Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

A JAPANESE FIRM IN MALAYSIA 129
manager’s house, or when entertaining a former Japanese expatriate manager
who was passing through Kuala Lumpur, and so on. On such occasions halal
Chinese restaurants in the large hotels–inreasingly patronised by the Malay middle
class–or other restaurants associated with Japanese, French or other national
cuisines would be chosen. The managers did visit each other’s homes for the ‘open
house’ gatherings (see Armstrong 1988) of their respective festival days, Chinese
New Year, Deepavali, Hari Raya, Christmas and so on. To do so was not merely
an expression of friendship, but a mandatory demonstration of respect for a work
colleague. Not to visit without a very good excuse would tend to be regarded not as
a passive act of omission but rather as a calculated act of hostility.
The senior managers therefore were ‘friends’, but they were quite middle-class
in the structure of their families and suburban lifestyles. They would argue that
their private time was for their hobbies and pastimes, their own nuclear families or
friends of the same ethnic group.
New graduates: work ethics and Muslim identity
As opposed to the senior local managers described earlier, who had direct personal
experience to varying degrees with Japanese culture and who did not have much
bargaining power with the company owing to deficiencies in their basic
qualifications and other aspects of their careers, the new graduates, who were
mainly Malay and who had been recruited largely on the basis of their tertiary
qualifications in the technical fields, had bargaining power as bumiputera, despite
their lack of experience in production.
Within the social organisation of the factory, they stood on their status as
graduates and rarely left their air-conditioned offices. Unlike the first generation of
managers, who helped set up the factory and who knew ‘every valve and pump’,
and every worker personally, they did not know the workers so well and it was
said that they did not care about them. As first-generation middle-class Malays
themselves, the new graduates’ generation, even if from kampung origins, had
received affirmative action bumiputera scholarships to special science-stream
secondary boarding schools set up under the NEP to ‘hothouse’ Malays into
tertiary science education. Their social origins were similar to veteran junior
managers’ yet their experience on the way to becoming middle class was quite
different. In these schools the Malay students experienced a very hard daily
existence, living in hostels and eating the unpalatable mass-produced hostel food.
To poor village families, the chance for one of their children to get a scholarship to
one of these schools was a great blessing as the child’s food and lodging were paid
for: they did not have to depend on the generosity of a wealthier relative in the
urban area to support their child at a good urban school. Secondly, the sciencestream
education assured their child of getting a place in a science course in the
university, and perhaps even a government scholarship to study overseas.
Any hardship was bearable in the face of this social mobility through education.
Often the schools were located in rural towns, so there was little recreation for the