A Fortune-Teller Told Me (23 page)

I walked back to the hotel in the broiling sun. It was the hour when in the tropics everyone takes a siesta. The rickshaw drivers sleep on the passenger’s seat with their feet up, shaded by the hood, the Indian tailors sleep on their counters, the Chinese in the dim interiors of their shops.

My visits to fortune-tellers were growing more and more disappointing.
What they told me about my fate was a string of banalities. Were there really any among them with special powers? Was the old man in Hong Kong one of them? I brushed away the thought.

Of all the things Kaka said, the only one that stuck in my mind was his advice to meditate. I was most definitely not going to wear a ring on my middle finger. And getting rich did not interest me in the slightest. If you are rich you end up having to be with other rich people, and the rich, as I discovered some time ago, are boring. Also, rich people have to worry about not losing their wealth, and that is a worry I can do without.

And yet there was something enjoyable in my encounters with these characters. As they reviewed the topics of family, health, love and money I was led to think about myself in a way I had not done for some time. Who at my age really thinks about himself anymore? Who stops to ask himself seriously if he wants a second wife, a third child, or even a ring on the middle finger of his right hand? Preoccupied with the problems of daily life, we scarcely ever stand back and take a good look at ourselves. How many happily married people take a conscious pleasure in their state? We have fewer and fewer moments in which to reflect on what we have. And who thinks about death anymore? For us Westerners it has become a taboo. We live in societies that have been molded by the optimism of the advertising industry, in which death has no place. It has been banished, exiled from our midst. By contrast, every fortune-teller I saw held it up to my gaze once more.

What changes there have been in death during the course of my life! When I was a boy and someone died, it was a choral event. All the neighbors came to lend a hand. Death was displayed. The house was opened, the deceased was visible, and so everyone became acquainted with death. Today death is an embarrassment, it is hidden. No one knows how to manage it, what to do with the deceased. The experience of death is becoming more and more rare, and one may well arrive at one’s own without ever having witnessed another’s.

If the Bangkok woman who looked at my mole was right, I shall end my days in a foreign land. What a pity, for there is something reassuring in the idea of dying where one was born, in a room where one knows the smell, the creak of the door, the view from the window. Dying where one’s parents and grandparents died, where one’s grandchildren will be born, one somehow dies less.

The Chinese have always understood this, and ancestor worship has been their only real religion. In ancient times they would reserve a place at the far end of the cave in which the dead were buried and the women gave birth. Thus a cycle was created, as if the new took life from the old. Reincarnation, in fact. There can be no doubt that remaining for generations in the same place, repeating the same gestures and the same rites, tends to favor the concept of a great continuity of life in which an individual’s body is something purely accidental, a convenient shell that just happens to belong to the person inside it.

While meditating, one of the Eight Chinese Immortals once departed so far from his body that when he “returned” he found someone else had taken it over. Not in the least distressed, he helped himself to the first free body he found: that of a one-legged beggar who had just died. Which is why that particular god of the Taoist Olympus is called Iron Leg Li.

From Penang I had to go to Kuala Lumpur. I could have taken the express train from Butterworth, but that seemed too precipitate, so I decided to work my way slowly down the peninsula. A shared taxi took me as far as Ipoh, a city from which—so they say—come the most beautiful women and the richest Chinese in Malaysia.

Little more than a hundred years ago Ipoh was just a big village. Its name comes from a tree whose wood the Malays used for making poisoned arrows. Then came the British, who discovered that the soil was full of tin. What happened next explains the history of Malaysia and its problems today.

Extracting tin required manpower. The Malays did not greatly care for working in the mines, so the British decided to welcome any immigrants who could manage to get there. In 1879 there were 4,623 Malays in Ipoh, 982 Chinese and one Englishman. By 1889 there were 10,291 Malays, sixty-nine Englishmen, and 44,790 Chinese. That was how Ipoh became an almost exclusively Chinese city. A few of these immigrant families, enriched by tin, are today an economic power with which the political power (controlled by the Malays) has to reckon.

“Only 10 percent of the Chinese here are really rich, but the other 90 percent work like mad in the hope that they may become so,” I was told
by one of the Chinese people I spoke to in Ipoh. None of them dream of going back to their homeland. “In Malaysia I’m a second-class citizen, but I still have a better life than I would as a first-class citizen in China,” a teacher told me. “So I stay put.” Nothing if not practical, the Chinese!

On New Year’s Day, 1993, I imposed on myself a second ban, besides the one on planes: not to stay in any of the usual modern hotels, all indistinguishable one from another, no matter what country you are in.

In Ipoh I found one for $5 a night, very Chinese, dirty, littered with cigarette butts, and with an ancestral altar on each floor. The fire escape was inaccessible, being used for storage, and all the rooms had several beds. But even Ipoh was undergoing modernization. I went to visit the oldest Chinese temple in the city, and found that it had just been completely rebuilt in concrete. I went to see the grottoes in the limestone mountain, where the first Buddhists in the area had lived, only to find that these too had been plastered with cement and lit with neon. The statues in the gorges were new and shiny. The old ones, blackened by incense and age, had been removed.

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur by bus as night was falling. I had not been there for years, and was surprised to find that the city had acquired a Muslim character of its own. The Malays had managed to give a new face to the capital and erase its Chinese look.

I landed up in one of those hotels with dirty carpets, plates left in the corridors after meals, and curtainless showers; but at least I was spared having to view the world as if through the glass of an aquarium. I opened the windows, letting in all the noises and smells of Kuala Lumpur.

The hotel’s owners and all the employees were Chinese. The only Malay was the doorman who carried the luggage of the guests, who were also Chinese. After about two words of conversation he too started telling me about the problem that divides Malaysia: race.

“Look,” he said with a sweeping wave of the hand. “The skyscrapers are Chinese, the market stalls are Chinese, the shops are Chinese, the supermarkets are Chinese … So tell me: is this Malaysia?”

Just then a motorcycle with a sidecar pulled up in front of the hotel.
The rider took off his helmet and set to work. In the space of a few minutes he had turned the sidecar into a miniature restaurant, with two gas rings and a table spread with tempting specialties on little trays. People stopped and selected skewers with meatballs on them, pieces of octopus, slices of liver, sausages and chicken wings. He would boil them in a pot, then dip them in red, yellow or orange sauces lined up in little dishes. The customers ate standing, and paid by the number of empty skewers they had in their hands. It was all clean, attractive and well organized. The man was Chinese. Chinese were all the people I saw in the streets, busily running here and there on all sorts of errands.

With such competition the poor Malay felt he would never get anywhere.

I
had been in Kuala Lumpur for barely twelve hours when I was invited to the home of the prime minister … along with millions of others. I had read in the paper that on Hari Raja, the holiday when traditionally every Malay opens his home to all, even the head of government’s official residence would be open to anyone who wished to visit, with him there to receive them. And this was the day in question.

A taxi set me down at the residence’s wide-open gates, and I entered. An enormous crowd milled around the platters heaped with rice, meatballs and pancake rolls. Guests were filling their plates and going to eat on the lawn. Others were queuing to shake the hand of Mr. Mahatir, who stood with his wife in the middle of an air-conditioned salon with signs on the walls requesting guests not to smoke.

The overwhelming majority of the prime minister’s guests were Malay, all dressed for the occasion in lustrous, brightly colored silks. The men, even the little boys, wore blouses and trousers with mini-sarongs over them like little skirts, and the Muslim black cap on their heads. The women wore the two-piece garment which has become the national costume: a floor-length skirt with a modest tunic down to the knees. They all looked as if they had stepped out of a fairy tale that began: “Once upon a time there was a rich land in which the Malay people lived happily and peacefully …” They all appeared well-fed, slow-moving, a bit vain, trying to look severe, but really quite mild. I grasped the gist of their fairy tale: “One day some colonialists came from a faraway land, but the country was rich and the Malays continued to live serenely. But when the colonialists went away, the Chinese remained in Malaysia, and there was no more peace for the Malays.”

For centuries they had lived in villages,
kampongs
, under their sultans, who were both spiritual and political leaders. It was the need to
compete with the Chinese that forced them to give up their pleasant life in the
kampongs
and move to the cities. The man who stood in the air-conditioned salon, shaking one hand after another, was the great strategist of this operation. His intention was to ensure that Malaysia would remain Malay and at the same time become a modern country.

The previous governments had likewise tried to protect the interests of the
bumiputras—
the sons of the soil—and to keep the Chinese at bay, but the results had been debatable. They had ruled that Malays must be involved in every Chinese company, and the Chinese had brought in some compliant Malays to act as dummies; they had imposed Malay as the national language, lowering the cultural level all round; they had limited the number of places for Chinese at the universities, so the Chinese had gone abroad to study, returning better educated and more aggressive than the Malays who had remained at home.

Mahatir, on coming to power in 1981, realized that further measures would be required to get to the root of the problem. His aim was to remodel the Malays, reinforcing their identity, and to marginalize the Chinese, while taking every care not to drive them out of the country: 70 percent of the private economy was in their hands, and their sudden departure might be fatal. Mahatir’s idea was to dilute the Chinese presence through a huge increase in the population. Malaysia has only twenty million inhabitants; Mahatir wants seventy million by the year 2020. The fact that as Muslims the Malays can have four wives, and their rate of increase is double that of the Chinese, should produce the desired results. The strategy is a reversal of the process of ethnic cleansing.

When it came to remodeling the Malays to give them a stronger identity, no longer influenced by a century of life alongside the Chinese, Mahatir turned to religion, pushing the country toward a Muslim orthodoxy it had never known before. For someone like me, who had been away from Malaysia for years, the changes wrought by this mass “reconversion” to Islam were surprising. Apart from the abandonment of traditional female clothing and the introduction of the veil, there were Muslim innovations in every aspect of life. Every hotel room throughout Malaysia is required by law to have an arrow on the ceiling to indicate the direction of Mecca; every restaurant has a special section reserved for Muslim food; each community has a “Muslim public eye,” a sort of religious spy to check on people’s behavior; the newspapers
discuss what is “decent” according to Islam; and the bookshops sell manuals prescribing how a good Malay should behave.