Tall tales and long houses

We had fun with the people at the seminary in Malaysia, but we also had some rare educational opportunities when the president of the Methodist conference of the region decided that we must visit the native long houses and local Taoist temple.

Driving up from a distance the long-houses of the Iban people looked a little boring. I was expecting thatched roofs and bamboo walls etc, but these looked like fairly western barn-like constructions. With a closer look, I was impressed at the length of these buildings (duh) and the number of people who live in one. They have a very long porch/deck along the front, and then you enter through one of many doors into a long covered room that is like a cross between a covered porch and a 'front sitting-room,' that is shared by everyone and extends the length of the building (over 100 yrds). The long house is split in half down the middle, so that one half is this entry room, and the other half is divided into individual families sleeping quarters, each with their own door. Our guide estimated that the largest long-house we saw could hold 500 people, although most of the young people are gone during the week, working in the city/factories. The long-houses are also up on silts because of frequent flooding and swampy conditions.When tourists come to see the long-house complex we went to, they usually just get to see the big front house, but we were fortunate enough to have the right connections to see the adjacent, older long-house. Here we saw the last remnants of the Iban's head-hunting past (100 yr old skulls hanging from the ceiling), and were invited into the back of the head-man's living area, where we got to sample their special rice-wine (reminds me of sherry) and talk about their children who are studying medicine in the UK. Good times.

Next, at the Taoist temple in town (Sibu), we got a personal tour from one of the temple attendants who was very proud to show us how he had been written up in travel books for his expertise in the meaning of all the symbols of the temple. Basically he related everything back to the symbolism of the ying-yang and went through all sorts of gimmicks and tall-tales to try to impress us. I'm still surprised that we sat through his presentation b/c he just kept going on and on with crazy symbolic connections (if you take the little taoist booklet of paintings he was showing us, plus circles and symbols from the ying-yang, plus some fuzzy math about unlucky Chinese numbers, then you can explain the origin of anything and could have predicted WWII, Mao's regime, Korean conflict etc, all the way up to the Bejing Olympics in 2008). But it was very interesting to learn some reliable information about Taoist beliefs from him too.