang Asli, which literally means "original people."  They comprise about two dozen distinct ethnic groups, distinguishable because they are of a different physical stock (closer to Melanesian) and do not practice Islam.  Moving to Borneo, there are dozens more who are technically supposed to be bumiputras.  The bigs groups include Kadazan, Iban, Bajau, Melanau, and Orang Ulu, but there are tons more.  More infuriatingly, there is a group called "Malay" that live on Borneo, but who are physically related to other Bornean groups, not Peninsular Malays.

There’s also religion, to the extent that this is supposed to mark an ethnic difference (if you don’t think so, ask a Bosnian).  Some bumiputras practice Islam.  All Malays practice Islam, because that’s part of the governmental definition of Islam.  Some Pakistani and Bengali Indian Malaysians practice Islam.  Some non-Malay bumiputras practice Islam, but most do not, especially in Borneo.

If you go to the National Museum, you will discover that Malaysian governmental ethnographers have decided that there are seven ethnic groups: Malays, Peranakan, Indian, Chitty, Portugis, Orang Asli, and Bornean.  Where are the non-Peranakan Chinese?  Beats us.  What makes the small Portugis community worthy of a separate ethnic group, but the far larger Kadazan community not?  Who knows.

One response to this confusing list is "who cares?"  Well, in a country where just about everything in politics revolves around ethnicity, this is a huge deal.  We’ll have to talk more about this some other time.  Another response may be "yeah, but there are really only three that matter–the big three."  That seems to be the government’s point of view, but that’s patently incorrect.  As a side note, statistically-inclined social scientists have been making a big deal lately out of counting ethnic groups in countries around the world so that they can do statistical analyses of the effect of ethnic cleavages on a whole host of variables.  The relevant term here, we believe, is "measurement error."