Unconditional Neutrality

The past week has been marked by some pretty little twists, squishing my loosely defined life into a whole new shape…

1. That band I joined?

It’s a marching band.

This has severely affected my participation, although I am still into the whole sitting in a chair/playing music I haven’t memorized sort of thing. I do feel a hint of regret knowing I will not get to wear the fun hat. The marching band had its big debut concert at a fantastically delightful extravaganza titled ‘Sports Day.’

2. This Sports Day has taken over my reality for the past few days, as all classes have been canceled for the grand event. The basic premise is that the school is divided into four color-coded teams, who compete for trophies in categories like sports, marching around with mascots and flags, and decorating tents. Basically, one of my major tasks in life became the strange job of decorating a yellow tent. Countless hours were spent cutting out yellow snowflakes and weaving delicate yellow things.

In order to complete this mammoth task, I had a late night party inmy apartment that basically consisted of girls searching desperately through my ipod for music they recognized (“Miss Ellie, where is your Celine Dion?) and eventually blasting Gwen Stefani while others produced paper mountains of these snowflakes. Sorry trees.

The actual event involved a lot of racing,

marching,


and stretchers.

A disturbing amount of students fell down/passed out extremely regularly, which allowed these enthusiastic students to run over with the stretcher and place them on it with a shocking degree of glee. Here the Red Cross is replaced by the Red Crescent.

Good old team yellow came in dead last in sports, but first in marching and tent-decorating, which are much more useful skills I suppose. We also had the best mascot, as Big Bird beats a flower, a butterfly, and a princess any day.

3. My mindless obsession with manufacturing yellow snowflakes has been balanced with my job of helping the English Drama Club write a devastatingly sad play about AIDS. The plot, narrated by a ghost: a drug addict gets AIDS, then gives it to his wife and daughter, they are consequently and completely shunned by the community, and they each die alone vomiting blood. I worked with the students to add in some kind, understanding people and to complicate the story a bit more and get perspectives from all characters. But the head teacher isn’t having it, so I am back to writing a deeply problematic tragedy with no redeeming factors whatsoever. I just have this overwhelming feeling that this play is not part of the solution to the AIDS problem on earthball.

4. I took advantage of the fact that the glorious Perenthian Islands are less than an hour from my front door.

This sun soaked paradise is where the tourists are completely segregated from any actual culture as the islands are infested with little ‘mat sallehs’ prancing about in their bikinis, imbibing vodka and other sinful liquids. It’s a very interesting and slightly sick arrangement, but the turquoise ocean on white sugar sand seems so much bigger and more important than any of our sad little human stories. That ocean really doesn’t care about what any of us are wearing or drinking or even if we are living beings, drug addicts with AIDS, or large pieces of driftwood. It doesn’t love or hate us and maintains this neutrality unconditionally, which I find deeply refreshing.

Freshly Squeezed Words

It seems the time is ripe for sharing some sentences…


The epicenter of my personal universe has officially shifted to Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Tengku Mahmud, 22200 Besut, Terengganu, Malaysia. (This also serves as my mailing address).


It is a fascinating reality for me to explore: being a peachy- pink- skinned American in this dominantly Muslim country, while relevant wars continue to fester within other borders nearby. Malaysia is composed of multiple clashing and compatible elements. Malays, Chinese, Indians, and others (listed in order of population) co-exist here, causing foods to blend, languages to infiltrate, and traditions to seep into each other...all resting on top of some rather silent racial tensions. Meanwhile the economy swells, chafing against religion, and filling TV/computer screens, mouths, eyes, and minds with shiny foreign ideas. Kuala Lumpur illustrated this so clearly, neon flashing electric fantasy shops, restaurants, and hotels share zip codes with piles of molding apartments. “Developing nation,” is the official term for this. Developing into what?

As for me, the peachy-pink person… (Humans with this complexion are referred to as “mat salleh” here. The origin of the term is debatable, but my favorite theory is that around the turn of the 20th century Malay ports were filled with drunken rowdy European boat crews, whose strange singing and general disorderliness quickly earned them the title “mad sailor,” which eventually relaxed into “mat salleh” and grew to encompass all white-type people). I am a very grateful little mat salleh. I inhabit a rather large apartment amidst over 200 adolescent Malaysian females. Living here is like a self-esteem boost on steroids. At least once an hour, I am told I am very beautiful or that I have a nice voice. At first the girls knocked on my apartment door extremely frequently to tell me such things (or to interview me for school projects), but I put up a white board outside my room to filter such affections. I now wake up to comments like: “I love you like a sister.” This extreme love would be purely sweet if it wasn’t for the creepy colonial history and wide-spread racial sickness that underlies these interactions. I am trying to find ways to address these issues, but will start with the basics—dishing serious love back at these giggling people. I want to work with the art teacher to do various poster projects, asking the students to make posters that encourage healthy habits (refraining from cigs and drugs, apparently a problem here), urge recycling and other earth-ball-loving activities (they don’t recycle at the school, but that’s one of my side-missions), and promote self-esteem. A large mural is also in order.

My actual job here is to teach English to 13/14 year-olds, a motive that I constantly feel conflicted about. It is a tricky sticky thing, instructing a colonized people in the colonizers’ language. I have justified the act by mixing peaceful, environmental, loving, and other revolutionary messages into my grammar lessons. I played Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind,” (with a lyrics sheet with many words blanked out that they had to fill in as they listened) and we discussed war and freedom. They were moderately interested, but soon asked me if I had any other songs on my Ipod, ones that were not old and were not about peace. The Backstreet Boys, Avril Levine, My Chemical Romance, Lincoln Park, 50-Cent, and Britney are all pretty big here. Still, I overheard some students singing the song together a few days later, so at least I’m promoting Dylan overseas.

Other highlights in my life include: extreme amounts of stray cats (although it is mating season and therefore my house is filled with strange horrible noises that sound like small babies are being tortured…apparently this is where kittens come from?),

mangoes/new delightful fruits (dragon fruit makes the crazy purple juice),
Chinese New Year and Chinese people in general,
insanely sweet and strange food (like this ice cream filled hot dog that Jackie is enjoying),

murdering massive amounts of mosquitoes,
kind Malaysians that take me on delightful missions/track me down to invite me to tea,
proximity to ocean,

and the rampant custom of eating every 15 minutes.

Low-lights: adjusting to conservative gender divisions,
tiny anchovy fish sneaking into everything I eat and staring at me with pathetic pleading eyes,

the host of frightening mannequins that inhabit most shops,

and the massive spider that invaded my house and stubbornly refused to die for an hour.

Besides my epic battle with the spider, I have conquered several small but serious fears in the past few days: 1. Singing in public. I found myself in charge of an assembly of over 300 15-year-olds with nothing to entertain them except for my vocal cords, so I taught them a couple songs. Now, I hear students singing “I like to eat eat eat apples and bananas” wherever I go. 2. Bike riding. I have never been very graceful on two-wheels and now it is my main transportation, specifically a superb silver bike with a large basket. It is very Wizard of Oz-esque. 3. The clarinet. This instrument and I have a turbulent past: I can remember purposely breaking my mouth-reeds in middle-school so that I could avoid embarrassing myself by my strange squeaking performances. Yet, I am now relearning to play as I have somehow joined the school band? Mostly, though, I am just grateful there are so many incredible new people in my life, especially my mentor, host family, students, and new friends like Suria. Mad love to all superb people, keep me updated on your adventures.

Suria, with her favorite kitten, Prince.