Election Fever

(Pic by Kean Wong of Bangsar roundabout where landscape architect Ng Seksan and friends planted thousands of flags to signify a Malaysian spring. April 2013.)

The last time I was around for a Malaysian election was 1999.

Anwar Ibrahim had been sacked and was proving a major thorn in Umno’s side, rallying young people, awakening the politically passive, and other inconvenient things. The economy was in trouble. Chinese Malaysians were worried about racial riots. Mahathir was on the warpath.

This time around, everything’s different. Oh, wait…actually, nevermind.

Living in the US for a decade, I missed the 2004 and 2008 elections. On election day in 2008, my family and I were having dinner with friends at a Vietnamese restaurant in St Paul, Minnesota. Immersed in our American life, I’d not kept up with news from home. After all, there was a pretty exciting election in the US that year too, if you remember.

It was our American friend, a college professor – who, of all things, once interned at the Star newspaper in PJ – who checked his cellphone just before the beef pho arrived and excitedly told me a political tsunami had hit my country. (Hi, Tom.)

We moved back to KL in 2011. It’s been heartwarming, happy, frustrating and depressing all at the same time.

So much has happened in the world. The United States elected a black president – twice. China overtook Japan to become the world’s second biggest economy. India was opening up. Myanmar held its first election.

Yet Malaysia seemed frozen in time, or sliding backwards. Our schools, our newspapers, our roads and a government that’s been in power since independence from the British in 1957.

We waited, in suspended animation, for an election that never seemed to come.

Now it’s here.

Campaigning is in full swing for a vote on May 5. In towns and villages around the country, people are thronging  political rallies, waiting hours in fields under the stars to hear a vision of an alternate Malaysia. In affluent Bangsar, they’re gathering to sip wine and discuss corruption and illicit capital outflows, salon-style.

Malaysians abroad, from Sydney to Singapore to Shanghai, who left for better careers and a better future for their children, are getting on planes, trains and buses and carpooling to make it home to vote.

Everywhere, there are fluttering blue, green and red flags and a feeling that maybe this time, things may change.

I’m in the Malaysian Insider

Onebrainblog regulars already know this stuff, but for newbies, Dina Zaman interviewed me recently on the Malaysian Insider on how I became one brain swimming against the tide of the Malaysian Brain drain….

Thanks, Dina.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/features/article/right-here-right-now/

Going Postal

New column on Outstation.my!

“Going Postal,” a postal voter’s diary by Ai Leen Lim in London.

Ai Leen will be posting regularly up until the election. Take a look.

http://outstation.my/blog/2013/02/ge13-going-postal/

Ai Leen Lim

The YK Pao School in Shanghai (and why I wish it were in KL)

When we were thinking of moving back to KL from the US, we spent a long time checking out schools for the girls.

In KL, our options were international schools (some v. good, v. pricey, but Chinese was definitely a side dish, not the main meal) and Chinese schools (language is front and centre, but you also get 20th century education ideas, rote learning, corporal punishment).

Neither was ideal. What we need in KL, I told anyone who would listen, is a Kinder, Gentler Chinese School.

(One person – a product of a strict Chinese primary school – almost fell off his chair laughing when I said this. Yes, you, Leslie Lau.)

Well.

I found one yesterday. Problem is it’s in Shanghai.

The YK Pao school bills itself a Chinese International School and opened in 2007. It’s pretty much one of its kind, aiming for a bilingual education that combines the best of Chinese education – academic rigor, culture, and of course, the language we all want our children to speak, with the best of US/UK education – problem-solving, sport, music, all that extra-curricular stuff.

One of the founders, Philip Sohmen, grandson of Sir YK Pao, the late shipping magnate and philanthropist, was in KL yesterday, to talk to parents. I found out about it because Philip went to Oxford with my brother TY.

Here. Here was my Kinder, Gentler Chinese School.

The primary school is in Shanghai and the secondary school is in a Shanghai suburb bizarrely called Thames Town, complete with cobblestone streets and red phone boxes. Both campuses are state-of-the-art and lovely. The fees are comparable to international schools in KL.

They also offer summer camps (two weeks in Shanghai for about RM5,000), which draw students from around the world. That seemed of the most interest to yesterday’s audience.

Time to find jobs in Shanghai.

Kidding! (Only partly.)

So why can’t we do something similar in Malaysia? You’d need lashings of two things: passion and money. But we already have international schools and we already have Chinese schools and…and… you’d think it’d be possible, no?

(For more of my pontificating on education in Malaysia, see “Fix Education, Fix the Brain Drain.”)

Law of the (Home) Land: Rueban Balasubramaniam

Rueban with wife Lindy

Rule of law. The social contract. Racial politics.

Brain hurting?

This guy will help you make sense of it. Even if he does live in Canada.

KL boy Rueban Balasubramaniam, a law professor who specializes in political and philosophical stuff, submits to the Outstation Q&A.

Story here….

Voting in the USA

While we’re all cooling down from US election fever from afar, here’s a story from someone who actually voted.

Choy Leow is an architect who was born in Jinjang and now lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota. He talks about what it meant to him to vote in this week’s election.

http://outstation.my/blog/2012/11/voting-in-the-us-elections-by-choy-leow/