terima kasih for nothing

Why a blog? The world needs another blog like American grocery stores need another brand of cereal. But to tell you the truth (and by you I mean you, my blog, because I’m not planning on widely publicizing this thing), I’ve been lonely since arriving in Kuching. Nah, lonely is not the right word for it, because I’ve been too busy to sit around being bummed out. The business of getting a flat and learning a language will take up plenty of time, especially when the money you thought you’d transferred to your new bank was not actually transferred.

But yesterday I took a break from spending hours on hold with my old bank and went around the corner to the mall, thinking I’d get a quick lunch at the food court. There are all sorts of brightly colored, awesome-looking wet markets here. But I wasn’t ready to try eight new kinds of fruit and haggle over prices. Honestly, I wanted a corn dog and an Orange Julius, or the closest Malaysia could get to that combination, which turned out to be greasy fried chicken and a smoothie from this cafeteria-style place. Fine with me.

So I paid my RM7 to the girl in the hairnet at the register and I said, “Terima kasih,” which is pretty much the only Malay phrase I know (it means “thank you”). (Good thing so many people here speak English. Fucking colonialism.)

The girl just rolled her eyes.

Look, I’ve had people be plenty mean to me just because I’m a foreigner. I can handle a little rudeness. But usually people are pretty cool if you make an effort to speak their language, so I was just confused.

Later I asked Tingang, the guy who lives across the hall from me and just about the only person I’ve talked to who doesn’t work for a bank, if he had any idea what that might have been about.

He was like, “They were probably Chinese.”

And I said, “But don’t they speak Malay? Doesn’t everyone here speak Malay?”

Tingang said, “Sure, when the have to.”

That made me think about how things were back at home—and I still sometimes more or less think of the U.S. as home, I guess. Say I went to some international-esque place, like Grand Central Market in downtown LA. Say I got some falafel from one stand and an empanada from another. I’d say “thank you” to both of them, and I can’t imagine either the Middle Eastern guy or the Salvadoran guy getting all pissy about it.

I’m not normally one to think, “Why can’t other countries be more like America?” But yesterday, for that tired, tired couple of hours I was. Hence the blog. A quiet little corner of the internet to put down all my stupid thoughts.