….one need only set foot in Laos to feel that there is
something uniquely poetic in the air. The days are long and slow, and the
people have a tranquil sweetness that is not found elsewhere in Indochina. The
French, who well knew the peoples they ruled, used to say: ‘The Vietnamese
plant rice, the Khmer stand there and watch, and the Laotians listen to it
growing.’
What an ugly invention is tourism! …. It has reduced the
world to a vast playground, a Disneyland ….. Is it not through the wear and
tear of tens of thousands of snapshots taken by distracted tourists that our
churches have lost their sanctity and our monuments their patina of greatness?
…..the vulgar modernity of Bangkok – dirty, chaotic,
stinking, where the water is polluted and the air lead-poisoned, where one
person in five has no proper home, one in sixty, including newborns, is
HIV-positive, one woman in thirty works as a prostitute, and someone commits
suicide every hour.
Living in Asia, I have told myself again and again that
there is no culture with the capacity to resits, to express itself with renewed
creativity. Chinese culture has been moribund for at least a century, and Mao,
in the effort to found a new China, murdered the little that remained of the
old. …..
Which Asian culture has preserved its own springs of
creativity? Which is still able to regenerate itself, to develop its own models
……
India, India? I said to myself, nursing the hope – or
perhaps the illusion – of a last enclave of spirituality. India, where there is
still plenty of madness. India, which gives hospitality to the Dalai Lama.
India, where the dollar is not yet the sole measure of greatness.
Where was the Malaysia of twenty years ago? The woman in
sarongs, wearing brassieres that always seemed a size too small, and skin-tight
lace blouses? Where were the rich colors and bodies whose joy seemed to reflect
nature’s? Swept away by Islamic austerity? In the Malaysia I knew in the
seventies, religion was marginal. The Malays had their mosques and he Chinese
their temples …. But then, to defend themselves against the overwhelming
economic power and materialist culture of the Chinese, the Malays began
slavishly following Islam. They took away their woman’s sarongs and gave them
veils and loose two-piece gowns, and shut themselves up in the citadels of
their mosques.
At the border post all the policemen and customs officials
were Malays. The taxi drivers, who offered to take me to the next town ….were
all Chinese. ….
The Malays have the political power, the Chinese have the
money…..
The Malay Federation, born in 1957 with a population that
was 40 per cent Chinese and 50 per cent Malay ….Now ….the races are more
hostile. The Chinese have become richer and the Malays more numerous. The
Chinese now comprise only 32 per cent of the population ….
When I was a boy and someone died, it was a choral event.
All the neighbours came to lend a hand. Death was displayed. The house was
opened, the deceased was visible, and so everyone became acquainted with death.
Today death is an embarrassment, it is hidden. No one knows how to manage it,
what to do with the deceased. The experience of death is becoming more and more
rare, and one may well arrive at one’s own without ever having witnessed
another’s.
M.G.G, at the steering wheel, had been telling me that one
of the consequence of imposing veils on Malay women was that the dermatologists
were making a great deal of money. Given the hot and humid tropical climate,
the poor creatures, who had previously washed frequently, oiled their hair and
left it exposed to the air, were now developing eczema and sores on their
heads. Many went bald.
By the end of the fifteenth century, Malacca was the largest
emporium in the Orient. The products of several continents were traded there ….
Apart from the Malays and Chinese there were Persians, Arabs, Indians from
Gujarat and from the southern empire of Kalinga, there were Africans ….Someone
has counted the languages that were spoken in Malacca at that time:
eighty-four.
Once upon a time Singapore was a city full of smells –
smells of mould, damp earth, fresh fruits, decaying vegetables, fried garlic,
rotting wood. These too had disappeared. ….. I spent my days in a continual
seesaw between admiration and disgust, between wonder and horror ….. The future
is the invention of one individual: Lee Kuan Yew, a man of great intelligence,
great arrogance, great ambition and no scruples ….he has created the most
efficient and least corrupt administration of all the Asian states, paying its
officials like captains of industry ….has established one of the most advanced
educational systems in Asia …There is no question that his experiment has been
highly successful.
The price? A city without life, a humdrum people, and
dictatorship. ….
Archives of Singapore newspapers are extremely hard to find,
even Lee Kuan Yew’s speeches are a state secret. They would reveal too many
contradictions, too many changes of line …..By now all non-Chinese, still 25
per cent of the population, feel excluded. ….
Lee Kuan Yew has done all this with firmness, at times with
unnecessary cruelty, without respect for anything or anybody, and above all
with no qualms of conscience. ….
Whole areas of old Singapore have been razed to the ground.
Whole generations of Singaporeans have been whipped into line by a
sophisticated system of creepin terror.
The ratio of policemen to population in Singapore is among
the highest in the world…..
Under a state security law, anyone can be arrested and
detained indefinitely. Dissenters, real or merely suspected, used to be kept in
prison for years without trial – the record was twenty-three years. Now the
systm has changed. A person is arrested, ‘broken’, and returned to circulation
with a government job where he can be constantly blackmailed and kept under
control
Indonesia has a population of 190 million. The Chinese
constitute barely 2 per cent, but 70 per cent of the country’s trade is in
their hands, and the top five industrial groups and the major banks are theirs.
….
..the diaspora Chinese – strong, tough, hard-working, always
ready to move on and adopt the passport of any state that would guarantee them
security and protection….
Father Willem ….the Chinese are a minority everywhere, and
everywhere the most enterprising, the most active, the wealthiest….
Today’s Indonesia is an empire held together and dominated
by the Javanese, who hold key positions in the army and the civil
administration. They realize that the strength of Indonesia depends on its
remaining united. Hence the military dictatorship, hence the instant brutal use
of violence against any dissent or any demand for greater autonomy.
Time and silence – so necessary, so natural – have by now
become luxuries which only a few can afford. That is why depression is on the
increase.
In my case, it started in Japan, where life was a constant
rush, packed with obligations, every relationship difficult and strained. I
never had – or thought I never had – a moment to catch my breath….
In Japan the whole society is in a straitjacket, the people
are always playing a part and can never behave naturally. Just being there was
oppressive …
What has happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 under
the Khmer Rouge regime defies any fantasy of horror ….A million and a half,
perhaps two million Cambodians, a third of the population, were
eliminated….Everywhere new mass graves were being found. There were survivors
who could not bring themselves to get on a boat since they had seen their
relatives taken to the middle of a lake and fed to the crocodiles. Others could
not climb a tree, because Khmer Rouge had used trees to test their victims and
decide who should live and who should die. Those who could reach the top were
considered peasants, who could be employed, the others were intellectuals, to
be eliminated. … In Cambodia even nature has lost its comforting innocence. ….
For the people of Vietnam, Cambodia has become a sort of
El-dorado: the country is underpopulated, the rice fields are fertile, the
rivers full of fish, and the cities full of people who have got rich quickly
with the traffics of war and then of peace and the United Nations…..
The difference from Cambodia is immediately striking. After
the semi-deserted Khmer plains, Vietnam seems absolutely crammed with people.
People sawing, hammering, welding, sewing, cooking, in what looks like an
obsessive preoccupation with survival.
This old, gigantic empire still called itself socialist, but
by now even China seemed to know only one god. ‘Qian’ was the first word that greeted me: qian, money, was the word I heard in every conversation during the
five days I spent crossing China from south to north. ….Passengers on the
minibus ….offered me, in exchange for qian,
tiny monkeys, fat snakes and other rare jungle animals, most of them no doubt
in the Red Book of endangered species. I didn’t buy any and they all travelled
on, in their bamboo cages, towards the cooking pots of the great restaurants of
southern China….
It took me three hours to buy my ticket – time to experience
a hostility which I had never before felt in China. The impatience between
foreigners and Chinese is mutual, and in the Chinese it is now mixed with envy,
anger, and an ever less concealed racial aspiration to settle old scores with
outsiders.
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