I have felt largely unable to write since I moved to Malaysia. I'm not sure why. I have a few theories, but no way to judge the worth of any of them. I realized this week that most of my pre-Malaysia thinking was done on my daily walks, that I would often sit down at the keyboard as soon as I arrived home from a walk to record ideas which had come, seemingly unbidden while I walked. I don't walk here: it's too hot, for one thing, and too urban for my taste. I try to keep my heart in shape by walking on the treadmill at the community exercise room, but it does nothing for my thought life.
I miss my daily 45 minutes in the fresh air, charmed by the subltleties of the seasonal changes which made the same route through the woods a different walk every day. A favorite pastime of mine was to take a mental snapshot of some stretch of the path and ask myself if I would be able to guess what month of the year it was from this photograph alone. I loved searching for the minute cues of color, angle of light, bough-dressing and ground cover that I had over the years come to intuitively associate with each page of the calendar on my kitchen wall. Here such a game would be pointless and unwinnable. Each day looks like the last looks like the next. I have been told in the market that certain fruits are seasonal, but I believe they are fruits imported from China, not ones grown here.
A weekend trip to northern Thailand suggested another hypothosis to me. My daughter and I sat beside a charming street musican on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Chiang Mai. Richie had shoulder length, thick wavy black hair closely shaved about the temples, dark eyes framed with thick black lashes, the whitest teeth I have ever seen and a soft but animated voice. He and Anna and I talked non-stop the 2 hour flight and hour long wait in the immigration line. A Colorado native of Cuban descent, he'd spent the last ten years or so travelling, playing music and busking to support himself through Barcelona, Croatia, Mexico, Germany, the UK, Thailand and Malaysia.
He clearly loved his music, and as we chatted he asked what I loved - what I did for pleasure. I said I wrote. . . or used to, and mentioned how I had stopped writing the last few months. He assured me that I was going to the right place. He told me how many painters came to Chiang Mai to create the works they sold elsewhere, how many people wrote there, how Chiang Mai had released the songwriter in him. I didn't know how much credence I put in the powers of place to foster creativity, but I did remember those walks in the woods.
We absolutely loved the three days we spent in Chiang Mai; I was reluctant to come back to Kuala Lumpur at the end, though I wonder how much of my hesitance was just not wanting to face my responsibilities again after three days chilling and drinking great coffee! I've thought a lot this week about place and atmosphere and and how they tend to support or squelch creativity. I've even remembered my first mid-wife walking through our 200 year old log house and affirming that yes, this felt like a good place to have a baby - as opposed to the sterile hospital room I gave birth in on another occasion (both babies were fine.) I've pondered Kuala Lumpur and Chiang Mai ad nauseum, and weighed them against each other, and decided maybe Richie was on to something.
I think Kuala Lumpur is hard. Not difficult, but unyielding. Not rigorous so much as rigid. While the houses in Chiang Mai were made of soft, dark weathered wood, homes here are constructed of concrete, marble and tile. Chiang Mai was full of deep shade and quiet temple gardens, colorful, rustic benches under drooping trees, and dusty by- ways bordered by walls just high enough to obscure the sight of what mysteries lay within. KL is characterized by gardens which are beautiful but sterile - full of clipped, controlled plants, carefully situated around golf-course neat lawns which dare you step off the manufactured stone pathways. Every house has a concrete wall with steel gates around it, gates which are either locked elctronically or with a large padlock.
Chiang Mai was full of street bazaars and shops selling goods created by local artisans - hand-woven cloth, hand-carved wood, locally made garments and hammocks and jewlery. Granted, Chiang Mai had its share of copied goods - Birkenstock sandals complete with tages printed in German which had actually been manufactured somewhere down the road, cheap toys from China that broke the first time a child played with them - but the majority of items in the stalls were locally made, as opposed to the famous Kl markets which are overflowing with manufactured goods, often imported ones, which are largely cheap copies of Western brands.
Chiang Mai was a clean city, but not ritualistically clean like KL, where you cannot walk through one of the many mega-malls without encountering dozens of immigrant floor moppers. Chiang Mai actually smelled of flowers, not disinfectant. The roads were full of motorbikes and tuk-tuks, the tiny open-air taxis that look a bit like a Jeep Landrover mounted on a motorbike. In the heat of the day their drivers nap in the back seats while waiting for a customer.
People walked in Chiang Mai and rode bicycles. You could rent a bike to get around town and hope to make it back to your guesthouse that evening. KL is so jammed with cars that bicycles are practically unheard of and legendary traffic jams are a fact of life. Cars here are shiny and new; a status symbol and a point of pride. They also seem to be a way for Malaysians to vent the frustrations inherent in life in a big, crowded, noisy place. Going anywhere is a wearying, irksome ordeal involving a lot of rudeness and risk-taking. There's so such thing as the Sunday afternoon drive in KL.
A more subltle difference, but one which was probably fairly significant, was the religious climate. Northern Thailand is primarily Buddhist, while Malaysia is officially Muslim. Disregarding the truth claims of competing religious systems, you can classify some as friendlier, softer, nicer than others. I found the monks intheir orange robes and babyish bald heads friendly-looking. They hung out in nice temples with big, shady courtyards that were open to anyone for a nap or a rest. They appeared humble and poor, whether or not they were, walking the streets in their sandals and loose garments. Malaysia, however, is a land of religious enforcement officers, of religious courts and judges, of official religious ID cards and of strict laws . The enforcement officers don't bother me, in the sense of harass me, since I am clearly a hopeless infidel, but they do bother me in the sense of irritate or annoy me. I don't like knowing they are there.
Last, but far, from from least, I noted the prevalence of books and coffee. As far as I am concerned these are the staples of the creative life - the life worth living - and Chiang Mai was full of them. Used book stores are everywhere and most are next door to cafes with real, Western style coffee which invite you to sit for hours reading, chatting, discussing the meaning of life. Malaysians are known for their disinterest in books; they freely admit it and always talk about how they should read more, but they don't like to read. Bookstores here are perfunctory; they exist chiefly to sell school texts, and just include some other books for effect. Chiang Mai is full of shops lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves divided into satisfying categories for easy browsing. I spent three times as much on books as I did on lodging the three days we were there, and I left so many books I really wanted on the shelves for another day (yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.)
Just when I am tempted to excuse my lack of creativity on my environment, I remember how many of the most beautiful works ever penned came out of prison, poverty, war and deprivation. I think of the British WWI poets, of Pilgrim's Progress, of Solzenitsyn and my own brother, and know that one's inner life can be beautiful and rich and productive, no matter what circumstances one finds oneself in. So, I don't get a pass on writing just because I live in KL. But I know where I'm headed on my next vacation!
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