Hasnor, Avoid Bintulu Like the Plague

Dear Hasnor,

I did not have time to reply to your email by the end of office hours today, so I forwarded it to my hotmail. I was mildly surprised by what you wrote towards the end of that email, that there is a possibility that you will be sent down here in the near future.

Well, Bintulu's not that bad of a place, honestly.

It sits next to the sea, it has an airport, it is always windy in the afternoon, and it rains heavily at night and in December. It has locals peddling home-cooked food, homegrown vegetables, and a variety of only-in-Borneo fruits right there in front of their front yard.

As a town, it has that feeling that you have just ‘chuted out of a Huey and fallen smack right in the middle of downtown Saigon during 'Nam. You look around you and you feel like you are some wide-eyed photojournalist from the Midwest, covering the war while trying as much as you can to stay alive long enough to come home and enjoy Christmas.

It really is not that horrible. Some people I know, after a while, have developed a certain liking for it. They treat the experience like it is an extended stay in a transit tourist town. On alternate weekends, they take the 3-hour drive up to Miri to go clubbing or to play bowling or to cross over to Brunei to see shopping malls with in-house speakers for azan.

It's just that Bintulu, in the context of working for this company, has become an HR policy that is misguided and wrong and so fraught with inconsistencies and pretense that whenever people are reminded of it, they clam up and look away and try their best not to show too much emotion about it. They would try to forget that it even exists as a policy.

You could argue that, well y’know, since it is a long-standing policy that everyone should at least work for a year or two in Bintulu during their entire tenure in the company, it might as well be that I start in Bintulu the first few years of my career so that I do not have to come here later when I am forty-seven or when I have a wife and small kids.

Well, the policy sure sounds solid and on-the-ground, but that "a year or two" clause --that holds everything together so well and makes it so inviting-- has for so many times been violated by management due to oh so many factors that in most cases "a year or two" have stretched to seven, eight years or to "how many kids you have now?"

It is accepted by many the fact that no one in Bintulu wants to stay here, not even the locals. When you have arrived here safely and you have gotten to know quite a few people close enough to confide your trust in, try asking, “Do you want to stay here?”

They would answer: If I am still here after X years, I would resign and work as a plumber, or I would get myself pregnant and force management's hands to transfer me out, or I would instead get active in Amway, or I would consider dabbling in S&M.

Not long ago, I went to a wedding reception in Bintulu (some guy from work) and I happened to witness in the crowd what might possibly be the image of my future should I decide to give in, get married, breed pink, and lay myself down to waste in this heap of dump called Sarawak –a young male in his early 30s, one hand holding up a small child to his chest, the other hand a basket of baby formulas and nursing bottles, looking depressed and brokeback as shit, unshaven for days, smeared in baby vomit, standing in wait by an idle car, looking at his wife chatting with her friends in the native tongue of Melanau.

Hasnor,
If James Brooke were not always on dope and Iban pussy, he would have said the exact same thing that I am going to say to you right now: avoid Bintulu like the plague.

With kind regards, your friend YBLalat
Dated and signed on July 4th, 2006.