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Thursday, January 28, 2010
We spent the afternoon in Chow Kit the other day. We wanted to see the gritty, real side of KL free from charmless shopping strips and sanitized urban dreams paved in white marble and terracotta pavements.
Chow Kit is old KL, with new inhabitants. The market is still around, people still go about their daily business in reasonable grit and deferred dreams of a life not surrounded by hardship in our City of Mud. We felt like immigrants in an immigrant city. The police asked us whether we were Singaporeans, mildy embarrassed that we couldn't pass off as KLites.
You can disappear if you find the right places to live. Chow Kit is their area, with charming Indonesian-owned coffeeshops and night markets selling used clothes down the alley from five foot ways owned by transvestites. We saw one, her, standing in her window frame above, watching the remains of the Old City with one breast exposed to the city air.
I was there to ask questions, but I felt rude to intrude. So we sat and watched the new world go by. This is their city, not ours.
Labels: Non-Fiction
2 Comments:
Haha, can't believe I read all your posts in one go. I was prepared to click off your blog when I notices that the first post isn't the same anymore.
I think your intentions and thoughts for the Burmese refugees in Malaysia are very noble. I'm trying to find my own way too, through better writing to address things that need to be addressed in Malaysia. Prob is I have to find a way to do it without being detained by ISA.
January 28, 2010 at 2:53 PM
I think we're all smart enough to write without getting caught by the government. They're not the sharpest tools in the shed.
I think our generation needs to step up. We have reason to fight. We're young, bright and ambitious young things. There's a lot of talk and a lot of criticism, but I think the best way to go is to actually apply what we know and what skills we've learned into practice, for those who really need our help.
The Government doesn't need more architects to build more palaces, and MNCs don't need more accountants to find tax loopholes and shuffle profits. People need working cities and quicker ways to get out of poverty. Malaysia might not be as behind as some countries, but if we allow things to go the way they're going, who knows what kind of trap we'll fall into.
January 28, 2010 at 6:18 PM
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