Box of Boxes Guide to the Klang Valley: Introduction

If you’re a foreigner, and you meet a Malaysian who says he lives in “Kuala Lumpur”, otherwise fondly known as KL, do not automatically assume that he has a nice cottage smack next door to the glittering Petronas Twin Towers. Hardly anyone from “KL” actually lives there, and if you do, fuck you, you’re an expat living off the strength of the Euro. Or, you might as well be one. Or, you’re from Kampung Baru. In that case, the rest of us will assume that you know where all the best Nasi Lemak/ Tom Yam stalls and weed dealers are. .  

 More often than not, “Kuala Lumpur” is used by many to refer to one of the many cities, towns and suburbs that make up the Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Area/  Greater Kuala Lumpur,  usually referred to as the Klang Valley, named after the large drain that flows through it.

On foreign soil, Klang Valley natives will present a united front as KL-ites because you might already have a hard time wrapping your head around where Malaysia is and we don’t want you to strain a muscle in your hat. Yes, that’s right. Your hat. Nice hat by the way. For your information, West or Peninsular Malaysia, where the Klang Valley is located, is a penis shaped thing below Thailand, pissing out a kidney stone known as Singapore. East Malaysia is irrelevant when we’re not stealing oil, gas and native land to make Peninsular Malaysia richer or come national election time, when Barisan Nasional (BN) needs to dig for votes to keep themselves in power since we’re all sort of fed up with them over here.

If you’re a local, you probably know all this already and you just should admit that back on home turf, Klang Valley folks are deeply divided by a sense of tribalism and you look upon other cities/towns/suburbs with a sense of superiority, or complete ignorance. Particularly, if you’re like me and you spent the first 20 years of my life in old PJ (that’s Bukit Gasing, not SS2, and definitely not the shitty PJS which isn’t even PJ mind you, but bloody Sunway). You see, even PJ kids are divided amongst eachother - it’s not just about where you live. Sometimes, it’s also about which school you went to when you were 14, even if you’re now 44. Graduates of Assunta, Sri Aman, Bukit Bintang or La Salle might still hate eachother but at least, we recognise one another as equals. If you went to say, Taman Petaling/ Taman Sea/ Taman Dato’ Harun - we might like you, but only because it’s so fun to root for the underdogs, isn’t it? If you went to a private/ international school like Cempaka or Kolej Tunku Jaafar, then you’re rich brat and even a 100k per year secondary education couldn’t save you from ending up dumber than a rock.   We sniff at you for your lack of pretend-street cred, and you in turn, will sniff at us for our toilet-cleaning, Mission-turned-Government school, boringly bourgeois, middling middle class ways.  Oh, and if your parents sent you off to some MARA Boarding school in another state; we wonder what you did to badly piss them off that they would destroy your life so. This is of course, only if you live in PJ. MARA Boarding Schools are completely acceptable if you live in places that some PJ kids can’t even name. And there are a lot of places that we can’t even name. Even if it’s just other places in the Klang Valley.  We’re out of touch, like that, and if we appear to not be, we probably fancy ourselves as some “creative freelance type”, who gets featured in KLUE a lot because all our friends work for the mag. And that ultimately means that we’re actually twice as out of touch but hey, look at this awesome DSLR around my neck, check out my “vintage” plaid shirt and wait, wait, wait, check out this dog-eared copy of this book with something that Nietzsche wrote on Andreas-Salome and uh, uh, we also write poetry on our blog and that’s where you can also find many artful pictures of us which makes us sort of look like Rodney Alcala’s murder victims.

Oh. Don’t mind me, I’m just bitter that I ended up moving to Shah Alam, with a shitty 9 to 5, no, 8 to 8 GOVERNMENT-LINKED COMPANY office job that also happens to be in Shah Alam. And the last time I wore some skinny pants to work, someone asked me why I decided to wear my swimming costume to the office. These are not swimming tights or part of a burqini you sartorially challenged wart! These are called “Disco Pants” by the pervert-owned poser-serving American Apparel

I want to have no EPF too. I want to write poetry too but as you can see, I have trouble sticking to a word limit. I also don’t have a Twitter account for this reason. I mean 140 word limit? The fuck! Do you tell Michelangelo that he can only paint using the colour purple? What’s that? I’m not an artist of his stature?!!

Stop digressing and end this introduction already.

Well, yes, Shah Alam. Living and working in Shah Alam for almost two years now, makes me hate myself and want to die. And that pretty much makes me the best person to write a guide on Shah Alam, doesn’t it? I mean, don’t you just hate those cloyingly optimistic, upbeat travel guides? They make it sound as if people in other places shit rainbows out of their ass. And they don’t. The only thing people shit out of their ass is shit. Hence, we refer to the action as shitting. Because it’s shit. Sometimes, I shit out of my mouth too or through my hands onto my keyboard and onto my blog. But not everyone is affected with that particular condition. Shitting rainbows however; well, no one can do that. Not even Care Bears. And screw Lonely Planet - dude, you people don’t even sound lonely! You know what’s lonely? Being stuck in gaddam Shah Alam.

So ladies & gentlemen, for the next part of my guide to the Klang Valley (yes, that would be Chapter One), I invite you to journey with me through time and space and non-matter to the “city” known as SHAH ALAM……………….

Except I haven’t written Chapter One yet so you’re just gonna have to wait.

Who is going to have to wait? No one reads your blog.