On A Trip to Kuala Lumpur
Years ago I read an article* in which speculative fiction authors selected the modern cities that they most identified with urban science fiction: Venice - built on canals and susceptible, with time, to an Atlantean fate; Dubai - a luxury oasis of skyscrapers in an unforgiving desert; New York - seedy and wakeful, the flytrap of the dreamer.
Kuala Lumpur too, nestled in the tropical forest valley where the Klang and Gombak rivers meet in a muddy confluence, has the otherworldliness we associate with the genre.
I arrived to Malaysia’s capital with my mother and sister in mid-March to searing temperatures that left me longing for the comparative coolness of Caribbean summers, the hazy exploration of the following days experienced through a fog of heat and illness.
I felt I’d stepped into a fiction’s metaphor for the passage of time, or rather, a fiction’s questioning of the nature of time. The city retains wilderness: greenery is everywhere – fields of palms adjoining highways, oxymoronically manicured vines climbing high-rises, dense stands of trees cradling historic homes. Inside this sprawling vegetation is a convergence of eras – colonialism, curling paint on 1950s walls, glass-faced modernity and a litany of cranes and road blocks reaching toward an unpredictable future. None of these felt like remnants of a bygone period; they were all now. I felt as if I were in a temporal vortex where rather than taking place progressively, all of this city’s stories existed at once; quite like China Miéville’s assessment of London.
My sister and I had followed our mother here for the World Summit on Arts and Culture. We’d booked the official hotel for the conference, the Pullman Kuala Lumpur City Centre Hotel – an upscale chain in the luxury shopping district with curling contemporary light fixtures and sleek pod furniture, but something of the mismatched sterility of modern interior design you expect from a conglomerate. The buffet was Olympian: congee with beans and dried fish, curries, pork buns, saffron rice, melon juice.
On the first full day, I’d insisted we visit Taman Burung, a free-flying aviary up a hill near the Botanic Gardens. I’ve taken up my retirement activities early. Those who put themselves at risk to read my too-lengthy social media captions will know this particular pastime’s history – an accident of the job that spiraled into nostalgic realisation and close-calls in traffic. Well, it was less of a sanctuary than I had assumed it to be, and I left the experience with some regret. The birds though, were thrilling.
From the higher level where cattle egrets bathed in artificial pools, I glimpsed the languishing gait of the yellow-billed storks through the foliage and felt my strange little heart leap. They’re imposing, closer up. At almost five-foot, they could nearly come face-to-face with you; they’re expressive, shy almost, like the bashful and withdrawn guardians of some elysian wilderness. To find yourself in a crowd of them is quietly intimidating, as if at any time you might be ejected from the exclusivity of their private conference.
For the ostriches, it was, evidently, mating season; needless to say we didn’t tarry there – a Jurassic bird stalking you along an enclosure isn’t a comfortable experience and in any case, it was a private moment.
We began our second day (or was it the third?) at a Hainanese Buddhist temple overlooking Jalan Syed Putra and the Federal Highway. Dedicated to Tian Hou (diety of seafarers, fishermen and sailors), Guan Yin (goddess of mercy and compassion) and Shui Wei Sheng Niang (protector of sea travellers), Thean Hou is an immaculately crafted six-tiered temple in shades of green and vermillion, lanterns strung across the interior courtyard throwing symmetrical shadows.
We threw the lottery sticks into the air, crashing loud in the angry way plastic does against metal, to determine I suppose, ways out of our self-made prisons. The advice to me was to wait - any movement or partnership would dissolve disastrously; a bit obtuse – wait until when? I kept it, in any case, for some months after in my wallet rather than burning it as a poor fortune in the elevated ash basins outside the temple. Sometimes, the Hermit is the best card we can pull.
We went from the hilltop to the centre of the city through the gauntlet of t-shirts and tattoo vendors that is Petaling Street Market, and stopped at ChoCha Foodstore for lunch. Like a secluded garden sprung up in an enclosed alley, the restaurant is long and narrow with vines and potted citrus trees, dried long-stem flowers contradicting exposed wood and paint-stripped concrete; sunlight floods in from a partially-open ceiling washing communal tables in Romantic light and shadow. The menu is locally sourced, seasonal and intended to be shared – jackfruit ulam salad with banana blossom, sawtooth coriander, jackfruit, ulamraja, pegaga, and kerisik kelapa; Chinese pesto flat noodles with housemade flat noodles, ulam pesto, charred capsicum, semi-dried tomato, peanuts and sesame seeds; cured fish rice with light pan-seared cured mackerel, ajitama egg, scallion ginger sauce and herb butter. We drank chilled tea and house-made floral soda and chatted over the zodiac.
The Petronas Twin Towers have this argent-chrome gleam under high sun – something vaguely Michael Whelan or Peter Elson. They were on my sister’s list so we walked the mile north to see them on the third day. I tend to forget what a remarkable art form architecture is; it frequently gets neglected in favour of painting, literature and theatre (very like dance until I saw Rambert perform Goat at Sadler’s Wells in 2018). After my 15-minute, poor attempt at capturing refracted light with a kit-lens-equipped low-end DSLR and unrefined knowledge, we browsed the towers’ indoor shopping mall (mostly lusting after books and craft supplies at Kinokuniya) before making the walk to KL Forest Eco Park. But for the view of KL Tower through the tree tops at its highest level, you could nearly forget you were in the heart of a major city; the reserve is drawn together by hanging footbridges through the canopies, stone slab paths winding through bamboo, tree ferns and the occasional small, bright blossoms.
By now, the discomfort I’d been making a paltry attempt at fighting had made its final advance. I spent the next day tightly wrapped on my hotel-floor cot, trying and failing to sleep off my worst cold since the one in a hostel above a night club in post-apocalyptic Madrid. I consumed an obscene amount of raw garlic with my room service, determined not to be down too long.
Forcing myself to Batu Caves on our final morning in Kuala Lumpur was probably not my finest idea, but the adrenaline of novelty (and monkeys) kept me happily distracted on the ascent up the 272 steep steps to the Hindu shrines. After that it was all torrid shade and congestion and overdramatic frustrated tears on the wait for the Grab car.
I left for Thailand without quite knowing how I’d felt about the place beyond an unsettled feeling of suspension clarified by a few moments of exactitude. All experiences are coloured by our own mindscapes, and I thought I was in the placid disquiet of a science fiction story.
*The linked Guardian piece is not the original article I refer to (which I can no longer find), but does give the author’s name and a snapshot of its content.