Malaysia is ranked 9th according to the Government Restrictions Index in the latest Pew Forum report called Global Restrictions on Religion. (yours truly was excited to see this finally published after one semester of researching for it last year). It is after Eritrea and before Brunei. Even though I wrote a thesis on this, and I read the archives on Malaysia in the US State Department International Religious Freedom report, where we conducted our primary research, I am nevertheless still quite surprised, and sad about it. Anyway, go check out the summary page, if not, the actual pdf file itself available on that link.

The latest thing you should know about my life this summer break…is my new passion for the law, and how its being used to defend justice in this country of mine, from Teoh Beng Hock’s inquest, Port Klang scandal, to something closer to my heart, such as the story of the Jahut Christians-Malaysia’s indigenuous people-some of whom are Christians, but the government has been trying to convert them to Islam for a while now. The story below is quite hopeful..:
” The Jahut Christians from Kampung Pasu are still powerless to pray in the house of God which they built.”

And it seems the lawyers representing the Jahuts, from the firm Lee Swee Seng & Co is something to keep on my radar as well..!

There’s nothing like seeing your father’s hand pierced to the IV pole, his wincing face at every swab of cotton by the nurse changing his dressings, his body clothed in the gingham patient gown that forces you, the daughter, to realize the vulnerability of the human body, and the invincibility of your relationship. Choosing between family and friends was an easier route this summer break, when the immediacy of my father’s gallbladder operation took precedence even over my dear friend’s arrival in KL for a nine day holiday. I note the way family roles coalesce into brisk efficiency as we allocate who stays with dad each night of his hospital stay. Many times this past weekend, I experience brief images of the way we three sisters would care for our parents in the future.
Patience,
empathy,
growing peace with my conflicting child and adult roles;
Thank you God for nurturing those qualities in me during these hospital overnights.

I haven’t blogged a single time when I was in China, resorting instead to sending pdf files on mass email list servs because not only did I have to go through many different proxy servers to access my blog,( it was super slow), I was always unsure how my critical observations of Beijing and China would be interpreted by the Great FireWall of China. 

But…..

Whew, another semester passed in a country that I breathed and lived in for several months. To quickly sum up my experiences and perspectives from inhabiting Beijing, I am now more acute to the

-Needs of the people in China-in terms of

• spiritual (religion and a dubious faith in the government as provider of all needs),
• physical (overcrowded public hospitals and frustrating long-winded bureaucracy) and
• materialistic (effect of overpopulation on public school system, hospital, legal system,etc.)

-From now on I will not merely see China as the “sleeping dragon” through the Western media perspective but it is now populated by the faces of friends (never knew so many were such ardent fans of KTVing), and memories of many “horrific” culture-shock experiences like seeing the murky pollution of the sky for the first time in April as the weather warmed up, carrying your own toilet paper everywhere in squatting toilets, navigating the heat and traffic of ever-hectic streets of Wudaokou, seeing kids in those “split-in-the-middle” pants held over trash cans and streets to do their “business”, I could go on…. but now that I’m back in Malaysia, give a shout-out if you are home as well, and I’ll provide more detailed stories!

Its been two weeks since coming back from Washington DC and I am surprised how far away my former life seems to me now. Leaving the political hub of the American capitol, I came back to Malaysia energized to replicate the important bits of my DC life in my home country: a church that seeks to be relevant in this culture, friends and acquaintances passionate for God’s heart for justice, the spirit of volunteerism and political awareness that was all around me. In the past two weeks since, I have confronted a common theme among my friends during mamak and mahjong sessions, open house and even, during clubbing events-a general resignation to the socio-political conditions back home…one of “this is how life is here in Kuala Lumpur (KL)”, and the nascent ambitions among my peers for a better life in all its different stripes. Mind you, I know I am being unfair in summing up the depth and complexity of decisions that we go through-as minorities (religious, ethnic, etc) in this country. And the idea of risk is quite frightening, particularly as well-bred middle-class inheritors (of privilege, of class, of education) that most of my friends and I are. However, as I hear the grim tones, the statistics of Malaysians wanting to leave the country, the overall pessimism by friends, family, compatriots …I am reminded of the struggles that will always accompany this faith: the inward groaning described in Romans 8:23 “as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons [and daughters], the redemption of our bodies” in the future. It is our calling to be uncomfortable amongst secularism, it is our duty to strike a balance between the increasingly blurred lines of our tenets and the values of our postmodern world, etc. But we need to remember that this “foolish” struggle–i.e. the path that makes no sense to anyone else of this world– can only succeed if we believe, wholeheartedly, that we can only find complete fulfilment in something that is not of this world. And in following the call, we have to give up many dreams that have been laid out for us..

[addendum] In a famous Yeats poem, one line said something like…”Being poor I have nothing, but I have spread my dreams under your feet, Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” I am currently gripped by that idea of willingly trading one’s previous ambitions in exchange for something more..a something that is vague and uncertain but resting at the footholds of an infinite glorious Creator.

Amazing how emails can keep you in contact with people like the editor of Cafe Babel, an online European magazine that I became acquainted with during my semester abroad in Paris. After getting goosebumps from both McCain and Obama’s speech, I quickly jot off a couple of lines before I went to bed last night, and I attach the excerpt below, reproduced from the website itself. If you do want to share how your own night was, let me know..I had a housemate that went off to U street at midnight to join in the festivities-what a crazy night.

Washington DC

From the morning, I feel the buzz in the air as I walk past the growing line of people waiting to vote at my neighborhood’s elementary school. My office is teeming with stories being swapped of how many hours each person waited at their polling station. Every vote seems crucial, even if it is in a definite blue state like the district of Columbia. I rush back home to watch the news after work.

A little after 11:00pm – Obama wins. My housemates and I – a white American, Asian, and African-American on the couch together – shout for joy, celebrating the advent of an America that has been truly changed.

I read this from an article, which was certainly thought-provoking:

All this ties in with a discovery Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin made as long ago as 1934 in his study, Sex and Culture (Oxford University Press).

Having researched more than 80 cultures past and present on this subject, Unwin discovered that societies, which do not impose some restraint on their sexual behavior, cease to develop significant social energies after only one generation.

Conversely, when social regulations forbid indiscriminate satisfaction of sexual impulses, the emotional conflict is expressed in another way. In other words, civilizations are built upon sacrifices in the gratification of innate desires.

There could be more Christians than  Communists in China, which means they could have the highest number of active Christians in the world!  The place where I work at the moment, the Pew Forum is part of the efforts in trying to find out these numbers exactly, anyway here’s a link to the Economist which talks about this: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342509

It’s been more than three months since I graduated from middle-of-nowhere Wesleyan University to end up here in “inner-city” Washington DC on my second internship with a research “fact”-tank. Many of the choices I have made during the summer was borne from much anxiety and prayer, and I am amazed to see how God has led me here, here regardless. When trying to explain to beloved friends and family about these choices, it was hard for them to understand why I chose this low-income, graffitied neighborhood. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a Malaysian friend yesterday who is just starting his Harvard Phd in Physics this fall, “My parents have no idea what I am doing, so the only way I can explain it is, “Physics allow you to make things like handphone or batteries or space engines,” and they are like, “oh, like engineering!”

Well, anyway that was a bad analogy, but I just read this article in the New York Press about a pretty large intentional community in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Although our house is different in many ways (ask me how, if you’re curious) and the article paints quite a radicalized romanticized image of the community, I will quote certain similarities our communities share as part of the New Monastic movement:

While their website describes a group of people, “dedicated to living a meditative, prophetic and prayerful life, centered in Christ, engaged in our neighborhood, concerned with social justice, and led by the Holy Spirit,” their Facebook profile advertises an affinity with like-minded communities around the country with names like The Simple Way, The Mustard Seed House and the Ecclesia Collective.

Like backpackers who meet each other at youth hostels, coffee shops and dive bars to share stories from the road, progressive in-the-know evangelical pilgrims travel regularly among these communities, meeting each other in these safe spaces of fellowship and devout faith. At the Hart Street house, there is a permanent “hospitality” bedroom where these “pilgrims” from around the country are invited to spend the night.

Many of the residents hold jobs as educators or social workers and occupy their spare time with volunteer work.

P.S. What is New Monasticism?

Sept 4, lost in transborder time:

I just watched Sex and The City: The Movie on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Washington D.C, with many transits in between, and it made me think of the common struggles that people in their 20s face, as opposed to those in the 30s, 40s, etc. I will be 22 in a month’s time, just another recent college graduate returning at the end of summer for a new chapter in her life: job-seeking.

The common thread in the lives of my friends and mine is no matter how uncertain the future is, we plod on with our doubts and fears.
There is the friend who just returned from her gap year where she backpacked around Latin America, looking for adventure, different perspectives, new relationships, etc. Talking to her over breakfast in her parents’ newly-constructed bungalow, I exclaimed at the stark differences between the tiny, sparse Guatemalan house she had rented and her current life at her airy, spacious house back with her parents.
“It’s too comfortable-lah, if I stay here I won’t be able to do anything because I would not be challenged.”
I completely understood what she was trying to say, because it was my own story as well; as if we both had to live, and glimpse, what was different from the lives we had, in order to find purpose and give meaning to our undecided futures. Even now, I struggle to put into words to explain to people why I chose to live in a high-crime-rate, segregated yet convivial neighborhood, where people waiting at my bus stop to go back to our neighborhood loudly proclaim their grievances of the day, and we wonder together where the resident homeless woman went today; a place where our next-door neighbor takes out our trash because he thinks he’s our guardian angel and warns us to be careful because my housemates and I manifestly stand out in this neighborhood.
“You both like to lead difficult lives, ah?” a friend asked during our last conversation together before I left KL.
Ironically enough, he will be heading to India à la medicine school, where he had previously glimpsed the equivalent educational systems at Adelaide and Kuala Lumpur already. Our parents are big factors in the decisions we make, and what happens if we fail to convey the urgency and importance of being able to do what we want to do? Caught in the transition between graduating from college but not yet from our parents’ pursestrings, our upbringing demands obedience but it is not necessarily immediate. I wholeheartedly respect this friend who will “give my mother another five more years” of his life by finishing med school, despite his talents and yearnings to write and play songs on his guitar.
Fast-forward twenty years later, and this friend would probably face the demands of providing for family and fulfilling his passion at the same time. A columnist cum playwright I knew told me that his desk job was a way of sek wan (Cantonese for earning money) while he writes his plays and books during his off-office hours. He is also an active family man. I shall not complain further about my impending juggling act in the coming months to study for the GREs, apply for jobs, be a model intern, and actively contribute to my household and our mission.
If anything, being surrounded by the overworked, ardent culture of Washingtonites–replete with NGOs, politics, segregation- has made me earnest to acquire skills and live out their ambitions too.
Although I have to say, take my words in stride, I have so much more to go.