The New Town Center

By Beth Green

Shopping—it’s not a necessity in Asia. It’s not even a pastime.

It’s become an art.

And since art needs a gallery, every respectable city in Asia has a fantastic shopping mall.

If an excess of period kung-fu movies has you envisioning the goat-and-chicken type of outdoor markets when you envision Asian shopping, you’re missing the big picture.

And I mean the really big picture.

Wikipedia has a list of the world’s largest shopping malls. Perusing this list, except for the palatial malls in the UAE, you see Asia, Asia, and more Asia. Even the Philippines, where I now live, boasts some of the largest shopping malls in the world, despite locals having far less disposable income than do people in the USA. 

A monk checks the wares at an Apple store in
IFC Mall in Hong Kong

While nostalgia and poverty (and tourists wanting to capture both of those on camera) keep traditional markets alive in rural areas, urban Asians flock—no, gravitate, as if being pulled by some planetary force—to the nearest shopping malls.

Malls, oh air-conditioned beacons of comfort, here take the function of what Westerners understand as the town center.

Shopping malls, in China and developing nations especially, symbolize how far the region has progressed in recent years. Progress, prosperity, the future—you can find all of those things between the doors, on your way to the cinema. Or going to the beauty salon. Or visiting the swimming pool, or making for the fitness center, or the driver’s licensing authority, or the amusement park…the whole town is here.

In our first city in China, the assistant assigned to foreign teachers could not get his head around the idea that we wanted to go to a wet market—the traditional, open-air shopping experience where you pick the fish you want out of a bucket by your feet and fondle a zillion strange vegetables, still encrusted with the farm’s dirt. Instead, he took us to shopping mall after shopping mall, pushing us to ride the escalators and bask in the cool air, while cautioning us not to buy anything (“too expensive!”). He loved showing off the city’s new wealth.

Asia also has shopping malls that are completely devoted to single categories of product. I think this has to do with the old grouping of tradesmen to particular quarters of the city. In olden times you’d have the tailors in one district, the silversmiths in another, and so on. Now, they’ve got baby clothes in one five story mall, shoes in another, and—my boyfriend’s favorite—technology in yet another.  If you think it’s difficult to pick out just the right gadgetry when you go to a department store or browse online, try visiting a whole shopping mall full of technology stores and then making a decision. I found visiting computer malls (and their close cousins, camera malls) in China exhausting, because of the crowds of people, stores blasting music to show off their speakers for sale, and floors and floors of kiosks and storefronts packed with wares. I finally had to tell Dan he needed to give me two days’ warning before visiting a technology mall so that I could summon the energy to quash the ever-growing urge to flee. If I was lucky, he left me at home.

Lion dancers bless shops in a mall in Guangzhou, China
during Chinese New Year

Of all of the countries in Asia, perhaps I like the malls in Malaysia the best. Malaysia is a bargain shopper’s paradise, like China, but without the crowds. Once, we were in Kuala Lumpur waiting in line at a foreign exchange bureau in a lower-end mall. Always nosey, I peeked over the shoulder of the blonde woman in front of me in line. She had a highlighter and a five-page list in small font of a “suggested shopping itinerary” from an Australian travel agency. Judging from her notes, not to mention the bags dangling from her bent arms, she was out to verify the whole list. No wonder she needed more cash!

One of the reasons I like Malaysian malls, in addition to the moderate crowds and the bargains to be found, is the food courts. Usually, you can find, tucked away on an upper layer of the mall, a low-cost food zone where vendors sell a variety of pan-Asian treats from small kiosks or carts. I always order either the “economy rice,” which comes with a choice of toppings plus soup, or I get tandoori chicken, with spicy chai and freshly made guava juice on the side.

Is shopping art? Perhaps I miswrote. Shopping, in Asia, is simply life.

Off The Beaten Track: Shamini Flint

Practicing law in Malaysia and Singapore before becoming a successfully published author, Shamini Flint traveled extensively around Asia for work before resigning to become a stay-at-home mum, writer, part-time lecturer, and environmental activist – all in an effort, she says, to make up for her “evil” past as a corporate lawyer! In addition to writing two excellent children’s novels – Diary of a Soccer Star and Diary of a Cricket God published by Allen & Unwin, Australia and Puffin, India – Shamini also writes cross-cultural crime fiction (our favorite kind), taking her main character – of whom The Guardian says, “it’s impossible not to warm to the portly, sweating, dishevelled, wheezing Inspector Singh” – through Malaysia, Bali, Singapore, and Cambodia to solve all kinds of perplexing murder cases. With the publication of Shamini’s latest novel in this excellent series, her protagonist finally makes it to India, the land of his ancestors. A bit like Shamini, in fact.

“Incredible India!” That’s the advert that’s been running for the last year or so on television here in Singapore and probably the rest of the world too. In it, India casts its spell on a wide-eyed man of Caucasian origin who sums up his experience on a postcard – Incredible India! My feelings about the motherland are far more conflicted so an entire novel – my latest crime fiction, Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Curious Indian Cadaver – hasn’t been sufficient to air my thoughts.

Both my grandfathers arrived by boat in Malaysia (then known as Malaya, which was a British colony) almost a hundred years ago. They settled in a small fishing village called Kuantan and set about carving a future for their children. One was a nurse, the other an estate clerk. Having found jobs, they sent for wives from back home and committed themselves to the production of numerous progeny. Their assimilation was impressive in that they adopted local hobbies – mahjong and badminton – and learnt to speak Malay, the native language of the country. Their daughters were raised to be teachers and the sons doctors. I often wonder whether they thought of themselves as Malayan at this point or whether they assumed, as so many of their peers did, that this sojourn in the tropics was temporary and would end with their triumphant return to their ancestral villages some day.

However, when Malaysia became independent in 1957, a choice was forced upon them and both chose to remain, abandoning any dreams of returning to India to accept citizenship of this new land while it was on offer.

Their offspring, the teachers and doctors, produced children who were lawyers and doctors (with a couple of engineers and accountants thrown in), and my grandparents were cremated knowing that they had achieved what they set out to do. All their dreams had been economic – the bottom line was the bottom dollar –  and in the success of the grandchildren, they were content.

Which is how it came to be, that I, a lawyer by training, grew up a Malaysian, unable to speak more than a few words of Tamil or Malayalee (the languages of my grandfathers) and never having been to India. The irony, of course, was that, in multiracial Malaysia where ethnicity determines university places and access to government jobs, my Indian-ness was singularly important. So there I was – an Indian in Malaysia, comfortable with my identity, wont to speak of the depth of Indian culture in a smug tone and to take pride in the Indian economic miracle. I did not go as far as some of my elderly uncles who – sitting pretty in Singapore or Malaysia – would attribute much that was good in the world to India or an Indian.

Apparently, for instance, an Indian discovered gravity long before Newton, penicillin before Fleming and invented the games of rugby, cricket, and football in the village square. My all-time favourite was when an aunt told me in in no uncertain terms, ‘Shakespeare was also Indian, you know.’ And don’t lets get started on Ben Kingsley …

So much vicarious pride! What fine Indians we were! Until the day I made my first trip to India in the late ’80s and discovered I wasn’t Indian at all. There were two dimensions to this. First of all, I didn’t feel I belonged. But more importantly, no one in India thought I was Indian, not even for a moment. My distant relatives were shocked at my short hair and kept asking if I was a boy. They didn’t like it if I went sightseeing on a hot day in case I was burnt any darker by the sun – fair skin being a pre-condition of marriage unless the dowry was to set you back a long way. Strangers pointed at me on the streets because of my short sleeves and jeans. And every single taxi driver overcharged me on the grounds that I was a foreigner and wouldn’t know any better. Finally, I fell ill and spent the rest of the holiday making use of the hotel facilities. I had severe culture shock in the place I had always assumed, in some distant but comforting way, was home.

I’ve been back many times since and India has changed a lot. I’m no longer viewed as an escapee from Mars/the zoo/prison. But this is largely because we have a reached an understanding, India and I. I am just another tourist from some foreign land – like the Chinese or the English or the Russians. From my point of view, I can appreciate the history (as if I was in Rome), the architecture (as if I was in London) and the food (as if I was in Beijing). I am a stranger finding beauty and culture and inspiration in a complex and fascinating land. But I know that I’m not an Indian anymore, and that is a huge loss.