Adam's Ambles: On frog porridge and sense of place

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

In Columbo airport, Sri Lanka, the old black man approached me in the smoker’s lounge. He spoke with the slow, wet accent of repressed pidgin English.

“White man – you have one cigarette for me?”

He was from Accra. We smoked and talked of Cameroon and his part of the world, and when he left I went to another part, and so this chance meeting off the tip of India – a place where I was three months earlier – felt like a predestined one: goodbye from one assignment to the next, in the shadow of another.

Saya di sini – I am here, in Malaysia. Southeast Asia, again. I don’t think there is one part of the world I’m meant for, but I feel like I know this place. I studied the region for years in university; my family ties on both sides run deep; I’ve worked here as a journalist, writer and editor. The history, culture and food don’t feel like something to be learned so much as remembered, such is their degree of familiarity with my memories and mind.

Tonight I’m sleeping in Kuala Lumpur, which feels like Bangkok, where I once lived and worked, with more Islam and less seediness. It is a modern, busy city, and while the ruins of bad development are scattered in little piles of rubble and rebar by the gleaming glass towers, the towers still shine, as do small street stalls and huge electronics emporiums and 24-hour bazaars.

I came here from London and a visit to my alma mater, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Seeing as I’m transitioning from Cameroon to Malaysia, my choice of Master’s institution feels apt. And it’s hard not to compare Asia to Africa at every step and on every street. The express train from the airport is a good start: sleek, fast and air-conditioned, in better shape than the Gatwick Express in London. I think if there is any reason why Africa’s Big Men, the unblinking autocrats who have raped that continent, have a particularly hot room in hell reserved, it is this train and the truth it represents: dictatorship does not have to exclude development. For decades Malaysia and neighboring Singapore were ruled by the same leaders who often ignored press freedoms, internal dissent and occasionally, due process and human rights. But these same leaders, to their credit, have used their unassailable position to develop their countries – not always in the best ways, but I feel confident saying the average Malaysian is better off than 95 percent of Cameroonians. And that is because Africa’s leaders for life (with some exceptions) don’t even bother with improving their playgrounds; they simply pillage and squeeze them while the roads and public health and education and opportunity are wasted. I should add as a final caveat: while Malaysia and Singapore are hardly perfect democracies, they do have at least viable (if often harrased) opposition camps in their parliaments and have both experienced peaceful transfers of power (albeit sometimes from one patron to his client) in the past.

On the train, an older English backpacker starts a mindless conversation with the Malay woman sitting across from him. He rabbits on about how disappointed he is with certain spots in Southeast Asia, how they’re “losing their culture”, or to be more accurate, not displaying the quaintness he ascribes to them, not fitting his idea of an Old Asia.

In my mind, the screaming monologue is: Yes, how dare these people modernize and gain access to good healthcare, education, consumer comforts and the general level of development that allows Westerners like yourself to holiday at your leisure in their country and then criticize said country in your own native tongue, which, by the way, the people here understand because of the impact of the above described progress and the legacy of colonialism, old school and neo, which nations like ours have left here, and which, by the way, is also (the colonialism) partly the foundation of the ethnic tensions that still threaten this nation with instability.

Those tensions are between Malaysia’s three ‘main’ recognized ethnic groups: the Malays, Chinese and Indians. These are simple categories that have become part of modern Malaysian discourse, but in truth the above groups blend and mix and produce sub-categories and alliances that create far more complex truths than these three simple labels suggest. But complexity equals hard to follow equals usually ignored.

That’s a shame, but to be fair there’s enough interesting about the three main ethnic groups to avoid complex explanations of complex affairs – just for a little. I’m particularly interested in the interaction of Indians and Chinese and this, their common ground, exemplified today by a Tamil man behind a noodle stall ordering around his employees in Hokkien, (sidenote: Another huge Asia-Africa difference? The food here is great, as opposed to starch plus overcooked meat) or the Chinese baby who ran, screaming and laughing, into an Indian uncle’s arms. Think of the name: Southeast Asia. South of what and east of what?

China and India. These two juggernauts (juggernaut, by the way – root word: Jagganath, from India) of the human experience, the oldest extant cultures of Earth, meet here. Right here, where Indian merchants and Chinese tin prospectors once convened and traded and lived, as the Malays clustered and added their own unique mix of, well, mix – for they are, surely, a mixed culture – into the preexisting blend. How this cultural drama plays out between the children of the nations that will define the next few decades is my side interest here (the main interest being finishing the ton of work and hillion jillion books I have left to write and squeezing in beach time besides).

Southeast Asia. I am back. How do I know? Dinner: frog's leg porridge, the white meat a fishy chicken swimming in a congee of rice gruel, shallots and chilies; ripe wafts, orange and strong, sweat or a womb in a forest, the unmistakable fecund scent of durian; static voices crackle in the street like broken short waves: Tamil, Bahasa Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, Singlish, carried by smoke from the sizzling oil and the air hot with these different words and smells, all resolving themsleves into an unmistakable whole. South of what and east of what? Saya di sini lagi.