a collection of batik sarongs from Malaysia
I seem to misplace a lot of factories
I can explain. I don't visit each one every year. I find most of them in such roundabout way that I'm lucky to find my way out again, never mind finding the way back a year or two later. Kampungs are not laid out in orderly grids with street signs on every corner. There are no street maps. Narrow lanes twist between houses built on stilts. Progress arrives and levels a block of shops, a stream is diverted to a concrete-lined canal, the main road is widened, new bungalows are built. Suddenly the area is unrecognisable.
In 1999, I found a batiker in Pasir Panjang with only the instructions to "turn left at the store." In 2005, I happened on that road again, now a major thorofare, lined with strip malls, shops, and businesses. I couldn't even begin to guess where the turn-off was. But that batiker is still there, I see his sarongs in the market.
I can't blame it all on redevelopment. I scoured an area near Chabang Tiga for three years looking for a batiker I'd met in 1996. I had plenty of occasions to go there and at that time, it still looked pretty much the same. It wasn't that big an area. And yet I couldn't find it until one day, getting off my bike to take a shortcut through a small wooded area, I came across it. Could it find it today? No. Although it would be interesting to know if they still use the traditional dampened banana plant leaves underneath the cloth being stamped with wax. Even ten years ago, most batikers were using tables surfaced with a layer of dampened foam rubber tightly covered with a layer of cling-film.
These days I rely on rough maps I've sketched in my notebook and notes like "left of the school" or "before the arch" but there is still a good deal of backtracking. And then, when I finally get the route fixed in my mind, the batiker closes down. Sarabanu was take-a-left-after-the-bridge-onto-the-footpath (now a road) and follow the stream (now a canal), go through the neighbors' yard and there it was. They were always cranking-- I even came across some Sarabanu sarongs in a Cambodian market in '06-- so I was surprised to learn in 2007 that it had shut down.
I'd like to find Safinor again. I'd been there once, in 1999. I went back in 2004 on a borrowed motorbike but no luck. You've probably been wondering why I don't just ask where it is? Mostly it's the language barrier. My Bahasa is not equal to the colloquial dialect spoken in Terengganu. There's a cultural barrier too but whatever the reason, I have received negative responses to queries for "the place nearby where people make batik" only to discover the factory 50 meters away.
In the '90s it was possible to find batikers almost randomly just by sniffing for wax in the air but now so many factories have closed that I try to get the location from the vendor in the market or shop. If I'm lucky, they know the name of the kampung where it's made. Then it's only a matter of bicycling out there... and circling around and around... it gives me the chance to continue my mental debate: