Malaisie, literature, Tash Aw -You Need To Look Away: Visions Of Contemporary Malaysia | The Weeklings

From my favorite malaysian writer!

 

COMEL IS THE daughter of a mamasan, a woman who runs one of several local brothels. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when her husband is out, Comel also turns the occasional trick, but otherwise she’s like any other twenty-one year old in the area, lively, chatty, obsessed by her smartphone. She is a sex worker who is not really a sex worker, hovering between two worlds.

Both mother and daughter are married to Indonesians, one a sailor, the other a migrant worker. At the end of the month, on pay day, they can see the dock workers queuing up at the ATM on the other side of the highway, waiting to draw out enough money to spend the evening with a girl. Here in the northern stretch of Port Klang, Malaysia’s busiest port, nightlife is sparse, and what there is feels gritty and distinctly unglamorous, a different world from the sophisticated Western-style bars and restaurants of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, only an hour’s drive away. The country’s gateway to the sea, Port Klang and the surrounding coastline seem to be disconnected from the rest of Selangor, the richest and most populous state in Malaysia, as if all the trade and industry that flows through its docks has decided to settle elsewhere, bypassing the coastline altogether.

The women live in an area of dilapidated shop houses hemmed in by a massive new elevated highway that separates them from the rest of North Port. This new road casts a shadow on the area where Comel and her friends live, the houses becoming shabbier with each passing year. Over time, some have collapsed entirely, leaving ghostly spaces in the rows of once-fine shophouses; others now have ficus trees sprouting from their masonry, their roots further destroying the fabric of these buildings. As for the fabric of the lives that occupy this area, there is a sense, too, that they are caught in a sort of stasis, cut off from the hubris of economic development elsewhere in the port, and indeed in the steadily modernizing country beyond. Yet Comel and her friends live with a sort of optimism that belongs to the narrative of “1Malaysia,” the government’s campaign to promote national togetherness and industry: they are part of the idea of a progressive, can-do country riding the swell of the material transformations taking place in Asia in the 21st century. Like so much else in photographer Ian Teh’s work, she occupies that space in between two worlds, two conflicting realities. She both is and isn’t what she appears to be, nor – crucially – what she wants to be.

 

viaYou Need To Look Away: Visions Of Contemporary Malaysia | The Weeklings.