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How many roads must a man walk down

Just before midnight last night, my Dad calls me over from my semi-permanent habitat on the living room sofa to come and read his essay. It is only one page, he cajoles so I wander over to the dining table and plop myself in front of his laptop. The title of the essay, unsurprisingly enough, is about the environment but my eyes bugged out when I read the first line, "Coming of age at 26 and flipping to the centrefold of a Playboy magazine in the library of my university....." WHAT?!? I couldn't process the next few lines as I tried to twist my brain around the fact that MY DAD had read Playboy. Which was stocked by his university library. What kind of university is it anyway?

Why the surprise, you say? He is a man after all. Yeah, but you don't know my dad. He is the biggest, straightest, most child-like nerd in the world. He gets a kick out of reading scientific journals not ogling over glossy pages of women's titties. Anyway, before you think my dad has decided to write erotica in his senescence, the essay WAS about the environment and bizarrely, the centrefold in that particular Playboy magazine 32 years ago was an illustration about the ravages that a polluted environment would cause on future man. Even in the 70s, environmental pollution was still as much of an issue as it is today.

"Why would your university stock Playboy?" I ask Dad.

"Because it has got some good articles in it," he says, with no irony whatsoever.

"And.... you read Playboy because of the articles?"

"Yes. Why not?"

Being an oldie and a person who has actually contributed something to the country, Dad was asked to contribute an article for a local newspaper, coincidentally the same one that my eldest sister freelances for. It's for a series about Merdeka in the run up to the nation celebrating 50 years of independence this coming August. There have been small articles and advertisements on television regarding this - people saying what Independence means to them, how life has changed since, their opinions on what the future holds for Malaysia and its citizens. My parents are the generation which grew up in the waning years of the British Empire and came of age in the post-colonial period. They were the generation for whom change was relentless; they were the generation that developed and changed the face of the country.

I am from the generation that was promised great things and have grown dissatisfied waiting for it.

Last Friday, I was chatting to a friend of a friend about life in Malaysia. I was speaking from the point of view of the prodigal child, aware of the pitfalls of Malaysian life yet still hopeful that things can get better, if only we put our minds and backs to it. This friend, let's call him Bowl-cut, had spent the past five years as a working adult in the capital city, was married with one child and was horrifyingly despondent about how his life was turning out. This isn't the Promised Land we were brought up to believe in, he says. It is not enough to work hard and be honest. You can't get anywhere without having the right skin colour, the right connections, the right job etc.

He wants to emigrate to Australia. He's sick of the hypocrisy, the racism, the corruption, the dog-eat-dog world that is life in KL.

What makes you think Australia will be any better?

A chance, he says, of fairness and transparency. Hypocrisy and corruption could still be exposed and reviled while in Malaysia people would just shrug and say, "Well, what do you expect?"

Perhaps it is a bit rich coming from me, a person who has spent nearly a decade out of the country, (in my defense, seven of those years were spent being educated) but if all the intelligent, forward-thinking, passionate people left the country, how do we expect anything in the country to change for the better? All we would have left are the bigots, the idiots, the venal, the short-sighted........

My dad has spent many years of his life raising awareness of environmental pollution, pushing through laws to control emission of pollutants and reining in rampant development projects. He did not know he would still be going down this path when he was a 20-something postgrad student reading a Playboy magazine. But he has made changes and he has seen changes made by others, and I hope to think that it will all add up to something one day. Maybe not in his lifetime, maybe not in mine but if someone hadn't started all those years ago, my generation would not have tasted the fruits of that labour, flawed as it is, today.

Comments

Maryam said…
Dude, you write great shit when you're bumming.
A chance of fairness and transparency in Oz, eh? If there is at all a chance at that anywhere in the world, it's a minimal one. Not worth emigrating for.
But the beaches are nice. Real nice.
Kere said…
Coming from you that's a compliment. I feel funny when my siblings say anything nice about me, why don't you be snarky to me like Dean is to Sam and vice versa? I miss that.
Maryam said…
Jeeebus dude...again with the Dean and Sam. Your love isn't pure...it's CRAAAAAAAAAZY.
Crazy comes to town! Crazy's the only game in town.
Kere said…
So be it. You can't choose your family.
Anonymous said…
good piece. havent much to say. But there was nice.
Lily G said…
I read maryam wrote something funny about your dad before..was it his trousers or something. lol

anyway, i'm with maryam up there. If we find our country is bias, what more abroad? so many of my friends want to go back to UK but well, it's easy when you are a student piggy-backing on someone else's money. But earning a living can't be that much of a breeze eh? I'm sure you know better since I only worked at selfidges/pizza hut and the likes.

Eh..sorry..tulis essay pulak..ha ha
Kere said…
Part of my dad's purpose in life is to provide amusing anecdotes for his children. :)

People here think I must be rolling in money because I worked for two years in England but honestly, when you get so heavily taxed on your income, tolak rent, kereta, duit minyak, exam fees, professional course fees,medical council fees, medical indemnity fees, food, utility bills - there ain't a lot left. The only saving grace is that an average graduate's income is enough to get you by and then some. Over there income is proportionate to how much things cost but in Malaysia and the Klang Valley esp, prices have been going up while your income stays the same.

Honestly, I don't miss England at all, (you know, tanah tumpah darahku and all that) except when idiots potong queue and I wish to God that we could learn to queue like the British.

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