My Life in Food - 2. Going Native down the Cowley Road

Continuing a three part series on my experiences of food in England. In Part 1, my horror and tears at English school food. This week, curry and spice and everything nice at Uni…

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison. I lived in a shared house down Cowley Road in Oxford during my second and third years, thriving in the joy of being free from the institutionalised halls of residence. My housemates and I threw parties and gave dinners, dressing up to fit the themes we devised. It was the early 80s and we were playing at being the cool, sleek grown-ups of the ’40s and ’50s - Bogie and Bacall were our models, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “High Society”. At candle-lit dinners in our shared living room, our men wore black tie and cummerbunds and we girls shimmered in cocktail dresses and high heels. We ate parma ham with melon, smoked salmon mousse, roast duck in blackcurrant sauce, drank champagne. With coffee, we puffed on cigarillos and nibbled at blue-streaked gorgonzolla, sipping port.

But nothing compared with my Malaysian dinner parties. I had brought a wok back in my suitcase after one holiday back home. In the cupboards were an endless stock of sambal belacan, stinky dried fish, dry-fried shrimp, thick gooey soy sauce, crispy ikan bilis, fragrant pandan leaves, curry powder, chilli powder, turmeric, five spice cloves, blocks of coconut concentrate - you name it, I had it. They came with me back to Oxford either stowed away in my suitcase triple-wrapped in plastic bags and towels or hunted down from London’s Chinatown. Back then, before mass cheap travel and globalisation, my English friends had never seen - or smelt - anything like it. Most of them had never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe and some had never left their little island at all. I fried up prawn chilli and flavoured rice with coconut and pandan for nasi lemak; sizzled up bright yellow turmeric pork with caramelised onions; cooked sesame chicken with nasi goreng. My friends watched me as if hypnotised, amazed that I did everything in the wok - even bacon and eggs on some Sunday mornings. “Why not?” I would say, “It’s just a cooking implement.”

To come to my Malaysian dinner parties, my friends had to dress up. In the winter, I would turn up the heating in the living room, pull back the dining table and chairs against the wall and lay out a large woven mat I had brought back from KL. Sometimes, I even managed crepe paper palm trees sellotaped to the walls with green fronds hanging from the ceiling. In the summer we would sit out in the overgrown garden, the tall weeds and unkempt grass adding to the fiction of the tropics in suburbia. The theme was tropical Malaysia so everyone had to come in tropical clothing - Hawaiian shirts and shorts, flip-flops, sarongs. We would all sit cross-legged on the mat and eat nasi lemak or curry with our hands. Once, Siva, a Malaysian PhD student brought a coconut and a parang and chopped it open Malaysian style, spinning the fruit in one had as the other expertly hacked the husk away while my English friends watched in awe.

It was in the summer vacations of those years at university that my English friends would take long trips to India and South East Asia. They would be the generation that would seek out exotic restaurants with tasty, spicy food once they were back in the UK and settled down to their jobs. They would be the ones finding new and cheaper ways to travel around the globe and to look outside of their home island for work and business opportunities. It seems to me that from the ’80s onwards, the British began to evolve from seeing the world as an empire they owned and imposed their will on to a place of interest and wonder to explore and exchange with. Looking back, I wonder how many other Malaysian students in the last few decades played their part in introducing their British friends to the wonders of another culture, through our delicious, unique food and our warmth and hospitality.

Whenever my British friends come across another Malaysian, they would always tell me. And I would always hear how friendly and generous this Malaysian is, how interesting and funny and talented. And how this Malaysian is really into their food. How they cooked for my friend and what an amazingly tasty meal they had together. And how much there was to eat. “Yup, that’s definitely a Malaysian,” I would laugh. Even if their passport might say some other nationality because they have migrated for career reasons, a Malaysian’s heart - and stomach - will always be Malaysian.

In two weeks time (Friday 20 July 2007): what happens when my English friends visit my family in Malaysia

Photos: from my photo album c. 1983/ 1984

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