Talking and Visiting

Wednesday I spent several hours with Don McCloud, director of MACEE. It served as my orientation session, and I felt quite well informed by the time we finished.

I spent all day Thursday with one of the UiTM p.r. faculty, Dr. Kiran, who was kind enough to take me out to the university and show me around. She also answered many questions I had about the teaching and the structure of the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies (there are about 55 members of the faculty, she said). I still have some questions left over, but they can wait! Kiran was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland.

On the way back to my hotel, she showed me the area where she lived with her family until she was 12 years old. It is quite close to the center of the famous riot of 1969 that had such a strong and lasting effect on Malaysian national policies. She pointed out two buildings that were then cinemas and told me a detail I never knew before. The riot began in those cinemas, one showing a Chinese movie and the other showing an Indian movie on that day (May 13, 1969), when Malays killed many people in the audience for the Chinese movie, and Chinese, after ordering all the Indians to leave, killed many people who had been watching the Indian movie. Kiran and her whole family went to those movie theaters all the time, so the riot came close to them in more than one way (although none of her family were killed).

Today I spent about three hours with Karl Stoltz, the public affairs counselor at the U.S. Embassy here. Our conversation was even more informative than the one with Don on Wednesday, and very interesting. I feel quite stuffed full of information now, in fact.