Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 25 April 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
We seem to be knocking down all our old buildings. I can’t decide, is this a good or a bad thing? It’s sad that Pudu prison has gone, but I didn’t want to live there. I mean, it was a prison.
Heritage Man

Does it matter if old landmark buildings are torn down? Should we be sentimental about real estate? After all, the old Pudu Jail was obsolete as a prison (it was built in 1895), it did not contain any happy memories and it sat on a big piece of land in the middle of a modern capital city where space is at a premium. Should we be sorry that it has gone? The old Bok House (aka Le Coq d’Or) was private property and sat on an immensely valuable piece of land in the shadow of KLCC in Jalan Ampang. If you had owned it, wouldn’t you too have knocked it down overnight? I don’t know who actually owned it, but wouldn’t you have torn down Bukit Bintang Girls’ School and built a shopping mall?

The arguments against knocking down old buildings are weak in cities like Kuala Lumpur and George Town, which were created for the sole purpose of commerce, for making money. Yap Ah Loy and Francis Light were not artists seeking to create hippie communes, they wanted to get rich quick. Surely campaigning to save these old buildings is mere sentimentality or emotional conservatism railing against inevitable change? Paris is 2,000 years old but much of what we picture in our minds as the definition of Paris was built as recently as the 1850s when huge swathes of the ancient slums were knocked down and replaced by beautiful avenues designed by Baron Haussmann. Today, everybody loves Haussmann’s boulevards and hardly anybody mourns the loss of what stood there before. But Paris is beautiful, is KL?

Ever since I returned to Malaysia in the early 1990s, I’ve grappled with the issue of the destruction of old buildings. When I was living in London, I would often sit in a long traffic jam caused by the road narrowing to go around a 15th century barn. I love old buildings but I would always be angered by the inefficiency being caused by this one old building. Just knock it down or move it so that the road can be widened and straightened and then the traffic can flow. So, when I think of the destruction of Malaysia’s buildings, I try to remember that one ridiculous barn.

But that barn represents who Londoners and the English imagine themselves to be today. Knocking it down would be to kill part of themselves and replacing it with a road would be the antithesis of who they think they are (rightly or wrongly). London has knocked down plenty of old buildings, London is not sentimental, but that barn would appear to represent a part of their history that they are not willing to relinquish.

Do our old buildings represent who we imagine ourselves to be? The answer depends if you’re asking the people who are knocking them down or those who want to save them. These old buildings in KL are generally from our colonial past when institutions were run by the British, and the Chinese held economic sway. For some, the imagining is that these institutions were once efficient and trustworthy even if they were run by cursed foreigners. Actually, the colonial administrators and educators were well respected, even admired, but we can’t say that. No, they were colonial oppressors and every built trace of their existence must be eradicated. The inheritance of those institutions must be forgotten as if it never happened. The old buildings must go, hopefully to be replaced by record-breaking skyscrapers. If you think you can remember any past, then you must know that it is over.

KL was once a Chinese town, it is not anymore. It is the capital city for modern Malaysia and perhaps the politicians who wish to reimagine our history must be allowed their playground. But when destruction of history happens outside KL, outside any city, then the meaning is more troublesome. Lembah Bujang in Kedah is a site that does not sit neatly into our new simplistic version of the past. Trade winds blew from India to Kedah for six months every year and between the 4th and 12th century, while waiting for the trade winds to blow back to India, a community was built, complete with several Hindu temples. In 2013, one of the thousand-year-old temple sites was torn down, ostensibly for a housing project (because, you know, space is at a premium in Kedah). The need to eradicate history stretches back to times far beyond just the colonial period. The Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo have a truly unique and remarkable history. The sea lanes brought people, ideas, languages and religions to an entrepôt where they were not greeted by antagonism but where many were able to find a home. No, I’m wrong. That never happened.

I’m all for progress and efficiency, but I’m also for history and aesthetic value. In Paris, Baron Haussmann swept away slums and replaced them with stunningly beautiful boulevards that are now the quintessence of Frenchness. Who are our Baron Huassmanns? What do they wish to create? Or is the more important factor, what do they wish to eradicate?

Sometimes, I think I’m the only person in Malaysia who doesn’t like change.
Change Not

I don’t like change (see above), but all good things must come to an end. Surinder Jessy has been the editor of Options for a very long time, since at least the 15th century, or is it 15 years? But now, she is leaving to take up a job as a car mechanic, I think (I honestly couldn’t read her email through my tears). I want to thank her for being a great editor and for allowing me the opportunity to write about anything I want (see above) and I’d like to think that I’ve done my best to honour this privilege by submitting my column approximately three seconds before the weekly deadline. I wish her the best of luck in her new endeavours and I promise to take my car to her workshop (or whatever it is that she’s going to do). Many thanks, Surinder.

Reprinted with the kind permission of