January 8, 2011
Malaysia
I still remember the first time I experienced Malaysia. It was 14 years ago, and my son and I were on the train from Bangkok to Singapore. We had to go through Malaysia. I remember I was reading John Naisbitt’s Megatrends Asia; he raved about this Muslim-dominated country of 25 million people, most of whom live in peninsular Malaysia (as opposed to the states on the island of Borneo). This was a country, he noted, in the throes of an economic revolution that was proposing to build major highways for India. Having just come from India, I well knew the challenges that that demanded.
I don’t know whether those highways got built, but I realized Malaysia, another one of those countries one hears little about, was quite capable of doing so. The long-time president at that time, Mahathir Mohammed, was a rival of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew for both vision and ability. Mahathir’s focus on Asia, especially on the economically challenged Muslim majority, made him an outspoken critic of the United States and “western values”.
What he attempted to do, and with success, was to meet one of the great challenges in the post colonial world—to define a country that pretty much owed its boundaries and existence to its former colonial overlord. The country has not really forgotten the potential explosiveness of racial division; the 60s were marked by race riots (the Chinese minority—about 30 per cent of the country have more than 30% of the wealth, and are Christian/Buddhists to boot). Mahathir’s plan favored the Muslims (bumiputra), and the country does have a Muslim-dominated government. Our guide insists that there is religious freedom, but non-Muslims cannot attempt to convert Muslims, and as I recall, marriage to a Muslim may require a non-Muslim to convert.
Mahathir created at least in the major cities a modern economy; Malaysia has its own car, the Proton, and a sophisticated high-tech sector tha tincludes the Dell factory we’ve visited in the past and which churns out most of your Dell laptops. I’m looking forward to our visits here later in the week, which will cover Muslim finance and food (one of the articles we read for the trip said that Muslim students had to buy kosher food until a halal provider came along).
Today has just been a long trip across the borders. We had to change busses because Malaysia charges Singapore busses more—the switch simply meant our company exchanged a Singapore license for a Malaysian license.
Anyway, the trip North was as I remembered the trip with David in 1997—on first rate highways (the North-South expressway), through a verdant landscape (that’s a nice way of saying it rains a lot) of palm oil plantations (we’re visiting them too) that stretch as far as the eye can see (and have largely replaced the rubber and tin that were the source of British colonial wealth).
We just stopped at Melaka for a baba-nonya lunch, named for the mixed families of Chinese and Malay. I was glad we came here because Melaka is one of my favorite cities. It was the seat of a sultanate that was one of the great powers in the area in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Portuguese, under the duke of Albuquerque, captured it in 1511, and there are still 
remnants of the old Luso (Portuguese) fort; About a 120 years later, the Dutch sailed in, and the Dutch Stadhuys (the governor’s palace) and the Dutch church remain. When I was here two years ago, I went into the museum, and learned a lot more about the Dutch East India company and the Dutch occupation here than I saw anywhere in Amsterdam! After the Napoleonic Wars, the British traded Melaka for what became Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Dutch East Indies. And then in 1957, I think it was, after the end of a communist insurgency (unlike the one in Viet Nam), Malaysian officials declared the independence of Malaysia from Great Britain in Melaka.
I’ve enjoyed my visits there more than students, alas, so on this year’s trip, I took Melaka out in favor of a trip from Saigon to Hanoi—so readers of my blog won’t have to hear this little lesson about Melaka again.