Category: General

So I (JM) have a new job.  While playing with the elephants this weekend, I mentioned to some of the staff members of the Malaysian American Commission on Educational Exchange (the office that manages Fulbrights here) that I’d be happy to help out at their office if they had any use for me.  Turns out they were desperate for volunteers to help mentor and advise Malaysian students interested in studying in the US.  I guess they weren’t joking, because I got a call at 8:15 this morning and they asked me to be in at 10.  I told them I could come in whenever they most needed me, and they asked me to come every day from 10-4.  So I have a job.  They pay me a "stipend" for lunch money and train fare of approximately $1.50 an hour which is hysterical.  I’d do it for free, but this way it will accumulate into grocery money.

I got the grand tour of the office today.  It’s a really nice, new place which is literally next door to the Petronas Towers, and it’s easy to get to via the train that runs near our place.  They have an enormous library of materials about going to college in the States.  I thought I knew just how many books there were ranking schools and giving little descriptions, but I was wrong.  They have hundreds and hundreds of these things.  I don’t know whether it’s kind of cool or really weird.

There were 8 or 10 students that came by today, so I listened in on the other two advisors to get a feel for how it works.  It was really fun, they all have different stories and interests and little problems.  I think the hardest thing is going to be getting them to look at other colleges aside from the Ivy Leagues.  The was one dude who came in looking for material for his son and would not leave us alone until we helped him pull up the list of Ivies on the computer.  Then he said "Where’s MIT?"  It was pretty amusing.  Did you know that during the Malaysian economic boom of the 1980’s about 20,000 Malaysian students came to the US every year to go to college?  I thought that was astonishingly high, especially since this country has only about 22 million people.  After the economic crisis in the 90’s and 9/11 the numbers are down to more like 6500.  That’s still an awful lot.  I’ll have other little interesting tidbits in the coming days as I slog my way through the 2 pound "Training Manual for Educational Advisors".

Two somewhat related notes.  To begin with, we have encountered some more funny language bits.  The first comes from a book about the culture of leadership on Java–which I am reading in order to be able to argue that culture doesn’t explain anything in my dissertation, it’s all plain old corruption.  Anyway, one thing about modern Indonesia that we found interesting is the culture of the preman or jago.  Preman comes from the Dutch words for "free man," but refers to local criminals in urban and rural areas who can extract a sort of protection racket in their immediate neighborhood.  You still find these a lot in Java, although modern preman can be different.  For instance, there were a couple of guys who lived outside of our apartment complex and charged taxis a nominal fee to wait there for people to call them, even though they have no actual claim to that piece of property, they just got there first and it belongs to them now.  The word jago, literally "rooster" or "game cock," is another colorful term for a preman.

No really, we have a point.  In this book, one of the authors made a point that the culture of leadership–whatever that means–is one of premanism.  The author then proceeded to trot out some other terms for preman, including the term tukang pukul.  To understand what this means, tukang means "tradesman" or "dealer," like tukang sayur is a vegetable seller or tukang sate is a satay seller.  Pukul means "punch" or "blow."  So, tukang pukul literally means "dealer in beatings."  What a great word.

We also learned yesterday that there are some words in Indonesian that are swear words in Malay.  Some guy at the library stopped me and chatted me up for some unknown reason, and let me in on this little tidbit.  It seems that memerlukan and membutuhkan, which in Indonesian both mean "to require," are not synonyms in Malay, and that membutuhkan in Malay is a very dirty word.  True enough, we looked it up in an English-Malay dictionary, and it is not listed.  Naughty.

Continuing on our theme, last night we went with friends to see a popular new Malaysian movie called Sepet.  We did not know what the title means, but quickly it became clear that sepet is the Malay rendition of the Indonesian word sipit.  Among other things, sipit is an adjective that describes the eyes of East Asians.  With as little prejudice as possible, it is best to translate it as "slanty."  In Indonesia and Malaysia, a common way that people will say that you can tell the difference between a Chinese Indonesian/Malaysian and an "indigenous" one is through matanya sipit, or "slanty eyes."  At any rate, this was a very good movie, even if it did contain just about every Malaysian theme possible–race, religion, class, discrimination, forbidden love, crime, prejudice, languages, etc.  It tells the story of (yes) a young Malay woman who falls in love with a young Chinese man.  There is a bit of a twist on the normal here: the Chinese man is working class, while the Malay woman is firmly upper middle class.  It was quite a wonderful movie, though, highly enjoyable, and thankfully subtitled in English, even the parts that were spoken in English.  If it comes to an international film festival near you, check it out.