Categories
Books, essays and others

[3016] Reading mechanically won’t do with Irene Sola’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Reading can be so mechanical for me that at times, I find myself reading without understanding the words written. It is not the oh-let-me-consult-a-dictionary/encyclopedia kind of understanding. It is the awareness kind of understanding: the eyes perceive but the mind refuses to work.

Sleepiness is a regular cause behind it but any kind of persistent distraction is enough a reason for it. It does not help when a novel plays around with plot sequence to the point of misdirection. To understand such kind of novel, the mind needs to be at attention. All-absorbing, all-aware, all-thinking. The moment the mind is caught undisciplined, the reader will go through the motion of reading mechanically without comprehending the meaning behind the words.

I found myself in exactly that situation multiple times while reading When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola, which is originally written in Spanish and then translated into English by Mara Faye Lethem. I would read pages and pages before stopping and then realizing that I had no idea what I had just read.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a fiction set across several generations. There is one timeline but that timeline is observed by multiple characters within the same time period and then across multiple periods. It is the diversity of perspective and the numerous characters that threw me off track. But there is another factor that tripped me: the reader needs to finish almost each chapter before reaching full comprehension what it is all really about. It is like you have all puzzle pieces laid out but the final key that would make it all sensical is given only at the very end: the final paragraphs will make you to reassess earlier paragraphs that you read and thought you understood.

The novel has fewer than 200 pages but the naughty play on sequence forced me to take more time than usual to finish it. I ended up revisiting earlier pages to make sure I get the story straight.

That may sound discouraging. But that very plot device (is that the right term?) that challenges the reader’s attention span is also the very reason I find the novel memorable and enjoyable.

There is also a little bit of magical realism that makes the novel fantastical, coupled with just simply beautifully translated sentences peppered throughout the novel. That made me wished I could read the original in Spanish.

Categories
Humor Personal

[3015] The MyKasih affair on New Year’s Eve

December 31 2025. The final day for the year. New Year’s Eve.

It is also the expiry date for the MyKasih program, a government scheme providing all Malaysian citizens aged 18 or above with RM100 digitally through each person’s identification card. However, the scheme isn’t universally accepted at all stores.

Paternalism and practicality and possibly something else have restricted spending avenues to a subset of consumer products—certain basic food items, baby requirements such as diapers and hygiene products like tooth pastes—at selected stores. Although MyKasih is free money for all voting-age Malaysians, somebody in Putrajaya must have thought it was morally inappropriate to have the money spent at the more upscaled Cold Storage, Jaya Grocer or Aeon MaxValu chains. It should be spent at places like KKMart or Hero Market instead, or so the logic goes, where the marhaen, the common people, patronize.

But no matter the misguided targeting policy. There is RM100 free money to be spent. However restricted the options are, there are still rich options available and there are choice purchases to be made before the government-funded cash-like voucher expires at midnight.

Recently with a baby, diapers are at the top of my mind and although I live rather comfortably, I won’t mind free RM100-worth of diapers. The economist in me optimizes. I reckon this supply of diapers would last me several weeks, or days depending on how often the baby poos.

I head to the nearest government-approved outlet for my free diapers. Currently finding myself in Petaling Jaya, it turns out the KKMart on Jalan Telawi in Bangsar is the most convenient convenience store for me. And so I turn up on Jalan Telawi, readying my IC to redeem my RM100-worth of diapers, possibly much at the chagrin of some policymakers in Putrajaya.

“Bangsar, of all places! Bangsar!” I’d imagine the man behind the desk shouts. “Next year, we’ll remove Bangsar from the pre-approved list!”, barks the man to his special officer who nods and says “yes sir, we’ll do that. No Bangsar in the list.”

It turns out, I’m not the only one thinking about spending it on the very last day. There’s line forming at the cashier’s counter. But it isn’t too bad. Five, maybe six people lining up.

I walk and begin my search for diapers at the back of the store. “A ah! There they are.” No, those are toilet rolls. No, I don’t need that. No, those are napkins. No, those are some kind of paper products. No, no, no…

It isn’t a big store and I find the right shelves soon after. But I realize I have no idea which diaper brand to buy. I flip out the phone, call the wife who immediately gives a sighing instruction. “Do you see it?”

“Yes, I do.” No I don’t. “Okay, see ya. Bye bye.” I’m currently reading RF Kuang’s Babel and I’m reminded by the novel that the etymology of goodbye if God be with you. May God be with me.

As I begin to pray deep in my heart, my eyes land on the right brand. I guess I didn’t need to pray after all.

A bag of those diapers cost RM12.50 each. My mind quickly calculates the math and understands immediately getting 8 bags would fully utilize my RM100. But 8 bulking bags are a pain to carry. I have a shopping bag with me but it isn’t big enough for 8. I have to carry these bags to the counter awkwardly and then to the car parked nearby.

By now, the line at the counter has grown longer.

On my messaging app, a friend at another place complains that the MyKasih system is struggling to handle the sale volume for today. “The system is down! This government I tell you!”

I count there are seven persons in front of me. The customer at the counter hoping to maximize his MyKasih allowance struggles to do the math and the cashier is obliging by too much. “This item cannot. That can.”

“How about that?”

“Can.”

“That?”

“Cannot.”

This to-and-fro conversation goes on for 10 minutes. It is as frustrating as lining up at a fast food restaurant and having the person in front of you being indecisive about his meal. “Big Mac?”

“No, this is KFC.”

It’s the next person’s turn but she is underspending it. “Wait, ah. I look for more stuff.” She leaves her stuff on the counter and goes to the back of the store. Several minutes later, she comes up only to bring an item that is priced above the residual value she has.

“It’s over the limit. You’ll have to pay cash for it.”

“Let me look for something else. Wait please. I’ll change.”

Another minute or two later, she finds it. “Thank you. I really appreciate the patience.”

Next!

This customer has the same problem. The cashier says, “if you don’t spend it, the government will donate it to charity.”

He replies, “oh it’s okay,” possibly feeling the intense stares from everybody else in the line. The line grows longer and it has been half an hour since I joined it.

A man with a helmet enters the KKMart. “Bang, MyKasih boleh guna sini?” Bro, could I use MyKasih here?

“Boleh, boleh. Join the line,” he smirks, knowing full well the implicit cost of MyKasih. The RM100 may be free, but so too standing up for half an hour or longer, opportunity cost be damned.

It’s been 45 minutes and the line is barely moving. A couple comes in. They assess the situation and decide it’s not worth the effort. “Jom kita pergi Speedmart sebelah.”

I look behind and I cannot see the end of the line. It has snaked all the way to the back. Give it time and the line will become an Ouroboros, with its end meeting the head at the counter.

I can’t feel my legs. This is no way to spend New Year’s Eve. I can hear a thunder or two. It’s starting to rain heavily outside. Maybe I should say the prayer after all.

“It’s only RM84.35. Do you need to get anything else?” This consumer runs deeper into the store.

Next!

“RM96.55. Anything else?” Off he goes.

Next!

My back hurts.

Finally, just above the hour mark, it is my turn.

One bag of diapers. RM12.50 appears on the screen.

Two bags. RM25.00.

Three bags. RM37.50.

Four bags. RM50.00.

Six bags. RM75.00.

Eight bags. RM100.00.

The cashier smiles and gives me an ovation. I hear laughter from behind, enjoying their comedy of math, paternalism and government targeting policy.

The rain stops.

Categories
Books, essays and others Economics Society

[3014] Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy and the limits of the market

There is a feeling that traffic offenses in Malaysia are generally not taken seriously by road users or the authorities, unless somebody dies or gets hurt. The fines are low and if you wait long enough, it will get discounted generously. It also gets discounted heavily if you pay it quickly. There are threats of court action or towing in cases of illegal parking of course but this almost always never happens due to the hassle it involves. For the authorities, offering discounts to offenders is far simpler and cheaper. But there is a terrible cost to this approach. That cost comes in the form of changing expectations and the cementing of the wrong behavior.

These traffic fines are meant to discourage behaviors that affect the public space negatively (for instance, parking at the junction is illegal because it may cause collision between other road users). But today, these effective fines are too low that instead of functioning as deterrent, they are now an enabler of bad behavior. The fines become fees.

What this means is that instead of a person paying fines to make amends, now that person pays fees to allow him to commit wrongdoing. So, people now are paying fees for the permission to break the law.

Fine as fee is among the subjects of Michael Joseph Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy. The subtitle is more descriptive: The Moral Limits of Markets. Sandel is a political philosopher who is perhaps best known for his Justice lecture series.

Fine as fee is only a specific example of a general set of cases where incentives designed to discourage certain behavior end up encouraging it instead. More precisely, (some) market-based incentives have the capacity of corrupting individual behavior by making previously frown-upon actions acceptable, which in the end makes the experience of public space sharing less desirable. There is a hint of the tragedy of the commons here.

There is one real world example I would like to cite from the book. It revolved around child-care centers in Israel that had difficulties with parents who were always late in picking up their kids. To discourage late pickups, the centers introduced a fine. In theory, this should encourage parents to pick up their children on time. But it became a perverse incentive, a concept undergraduates learned in their introductory microeconomics classes. Instead, it changed parents’ behavior for the worse, who now see the fine as a payment for late pick-up service. Incidence of late pick-ups rose afterward, as parents were more than happy to pay for the convenience. The lesson here is that that fine (a market-based solution) changed the expectations about late pickups: from something that reflects irresponsibility to just another non-judgmental service.

But this example and more are not a Freakonomics kind of entertaining read that opens up the world of economics to lay readers. Sandel attempts to convince us that market-based incentives change norms, unlike the typical economics assumption that these incentives itself are valueless and only reflects preexisting preferences.

Sandel’s ultimate thesis is that we have evolved from having a market economy to becoming a market society, where market mechanism has pervaded throughout all aspects of our life. He is worried that such proliferation is crowding out non-market norms and that the outcome is for the worse. Some of these norms are the egalitarianism (for example, lining up as opposed to express lanes where you pay to get ahead), the sacredness of human life (as opposed to paying for human organs or babies), honesty (as opposed to paying for friendship or dates), empathy (as opposed to auctioning immigration rights to refugees), civic mindedness (as opposed to paying to pollute or simply be a litterbug) or in general, the inculcating of the public spirit or civic duties which the market more often erode.

What Money Can’t Buy can be seen as an anti-market work but I think that is an unhelpful way of looking at it. Instead, it should be seen as a warning that not all realms of life should be opened to market mechanism or solutions. We should not bribe our kids with cash so that they eat their greens or clean their rooms or get an A at school. Sometimes should be encouraged through non-market means. There are social and moral limits to markets and there is wisdom in acknowledging those limits, even if one is—especially if one is—as I am, generally a pro-market person.

This brings back to our Malaysian case of traffic offences and fines as fees where people pay to commit offences. The possible solutions (apart from the market ones that involve more severe non-discountable punitive pecuniary penalties) appear to be a non-market one: towing, driving license suspension, lengthy court cases and even jailing.

Yet, most of these non-market solutions require government enforcement and enforcement requires funding, i.e. tax revenue. This goes back to the contributory factor behind the proliferation of market mechanism in our life: shortage of public funding means a retreat of public service, and that empty space gets filled up by private enterprises.

And yet, non-market norms where it exists can be cheaper than market norms. As Sandel writes, and I agree with this:

“[f]rom an economic point of view, social norms such as civic virtues and public-spiritedness are great bargains. They motive social useful behavior that would otherwise cost a lot to buy. If you had to rely on financial incentives to get communities to accept nuclear waste, you’d have to pay a lot more than if you could rely instead of the residents’ sense of civic obligation. If you had hire schoolchildren to collect charitable donations, you’d have to pay more than a 10 percent commission to get the same result that public spirit produces for free.”[1]

[1] — The mentions of nuclear waste and donation refer to an earlier real world examples in the book.

On nuclear waste: Switzerland needed a site to store nuclear waste. In a survey, when residents of a village were asked whether their would accept the government constructing a nuclear waste site at their location, 51% said yes out of sense of civic duty and the common good. But when the same question was asked with cash compensation added in, the result changed. Now, only 25% would agree, with the rest felling offended that they were being bribed.

On donation: two economists did an experiment involving high schoolchildren going door-to-door solicitating donations for certain cause. These children were divided into 3 groups. The first group was given a motivational speech about the worthiness of the cause, the second was given the same speech while getting to keep 1% of any donation collected and the third was also given the same speech while getting to getting to keep 10% of donation collected. The result? The first group collected 55% more donation than the second group. Meanwhile, the third group did better than the second, but worse than the first. Lesson: doing it for free out of civic duties leads to better results, but if you want to pay, it has be to a lot.

Categories
Books, essays and others

[3013] A talk to celebrate the second anniversary of The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

All the way back in February this year, I gave a talk about The End of the Nineteen-Nineties at Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, in conjunction of the ‘Boom Boom Bang: Play & Parody in 1990s K.L.’ exhibition.

Since today’s the second anniversary of the book, I thought I should share the talk here.

In summary, I explained why 1990s was fundamental in shaping the Malaysia of today. The video has me talking for 60 minutes and the rest was me answering questions.

Categories
Books, essays and others Society

[3012] The contemporary relevance of Syed Hussein Alatas’s Intellectuals in Developing Societies

While reading Syed Hussein Alatas’s Intellectuals in Developing Societies recently, there was one question that kept popping in my head. Is the book still relevant to contemporary Malaysia?

Some rights reserved. By Hafiz Noor Shams.

Published in 1977 but written earlier, Syed Hussein Alatas asserted that developing countries such as Malaysia (and more generally, throughout Asia) did not have an intellectual class. There were a few intellectuals but they were so few and far between that they were powerless and could never function as a class that could exert influence on the elites and the society as a whole.

He attributed the lack of the intellectual class in Malaysia (really, his focus was Malaya/Peninsular Malaysia but the claim is also relevant to the Borneo states) to the massive colonial immigration. In his own words, “the population of Malaya was composed of immigrant groups, devoid of intellectual interest, many of them from the lower economic class in their country of origin.” Meanwhile, the colonial education system was designed by the British purely for vocational reasons and avoided the nurturing of intellectual interest. In short, the whole population was more concerned with economic and other immediate practical factors instead of intellectual pursuits.

The economic focus with limited intellectual development continued beyond the colonial period. Here, Syed Hussein Alatas blamed the Alliance/Barisan Nasional government for failing to create the intellectual class. He reasoned the peaceful nature of the country (relative to the more turbulent revolutionary history such as in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam) had made governing a routine business. Such routines gave way to the rise of the managerial politicians and technocratic class where they functioned to keep the social machine running, instead of manufacturing new machines that intellectuals would do. The lack of need to create new machines meant the lack of need for intellectuals. Only crisis would demand intellectuals and Malaya and Malaysia had little, or so that was the claim.

While that might be true, surely there is an intellectual class in Malaysia today. Syed Hussein Alatas himself had influenced a whole school of thought that is alive and well in Malaysia. And there are other intellectuals of different persuasion who are thriving in the country now. In fact by the 1970s, it does appear to me there was an identifiable intellectual class with Syed Hussein Alatas himself a giant. Furthermore, the events of 1969 were a crisis for Malaysia and to follow his own logic, the times demanded intellectuals, which the society then did provide.

This counterpoint of mine shifted my mental mode. Instead of reading the book as something of contemporary relevance, I began to view it as a material giving insight to the 1950s-1970s society. After all, the author was fully engaged in the 1960s-1970s political debates, with commentaries/examples on less-than-inspiring results from government policy and policy implementation in Malaysia then. He reserved some venom for the Cabinet under the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman, which Syed Hussein Alatas described as lacking rationality and filled with unsuitable happy-go-lucky personalities. (There are several chapters on fools and bebalisma but I have a feeling this segment of the book was steam-blowing ranting against the then-government disguised as an model—essentially it is about calling other people stupid without actually doing so. Syed Hussein Alatas had a political career in opposition to Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Razak’s leadership.)

Perhaps, something does not change after all.

And perhaps, the existence of an intellectual class does not entirely remove the relevance of Intellectuals in Developing Societies to contemporary Malaysia.

Here, the lack of need for intellectuals during the early days of Malaysia had led to the education system focusing on developing technical expertise without inculcating a ‘philosophic spirit’, an idea borrowed from Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abduh and a long line of other intellectuals. This gave rise to what Syed Hussein Alatas called the dualistic man where outwardly the person accepts, enjoys and wants the conveniences of science and technology but inwardly, believes in the supernatural in direct contradiction to the sciences. The person wants to be the consumer of science but the science behind the product can be magic for all he or she cares. This can easily describe our post-modern reality that might get worse with the proliferation of mindless artificial intelligence usage within our society.