In Cold Air

The malls of Kuala Lumpur |  2,335 words

Translated from Chinese by Zhui Ning Chang

On Saturday morning the weather was scorching hot. I opened Google Maps and looked at the shopping malls in a nearby radius, then decided to drive to one near my condo to eat lunch and watch a movie, soaking in the 16-degree air-conditioning that I didn’t need to pay an electricity bill for. Night was falling rapidly by the time the movie ended, so I wasn’t much aggravated by the blast of hot air that greeted me when I walked out of the mall.

Such is the life of a Malaysian city dweller on the weekend. 

In this skeletal steel jungle where it is summer all year round, we rarely go for outdoor activities. When temperatures rise, those public parks that look so lush and verdant become far too hot for people to linger, and the cooling rainforests are deep in the mountains, reachable only at the end of a long drive. In contrast, along the forty kilometer stretch of KL’s Damansara-Puchong Expressway (LDP) connecting Petaling Jaya to Puchong, you can find some twenty shopping malls.

Having lived and worked in Petaling Jaya these last five years, spending time in air-conditioned malls has become my chief leisure activity. Gradually, I’ve compiled a set of criteria for choosing malls to visit.

If I plan to unwind and spend the whole day lounging about, I’ll choose a giant mall. Tens of thousands of cars can park in this type of mall; they are often multiple stories high with a vast floor area and a fairly complicated pedestrian traffic flow. The giant mall closest to me is Sunway Pyramid, with an approximate floor surface area of seventy-five football fields. As its name suggests, it’s built in an Egyptian style: the main structure is a “Pyramid”, and you must cross a threshold guarded by a huge stone lion to enter. It was completed in 1997 but even today continues to be expanded.

Sunway Pyramid can be accessed via buses and the BRT, making it much easier to reach than many parks, libraries, or museums. The Sunway Resort Hotel is linked to the mall, and the Sunway Lagoon Theme Park is installed next door; facilities such as the Sunway Medical Centre and Sunway University are also close by. Together they form Sunway City, the flagship project of domestic property developer Sunway Group, and the most comprehensive leisure town in the whole of Malaysia. 

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve voluntarily visited Sunway Pyramid each year. Size does not always imply convenience and oftentimes results in the opposite. The process of parking the car, finding the desired stores and buying goods, then walking back to the carpark to pick up the car may appear simple, but in a mall of this size, hours will pass in a flash. When I was still new in town, I lost my voice recorder in Sunway Pyramid. It took me fifteen minutes to walk from the coffee shop where I had conducted the interview to the lost and found booth. After unsuccessfully trying to make myself understood to the foreign security guards, who weren’t fluent in English or Malay, I retraced my path back to the coffee shop. I wasted more than an hour just going back and forth, and my efforts were in vain. Before I knew it, it was already closing time. Misfortune never comes alone, so of course there was heavy congestion in the carpark when I was leaving the mall. I could not leave within the allotted half hour after paying for the parking ticket. The ticket bounced back from the carpark exit machine, and I could only turn my car around and weave past the long line of cars to pay again.

That night, the only thing I did right was to take a photo of the carpark lot number and write down the names of the shops along the way, so that I could slowly but surely make my way from the correct exit to the carpark to find my car. Otherwise, speaking from past experience, even if I gave the guards my number plate, they would have had no way to quickly pinpoint a single car in such a huge chaotic carpark, not when there are five different zones spanning three to six floors each.

When I finally left Sunway Pyramid that night, embarrassed and defeated, that huge lion was looking lazily down on us departing visitors, with that customary small smile playing at the corner of its mouth.

A working person’s time off is precious, and usually I only want to spend half a day at most in a shopping mall. In that case, my choice is small to medium-sized malls. About five to eight stories, tall but not wide, only able to fit between one to three thousand cars, and with a simple pedestrian traffic flow. Within several visits I will already be familiar with where the restaurants, movie theatre, clothing stores, bookstore, and even washrooms are. I think, perhaps, that this is the real convenience of shopping malls: without expending effort, we can see to our basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment, all in one place.

After several years, visiting shopping malls has become a near-daily ritual of my city life. On sweltering weekends, I head to a mall for aircon. During thunderstorms, if I want to buy ingredients or eat out, going to a mall to shop and dine means I won’t get caught in the rain. When I mess up at work or encounter any setbacks, I will walk into a mall and take some time to relax. After gritting my teeth to finish a work project that has dragged on for several months, I go to a mall to relieve stress. 

When I quarrel with my family or partner and neither side is backing down, I leave my apartment and drive to the carpark of a shopping mall, where I’ll cry in my car for a short while, and then kill the engine, head upstairs, and do some window shopping. Aimlessly walking into Watsons to look at the new cosmetics on the shelf, arriving at the bookstore and flipping through books and browsing through stationery, or going to the clothing store to try on clothes and take selfies—after making a circuit of the mall, the agitation that I cannot show in front of those half-baked people at home is usually soothed. If it happens to be payday, while I am here I will also get a few things I like, buying myself a brief moment of happiness.

At times like this, I think of Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which I had to study at university. In the book, Berger warns that advertising will lure people step by step towards a pit of consumerism. I also read an article somewhere that there is no such thing as freedom in consumer choices under capitalism—it is all a pack of lies.

I used to work hard to avoid such traps, even as my rational and emotional sides debated these issues over and over. Now, every time at checkout, I swiftly console myself: life is so hard, we all need our guilty pleasures.

*

I’ve always been a kampung kid whose heart longed for the big city. The year I graduated secondary school and chose my college, I only looked at Singapore and Taipei, and didn’t even think to consider anything in the suburbs. When I left Taipei five years ago and returned to Malaysia, I was determined to flee my hometown in the country’s south and head to the capital KL.

My fascination and yearning for cities actually came from the KL shopping malls that I so wanted to visit in my childhood.

I grew up at the turn of the millennium, when Malaysia’s mall economy was booming. Besides KL Tower and the Petronas Twin Towers, whenever I imagined KL as a child, I would think of Berjaya Times Square and Sungei Wang Plaza, which KL locals colloquially called Times Square and “Kum Hor”, from Cantonese. 

At the end of Primary Six my school arranged a graduation trip to KL, and Times Square was one of our stops. When we arrived, twelve-year-old me grabbed onto the escalator with my classmates, climbing the floors one by one until we reached the tenth and highest floor. The mall had a child-friendly theme park, so we little brats eagerly expended all our energy on the rollercoaster while the teachers in charge seized the opportunity to go shopping. In the years since, I’ve long forgotten my classmates’ names and faces, but that huge Christmas tree in the Times Square foyer amidst a backdrop of Christmas carols still shines bright in my memory.

As an idol-chasing teen in secondary school, Kum Hor was a landmark of local pop culture. In that era, whenever we heard some pop song, watched an idol drama, or became a fan of some artist, we would keep a close eye on newspapers and magazines, scanning them for reports of that celebrity. Most celebrity activities at that time, whether a New Year’s Eve countdown concert, autograph session, meet and greet, or other event, would list “Sungei Wang Plaza, KL” as the location, and were out of my reach. In that small restricted world where Google Search was not yet widespread, I would imagine in my mind’s eye all these places I could not visit, secretly speculating about their grandeur, then make a wish in my diary: “When I grow up, I hope to go to Sungei Wang with my friends”. 

I only heard afterwards that in the 1980s people used to say: “If you’ve never been to Kum Hor then you’ve never been to KL”. And this line has had countless iterations. Before Kum Hor made its appearance, this saying used to refer to Ampang Park. Don’t get me wrong: “Ampang Park” is not an actual park, but rather Ampang Park Shopping Centre. It was built in the 1970s and was the first shopping centre in KL, maybe even in the whole of Malaysia. I only knew of it in 2018, when the news covered its demolition and I saw people reminiscing about it on social media. Some had bought their first camera there, others enjoyed the yong tau foo and wantan mee; people used to spend school holidays there with their families or had first dates in that mall.

Local folk singer Azmyl Yunor released a mini-album entitled “Ampang Park”, commemorating his childhood memories and the fading historical landscape of this city. The album’s second track is called “Forget Me”. Accompanied by a somewhat mournful guitar, his low deep voice repeatedly croons, “Forget me / Leave me in my slumber / Leave me as you found me”. Watching the music video I realised it was a song about growing up.

In the past half-century, KL peoples’ collective memory has been closely intertwined with the transformation of shopping malls. From the department stores selling Western products in the 1960s to the addition of dining and entertainment outlets in Kum Hor and Ampang Park in the 1970s, to the giant modern malls built around the turn of the millennium that prioritised interactive experiences, and more. First we went to malls to buy goods, then we started to eat fast food, ice skate, watch movies, ride bumper cars and merry-go-rounds. Today, we’ve progressed to going to malls for fitness class, massages, music lessons, doctor’s appointments, and even to experience artificial snowfall and enjoy festive celebrations.

When I first arrived in KL, I was swamped in the busy life of a journalist, and could never find time to head to the city centre to call upon Times Square and Kum Hor that I’d held so close to my heart. Until one day, I had the day off and was driving idly around KL, then noticed Times Square was close by. 

I turned towards the mall at once, brimming with anticipation, but I grew more and more uneasy as I drove closer. The mottled, brick-red structure in front of my eyes did not have even half the dazzling magnificence of the building in my memory. Undeterred, I entered the decrepit carpark and pushed open the main doors of the mall—what greeted me were dim lights, dysfunctional aircon, and the shattered dreams of my childhood.

After that, for a long time I lost the desire to go see Kum Hor. Instead, from time to time I searched online for its past and present state, seeking to complete an imaginary jigsaw puzzle for my childhood self. It turns out that, in the era when I was chasing idols, Kum Hor was not only an important venue for many film and television activities, but also the gathering place of stylo-milo youths all dressed in the latest trends, and always carried a whiff of Famous Amos biscuits. However, as the years passed it became rarer and rarer for popular artists to go there to do promotional activities. Kum Hor is now over forty years old, and apparently has been renovated several times in recent years. Much later, I went there on a whim, thinking that I could fit that last missing piece in the jigsaw, but the brand-new block I saw was an entirely different thing, utterly incompatible to the original.

Cities are constantly like this, using their glitter and shine to draw in those from outside, capturing our imagination, constructing beautiful dreams. We who follow the lights will eventually wake, and afterwards, some will go and some will stay.

From the first time I got lost in a giant shopping mall, to when I saw that the Times Square and Kum Hor of yesteryears were lost forever, to my rueful acceptance that every now and then I would give in to consumerism in exchange for a moment of happiness… would you say I am awake now, or still dreaming? 

I continue to visit malls and sit in their resting areas and indulge myself watching people come and go: fashionably-dressed youths, foreign security guards, white-collar workers talking business on computers in Starbucks, mothers pulling their children along to buy foodstuffs… If you stumble on me you might hear me say: “If you’ve never been a shopping mall then you’ve never been to KL”.

© Fion Yap

English translation © Zhui Ning Chang

Commissioning editor: Wong Kai Hui