Word: malays
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Queen Elizabeth's birthday is celebrated with a full-dress military parade and a flyby of the Brunei air force, which consists of twelve helicopters. The English commander of the 1,000-man Royal Brunei Malay Regiment is in effect the sultanate's Defense Minister. The British High Commissioner handles foreign affairs and is chauffeured about the capital of Bandar Seri Begawan in a huge silver Daimler, given to him by the sultan. One of the few points of interest in the sleepy capital is a museum honoring Winston Churchill. Another landmark is the Royal Brunei Yacht Club...
...Riebeeck imported slaves from Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Ceylon and the Malay Archipelago; during the first few years of the settlement, he encouraged his men to marry slave women who had been converted to Christianity. There was also casual mating between visiting European sailors and local nomadic Hottentot women, and between slaves, half-breeds and the Hottentots. In 1682 the Cape colony rulers decreed that whites could not marry freed slaves of "full color" but could continue to marry half-breeds. Nonetheless, "irregular unions" continued...
Those flaws have been fatally enlarged by recent history. The book's nameless narrator has been sent to the Malay village of Ayer Hitam to close down a U.S. consulate that has outlived the prosperity of the American-owned rubber plantations that once flourished there. The Viet Nam War is over. In literary time, it is post-Heart of Darkness and The Ugly American. The real action now takes place in far-flung Hiltons, where multinational businessmen confer in the Esperanto of global trade...
...boor is revealed as a pseudo reactionary because "he had no politics, only opinions, pet hates, grudges, and a paradoxical loathing for bureaucracy and trust in authority." A Japanese businessman who is cold-shouldered on the tennis courts exacts revenge by elevating one of the club's Malay ball boys to guest status. "The war did not destroy the English," writes Theroux. "It fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different...
...ominous spirit of the mysterious East is not entirely dead. It surfaces in the pain and hallucinations of breakbone fever, in a Malay medicine man who is accused of turning into a weretiger to commit murder, and in a chilling description of the noxious Midnight Horror tree: "The flowers are pollinated by bats which are attracted by the smell and, holding to the fleshy corolla with the claws on their wings, thrust their noses into its throat; scratches, as of bats, can be seen on the fallen leaves the next morning...