A Short Trip to Malaysia

            by Ben Rubin

 

            The last bit of 500 base pair marker dropped into the gel as I pushed down on the release button.  The yellow dye oozed into the gelatinous substance and I drew my pipette out, ejected the tip and walked to the lab exit.  I stretched the fingers of my latex gloves and let them snap back mimicking the actors I had seen T.V.  Then I took off my lab coat, disarmed the door, and strode over to my desk.

            I picked up my graphs of the mitotic index and shuffled them clicking my tongue as if I was making important observations.  On my desk was also a yellow sticky that said, “I would like to talk to you.”

            That’s strange, I thought to myself, who would want to talk to me? I was living alone in Singapore as the result of the communications that my dad had with a lab there.  My plan was to spend two months in the city state working on biology.  Initially, I had been staying with family friends, but since they had left I was now house sitting alone.  Everyone I knew worked on my floor of the lab.  Ignoring the note, I again picked up the papers and continued to shuffle.

            “Hello Ben.” A big voice said from behind me.

            “Hey.” I said, spinning around.  There stood a large Asian man with wide face and a big pot belly.

            The man dumped a pile of SAT books on my desk.  It suddenly stuck me that the man’s name was Eugene and my dad had told me that he would be sending books through him.  This must be the transporter.  I smiled and thanked him, but to my extreme displeasure, he began to tell me his own naïve plan about how I should proceed to study for my SAT’s.  He was attacking something that I held dear to my heart: my independence.  I looked at him trying to hold back a grimace as he babbled on.

            “Hey so, I have two kids your age, and I think that you and them could hang out together.  There’s not much to do in Singapore, but we could go over to Malaysia.” I have always had trouble being too polite in situations like these, so instinctually I kept smiling and nodded.  If only I had realized that I had just created an unbreakable contract.  My face contorted noticeably as he continued, “Maybe we could go next weekend.”

            Later that day I walked around the house feeding the animals and watering the plants.  I thought about what this strange man had said to me.  Did he mean it? Is that how people think here; does he realize that he just trampled on all the implied rules of social conduct? Will I be on B.B.C news next weekend as a corpse found in a gutter somewhere in Malaysia? Without anyone to check my concerns, they flew out of control into a neurotic spiral.  I calmed myself down and thought about it rationally.  I did not even know him.  I must not have understood his accent.  Even if he did say it, he didn’t mean it.  I was a little bit confused about the culture here and I had taken a joke as the truth.  I should have laughed.  The phone’s ringing jolted me from my thoughts.

            “Hello?” I said hesitantly, wondering who was calling me.

            “Hi Ben! I am just calling to tell you that I have arranged a hotel and that everything is ready!” Eugene told me as if it would be reassuring news.  I knew I had to make my stand now or never.

            “You know Eugene; I really don’t do well in salt water, sun, and sand.”

            “Weren’t you just on a surf trip on the equator?”

I gulped, thinking quickly.  “Well yes, but it is only with extreme sun protection that I can enter the water.  In the equatorial sun, without it I would be fried in a few minutes.” I could almost hear his strange mind whirring on the other side.

            “Well, we will stay inside in the daytime.” I wondered how this would work at a beach resort, but nevertheless my opposition was deflated.  I didn’t know why he wanted to take me so badly, but he would have his way.  I ate dinner and went to sleep with only my grim thoughts to keep me company.

◊

I was having trouble getting to sleep.  My mind kept rolling over the fact that tomorrow I was going to a third world country with someone I hardly knew.  I had finally reached a state of fitful slumber when the phone rang.  It was Eugene. 

“What?” I said, hoping to sound as annoyed as possible.

“I’m calling to make sure you’re ready to leave tomorrow.” I didn’t respond.

“Well, you have to bring your passport, some sunscreen, some swimming gear…”

            He kept talking in his jaunty voice about what I needed to prepare.  I looked over at my clock, and saw that it was 12:30.  I put the phone to the side and sunk my fingers deep into the pillow.

            “Ben?” He said, unsure that I was still on the line.

            “Bye.” I replied ignoring the alarm that went off in my head, which told me I had just crossed the boundary of the socially acceptable.  At the time I couldn’t care less; I didn’t like him; I didn’t like his stupid trip to Malaysia, and I certainly did not like this phone call.

At six the next morning, Eugene arrived by taxi.  His kids, who he had told me so much about, were not with him.  His car had also broken down.  To my displeasure, this did not mean that the trip was canceled but that we would have to take a ferry.  On the boat, I decided not to talk to Eugene or his loud wife.  Instead, I took out a copy of Moby Dick and began to read to the sway of the ferry.

When we arrived in Malaysia, we lugged our baggage onto a shuttle.  The road to the resort was surrounded by palm tree farms.  This time of year all the new trees were growing, and since they grew their foliage before they grew their trunks, they resembled bushes.  As far as I could see, there were rolling hills covered with ‘palm bushes’, occasionally broken by a little island of full grown trees.

             The resort was one of those places that sell an ugly room and a scrap of beach to bake on.  After we checked in, we sat down at the resort restaurant for a lunch of pasty tomato sauce on undercooked pasta.  I was starting to feel really pessimistic about the whole trip until I found out that they had windsurfing as one of their activities.  It sounded like a really fun alternative to cooking in the sun, or rather, a recreational way to do it, so we went down to the sports center (a green shack at the beach) to ask about it.

"We want to go windsurfing," we said to a group of smoking locals who acted as the recreation managers.

"No windsurfing."

"Okay, how about sailing?" I said, looking over at a few dinghies.

"Nope."

“Kayaks?” I recalled from the brochure I had read earlier.

“No!”

It turns out all this group of smoking locals did was send the tourists out on overpriced jet skis, which were turned down by Eugene (for someone that is quite well off he was certainly miserly).  He, his wife, and I decided we would walk down the beach to a rock formation to go snorkeling.  As soon as we had walked a short ways away, the beach became more and more sullied with trash.  On our way, we passed by a local living area, which reeked of garbage.  The houses were merely a few haphazardly nailed boards, and from the smell of fish and the sight of the huge net bundled outside the shacks, it looked like they mostly lived off the fish.  Nevertheless, there were T.V antennas haphazardly projecting from the roof. 

When we arrived at the rocky area, we all pulled on our gear and hopped into the water.  It was so dirty that when I extended my hand it disappeared into the sludge.  The rocks did not represent a coral formation, but only some very dead and ragged crags.  We soon gave up on seeing anything.  Eugene turned to me with a fat grin and said in his upbeat voice, “Let’s just have fun.” I laid down, depressed, in the shallow with only the tip of my snorkel projecting out of the water like a dead fish.

We trudged back to the resort and, despite Eugene’s promise to stay out of the sun and big plans to have fun; he plopped down next to the pool and closed his eyes.  At that point I was tired and melancholy by now so I decided to go back to the room and take a nap.

 When I woke up, it had cooled and I took the opportunity to go for a bare-foot run, the one activity this resort actually had and did not charge money for.  The wind had died down in the afternoon and glassy waves lapped on the shore.  It was serene running down the beach on the border of the water and the land.  My goal was a rocky point that looked to be a few kilometers away, so I jogged off down the beach.  As I ran, the terrain gradually changed.  I had left the resort area and on my left was a tropical rain forest emitting gentle sounds of wild life.  On my right the water retreated to long wet sand flats extending out about a kilometer.  Ahead, the beach was jammed up with fallen trees and rock.  I ran out onto the wet sand which felt good against my feet.  At the edge of the flats were unusual plants with strange roots that went up into the air before meeting the stem.  As I came closer to my destination, the ground became rockier.  When I finally reached the tip of the point I stepped carefully through a tide pool area with birds diving here and there for dinner.  It was so much more alive then the scrap of sand at the resort.  Being able to go no farther barefoot, I turned around and ran back into the sunset which gave the forest a majestic back lighting. 

The next day, I told Eugene about the place I had been to and said there would be better snorkeling, but warned him that it was pretty far.  Nevertheless, he seemed extremely excited despite my warnings and so he, his wife, and I trekked out down the beach.  About a quarter of a kilometer later they gave up and Eugene suggested that we, “just have fun”, so we all flopped into the hazy water and again lay like dead fish.

             Our last activity of the trip was to go to the crocodile farm.  The crocodiles were colossal; they looked like they would be right at home in the Jurassic age.  They sat with mouths open and tails extended, as if they were frozen in the midst of an attack.  Eugene took one look at them and angrily proclaimed that they were fakes.  Our driver told him to go in if he thought so. 

The tour of the crocodile farm was nonexistent, and our driver who had also never been here, was our only guide.  Eugene started to get pretty riled up over what a waste of the trip was and demanded on getting his money’s worth. He grabbed a long stick and began to poke the alligators.  They would stay completely still, that is until they perceived it to be the right moment at which point they would spring and snap their jaws on it.  I couldn't help but to jump back a few feet.  After attacking the stick a few times they would scuttle back into the pond defeated.  Unfortunately no explanation of any of the farming process was given.  I excused its bad presentation, assuming that it was all very utilitarian.

As we walked back to the van, we met a tan older man smoking a cigarette.  Eugene chatted with him in Mandarin for a while, but no one bothered to translate anything to me so I just watched as the chickens pecked the ground dangerously close to the crocodiles.    Afterwards, we had lunch at a local restaurant.  I thought the food was pretty good, but Eugene’s wife did not agree.  She called out the waiter and accused her of heating frozen fish.  The little Malaysian women snarled, and fired back a clip of fast paced Mandarin.  Eugene’s wife, to my surprise, was unfazed and retorted with some equally nasty sounding words.  Midway through her response, the waiter made a spitting noise, turned her back and strode away.  I was glad we had already been served all of our food.  As we ate, I got Eugene to tell me about his conversation with the tan man.  Apparently the crocodile is a protected animal in Malaysia and the farm was only for show.  They can’t kill any of the crocodiles and the only way to make money from them was to show them too tourists.  As a result, he loses money every week and has been losing money for the last 50 years now.  We talked and laughed about the situation for most of the lunch.

            After the meal our driver; who was progressively becoming more talkative, insisted on taking us to a fruit market.  We drove through little twisted roads until we arrived at a dilapidated shelter.  As we walked up to the market, the Malaysian owner immediately latched on to us.  In my travels I have realized that white skin is equivalent to money in eastern Asia. 

He steered us through stalls of exotic fruit that I had neither seen nor imagined.  I tried one spiky purple fruit that tasted like “Juicy Fruit” bubble gum.  Eugene, who was gobbling down pink, red, and yellow produce, realized that there was one fruit missing: the king fruit; the Dorian.

It turned out that the driver had a contact for Dorian, so, when we untangled ourselves from the money hungry salesman, we hopped back in the driver’s car and left.  After a short ride we pulled into a big empty parking lot.  Eugene immediately became uncomfortable and grumbled childishly at the driver, but a few seconds later a big white van pulled into the lot.  Before I knew what it was, the smell hit me.  I sniffed in the putrid scent of sewer rotting in the tropical sun.  I struggled through the smell with Eugene to get to the van, where a big muscular local stepped out of the driver’s seat and began opening the back of the van.  By the seriousness of the mood and the expectant gazes, the scene took on the feel of a drug deal.  The man reached into his van and produced a green spiky globe that seemed to be emitting the stench.  He weighed it and then, grabbing a huge butcher’s knife, cracked the fruit perfectly into segments.  Each segment had a hollowed out section which held the true treasure: a little white blob.  Eugene and his wife snatched them greedily and began to stuff them in their mouths.  Eugene smiled at me and said, “This is good Dorian.”

I watched, sickened by the smell, while the big local man grabbed fruit after fruit. 

Eugene eventually filled up on Dorian and asked me to try one.  I kept saying no, but he kept on pressuring me. Some part of me wanted to try this strange fruit before I left Malaysia, if only for bragging rights.  I walked over to one of the opened Dorians. As I got closer, the smell went from open sewer, to rotting animal.  I reached for one of those white blobs and my hand went straight in to the center until my fingers gripped the seed in the middle.  The texture was soft and slimy like ripe dog shit.  I plopped it into my mouth.  It tasted like a mixture of sweet meet and onion, except with sickeningly soft texture.  Eugene was looking at me, smiling as I choked down the flesh and spat out the seed.

            “You know there’s a saying here.  ‘Once you like Dorian, you stay;’” said Eugene.  I smiled.

            “Well I guess its time for me to go,” I retorted.

            Soon after that we cruised back to the resort, collected our baggage and left for the ferry ride back to Singapore.  On the way back I looked out on the rolling hills of palm islands and congratulated myself for surviving Malaysia.  When we arrived at the ferry it was afternoon and the water looked like oil.  The sun was setting over the rain forest as we departed and I reached into my suitcase to find Moby Dick.  As the boat cut through the glassy water I chased the white whale once again.