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May 24, 2006
MYTEAM and the MTUC
a personal victory:
i went to the beach the other day, and although on this particular outing i didn't practice speaking Malay as much as maybe i'd hoped to, i did spend a few minutes talking to some guys selling fruit and sodas by the side of the road after asking them for directions. they asked me where i was staying (this may sound stalker-ish to an American but it is a typical small-talk question here)
"Jalan Perak" i say
"oh, Jalan Perak, where? in a hotel?"
"with a family"
"oh, Jalan Perak, with a family. Malay or Chinese?"
this apparently narrowed things down quite a bit, either because there are only a few Malay neighborhoods on Jalan Perak, or because all, or at least most, Malay neighborhoods (as opposed to Chinese neighborhoods) are considered "kampungs" because as soon as i said "Malay" he looked sort of surprised and said "oh, so you're staying in a kampung?!"
"yeah, a kampung," i say
"so, do you shower like this (holds his hand over his head), or like this (motions like he is splashing water on himself with a bucket)?"
"like this" i say, also motioning like i'm splashing water on myself, at which point he claps his hands together, he and his friends laugh, and i maybe earn a few cool points
staying with the family has is pro's and con's. the pro's include learning basic day-to-day things like how to work Malay showers, how to eat with my hands, and being introduced to the reality TV show "MYTEAM", about a bunch of amateur soccer players from all over the country who are being coached to play against the national professional team. last week the last few players got cut. it was pretty intense. this week they got to go to the UK to play a scrimmage against Manchester United (they tied kosong-kosong, or zero-zero). i also have access to certain information such as to were all the good food-themed (as opposed to touristy-souvenir themed) night markets are, or where the best place is to buy buah pala (pickled nutmeg) to bring back for my friends in KL.
as far as the con's, staying with a family has actually made it a little bit harder to make friends. they get nervous if i am out late alone, and they'd also get nervous if i was to "jalan-jalan" with someone they didn't know, so i have a pretty strict curfew. its also sort of been hard for me to do much formal research, since, like i said before, they have a maid for Indonesia, so although i told them that i'm doing research on migrant workers, i don't think it would be appropriate for me to go around asking the Indonesian people i've met in the kampung (many who are working as maids) how they feel about working here. although i'm not sure i'd feel right about doing that regardless, since, like i said before, the transition from just talking to someone like a friend to asking them really personal questions for research is huge, and i haven't figured out a good way to deal with that yet
i did finally get to meet with someone, not from the NGO i originally contacted here, but from the Penang branch of the Malaysian Trade Union Congress. he talked to me for over an hour about the situation migrant workers were facing in Penang, gave me specific examples of cases he had worked with recently, and gave me a broad overview of some of the ways the demographics have changed in the last 30 years. in some ways it wasn't that different from the meeting with the NGO in KL, but i felt a lot better about this meeting and found myself trusting what this guy said a lot more than i did the woman from the NGO. i'm not sure why exactly, maybe its just because i have more experience talking to people from unions in the US than i do NGO's. or maybe it's a class issue. i know that someone working in a union office isn't exactly on the same playing field as someone making maybe 400RM a month working as a live-in maid, but at least he didn't have to pause in the middle of a conversation on domestic worker abuse, like the woman from the NGO did, to say "i mean, of course i have a domestic at home, but we give her time off, and take her to church if she wants to go"
Posted by diparker at May 24, 2006 02:06 AM