We cannot be free if others are in bondage
In a harrowing short story, 'Flight MH72' , a Malaysian writer, Krish Ram, narrates the tale of a local housewife in a middle-class neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur.
She has a live-in Indonesian maid who gets sick. Her husband rushes her to the hospital but the wife is scathing: why waste money on a maid? Later, the husband loses his job, and the wife is unable to find adequate employment, though she holds a masters degree in English from Universiti Malaya, the country's oldest and most prestigious institution.
She ends up swallowing her pride out of necessity, and signs up to become a maid to a middle-class Chinese family (she used to be one herself) in Hong Kong.
It turns out this story, especially as it shows the housewife eventually sliding into the shoes of her maid, is in fact an illustration of Malaysia's current oil-sheikhdom-gone-awry predicament. As I have lived in an emerging oil sheikhdom, namely Brazil (as from this year for the first time, only Venezuela in South America will produce more oil), I find Malaysia's woes of more than passing interest...
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