My Mandarin sucks ruthless ass, virtually non-existent and a joke.
That meant bringing a relatively new colleague along, for show and tell and a bit of info here and there; as it was generally an engineering job, I was sent along to watch over things. Let’s call him P. I arrive at work about 5 minutes shy of our agreed time, and shuffle off to Batu Pahat in my trusty Perodua steed. Being about 8 months old already, he was up for confirmation, and I thought he’d keep quiet about the lack thereof.
He didn’t of course, and I suddenly found in him a familiar frustration about how things are run. The guys at the office, being angels, are very careful about how new guys are handled. They are told next to nothing about the company and its practices, its policies and such; the assistance we provide willingly is with work, that’s all.
It’s usually no surprise when, having experienced the rigmarole at work, these newbies begin to form negative opinions about the company, all by themselves. What is disheartening is the 100% rate of anti-company men these newbies become. 
We reach our site in record time (because I’m speeding most of the way) and are introduced to our client’s partner. We got into his pickup and proceeded some ways down the road before turning into an oil palm estate. Now, oil palm estates are pretty tricky. Besides having to deal with hellaciously bad mud paths that serve as roads, you could get lost among the branching turns here and there. Worse, you are almost completely uncontactable via mobile.
As I sat behind and watched P converse with Partner in Mandarin, I began wondering if Partner was leading us deeper and deeper so it’d be more difficult to find ..um.. evidence of our disappearances..
For brief moments, we emerged from the dull wall of homogeneous green on either side to blank plots of land spotted with even, procession-like rows of oil palm shoots. They looked strangely like the shoots of a coconut tree/plant/blah, I thought, as I was presented with a view of the open, cloudy sky overhead. The view of the sky was framed at the bottom by stand of oil palm trees, giving the impression of a sketch bounded by the limits of the edge of canvas or paper.
Partner took us yet deeper into the oil palm estate, and soon we were bumping along on hard mud, testing his pickup’s suspension. Oil palm trees soon gave way to a fenced enclosure to our right and left, separated here and there by vegetable patches with raffia strings lining the edges of plots, hanging above. It was a funny kinda disconnect to see concrete buildings behind those fences suddenly emerge from that haze of green. It felt a little less bizarre when I saw chicks scuttling about plastic, domed feeding cages within open yards.
We arrived at our site, and I began wondering if this was another ‘Sungei Kong Kong’ adventure; the path/road ended in excavator tracks leading off into jungle, past a bare sloping hill stripped bare of its trees. Congealing mud lay within pits dug up by passing excavators, and said hill looked as if it had been overturned. Most of the hill’s topsoil had been shaken loose, and potruding roots and buried branches gave the place an impression of a clearing done with brutal efficiency.
By the time we reached the stranded excavator up the hill (of course), we were surrounded by insects and bugs you only see in large, untouched jungles. Even the ants looked different, broader, more nourished and far more menacing. The excavator was standing, of course, but its rear appeared to have suffered a brief barbeque. Further examination revealed that a fire had begun from a short-circuit either from the master pump’s regulator or solenoid, causing the ignition firstly of hydraulic fluids trapped at the bottom of the oil pan, thence igniting rubber sheathes and pipes.
We slapped insects off as we took pictures, and soon Partner warmed to me and began conversing in Malay. Besides learning that the girls at Tanjung Balai weren’t cheap and weren’t pretty, and that the girls in Thailand were more “worth it”, I didn’t get much more info from him. Partner discussed the prices of girls (read: prostitutes) in Tanjung Balai, making estimates of “doing it” there and the cost of “doing it” in Johor Bahru. He kindly advised that I try the girls out in Johor Bahru since, according to him, there was no difference between here and Tanjung Balai.
How interesting.
It was a pleasure, however, seeing P work. After 15 minutes, I realized that I didn’t have to be there, he was that thorough. We climbed onto the excavator, and I pointed out burnt or melted sheathes, showing him how the pattern of burning indicated the point of origin of the fire, and such.
About 2 hours later, we were having a late lunch at the Machap rest area where, incidently, I learned how truly fucked local universities were. P belonged to the last batch of students still affected by the quota systems in university, before the Merit system had been implemented.
If ever there was a microcosm of how divided our country is, it’s probably in universities that you see it best: according to him, Malay students tended to read Islamic studies, they tended to keep to themselves as do the Chinese and Indian students, had their own clubs and groups; the “bankable” courses in universities were usually filled with Chinese and Indian students, with an estimated 20% of said courses being Malays.
Worse still, according to him, Malays usually failed such courses, though there were exceptional ones who really deserved to be there. Apparently, he’d heard of Malays extending a 3 year degree program to its maximum 6 years, having failed modules in these courses repeatedly. Even more shocking was the fact, he revealed to me, that with some general modules lecturers would actually clue students in on questions that would come up during the exams. He related several incidences of lecturers actually handing out exam papers before the exam proper.
The picture he painted was so bad I wondered if he was really telling the truth. It was, however, the first time I’d seen P so animated about anything. “It’s really sad, you know,” he said as we neared the tollbooths lined up like the walls of a dam.
