Noite de Malaca

The club is an old club of colonial origin. Malaysia has many such clubs. In fact, even though my knowledge of the former British Empire is confined to South Africa and Hong Kong, I am surprised at the tenacity - it is harder to find a better word - of the phenomenon. Well over a hundred years after they first opened their doors the clubs are still there. I remember being taken to Wilhelm to his club in Cape Town. It is located in the heart of the city in a very beautiful old house. There are views of the mountain to be had from its wide verandah. However, the club is actually a collage of three different clubs (originally two British and one Afrikaans club) that had to merge because of a serious drop in the number of their members (even though in the post-apartheid era they are of course open to all people instead of whites only). Nothing remotely similar seems to affect Malaysian clubs. They are all going strong (I remember standing outside the Ipoh Royal Club on the old Padang and listen to the apparently incredible parties going on there in some evenings. Some of the cars parked outside were Mercedes Benz). But then Malaysian clubs have become fully indigenized well before their South African counterparts. Namely, they may be exclusive, but they are hardly colonial only. Also, the English have long departed. And like colonizers who have long departed they can in fact be found all over the place, clubs included. It is one of those ironies of the postcolonial era. A colleague in Paramaribo, Loes Kloof-Monsels, used to say laughingly about the Dutch that never before have there been so many Dutch in Suriname as in the postcolonial time. You open a door and there stands a Dutchman or woman, said Loes.

The club is now located in a glitzy nondescript venue built on reclaimed land like a good deal of the city nowadays. Apparently most members sighed with relief as the club moved out of its cramped quarters in two old shop houses. Old and small is bad; new and spacious is good. That is the lopsided equation heritage activists in Melaka and all over the world have to deal with nowadays. Of course the old shop houses are by definition on the losing side while the new venue on reclaimed land is the future. I guess no old decaying run-of-the-mill shop houses can be expected to provide the necessary glamour. Maybe now the old club house is a restaurant serving nyonya food to Singaporeans nostalgic for the past they actually never lost because it was not exactly theirs in the first place; or else it is a backpackers lodge as the old house where I am staying on Jalan Tukang Besi (there is still one tukang besi there by the way, namely a ferreiro). It is meant for foreigners who need simple accommodation in quaint surroundings with the basics of a supposedly Asian lifestyle they would never be willing to cope with at home. It is also meant to be authentic as it is an old crumbling house. It is hard not to savour the irony of Westerners (I was going to say foreigners but in fact Singaporeans wouldn't be seen dead in a house like that) willingly staying in an old un-restored house in urgent need of repair whereas locals flee to the suburbs as soon as they can. The sad thing is that there is an increasing divorce between the buildings and the original inhabitants: the historic centre is slowly becoming a heritage town for tourists to gape at while local society moves to the sprawling array of suburbs making up the city.

The club has its own casino. That makes it into a Chinese club even if its origins are British colonial. As a former inhabitant of Macau, I feel only a very remote interest as I am given a short tour of the premises. The casino is small. It is however fairly busy for a Monday evening. But then here as in Macau casinos never really sleep, nor are they ever on holiday. The small casino has booths where players can stay on their own: the booths even have their own toilets as well as tables and chairs. I am told they are always fully booked even though the casino is open only for members. After we leave that tiny fragment of Macau in Melaka, we go upstairs and we are signed into the club proper. It is new and modern. It is not however cosy. It is not chic either. Nondescript modern would be a nice way to put it. However, what makes the club what it is are its members. As a matter of fact, I had quite a remarkable evening there.

The club has the luxury of having its own house band. Also, it is not a Filipino band as is often the case in Malaysian venues. It is actually a local band but made up of Malays only. For most of the night they sing slow songs. They are mostly oldies in English with quite a few old Latin American hits in Spanish such as Bésame Mucho. No songs whatever from Brasil. There was however a good sprinkling of Malay songs, and one of them was titled Bossa Nova. The songs were oldies and slow because it turned out, at least on that evening, that the age bracket of the crowd there was fairly high. It was explained to me that the club charged quite a good deal of money for new members (five thousand ringgit in fact), and young people either did not have the money or were not willing to spend it to become a member. However, Aidah, the lead female singer, had just become a member - her photograph was accordingly hanging on the wall in the entrance hall. She wore of course no tudong. Instead she wore a tight-fitting black dress that made her even more attractive. In fact, as we sat down a joking comment was made about her legs. I wonder whether she would dress like that in a Malay club - or work in a Malay club at all (in case Malay clubs exist, that is). The other lead singer - Zayn - was a nice-looking young man who wore dark glasses all the time as well as a hat and tie over his white shirt. Their voices were quite different. I thought she was the better singer. The musicians were good. As usual, they accepted - even solicited -requests from the audience. There were pencils and printed slips of paper for the requests: you had to sign your name too. That would be unusual in Brasil.

This crowd was in fact anything but geriatric. They turned out to be a very energetic bunch rising from their seats to dance quite often when a tune would appeal to them. The band had been there only for two months but they seemed to have eased themselves into the routine of the club. They clearly knew their audience as they played six evenings a week (from half past nine until one in the morning or later). During breaks Chinese music would be played. People always danced in couples - always - unless they danced to some Chinese tunes that seem to require group dancing. Once a lady was left behind in her seat for too many tunes in a row, and Aidah got off stage and danced with her. She often interacted with her audience, egging them on and cajoling them. Nobody was a bad dancer, and some were very good ones. There were some Indians around but they danced far less often than the Chinese. I found it slightly funny that Indians would sit around and watch while the Chinese danced. It was comparatively rare for most of the club goers to be on the dance floor at the same time.

I didn't dance very much. Of course they all knew after a while that I was the visitor from Brasil. I was also supposed to be a good dancer, needless to say, but in fact almost everybody else would dance more often and far better than I. Also, I don't enjoy ballroom dancing very much. Even the rumba that was played left me cold. I was however amazed at the baba nyonya present - namely, the local Chinese. When a joget was sung, they all came to the floor and danced very well. A joget is supposed to be a wedding song and a kind of dance in a baba nyonya wedding. The song is in Malay, not in Chinese. I found the crowd there knew how to have fun and enjoyed themselves a good deal. They would not be out of place in a similar venue in Brasil - say, a gafieira in Rio. The music of course would be much different and also the dances, but basically the energy would be quite similar.

Zayn then started singing a song in a language I could not make out at first. When asked, my companions (two nyonyas) immediately said it was Hindustani. I found it great that they had used the colonial term. In India it would be Hindi (or Urdu in Pakistan). The postcolonial condition has killed Hindustani - a language that could be written in either devanagari or Perso-Arabic script and was full of Persian and Arabic words. In the postcolonial era, it has turned into two rigidly separate media, each with their own script namely, Hindi and Urdu, the former associated with India and the latter with Pakistan. The spoken language of course remains very much one and the same though there are ever more differences. An attractive young Chinese woman married to an older husband who was always on the floor with her was imitating Indian dancing for fun - she did it quite well. The Indians remained nailed to their seats. Zayn seemed to enjoy singing the Hindustani song immensely.

I don't know what to make of that evening. Everybody behaved quite properly (it was after all a private club where everybody knows each other). The music, except towards the end when it became really fast and therefore nice to dance to, was mostly not to my liking. Nonetheless, the ambiance was pleasant and the fun was real. 

That evening to me was more important than many articles on the baba nyonya and their hybrid Chinese-Malay heritage or visits to the baba nyonya museum in Melaka (a beautiful private museum housed in a grand old house). There is a good deal of hype about the baba nyonya heritage - whose cradle is supposed to be Melaka. I find all the food and the objects in the museums quite interesting but they don't speak to me directly as a foreigner from Brasil (in fact, no matter how attractive or tasty they still remain somehow alien: somebody else's heritage). However, what I glimpsed there at the club made me think that there is more to Melaka than meets the eye. Namely, there is a living felt heritage behind the food and the objects. Something I could identify with and understand. 

It is a pity that heritage now is increasingly divorced from the urban setting where it sprung up and existed for centuries.