Some Southeast Asian Junk

A Visitor

We are very excited that our friend Lindsey arrived today, in remarkably good shape for having flown 20 hours plus a few more for layovers.  We had a fun day walking around Chinatown and eating roti canai for lunch (yum), followed by a lazy afternoon in the pool, and then dinner at a Chinese hawker stall.

Tomorrow I (jm) have to go to work to help out with a pre-depature orientation for some kids going off to college in America, and I think Lindsey will come along.  Hopefully it will be an entertaining adventure, and we'll get to meet some students going off to the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Minnesota (don't ask me why these schools- the national oil company Petronas is sponsoring them and that may have something to do with it).  So Lindsey will be able to tell half of them all about Colorado, as she is currently living in Boulder.  Unfortunately we don't have anyone from Minnesota, so the other half are out of luck.

On Saturday morning we're heading up to Langkawi, an island off the northwest coast of Malaysia close to the Thai border and we're really looking forward to that.  If it is half as beautiful as the pictures in the guidebooks make it look, it should be a nice trip.

Laziness and Telephones

We have a little bit of a problem at MACEE.  When trying to convince students that the US really is a great place to go to college, we have to overcome several obstacles.  The first is that America is "so far away" compared to the UK.  It's only about 3 hours longer to LA than London, and once you're past 12 hours on a plane, adding a little bit more doesn't seem like such a big deal.  Another problem is the, "I went to the UK for college, so I'm sending my son/daughter to the UK for college" excuse.  That plus the, "what if they get married, stay there and never come back" arguments seem kind of weak to me, but what can you say?  That they're just as likely to get married to a Brit and never return?  They've usually stopped listening by then.

But I think that the biggest problem we face is that it takes quite a bit of time and effort to apply to and get into college in the US.  It's a big process for Americans, and there are even more obstacles for international students.  The education system here leads nicely to the UK and Australian systems, and the kids are all familiar with those colleges and applications.  For both of those countries,  there are common applications (none of this each school has their own separate application) and there are more services that just match up kids and schools.  We of course can't do that though, so when they come in expecting to get everything done in  30 minutes flat we have a problem.  On numerous occasions, I've had parents on the phone or in person asking me for THE list of scholarships, and then getting really mad at me when I tell them there is no list and they have to look around on their own.  Another problem is the visa process- granted the forms are a little bit complicated,  but never in my life would I expect to call somebody up on the phone and go through every single question on three forms with them.  But I've spent much of the past month talking people through the forms question by question when I can hardly understand them because they are in a car and have bad reception.  It's like they can't do anything by themselves at all sometimes.  One of the advisors from our other office has been doing this for years and has given up.  She just tells them that they better figure it out on their own and deal with it, and that they better get used to doing things on their own because nobody is going to hold their hand in America. 

Don't get me wrong, this is not the case with everyone I meet. I do also get to talk with some delightful, highly motivated students of all levels.  And one thing that Malaysians are very nice about is thanking you for your time.  No matter whether they are arguing with me or listening and asking very good questions, they always thank me for my time. 

While spending all this time on the phone, I've slowly realized that phone etiquette is somewhat different here than at home.  I always answer "Good afternoon, MACEE" and then pause.  Almost every person will introduce themselves, and say where they are calling from (often where they work, their position, and the city that they are in).  Then they stop.  This is part where I get confused.  Sometimes they expect me to know them because they've called before.  Sometimes I think they are waiting for me to introduce myself, but they invariably start talking before I'm done with that.  Sometimes I just say hello, and they say hello back, and we go around in circles for a while until they decide to ask me a question.  It's highly entertaining.

Karipap

If you say the word karipap aloud, you might be able to figure out what it means.  That's right, curry puff.  This is a classic example of food with Indian and Portuguese influences that has become a staple part of the Malaysian cuisine.  In Indonesia, the guys on the street selling fried things (gorengan) usually have bananas, tempe, tofu, and sweet potato.  In Malaysia, the gorengan sellers have bananas, sweet potato, taro, and karipap, and sometimes other unidentifiable--but tasty--treats.

Basically, a karipap has dough that is not unlike a pie crust, wrapped around a curried potato mixture, and deep fried to deliciousness.  When cooking, be sure to work quickly.  After stuffing the curry puffs and folding them, fry them as soon as possible rather than waiting.  If you wait, they are liable to become unstuck when you fry them.  Here's a picture of a gorengan stall, and here's a picture of our own efforts.

Dough
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
5 T water

Filling
1 lb. baking potatoes, peeled and diced
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
4 shallots
2 inches ginger, peeled
1 Tbsp. fennel seeds, toasted
2 cinnamon sticks
1 heaping Tbsp. meat curry powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. palm sugar
1/4 cup water
4 Tbsp. vegetable oil
oil for deep frying

First, make the filling.  In a blender or food processor (or with your trusty mortar and pestle), grind the fennel seeds into a coarse powder.  Add the onions, garlic, shallots, and ginger, and process into a smooth paste, adding a bit of oil if necessary.  Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet or wok over medium heat, and then add the cinnamon sticks.  Cook until they are very fragrant, about 1-2 minutes, and then add the paste.  Saute gently, making sure that the mixture does not brown, for about 3 minutes.  Add the curry powder and saute for three minutes more until the mixture is very fragrant.  Add the salt, sugar, and water and bring to a boil.  Add the potatoes and bring to a boil, and then lower the heat and simmer, stirring often, until the mixture is very dry, about 20-30 minutes.  If the mixture gets too dry before the potatoes are very soft, add a bit more water.  When done, let the filling cool.

While the filling is cooking, make the dough.  Combine the flour, salt, and oil to make a mixture like bread crumbs.  Beat the egg together with water and add to the dry ingredients, mixing constantly to form a dough not unlike something for a pie crust.  Knead the dough for 2-3 minutes to make sure it is very smooth, and then cover with a towel and let rest for 15 minutes.

Heat a skillet or wok with about 3 inches of oil in it over low heat until quite hot.  Divide the dough in half and roll very thin.  Using an overturned bowl or a cookie cutter, cut out circles in the dough with a diameter of three inches.  Place one teaspoon of filling in the middle, rub a bit of water over the edge of the circle, and fold over to form a half moon.  Crimp the edges to make it look pretty.  You can re-roll the scraps to make additional puffs.  Gently lower the curry puff into the hot oil and deep fry just until it reaches a dark golden brown.  Remove and drain on paper towels before serving. 

"Elections" in Iran

From a CNN.com article about Rumsfeld's condemnation of the Iranian elections as a sham.

"So the fact that they had a mock election and elected a hard-liner ought not come to any surprise to anybody because all the other people were told they couldn't run."

Rumsfeld's comments are pretty much absolutely right here.  The election in Iran was not anywhere close to the type of election that a real democracy would have.  There ruling Guardian Council, a bunch of theocrats who decide the limits under which democracy will function in Iran, has completely emasculated any functioning opposition in within the country.  Given a restricted set of candidates and restrictions on the types of things that could be debated, Iranian voters did not have the full range of choice that they should have had.

It strikes me (TP) as sadly predictable, though, that the current administration has made such a fuss about this sham election while claiming success in other sham elections.  Are we really supposed to believe that Egypt deserves credit for "opening up" its electoral process to some more dissent and a bit more opposition activity?  Are we supposed to congratulate Saudi Arabia for having municipal elections even though it's a monarchy?  This, after all, is the much lauded new awakening of the Arab people to democracy and liberalism.

Here's another option.  The current administration believes that when dictatorships have fake elections that return US allies, it's a "step towards democracy".  Conversely, when dictatorships have fake elections that return irrascible conservative Islamists, it's an "illegitimate election".  We should note that despite the restrictions on candidacy, the conduct of Iran's elections is probably more fair in procedural terms than elections any where else in that part of the world, starting at the Turkish border and ending in India.

A subject that attracts scholarly interest every decade or so is the question of what, exactly, makes a democracy.  Like, how do you know a democracy when you see one?  It's a surprisingly difficult thing to answer with any degree of precision, but everyone believes that if nothing else, free and fair elections are the gold standard of democracy.  But then you have the question of what, exactly, is a free and fair election?  If can two elections be on the whole unfair, but one is "more fair" than the other?  If so, is that country "more democratic"?  It's hard, but one thing is for sure, Iran--like Egypt--doesn't have free elections, and that's too bad.

Gym Renovations, Lindsey, Funny Website

Our gym is being renovated, as we mentioned a week or so ago.  Very annoying.  This weekend, though, took the cake.  They had a gigantic "opening party" that involved a very annoying man on a loudspeaker announcing when the next free prize giveaway was going to be and how anyone walking by was welcome to drop in for a free workout.  They did have a funny contest that involved people lifting medicine balls over their heads and keeping them there as long as possible, so perhaps it wasn't a total loss.  And, the announcer was yelling "concentrate, focus power!" on the loudspeaker, which is exactly what Mr. Miyagi says to Daniel-san in Karate Kid Part 1 when he's teaching him how to punch. 

Despite our troubles with the gym, we are very excited to have a friend coming to visit.  Lindsey is taking a full week off to make a whirlwind trip through Malaysia, and we are psyched.  We plan on travelling to Langkawi, an island getaway about an hour north of here close to the Thai border, and we also hope to finally get a chance to see Malacca.

On a final note, check out this website.  It gives all the flags in the world letter grades based on how aesthetically pleasing they are.  (Make sure to read the methodology part first.)  Part of what makes it funny is that the guy is funny, but also that someone spent so much time on it.

Nouns

Indonesian and Malaysian are relatively easy, as far as languages go, because the rules are very regular.  You can take a root word like an adjective or a verb, slap on some affixes, and turn it into all different sorts of nouns.  Unlike English where there are tons of different affixes for making abstract nouns, many of which have nearly identical meanings, here there are five.  It's sometimes hard to express exactly what the endings correspond to in English, but you can approximate things.

-an    Takes a verb X and turns it into a noun that means "the thing that is X-ed".  For example, makan (to eat) turns into makanan (food).

peN-    Takes a verb X and turns it into a noun that means "something or someone that X-es".  For example, tani (to plant) turns into petani (farmer) or awet (durable) turns into pengawet (preservative).

ke- -an  Takes a verb or adjective or noun X and turns it into a noun that means "the condition of being X".  Sort of like "ness" or "ity".  For example, berada (to exist) turns into keberadaan (existence), sehat (healthy) turns into kesehatan (health), and menteri (minister) turns to kementrian (ministry).

peN- -an    Takes a verb X and turns it into a noun that means "the act of doing X".  For example, bangun (to awaken) turns into pembangunan (development).  It also can make gerunds, such as terms like pengasinan ikan (the salting of fish). 

per- -an    Takes a verb X formed by affixing ber- (to be engaged in) and turns it into a noun that means "the process or result of X-ing" such as in lepas (free) turning into berlepas (to depart) and then perlepasan (departure) or temu (meet) turning into bertemu (to meet) and then pertemuan (meeting).

Of course, these can get confusing and the meanings are subtle.  Take the word satu, or one.  Kesatuan means "unity", persatuan means "union" (from bersatu, to unite), and penyatuan means "the uniting of".

OK, of course you aren't reading this to get a grammar lesson.  There is a point.  Sometimes ke- -an can be used idiomatically to refer to something that happened to something else accidentally, or more specifically, without intent or volition.  The way I remember it is with a sentence a friend used in an Indonesian class: Guru kejatuhan sebuah kelapa, which literally translates as "the teacher experienced-the-falling-of a coconut", or "a coconut fell on the teacher".  "To suffer from X" is how teachers often teach this construction to Indonesian students. 

Well, many of the recipes that we find in our Indonesian and Malaysian cook books use this construction to refer to food colors when cooking.  Like, when deep frying a curry puff, you are supposed to menggoreng hingga keemasan, which according to our mnemonic translates as "fry until it suffers from gold", or until golden.  Our very favorite, though, describes how you are supposed to fry your chicken: hingga kecoklatan, or "until it suffers from chocolate", meaning until brown.  It never fails to make us laugh.

As an explanation for this very silly post, well, it hasn't rained in a couple weeks and the heat must be getting to us.

More Bibliography Woes

I (TP) was only scratching the surface of my difficulties with bibliographies.  Malay, Indian, and Chinese naming conventions really aren't that hard to master once you learn the rules.  And fortunately, just by looking at the name it is almost always possible to tell what rules to use: Chinese names, Indian (usually Tamil) names, and Malay names are significantly different enough not to confuse you.

Indonesia is the real problem.  I'm sure that someone who has spent a lifetime studying the various cultures and languages of Indonesia would understand things, but I do not.  The issue stems from the fact that different ethnic groups across the archipelago have different naming conventions.  And, from looking at the name, you cannot normally what that ethnic group is.  Javanese is the exception--if it's got an "o" at the end of it and it starts with "Su/Soe", you can be sure it's Javanese.  Then there are Balinese, which are easy to spot because there is a pattern.  In Balinese, your name is determined by gender and birth order.  If you are a boy, your first name is I.  If you are a girl, your first name is Ni.  If you are the first born, your second name is Wayan.  If you are the second born, your second name is Made or Nengah, and so on.  Then you get your name.  So someone named "I Made Budiana" is the male second child named Budiana.  You alphabetize starting with the first name.  Of course, this is only for the common caste; higher caste levels have more complicated names.

But there's another layer of complexity.  Some Muslim Indonesians--but not all of them--have dropped their ethnic naming conventions and adopted Islamic naming conventions.  In such a situation, it's like Malays in Malaysia: first name is given name, second name is father's name.

However, we are usually not so lucky.  There are Indonesians (usually Javanese) with only one name, like Soeharto and Sukarno.  There are Indonesians with two first names and no last name, like Soeharto's son Bambang Trihatmodjo. There are Indonesians with just a first name and a family name, like Emil Salim or Rizal Mallarangeng.  There are Indonesians with a first name and a clan name, like Anwar Nasution or Djisman Simandjuntak.  There are Indonesians with a first name and a patronymic, like Sukarno's daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri. 

So, what you need to know is not only the name, but what the name means.  There is no rule besides that.  It's good to be able to recognize Minangkabau clan names like Nasution and Simandjuntak, but there are many more that I don't know.  You just have to know, for example, that Bambang Trihatmodjo is Soeharto's son and that Trihatmodjo is a descriptive second part of a first name, not a last name.  For bibliographies, these are the rules.

On a related note, here's a bit of information I learned about people with Abdul in the names, and why you refer to someone named Abdul Razak Hussein as "Abdul Razak" or "Razak", not just "Abdul".  Abdul means "servant of", and in Muslim names, get combined with one of the ninety-nine words used to describe Allah in the Qur'an.  So, for example, in the Qur'an Allah is referred to as "al-Razzaq", the Sustainer.  The name "Abdul Razak" means "servant of the Sustainer".  "Abdul Jabbar" means "servant of the Compeller", and so on.  Which is why you would never just call someone "Abdul": it's incomplete.  This is good stuff to know so you don't make a fool of yourself, and it's also the type of stuff that no one ever sits down and tells you.

I Don't Get It

Why do governments have to be so screwy? TP gets to spend all his time reading about the weird policies of the goverment here, while I (jm) get to talk with actual, hard-working government employees who tend to have some serious grievances with their employers. I get really frustrated just listening to the stories, I can't imagine having to work in these departments.

Take this guy I met yesterday, for example. He was just informed that he has been awarded a scholarship to get a Master's Degree in Medical Devices or Medical Physics. Problem number one is that he has only until October to find a program and get started, or else he loses the funding. It is pretty much too late to get into any program for the fall term right now, so the only hope is to quickly get admitted somewhere for the spring term and then hope the goverment is lenient about the timing. Problem number two is that there are no courses that I could find called "Medical Devices". I've run into this problem several times already; students come in looking for majors which are worded differently here than in the States. The problem is that for government scholarships, they won't give you funding if you don't go for a program with that exact name. So he can look for medical physics programs (which he is not really interested in) or try for something else that comes close in the name department. But basically, the government has given him a generous scholarship that he can't possibly use.

Today I saw a women from another government ministry who wants to get a PhD in Health Economics (this program does exist, thankfully). She applied for a government sponsorship scholarship last year, and was told, among other things, that she is too young. This woman has an M.D., a Master's in Finance, and a Master's in Public Policy, all foreign degrees. So she's not that young. The oldest you can be to qualify for a scholarship from the government is 45, so she argued with the guy and said that if she waits until she is 45, by the time she finishes her PhD she will almost be ready to retire. This sounds like a pretty strange way of doing things; you'd think if you were funding further study, you'd want to assure that you'd get lots of return on the investment. So she applied again this year, and has not heard the results yet. At her interview this time, she was told that she was overqualified, and that she should just go back to the hospital and doesn't need to bother with a PhD. Again, this seems kind of strange. Here is a woman who has worked in all areas of this ministry (including the hospital setting) for 14 years, has used all three of her advanced degrees to the ministry's advantage (including doing tax work herself instead of the department having to hire an accountant), and they feel like telling her that she doesn't need a PhD? What nonsense. Oh, and there was one other thing. She's Indian, and as she said, "the color of my skin is a little bit off." I'm guessing that this unfortunately has something to do with her frustrations. But, like so many other ballsy professional Indian women I've met here, she's decided to go and she's going to make it work somehow, period. Good for her.

This brings me back to the whole problem of education here in Malaysia that TP has recently posted about. Its like they're trying to do the right thing but going about it all wrong. These are not the only two cases I've seen like this, I've probably seen at least 9 or 10, and crazy educational requirements which are impossible to fulfill make for some very frustrated citizens.

"Do You Eat Rice?"

Just about every time I (TP) meet someone like a security guard, a librarian, a receptionist, or someone like that, I get asked this question.  Now, I'm not sure what most people's general experience with Westerners is, but JM and I suspect that it's just the case that many people do not realize that Americans eat rice sometimes too.  However, it is fair to say that Americans eat LESS rice than Malaysians, or Indonesians for that matter.  Whenever we end up at a self-service food place around here, we end up taking far less rice than the people around us.  We take about the same amount of food, but our ratio of chicken curry to rice is about 1:1, instead of about 1:4 as is normal.  Also, we are schooled in the American tradition that you would never have noodles and rice in the same meal.  Here, that's not the case.  Nonetheless, we find it funny that people would wonder if we ate rice at all.

The other question we get a lot is whether we eat Malaysian food at all.  This happened to me today at the library, where circulation official chatted me up for about 15 minutes, asking me what my opinion of Malaysian food is.  Most of his questions centered around whether or not the food here was too spicy, but he seemed genuinely surprised that, yes, I like rendang daging and nasi dagang.  Again, we are not sure how other Westerners act, but from our perpective, in general, Malaysian food is not extremely challenging.  Sure, you might find yourself with a nice bowl of beef tripe soup or something on occasion, but that's very rare.  And the food is far spicier than most American food, but it's hardly ever inedible.

Maybe it's just like some Americans who meet Europeans and ask if they have televisions and department stores.  In other words, people are curious about people who are different.

Etymology of the Eggplant

Here's another example of Indonesia making a mockery out of us.

When we were in Indonesia, one of our favorite dishes was sayur asem, sour Javanese soup.  We included a recipe for it awhile back.  Sayur asem, though, has some crazy ingredients that we didn't know about and tried to figure out.  One of them was the elusive melinjo.  We complained that when we looked it up in the dictionary, the dictionary just said "melinjo fruit", which wasn't very helpful.  However, when we went to the store in Indonesia we bought a pack of something that said "melinjo" on it and which looked a lot like little round eggplants.  Cut up, they are exactly what we would find in our soup, and they acted just like an eggplant, so we figured that an eggplant is a good substitute.

Now, the melinjo episode has never left our minds.  Enter Malaysia.  In Malaysia, lots of the words for vegetables are different.  Eggplant in Indonesian is terung, but in Malaysian it's brinjal.  Today, I (TP) was changing at the gym and for some reason was thinking about vegetables, and it occurred to me that melinjo and brinjal are quite close.  Using my heretofore useless Articulatory Phonology from college, I recalled that both m and b are voiced bilabials, and that l and r are both alveolar liquids.  It is common as languages evolve for letters like m and b to replace one another; the same goes with l and r.  Given that in normal speech melinjo is pronounced more like MLIN-jaw, it's not so hard to see how brinjal could become melinjo.  JM and I decided that it was likely that melinjo came to refer specifically to the green round eggplants in Indonesia, and terung to the other purple kinds.

Great.  So we got home and sought to use the OED to figure this out.  We had some luck, and found some things out about the etymology of eggplants.  Aubergine is a cognate to alberengena in Spanish, which comes from the Arabic al-bethinjan.  This in turn came from vatin-gana, Sanskrit for something to do with "the class (that removes) the wind-disorder (windy humour)", seemingly something to do with the gaseous effects of eggplant consumption.  And, indeed, brinjal comes to Malay from Portuguese.  The local Austronesian word, terung, is kept in Indonesia, but has died out in Malaysia.

But all of this means nothing because we were wrong about what melinjo fruits were.  We did a Google Image Search for melinjo, and came up with puzzling results.  Rather than the little round eggplants, all the pictures showed little green and red things that look like raw olives.  Indeed, we do remember these from our sayur asem in Indonesia, but just thought they were unidentifiable--people we asked kept telling us they were peanuts.  So melinjo fruits are actually some little weird fruity/nutty things.  They are good, but they're not eggplants.  We still have yet to find melinjo fruits in a store, and we are not sure exactly what those green eggplant things were after all.  Probably actually a local variety of eggplant, just mislabelled.  We'll look for terung hijau (green eggplants) at the store next time.