Some Southeast Asian Junk

Goodbye from Singapore

Singapore is still clean as ever.  We got in yesterday evening at 5:15 and headed off to our hotel in Changi Village, had a final street food dinner of wonton soup, oyster sauce vegetables and char siew, and then headed off to bed.  Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Singapore's independence from Malaysia, so that was a big celebration.  When you think about it, 40 years just isn't that long.

Malaysia seemed to be enticing us to leave, in a way.  The smog and smoke was so bad that the government issued warnings for children not to play outside and for people with respiratory illnesses to avoid non-essential exertion.  Both JM and I could notice the effects--JM's allergies acted up, and I had a sore throat with a frog in it.  The reason for the unbelievable pollution is human activity, in this case the burning of rain forest land for cultivation.  Fire creates rich soil and clears the land for cheap.  Too bad rain forests have large economic value as well.

So that's it for us in Southeast Asia.  Those of you in the US, we'll see you soon; those of you in Indonesia and Malaysia, it's been a blast.

Final Pictures Installment

This will probably be the last installment of pictures that we post.  It's a good one though.  Some of it comes from our last week or so of roaming around KL, and the rest consists of updates from our friend Lindsey, who has sent picitures from her visit.  Her digital camera takes great pictures too.

• Our album Around KL has pictures of the smoky haze that has enveloped KL in the past couple of days, JM's coworkers, and some others.  Start here and scroll forward if you have been following along at home.
• Culinary Delights now includes an extensive series on our favorite Malay wet market, plus a guy spinning roti canai and all sorts of goodies we have cooked lately (start here).
• Langkawi has a bunch of new pictures, including monkeys, cats, a great sunset, and us driving a boat (start here).
• Melaka has a couple new ones (start here).

It looks like our flights from Singapore to Tokyo and then Tokyo to the US are going to be very full.  Again, we are not complaining, for we are happy that United is still in business.

Packing, Shopping, Eating

We are now pretty sure that our driver screwed us yesterday by driving us to Kota Damansara the long way, via highway, when it could have been done much faster.  Kota Damansara is right next to Damansara Heights.  Argh.  This is one thing that we will not miss--not knowing what's going on.

Besides that, we can only think of one other thing that we will actually not miss.  The smog and diesel fumes, maybe?  Nope, that's part of the fun.  Negotiating in bureaucrats in strange languages?  No again, that's part of the fun.  The one thing that we will really not miss is line behavior.  Let us explain.  We are unabashedly culturally relativistic in our view that standing in line is a fundamental social convention.  When we are in line, we demand that people who arrive in the line after us stand behind us.  Here, that convention is broken on a fairly regular basis.  JM gets it worse than I do.  The other day she was standing in line at the bank, the next up for the teller.  When the person in front of her walked away, she was plowed over by some guy who just walked right through her to get to the free teller.  JM heroically pushed back and maintained her place in line, but the whole premise of the interaction is almost unthinkable to us.  In the US, that would have raised stares.  As George Costanza said once, "we're living in a society here!"  We are like intrepid Danes travelling to the Italian Riviera, wondering why everyone insists on waving their hands when they talk; or like Asians visiting the US, perplexed that someone would wear shoes inside somebody's private residence.  We have gotten used to a lot of things, but we are too American to have lost this.

These are the things that go through our heads as we spend these days packing, shopping, and eating.  Besides, of course, simple incredulity that we managed to accumulate so much junk in the space of 11 months.

Any last requests for Asian packaged goods?  Our last day at the grocery store is tomorrow, so let us know.

FedEx, Far Away

Today we went to find the FedEx outlet nearest to us.  We have a local DHL outlet that we use, but DHL's prices for shipping packages (as opposed to paperwork) are terrible here.  And DHL has already lost one of our packages, so we are not going to let them have a chance with our very important souvenirs and things.  So we found that the address is in Kota Damansara, a place that we had never actually visited before, but which we figured would probably be near Damansara Heights, which we have visited.  It turns out that Kota Damansara is far away, about 30 minutes from here by highway, and not near Damansara Heights.  (Note: We are not absolutely sure that our driver did not just royally screw us, but we are pretty sure.)  We got very lost, and stopped to ask directions a couple of times, the first time ending up talking to a Burmese Muslim immigrant whom even our driver could not understand.  The second time we stopped at a gas station and enlisted a couple of petrol-heads who showed us the way.  All in all, it was quite an adventure.  We believe that we will call for FedEx to do a pickup on Monday instead of exploring the outer reaches of metro KL again.

We then set about doing some more shopping for gifts for our friends and ourselves.  On the way, we got what will be probably our final roti canai at Hameed's, our favorite roti place.  We then stopped by our favorite Malay wet market and snapped a bunch of pictures, which we will post tomorrow or Monday.  There, we got our final nasi lemak and our final unidentified kuih-muih (assorted cakes), which included this time a yellow sweet-corn gelatin treat which was surprisingly good.

During these long excursions, JM and I discussed what we think the smells of Southeast Asia are.  While your eyes and ears tell you a lot, we think that probably the smells are what really tell you where you are.  So what are the smells of Indonesia and Malaysia?  Well, they are some combination of the following:

• the cloying sweet smell of local fruits--mangosteen, mango, snakefruit, rambutan, longan, melons, soursop, jackfruit, bananas, pineapple
• the smell of crowds of people everywhere, body odors and babies
• cigarettes and kretek (clove cigarettes)
• charred grilled fish and chicken and lamb, fried peanuts, coriander and cloves and nutmeg and black pepper
• the rotten sweet smell of durian and ripe knobly jackfruit
• boiling palm oil--a surprisingly good smell, with soybean products and bananas bubbling away
• sweet soy sauce
• exhaust--diesel, leaded gasoline, two-stroke engines
• coconut in all its forms--oil, candies, milk, sugar, and freshly cut open with a machete
• sewage and commingled human and animal waste
• chilies and scallions and garlic, raw and mashing into paste, or fried and crispy

That's the best we can do, and there's a couple other undescribable smells that we can't even begin to capture.  As you can see, not all of them are good smells, but they are part of the experience, and their combination is unmistakably part of island Southeast Asia.

My Goodness

We don't think we've mentioned this yet, but guess what?  We leave Malaysia on Tuesday afternoon, local time.  It's almost beyond our comprehension that we have been in Southeast Asia for almost 11 months.  It seems like just the other day we got to Malaysia, and just a couple days before that that we first get to Indonesia.  We travel to Singapore for a night, then on to Tokyo, then we split up to visit our families on the two coasts before heading back to New Haven at the end of August.

What does this mean for you, readers?  Well, there may only be a few of you, but unfortunately we do not plan on continuing to blog when we return home.  It's been fun, but we feel that it's something unique to our time abroad.  We will of course leave the blog online for at least a month or so, but we don't expect to do any more posts after we leave from Singapore.  So, you'll have to find another time waster, and so will we.  It also means that you Indonesian and Malaysian teenie-boppers who google the lyrics to "Ada Apa Denganmu" and leave snotty comments about how crappy our translation is will just have to find someone else to bother.  Note to children: translating crappy poetry is hard.

What it means for us is, we are in the process of getting ready to pack, finishing up research, doing last minute souvenir shopping, re-confirming tickets on United (which, to our pleasant surprise, has not gone under since we left), and deciding where our last meals will be.  We think that we'll need to get at least one more roti canai from the Central Market, one more order of masala thosai and appam from the roti man in Bangsar after some sate and popiah from the night market, one more gluttonous feast of Lebanese food at the Islamic Arts Museum, one more stroll through the Malay wet market around Masjid India for sweets and nasi lemak, and one more trip to Jalan Alor for Chinese grilled fish and fried kangkong.

Devil Curry

This is, more than anything else, the quintessential Eurasian Malaysian dish.  It is a specialty in Melaka, where we had a delicious version of it, where both Straits Chinese and Portuguese communities pass down recipes from generation to generation.  It shows obvious influence of Portuguese, Malay, and Indian food.  It's name comes from its heat: simply put, Devil Curry is spicy.  Not "whew, spicy!" like, but full-bore, "I'm going to regret this tomorrow morning" spicy.  Normally when we get it, I (TP) take it as a challenge to finish it off before my entire brain leaks out of my nose, while JM takes it as a challenge to eat as much as possible while continually saying, "OK, just a little more, it's too spicy."

With the heavy vinegar and mustard components, you have a dish that is oddly reminiscent of Carolina-style barbecue.  Indeed, a related Melaka favorite, Curry Kapitan, is obviously related to the Southern dish Curry Captain.  If you make a not-very-spicy version of this, you could easily pass this off as an American curry dish with an interesting flavor.  This is our take on it.

Devil Curry
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
2 large onions
8 meaty chicken thighs, well-sprinked with salt
1 Tbsp. mustard seeds
1/4 cup rice vinegar, plus more to taste
3 peeled baking potatoes, chopped into large hunks
water
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
salt

Spice Paste
chilies (see note on chilies at the bottom)
red pepper powder (see note on chilies at the bottom)
black peppercorns (see note on chilies at the bottom)
10 shallots
6 cloves garlic
2 inches ginger, peeled
2 inches fresh turmeric, peeled
8 candlenuts, toasted
1 Tbsp. mustard seeds, lightly toasted and ground

In a blender or food processor, combine all the ingredients for the spice paste.

Heat the oil to medium high heat in a large wok, then add the chicken to brown.  Remove and set aside.  Heat the oil again to medium heat and add the onions, cooking until just beginning to turn golden.  Add the spice paste and fry, stirring constantly, for about five minutes.  Add the whole mustard seeds, fry for a minute more, and then add the vinegar, chicken, and enough water to just cover the chicken.  Bring to a boil, then add the potatoes.  Bring to a boil again, then lower the heat and simmer for about 25 minutes, until potatoes and chicken are cooked through.  Add more water as needed to keep the gravy from getting too thick.  Add the soy sauce and cook 5 minutes more, then add salt and vinegar to taste.  Serve with rice, it looks like this, although we let the gravy get too thick so it's not quite right.

NOTE ON SPICINESS: We have had some truly volcanic Devil Curries.  For a muted version with a hint of heat and most of the flavor, use 1 tsp. red pepper powder, 5 peppercorns, and two chilies for the spice paste.  For a spicier but not yet authentic version, try 1 Tbsp. red pepper powder, 10 pappercorns, and five chilies.  For an authentic version, we don't know what you'd do, but you could try adding a birds-eye chili and upping the red pepper powder even more.  We will probably never try this because we don't want to ruin it, so you'll have to experiment on your own.

Internet Down, More Words

The internet at our apartment has been down all day, an unusual occurrence. Perhaps our months of government criticism have finally hit home. OK, probably not, it's probably just broken.

So, we only have time for a quick update today, as we have to write from JM's office. Here's a couple more silly words I came across reading the newspaper in the past couple of days.

denggi Worse than malaria, and no vaccination available
francaisi Someone who has a francais
kem Concentration, Boy Scout, or Hill, Pennsylvania
renjer An elite Army soldier (in the US and Malaysia)
skru Persistent speculation on your currency tightens these on your economy
tayar The things on the car that make contact with the road

Cap Naga

Hmm, funny words, only two of them, must be a recipe, right?  It's not.  I (TP) have come across this term a couple times over the past couple of months when reading about the reformasi (reform) movement in Malaysia after the sacking of then-Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim.  Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, ended up heading the National JUSTice Party (KeADILan) after Anwar was arrested and jailed for sodomy and corruption.

So what about this term.  It's funny because it's one of those terms that you think that you are misunderstanding when you first read or hear it.  It translates as "dragon brand" or "dragon stamp".  Now, when you're in this part of the world you learn pretty quickly that "dragon" is a codeword for Chinese.  So I was sure that I was misunderstanding when I encountered this term being used to describe Wan Azizah.  As the elections right after Anwar's sacking approached, a number of Malay politicians remarked that Wan Azizah was not a suitable leader for Malays because she is cap naga.  What could they be talking about?

Well, it turns out that Wan Azizah has some Chinese ancestry.  OK, but that's weird: in Malaysia, by law, the definition of a Malay is someone who follows Malay customs and is a Muslim.  Wan Azizah certainly falls into that category, and there is precisely no legal provision for genetic requirements for Malayness.  Once I met a guy, Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee, who was certainly Malay but very openly was proud that he had very little Malay ancestry (here's a picture).  No one disputes that he's a Malay.  In fact, this accusation against Wan Azizah is quite shocking; JM and I have never heard or read about anyone seriously disputing whether or not anyone was a Malay based on appearance or ancestry.  In fact, the newspapers here occasionally run stories of saudara baru (literally, "new siblings"), usually Chinese Malaysians who have converted to Islam and "become Malay".  This accusation against Wan Azizah is the lowest of the low blows that we can think of in Malaysian politics (and anyway, check out her picture).

I looked up cap naga on Google, and the only hits I found were articles about these accusations against Wan Azizah and products by a company named Cap Naga that sells Chinese herbal concoctions in Malaysia and Indonesia.  This suggests that either the term was created for Wan Azizah, or (more likely) that it's a term that you rarely hear out in the open.

At any rate, this is a nice additional commentary on politics and ethnicity in Malaysia.  Everybody knows that everyone is supposed to fall neatly into one of the ethnic categories that the government perpetuates, and everybody also knows that these categories are sort of fake, but everyone has to act as if these categories have objective bases in reality.  And the government can try to marginalize you by taking away your ethnic affiliation.