A Mental Stroll

Last night I dreamed of Marienbad. That line is from a movie by Reinais. I've always thought its haunting simplicity captures a part of the narrator's soul. It is also a mockery because what he remembers, is not what is.

Last night, they showed the Malaysian leg in The Amazing Race. I watched it avidly, enjoying the references to familiar places. I grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but that city is not the one shown on the TV screen last night. The KL I grew up in was still an emerging Third World place at that time, nothing like the ultra-modern city of which I was given a glimpse, with its highrises, subways, and impossibly clean-looking cabs ;-).

In many ways, I don't want to go back because it would probably destroy my childhood memories of that place. I know a lot of those places that I hold special in my heart are gone--my secondary school, BBGS; my little hideouts in the city when I stayed late from school; the ramshackled shanty town in the backstreets where the squatters lived, especially the Ah Pak with his special stinky ointment for twisted ankles; the dark and mysterious Chinese temples in the heart of the old city where I knelt in front of the giant statues of the Goddess of Mercy and the King of Heaven and rattled the tall container filled with flat sticks with the hand-written Chinese I-Ching numerals that revealed my hidden path (not that I understood anything the nuns told me!); the open market with its smell of fish and livestock, where you could pick the chicken you wanted and the guy slaughtered and de-feathered it in front of you in seconds--and are now replaced by offices and flats.

But it was still fun watching and keeping a running commentary to my friend, "Hey, that's Batu Caves. We walked on coals there, you know, during the Indian festival, Deepavalee. Oh, that part of town they're showing now used to be the pits to walk in, with trash everywhere. Check out the goodies--dude, we don't call them cookies, 'kay? It's kuih-muih. Dang, they still have those crazy bicycles. And check out that neighborhood--do you think those rich folks would have so much newspapers handy, huh?"

I was both amused and nostalgic at the same time. I actually led a pretty boring life when I was growing up, but if I tell you all the festivals (being a multicultural society, we have FOUR major new years to celebrate, all national holidays), the late night food escapades in the night bazaars, the high-decibeled noise level of the school playground of 2000 hungry and over-active schoolchildren at breaktime, it certainly does sound so much more exotic than the modern day soccer mom's life in Florida.

It used to be that the old country sounded so far away. It used to be that few people knew where Malaysia was, let alone Kuala Lumpur. A TV program would usually bring up images of exotic Asian mysticism and idyllic romantic scenery of the locals handwashing their clothes by the river while breaking out into a chorus of happy songs. You know, snarkalicious moments for a Malaysian overseas.

Not any more. Other than the multicultural people, everything shown was just like...hmm...any American big city here. But cleaner ;-). The food, however, remains incomparable; I wish The Amazing Race showed that instead.

But last night, for an hour, I dreamed of KL.

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