Projek Dialog

Penulisan

Posted on

Sex Workers in Malaysia, the People Who are Our Neighbours

sex workers Malaysia

Image courtesy of bungasirait

by Shaun Phuah

 

From the thirtieth floor of a condominium in Pudu, my friend asks, “do you see that building over there?”

“You mean the IKEA?” I ask.

“No, that one,” she points at a tall beige building with a black middle in the distance. “It’s a brothel,” she says.

I take my time and look at the building. From here, I can see its weathered paint, the green plants that climb off its balconies and onto its sides, the many air-con units that stick out along with an assortment of clothes hanging from windows that bring a flash of colour to the building’s front, hung out to dry in the afternoon heat. It looks like any other large KL building. I can’t help but think about how many other nondescript buildings across Malaysia provide similar services.

Malaysia is a constant mix of people, languages, and culture; a melting pot formed in large part due to the Strait of Malacca, a major port and passage of trade in the past and in our current day, considered one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. Through this, illicit activity and goods move back and forth between Malaysia’s borders to the countries that surround it. These illegal entities encompass things as wide ranging as drugs, to refugees, to people who have been trafficked.

Malaysia as a whole is well known for being a country that “makes no distinction between refugees and undocumented migrants.” This means on a systemic level, refugees who are already in situations in their home countries where they have found it necessary to escape are marked as groups of people who can be exploited and trafficked by organized crime. Under such organized crime which utilizes this lack of policy that surrounds refugees, it becomes nearly impossible to see the violence that happens to these legally vulnerable people until it is already too late; as the discovery of the 28 human trafficking camps and the mass graves holding 106 human bodies in Wang Kelian shows. As a further consequence of the complete lack of policy surrounding refugees coming into Malaysia, police officers themselves, with the authority they possess, freely engage with and profit off of the exploitation of migrants seeking refuge that enter Malaysia.

Aside from refugees, migrants entering Malaysia willingly also face an unprecedented degree of exploitation as the Malaysian government fails to systemically form basic rights for migrants, allowing criminal groups to take advantage of this lack of systematization.

All this culminates in a country where sex work is a massive industry that is ultimately ignored in part because of the social stigma and laws that surround it. This industry could only exist however, as a result of demand. People—both foreign and local are still engaging with sex workers despite its taboo status. The fact that sex work remains illegal has not curbed its existence in the slightest; it has instead allowed this lucrative industry to be co-opted by bad actors and instead of the police stopping sex work from happening—because of its illegal nature—corrupt police use this lack of accountability to profit from and further exacerbate the issues surrounding human and sex trafficking. Even with a complete crack down on sex work by increasing police effort and giving harsher punishments to those interacting with sex work, the industry itself will remain. There is simply too much money to be made and too much demand.

 

A few years ago late at night, I was standing by a quiet roadside in KL, in front of a Chinese temple still under renovation. I was out smoking shisha with a friend and we were headed back to his car to get back home. The street was covered in the dim orange light of a few street lamps and I saw a woman standing by the roadside.

She was a pretty woman with long black hair and she wore a short dress that showed her thighs. She turned around, looked at me and waved.

“A prostitute,” my friend laughed, as we got in his car and he started the engine. I could still see the woman standing on this empty road until we turned the corner.

I still think about this woman. About where she must be right now.

Knowing that sex workers face a higher degree of violence as a direct result of the work they do and how they are perceived by society, a grim image is painted of the great adversities the average sex worker in Malaysia must face.

It is easy to look at the statistics and the data surrounding sex work and to dissassociate these facts from the actual people who under varying circumstances have ended up in this line of work.

But here was the actual person, who I recognized then, standing tall on this dark roadside by herself, had a level of courage that I could not imagine. This was someone who like anyone else woke up in the morning, ordered food from shops similar to those I visit, who probably had people they cared deeply about, who ended up a sex worker for many different possible reasons and none of them out of convenience.

 

On an initial level, is the simple fact that what is truly being trafficked is labour. Women who are trafficked are not always trafficked entirely for the purposes of sex trafficking, but instead are trafficked to Malaysia “for forced labour as domestic workers”. Sex trafficking is simply a large branch of the giant and lucrative tree that is forced labour. The only solutions are legitimizing migrants and refugees on a systemic level within Malaysia; a tricky and complicated solution that our government is reluctant to act on as voiced by Malaysia’s deputy home minister, Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar as he says, “If we allow these people to start working, everybody will start coming here.”

There are no simple answers to the massive issues that surround human trafficking. However, the decision to simply ignore the issue and especially ignore it through wholesale criminalization of a wide ranging group of people only serves to empower criminal organizations and complicit government officials to profit off of and manipulate the system itself. To criminalize something does not magically allow the problem to disappear—it instead becomes deeply embedded within the system of our society as checks and balances disappear and accountability for the officials that abuse this system dissipates entirely. To create a system which legitimizes migrants and refugees is also to tackle the tools human traffickers and corrupt officials use at its very root; it also begins to tackle the very cause of sex trafficking itself.

 

It is a simple fact that sex work already exists and is here to stay in Malaysia, as stated earlier, it is too lucrative and there is an endless demand. Much like with the issues of human trafficking, to simply ignore the issue entirely through criminalization is to allow sex work as a whole to enter the invisible space of the underground where it becomes hard to track and hard to see; where it ends up entirely within the jurisdiction of law enforcement allowing for law enforcement to have no oversight which allows them to take advantage of and profit from the illegal industries they were tasked with preventing in the first place.

Research shows us that one powerful solution to sex trafficking is the legalization of sex work itself. This allows for sex work to be systemitized, so that checks and balances can be afforded to the industry as a whole, where not only law enforcement is involved, but an environment where social workers and other government agencies have the ability to further check up on and make sure that the sex work that is happening is within a consistently ethical context. The legalization of sex work would also decrease the amount of social stigma sex workers face and as a result, it would also reduce the violence that comes with that stigma. When proper regulation is implemented within the space of a wholly criminal industry, criminal organizations have less opportunities to exploit the people within the industry itself.

The concept of sex work in itself is a controversial one within the context of Malaysian society, in large part because of religion. However, we do not ban either alcohol or pork and we accept that different rules apply depending on the religion a person is born into and form laws accordingly; this does not mean that these industries and products are banned and made illegal by our government.

Ultimately, people are being abused and their labour is being exploited in large part because of laws that meekly criminalize groups of people and sex work itself. These are people we see on a day to day basis going out into the city, going to our local grocery stores, who pass us on the street, who take the same public transportation as us. They are still part of a wider community of Malaysia even if legally they are not recognized as such. To make life better for them is also to foster a more transparent and compassionate society that recognizes our own individual agency and the beautifully complicated personhood that exists in every person we pass on the street or eat beside in the food court or mamak.

Posted on

Why Malaysia Needs Mat Kilau: Collective Trauma and Racism in Malaysia

mat kilau

by Dorothy Cheng

Just a few weeks after its premiere, the 1915 hit film The Birth of a Nation was banned in multiple states across the United States. Throngs of people rioted outside cinemas that screened the film. Public figures made fiery statements decrying its message. The film became a political tool that is still deeply relevant to this day.

So what was all the fuss about?

The turn of the century had come and gone, but the United States was only 50 years freshly removed from the Civil War and at the apex of Jim Crow. The film was about the Southern spirit, with the Ku Klux Klan acting as the protagonist, fighting against authoritarian abolitionists and insidious freed slaves. It was a powder keg of racial tension.

Malaysia almost had our own Birth of a Nation moment. The 2022 film Mat Kilau has been making waves for its purported racial insensitivity. It has been accused of being racist, fascist and historically inaccurate. But there is much more to this conversation. We need to talk about collective trauma, colonial conceptions of race and art as a tool to heal from trauma. We need to talk about Mat Kilau.

The Role of Art in Shaping Society

It is a testament to the influence and artistic merit of Mat Kilau that important conversations are being derived from it. But Mat Kilau is not unique in this sense; art and films have always played central roles as propaganda tools in wider social conditioning projects. At the very least, they are mirrors of the opinions, cultures and conversations that shape a nation or people, especially if the film deals with a historical or political subject.

In 1915, 50 years after the Civil War, the United States was still a divided country (and still is to this day). There was a division between former Union and former secessionist states, between African Americans and whites, between anti- and pro-Jim Crow corners and of course, between those who liked The Birth of a Nation and those who thought it was “the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history”.

A film like The Birth of a Nation is a product of its time. It is a film about Southern white pride and identity in an age that was moving away from the agrarian past and embracing new, progressive values. It is a film about Southern white heroism and victimhood in an age when African Americans were beginning to be recognized as free citizens. It is a film that panders to white superiority and insecurity in a time of change, arresting its audience in a freeze-frame of an escapist narrative so they can relive “better” times.

Films do not only show us what is unsaid in society. It also reinforces ideas and can go on to inspire change. In the wake of the film’s premiere, lynchings of African Americans throughout the country spiked and the Ku Klux Klan’s membership boomed.

Malaysia in 2022 is not comparable to America in 1915. But there are similar conditions at play here and to say that Mat Kilau is just a film with no bearing on reality is to not do its narrative effectiveness justice. Stories have power. It is why Mat Kilau was made in the first place, so Malays could look to it as a monument to their history and culture. Stories are especially important for post-colonial societies. Much of the project of nation-building comes down to the ability to form a cohesive identity and to take from a shared history. Without stories, there are no identities.

Mat Kilau as a Post-Colonial Nation-Building Story

We are as far removed now from British colonialism in Malaya as America was from the Civil War at the time of The Birth of a Nation’s premiere. Malaysian Independence was only achieved 65 years ago. There are people alive today who remember the British and their rule over this land, just as in 1915 in America when Civil War veterans and former slaves were still alive. The wounds of colonialism are fresher than we think. We needed a story to serve as a balm.

Throughout Mat Kilau, numerous characters reference the British perception of Malays as a race bogged down by infighting, apathy and a general inability to self-govern and prosper. This is not fictional as there is a wealth of evidence of British attitudes towards Malays, and of course, firsthand testimony from many who lived through British rule.

In his paper “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology“, Charles Hirschman points out that the British treatment of Malays came down to one overarching theme: paternalism. Paternalism, in a colonial context, is the idea that a more superior force must rule over an inferior group due to that group’s inherent lack of capability. Hirschman identifies British stereotypes of Malays as lacking intellectual capabilities and being lazy, in particular.

The British naturalist A. R. Wallace said, ” In intellect the Malay is but mediocre. He is deficient in the energy requisite for the acquisition of knowledge, and seems incapable of following out any but the simplest combinations of ideas.” This is a man who went on to make significant contributions to evolutionary science, so we must not underestimate how deeply-rooted and pervasive racism can be in our canon of knowledge, and how these stereotypes can continue to affect people today.

Of course, there is a much simpler explanation for these supposed attitudes of the Malays that the British conveniently missed. In his book The Myth of the Lazy Native, Syed Hussein Alatas points out that many Malays stood to gain nothing by working for the British, considering it was their land that was being exploited and their profits that were being funnelled overseas. But this stereotype was continually pushed and set the tone for the British subjugation of the Malays. The erasure of Malay accomplishments and emasculation of Malay prowess, combined with the material reality of colonial rule, suppressed Malay cultural pride and economic emancipation.

We do not tend to think of colonialism as a traumatic event the way we rightly think war is. But the truth is that colonial trauma is real, and it is intergenerational. The myth of inferiority and feelings of helplessness and subjugation can be passed down from generation to generation.

That is why stories like Mat Kilau resonate so much. Malaysia does not have a large library of historical cinema dealing with post-colonial themes. China has Ip Man. India has Gandhi. Why shouldn’t Malaysia also have stories that undo the erasure of Malay accomplishments and correct the myths about the Malay race and culture? Without stories to uplift a nation, dominant narratives will take center-fold. Malaysians must replace outsider narratives with our own.

But did Mat Kilau achieve this?

Mat Kilau as a Continuation of Colonial Racial Narratives

One of the key things the movie forgets is that this colonial trauma is shared. The idea of inferiority, medicated by the unyielding force of colonial paternalism, is one that plagued all communities in Malaysia today. The great civilizations of China and India were brought to their knees before Western powers. That trauma followed Chinese and Indian immigrants to Malaya. Then, as colonial subjects in Malaya, the Chinese and Indians also became victim to stereotyping and racism as part of the British “divide and conquer” strategy, but also in the service of the wider Western curiosity surrounding scientific racism.

With its caricatures of Chinese merchants and Sikh soldiers, Mat Kilau adopts the very race rhetoric that the British used in Malaya but conveniently excludes Malays from it. Therefore, instead of presenting a Malaysian post-colonial narrative, it simply repurposes the colonial racial narrative for its own use.

Frank Swettenham wrote of the Chinese: “It is almost hopeless to expect to make friends with a Chinaman. And it is, for the Government Officer, an object that is not very desirable to obtain. The Chinese, at least that class of them met with in Malaya, do not understand being treated as equals.” According to Hirschman, he and other British contemporaries primarily defined the Chinese as having no morals above greed, and as such, developed resentment and distrust of them.

At once contemptuous of Indians but reliant on them for the massive amounts of labour required for their absurdly international conquests, the British invented a convenient stereotype for specific Indian communities, including the Sikhs: the concept of a “Martial Race.” According to the historian Jeffrey Greenhunt, “The Martial Race theory had an elegant symmetry. Indians who were intelligent and educated were defined as cowards, while those defined as brave were uneducated and backward.” The wider aim of this British narrative within India was to divide different Indian communities by pitting “loyal” ones against ones that were “disloyal” and that had rebelled and mutinied against the British.

Mat Kilau’s narrative recognizes the incorrectness of the British stereotype against Malays while entirely leaning into similar stereotypes the British made about the Chinese and Sikhs. The Chinese character Goh Hui is a greedy, scheming and slimy character who doesn’t do anything if it does not benefit him personally, and the Sikh soldiers are violent, cruel and wholly obedient to their British masters.

Worse still, these racial tensions between the Malays and the non-Malays culminate in violence against Goh Hui and numerous Sikh soldiers, but not a single drop of British blood was spilled. Are the Chinese and Sikh characters merely obstacles in the Malay fight for justice? Are they simply a box to be checked before Mat Kilau and gang can defeat the final boss in the inevitable sequel? Are the British simply long-forgotten as a historical relic and therefore, not even worthy of an end, while the Chinese and Indians are the real threats that exist today? The symbolic violence of killing the only Chinese character with dialogue and of scene after scene of corpses dressed as Sikhs surely is not something a Malaysian Chinese or Sikh person can sit through without feeling like there is a message being directed at them.

Mat Kilau has its Chinese and Sikh characters spout mantras about British superiority, professing their undying loyalty to the very people who crippled their motherlands. This choice to erase Chinese and Indian colonial trauma is an interesting one. Was it an indictment of Chinese and Indian loyalty to Malaysia? Was it a moral message about uniting as a nation of Malaysians, regardless of race?

As a Malaysian Chinese person, I came out of my viewing of Mat Kilau reflecting on whether or not non-Malays are truly uninterested in the larger project of helping Malaysia prosper, or whether continued racial tensions, coupled with the inherited racial stereotypes from the British, have created a collective memory among some Malays that non-Malays are not to be trusted.

That begs the question: do the narratives of race in Mat Kilau simply reflect a reality of how non-Malays are perceived in this country?

Beyond Mat Kilau: Future Malaysian Post-Colonial Narratives

Collective trauma and collective memory go hand in hand: the Malay experience of British colonialism was of having their lands taken from them, their ambitions quelled, their kings weakened and their society and ways of living fundamentally changing. Their collective memory was of the arrival of foreigners in a time of change and how these foreigners all behaved in certain ways that largely coincided with the disenfranchisement of the Malays.

Like The Birth of A Nation, Mat Kilau is about addressing the anxieties of a particular race, arresting a moment in history for them to place themselves in so they can relive a better time.

Art heals trauma. The first step is to talk about it. It is crucial to note that Mat Kilau is only one retelling of the Malay experience, which is not universal. Whether we agree with this manifestation of collective memory about non-Malays is irrelevant, because we cannot begin to address that if we do not first understand it.

I only hope that Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indians will have the same opportunities to convey what our trauma looks like.  When that time comes, will Malaysians still say “It’s just a movie, don’t be so sensitive?”

Ultimately, the goal should be to get to a place where we can tell stories that reflect the true diversity of a Malaysian narrative. Until then, siloed messaging is a baby step that young, post-colonial countries live with until we feel like we’ve aired out all our trauma – Malays have always made movies for Malays, Chinese for Chinese and Indians for Indians. Of course, there are exceptions, and I would never propose foregoing the telling of individual communities’ stories in favour of some contrived muhibbah narrative.

The Birth of a Nation was banned. I don’t think Mat Kilau should be. As a movie, it is a watershed moment for Malaysian cinema and its technical capabilities. It is also an important piece of a larger conversation we need to be having in our society. What can we all do to forge our own narratives? What would a film about the Malaysian anti-colonial struggle across cultures, religions and races look like? What would a Malaysian film that touches on racial tensions look like if it were created with the input of all the affected races? I do not want to tell people to forcibly change their collective memory, nor do I think it is possible in a short amount of time. But I do think we need to keep telling our stories to each other. Tell me your memories and I’ll tell you mine, and somewhere along the way, we can heal.

Posted on

Kayangan B40 and Class Consciousness

by Yvonne Tan

It’s safe to say that words initially created by the Najib administration to identify who would be eligible for aid regardless of social class (like “B40”, “PPR”, “T20”) have officially become part of our everyday lingo, sparking many viral debates about class. In our past blog posts such as The Revolution is Viral and Antara dua Darjat (MCO 3.0 version), we have covered how netizens would call out particular individuals for their tone-deafness, especially during the pandemic. The latest of such individuals included the UiTM lecturer who berated a student for not having a laptop through the immortalized saying “Aku tak boleh duduk orang dengan B40”.

Now it is time to explore the other side of the coin. Recently, the Facebook group B40 Buat Perangai Apa Harini has gained momentum and wide appeal. At the time of writing, the group has amassed more than 27.4k members; it was temporarily paused for 7 days from 26 May to 3 June 2022 with the reasoning from the admin “Group terlalu panas. Bagi sejuk kejap”. The reasoning is most likely due to some of the posts being featured on tabloid outlets, particularly the renovation of a flat to look like a terrace house. The house was described as “Ini B40 kayangan tuan2..pemikiran luar kotak..” 

Other posts in the group are not so forgiving, typically featuring a wide range of “things working class people do” that netizens tend to mock or ridicule. From questioning if B40 people truly are suffering and poor – with reference to evidence of fancy, modified Lamborghinis parked at PPR flats – to asserting that B40’s financial troubles stem from having a particular way of thinking that is not smart. Nevertheless, several netizens on the page who are from the B40 group are also self-aware and find what those of the same class group do distasteful. 

The phenomenon is too accurately described by the film Parasite (2019) that has helped us articulate class divides during the Central Malaysia floods. Despite being in  similar positions, the Kims – an art therapist, chauffeur, and housekeeper of the Park family – recoiled in disgust at Moon-gwang – the previous housekeeper – and refused her plea to help her husband, Geun-sae,  remain in hiding in the bunker of the Parks’ house from loan sharks. Having a shared class background and common plight did not mean that they would empathize and share solidarity with one another; rather, the Kims and the couple cling to the possible opportunity for upward mobility with the Parks, which is believed to be reserved to only one family.

Twitter posts complaining about B40 working habits such as slacking off and foot-dragging have gone viral. In the posts,  the attitudes of B40 workers are described to be at odds with those of their M40 manager and T20 boss who are responsible for supervising them. Rationalisations that B40 deserve to be  where they are are plentiful, which are typically summed up as “poor people mentality”. This idea that there is a very real possibility of being able to transcend one’s class through simply hard work and switching off “class mentality” is still salient here. In fact, it is at times the defining justification for why some people are in the B40 class. Maybe it’s our own weird version of the American dream, where  the poor deserve to be poor,  even with the understanding that it is not possible for everyone to achieve wealth due to scarcity of opportunities.

One could argue that working class subcultures like Rempit and Ah Beng have been subsumed under the larger umbrella of expressions used to mock the B40 group. Things like modified cars are immediately labelled as an indicator of someone from B40, which comes as no surprise as their group description explains that it was initially created to “memasyhurkan golongan motor ekzos bising sebagai “B40”. Tapi dikembangkan untuk merangkumi segala aspek perangai B40.” Asset ownership, such as spacious housing or luxury cars, are lifestyle indicators that are key in cementing and signalling middle-class status. [1] Thus, when the B40 group attempts to achieve the same “look” in a much more low-cost manner such as creating a bungalow out of two flats or modifying cars with loud exhausts, instead of “working hard” to accumulate money and transcend one’s class, those attempts are subjected to ridicule.

Audi Ali in his article Why Is It Difficult to Organise Around Class in Malaysia speaks on our recent status consciousness, which one would think would go hand in hand with class solidarity. He argues that, through the New Economic policies, rapid modernisation had moved the middle class from working in agriculture to working in the service sector. This blurred class relations and obfuscated workers’ disenfranchisement. As terms like B40, M40, and T20 contributed to making  class more visible, the fact is that this visibility is still based on income. As Ali argues, the visibility should instead be about “the causal chain between poverty and capitalist exploitation [which] is rarely made explicit in these analyses. Perhaps this failure to reveal how labour is exploited by both the state’s bureaucratic elites and capital has created apathy—if not antagonism—among the middle classes towards the poor.”

In our post-Covid world where class antagonisms have become part of our vocabulary that does not replace, but rather complements our racial stereotyping, where has all the solidarity gone? During Covid, there was a clear disparity between the upper and lower classes with regards to selective prosecutions, but the criticism was not necessarily directed at the systemic failure of our government to ensure that there were no double standards and abuse of power when it came to criminal law. Class stereotypes are forming in the same way we approach race, writing off certain groups on the basis of specific behaviours that are predicated on the principle that these behaviours would be different if these groups had a “better” mindset. The day we realise classifications divide us and lead us into scapegoating one another, is the day we recognise the institutional mechanisms in place that continue to keep those in power. 

References 

[1] Embong, A., 2002. State-led modernization and the new middle class in Malaysia. Springer, p. 100.

Posted on

Raising the Feminist Future

by Yvonne Tan


Unilateral conversions are clearly wrong, typically used as an excuse to separate mothers from their children. Single mother Loh Siew Hong’s case reignited issues like children’s rights and consent, which skirt around the gaps between civil and Syariah courts. The story mirrors the Indira Gandhi saga where ex-husbands, with a history of domestic abuse, utilised unilateral religious conversion against women under civil court, separating them from their children and giving the husbands sole custody. Her landmark case ruled that the word “parent” in Article 12(4) of the Federal Constitution meant both parents.


The Perlis mufti, on the other hand, has stated that in Perlis Islamic law the agreement to conversions were amended from “both the mother and father” to “either father or mother” in 2016. People can easily sympathise with the fact that such gaps in the law should not result in mothers being separated from their children. This article is about women like Indira Gandhi and Loh Siew Hong. They are depicted as dedicated mothers and also devoutly religious, with great moral character—ensuring that Islam would not the enemy. Loh Siew Hong has mentioned she would convert to Islam if it meant she would be reunited with her children and Indira Gandhi emphasized she had no issue with her youngest child embracing Islam as long as they could be reunited. Their aim is simple and they are committed to navigating the complicated and complex problems of our courts and constitutions, to get back custody of their children.


Their “motherhood” is explicitly emphasised. It is a narrative that purports to help women overcome being victims of domestic abuse to enduring years of court battles for custody of their children. Highlighting motherhood has also been important in the fight against gender discrimination in Malaysian’s citizenship law, where fathers can pass Malaysian citizenship to their children but mothers cannot. Family Frontiers and six  Malaysian women filed a suit seeking court orders to allow Malaysian mothers to pass on their citizenship to children born abroad. 

Rachel Ng is one of the six mothers. She is also a single mother with full custody of both of her children, but is unable to pass down her Malaysian citizenship to her eldest child. The case received lots of media attention and popular support, which led to a historic decision on 9 September 2021 to recognise that Malaysian women have the same rights as Malaysian men to pass on citizenship automatically to their children born overseas. There are also similar movements helmed by the likes of the Foreign Spouses Support Group (FSSG) that advocate for protecting the rights of foreign spouses of Malaysian citizens and children. Foreign spouses too are under their purview as there is no automatic citizenship for foreign spouses in Malaysia. Instead of taking a human rights approach, the group also “invoke[d] the motherhood rhetoric to affect immigration and citizenship reform” [1].


It is undeniable that being a woman in Malaysia is inextricably tied with motherhood. Maila Stivens stated that local cultural productions of Malaysian Malay mothers, which I argue could extend to all races, “have often overlapped with popular cultural pictures of the long-suffering, self-denying Malay mother and the sentimentalisation of her relationship with her children.” [2] It is this heavy sense of moral duty that women, especially mothers and wives, have to uphold in supporting their family and in the process, make sacrifices especially for their children. We all probably know mothers, aunts, sisters and so on personally who lived out most of their lives with this sense of burden towards the family. As put simply by Amanda Lee Koe in her short story Love is No Big Truth, “But for us, to have people in our lives, to have relations, is to have duties, is to serve. We can’t shake it off. We can’t be the ones to turn our backs.”


Take for example, a homemaker who exploded on YouTube during the MCO period, Sugu Pavithra. When Pavithra and her husband stopped making YouTube videos after she infamously suffered domestic violence from her husband, they stated that they “want to focus on family life instead” and asked for privacy to “please just allow us to lead normal lives as a family”.


When Pavithra did a magazine photoshoot with her on the cover page, it quickly became viral. She immediately shot down ideas that she could become a model as it would be her first and last photoshoot and that the last time she ever dressed up this extravagantly was for her wedding. In her words, “Becoming a model never ever crossed my mind…. I will never be a model. I just want to carry on with my cooking routine and sharing my videos, besides dutifully carrying out my responsibility as a wife and a mother.” She would consistently emphasise that her career is never as important as her role as a mother in her family and there was never even the idea of a crossroads between career and family. One could even argue that her humbleness and devotion to motherhood is also part and parcel of her popularity among Malaysians, as she films one of the key responsibilities of a mother—cooking delicious meals for her family.


The cultural production of what it means to be a woman and mother in Malaysia is due to many factors and expectations stemming from religion, culture, history and also the nation’s interest in population control. Malaysia’s “70 million by 2100” policy adopted in 1984 has put increasing pressure on women to stay at home and nurture their children and ultimately, the nation’s future population. Scholars argue that colonial interventions on mothering in British Malaya were also done with the similar goal of securing labour for the colonial economy, given that replacing labour overseas had begun to become too costly [3]. Thus, being a mother has always been highly regarded. Invoking  the rhetoric of motherly sacrifice and determination remains very powerful in our society. The problem is, mothers are treated as passive subjects in this rhetoric. However, women are today taking hold of this narrative to call for meaningful reforms. mothers are passive subjects and are taking hold of this narrative to call for meaningful reforms. With all the zeitgest surrounding the Indira Gandhi and Loh Siew Hong cases, these are, who are not only victims of sexual abuse but also single parents and thus typically seen as not having a place in our nuclear family society, are now celebrated for their determination for their duty to their children.


Celebrations like International Women’s Day may be easily associated with derogatory terms like “the angry feminist” who is “Western” and against motherhood.  However, it is undeniable that there are feminist movements here too, with the cases of Indira Gandhi, Loh Siew Hong, and the six Malaysian women. They are mothers who are fighting back and challenging courts and our constitution to advance equal rights by utilising the narrative of the devoted mother. Platforms like Caring Moms recognise that many underprivileged women are trapped in abusive marriages because they have no other choice. Caring Moms advocates for economically empowering mothers to be able to be independent and care for their children. As we celebrate the sacrifices of mothers in our lives, let us also celebrate how they are also paving the way for women’s rights in Malaysia.


References

[1] Low Choo Chin, “Reconciling marital citizenship in Malaysia through activism: Gender, motherhood, and belongingness” in Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot,, and Gwénola Ricordeau, eds. International marriages and marital citizenship: Southeast Asian women on the move. Taylor & Francis, 2017, p. 59.

[2] Stivens, Maila “Modernizing the Malay mother” in Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly (eds.) Maternities and modernities: Colonial and postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific. Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 56.

[3] Manderson, Lenore. “Health services and the legitimation of the colonial state: British Malaya 1786–1941.” International Journal of Health Services 17, no. 1 (1987): 91-112.

Posted on

The “Future” of Work

by Yvonne Tan

The future of work is full of precariats. What is a precariat? It is a portmanteau of the words “precarious” and “proletariat”. Terms like “precariat” have taken on more importance with the popularity of the “gig economy”. Back in 2021, NASDAQ listed Grab Holdings Ltd, a Singapore-headquartered company. Some celebrated this, while others lamented the “brain drain” of Malaysian talent. Squabbles like these overshadow a bigger issue: Grab food drivers hardly earn more than RM 5 per trip. They work an average of 12 hours a day only to get RM 2,200 a month.

The story of entrepreneurship has long overshadowed the story of the unfair labour conditions these entrepreneurs’ workers face. Proponents of the gig economy regularly rehash a number of justifications for why labour conditions do not need to be improved. These include supposedly competitive pay, job flexibility and flexible hours. 

However, massive strikes and protests led by workers of the gig economy in surrounding countries such as Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand have resulted in high-level mediations and changes in government labour policies. These movements were able to achieve this despite most workers never meeting or working with one another. They were able to enact spontaneous collective action while remaining leaderless.

Couriers for GoKilat, Gojek’s GoSend same-day delivery service, recently carried out back-to-back strikes to protest GoKilat’s new incentive scheme. The scheme proposed that couriers who once received IDR 10,000 (US$0.70) for five completed deliveries would now only receive IDR 5,000 (US$0.35).

After the estimated 100,000 drivers went on strike for three days, Lalamove couriers and Grab drivers also took up the cause, shining a light onto working conditions in Indonesia’s gig economy. These were not isolated cases. Protests and strikes against job suspensions, income reductions and demands for better health insurance have been carried out throughout Indonesia since 2015.

In Hong Kong, it all started with a Foodpanda delivery driver of South Asian descent. He had his account suddenly suspended and expressed his anger in an anonymous group chat of other drivers. The invite link quickly spread and has led to almost 1,500 members today. Now, these drivers were able to share their grievances on exploitative working conditions, racism and low wages. They could organise themselves to go on strike and formed links with local non-profits such as “Concern Group for Food Couriers’ Rights”. They even famously linked up with Boxson, a YouTuber who shares his life as a delivery driver. By November 18, negotiations between strike leaders, who were mostly South Asian workers, and Foodpanda management led to the fulfillment of some of the strike’s 15 demands.

Delivery services have taken on more importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, many workers also notably lent a hand in rescue efforts during the flash floods in Malaysia. They are now widely seen as “heroes”.

Another group of Malaysian heroes, medical staff, went on strike in July 2021. The Hartal Doktor Kontrak protest called into question the contract system, which said medical officers were not going to be absorbed as permanent staff after five years of service. Many Malaysians had a far more positive reaction to the doctor’s strike than they had to strikes by low-wage workers.

For instance, the J&T strikes in February 2021 were met with anger against the workers for apparently destroying customer packages and not delivering packages on time. The protest against J&T’s change in the commission system, which would reduce the wages for delivery workers, was largely overshadowed by netizens’ anger against worker attitudes. The media also began to spotlight how customers can make complaints against J&T to get their money back, rather than talk about the strike itself. Clearly, we do not treat all our “heroes” equally.

This is in stark contrast with an almost similar experience taking place in April 2021. An innocent chat between a Shopee Express courier and a customer revealed that the reason the package was late was that there were strikes. Shopee was going to cut the pay for each delivered package from IDR 2,000 (USD 0.14) to IDR 1,500 (USD 0.10). Screenshots of the conversation went viral, leading many Indonesian netizens to join the strike online with the hashtag #ShopeeTindasKurir. The online element of the strike was a great platform for Shopee couriers to share stories of their working conditions—stories that are hardly reported or known. 

Meanwhile, in Thailand, a mass boycott of Foodpanda under the hashtag #BanFoodPanda was underway. The delivery service had stated that they would terminate an employee for attending an anti-government protest. The boycott was so effective that Foodpanda allegedly lost almost 2 million users and 90,000 merchants. Although, Foodpanda has claimed the numbers were inflated.

Strikes work, even in this region, even without unions. However, public support is a key element in ensuring the success of strikes. The public must want to better working conditions for gig workers. Workers can then use this solidarity as a bargaining tool. Thai, Hong Kong and Indonesian public support for strikes, as well as Malaysian support for Hartal Doktor Kontrak, illustrates this. The Hartal Doktor Kontrak strike resulted in parliament urgently debating the issue despite threats from directors of hospitals and state health departments on medical workers. At the time of writing, the Ministry of Health has promised that contracted doctors will be able to apply for specialist training under Hadiah Latihan Persekutuan.

Pundits and economists typically tout gig workers as the future of work. What about the future of demanding better working conditions? Workers should be able to organise in a decentralised and spontaneous manner even in the private sector. Critiquing elitist privilege must come hand in hand with uplifting lower classes. We must recognise that the problem is systematic economic insecurity.

Former Paralympic athlete Koh Lee Peng made headlines for selling tissue packets. She had been unable to secure jobs due to her disability. She mentioned that locals assumed she was part of a syndicate or that she was an illegal foreigner.

There is a deep classism against low-wage workers in Malaysia that needs to be addressed. Many locals associate low-wage workers with Southeast Asian or South Asian “foreigners”. The coinage of the term B40, to denote the lowest economic class, brings with it a fair share of critique against the upper-class T20. However, we do not use the term B40 in a way that invokes solidarity. There needs to be more advocacy for inter-class cooperation for the right to fair working conditions. 

Posted on

Rethinking Malaysia’s Police Violence

by Yvonne Tan

Some of us grew up with cop films—either local or international—that portray a life of action and excitement hunting down bad guys and saving the world. Some of these films were jam-packed with action and martial arts while others exuded sex appeal. Maybe some of us grew up with stories of a lone, amateur detective like Sherlock Holmes, who makes up for the uselessness of the police force. However, our real experiences with cops tend to be completely different. Bureaucracy makes up a huge part of police work and the police vs. villains dichotomy does not seem as clear-cut.

Prisons and the police may seem like background government agencies that many of us hardly encounter, besides the occasional bribe typically dealing with driving rules. Or maybe if there is something seditious on social media, you may quickly encounter the hashtag #PDRM in the comments. 

But to others, the police force is a lot more prominent. One time, my friends and I got into a car and one immediately said: “Luckily we have one Chinese girl here, if not we will be stopped by the police”. Another time, we were actually stopped by the police and asked to hand over our MyKads, with torchlights flashed into our faces before being let go. A friend commented again that we were only let go because of me.

This stop-and-search process is probably the reality of many Malaysians and people living in Malaysia, especially with tightened pandemic restrictions. Many people often think about what we would have to do if we were “unlucky” enough to be stopped by the police. Solutions include calling in favours, trying to offer larger bribes and finding different ways to ensure they don’t get beat up. Probably the most famous instance of Malaysian police violence was Anwar Ibrahim’s black eye, and things have not changed since.

SUARAM reported a total of 456 deaths in police custody in the year 2020, including prisons and immigration centres. This year, there was a significant public outcry over the custodial deaths of A. Ganapathy, a cow milk trader, S. Sivabalan and a security guard, who died a mere hour after his arrest. But the custodial deaths did not stop and threats to the public were made. People were threatened for commenting on the issue and an example was made of Syed Saddiq. You can’t make this up.

One Two Jaga is one of the few films in Malaysia that placed corruption at the center of its subject, with story arcs of how poor wages in the police force led to corruption. The film critiqued the optimism of the police vs. villains dichotomy.

The people who have suffered most at the hands of the police are migrant workers. There is a clear understanding that not only do you have to be the right colour but also be socioeconomically well-off in order to keep the police off your tails. Our police force works the way it does because of our racism to others. Many Malaysians still believe that victims of the police deserve it, falling back on racial stereotypes as justification. The “logic” of illegal migrant workers and the Indian community’s supposed high tendency for crime has made it easy to dismiss police brutality because these people simply “deserve” it for breaking the law.

Rarely do we ever see them as victims of circumstance. They are instead seen as a social threat and exaggerated racial differences provide legitimacy to our criminal justice system. The police tend to be seen as operating in a faultless mechanism. If there are indeed faults, they would be blamed on maybe a few rotten eggs. This allows for the continuous justification of excessive police harassment and force. The truth is, the police force is an institution which can have competing interests against ours, and minorities are especially socially disadvantaged. 

Take for example Malaysia’s remand system, which allows the police to apply to the Magistrate to detain anybody for longer than 24 hours for further investigation. The Magistrate can also order the police to do the same. After 24 hours, your detention period can be extended up to 14 days. At the end of the detention period, the police should release you or bring you before the Court to be charged. In theory, your relatives and lawyer should have details of your arrest and remand. However, chain remand has been a common practice, allowing for detention without trial under the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2021 (SOSMA) and POCA despite no charges being brought against a person. 

The social aspects of the issue are further worsened by ministers attributing social ills to migrants. For instance, migrants were blamed for spreading Covid-19 due to “poor hygiene” and were even painted as looters during the floods, despite many of them playing an active part in rescuing locals.

Crime is often used as a way for us to air our racial and class biases. The talking points and dog-whistles parroted by political elites who posture as “law and order” allow for such sentiments to become systemic. The official designation and criminalization of PATI (the term used to denote illegal migrants) and the introduction of the word K*ling into the Dewan Bahasa are just two examples of this.

There have been proposals to “prevent corruption” by making police wear bodycams or forming independent bodies to oversee the PDRM. These initiatives have been put under the purview of the Home Ministry. However, we need to challenge the root cause of the issue: the rationalisation that people deserve to have violence enacted on them in the name of crime control. Malaysia’s police violence is rooted in the racial and class prejudice that permeates not only our political systems but also our criminal justice system.

Posted on

The Post-Wawasan Malaysia We Got

by Yvonne Tan We end the year 2021 in Malaysia with disastrous flash floods amidst a pandemic and rising food prices. All this came on the heels of yet another cabinet reshuffle by Prime Minister Ismail Sabri. This is the year where things are put into odd perspective – ministers pose for press conferences to save flash flood victims while drawing criticism from former prime minister Najib Razak, looking to make his inevitable political comeback. This juxtaposition of events invokes questions of continued political apathy over climate change and how the people’s suffering is nothing more than political fodder. As flash flood levels continue to rise and affect more victims, pictures of fireworks and cake cutting from UMNO party meetings emerged while they decided when the next election should be held and ensured continual support for Ismail Sabri. Hashtags such as #KitaJagaKita, #BenderaPutih and #KerajaanPembunuh that became popular during the pandemic have taken on another layer of meaning as most of the community rescue efforts were carried out by volunteer citizens and foreigners as the government was slow to respond. We witnessed double standards too, when rich celebrities who hosted extravagant wedding celebrations were given almost the same amount of fines as those given to a roadside burger stall owner. In yet another absurd publicity move, said celebrity offered to pay the fines of the burger stall owner due to criticisms of the disproportionate fines. Adding to the absurdity, the Minister of Health, who was at the government’s “100 Hari Aspirasi Keluarga Malaysia” event where thousands were in attendance, was only charged a small fine of RM 1,000 for breaking SOPs. Policemen were caught dancing under disco lights and singing karaoke with women at a police station while deaths in police custody continued to happen. Threats against the general public for questioning such custodial deaths were made. Press conferences were called to brush off pleas on social media to find missing relatives due to the flash floods, while politicians tried to paint flood victims as looters when they have gone days without food and help. Even the corporations affected had to put out a statement that such acts of desperation were understandable. Politicians under trial for their role in the 1MDB scandal managed to plea for their passports to travel overseas for a range of reasons, from medical to family circumstances, while it was revealed that the Prime Minister’s official residence had spent RM 30 million in renovations. We also learned recently in a parliamentary reply that a total of 30,679 tip-offs were received by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) between 2015 and September 2021. The problem of kleptocratic politicians and their lack of care in governing the nation always looms before the general elections, but there was always a deeply ingrained fear as a nation that race riots and conflicts would erupt and result in instability. The May 13 riots have been imprinted into our collective cultural memories and emerge like an ominous warning during every general election and mass protest. Our politics have been ever preoccupied with how to capture public approval via ethnic categories. Some try to tie race and religion to parties. Some try to emphasize developmental nationalism and dissolve racial categories. But with everything that has happened, maybe this is the year we redefine our ethnic categories with social inequality violently stamped in our minds. This is the year we learned about the extent of corruption and the lack of responsibility and humanity of the powers that be. The anticipation of and subsequent disappointment in Wawasan 2020 serves as a symbol of faded trust in our political institutions and the future. Many on social media pointed out that since the coronavirus pandemic, Malaysians have already essentially been governing ourselves regardless of race and religion to make up for institutional incompetency. During the postwar period of Malaysia, many had already begun to imagine our identities in a multiethnic context. Arrifin Omar pointed out that Burhanuddin distinguished between bangsa, to describe the Malay community, and kebangsaan, as an interpretation of “Malayness”, to mean that non-Malays could be a part of kebangsaan Melayu without being bangsa Melayu. PKMM advocated for “bangsa Melayu” or “Melayu Raya” to represent nationality while retaining separate ethnic categories. UMNO, of course, rejected both of these but kept the door open for non-Malays to “masuk Melayu” through religious and cultural conversion before later adopting the idea of “Bangsa Malaysia”. Others adopted the concept of “bangsa Malayan”.  Just as these groups imagined a Malaysia on the brink of its formation that was fair and equal, we too can do so once again to bring about a change that has been far overdue. David Graeber believed that there were two kinds of imaginations: the first was “imaginative identification”, which is the ability to imagine another’s point of view to compromise and work together towards common goals. The second was “immanent imagination”, which is the capacity to imagine and bring about new social and political ways of being as we collectively decide what we want to do with our lives.  Back when I was in school, we were asked to imagine a Wawasan 2020 during art class which was premised on the fact that Malaysia would be a developed country. Let us imagine what Malaysia’s sociopolitical landscape could be once again. Maybe we will have a Malaysia where police reform has ensured that Malaysian Indians don’t get stopped and searched randomly. Maybe it is a Malaysia where politicians could be recalled anytime they were not serving the needs of the public. Maybe there would be an end to GLCs running public transportation services which were instead owned by worker cooperatives. Maybe we would be able to celebrate and identify our national culture as a hybrid of many, including the foreign workers who helped build our nation.  More than ever, we have learnt that the government has failed us. But also, more than ever, we have learnt that we have the power to govern ourselves and chart our future.
Posted on

Here we go again? The Timah Controversy

by Yvonne Tan

Every so often, parliament will heatedly discuss an “issue” that seems to be somewhat petty, typically within the scope of race and religion and begging the question of whether we have more pressing to discuss. The Timah whiskey controversy is one such example, joining the ranks of Malaysia’s censorship of Beauty and the Beast due to the film’s LGBT character and permanently banning Beyonce. 

Free Malaysia Today put out a highly popular list of previous “controversies.” There was the issue of A&W not being allowed to use the words “bee” or “dog” in their names, due to a rule in 2012 by JAKIM and DBKL. The rule was related to a billboard depicting a wombat, which had to be removed as the creature was mistaken for a pig. There are also a number of controversies related to when food outlets had to rename “hot dogs” (to sometimes laughable food names) or else JAKIM would not provide halal certification. 

What these controversies have in common is that they feel like “non-issues” that are blown out of proportion. They hardly affect anyone’s daily life, and yet they are debated in parliament and plastered all over our media. They skirt around the issue of race and religion but are not obvious disputes such as the anti-ICERD rally, refusing to recognise UEC certification, the Allah controversy or the pendatang rhetoric. Hence, these sorts of “non-issues” typically garner ridicule from the public or amp up worries that our politicians have turned our nation into a laughing stock by putting their time into such issues. 

The Timah controversy revolves around DBKL banning alcohol in Chinese medicine halls and sundry shops. Tangga Batu MP Rusnah Aluai compared the consumption of Timah whiskey to “drinking Malay women”, as the name alludes to Kakak Timah, Mak Timah and Mak Cik Timah. This comparison was made during the debate session on the Trade Descriptions Bill (Amendment) 2021 on 28 October. Ten days before this, the PAS Dewan Ulama (DUPP) expressed concern about the use of the name “Timah” as a whisky brand, saying the name was derived from “Fatimah”. They also claimed the logo had an image of a religious man in a beard and kopiah, calling for the stop of all promotion and sale of liquor to the public. 

Timah was allowed to keep its name. Some claim this controversy was to win the support of different factions. Others spent their time obsessing over the semantics of “Timah” in Malay. As much as this may seem like a “non-issue”, the saga does reveal that there are still strong racial and religious anxieties that can be triggered by something as nondescript as a bottle of whiskey. 

Being Malaysian does mean that racialised experiences and religious anxieties are our everyday political landscape. MacLeod (2016) coined the concept “fragmented essentialisms” for how different fragments of ethnoreligious identities from the colonial past continue to be exploited for contemporary political means. Politicians might claim to speak on the group’s behalf by stressing specific aspects of identity and history, emphasizing their differences to other groups. [1]

No matter how inconsequential the controversy may seem, the talking points that they used have been effective at perpetuating racial stereotypes in Malaysia and helping the originators of the controversy achieve different political goals. The rhetoric placed a strong emphasis on the notion of a “nation under threat”, justifying the absurdity of turning the name of a whiskey brand into a battleground of anxieties. The controversy also points to the increased influence of PAS’ religious intolerance as well as the lack of solidarity from the MPs from Amanah and PKR that support PAS.

Nur Sajat, who had been manhunted before seeking asylum in Australia, said in a video interview that her trans identity has been regularly turned into political and religious kerfuffle to distract from real issues. Her case is also seen as absurd given the police’s commitment to extraditing her but corrupt politicians. In House of Glass, Sou Chou Yao says that “elections are often defined around sensitive political issues, and where sensitive issues lie, there is an opportunity for essentialisation. Elections represent a battleground where these categories are periodically reformed and reshaped.” [2]

The ethnoreligious essentialism displayed throughout this controversy points to our politicians’ drive to define an “ideal” yet exclusive type of community. With that said, their efforts are met with continual rejection from a new kind of community that chooses to voice their political opinions via memes and other social media outlets. Although it may feel as though the political landscape in Malaysia is continuously dominated by the tug and pull of racial and religious issues, let us remind ourselves that they do not speak for all of us.

References

[1] MacLeod, Alexander. “Race and nation in 21st century Malaysia: the production of racialised electoral politics in the Malaysian media.” PhD diss., Newcastle University, 2017.

[2] Yao, Sou Chou, House of Glass, (ISEAS: Singapore, 2017), p. 14.