Thoughts and perspectives...

Thank you Krazie for the thoughtful and educational comment on the entry below. Definitely worth a read if you are purusing my blog right now. When I started this blog, I was a little wary of giving the address to my Malaysian friends. I didn't want to offend them if I interpreted things about their culture and country differently than they saw it. But these days a few of us have a small blog community going and I love talking with them and getting feedback on what they think about my comments and perspectives on life here. Likewise, I enjoy hearing their perspectives on American culture.

The more I travel, the more time I spend abroad, the less I feel like I know. Let me qualify that. After time you begin to learn the nuances, the things you can't see if you only stay somewhere for a week or two. You start to understand that you can't just take things at face value, because there is SO much going on under the surface. You have to take into account a people's history. Did they grow up in a place where free speech was the norm? Or is it a place where expressing your opinion has been at times a very dangerous proposition? Does the country allow freedom of the press? Do you even KNOW if the country allows freedom of the press? How does that affect people's point of view? What is the religious background of the people there? In Malaysia you have a territory that was at first ruled by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, then Islamic, overlaid with the influence of the Christian West during colonialization. On top of that, you have newer immigrants (in the last 200 years or so), who descend from China and a more Confucianist background, as well as Indian Muslims and Hindu's. Now, how could one possibly sum that up in a catch all statement about how "Malaysians all do... or all think..."

I think I mentioned this once before, but no where in my travels have I experienced such a juxtaposition of understanding of "the way things are" than I did in Vietnam. People my age in Vietnam are old enough to remember the very difficult years that followed the Vietnam War, they can remember near starvation under some of the early policies of the Communist Party. And they had years of schooling that espoused the evils of the west. Particularly America. My understanding of particular political and social situations in Vietnam were 180 degrees different from that of my Vietnamese friends of the same age. I had one friend there who's major was American studies. Sometimes we would joke that she knew more about my country than I did, and I about hers. But in reality, what we both knew was based primarily in book study and couldn't truly do justice to the incredible complexity of both of our countries. In most situations our opinions were both right and wrong... and came from two completely different ways of viewing the world...

Don't misunderstand me. I loved Vietnam and I still have numerous friends there, all I'm saying is, history, cultural values, and societal norms (of any country or group of people) are not something that can be simply summed up in a blog entry, like the one below. I threw that one up there because I had a nice thought about the relaxed atmosphere you can sometimes feel around Friday afternoon prayer time. There are other places in the city where the end of prayer time often leads to political demonstrations that are anything but relaxed. And it all leads me to one thought. Everything is true, and nothing is true. What you see is what you get... but what you get is not always what you see...

I know not everyone has the time or inclination to study history and politics the way I do. We all have different ideas and priorities about the world. It's that cool, and sometimes not so cool thing that makes the world what it is... I'm simply saying, sometimes things just aren't that simple... ;-)

So thanks again Krazie, your comments are most welcome and appreciated. And, Ya, sila gunakan Bahasa Melayu kadang-kadang. Tadi pagi, aku fikir sama dengan kau tentang perbincangan kita dalam bahasa Melayu...