Customs Corruption in Malaysia
Nov 12, 2007 in Working
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(If a blog post title were written to get good search engine results, the above would be a fine example)
I was randomly shopping (or rather, window shopping online style) online when I ran into something familiar, And1 Mixtapes on DVD on Overstock. I wasn’t looking at the exact same DVD that the following story is involved around but that doesn’t matter.
Last year (September 2006) I arrived to Kuala Lumpur after 2 weeks in Hanoi, the first two weeks of my personal “leaving of America” experiment. I had agreed to work on a contract with Vietnamese software giant FPT for 6 months, and I arrived at the airport not really sure what lay ahead of me. I barely knew anything about KL- I knew I’d get to work at the famed Petronas Twin Towers, but that was about it in terms of my knowledge of the country and its people.
I remember coming in on the flight and wondering mid-way, “Hmmm, don’t I need a visa to go into countries?” I didn’t have one, and no one at FPT had mentioned anything about that, a theme that would present itself over and over throughout my 4 month stay. Thankfully, when I came in sign with US Citizens, no visa needed, 3 month stay automatically granted for cool cats/upper tier people like myself (sarcasm).
Whew.
When I got into customs, a young guy wanted to look through my luggage. I think he saw my cd case in the X-Ray machine, so he wanted to take a look. Understandable. He saw I had some copied DVD’s (not all pirated stuff) and asked about them- I told him what they were. He seemed to not believe me or didn’t want to believe me. He then saw my And1 DVD’s and he talked about how he liked basketball as well, and we had some small talk about basketball in Malaysia, with me trying to be nice and cordial (BS) in order to get out of there. Eventually, the customs guy said, “Hey, it’s so hard to get And1 stuff like this here, would it be ok if I have one of yours?”
Of course, I said no, and told him to f**** off. Then, my luggage was seized and I went to jail for a few days.
No, I obviously did not say that, and I knew I was in the unenviable position of giving something up I wanted in order for this guy to pass me through.
Without hesitation, I said something like, “Sure, let me see”, and looked through my stuff (I have every single And1 production on DVD, purchased). I found the disc I liked least and gave it to him, and he let me go on my way after a thank you.
The DVD, if I were to buy it again, would definitely cost less than $10 shipped, but as you might guess with these types of things, it was the transaction rather than the cost that still bothers me to this day.
Later that night, after almost 2 hrs in a taxi, I arrived at the FPT company house.
That’s also when I met Thuy.
(I hope to write more Malaysia stories in the future, there’s for sure one blog post I’ve been waiting to write for over a year.)
Tags: and1, customs, fpt, kuala lumpur, malaysia, petronas