Written by Sorayut Aiemueayut
Translated into Malay by Hara Shintaro
Translated into English by Peera Songkünnatham
Proofread by Najib Ibn Ahmad
Illustrated by Adrian Beyer

[Klik di sini untuk membaca “Orae Lua | Orang Luar” dalam bahasa Melayu]
[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “ออแฆลูวา | คนนอก” ในต้นฉบับภาษาไทย]

Sanam Ratsadon is proud to present Orang Luar, our seventh and most ambitious issue to date. The issue collects longform nonfiction writings by outsiders in the Malay peninsula, encompassing present-day deep southern Thailand and peninsular Malaysia. Longform, so that the reader can walk a mile in their shoes. In order of appearance, the orang luar are: a Malaysian Malay Muslim doing an arts-and-culture residency in Pattani; a Thai ethnographer bonding with a self-identifying outsider and a host family in a Pattani fishing village; a Siamese man of letters looking for traces of Malay in the Thai language; a Siamese woman of letters learning from an international conference in Kuala Lumpur; a newcomer in the scene of Malaysian political activism; and a veteran artivist caught in the spotlight.

What is there for outsiders to say? A lot, it turns out. Whether for reasons of ethnicity, class, political commitment, or country of origin, to stand on the outside affords one a vantage point from which one can see, in arresting glimpses, what’s going on on the inside. Where do outsiders say what they see? Elsewhere, as it tends to be, where they belong, or in an aside or a whisper to be reported later by their captive audience.

We open with “Patani in Three Vignettes” by Zikri Rahman and “Orae lua | Outsider” by Sorayut Aiemueayut. Both are available trilingually in English, Thai, and Malay. Using the essay form, both retrace journeys across national, social, and emotional borders. A man returns to his ancestral lands; another departs. Someone opens up; another zips it. While much is left unsaid or unresolved in each piece, the two complement each other by the force of their observations in revealing what it feels like to become an outsider in what is supposed to be one’s own land.

Zikri Rahman’s essay was first published in 2020 in the inaugural issue of SVARA, a contemporary culture journal of the Malay world. It is based on his one-month residency in southern Thailand in 2019 that coincided with the sudden deterioration in health during detention of Abdullah Esormusor, about whom the translator Hara Shintaro wrote in an article on Prachatai. The residency’s official output was the essay “To Speak with Their Pens: A Conversation with Zakariya Amataya and Najib Ahmad” published on Nusantara Archive, a Taiwanese project. Sorayut Aiemueayut’s entry includes three chapters from his 2015 book Melayu as is felt, whose opening “Payoh nok yadi Nayu | It’s hard being Malay” was featured in our last issue.

Orang Luar is an attempt to forge a possible tradition of internationalism from below that may help us find creative ways to act outside the demobilization into political parties that very much characterizes the present moment in the mid-2020s for both the Thai ratsadon and the Malaysian rakyat.

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Orae Lua | Outsider

In the lonely quiet one late morning, Bae Ni (pseudonym) and I sipped coffee together in a teahouse in the center of the kampong. Earlier, the middle-aged Melayu man with a pensive look had been lingering instead of taking off as usual for day work. Once most patrons had left the place, he took the opportunity to move to my table while ordering his third cup of coffee in under two hours. From his actions I sensed that maybe he needed to talk to me about something.

We caught up with each other a little bit. When he learned about the community meeting I’d called to clarify who I was, he expressed sympathy with my predicament during data collection.

“We’re both outsiders,” Bae Ni (Abang Nik) said matter-of-factly.

……………………….

It’s been more than twenty years since Bae Ni moved to this kampong as an anok natu or son-in-law. He was born in a kampong in the foothills and grew up with rubber tapping jobs. But Cupid had other plans: his love arrow struck Bae Ni when he met a fisherman’s daughter while studying religion in a pondok. The two had a simple wedding, and Bae Ni moved in with the bride’s family in accordance with original Melayu tradition for a “probation period” where he must work for his father-in-law on the fishing boat before he could officially have a family of his own.

Bae Ni’s new life in the kampong proceeded normally. He even began to show signs of extraordinary achievement: he came to be a community representative in quality-of-life improvements as well as a religion teacher at the local tadika or kindergarten. It was smooth sailing until some days prior, when Bae Ni ran into a conflict of views about the soliciting of donations for public services and religious activities in the community such as the Mawlid (Mok Lok/Maulid) festival, burial rites, masjid maintenance, kubo (Kubur) cleaning, and water pipe laying. He viewed that the poor should be entitled to the services and must take part in all the activities, but they should not be expected to pay as it would be like squeezing a crab to death expecting blood. However, some others viewed that every family in the community should contribute monetarily, though the exact amount might vary depending on monthly income.

“It never occurred to them that some people don’t even have rice to fill a pot and only survive by constantly taking out loans. If their idea goes through, Bae, trust and believe that the taokae’s (Tor Kae) in this kampong will gain a lot of new clients to lend to so the poor can cover the donations,” Bae Ni said, his eyes hardening. He added that the proposed donation rule had no basis in Islamic principles, but operated under the conditions of village life. Those who didn’t pitch in financially were often the object of badmouthing both in their faces and behind their backs. They were also barred from the services they deserved.

“So the poor must carry their burdens in order to participate in the collective life of the community. We’ve never had any welfare assistance for the poor. Do you think this is right, Bae?” The sharp question staggered me, but just as quickly as he shot it out, his eyes clouded over with his takeaway from well-worn experience: “But nearly every poor person has to abide by it. Some of them consider it to be the rules they have to accept, or else they won’t be able to rely on the taokae’s or on their relatives anymore.”

Bae Ni’s argument on the issue spread by word of mouth from the village committee meeting to other groups. And soon everybody knew about it. What’s surprising was that of all the community members, the poor were the most critical of his views despite being the people he wanted to help.

“They said, he’s an outsider. No way he can understand people here,” Bae Ni concluded.

……………………….

As I was listening, I began to connect the dots. The arguments between Bae Ni and community members are no different from what has happened in other cultures. Of course, anthropologists who study cultural change may observe that the above story illustrates a challenge to an existing social structure’s value system and egalitarianism by a new worldview. If we take this view, then Bae Ni’s proposal becomes an agent of chaos for patron-client relationships in the community; his vision of justice, a destroyer of the one option for survival for the poor of the kampong!

However, I was stuck trying to wrap my mind around the criticism of “outsiderness” that the poor had towards Bae Ni, since in Malay Muslim culture the use of the term “outsider” or orae lua is quite complicated.

Take for example what happened to me. After the clarification of my real identity to dispose of people’s perception of me as a “taokae from Singapore,” taokae meaning Chinese businessman, a no small number of community members decided to call me orae Bakok or a Bangkok person, as opposed to orae sini (Ore Sining) which means a person here. But whenever I tried to interview senior community members who usually hung about chatting on the veranda of the mosque, or whenever I tried to enter the kubo to observe a burial, I was often called orae lua agamo or a heathen (“person outside religion”) and, with that, barred from participating in the activity.

Some people put me in the same category as the soldiers, the police officers, and the academics who joined forces to descend upon the Three Southern Provinces: they were generally called orae pelek or stranger. The word came with a rather negative connotation as it usually referred to a visitor who had an ambiguous or dangerous agenda. In Melayu people’s interpretation, a person of this kind was considered to be doubly outside, the “outer margin” of outsiders.

Still, as I grew closer to community members and as they trusted me more, I began to notice that all the various labels were melting away. Instead, some turned to calling me by my nickname; some of the seniors liked to call me “Adek” (Adik) which means youngin or younger sibling; some others liked to call me “Bae” which means older brother. Of course, I was subsequently granted access to the observation of rituals in the kubo and to joining the conversations with seniors at the mosque even as a religious outsider.

My “outsiderness,” in retrospect, was based on differences of religion, language, and ethnicity, all of which “marked” me from the beginning and functioned as grounds to be invoked by “insiders” in each situation to create the mutual feeling that I belonged to a different category from them. However, such “differences” could readily be ignored or erased from the perception of the “insiders” once I gained a footing in the community such that they could believe I wouldn’t bring them harm.

Bae Ni’s outsiderness, in contrast, was less “visible” and harder to grasp, especially to community outsiders like myself, because it was deliberately “created” or highlighted. Bae Ni was a Melayu person, spoke Bahasa Melayu, had lived in this community for over twenty years, and lived in as much poverty as the people taking him to task. At a glance, he seemed to be completely at one with other community members. But when the conflict of opinion arose, the others then looked for the grounds to explain Bae Ni’s dissent from them in this case. Bae Ni’s track record of being accepted by the community was thus disregarded in favor of his condition as an “in-law” from the foothills which newly served to highlight his “outsiderness.”

Of course, Bae Ni’s outsiderness is based on his entry by way of marriage into his wife’s family, who belonged to the community’s major clan and lineage. That he was an “in-law” who did not have the means to have a house of his own and so had to stay indefinitely under the roof of his father-in-law was already ammunition for veiled insults, both in his face and behind his back, that he was an orae daekaw or “handicapped person.” On top of that, the image of a villager from the foothills in the eyes of people from a fishing village on the coast was that of an orae darat or “backwater person” who was far from civilization, lax in religious practice, and ignorant of the rules governing the social fabric of a larger community.

All of these were things people brought up to make their point. As some told me, “Bae Ni’s proposal sounds principled enough, but it’s just the views of a backwater person who doesn’t have the wits to build his own house and buy his own boat—how can we agree with him?”

……………………….

Noontime inside the teahouse in the middle of the kampong, I sat writing down the day’s notes by myself. Around me lay the coffee cups and the palm-wrapped tobacco stubs of my visitor, who had shambled back home after pouring out all his frustrations.

Bae Ni’s story made me seriously question some of the basic principles of anthropological field research, in particular the quest to understand a cultural worldview in a way that aligns with how the local or the native understands it, as well as the burning desire of virtually every anthropologist to gain access to an “insider” perspective (emic view) while simultaneously looking at it with the eyes of an “outsider” (etic view).

In the last analysis, in the midst of anthropologists pondering about who the “insiders” are, what they look like, and how they feel, those men and women being observed might actually see the issue as a non-issue or one too trivial to explore. The searching questions “the self—who is it?” and “the other—who is it?” might seldom, if ever, occur to people going about their day-to-day lives.

That Bae Ni and I met at the intersection of “outsiderness” was thus a clear reflection of the turmoil or out-of-whack-ness in the social life of the community. I was an other who inserted himself into the community, catching some unawares, whereas Bae Ni was calling into question the legitimacy of local patron-client relationships.

“Outsiderness” was precisely the product of the effort to recalibrate the relationships among community members to restore order. The concept served to explain away the division or alien element that arose as the fault of the difference in the troublemaker’s deep-rooted attributes—and not the fault of a structural problem in the actually existing system of relationships. It operated by the use of “difference,” be it of religion, language, geographic origin, or other social category, as a thin “dividing line” segregating me and Bae Ni from the rest of the community. (Since they are not like us, how can they understand us? And how can we accept them and their ideas?)

Accordingly, the anthropologist’s single-minded quest to gain access to “insiderness” may yield only one side of the story, and the data from that side may not actually help us better understand the community under study, because it typically isn’t an important concern in people’s everyday lives.

Only when an incident occurs that necessitates the mention of “outsiderness” do we get a chance to see the dynamic of the actually existing system of relationships and come to appreciate the multifaceted character of people’s lives beyond their simplicity and loveliness: they have an abundance of conflicts, too. This applies equally to “us” outside as to the people inside “the Malay world.”

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Monsoon Season

Big drops of rain, violent winds, and turbulent seas were the signs of monsoon season.

As people in this fishing kampong were well aware, whenever November came around their small boats would lie motionless under thatched roof by the beach and stay there until January. During this interval, the seasoned fishers would turn into househusbands or housewives, if not day laborers in the city. Nobody dared to test nature, especially when it was in turmoil.

Today was day three. The rain had been going strong since before dawn; it’d been going on for so long nobody noticed the sun rise or set. The low-lying area surrounding my rented house was by then a mini lake. From time to time, casting a glance outside the window I could see a flock of Muscovy ducks, now floating by, now sticking their beaks underwater to find bits of food, now waddling on the slushy mud. During brief moments when the rain thinned down, the boys in the neighboring houses would run outside through the slosh to race their little boats crafted from leaves.

Yes, all these images buoyed me up in the midst of living sequestered in my house, with writing being my only company. Other people in the kampong probably had the same thought: if only the rain had been lighter—we could have met up at a teahouse to chat over steaming cups of coffee and puffs of palm-wrapped tobacco. A resident told me, this was the worst monsoon in five years.

……………………….

I survived the days of downpour by relying on meals packed in tiffin boxes from the family of Bae Yú (Abang Aiyub). Bae Yú had to brave the rain with an umbrella to deliver almost every meal. The main dish of the monsoon season was most often salted fish, which kampong residents had fermented earlier in the year. A more well-to-do household might use king mackerel, but for a poor family, just having ikae budu (Ikan Budu) or budu sauce with fish was more than enough. Budu sauce with fish came from the fermentation of small fishes like short mackerel in budu sauce. The fish tasted more like salt crystals in fish form as it didn’t have much of a meaty texture. As a dish it was low-cost and long-lasting.

I had the opportunity to taste both varieties of salted fish as prepared by Kak Yah, Bae Yú’s wife. But what interested me more than the flavor of the food was Bae Yú himself, who liked to hang around after the meal and engage me in long conversations almost every time. Initially I just thought, how nice it was to have a friend while being stuck at home. Besides, I could ask him about goings-on in the kampong and his experiences here, plus he also had a great many stories he wanted to tell me.

Then, one day, I was surprised by the monsoon’s capacity to reveal something from behind the scenes. That day, Bae Yú delivered salted fish with a long face, and I couldn’t help mentioning it out of concern. However, that made him look even more uneasy, so I busied myself eating while Bae Yú walked out to smoke tobacco on the front porch, enveloped in occasional mists of rain.

The silence was short-lived; soon enough Bae Yú came back to unburden himself to me. He told me that before coming to deliver the salted fish, he and Kak Yah had a big fight. The issue was that they didn’t have enough to cover the daily costs of living and sending their kid to school. During the monsoon season, Bae Yú couldn’t go out to sea at all, which meant that for three months the family’s main income source was gone. As for Kak Yah, whose occupation was day work in the fishing industry doing things like cutting off fish heads, peeling prawns, and cracking crab legs, she found herself unemployed as well. Like many other local families whose livelihood involved fishing, Bae Yú’s family had to take loans from local business owners to cover expenses throughout the monsoon. This led to an endless “cycle of debt” such that a new loan had to be taken out despite an existing pile of loans that had yet to paid off in full.

Maybe, monsoon winds were a sign of incoming poverty and familial strain…

“Sorry, Bae Yú, uh… if you need help with anything or need a listening ear, I’m here,” I said. But his reply only served to pique my curiosity rather than relieve his anguish. He told me that he was a mere son-in-law who built a house near his wife’s relatives. Being a son-in-law made him uncomfortable; he felt as if he were being spied on at all times, and he had to keep from expressing his emotions fully. In almost every fight, Bae Yú had to let the problems blow over with silence and time. Of course, deep down he felt that his dignity as a man was shrinking by the day. So this time, Bae Yú turned to the most legitimate method provided by religion.

According to Islamic principles, Bae Yú told me, a husband could divorce his wife simply by vowing to do it three times over during the marriage. So he used that method: by saying “I would like to sever all ties with you” twice in a row, but delaying the third on purpose to leave the door open for Kak Yah to come beg for forgiveness. And to heighten the tension, Bae Yú began packing his clothes as if moving out.

However, almost two hours passed without Kak Yah coming in to check on him. Waiting inside for her apology, Bae Yú began to lose patience and stole a glance at Kak Yah through a crack in the wall. He saw her sitting with her friends, absorbed in some activity as if he did not matter to her one bit. So he grabbed his big bag and left, hoping to give Kak Yah a taste of separation, of losing her husband.

It was only seconds before he came to stand before Kak Yah, who was occupied with cutting off fish heads. She glanced at him for a brief moment, then returned her gaze to work. Bae Yú, bag in hand, didn’t know what to do next. He knew that one basket of headless fish (which weighed 20 kilograms or so) would net their kids 10 baht of pocket money for school. And more baskets than one would mean savings for a rainy day, since work was so hard to come by during the monsoon. As Bae Yú stood stiffly at a loss, Kak Yah slid a wooden cutting board, a plastic basin, and a knife to her side, saying, “What are you up to? Come sit and help me cut off these fish heads.” He put the bag down, took a seat beside her, and began cutting off fish heads.

“Wait, Bae Yú, you didn’t say anything to Kak Yah?” I asked directly, noting how the story ended abruptly and a bit too easily.

“What would you have me say? Would you have me break up with Kak right in the middle of her working to feed our kids? I am the head of the family. Abandoning my kids and wife is out of the question—there won’t be any dignity left in me as a man.” Bae Yú continued, “By the way, I only meant to make a threat by walking out there. I wasn’t going to follow through. If a man who’s a son-in-law gets divorced and returns home, it’s like going back to square one: the one managing finances is the wife; the one keeping the keys to the house is the wife; the kids ask the mom for money; the house sits on the land of the father-in-law. Wouldn’t it be better for me to keep my head down and help my wife do work?”

“So… the husband’s God-given right to divorce is not so sacrosanct after all,” I teased Bae Yú.

“In principle it is sacrosanct. In real life only a handful of rich Nayu (Melayu) men do it,” he gave a short reply and changed the subject by asking about the flavors of the ikae budu, then going off on a tangent about the weather.

Before long, he picked up a palm leaf, put in tobacco, and rolled it slowly. He gazed into the rain before him. Bae Yú might be holding in and hiding away his feelings; I truly believed that those feelings had something to do with his “dignity as a man.”

Strangely, not long after Bae Yú left, I grew fond of monsoon season. Although it probably wasn’t fair to him for me to feel this way, the downpour that had foreclosed my travel plans to gather research data turned out to be an opening to understand and examine people’s inner feelings that were released as if from a prison.

At the very least, I began to notice that certain explanations about the “power relations” between Melayu women and Melayu men in the last several years were rather superficial.

The academics and the NGO workers who took it upon themselves to go to the Three Southern Provinces to work on conflict resolution and remedy for victims and injured persons deserved to be honored and praised. But quite often, the way they described the life circumstances of Melayu women was pretty much taken wholesale from those of Muslim women in Middle Eastern countries who were believed to be oppressed and controlled at all times by men’s power.

Many still believed that Melayu women wouldn’t dare argue with their husbands, that they were confined to the home without a chance to learn about the outside world (???). And many still believed that Melayu men tended to be lazy bums who only wanted to go out, birdcage in hand, to teahouses to show off their pet bulbuls (???). Regrettably overlooked were the social and cultural conditions and dynamics of womanhood and manhood in Malay society.

……………………….

Big drops of rain, violent winds, and turbulent seas were the signs of monsoon season.

The morning of day four, Kak Yah was the one to deliver me food under the umbrella. Bae Yú, she told me, had made the decision just the night before to go to Malaysia for work.

“Bae Yú said thank you, Bae, for taking the time off your day to sit down with him and listen to his troubles yesterday. He said it’d be three months before you guys meet again,” Kak Yah added.

From Kak Yah I learned the reason for Bae Yú’s taking off. He didn’t want to be a burden to his family during the time of economic incapacitation. His hope was that he could at least save up a small sum from working in a tom yum goong stall in Malaysia.

“What about you and your kids, Kak—how will you manage?” I asked, concerned.

“Don’t worry about us. We’ve got salted fish. We’ve got family. I’m only worried about Bae Yú—how will he survive?” she replied as she turned her gaze to the rain.

Whenever monsoon season came around, it wasn’t only boats that awaited their trips to the sea; people also awaited the return of their loved ones who were struggling abroad and who wished dearly for their own return, when they would share stories and pass along hopeful news.

Bae Yú was just one among dozens of Melayu men in the kampong who left to find work during the monsoon season.

This was the worst monsoon in five years…

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Monsoon Season (continued)

Several Melayu fishermen and fisherwomen said the same thing to me: that their perahu or boat held as much significance to them as their rumoh (Rumah) or home, because one-half of a fisher’s life was lived on the water.

In Bahasa Melayu, the word baro refers to a mode of migration for settlement or fishing which usually involves a large boat carrying two-to-three families. Migrants build small shacks on the beach and stay only for a month or two before moving to the next stop in the cycle following the movements of fish, unless they have discovered a new place of plenty.

Aside from baro, barae is a similar mode of migrant fishing on the sea that lasts only a few nights and involves fewer people.

[Proofreader’s Note: barae is barang in the central dialect, meaning object, whereas baro means smoldering firewood, and refers to warming at the fire or staying the night.]

Of course, these two modes of sea voyage have all but vanished in the present day due to the depletion of marine resources and the strict government measures on migration. Still, many Melayu fishers continue to be more attached to the sea than to the land, and to feel a sense of security in life as long as the sea hasn’t dried up.

So it was no surprise when the kampong came alive once again after the end of monsoon season.

The fishers, women and men, were making preparations for going out to sea after a period of sitting around at home or taking jobs in the city. Some were cleaning boats. Some others were diligently repairing a variety of fishing tackle. A few told me that going out to sea at this time was crucial to the life of a fisher: it was a mission to make money for the family, to pay off debts to the business owners, and to buy necessary goods. Importantly, it was also a joy that couldn’t be explained.

However, though the monsoon had been over for tens of days, Bae Yú hadn’t come home…

……………………….

Migrant work in Malaysia is normal practice for Melayu people in the Three Southern Provinces. It also has a precedent: in earlier times, during the off-season of farming and as monsoon season approached, many people relied on relations of kin, language, and religion as a ticket into being hired as a rubber tapper, rice farmworker, and fisher in Kelantan and Kedah. These men and women would return once rice farming season came around and the monsoon was over.

About ten years ago, however, working in tom yum goong stalls and buying clothes for sale in Thailand became new attractions for Melayu people. These two kinds of work stemmed primarily from the need for labor and the need for new markets for Malaysian goods.

Aside from economic factors, the inner life of Melayu people also ascribes great importance to migration which implies “traveling” to gather life experience or jalae-jalae (Jalan-Jalan). This kind of migration often crosses into a treasure expedition of the kind that has changed the course of many a laborer’s life for the better.

Some people in the kampong spent enough time working in Malaysia to pick up standard Malay, Indonesian, Thai, and English. Once they returned to Thailand, they tended to switch careers to interpreters for tourists in tour companies or leverage their language skills into making successful business deals. Some became leaders in community development as they were able to apply the lessons learned from other places to the conditions of their “home.”

Therefore, that Bae Yú went to work in Malaysia was nothing out of the ordinary for Melayu people; that is, aside from his not keeping in touch and not returning in time according to plan. Kak Yah told me that it had been almost two months since Bae Yú last contacted her via mobile phone. She knew only that he was about to quit his job in the tom yum goong stall because of low pay.

Kak Yah explained to me further what working in a tom yum goong stall entailed. Sure, the work was easy to find, but it was only a good fit for teenagers and people who didn’t have a family. For Bae Yú, he needed a new job that had a high enough pay to take care of himself and several others at home.

“That’s all Bae ever told me,” Kak Yah said. Apart from his first month’s pay of 4,000 baht which had been passed along a relative of his who had by then come back to the kampong, she knew nothing.

Kak Yah and I tried to find Bae Yú’s whereabouts from the people who went to work in Malaysia at the same time as he did. One said Bae Yú still worked at the same place. One last saw Bae Yú as the latter was applying to be a crewman on a push net boat. And one insisted that Bae got his passport and work permit confiscated since his quitting was a violation of his contract with the employer.

“What are you going to do now, Kak?” I asked.

“I don’t really know. The kids are asking when Dad will be back. The taokae is reminding me loan payment’s due. The boat is parked in the same spot. Can’t go out to sea if it’s just me,” Kak Yah said in a strained tone of voice trying to suppress an emotion. I didn’t dare say anything further.

Certainly, from my data collection thus far I knew as Kak Yah did the possible implications of a migrant worker’s failure to return from Malaysia. The first was arrest, which was in fact a highly typical occurrence for migrant laborers, legal or otherwise. The comparison made to me by a Melayu person that “the life of Melayu laborers in Malaysia is no different than that of Burmese laborers in Thailand” still held water and rang true.

The second possibility was re-marriage to a well-to-do person. This was not a new phenomenon, since cousin marriages between the Three Southern Provinces and the States of Kelantan and Kedah were a long-standing practice. However, more recently it happened to people who had a family prior, resulting in a spike of divorce rates in the kampong. Some people returned only for one day to sign divorce papers and drop a sum of money for the family for the last time.

The third possibility was death. The failure to return home in the planned timeframe nor keep in touch for a long time could of course lead to the supposition that the person had died. Deaths of Melayu migrant laborers in Malaysia occurred from time to time; the cause varied. People in the kampong told me that every time a death occurred, government authorities and people in Malaysia would refuse to let the body be buried in a cemetery that belonged to people in Malaysia. Consequently, relatives of the deceased would have to try any way they could to bring the body back for burial in a ka-pong kubo (Kampong Kubur) on the Thai side within twenty-four hours (the time limit prescribed by Islamic principles).

This meant that, in the case where the body could not be brought home in time, relatives of the deceased would have to raise funds to hire a Malaysian Muslim to (secretly) do the rites and burial in their stead. And if truth be told, quite a few bodies were dumped in the middle of the sea or buried unceremoniously in the wilderness. This fate after death often befell the crew on fishing vessels and the laborers who were indigent.

The final possibility was living in hiding, always having to move from place to place, from job to job. This kind of life usually came about after a laborer had their work permit and employer-issued passport/visa confiscated for whatever reason. I’d heard stories of this sort from people in the kampong, so I had some idea of the difficulties. Some people had to sleep under a bridge. Some barely had any food to eat. And some had to spend years wandering all over Malaysia for work from Kelantan to Kuala Lumpur and Johor.

Most importantly, these people often didn’t have a single baht to their name once they finally made it home.

……………………….

Though the monsoon had been over for tens of days, Bae Yú hadn’t come home…

I couldn’t help but despise myself for my inability to help Kak Yah other than keeping an eye on her from a distance and sometimes going up to her to talk. I realized instantly that the stature of an anthropologist meant nothing when I could only be a gatherer of data who watched and let her loss vaporize into the ether right before me.

Of course, people had different paths, different missions in life. In a few months, I might be writing my dissertation in my rented apartment in Bangkok, whereas Kak Yah would remain in the same place, dealing with poverty and Bae Yú’s disappearance on her own.

Summer was coming. The sun was getting hot and the surface of the sea was turning placid aquamarine. Kak Yah continued to busy herself working, raising her kids, and paying off debts, just like some other people in the kampong with the same predicament.

Her and Bae Yú’s boat still lay in the shack on the beach. Kak Yah was so diligent in caring for the boat that a taokae made an offer to buy it and several neighbors asked to use it. Yes, every request was denied. That boat, she said, was very important to her family. On some late afternoons, people in the kampong saw her and her kids there, hanging out and having dinner.

I began now to believe in the notion that a boat was like a home for Melayu people. It wasn’t only because they lived one-half of their lives on the water.

But a boat—the boat—was also part of the memory that Kak Yah was preserving as she waited for the day of going out to sea with Bae Yú once more…