Bandannas and Times Square

My head has been naked for the past 3 months. When I was gathering my laundry from the maze of clotheslines on the roof of Dali No. 5 Inn, I noticed that my bandanna was curiously absent. This do-rag was my favorite piece of headwear in the world (I’ve conveniently circled it in the picture above just in case you have trouble distinguishing it from Soup’s Vietcong assault ware). I scoured the entire place, peeking under the unmentionables – sorry to mention them – of dozens of globetrotters, but alas, it was no where to be found. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that it was stolen. That just seemed impossible. I know it was camouflage and badass, but who would take a cheap piece of fabric? Now that I have been halfway across the continent, I am beginning to understand the motives of our fabric thief: you literally cannot find a bandanna to save your life in Southeast Asia.

Anything else you want – anything – is for the taking: screen-printed t-shirts of beer companies, cartography sets, fake diplomas and driver’s licenses, decorative umbrellas, flying squirrels, you name it. I’ve searched high and low from China to Laos to Cambodia and Thailand. Nothing.

When I arrived to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, I found myself at a guesthouse on a massive pedestrian shopping street, just around the corner from ‘Times Square,’ the biggest shopping mall in all of Southeast Asia. If I couldn’t find a replacement here, I’d never find one.

The first thing to dawn on me upon entering a place like Times Square is that Americans – who once reigned supreme over all that is material – have been disposed from their throne as the world’s most avid consumers. That crown now belongs to the Asians. When you think about the psychology behind rabid consumerism, it all kind of makes sense; in the past 20 years, Asian countries have been experiencing massive economic booms. In the wake of success, we’re seeing an emerging middle class in China, Thailand, Malaysia, and – most notably – in Singapore and Hong Kong. People who could barely afford to eat growing up are now finding themselves with pocketfuls of extra cash. So they flaunt it. Now that they can spend, they probably feel that they have to.

But there are more pressing issues than fiscal anthropology; my head was still nude. You’d think that amongst 10 floors of shopping, a square foot of fabric would be an incredibly easy thing to come across. I found a lot of things in Times Square. I found the Hajj Game and the Amazing Mosque Race. I found a store called Cue that sold only billiards paraphernalia. I found a travel agency that only dealt with flights to countries ending in –stan. I found two branches of Sock World. I found an entire half floor of furniture that looked like a space-aged ghost town. I found that there was a 20 story hotel attached to each end of the shopping mall. I found that the staff of each shop knew as much as the information desk, which was nothing. I found myself being led to the 6^th floor, then down to the 2^nd, then back up to the 8^th, and then all the way to the 1^st.

Each time I asked a clerk where I could find a bandanna, they would look at me like I asked who the Comptroller of Swaziland was. Finally, after inquiring from no less than 30 people about where in the fair city of Kuala Lampur I might procure a do-rag, a magical thing happened: I found one. There was a small selection amongst a host of wigs (I guess the two are always used in conjunction in SE Asia) at a store called Mono. The irony of getting sick the day after visiting a store named after an infectious disease has not been lost on this traveler.