Last week I was sitting in traffic (again) behind a car with an intriguing bumper sticker in the back window - which is where bumper stickers go in Malaysia. It had a picture of a golden buddha on a blue-sky background and announced, "Anyone can go to heaven. Just be Good! " In small print it said justbegood.net.
I mused about this cheery announcement the rest of the way home. Although it was meant to appeal to me by its egalitarian, affirming message, I find the exhortation to "just be good" extremely depressing. What person over 12 years old actually labors under the delusion that he can "justbegood." "If that's the way to Heaven", I decided, "I'll never make it . Of course, I'll be lucky to make it home in this jam."
As I navigated the LDP highway, watching carefully for signs for Puchong, Putra Jaya, Taman Tun Dr Ismail (T.T.D.I. to locals), I found myself idly concocting a theology based not on bumperstickers, but on the trafffic itself - like, it doesn't matter which lane you choose; we'll all end up in the same lane eventually. . . . unitarian, I suppose. It's true for traffic, at least.
A few days later our family embarked one morning upon a long-planned trip to the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. We had several errands to perform there: changing my husband's new passport to read "Male" rather than "Female", registering our presence as Americans in Malaysia , getting a NH residency form notarized for a college application, and correcting a piece of misinformation on my daughter's passport. KL is not far when considered in kilometers, but it can easily take over an hour to drive there (not allowing for any wrong turns) and nearly as long to find a parking space. So we decided to avoid the traffic and take the train into the city. We would then hike the few blocks from the train station to the Embassy.
My husband took the day off work and we left the house at 9:30, carrying all our critical documents. I found I was inordinately excited about the prospect of setting foot on an outpost of the US; I was all ready to be thrilled by the sight of the Stars and Stripes flying in the hazy tropical sky.
We drove to the LRT station near our house, purchased tickets to Ampang Park and sat down to enjoy the ride. Since our station is the last one on the line we can nearly always find seats. We arrived at our stop about 10:15 and got our bearings. We figured the embassy was about a 1/2 mile from the station and we guessed at the direction in which to head. Everyone immediately noticed how many non-Asians were about in the embassy district. We see very few non-natives in our neighborhood. It's a funny thing but Westerners tend to pretend not to notice each other here; if you accidentally make eye contact you both look away as if there is nothing notable or interesting about the other person. I'm not sure why.
When we arrived at the Embassy after walking the half mile from the monorail along a busy road in the blistering sun, we found it shut and barred. There was no sign of Old Glory anywhere. We quickly checked the time to make sure we had not missed the window of opportunity. The US Embassy is open all of two hours a day, five days a week for any business any Americans in Malaysia might have. (I hope there is never an emergency. . . .) But we were well within the 9-11 AM time frame. Apparently there was a little booth you had to register at first. My husband approached the Malaysian (how disappointing) manning the desk and was about to ask which entrance to use, when we saw the sign, "Closed for Martin Luther King Day, January 15th, 2007"
But it's not even Martin Luther King Day in the US yet, we wailed. It's still Sunday night!! Then we saw the other sign noting that the US Embassy closed for ALL public holidays, Malaysian and American! When you consider how many holidays the two countries celebrate, the place must be open an average of 8 hours a week, not even 10!! I was ready to renounce my citizenship then and there, except I probably couldn't do it until the embassy opened! We felt annoyed that all our efforts were for naught, but we also felt abandoned here on foreign soil, as if we didn't matter anymore. "That's what you get for moving to the other side of the world, you ingrates," was the message the locked gates and unwelcoming signs seemed to convey.
So, we went to the Canadian Embassy instead, which is open 35 hours a week, where we picked up applications for Certificates of Canadian citizenship for all our children, (I was born in Canada, so they all can claim citizenship), and they even offered to give the kids all 1 year passports while their Citizenship Claims were being processed!! So there. (We didn't go out of spite; we had planned to do this anyway.) We lounged around in the air conditioned Canadian waiting room for awhile before we headed back out to the hot sun and the train and the traffic. We felt slightly less offended; at least some country wanted us!
Then we went to the beautiful old Central Market for shopping and lunch, where we avoided eye contact with many more Westerners and ate wonderful clay-pot black pepper chicken and rice. We were back home by 3 PM, though we felt as if we'd been away a lot longer. We turned on the air-conditioning, sent the little girls off to the swimming pool and decided we'd let some time go by before we tried to visit our Uncle Sam again. Maybe he'll decide he misses us after all.
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