I love maps. Hanging on a wall in the living room of the house that I grew up in was a large beautifully rendered world map. It was a topographical view of the world with clearly defined country borders and neatly printed labels of major cities.
One of my favourite pastimes was to stand on top of the sofa so that I could see areas of the map that were out of view given my height then. Good for me. But bad for our family sofa as my mother would lament the semi-permanent depressions on the cushions.
I could stare at the map in amazement for hours, trying to look for cities like Ulaanbaatar or imagining the vertices of the Bermuda Triangle.
The map placed Asia close to the middle. Europe and Africa were on the left while the Americas were on the right. Dividing Asia and the Americas was this almost straight bold red line that mysteriously zigged leftwards and zagged rightwards at different points of the map, avoiding certain land masses.
I can’t remember where we got the map. It must have been from one of the many items that my dad got from a manufacturer of ball bearings that he was selling. That manufacturer was probably Japanese, a deduction that I had made as Japan was placed strategically at the centre of the map.
On my map, Malaysia lay close to the centre and though we were small, relative to the other countries, there was a sense that our country was special. I remember learning in school that we were, then at least, one of the major global producers of two resources that the world needed: rubber and tin. Why place us there if not for the outsized importance of what we bring to the world’s table?
Though I knew that we all live on a spherical planet (thanks to the 70s kids TV program called The Big Blue Marble, proof that I watched a lot of TV growing up), it wasn’t until I got a globe that I started to realise how wrong flat maps are.
Compared to the globe, Greenland is not as big as I thought. And Africa is big, like really big. All this has to do with projections. Cartographic projections distort sizes of land masses because they needed to fit the area of a sphere neatly on a flat square piece of paper.
And my perception of Malaysia being the centre of the earth? That disappeared when I realised that there is no left, right nor middle on a sphere. I must have been psychologically scarred after being lied to by a Japanese ball bearing manufacturer who decided to put Osaka in the middle of the map arbitrarily.
The UN General Assembly recently voted to adopt the “Correct the Map” resolution. The resolution wants to replace the existing Mercator projection with a newer Equal Earth projection. According to the sponsor of the resolution, the Mercator projection downplays the size of countries. The foreign minister of Togo put succinctly that “[a] fair world begins with a fair map.”
Being a map nerd, I get their argument. The intention is for the next generation of map nerds growing up in Africa and South America or even Malaysia to see a world that is visually fairer, free from a historical distortion that the rest of the world has finally agreed to move on from.
However well-intentioned the move is, people hardly read printed maps these days. Each of us has the highest resolution map ever known to humanity right in our pockets. Opening Google Maps on our smartphone, we pinch-and-zoom our way through the old projection of our world. In the spirit of equality, perhaps we should ask Google to only ship Google Earth as the default mapping app instead? That way, all of us (bar flat-earthers) will have the most accurate portrayal of our world ever.
I do not remember what happened to the world map in the living room. Maybe it was removed during a wall repainting and was never put back up. Maybe after I got a globe, my parents removed it to make the living room more presentable for guests.
Or maybe, as I got older, my interests deviated to other wall hangings. Like the bikini-clad girl in a 1977 poster calendar hanging in my bedroom from 1976 to 1983.