COMMENT It was full moon last night. The air was clearly charged with surprises. As a friend kindly drove me home to Changkat Bukit Bintang after a visit to Damansara, I at once spotted my good friend Jack having a beer, sitting at a table on the sidewalk at one of the local venues.

It turned out that he was meant to leave for the United States on the following morning. He is a United Nations-recognised Myanmar refugee from Kachin state. We had a good conversation on the sidewalk (now often clogged with tables so it is even difficult to get through - an upmarket version of Jalan Alor nearby, if you will).

He is being sent to a small town he had never heard of on the US-Canadian border, where there are certainly not many people from Myanmar. He mentioned to me however the name of half a dozen cities all over the US where there are Kachin people he knows (he has no family or friends living where he is going).

Jack can eventually move to one of those cities if he does not like his first small American town (though by doing so he will at once lose the official support he enjoys on arrival in what concerns housing, health care, etc). He is also thinking about joining the US army.

I tried to reason with him, mentioning Afghanistan, but I guess for a boy growing up in what has often been virtually a war zone, namely Kachin state, living at loggerheads for 60-odd years now with Myanmar’s central government, the prospect must look interesting.

At any rate his mind was too restless and his mobile was ringing far too often for us to have a proper conversation on the subject. He was obviously feeling anxious about his travel and his new life in the US, as well as sad because he is leaving behind all his friends here. These were in fact often his friends back in Kachin state as well.

Five years in Malaysia

In reality, Bukit Bintang has a ‘local branch’ of his neighbourhood in his Kachin hometown. Many of the people he grew up with are living and working in the area, especially as the night venues provide a steady flow of low-skilled jobs eminently suited for young Myanmar people who need to work to survive and have no recognised certificates.

In the US it is much harder to reconstitute a community than it is here: refugees are typically spread out cross the entire country. Some have been trying almost strenuously to create nodal points with larger communities at a few cities, but many people remain all the same scattered all over. Former Myanmar and Malaysia friends usually just meet often or twice a year at best, as distances are great.

NONEI dropped by later around midnight to give Jack a final hug and wish him all the best. He was then in a great mood. His friends were all around him. Some gave him warm clothes for the trip (not really adequate for a US winter, I thought, though he is flying now into the summer); others gave him beer.

Slowly, a farewell party began to gather to see him off at the UN office in Pudu, where he was to report at four in the morning to wait for immigration and embarkation procedures. As a stateless person with no passport, he cannot do anything on his own. As is usual in these cases, he had no idea what flight he would be taking (he only knew he was flying to Los Angeles first).

Jack has spent about five years in Malaysia, almost all of it working extremely long hours - over the weekend easily 10 hours of heavy duty in an overcrowded bar with loud music. Fortunately his local boss gives him one paid day off a week (a kindness - in many countries a right protected by law - many bosses do not care to extend to their foreign workers).

There are virtually no Malaysians working at his bar, unless it is a supervisor or manager. Apart from a cook from Thailand, virtually the entire staff (a couple of dozen people) are from Myanmar, almost all of them belonging to ethnic minorities rather than to the majority Burmese population.

A Kachin stronghold

There is a slight preponderance of Christians, as two well-represented minorities in Bukit Bintang, namely the Chin and the Kachin, are usually Christian. They often go to church on Sunday mornings at the Kuala Lumpur Baptist Church at the start of Jalan Alor. The church also houses an informal Kachin school for refugee children.

Most of Jack’s friends therefore live and work right around the corner. Though he is a refugee now finally on his way to a better life in the US than he can hope for in Malaysia, let alone in Myanmar, he is clearly also sad to go.

For years he has been enveloped by an entire community of his own people, which he will now have to leave behind for good. It is also quite possible that never again in his life will he live in an environment where he shares language, religion, school and neighbourhood networks, and even kinship ties, with so many people.

Bukit Bintang is usually associated with night-revellers, tourists and expatriates. Yet it is also very much a Kachin stronghold, even though many people who visit the neighbourhood during the evening, and even live there, have probably never heard of the Kachin.

They nonetheless add a layer of cosmopolitanism to the Bukit Bintang scene that has become an integral part of it over the years. As Jack leaves, recent, continuous arrivals from Kachin state will certainly keep the local community strong and thriving.

FRED ROSEN has been gallivanting around South-East Asia for quite some time now. He is interested in foreign communities in Malaysia’s large cities. He has also been writing about Malacca, both in the present and the past, as well as other ancient port cities in the Indian Ocean.