I don’t have to listen to you!” Tun replied, luring the kayakers ever closer to certain annihilation.
I sat in my kayak, sweat from the thick morning humidity dripping down my back, watching in disbelief as Tun corralled his 12 fellow instructors-in-training into the traffic lanes of a commercial port. Triple-deck steel passenger ferries, 80-foot fiberglass yachts, and wooden long-tail fishing boats swarmed like angry piranha—a treacherous place for slow, hard-to-spot sea kayaks.
I had assigned Tun, a Malay man in his mid-twenties, to lead this daytrip as part of a weeklong safety seminar I was teaching. As part of a hands-on, experiential training program, he guided the group, now a few hours into a three-island tour, while I tried to provide real-time constructive feedback on his group management, or lack thereof.
Now, however, I found myself feverishly paddling toward Tun in order to prevent the death by motor yacht of the Wilderness Center’s entire future staff.
Ah, the joys of working abroad.
In the two years since college, thanks to a globally recognized instructor certification from the American Canoe Association, sea kayaking had become my vehicle for paid travel. With no previous experience in Asia, but fueled by wanderlust, I flew halfway around the world to teach sea kayaking to the staff of the Wilderness Center, an outdoor education school founded by a Malaysian shipping magnate in 2002 under a Ministry of Education contract to conduct weekly adventure-based experiential programs in English for Malaysian students. First, local employees had to be trained to lead these trips, which meant importing foreign educators—like me—to teach them.
My only preparation for living in Malaysia had consisted of a 15-minute phone interview and a six-page orientation pamphlet that I’d skimmed as my plane hit the tarmac. How difficult could working in paradise be? After all, I was living a dream: being paid to teach sea kayaking on a tropical island. Nonetheless, just two weeks into the job, I felt useless.
“Tun, why do you want to stop here?” I called over the enveloping buzz of outboard motors. “Is this a safe place, Tun?”
“I don’t have to do what you say!”
Stunned and offended by his bristling rebuke, not to mention exhausted from fighting the wind and the fragile Malay male ego all morning, I replied, “Fine! I don’t have to do what you say,” and paddled away, alone.
I paddled to our lunch spot—a densely forested jungle cove on Singa Besar Island. The narrow beach was untouched, save for the ubiquitous jumble of seaweed, fishing nets, plastic water bottles, and shopping bags that washed ashore with the high tide.
Having narrowly survived the aquatic gauntlet that is Kuah Jetty, the trainees soon nudged ashore and collapsed headlong in the white sand. They listlessly retrieved lunch from their kayaks and eagerly devoured curried rice, dried sardines, and boiled greens. I snatched my tuna salad sandwich and scoured the beach for shade. Eventually, I huddled alone under a gnarled, salt-chewed tree and counted the months remaining on my contract.
Dream Job?
So went my first month on Pulau Langkawi, an island in the southern Andaman Sea 18 miles off the northwestern coast of Muslim-majority Malaysia. One of only three inhabited islands in a 100-island archipelago that abuts the Thai border, Langkawi is by far the largest and most developed. Its designation as a duty-free port in 1987 spurred upscale resort development that attracts well-heeled Europeans, Arabs, and Scandinavians.
Despite its incongruous tourist traps, Langkawi remains packed with meandering mangrove wetlands, impenetrable jungle mountains, and hidden white sand beaches. To experience the tropical beauty, I eagerly committed to work in Langkawi.
Trouble began soon after my confrontation with Tun, when a contingent of local staff complained to the expat training manager about my teaching style. According to the manager, the locals considered my training unnecessarily difficult. No one had ever mentioned this grievance to me, but as a result, I spent my time observing sessions rather than actually leading them. I’d report my feedback to the training manager, who would then relay the information to the training leaders, who’d finally tell the instructors-in-training—all so the critiques appeared to come from a Malaysian staff member.
Over cold Carlsberg beers one evening, two senior Australian instructors confidently informed me that my cold reception was due to the pay disparity, always a bone of contention. Expats made three to four times more than our local counterparts. While expats rented or owned cars, flew to Thailand and Indonesia for weekends, and ate at the few wildly expensive Western restaurants on Langkawi, most local staff were lucky to have a functioning motorbike, let alone a car, rode the bus home for holidays, and ate nasi—rice—at every meal.
After my conversation with the Aussies, I insulated myself from the critical locals and went about my work reclusively. I dismissed my problems as part of an insurmountable cultural divide—a decision that would prove to be my greatest mistake, for I would soon discover the real reasons that my Malaysian counterparts treated me harshly.
Epiphany With Eija
After two months of training, with enough staff instructors deemed competent to lead student groups, the Ministry of Education began sending us 300 Malaysian teenagers a week, pulled from all over the country, to participate in five-day jungle trekking and sea kayaking trips. With staff training on hold for a few months, I accompanied trips into the field as a co-leader in order to evaluate the local instructors.
On the first trip I led for our woefully unprepared teenage participants, a simple conversation made me realize why my Malaysian peers disliked me. As our group prepared dinner, I sat on the beach with my co-leader, Eija, a devout 24-year-old Muslim woman who never missed a single one of the five daily prayers and always wore the traditional head scarf, called a tudong.
She wasted no time prying into my love life. Caught in a social tug-of-war, many young Malaysian women devour Western pop culture, with all of its supposed societal ills, yet, outwardly, they maintain the conservative tenets of Islamic culture. When given the rare opportunity to pick a Western male’s brain, they go straight for the dirt. After hearing my opinions on marriage (“When will you marry?”) and sex (“Oh, no! You did not wait for marriage?”), Eija changed the subject.
“Why don’t you like us?”
I was shocked at the courage Eija—usually meek—had summoned to ask such a candid question.
“Some people here, they think you are, um, arrogant? Yes, arrogant. They think you are better than them. You do not makan”—eat—“with them. You do not talk to them. They think you are too good for them.”
Totally crestfallen, I could only muster a hushed reply, “I don’t mean to be arrogant.”
Eija continued. She told me that many locals were too self-conscious of their English to initiate a conversation with me, so it was my responsibility to approach them, to better learn their language, and to extend my hand in friendship. As Eija spoke, I thought about how I had eaten alone on the trip with Tun’s group. I now realized how bad that must have looked, and that was just one instance among many.
I had clearly failed to earn the locals’ respect. I’d allowed the older, jaded expats to influence my views on the locals without getting to know them. In a society where great value is placed on symbolic gestures and social pleasantries, I eschewed small talk. Instead of chatting over lunch, I ate alone. If invited to have a cup of tea after work, I declined in favor of a cold beer on my balcony.
I arrived in Malaysia expecting the local staff to instantly befriend me. Instead, my kayaking prowess intimidated them. That factor, coupled with my reclusive demeanor, had turned the majority against me. I had unknowingly confirmed all their worst notions of Westerners, especially Americans.
As the sun spilled its last gasp of daylight, we reveled at the array of orange hues reflecting off the calm seawater. I promised Eija that I’d forge a new beginning with my remaining five months. Luckily, Malaysians are a forgiving lot.
After toasting our water bottles to seal our pact, Eija, quite pleased with our breakthrough, resumed her previous line of questioning.
“What about pornography? Why do men like to watch the pornography?”
A New Beginning
Immediately upon returning from my trip with Eija, I went about rectifying my social shortcomings.
I attended open houses—epic feasts followed by karaoke. At high tea, I enlightened Eija’s crew of obsessively inquisitive young women on a Westerner’s view of sex, love, dating, and marriage, leaving them in jaw-dropped amazement. Every evening, I braved matches of Takraw—a game similar to hacky-sack, where a plastic softball-size orb is passed around a circle at terrifyingly hilarious speeds. I even ate nasi three meals a day.
I also endeavored to speak Bahasa Melayu, the official language of Malaysia—an effort happily embraced by my coworkers. They refined my growing knowledge with such invaluable phrases as “Not spicy” and “Do you have a boyfriend?” Learning some Bahasa provided a practical advantage when I taught kayaking, as I could explain techniques in Malay rather than relying solely on visual demonstrations.
In conversations with local staff, I discovered that the many problems at the Wilderness Center were not the result of the proverbial cultural divide. Instead, it was that the Wilderness Center is owned by a businessman more interested in currying government favor than in offering a quality service. In Tan Sri Halim’s haste, he depended too heavily on skilled expats without investing long-term in local employees. The skill gap never closed, which confused and irritated our Malaysian counterparts, who manifested this frustration by ignoring the easiest targets—their foreign superiors.
In return for my effort at building friendships and assimilating into local society, I was rewarded with gifts of uncommon tenderness—gifts that I could neither pack in my bag nor capture on film. My Malaysian coworkers taught me that for a fulfilling work abroad experience, it is imperative to understand local culture, customs, and language; that one must proactively meet local coworkers in order to gain their perspective, and thereby earn their respect and acceptance.
Even Tun came around
One week before my return to the Western world, I taught advanced kayak maneuvers to a group of assistant instructors, including Tun. As the last hurdle to confirmation as lead instructors, the group needed to master a set of difficult paddle strokes. The draw stroke—used to propel the kayak laterally—confounded Tun. If he could not properly execute it, Tun would have to wait another three months before he could try again for assessment as a lead instructor.
During lunch on the first day, I asked Tun if he’d like to work together on his draw stroke. To my surprise, he readily accepted. Every day, after the rest of the group had returned home for the night, we spent an hour practicing his draw stroke in the calm bay in front of base camp.
At the end of assessment day, he tracked me down in the boat shed as I cleaned and organized gear.
“Rory, I want to say thank you,” he said. “I passed my assessment and made lead instructor. I could not do it without you. Glad I listen to you!”
Likewise, I thought.
Uncharted: Troubled Waters