Fade to Grey

I often find myself staring out into yonder. People watching.
I see people going about their daily lives, living out the daily grind.
Funny how that means something different to everyone.
I see a man watching the traffic go by, and I wonder what he's thinking.
A poor man, guiding in a rich man's car. Waiting for the menial sum to be pushed out the window afterwards. Why is that? What caused his world to be that way?

It's easy to excuse the poor as a simple people, with simple thoughts, and not the lofty ideals notions that we possess. When we see a plot of land, we see a house or a development: an investment for the future, or another piece of the puzzle that is our life's goals.
A poor man sees a plot of land... What does he see? What does he think? Does his simple life dictate that he holds simple views? Does he possess the capacity to be financially successful? Is he limited by his resources, or are his resources limited by his mindset? Or is he a victim of circumstance: a rich, influential, intelligent man, trapped in the body of a peasant?

Depending on which scale you measured by, my wife and I are either moderately well off or obscenely rich. Monetary stature aside, one area of true richness we hold is in the friendships we've made.

Over a beer or three, a friend and I talked about life.

My friend is a well educated man. Now by that I don't necessarily mean he's a Rhode Scholar. He is academically clever enough: but the wisdom I refer to is drawn from years lived abroad, in different countries and cultures, working with people to find solutions to whatever problems they may face. He has formed what many lack, and what is almost impossible to teach in a lecture hall. He has what I would refer to as a balanced world view, something many professors, lecturers, and leaders of nations have failed to grasp - and yet which is something that is required to prevent prejudice, judgement, and racism within yourself.

On this fine afternoon, we saw fit to cover the big issues. One of which was the issues of bar girls.

'Bar girls' is an innocent enough term in Australia. When applied to Thailand, however, it takes on a different angle.

You see, a bar girl starts the night serving beer, and talking to the patrons. It's very common for people to go to a bar by themselves- think of travelling businessmen, for example. There's nothing sadder than a man sitting in a bar by himself, drowning his sorrows. Someone to talk to is nice. So the girls will sit by him, across the bar, hanging on his every word. He opens up, because... well. His wife/friends/parents/boss doesn't understand him anyway, and buys her a drink, and buys many more for himself and for her. And her wage is justified again.

Now, during the course of the night, should someone take a particular fancy to that bargirl, her full attention can be purchased from the bar for the remainder of the evening. This purchase is referred to as the barfine. Following the payment, a second, personal payment will be negotiated with the bar girl as to the end result of the night's activities.

If you have an inkling that what I'm referring to is prostitution, then you're pretty much on the money. But if you're thinking this girl is a prostitute, then you're only half right.

My friend works in different countries throughout south east asia. To his credit, he's gone to the effort of learning the language of at least one of the countries that he has lived in. So he's in a bar, having a beer, and quite bored. So he begins chatting to one of the bar girls. He's talking in her native language, which is making things a lot easier on her behalf.

The direction of the conversation soon turns to what brought her to be working in a girly bar in Phuket.

I'm from the country, she explains, and I send money home to my family. I can make money here I could never make back at home.

So, what of the mechanics of this whole thing? Do you have much say in who you go home with at the end of the night?

She explains that she's not planning on working here for long. She'd like to meet someone one day, maybe marry a guy who once came to the bar. Other girls she knows have done it, and are living a good life. And besides, it's not like she'd go home with just anyone. She wouldn't go home with a jerk, just the nice guys. She'd never leave with someone she doesn't feel safe with.
Kinda, if you think about it... the sort of guy she'd like to stay with.

All of this got me thinking.

We live in a polished, western world. Even those of us who have left the western world still see everything through our own western lenses. Culture, whether it be ours or theirs, never goes away, and never stops influencing how we view a given situation.

"You grow up your whole life with people telling you that things are black or white," he says.

This girl's a bargirl.
This girl's a slut.
This one's a whore.
This one... well, she's just looking for a man.

"But it doesn't work."

Life, he says, is grey. You can't make a judgement on something by what you see on the outside.

In that moment he spoke of more wisdom that I've read in any textbook, heard from a pulpit, or spat from my own mouth.

You don't know, because you don't know her.

Or him. Or them. Or anything.

Maybe. Just maybe.

If we looked at life as though it were grey, maybe we wouldn't see bargirls. Or whores. Or bums, peasants, beggars, queers, slags, or druggos.

We'd see people.

But all we see is problems.

Food culture.

I should really take photos before I stir it all up 

Roast pork wan tan mee, from the food hall near the office blocks. Chicken rice, with chili and lime sambal, from pretty much anywhere. Penang char kuey tau, preferably from Penang, but the place in Lucky Garden does a pretty good one too.

Tai bu mee. Pudu noodle, as my wife calls it. House-made wan tan noodles, soup with shrimp wan tans, sliced roast pork and minced pork gravy stuff on top, generous application of pickled jalepenoes, usually washed down with one of the (terrible!) sweet kopi ais – iced coffee. They use a cloth bag full of ground bean set in a pot of boiling water. Then they mix it with sweetened condensed milk. Because diabetes is for life, and not just for Christmas.

Anyway. I'm eating there one day, and there's a bloke sitting next to me in a business shirt and tie. The weather is stiflingly hot, and the hole-in-the-shed-wall of a place we're eating this delicious feast of the gods has neither AC nor fans, but here he is, patiently waiting on his bowl of steaming goodness while Jem and I shovel ours down our throats as fast as physics allow while letting slip occasional moans of gratefulness and indescribable satisfaction. Anyway, shirt guy is looking at me with a curious angle on one eyebrow. I stop wolfing for a moment and smile at him.

“How'd you hear about this place?” he says.

“Luck,” I reply, “we found it when we were looking for the market.”

He does the eyebrow thing again and leans back from the table a bit.

“This is the most authentic tai bu mee in the city,” he says.

“I walked a long way to have lunch here. My father used to eat here, and HIS father used to eat here too.”

Roast duck. Oh, sweet duck. What did you do that God would make you so delicious? Is there a verse missing in Genisis 3? Did I miss that in Sunday school?

“Cursed are you, oh duck,” saith the Lord, “For your sins, ye shall fly across the lands, seeking safety from the pit of Man's bellies. But your deliciousness shall know no bounds, and neither shall thine fleeing...”

I almost feel bad. To hell with steak, I could eat duck for the rest of my life and die happy. Morbidly obese, but if that's the cost of happiness, then put me down for five, please.

The other day I was on Zuckerburg's method of global productivity theft and I saw a post from a Malaysian I know who lives back home.

It's normal here, like everywhere else I presume, for some people to post pictures of their dinners before eating it. Now it may only be in Malaysia that people go to the extent bringing the SLR and five different lenses out to document their order, but Instagramming your food is pretty standard.

Ol' mate back home was pre-gramming, though. He was posting pictures of the food he was going to eat tomorrow. There's some excitement levels without parallel on display here. It was food I recognised, too, roast pork, and ducks hanging up on hooks in the glass windows of the little food carts that you see anywhere in Asia.

But the following day, no lunch-o-gram was to be found. The shop had sold out, you see. I can only presume every Asian in Geelong has cleared them out before he arrived.

So I did the only thing an Australian male could do, and sent him pictures of my lunch – roast pork rice, with fresh sambal on the side. And then I took some photos around the shop.

Big trays of beef rendang. Curried mutton. Brianni rice. Piles of uncooked wan tan mee. I thought I had him on the ropes.

I was wrong.

“Are you sure you want to come home, Joshua?”

The roast pork turned to ash in my mouth. The smell of duck made me sad. The fish heads peered up from the baymaree, YOU'LL MISS US WHEN WE'RE GONE they mouthed, in a silent, dead fish kinda way.
Game. Set. Match. The slender Malaysian man in the corner, tapping on his phone between consultations.

Well. I used to be sure.

It's been said you can never judge another's culture without bias, because you can never un-learn the culture of yourself. But everyone tries, and you make discernment on what you see all the same.

I don't get why being thirty minutes late to work is ok, but it's frowned upon to arrive on time, but leave at six.

I don't get why people slow down to take photos of accidents on the roadside.

I don't get why 'yes' means yes, no, I don't know, I'll check, we don't have that, I can't, and maybe.

And I don't get why in spite of crazy working hours, everyone takes their full hour at lunch time. But I kinda wish I did.

I'm not really employed at the moment, but for a while I was working underneath perhaps one of the most successful PR men in SEA. An older Australian man, who claims five divorces as the only reason for him to keep working as his age. He walks by his secretary's desk and pauses. Looks at her, and smiles.

He turns to me.

“You know,” he starts, “one of the things I've learned over the years, is that it doesn't matter what is happening, or how busy you might be. Whatever crazy situation you find yourself in, everything will always stop for makan.(eating)”

His secretary smiles.

“Of course,” she says, swallowing her noodles, “lunchtime is sacred.”

I don't get a lot of things I see here in Malaysia.

I parked my junk of a scooter outside an upper-class plaza in KL. Between a Harley bagger and a shiny Kawasaki. The guard approached me, and told me I couldn't do that. I pointed at the other bikes, but he kept saying no until I took of my full-face and he saw I was white.

“Malay, cannot,” he says, “Indian, Chinese cannot, but you sir, can.”

I hate that his job is to discriminate.

But then, I've never seen a homeless man turned away from a mammak. He goes to the owner, who points him to a chair, and serves him. I've tried to pay for his meals in this situation before – always, always the owner has refused.

Food is a right. Feeding is a responsibility, carried out by the lowest earning restaurateurs in the city.

I don't know why we don't see things the same way.

But I really wish I did.