Foreign Service Life in Asia: Visiting Kuala Lumpur

Part 2: Mysterious Malaysia, mixing Islam and gambling casinos

Modern Kuala Lumpur, better known as KL, is a far cry from the “muddy estuary” its name implies. The Malaysian capital, with nearly 2 million residents in a sprawling metropolitan area approaching 10 million, is a fascinating, vibrant city with twin skyscrapers that played a key role in at least one widely-seen Western movie, Entrapment (1999, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery).

The 88-story (452 meters) Petronas Towers may no longer be the tallest towers in the world—they lost that title in 2004 to the taller Taipei Tower—but they do symbolize the slick and cosmopolitan metropolitan skyline of one of the the world’s fastest-growing cities. And they do still house the world’s highest two-story pedestrian bridge—joining the twin towers, nearly 600 feet above the city. Designed by Argentine-American architect Cesar Pelli, the circular towers were completed in 1996, and named for the Malaysian national oil company, Petronas (National Petroleum Limited) established in 1974.

The twin Petronas Towers dominate Kuala Lumpur’s modern skyline. Photo J. Apicella/Cesar Pelli & Associates

After developing its own oil and natural gas fields, in 1989, Petronas began its global expansion into one of the world’s largest consolidated energy companies, beginning with joint ventures in Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, and Vietnam. Now among the world’s largest producers of natural gas, Petronas continues to provide a significant share of Malaysian federal government revenue—estimated at 15-20 percent of all revenue in a 2020 report.

But the growth of Kuala Lumpur is not limited to Petronas. It is an increasingly sophisticated city, reflecting both its Muslim plurality and its Chinese and Indian subpopulations. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Muslim Malays may be the largest ethnic group, but “the non-Muslim Chinese dominate the city and its economy. The mostly Hindu Indian minority, connected historically with nearby rubber estates, also is substantial.” The city traces its history to the 19th-century period of British occupation, and a settlement astride the Kelak and Gombak Rivers.

Modern Kuala Lumpur, the prosperous Malaysian capital, glitters at dawn. Public domain photo

Modern tourism accounts for about a third of Malaysia’s annual income, providing some $19 billion in 2020, and most visitors find the country’s beaches an especially friendly environment—and the northern hills for gamblers. The country’s only gambling casino, open since 1974 at Genting Highlands, about an hour north of KL, is technically off-limits to nearly 20 million Malaysian Muslims—explicitly forbidden by sharia law—and those under 21, but welcomes adult foreigners and non-Muslim residents alike to its alluring setting.

The Genting Highlands casino north of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Public domain photo

Condoning gambling is just one curious side effect of the country’s parallel legal system, which mandates Islam as “the religion of the Federation,” according to a U.S. State Department report, but welcomes all religions, and gives “federal and state governments … the power to mandate doctrine for Muslims and promote Sunni Islam above all other religious groups. “ The states administer sharia law.

Consumption of alcohol is also permitted by non-Muslims, and it can be sold legally by merchants—although it is sometimes hard to find on shelves, and often confined to Chinese groceries, and there are strict punishments for drinking and driving.

Another holdover from earlier British days—capital punishment for a total of 33 offenses—was recently all but eliminated by the Malaysian parliament, after a self-imposed moratorium on executions (its last was in 2017). Unlike nearby Singapore, which still mandates hanging as the penalty for worst offenses, and carried out its most recent execution of a drug trafficker a few months ago, Malaysia has shown little appetite for executions, even for those offenses still on the books, including drug trafficking. But foreigners are ill advised to take that risk—just as they are darkly warned not to proselytize among the Muslim population, another no-no.

Malaysia’s blend of secular Islam with an international flavor has made it increasingly popular with international corporations, with more than 5,000 foreign companies now carrying out operations in the country—including Coca-Cola, the American soft-drink firm that has had a Malaysian presence since 1936—and manufacturing plants of U.S. companies such as Intel Corporation, Dell Technologies Inc., and On Semiconductor Corporation. The expatriate population in Malaysia—including U.S. retirees—amounted to about 250,000, nearly 1 percent of the country’s population of 33 million in 2023, according to https://www.investasian.com .

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I traveled regularly to Kuala Lumpur in 1991 and early 1992, while I was posted by the U.S. Department of State to Singapore as a regional personnel officer. I generally found KL an inviting city, although the city’s roads were nearly choked by automobile traffic. The large U.S. Embassy in KL was regarded as an increasingly popular bidding post for Foreign Service Officers—almost on a par with Bangkok, Thailand—in part because English is so widely spoken and learning the Malay language is considered fairly easy. (I do not speak it—but according to one resource I consulted, Bahasa Melayu/Bahasa Malaysia has no conjugations, no plurals, no gender, and best of all, has no verb tenses. Thai is much more difficult to learn, I am told.)

A large part of my assignment in KL was to conduct a wage differential survey for Foreign Service National (FSN) employees, to ensure that our Embassy pay scale was roughly comparable to salaries paid by selected employers to their local staff. We wanted to remain competitive, not lead the pack. That meant visiting a group of local manufacturing and service firms in KL, conducting thorough interviews with their human resources departments, including as many American firms in the area as we could find (Coca-Cola was one of them); and then attempting to correlate the hierarchy of our local jobs with their structure of corporate job offerings—”matching” as many jobs as possible, no easy task, since many of the jobs held by our local employees simply have no counterparts in corporate structures, particularly the high-level reporting and analysis jobs of our most educated and experienced FSNs. But in theory, we were operating as if the job pools from which the Embassy and local industries recruited their employees were generally the same.

It was a time-consuming, challenging project, and my very first such attempt at mastering the arcane rules of State Department regulations I had never studied at length. The object was first to make sure that our pay structure, on average, did not exceed prevailing local wages—and certainly, second, that our average compensation did not trail the rest. The ideal was a rough ranking midway or slightly higher. Ordinarily, the Department should have sent out a special team to conduct the survey. I was chosen in part, I think, because my more-experienced predecessor had probably agreed to do an interim survey just before she curtailed her assignment—and it would now require another year or more to prepare and schedule a special 2- or 3-member team from Washington.

By the time, I arrived on the scene in January 1991, the Embassy staff was clearly growing restless—they felt chronically underpaid—and I was willing to give it a try. The Embassy admin section chief in KL, a very helpful, experienced FSO named Larry Baer, encouraged me to conduct the survey if the Department agreed. They did. So I did it, taking almost two weeks to compile the individual surveys, process the paperwork, and submit my findings. But the process proved quite interesting, giving me a true bird’s-eye view of how businesses recruited and compensated their local employees in a fast-growing metropolitan environment like KL.

My previous jobs at other embassies had never required much direct, regular contact with local businesses—and as I learned, it was a somewhat complicated process requiring finesse and a greater knowledge base than I had, even with a strong background in retail business.

In the end, my survey results clearly disappointed the local FSNs, who expected a significant raise in their salaries—based on what they perceived as local inflation rates and cost of living (factors not considered in the survey). According to the data I compiled, their current compensation schedule compared favorably with the prevailing wages at other, similar employers, and thus warranted no change. I was disappointed myself—I had hoped to deliver better news—and wondered if perhaps my inexperience with the survey process had contributed to the overall result.

But no one in Washington expressed any misgivings, and Larry assured me that he believed I had done my best in a difficult situation. I presume the Department eventually dispatched an expert team to conduct another periodic survey. But if so, I never heard what results were produced. Hope the results were better!

Sadly, I spent only a little time sightseeing in KL, and never got out of the city into the country’s other states. I spent a few days helping out during a visit by Secretary of State Jim Baker at the July 1991 ASEAN Summit, but never left the hotel. Go figure.

Kuala Lumpur’s luxurious Pan Pacific Hotel, site of the 1991 ASEAN Summit—all I saw. Public domain photo

My wife, Margaret, accompanied me on one of my other business trips to KL, and actually did get to do some of the touristy things—including a brief tour of the Genting Highlands casino, as I recall. Lucky lady. After we left Singapore in early 1992, I never returned.

Next time: More tales of North Carolina’s 19th-century African American legislators