Learning to live with foreigners

I GET it. With progress, we need foreign workers to take up menial jobs. All prosperous countries deal with this.

And that is how it is living in little Penang in recent years. We live with foreign workers, often times right next door.

Despite being the second smallest state, Penang has the third highest population density in the country after Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya.

The state regularly hits record-breaking annual foreign direct investments, and coupled with the spillover effects from that, it needs to house more and more foreign workers.

I feel angry with myself because I want to be civil, tolerant and understanding, but differences exist between the average Malaysian and foreign workers.

A few units in my apartment block, upstairs and downstairs of me, are now the quarters of foreign workers. I do not know their ethnicity.

Truth be told, I rate myself better off than other Penangites living with foreign workers.

My foreign neighbours don’t litter.

They don’t hang their laundry along railings in the corridors.

They don’t gather in common areas and drink rowdily in the afternoons on their days off.

Elsewhere in Penang, others deal with all of the above and more.

In the name of journalism, we visit many places where people want their pains highlighted in the public sphere.

In some cultures, betel nut-chewing is a thing.

Instead of swallowing the saliva built up, betel nut chewers spit out the vermilion juice, and I have been to low-cost flats where the floors and drains near gathering places are stained red with betel nut spit.

The splotches are permanent after they dry.

Some foreign workers, just like some thoughtless locals, have also thrown garbage right out the window, and in the air wells on the ground floors of some low-cost flats on mainland Penang, the floors are riddled daily with tens of burst bags of wet, stinking refuse.

The staircases and lifts of those flats reek of urine, while the walls of the foyers often have marker pen scribblings in foreign languages.

I called many Penang friends yesterday and every one of them living in affordable housing, low-medium, low-cost apartments and flats plus houses in old neighbourhoods like Ayer Itam and even Tanjung Bungah told me they have foreign workers living in their community.

It is becoming a way of life in this congested state.

The state government is trying very hard to find a compromise.

Calling it a “social disruption”, state housing and local government committee chairman Jagdeep Singh Deo has spent years working with developers to build workers’ hostels in commercial and industrial zones.

Built to standards that comply with the International Labour Organisation and a global industrial NGO called Responsible Business Alliance, these workers’ hostels have 24-hour security and amenities from convenience stores, barber shops and movie rooms to basketball courts.

But geographic limitations in Penang remain.

The Batu Maung foreign workers’ hostel in the south of the island built a few years ago is about 30km from beach resorts and shopping complexes on the north of the island, and these businesses need foreign workers too.

The hostel is too far away and land in the northern edge of the island is too highly priced for a workers’ hostel development.

As a result, many units in old apartment blocks in Batu Ferringhi, no longer appealing to locals, have become workers’ hostels.

An executive of an international hotel living in Batu Ferringhi keeps me informed.

A flashpoint will come one day when too many becomes too much.

Should a whole neighbourhood become so overridden with foreigners that they “colonise” it and replace the social and cultural fabric with theirs, they stand to become a force there.

This is why planning for foreign workers’ housing has to be a priority.

It must be adequately pleasant and comfortable for foreign workers to have good memories of their temporary stay in Malaysia.

They are here to earn their keep, broaden their horizons and bring home the financial and socio-cultural wealth acquired here. Nothing more than that.