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Zedeck Siew, October 18, 2007

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By Zedeck Siew

This happened a week or so ago: a friend, after reading several news articles and op-eds (mainly about Islamisation and judicial corruption), started messaging me about the State of Things Today. “I’m left wondering what I can do,” he said, “I don’t like having to take up arms, but increasingly I feel like I need to make a deliberate stand.”

Now, this friend of mine can hardly be accused of apathy — but it was close to midnight and I was feeling declamatory (I might also been drinking), so his worries prompted a monologue. “Eventually things will get to a point that you have two options,” I said. “One: you migrate — run away — like what most of the middle class here will do; two: you say, fuck this, Malaysia is my home, I’m not going to run. people run away because they have to. but some, as soon as things start getting better, want to come home. whether Malaysians can do the same is the measure with which we can gauge its future.”

This notion — the vital importance of how much attachment a citizen has with his or her home — had been gestating in my head for some time, and its germ was embedded in another night of inebriation. The drink, this time, was vodka, straight and in shots; the company was a writer and journalist, Andre Vltchek. He was a war correspondent in Bosnia and East Timor; his collection of essays, “Point of No Return”, comes with a recommendation by Noam Chomsky. He has had many homes, over the years, and one of his favourites is Santiago, the capital of Chile.

Andre began telling us about the end of the military regime and the Transicion. Latin America has always been place of gestures — Chile in particular: Salvador Allende’s final speech, Pablo Neruda, the slogans of 1987’s opposition coalition (“Joy is coming!”), the government’s refusal to declare a national day of mourning for the death of the dictator Pinochet.

Within that narrative one detail stood out, for me. “During the elections,” Andre said, “The Chilean air force itself flew Chileans home to vote.”

That got me into speculation. Several people I know, in the face of worrying circumstances, have expressed their desire to vacate. Many have escape clauses; during the Brain Drain they left for more benign conditions in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand — few among this number returned. If things go really bad in the near future, will there be refugees, fleeing because they have to? Or people who pack their bags the first sign of trouble, instead of heading out to the streets to rectify things — people who say: “Oh, I used to live in Malaysia. I don’t anymore.” Do Malaysians abroad bother coming home to vote?

Do they even think of Malaysia as home?

I love this place. Though I would like to see more of the world, I have never lived anywhere else. I’m not sure why –you and I know that Malaysia can be pretty shitty, sometimes — but whenever I get off the train at KL Sentral, when I walk across the be-stalled car park to the Monorail station, getting annoyed by slower-paced commuters, I feel a sense of contentment. I suspect that, for me, Malaysia will always be tanahair.

It is, of course, easy for me to pontificate now. I’m a young, single male, with no dependents, no children — possibly the demographic least burdened with responsibility. I’ll not deny that, under different or future circumstances, I may choose to throw in the towel with Malaysia. It is human to want better for you and yours, and if you can find these opportunities already available elsewhere, it is natural to pursue that instead of the nebulous promise of conditions becoming more positive where you currently are. Fair enough.

But democracy and equal suffrage are not natural things. The development of human culture represents the triumph of self-scrutiny and self-sacrifice, of ideas and ideals, over our more amoral instincts; the willingness of the powerful to relinquish power — or, more importantly, to have yourself chance water cannons and batons for a political or social stand.

I feel that this realisation is crucial: people stay put only if they believe in something enough to risk them and theirs — or if they have nowhere left to go. There are many in Malaysia who think of Malaysia as home because they don’t know anywhere else, there are many in Malaysia who believe in the things they do because they have not been persuaded to an alternative. What can this country’s prognosis be, if the section of society most capable (economically or socially) of enacting change have airplane tickets in their drawers?

I’m hopeful. We were once great: the leftist anti-colonial struggle, the vibrant student activism of the 1960s and 70s. We are okay, now: the thousand-lawyer-strong march in Putrajaya; 21-year-olds who have registered to vote; people like my friend, who feel the need to take a stand for “where my friends are and where i can get things done,” — the simplest definition of home.

Now the test is whether there are enough of us to reach out and strike a balance. Any society is at war with itself. Here, the fight that governs almost every skirmish has, in general, two sides: on one hand are the curious, the open and the conciliatory; on the other are the small-minded, the callous, and the absolutists. Whether the tables are balanced is still an open question. The outcome depends on where you want to be, and how much you’re willing to fight, and lose, to stay there. If the other side has greater resolve — then, well, Malaysia is rightfully theirs.

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