On a hot dusty afternoon, the sky bluer than the huge Barisan Nasional banners flapping near this warung in what is now dubbed Bangsar South but is forever the remote Kerinchi of my childhood, a wiry 70-year-old Meng opens up a little about why he’s compelled to spend humid nights planting flags and banners for Raja Nong Chik Zainal Abidin around the Lembah Pantai constituency.
Looking a good decade younger despite his few stained teeth the colour of the cracked tiles sizzling in the sun just beyond our table, Meng knows Lembah Pantai is a keenly contested area but his reasoning is clear.
The minister and his toothy smiles are often seen even where he lives near Jalan Kuchai Lama, swiftly attending to much disparaged longkang-and-utilities problems that Meng’s still resigned to after years of working in the sprawl of Pantai Dalam.
This building and renovations contractor is less impressed with the MCA, despite having secured his low-cost flat’s title with the MCA’s help after several years of going nowhere inside DBKL’s bureaucracy.
Though we at first try speaking in my (poor) Hakka, it’s much less painful for him when we end up chatting in Malay. As he explains, his clients since the boom years of the 1990s, when this corner of Kerinchi opened up for development, are mostly what he describes as “Melayu Baru” with interior renovations and a “logat bandar” to match.
With a weathered eye glancing at the huge thunderstorm approaching and threatening to wash away all his banner work later this afternoon, he says he has no issues about incumbent MP Nurul Izzah Anwar but Raja Nong Chik has delivered on his promises, at least in the small pocket of Meng’s universe.
Moreover, he says he remembers the fears of his neighbourhood during the unsettling “reformasi” years of the late 1990s. While he no longer seems to see his mixed neighbourhood of Malays, Chinese and “immigrants” in the divided terms still favoured by many politicians, he has become more conscious of where his “orang kecil” fit into this heaving, brutally expensive leviathan of Kuala Lumpur, a far cry from his childhood casually spent at funfairs in faraway Bukit Bintang.
His neighbourhood, he says, has been pummelled by the rapidly rising costs of living, the congestion and the worry over fewer yet ever lower-paid jobs.
He senses the boom and optimism of the 1990s is long gone, just like the faded “Malaysia Boleh” and newer “1 Malaysia” stickers on the cigarette counter.
Only the daily struggle continues for his neighbourhood and some of his clients, juggling bills and Ah Long debts to keep themselves afloat financially.
For that reason alone, these elections are all about “small” issues, and whoever can ease the next week and the next month, never mind the next year.
Talk of the grand visions or political narratives of hope and change so many have invested in, for those living and working just the other side of the Federal Highway, are just quicksilver phrases he marvels at but doesn’t ingest.
So he doesn’t really understand why the prime minister’s image dominates so many of the street posters and advertisements beyond his neighbourhood, making him joke about the PM running against every single Opposition face he sees on the banners he passes whenever he goes to replenish his supplies around the Klang Valley.
It’s a presidential-style campaign, like in America, I tell him. But he seems indifferent ― he likes his choice of local candidate, who promises to alleviate some of the city’s crush, and that’s good enough for now.
A few days earlier, Nomination Day for Lembah Pantai was another hot, clear morning and despite the big posters of Raja Nong Chik flanking the temporary stage just off Jalan Bangkung in Bangsar, the bussed-in crowd on the Barisan Nasional side of the policed divide outside the nomination centre were praising the prime minister for recent BR1M payments and the promise of more to come.
A few offered up the BN “gift bag” that included nasi lemak and a BN-branded bottle of water, while the young band tuned up their guitars, waiting for their candidate to emerge from the nomination process.
Nobody was keen to expand on reasons why Raja Nong Chik (or RNC) was the better candidate beyond a slogan of “peace and stability”, though a few Indian Malaysians waving the BN flag who said they represented Hindraf spoke about RNC’s problem-solving skills with DBKL ― they laughed when asked about the seven tour buses parked nearby and whether they could get a holiday from their woes.
The physical divide that morning seemed stark when I bump into a few friends and acquaintances I had not seen in ages, not since my first years at university.
Now a well-established lawyer and deal-maker with an office in Bangsar, a feisty 50-year-old Liew said his support for “change” was necessary and urgent, his earlier discomfort over a Malaysia riven by corruption now translating into spending time and money on Nurul Izzah’s campaign.
Two other friends, another lawyer and an engineer, join in the conversation as we wait under a tree for Nurul Izzah to emerge. It’s soon obvious they urge the moral imperative for Nurul Izzah’s candidacy, that there is both an intellectual and emotional argument for “change” to happen, sooner rather than later.
Yet their enthusiasm belies a hunger for a new, compelling idea of what a Malaysian could be in this new century, a place that took citizenship seriously beyond what the engineer described as a fatuous 1 Malaysia where “BN shamelessly defends Project IC and Ibrahim Ali runs wild!”.
Maybe that’s the problem with the PM mounting a presidential-style campaign, where whatever sanguine sentiment there is for him personally is quickly disrupted by his side’s candidates like Zulkifli Noordin and Ibrahim Ali.
Having just survived several months of last year’s presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as a journalist and bemused spectator, there seems to me to be a few problems in running a presidential-style campaign here, no matter how compelling it might seem to foreign consultants and others entranced by Obama’s notion of “change we can believe in” (sic).
Never mind the fact that in a Westminster-style system like ours, the prime minister is chosen by the side that wins the majority of seats, and not directly by the electorate. There’s also the problem of having a story to tell, a “narrative” that drives a presidential candidate and buoys the troops in the many moments of campaign despair along the way.
The BN campaign since nomination day has gone mostly negative, picking holes in Pakatan’s broad alliance and raising fears about the alleged hidden Islamic agendas of parties like PAS.
As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, there is no “there” there in the BN campaign, no story about what the future might hold if BN were to win again. There is no compelling life story like Obama’s, little to suggest the much vaunted change-agent could reside somewhere in BN and not in Pakatan, where the candidate has revealed himself or herself to a new electorate keen on a personal politics beyond First-world infrastructure (and Third-world mentalities).
There is also the spectacle of insurgency that Obama’s campaign tapped that seems unavailable to BN’s presidential candidate, where arguing for more of the same isn’t quite the same as the thrill of the new.
Unlike 2008’s campaign, when American voters were struggling against the financial implosion while wary and exhausted by expensive foreign wars and hometown casualties that mashed cases of both damaged war veterans and soaring personal debts balance sheets, where the disappearing middle-classes were held hostage by villains in Washington and on Wall Street, the 2012 Obama argument for “change we can believe in” sketched out a new American identity of multiracialisms, genders and sexualities.
There was room on board for everyone on that Obama train, not just the 47 per cent Romney so infamously besmirched.
By comparison, divining what 1 Malaysia can and should mean for Malaysians is much trickier. How we can craft our own particular notions of citizenship like so many slivers bonded together by thick pasembur sauce when the whole project offered by BN seems mired in the mixed messaging of swatting back the likes of Zul Nordin and Ibrahim Ali on the one hand, and grasping for the choice phrases and ideals found in the ambitious ETP on the other.
As the Kerinchi makcik who offered the BN nasi lemak that nomination day morning noted, you can have the sambal, the kacang and the timun any way you like it, as long as you shared the eating with us here under this tree as we waited for RNC.
It was inclusive and tasty, and for that morning, a hopeful prelude of the campaign to come.
- Kean Wong is a Malaysian journalist based in Washington DC.
26 April 2013
Originally published at www.themalaysianinsider.com.
