KL

Misery takes all forms.

                In Kuala Lumpur. It’s misty and foggy. Clouds cover the sky foreboding torrents of rain. I’m here staying in the heart of Chinatown.

                I definitely did not bring enough shirts to walk around in this humid weather. My polos and cotton t-shirts smell of dried sweat. I should have had some foresight and brought polyester.

                So this morning, as I have waken early, I resolve to find a laundromat in Chinatown, KL. The first thing I do is talk to the front desk lady at the hostel and ask her for the closest place to wash my clothes, since the hostel doesn’t have a laundry machine. She points me westward and says something about a 7-11 and a clothing store that doesn’t exist there anymore.

                I walk outside to the aforementioned climate and start to dread the inevitable sweating into my only relatively clean T-shirt. Time is of the essence.

                Of course, I get lost. So I find wifi and look up the address of the place. I find the street and make my way there, but can’t find the laundering spot. I ask at least six people and end up in another hostel of some sort that has a laundry machine, thank God. But it’s one you can only use if you stay there. I leave, trying to find another one.

                It shouldn’t be this hard. I’m in the biggest city in Malaysia and I can’t find a place to do my freaking laundry. Did I mention it’s three days before Christmas?

                One thing about homeless people in Malaysia is that many of them are in bad shape. Not to say that the homeless are that much healthier in the States. But a surprising number of them are missing limbs. They lay on cardboard and have crutches (some made out of wood) and look as though they can barely stand or walk. It seems like the look of true destitution, but lacking even desperation in their situation.

                You see them in the walkways to the subway station with hands holding plastic soda cups. I try not to look, not out of haughtiness, but because I know that I’d feel too emotional contemplating how shitty their lives are and how I’m just strolling by to be a tourist in a country that isn’t mine. So maybe it is haughtiness on my part.

                Zizek says the goal of society should be to reconstruct itself in a way so that poverty is impossible. After my experiences volunteering in Philly, I agree. The problem is individual (meaning it affects families tangibly) but also structural. Homelessness and poverty are maladies that afflict almost every country. How? Is it globalization causing the displacement of workers? Is it the failure of government, or simply the price of living in a competitive society? Racial discrimination in housing , or the lack of educational opportunities? The thing is deep thought is necessary; these issues affect not only us but future generations losing out on human capital.

                With pathos melded with logos, I see the situation of the man lying on his side with ragged clothes differently, or so I’d like to say. I’m challenged to do more. I’m inspired to change the basis of a society that has the belief that these problems are intractable. That believes that social programs are enough to stem the tide of poverty when it is really a wave of suffering. That these issues are unrelated to our spiritual poverty, in which our common humanity is abandoned in favor of logical thinking.

                True thinking, though, cannot be tautological. It must be multidimensional; it must be pluralistic and responsive to the complexity of a society that exists not just in theory but in a relational sense.