A Trip To The Market

I am a junkie for word vomit because I’m the son of a junkie for word vomit.

* * * * *

We exited the monorail at the Chow Kit station. It was my idea to come see the neighbourhood wet market. A. had come here a couple weeks back to pick-up some fruit, and the bounty she and M. had returned with then made me regret not going. I figured I might also be able to snatch a pair of discount, knock-off shades at a good price in addition to seeing the sights and sampling the produce. It struck me as terribly uncouth to be wandering countries bathed in relentless tropical sun without a second pair of wayfarers to lend depth to my already skinny wardrobe. The past year had taught me I was a wayfarer guy—variations of the classic Ray-Ban silhouette suited my face well enough, and the always-present overtones of a bygone, late-50s era accented my predilection for vintage tones. We were a personality match despite the onslaught of its resurgent trendiness and will likely continue as such once both of us fall well out-of-style.

Mother and father braved the oncoming afternoon heat to accompany me. What else were they going to do? How else were a couple of actual retirees and a semi-retiree supposed to spend a nondescript Thursday? Besides, they reasoned, they hadn’t been to that part of the city since they left Malaysia the first time. Somehow, the numerous return trips since never afforded the opportunity. Kuala Lumpur was big, their actual hometown was Ipoh, several hours’ drive North, and the near-thirty year interim since they spent their early working lives here was a life lived half a world away in Canada. Chow Kit had never figured on the agenda.

The neighborhood had long been anchored by the market—and along with the surrounding area, originally and predominantly, Chinese. The nature of an urban, Asian market—tight, overcrowded, jammed-into the smallest pockets of labyrinthine alleys and dead ends—was echoed as the elevated monorail car pulled into the station. The ragged buildings and shopfronts inching perilously close to the track, their cracked-glass windows breathing down our collars like suspicious old men along the corridor to a back-room gambling den. The station itself stood above a suddenly-cleared roundabout; a manicured knot where a tangle of KL’s congested, serpentine roadways can catch a brief respite of air. We stepped-onto a lower concourse, still suspended above the realigned, re-made streets. My father took in the vista that the stairs had directed into our view. He began mouthing the inaudible syllables to the beginnings of words, cryptically stuttering into being, Yeah, this is where it all started.

As the years push us further apart into some incomprehensible sea of irreconcilable difference, this type of moment is one of the few remaining where I find my father endearing. When a place rises up from the grave modernity has nearly buried it in to give his memories a footing. He catches something familiar, then another, connecting the dots and sketching the outline of a once vivid tableau. Like a child just learning to read, his lips start groping for the shape of a story. His eyes arc from a grey sheet of casual disinterest into the intense focus of the deepest black; the soft, night moon giving way to the burning sun of day. Often, it is a story I’ve heard many times over but completely out of context. A tale told over a dinner table, or in passing on a cold, Canadian evening between one of the many violent disagreements fathers and sons like him and I have. Sometimes, despite the thick volume of his back catalogue, the tale is shockingly new to me. Sometimes, the tales seem wildly fantastic, unbelievable. These are always the ones that turn out to be true.

* * * * *

Yes. Definitely. This is where it all started. He repeated.

What started? I asked, half-knowing the answer (it always paid to tease the stories out of him by playing the part of idiot listener).

Why, May 13th, of course…

* * * * *

Only since I had arrived in Malaysia this time around had the history of May 13th begun to unspool in vivid and horrendous drips and drabs. M. had a voracious appetite for history and politics, and I too was keen insomuch as some (preferably) personal narrative could also be drawn from their discussion. Both of us were sorely lacking on such a socio-political-historical foundation concerning our supposed motherland, Malaysia. We both had used gatherings liberally dosed with relatives and old-timers over the Chinese New Year celebrations to cull together a larger picture.

The May 13th in question happened in 1969 (did all defining, modern social and political upheaval around the world happen in either 1968, 1969 and in the month of May for that matter?). And without doubt or dissent, it was indeed the darkest day in the Federation of Malaysia’s young history. Not that you can get official recognition as to what happened, nor a truly public account of the facts without polarizing opinions and/or fear of recrimination. On May 13th, 1969, much of urban Malaysia became engulfed in bloody and vicious race riots. KL was both the flash-point, the beginning and the bloodiest and nastiest of the incidents.

The roots of what would become May 13th were sown long before. In fact, they were sown in the birthing of the nation (as is often the case of most any nation’s upheaval). I cannot say with any authority exactly what all the many contributing events and factors were, but quite simply, it has everything to do with the post-colonial struggle of the native Malay majority to assert dominant political, economic and social control over the country. Not that in the wake of the British desertion of colonial rule the Malays were a clear majority—they numbered (without inclusion of various, distinct indigenous tribes) just over 4 million, whereas the Malaysian Chinese numbered just under that. With Malaysian Indians also contributing at a healthy clip well over 2 million, you could almost say there was a near even distribution. Then, as now, it has always seemed that Malaysia operates at the everyday, everyman level purely as a fair coalition between the three major ethnic groups. Still—and despite the British laying major control of the massive rubber industry (the world’s leader at the time) almost entirely to the ruling Malay elite/government—the prevailing sentiment was that the Chinese had a disproportionate share of the economic wealth. Factions in the surging movement for conservative hegemony and native Malay rule always invoked this perception to bolster a ‘Malaysia for Malays’ nationalist fervor. They were known as the ultras (from the notion of being ‘ultra-Malay’) and being on the far right, supposedly championed a growing majority of the more impoverished Malays—both rural and urban. Not that the general sentiment of the country’s Chinese was any less disdainful. They too had always been victims of their own prejudices and ethnocentric nature. Still, a tenuous coalition including both Chinese and Indian parties but still primarily Malay-led held power under the Prime Minister in the run-up to the general election on May 10th. A small opposition of mostly Chinese and some Malay had been formed in reaction to the sliding, ultra pro-Malay agenda (one containing issues such as affirmative action for native Malays and a singular national language of Bahasa Malay as opposed to multilingualism) ever since the dismissal of Singapore from the Malaysian federation (an event that also included race riots and bloodshed of its own). It doesn’t appear that this left-of-center opposition wanted singular power or to enforce ideological rule (though were often linked to Communist factions) so much as to give democracy by representation a clear voice (and one of necessary dissent) in parliament.

Despite the tension, the elections of May 10th went off normally. Results were tallied. Much to the dismay of both the ruling Alliance, and the ultra-Malay UMNO party, the opposition parties managed to take all of Penang (where the mostly Chinese inhabited, major port city of Georgetown was located) and parts of Selangor (the state to which KL belonged at the time) at the state levels with inroads on the federal level too. Political naivete was at play when these ecstatic, energetic opposition parties decided to host victory parades that flirted with routes nearby traditionally Malay kampungs (Malay villages) throughout the city on May 12th. Vociferous jeering was involved as the underdogs had their day and simply decided to make more of it than necessary. This behaviour opened the door for retaliatory action—or at least incitements towards it. A simple day later, incensed Malays from all parties and stripes were mobilized for “anti-victory” parades. Though the sheer number, organization, and the uniform presence of traditional, long-stick weaponry strongly suggested this had been in the works for longer than the 24-hour reactionary period to the events the day before. When news and conjecture spread of Chinese violence towards Malays, a large group of men in uniform black and organized in military columns marched down from an already convened gathering at Chief Minister Dato’ Haurn Haji Idris’ house several kilometers away towards the Chinese neighbourhood and bustling market of Chow Kit.

They began lighting Chinese shops and houses aflame. Then they attacked. The Chinese in the markets were tipped-off, but only so much in advance as to arm themselves with the knives and meat cleavers already at their sides in their food stalls. It was mayhem. It was archaic bloodletting. The sheer numbers and surprise favored the Malay factions and a relative Chinese slaughter was at hand. Horrific personal descriptions of barbaric lynchings and people burned in their own vehicles have surfaced over the years. The action was coupled with almost clockwork flare-ups later in the day at various other locations throughout the country. Many pockets of the city were soon swallowed in ceaseless fire. A state of emergency was declared, the too-small numbers of local military detachments were deployed—and though their more sophisticated arms could have quelled both sides and the fighting in general, it somehow didn’t happen. The military was vastly populated by Malays, and sympathizers to the ultra cause—accounts that the soldiers simply stood-by and even turned their guns on the minority Chinese (and by then Indians too had joined the overwhelmed throng) have been many, but will likely never be verified by official sources within Malaysia. Both Time Magazine and Far Eastern Economic Review published accounts of this seeming massacre. The parliament would go on to be suspended for nearly two years (a security council of hardliners formed and placed in command), curfew lasted for days, and a state of emergency initiated that still technically lasts to this day. The official count of the dead would be 196 by the end, though many outside and international observers put it modestly at nearly ten times that.

Of course, with nearly everybody implicated to some degree in such an ugly, barbaric affair in modern 1969, and in a tiny, unnoticeable Southeast Asian country struggling desperately to defy the post-colonial fate and WW2 aftertaste that left this part of the world in a stricken, impoverished, often inhumane mess, May 13th goes unmentioned. It’s the footnote to a flawed but seemingly industrious, first-world aspiring, Muslim democracy’s history. A footnote written in vanishing ink. The chapter never read aloud. The story I never heard by the fire or between courses at dinner as a child.

* * * * *

They came from there. He said, pointing off to where Jalan Raja Muda curls behind the row of modern shopfronts. They marched with their weapons and torches yelling slogans. Right up to this roundabout here. He surveyed the terrain of the story constantly with his eyes, his head doing slow pans from right to left, every inch a second. Every second the memory drawing blood and into life from 1969 to be present right there.

Wow. I could only reply. And were you here to witness it?

Of course not! I was working in PJ at the time. That’s 30 minutes drive outside the city. We only heard this much later. But you can ask your mother. She lived right over there. He pointed behind a white-washed and marley-roofed warren of ramshackle homes dappled with cheap, concrete office buildings decaying in the hot sun. She was coming home from work.

My mother is the one person who has heard his voice, and all his stories the most. And she lived most of them with him too. She slipped out of her customary reverie—an unconscious reaction when she can hear and feel these self-aggrandizing, illustrated tour guide yarns coming on. This sudden news had me speechless, my face incredulously suspended in animation. She just turned towards us—still so elegant in her 60s, still with the innocence and aloof lightness of a schoolgirl caught off guard by the wandering rainbow of a passing butterfly.

Yeah. Of course. Just over there somewhere. She pointed in the same vicinity as my father had.

And, you were coming home from work that exact moment? I asked anxiously.

Yes, I was in a taxi. I saw the group. I saw all these strange men.

You see Malcolmm.. She worked- her school was over there. He pointed again, down the street from where the mob had come that late afternoon in 1969. Just five kilo-meters down the road. She was working there at the time. And living over somewhere here—aya. Maybe one street over, parallel to this one.

I said to myself, What are all these men for? What is going on? Isn’t this funny. I could tell by just how detached she described herself being, how matter-of-factly it rolled-off her tongue, that indeed it had been exactly like that.

And you thought it was a demonstration? I asked, words barely forming in my mind before shooting out my mouth.

Ah, ya, something like that-lah. You see, normally I walked home from the school… She said, still strangely above the fray—in the memory, in the present—like gossamer. I knew we only had her for another line of fact or two, she never lived in memories, nor even the moment sometimes. My mother has always been too beautiful a thing to be weighed down by anything as sullied as the past or a tragic story.

And that day you didn’t!?! You’re lucky mom. You were just safe enough in the taxi. You could’ve been killed otherwise.

She furrowed her brow, shot me a sideways glance and in a second it changed right back to light. I guess. She said. And then she floated off again.

You see. They came in this way. He said gesturing with his hands. Now his eyes were wild, his body had to move and follow suit, and I could see him begin to lather a bit at the mouth like a rabid dog. He’d caught the tail of this story and was ready to ride it. They came in here, you see. And they had all these knives, these sharp sticks, you see. And the Chinese in the market, they had been told-

By whom? I asked. I liked to play the simpleton. I liked to ask questions that didn’t matter, that there wasn’t a reasonable answer to. To rile him up a bit was to press your foot against the accelerator a tad.

Naww… But let’s just say, whomever lah. It doesn’t matter! They only had time to grab their knives and those y’know-

Meat cleavers? I had heard this part a couple weeks back in Ipoh for the first time.

Yes, of course. Certainly. And they attacked back! A-haw, a-haw… He made some swift, efficient but excited chops in the air and shuffled his feet to suggest movement.

And where were you at this time? Did you know what was going on? Did you know mom was in danger?

Ahhww, I didn’t know-lah. He scoffed, looking at me as if I were an idiot (which for the most part, I am to him). I was all the way in PJ. He paused. His head began to tick, knocking loose the dregs of another memory. I was driving. From work, down the federal highway to KL to come see your mom. He started slowly. I did this almost every night. Then I saw this big fire in the roadway. Right at Kampung Kerinchi.

I had gotten into the pitch and roll of the story and feigned my fourth look of awe or shock in the last two minutes of hearing the tale. And what did you do?

What could I do-lah! The highway was blocked. I was driving my old beetle. He smiled at this. He loved to invoke old models and makes of cars in his stories—they were like watermarks that helped him navigate the depths. And you know… He giggled and passed a finger over his mouth and the other hand softly on my shoulder as if telling me a conspiratorial secret. I had to jump the curb and make a u-turn. That little car you know, has no clearance.

Did you know what was going on then? When did you know that something was wrong?

Still no idea-lah. I could only see that the city was burning.

Surely, you were worried. Surely you knew it was bad.

How could I know anything? A look of surprised befuddlement coming over his face. His eyes, and the lines of his jowls now painting just as vigorously as his words the tale. I just drove straight back to my favourite hawker stand in PJ to get myself some dinner. I was hungry. It was supper time.

And…?

Well, just as they finished making it, all of a sudden this big police truck with you know, those loudspeakers came rumbling by. “Everybody go home now! This is a curfew! Go home immediately or be arrested!” He cupped his hands over his mouth, stretched feebly to plumb the depths of his voice.

So now you knew something was up?

Yes, of course. Certainly.

Then what did you do? Did you try to contact mom?

What could I do? There were few phones in those days. We didn’t have hand-phones like today.

So?

So. I just asked them to bungoose my dinner so I could take it home with me. And I ate at home.