“Re-for-masi, Re-for-masi, Re-for-masi.” It was a warm evening last month as I stood in a field in Malaysia, listening as this deafening chant rang out from a crowd of thousands, gathered in an intoxicating mass. This was history in motion: Anwar Ibrahim, the man who had paid the high price of two jail terms for his attempts to bring reform in Malaysia – and who had coined the “reformasi” chant as the rallying cry for change – had just been released from prison that morning. A free man, he stood triumphant on stage as I watched from the sidelines.
“We have entered a new era for Malaysia,” he shouted, to another euphoric roar from the crowd.
Just four months earlier I had made the unorthodox jump from being the Guardian’s culture reporter in London to being south-east Asia correspondent based in Bangkok. It is without a doubt the most brilliant posting; this region is bursting at the seams with great, totally uncovered, stories and every day is surprising. But it is also, honestly, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
While I love it now, Bangkok is not an easy place to parachute into: a vast, neverending metropolis of contradictions, where street-food vendors sell noodle soup for 20 baht (50p) on the steps of glossy shopping malls where rich and fabulous “Hi-So” (high-society) Thais stock up on Prada handbags.
As a woman I have found it particularly hard to adjust to, not because it feels dangerous – on the contrary, reporting in this region as a solitary female feels refreshingly safe, and I am never harassed – but because Bangkok is a city which wears the sex industry on its sleeve.
Walk down ordinary streets here and the sexual objectification of women is impossible to avoid: girls sitting in droves outside massage parlours and “sexy bars”, simply on show for the male gaze.
An alley by my apartment is lined with such places, and no matter how much they are dressed up with twee pink heart decorations, in the cold light of day I regularly see a dozen Thai women line up in front of a (usually white) male customer while he takes his pick.
It’s not an entirely clear-cut issue. My brief investigations into the Thai sex industry have taught me how much empowerment and how much agency a lot of these women have, but it has nonetheless been hard to stomach this dark side of my newly adopted home.
And then of course there’s the dreaded b-word, that you never really fully understand until you move to Asia: bureaucracy. In my first week here a microscopic tear in my passport left me trapped in Cambodia and it was only after a Kafkaesque mission to four different embassies, two immigration offices and a police station that was I able to leave. I also seem to have already been banned from Myanmar before even having had a chance to go there; my endless journalist visa applications are falling into a foreign ministry abyss.
But while adjusting from the culture beat to the political and social fluctuations of south-east Asia has been a steep learning curve, it has never once been tedious. One week I am up a ladder in a palm oil plantation in Malaysia, the next at a Buddhist dog funeral in Bangkok, or in Kuala Lumpur in the early hours watching the police seize 284 designer handbags and 72 bags of cash, jewellery and gold bars from the flat of the former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansor (it seems Imelda Marcos may have had nothing on Rosmah).
But covering the events of the Malaysian election in May and being there on the night of Anwar’s release will always be a turning point for me in this job. I had hustled my way on stage and watched from the wings as Anwar addressed the crowds – his notorious charisma at full force and his supporters roaring with joyful optimism. Here, in the screwed-up world of 2018, was something I had thought was impossible: the triumph of hope and democracy over fear and small-mindedness.
The overarching narrative in the region is of a march away from democracy and towards oppressive, authoritarian, rule: Thailand, ruled by an unelected military junta; Cambodia, where leader Hun Sen has dissolved all opposition parties and crushed the free press; the Philippines, where Rodrigo Duterte is slowly dismantling the rule of law and authorising thousands of extrajudicial killings; Myanmar, where the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya has happened under the watchful eye of the former Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. So the international ramifications of this election could be monumental.
Sitting down with Anwar in his home a couple of days later, it was easy to see how he has been both the figurehead of hope in Malaysia for so long, and why two previous prime ministers were so keen to have him out of the way. He was surprisingly softly spoken, but prison had done little to rid him of his ambition, even at the age of 70.
He recounted to me a conversation he had with Nelson Mandela after Anwar was released from prison for the first time in 2005. “I remember one of my first long conversations with Madiba and he said to me, ‘Anwar, people say we are mad and crazy’, and I said no, we are not mad, but crazy for sure,” said Anwar, laughing uproariously.
My pre-election encounter with the new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, meanwhile, I remember less fondly. Nothing to do with him – refreshingly, he takes no prisoners in his answers and, at 92, would probably outpace me in a marathon. I had been given just two hours’ notice for the meetings, and was still nursing a slightly sore head from the night before, when I had had one too many glasses of white wine with Najib’s spin doctor (meeting with both sides is a key part of this job).
Yet, the thing I have come to realise most of all, in the past five months on this beat, is that reporting on the goings-on of the art and music world is really not so different to reporting on the affairs of south-east Asian nations. Sure, the ecstasy present in that Malaysian field was driven more by politics than illegal substances. But if my experiences here to date have taught me anything, it’s that politics and the art world eventually boil down to the same things: money, ego – and expensive handbags.
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