Malaysia's Hybrid Culture By Megan Rosenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 26, 1998; Page A23

Schoolgirls in Islamic dress inside a McDonald's in Kuala Lumpur. (By Steve Raymer – The Washington Post)

In this country the result is a mixed message. Thus, lewd jokes are censored from the David Letterman show, and the sex scenes snipped from "The Man in the Iron Mask." Malaysian pop charts feature home-grown sound-alikes of Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys. A restaurant in a shopping mall boasts of being "Proudly a Malaysian Discovery" -- and names itself Dave's Deli.

The government, like a stern parent, reviews every movie, television show, book and performance, deleting violence and sex, and guarding against perceived violations of Islamic values, like bare female shoulders or long hair on men. It also protects, or tries to, Malaysian producers -- requiring, for example, that television commercials be made locally.

Yet most TV ads are modeled on American versions, and usually feature actors of indeterminate ethnicity. Often the ads play off viewers' vast vocabulary of U.S. pop culture, as in one commercial for a cellular telephone company:

"Hello, darling?" says a construction worker in a bad American accent. He is calling his wife on a cell phone. She is in the hospital having their baby. "I want to call him Elvis instead of Rocky!"

And so the culture here is in many ways a hybrid, a synthesis. East and West are not just meeting, they are dancing together to a driving beat, toward a future in which defining one's own native, personal, national culture becomes increasingly difficult.

In this way, Malaysia is typical of many countries rushing into modernity.

A country that only 20 years ago was primarily a producer of tea, rubber, tin and cooking oil is now the world's largest exporter of semiconductors. Malaysia has embraced the modern world emphatically, even as its citizens wonder exactly what it means to be Malaysian. It is a former British colony still finding its way as a relatively new and multicultural nation. There are three ethnic groups -- the Malays (about 59 percent), Chinese (about 32 percent) and Indian (about 9 percent) -- in a population of 20 million. Islam is the dominant religion.

In the past decade, thousands of rural residents have moved to the cities, dislodged from their villages, dazzled by the new malls and cineplexes and looking for a place to belong. With urbanization has come a roster of social ills familiar to Americans: rises in the rates of divorce, crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, drug abuse and HIV infection.

"They have TV now in my village," said Mohamad Nor Khalid, nationally known as the cartoonist Lat. "They are not the innocent villagers of my childhood." Lat, 47, remembers a village home without electricity or running water, and the thrill of going to a movie, set up in the schoolyard by a traveling medicine salesman or politician. "We learned from John Wayne movies that white people were good and the red people were bad," he recalled. "And an aircraft carrier meant you were safe."

There are now three private television channels, two government-owned stations and a struggling cable company. In the last four years, a boom in cineplexes has produced a total of 230 movie theaters -- and 60 of them were showing "Godzilla" in early June. During one week this summer, nearly two-thirds of the movies shown here were American, the rest Chinese or Indian.

"We have a dilemma, we don't know what we want," said Abdul Razak Baginda, executive director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre. "That is why you will find on television the call to prayers at 7:20 in the middle of some entertainment." Razak, educated in London, has three television sets at home and a 10-year-old daughter who wears baggy denim overalls and has seen "Titanic" five times.

Malaysia's cultural rainbow was on display at a recent concert organized by a group of young adults to benefit an orphanage. Ten of the orphans wore examples of national dress and dutifully performed a dance that synthesized a mind-boggling number of influences. The music: a traditional Malaysian song vamped up with a loud disco beat.

The rest of the concert was equally eclectic. A Muslim gospel group of four young men in white prayer caps and high-collared jackets sang as a Brooklyn-born drummer pounded percussion; a long-haired Jacques Brel-style troubadour in a velvet shirt sang in Bahassa Malay, backed by an electric guitar. The "Bob Dylan of Malaysia," Amir Yussof, 31, sounded more like James Taylor. He sang songs in English from his next CD, which is titled "Altered Native."

Outside the auditorium, students strolled by in T-shirts bearing the imprints of Calvin Klein and B.U.M., while a disc jockey broadcast from a perch above the action. He promised an hour and a half of "hits from the '70s and '80s," as K.C. and the Sunshine Band and Madonna's "Material Girl" blasted out over the crowd.

"Our own people are very insecure about their music," Amir said a few days after the concert, sitting in a Chili's restaurant in the Bangsar shopping mall. "They think everything from the West must be good. At the same time, I get criticized for singing my own compositions in English, because my name is Malay."

Raised here and abroad as a diplomat's son, Amir is the quintessential multiculturalist trying to express himself rather than an ethnic group. English is his first language; he is afraid that if he sings in Malay his pronunciation will be ridiculed. But he also resented being asked to sing "Hotel California" four times a night when he was doing bar gigs.

MTV changed Farouk Aljoffrey's life. Now 29 and a successful video director, he first encountered the music video channel in a hotel room in Indonesia while on a business trip.

"They couldn't get me out of my room," he said. "I just wanted to watch MTV all day."

That was about eight years ago. Since then Farouk has changed his career from fashion styling to television advertising, making about 20 commercials a year. Farouk recently won top honors of the Malaysia Video Awards for several of his commercials. (Televised awards shows are another U.S. import.)

He clicks a remote control and plays one of his prize-winning entries, a Coca-Cola ad aimed at the youth market, full of quick cuts and diagonal camera angles. He explains that Coke showed him an ad it wanted re-shot for the Malaysian audience. He cut a scene of a dog because some Muslims do not keep canines as pets, and changed an African American musician to a group of three Malaysian teens.

"I'd like to dress kids in baggy jeans, but that would be pushing too far," he said. "Armpits are a no-no. No bare shoulders or backs. The American influence they want to keep out is almost always sex."

It's not yet clear whether Malaysia will be able to pick and choose.

For several years Farouk and his wife, Bernice Chauly, an avant-garde publisher, have been keen observers of a growing rebel youth culture, composed of teenagers organized around different types of music and including increased use of drugs, especially heroin and Ecstasy. Southeast Asian cities have their hastily organized raves ruled by deejays spinning the latest techno, grunge, heavy metal, garage funk or punk recordings just like any other metropolitan areas. "Techno is it in Indonesia," he reported.

"It's a lifestyle thing, not political," he said. "In K.L. [Kuala Lumpur] the bars close at 1 a.m. now, in Bangkok it's 2 a.m. So the underground clubs spring up after hours. So it's illegal. . . . Anything your parents don't understand is cool."

Malaysians value respect for authority, for elders and for parents very highly. The nascent youthful rebelliousness here is disturbing, however small its scale. Over 50 percent of the population is under 25, so youth culture in all its varieties is a considerable force.

"Respect for authority figures is eroding," said Chew Wing-Foong, father of three. He tells how four girls at his children's school "ganged up" on a teacher and made her cry by ignoring her orders, passing notes and talking during class. "A disturbing trend is getting into a little lawlessness," he said. "Kids who are 12 will ride their parents' motorbike in the neighborhood without a helmet. They are becoming a danger."

Teenagers who loiter in malls are the source of much hand-wringing, as is the practice of bohsia (literally "without a word"), a reference to girls who exchange sex (not necessarily intercourse) for money or favors. "The government has found this to be a social problem because of rapid urbanization," said Chew. "They lost their traditional home; they don't know what to do in a small apartment."

Mary Assunta, spokeswoman for the Consumers Association of Penang, sees larger forces at work. Part of the message kids get from American television, music, movies and advertising is to buy brand names, to buy fast food, to buy, buy, buy.

"We're so vulnerable economically we feel we can't afford to offend foreign interests," she said. "There is a very strong culture coming out of the U.S., controlled and promoted by large multinational corporations. They sell this aura, this Coca-Cola-McDonald's movie image."

She cited the example of fast food. For less than the cost of a hamburger and fries, she can buy a balanced lunch of locally produced food. "American companies have influenced the diet of our children," she said. "The [fast] food is low on nutrients, high on fat, highly processed and expensive. But it's cool, it's the place you would take someone on a date."

She's having about as much success persuading people to avoid McDonald's as she did banning the Barbie doll. In other words, zip.

"If we ban Barbie dolls, it will also give other countries an image that we Malaysians are narrow-minded," wrote one 13-year-old girl to the Star newspaper in response to Assunta's short-lived campaign. "Please excuse me for saying so but who in their right mind can even think of banning the ever so famous Barbie doll?"