In 1981-82, I was a college exchange student in Malaysia where I attended the University Sains Malaysia (USM) on Penang island for an academic year. My home college was the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where I majored in Anthropology. At USM, my academic goal was to complete my senior research project and so I asked for help in defining an area where I could commute to easily and also spend time absorbing the customs of a rural Malay village. The community I was eventually matched with was located on mainland west Malaysia. So every week for about five months, I rode my Yamaha 100 cc motorcycle out to visit the villages of Kampong Sungai Bujor and Kampong Sedaka, in the district of Yan, in Kedah state, Malaysia. (“Kampong” in the Malay language means Village)

.Kedah is known as the “rice bowl” of Malaysia and it accounts for nearly half of all the rice produced in Malaysia. Nearly 75% of the people in Kedah are Malays, who are Muslim by law and custom, and who primarily speak the Malay language. My language skills back then were sufficient enough to carry on a simple conversation. Being that my research project focused on rice production, I followed my contacts around the village and talked to people about how they produced rice. My time in the village coincided with the early days of the introduction of mechanized Rice Harvesters as well as the broader use of chemical fertilizers. The new technology made rice production more efficient but it also significantly reduced the need for manual labor. While the fertilizer increased yields, residents noted a decrease in padi fish they were accustomed to include in their diet.

On January 18 -19 this year, I returned to visit the villages of Kampong Sedaka and Sungai Bujor to see how things may have changed and to see the places I stayed at. I was brought there on one of the days by Mr. Masri Abdullah, my former dormitory mate at USM and a member of the Malay family in Sedaka whom I had lived with in 1981-82. Mr. Masri grew up Sedaka, and had suggested his village as a place where I could stay when I was searching for a fieldwork area. Mr. Zakaria was an older brother of Mr. Masri and he was my primary contact for learning about rice production along with their father, Mr. Abdullah. During my trips to Kedah, I slept at the home of Zakaria’s parents-in-law whose grown children had moved out of the family home. I addressed Zakaria’s elderly parents-in-law as Pak and Mak Haji. In Malaysia, the honorific Haji (for men) and Hajjah (for women) are applied to people who have performed the mandatory Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. On this return visit, I learned that Mr. Zakaria Abdullah had passed away in 2021 and his children are pursuing careers in other towns in Malaysia. Also, the villages have more houses, the roads have been widened and rice harvesters are more evident on the rice fields. Two of Mr. Abdullah’s children still live on the land of their family home in Sedaka. While Pak and Mak Haji’s son, also named Zakaria, now resides in the family home in Kampong Sungai Bugor. The locals of Kampong Sedaka and Kampong Sungai Bujor remain as welcoming and warm as forty years ago.

The rest of this blog post shows photos from 1981 / 82 and some photos from my visit in January 2023.