Malaysia

When I hear about the country of Malaysia, one thing comes to mind.

Zoolander.

In the 2001 comedy starring Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell, Derrick Zoolander, an extremely famous male model was brainwashed to kill the prime minister of Malaysia in the name of child labor issues. I know this is completely showing everyone how illiterate I am, but honestly pop culture and media shapes the way you think of things in the world and I think it’s important to be able to connect fictional knowledge to actual facts.

The basics of Malaysia I have found are:
-13 States
-3 Federal territories
-Total landmass of 329,847 square kilometers
-Population 30,018,242 people

After doing some research I have found out a lot of different interesting things, including where it actually is. Malaysia shares borders with Thailand, Indonesia, and Brunei. They have a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multilingual society, which makes me think of the United States. The structure of the cultures are Chinese and Indian, while also grabbing from Persian, Arabic and British areas. They have a country motto which is, “Unity is Strength”. I think that is extremely powerful, seeing the circumstances they are currently in with the airline mishap. I am really interested in other countries government, and Malaysia has a Parliament type government with an upper house “Dewan Negara” and a lower house “Dewan Rakyat”. They were able to become independent from the United Kingdom on August 31^st, 1957 and became the federation of Malaysia.  Since becoming independent, Malaysia has one of the best economic records in Asia, which is extremely impressive. It has a GDP growing an average of 6.5% for about 50 years now. The resources it provides is not just natural resources, but it has expanded in sciences, tourism, commerce and medical tourism which is when people travel to other countries for the purpose of getting medical treatment. Usually it happens when impoverished countries don’t have the medical resources to take care of some procedures, so they send the patient to higher developed countries.

I thought it would be interesting to look into the educational system, seeing as I am in my last days of completing my education. They start off with preschool, beginning at ages 3 and can go up to 6. Children typically spend about 2 years in preschool, before they can reach primary school, which is like our elementary school. Primary school is broken up into three levels. Something that I found extremely interesting is that Malaysian students are promoted to the next year regardless of their academic performance. Another fact I found is that English is a compulsory subject in school.

Overall, beginning this research, I didn’t really know much about the country of Malaysia, but after looking into it, I feel as if I have found out a lot, yet just scratched the surface. Finding out more about various countries and becoming more culturally aware is something that I look forward to be doing in this upcoming quarter.