Backwater: Kuala Terengganu

Trekking the East Coast

Mom had planned for us to do the entire East Coast, in that usual overdo way of hers. I can’t imagine what it must be like for her having to coordinate the way I think generals coordinate entire armies. In a way, I’ve come to believe, mothers are generals with stronger stomachs and better cooking. In the end, we only covered Terengganu. Here’s a story about poverty.

There’s a special kind of poverty that pervades the entirety of the East Coast.

It’s somehow different from the sluggish slum-poverty that we see here in Selangor, and the other states on the western side. We’ve so many beggars on this side. Victims of ah longs and mobsters, hobbling on limbs bent at horrifying angles; stragglers with haggard faces caked in KL dust and the kind of sweat that water doesn’t wash away. All around you see women on rattan mats, usually with a child cradled in their arms to gain sympathy. Their faces are empty, they’ve already given up hope.

(Side note: never give beggars money. Never. Give them food, give them clothes, give them a warm blanket, but never give them money. The money you give them goes straight into the pockets of their handlers. All part of a syndicate, baby.)

You don’t see this kind of poverty in Terengganu. Some other kind of despondency lingers in the eyes of all in the state, and the funny thing is, I don’t know if they mind very much about it.

My parents are huge fans of “let’s go see this obscure place and learn about culture!” road trips. I don’t mind because you usually do end up learning something interesting, or you find yummy food that will usually hardly materialise in KL. This time, our goal was a small shipbuilding village where — apparently — craftsmen were famous for building these massive fishing ships in the traditional way. Guided by the mellifluous voice of the GPS repeating “recalculating” every three kilometres, we somehow arrived in an isolated kampung (village) that was squashed to the side of a highway construction site.

Dad, gung-ho as any father can be, drove right in.

We probably really shouldn’t have. The roads could be measured with those small floppy rulers we used in high school, houses leaned on each other in a ramshackle mess of regurgitated metal slates, slabs of atap and dirty, pastel-painted brick walls that looked like the last Hari Raya cleaning they saw was a decade ago. Kids ran home from school in grey-tinged shoes, and lalang (elephant grass) poked out from the sides of everything.

It looked like what I imagine real poverty looked like, not the commercialised business that KL ah longs and gangs had artificially manufactured. Clothes that were hung out to dry looked like they needed to be sent back to the wash ten times over, hangers were bent and nearly broken, tyres still in their motorcycle frames lay in shoddy piles about the walkway-roads. Flower pots were cracked and their resident plants looked like the death had come for them. Houses were squished together in a mockery of a cul-de-sac. Dad risked denting his car in several different places when he attempted the million-point turn in a narrow alleyway.

No one seemed too bothered by the surroundings, except my mother of course. They seemed pretty chill — as it seemed to us city-folk — about the slum they were living in. I don’t think they even considered it a slum.

A woman putting out the laundry sang an old P. Ramlee song out of tune, boys kicked a half-deflated ball in the middle of the “road,” little girls in pristine white school tudungs giggled conspiratorially as they gossiped, shirtless men walked went about lifting wood or new tyres, all of them invariably smoking, and old women sat on their rattan sun chairs, peering at us suspiciously as we passed by. There was life in this place, and though it seemed dim and kind of depressing, life is still life.

My aunt once told me that my cousin had gone on a jaunt about the East Coast on work-related stuff. She was supposed to find out what her company could do for the people living in poverty there. When she came back, we found out that she’d discovered that all across the board, no one wanted anything. They were content with their lives there, living in their small dilapidated homes and lalang-infested backyards.

Well, to each his own, I guess. Here’s an upside though: the school in this tiny backwater kampung has a field twice the size of any you’ll find in KL.

We found that place where they make ships, and suffice to say, no one makes ships there anymore. The jetty has half-crumbled into the Terengganu River, and what hasn’t been swallowed is slowly being dissolved by the rain. I can imagine the river swelling to terrifying heights when the November monsoons come. Only factory-manufactured fibre glass boats bob in the water, no famous traditional boats. Now, in humid July, rempits (motorcycle gangs) crowd underneath the pondok to hide from the rain, and puff their cigarette smoke. Nearby, old men — I guess they’re our former shipwrights — watch them with careful, weary eyes from inside their leaky homes.

No one’s bothered to fix the jetty. Livelihoods were lost when that jetty disappeared because now old men can’t put their boats to water because it’s too dangerous, and their backs are far too bent. Terengganu is a state filthy with oil money. It supports nearly 20% of Malaysia’s annual GDP. Small fishing villages live side-by-side huge oil refineries. Maybe that’s why I find the poverty in Terengganu so disconcerting — right next to the poor, huge money-making oil factories hum, untouchable.

Dad commented that corruption prevented any of that money from coming to anyone who wasn’t titled or knew someone important. All that money trickled down to Kuala Lumpure, instead of into that old Terengganu jetty.

Maybe that’s why no one minds their poverty, and no one wants money from large, fairytale-faraway companies. They’re so used to living in squalor and poverty, it’s all they’ve ever known. Sometimes, maybe, having familiar, little broken things are better than sparkly promises of a “better life.” What is a “better life” anyway? They’ve still got that nice field after all.