My mother's milk is expensive (Melakan Portuguese dilemma) -- Part 1

I spend an entire lazy afternoon in Kampung Portugis speaking in papiaçam -- the Creole Portuguese of Macau/Melaka -- with Noel Felix. With us is one of the few Portuguese-speaking young scholars of Malaysia. (She's not of Portuguese origin.)

Felix can speak for hours on end in front of his Carlsberg. As I heard him out, I realised the many complex paradoxes of being Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. For that's what Felix considers the Melakan Portuguese to be, besides being Portuguese-speaking Malaysian. They are not a Creole community; they are Portuguese and speak Portuguese, though of course he is aware that they are not European Portuguese, nor is the language the same as that of Portugal.

Felix says he speaks old Portuguese, not Creole. He has been to Portugal once. He has a daughter who once lived in Brazil and now speaks to him in Brazilian Portuguese. He does not mind. He finds Brazilian Portuguese and Melakan Portuguese to be very close. Or, at any rate, closer than either of them is to Portugal's Portuguese. (I have difficulty with this in its spoken forms. I would often ask friends in Macau to repeat what they had just said to me, sometimes twice, only to realise that I was unable to make it out. It would have been embarrassing to ask them to say it in English, of course.

In Melaka, I have difficulty following local Portuguese, but if I'm persistent and my interlocutor patient -- and Felix is patient -- then we manage to communicate. (I must confess, however, that I'm more a listener than a talker). In another context and in another time, he might be considered a language nationalist of some sort. However, in the modest environment of the kampung in Melaka, he is someone who does not want his traditions to disappear, perhaps because he grew up with them. He says his mother's milk is expensive. He imbibed the language from her.

He does not want to give his language up nor does he take easily to the fact that his community is clearly losing it -- young people in particular can understand it though they do not speak it as fluently as their parents. They prefer to talk in English and Malay. In fact Felix interrupts our conversation for about an hour to go and teach a Portuguese class to some of the kampung's young people. Voluntary work.

The lady who runs the restaurant where we are sitting and talking puts his beer bottle into the refrigerator. At one point, he was in doubt if he should take it along with him.

Perhaps everything is changing, and too fast. Noel is very religious, like all community elders I have spoken to so far. He goes off into a long tirade about morals and religion at the slightest provocation. I wonder how appealing that is for the younger generation.

The Portuguese community has always been an open group: the descendants of the Dutch in Melaka speak Portuguese too and are often counted as members of the community. (I don't believe anybody speaks Dutch in Melaka any more.) Noel still inveighs against the label Eurasian every now and then, his point being that it does not root people in any country, but is vague and general. It was a designation used by the British colonials, that was accepted by the community before it refashioned itself as Portuguese. Noel must have been a teenager when the identity shift took place. I am not aware of anyone in Melaka who calls himself or herself Eurasian, and there is certainly no visible community that claims that identity now.

The point Noel hammers home again and again is that the community is Portuguese, and Lusophone (i.e. Portuguese-speaking).

Call for New Asian Short Stories

Call for New Asian Short Stories

Professor Kirpal Singh of Singapore Management University and Professor M.A. Quayum of International Islamic University Malaysia will coedit a new collection of Asian short stories. New and previously unpublished short stories are invited from writers of Asian origin/background or those writing about Asian life, culture and experience. Submissions should be sent to asianshortstories@gmail.com by 15 July 2014. The edited volume is expected to come out by the end of 2014.

Terms and conditions of entry:

1.     Writers must be of Asian origin/background or writing about Asian life, culture and experience.

2.     Submission ought to be new, unpublished and not submitted elsewhere.

3.     Each author is allowed to submit only one story.

4.     Stories must be in English, typed double-spaced in Times New Roman.

5.     Stories should not exceed 6000 words in length.

6.     Submissions in any other genre are not considered.

7.     Writers should include their name and a brief profile (100 words max.) on the cover page of the submission.

8.     No submissions will be accepted by post or after the deadline.

9.     Successful writers will be contacted on or before 30 September 2014.

10.  Further queries about the project should be sent to the email address above.

About the Editors

Kirpal Singh is a renowned poet and academic, and Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre at the Singapore Management University.

M.A. Quayum is the author, editor or translator of 27 books. He is currently Professor of English at International Islamic University Malaysia and Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University, Australia.

Please forward this to friend who might be interested.

Páscoa (Easter), 2010

(The author, Fernando Rosa Baragül, is a Brazilian anthropologist based in Kuala Lumpur and Melaka.)

Easter. There were so many people at St Peter's Church in Melaka (built in 1710 - two images on the right) that it was impossible to go in. It was not unlike an Easter procession in Brazil. Even as a child I had found that there was something slightly gloomy about processions. This one was no exception as it wound its way along the Melaka river early in the evening, with thousands of people, stopping and then starting again when someone gave a signal (usually by clapping hands). All those at the head of the procession were men. This compared well with my vague memories of its counterpart in Brazil. It was indeed a very male procession.

People said that it was the first time in many years that the procession has been allowed outside the church grounds, and they were excited. (In Brazil, processions normally proceed along the streets). Some people thought this was the first time in history that the procession was allowed onto the streets. But they were wrong. I learnt that as late as the late 1960s (and some years after that ), the Easter procession in Melaka was along the streets. It is intriguing how short historical memory is. It was something that had gone on for centuries, then stopped for a couple of recent decades by the government, and was already fading out of social memory. I was certain, however, that the Portuguese community - especially the older members - still remembered.

There was not much difference between this procession and the ones I had watched occasionally as a child (my family was not religious). There was one difference however, and it stood out  prominently: many of the participants in Melaka were not even Catholics. It was obviously a religious and social event that everyone participated in. It was the hub or fulcrum for Melaka's incredibly varied society. Someone told me that in old times people would carry large incense sticks used in Chinese temples instead of candles. I did not see any this time. There were only candles (and there were many sellers of these by the gate to the church grounds). Long candles of the same type I remembered from home; giving out light in the gloom.

I did not feel like staying on, however. It was hot and crowded, and somewhat too familiar to hold much fascination. It was funny how familiarity triggered disinterest. Nonetheless, it was all reassuringly familiar. It served as a point of reference, an anchor even, because of my own history. It was something so parochial that, at home, I would not have even given it a second thought. On the contrary, I would have shunned it for being boring.

Religion feels so different in Melaka when compared to Brasil. Here, it envelops everything, it's part of the social fabric. Religion here is as important as ethnicity, and commerce is thoroughly intertwined with both. It is funny how academics seem not to see it, and treat ethnicity as either part of politics or folklore. But it is part of neither. It is about being a part of the world -- being different in different ways. It is also not fixed, and that's why the Easter procession and the mass are Melaka events, not merely Portuguese ones. The Portuguese run the show, but it is for everybody.

It was also intriguing how many inquired later, over and over, whether I had witnessed it. They somehow also acknowledged my history as theirs.


Fernando Rosa Baragül has worked in the Caribbean, Cape Town, Kerala, and was, until 1999, in Macau. He is also interested in Dutch-Afrikaans, Arabic, and Malay writings, and the possible overlap between them.
 
His latest publications include a comparison between Brazil and Kerala in the rise of local literary canons and modernity; a bird's-eye-view of African language materials generated in South Africa in the twentieth century, and their racial underpinnings; and a book chapter (in Portuguese) comparing Cape Town and Melaka in terms of their history, urbanscape and people. His next publications will be a comparative study of two authors, namely Garcia d'Orta and Sheikh Zainuddin, one Jewish, the other Muslim, the former writing in Portuguese, the latter in Arabic, respectively in sixteenth century Goa and north Kerala.

Flight MH72

Flight MH72 by Krish Ram

Susan has managed to find an empty table after hovering around a couple with large Coke in one hand and a bag of french fires in the other, and waiting for them to leave, at the McDonald’s outlet at the departure lounge of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

She looks around her as she nibbles on a piece of deep fried spud, feeling lonely seeing all those others who have come to send off families and friends but, at the same time, she’s glad that she’s alone. Her children are in school, and know that she’d not be home when they return in the afternoon in the same bus, for they are aware that she's leaving to Hong Kong for a job.

“Two years? Why so long? Can we come and visit? Hong Kong has Disneyland, you know?” Mei Ling is only seven. Kar Jin, her boy, who is fast becoming a teenager at nine, had simply shrugged like he knew everything, but didn’t. Or, did he?

We’ll see, darling, she had said, giving her a hug and a peck on her cheek and turning away quickly as she fought back tears, whilst pretending to shout out homework instructions to her son who was already on his way out to the bus-stop. She had cried miserably after they left, while her husband watched her wordlessly from the living room couch. At least, he had lowered his newspapers.

Only her husband knew, and she had had his approval, not that it mattered much. It had not been his idea and had hardly offered an opinion. He had increasingly withdrawn into himself ever since the restructuring exercise in his company. It was a choice between taking a pay-cut and voluntary retirement. He had chosen the latter, and it didn’t take him long to understand what the 8% national unemployment figure meant. He had too much pride to take a job that paid less than his earlier one. That was three years ago, and he has not worked since.

Susan thought she should have seen the signs. She had wondered about the increasing numbers of ‘Bank Lelong’ notices along the roads around Bangsar, written with marker pens on packing-box cardboard, and stuck to lampposts. She had once said to her husband that they should seriously think about using these bank auctions as a means for home upgrading. He had smiled and remained silent. Then, she started noticing the notices in banks, too. She once took a hefty printout, and browsed through it while waiting for her number to be called by the teller. She had been mildly surprised at the number of houses being foreclosed. She had shuddered, and had been glad her family was not part of that statistic. “Poor things,” she had thought. “Where will they live?”

To be honest, she had never understood when friends talked about ‘the economy tanking’, although she had shown sufficient concern, nodding and agreeing vigorously when they talked about the bursting property bubble, or the crashing stock market, or unemployment figures, or the plunging ringgit. To someone like her, who’d been a home-maker most of her adult life, these were mere numbers that existed in a parallel universe, like video-game scores. Sometimes it would get heated, particularly when they discussed politics, at which point Susan would quickly go into her kitchen and return with nonya kueh she had bought from the auntie outside TMC that morning. “ Anyone for kueh bengkang?”

Then they got a notice from the bank. Her husband had not paid the mortgage instalment for almost two years; nothing, since he lost his job. Maybe there were other notices that she had not seen. She doesn’t know why she had opened that letter, because it’s not like her to open her husband’s mail. She had slit open the envelope and had started reading it absent-mindedly before realising it was addressed to him.

They had argued that night. Well, she did. Him, not so much, his stony silence saying everything. Then, she had sobbed for a long time, thinking of all the worst-case scenarios. He said calmly that they should sell the house. She had argued and sobbed some more at that. It was almost paid for, she had cried. “We can’t repay the mortgage any more,” he had said. “I don’t have a job.” Well, if you were not so damned stubborn she had wanted to say, but had bit her tongue. He had worked so hard for so long before. They had been living on his savings all this while, he had said. He had not serviced the housing loan because he had not wanted to affect their lifestyles.

“What were you thinking? What happens when we run out of money?”

That's what happened, finally. The house was sold at an auction; they got some money back after the bank did the sums, and they rented a seven-hundred-square-foot flat in Taman Desa.

She thought she’d get a job; she did have a masters degree in English Literature from the University of Malaya, after all. She tried running tuition classes. She got a few students, but only made enough money only for utility and grocery bills. There were far too many unemployed graduates, and they were all running these classes. Schools were not hiring; not even kindergartens. She was willing to work as a clerk or a secretary, but she got no calls for interviews. She was over qualified for them, they said when she inquired. The unemployment figures were now at 9% and rising. No one had expected it to get so bad so quickly. Meanwhile, they kept eating out of their piggy bank. Once, she thought she was desperate enough to flip burgers at the local MacDonald’s, but her pride would not let her. What if I’m seen, she had thought.

Then, she saw the advertisement by an agency. She applied for the position, a job overseas. She was desperate. She was interviewed, and selected. The pay was good; almost RM3000.00 plus when converted back. But she didn't speak Chinese. The agency told her not to worry about anything; they’d be given training and language lessons before they left. It was also the agency that suggested she changed her name to Susan from Wei Fern. It was easier to say and remember it, they said.

So, here she is in the airport, waiting for her flight to Hong Kong. She had chosen to fly on her own by Malaysia Airlines. Let me at least save a little of my dignity, she had decided. The others were travelling in a group on a budget airline, but Susan was afraid someone might see her. We’ll meet in Hong Kong, she had said, lying to them about some prior commitment.

“Malaysia Airways flight MH72 to Hong Kong is now ready for boarding. All passengers are requested to proceed to Gate C11 immediately,” she hears over the PA system. She sees some people grab their bags, and their children; some hugging, some kissing. She decides to wait out the rush.

Finally, on the third announcement, she gathers her bags and heads to the immigration counters to begin her two year contract as a domestic maid in Hong Kong. The couple have two children and I have a masters in English; maybe I could be their governess, she’d think sometimes, before real visions of toilet brushes, scrubbing pads and mops crowded her mind, and a sob ran up her throat. Anyway, she has decided tell that to her friends on Facebook and that she’ll mainly teach English to little Chinese brats in a palatial home on the island. I’m sure they have a big home.

It was only three years ago that she had had her own live-in Indonesian maid in Bukit Damansara. She remembers how she had complained to her neighbour when her husband took the maid to Pantai Hospital for treatment when she collapsed suddenly.

“No need to waste so much money, mah,” she had told Mrs Khoo. “She's only a servant, what?”

She, suddenly, stops in her tracks. “Oh my God; what if they beat me?”