Archive for the 'Fusion Stories' Category

Xavier Salomon, the curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, talks to me about his own pan-European roots and about the fusion art of Canaletto, the great Venetian painter who came to London in 1746. Canaletto painted famous London scenes with his Italian eye, staying in this vibrant city for 10 years. Xavier talks about what London might have been like at that time and why Canaletto came here for his painting. He also talks about his personal experiences of European art and what it takes to become the curator of one of the most respected art galleries in the UK.

You can listen to the podcast of our convesation (about 31 mins 50 sec) using the grey player below.

To find out more about the Canaletto exhibition, which is on until 15 April, go to www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.

Above: Canaletto’s painting of Westminster Bridge, London.
Top: Photo of Xavier, thanks to Ingrid Beazley

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The Guardian first book prize has gone to Chinese-born author YiYun Li who has only recently learnt to write in English. This is very exciting. She won it for her short story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”. Her stories have been described as “perfect and complete capsules” and one of the judges of the prize speaks of her as “a writer of rare perceptiveness and originality”. She has already won the Frank O’Connor international short story prize and the PEN/Hemingway award. Wow!

You can read the full article in The Guardian here.

I was taken by the samples of Li’s writing that the Guardian article gives:

“Li’s stories, the longest of them 24 pages, exploit the ability of the short form to register fine shifts in everyday lives. The background events that shape the people she writes about are the imperial centuries of feudalism, Mao’s communism and cultural revolution, Tiananmen Square and the plunge into capitalism.

In their speech, new half-poetical sayings mix with old proverbs: “a dew-marriage before the sunrise” (a one-night stand); “There is always a road when you get into the mountain” [see extract]; and, poignantly, in the same story, “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor. The pain of love is the darkness following.” “

I wonder if the influence of her mother tongue, Chinese, has blurred over into her use of English thus creating these powerfully evocative images. I have been exploring the issue of identity and language and even dialect in this blog, with thought-provoking contributions from commentors and guest-bloggers. We’ve looked at how our core selves may be formed by whether we speak English or Japanese and how one might change like a chameleon depending on whether one speaks standard American or working-class / regional American. Now, these examples of Li’s writing make me curious as to how the writing of multi-lingual writers is enriched by their many tongues.

The dense, intense writing of Joseph Conrad comes to mind. He made fictions from his experiences in Malaya and the Far East and Africa, having served as a merchant seaman. He was Polish originally, I believe, but wrote in English and is studied as a major figure in English literature. The intensity and power of his writing can in part, I think, be attributed to his writing in a language that was not his mother tongue.

Do you have any personal experience of this question as a writer? Or perhaps as a reader, certain phrases from books strike you - could those idioms come from the book’s author’s multi-lingual life?

Please add a comment or email me. I will post the most relevant and interesting contributions as individual Guestblog writings for Fusion View.

You can find out more about Li at her homepage www.yiyunli.com

Photo: thanks from Li’s homepage

A while back, I wrote about the First Ancestor, the story that my family tells of where we came from. I found a tape recording of an interview that I did with my grandfather on my mother’s side 30 years ago, asking him to tell us the story of our family. I was thirteen at the time - and I guess in a way I was doing a podcast even before podcasts were invented!

The family gathered round one evening just before Christmas 1976 and I taped the story that my grandfather told. This is the last and only recording we have of his voice as he died a year later so it is a recording that is treasured in our family.

I have transferred it to digital format without any expert or fancy technology so the sound quality is not perfect. However, I hope that you can still enjoy the story he tells…

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We end the current Fusion Stories series with a post from my father, Ooi Boon-Leong, about his first experience of England in the 1950s as a young, naive student from the colonies. Dad will be 70 next April and still busy with his law practice. I am really pleased and touched that he has taken the time to write this piece for me and to share his perspective of a different time in a country that was foreign to him then but home to me now.

He writes:

There were 3 of us from the same secondary school who had gained admissions to different universities in England, I to Cambridge University and the other two to London University. Two of us were 18 years old and the third a little older than 19. We lived in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaya (then) and none of us had travelled further than Singapore by rail, a city about 300 miles south. The three of us were “village yokels” really, although we spoke fluent English and had all completed the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate Examination. This examination was conducted for all English schools in the Empire with some local variations.

In those days you could go to England either mainly by boat or, more rarely, by air. By air, if you are very rich for it was very expensive and even then you had to spend a night in Bombay or another Indian city and a night or a long lay over somewhere in the Middle East for the plane to refuel. Most people travelled by boat and the most famous of the various lines was the P & O. We could not get a booking and so instead we booked a berth for the three of us in an Italian boat that sailed from somewhere in Australia, stopping in Singapore where we boarded it and the journey ended at Naples, its home port. We had to finish the journey from Naples to London by train.

Being on an Italian boat with lots of Italians going to Naples from Australia, it served Italian food. For the first evening I had my first experience of salami. When I put a slice in my mouth and turned it about, it spread around my mouth and it gummed up all my salivary glands and my mouth dried-up. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The spaghetti was alright because it looked like Chinese noodles but it was strange to eat it with tomato sauce instead of it being fried.

Except for going through the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal I was seasick all the way.

We arrived in Naples and went on to Rome. Then we went on by train to Paris where, because we had not booked a hotel we spent the night in the railway station, and went on to catch the boat train and then the ferry to go across to England. We duly arrived on the English side of the Channel and this was my first experience on English soil.

A porter helped each of us with our luggage on to the train. Each of us was in charge of tipping his porter. I was too tired and frustrated and was so relieved to have arrived and to be able to speak to someone without any effort that I happily tipped my potter one pound for carrying my two suitcases. He then said “Sir, this is too much. It’s not that much,” and handed back the pound note. I did not know how much it should be so I tipped him ten shillings anyway.

I was very impressed and still am impressed by his act. He definitely could do with the extra money – buy something for his kids or wife or stand his mates drinks in the pub. This has coloured my view of the English but I also remind myself that it was in 1955 when people all over the world, despite going through a terrible war not so long ago, were gentler, kinder and less greedy.

Another incident also shows the kindness and consideration of the English (or British.) I had settled down in my University and during one of the holidays I bought a ticket for a concert in the Royal Festival Hall in the south bank. It was not a pricey ticket but one in the middle range. When I went into the hall I was shown by the usher to a seat which I suspected was in the more expensive section. I mentioned to the usher that I thought that that could not be the correct seat. He insisted that it was and not to argue with him I took my seat. Sure enough before the concert started the person with the correct ticket came to claim his seat and I had to vacate it. I was, of course, very embarrassed and doubly so because I was a foreigner. I did not want the people who were seating behind and beside me to think that here was a foreigner who was trying to cheat by taking a more expensive seat than what he was entitled to. As I was slowly edging out of my row of seats someone, a man, said loud enough for me to hear “Don’t worry, it can happen to any of us.” I was somewhat relieved because there is at least one person who did not think that I had tried to cheat. Only a people who have a deep consideration for others can fathom without being told the discomfort and embarrassment what a person is undergoing and is kind enough to want to reassure him.

Another incident that deserves mention is this. A college friend had invited me to his home for a few days during the vacation. The first night when I went to bed, I found on my bed side table a pile of four or five books ranging from novels to essays for my night reading. Although I had not brought any reading materials I had not asked for any books. It was a gesture I thought very civilized. Another act prompted by their consideration.

These were not the only kindness I received when in England but they stood out. The others were ones one usually meets with in daily life: the “pleases” and “thank yous,” the holding of doors for one to pass. I think it was Orwell who wrote in an essay that only in England can you push an Englishman off the pavement when you two meet going in the opposite direction.

My partner Angie Macdonald is from South Africa and after watching me blog from the sidelines, she has been inspired to contribute this Fusion Story about her experiences of reverse migration:

It was only when I emigrated to England that I finally came to understand my father. As an Englishman in Africa, my father never
fitted in. He was conspicuous in his baggy safari suits and pale skin that blistered pink in the sun. His broad Lancashire accent with its clipped vowels contrasted starkly with the leisurely pace of Durban English and the rolling r’s and throat-scraping sounds of Afrikaans. As for Zulu, he never even attempted it.

In South Africa, men love sports, drinking beer and cooking meat on a braai. My father is a trainspotter, does not believe in exercise, and a strict vegetarian. He embraced conservatism and the politics of apartheid, but beyond that he has always been an outsider.

In England he would fit right in with the tea drinkers and people discussing the weather and obsessing about bowel movements. He would find many to share his hatred of Maggie Thatcher and his passion for trains. Yet, since leaving England over fifty years ago, my father has never returned to his roots. And I have never heard him speak of England as ‘home’.

Like my father, I always felt an outsider in South Africa. I rejected the role of a typical South African ‘lady’ and drank beer from a bottle, wore trousers instead of floral dresses, cropped my hair and rode a motorbike. I dressed in black and preferred women to men. Culturally, I longed to be in England, to see the bands I admired like The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, to be able to go to the National Theatre and take my pick of bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. I was prepared to reject sub-tropical heat and eternal sunshine for the chance to wear a black trench coat and Doc Martin boots in the middle of an English winter.

I thought that when I came to England I would fit right in. I spoke the same language, had similar cultural references, English blood flowed through my veins. It would be like coming home.

I was wrong. Fourteen years later and I am still unsure where to call ‘home’. I speak of my past life ‘back home’ and yet I feel that my home is firmly in South London, with YM. For the first few years I was here, I suffered an identity crisis; I did not know where I belonged, nor did I feel any particular sense of belonging. In London, my accent marked me as an outsider. I had no shared past with anyone – I had not gone to school or university during the Thatcher years or experienced the bleakness of ‘70s Britain. No British TV programmes were shown in South Africa because of the Equity ban so there were no cultural references there. I had to get used to things like travelling on the underground, miles instead of kilometres, pounds and pence. Bank holidays and sandwich shops. And the fact that here I was one of many. There were no privileges because of the colour of my skin.

When I went back to Durban on holiday, I felt I no longer belonged there either. Being away meant that I had changed. I had experienced the challenges of starting life in a new country while my friends had continued with their lives as they were. And Durban had changed too. There were new roads, new shopping malls. Things that I had never been part of. My favourite restaurants, bars and clubs were no longer there and with them my history had vanished. Wiped out.

But I am gradually getting used to my new life. Now I pepper my speech with ‘i’n’it’ and say ‘all right?’ in place of ‘hello’. I indulge in long detailed conversations about the weather and enjoy gardening and listening to BBC Radio 4. I own a pair of wellies and numerous umbrellas. I have even eaten my sandwiches in the rain. In short, I think I am turning English.

And when I travel abroad I think of myself as a ‘Londoner’. I start missing winding cobbled streets, cosy pubs, ancient buildings and buses that run all night. I miss all the other people like me: the immigrants, with their different cuisines and exotic languages, and I become homesick.

Yet, there are still moments when I am at the seaside, or smell steak cooking on a BBQ and hear the life-affirming beat of the African Jazz Pioneers, when I long for my life in South Africa, for the sky and the sun and the sense of space and friends and the good times we shared. And with that comes sadness and nostalgia, and a deep knowing that, like my father, I have left that life behind. Forever.

Written by Guest Blogger Angie Macdonald

Martin Smit has been, and sometimes is, a playwright and singer in a ‘difficult’ electronic band.He runs a website for independent musicians and hosts a twice monthly Podcast which promotes Music Tourism and features eclectic sounds from many strange and beautiful groups. Born in Africa now living in Europe, he believes that music, art and his wife and daughter keep the soul alive.

Martin wrote this for me earlier this summer:

So many thoughts, flying. Fusion, isolation, integration. The world cup starts to today and I am wondering how exactly I should feel about this, who I should support, get excited for, get hopeful for. Four years ago it was easy, I love to support the underdog and my home country (South Africa) was a natural underdog, so I could follow my instincts AND scream and sigh and be patriotic all at the same time.

Now, here in Krefeld Germany, as I type this out, I can feel the streets outside start to get a little tense and the TV with the sound down is practically jumping off its table with nerves. Germany, though, is no underdog and even won the cup a few times…. Mmm ok I think I will just sit and watch and let my emotions tell me what to do, and as I make that very me decision I realise just how ‘not German’ I am and I wonder if that I am dishonouring my adapted country by being like this.

Ok yeah, I think too much.

Fusion.

How do I fuse into the world around me? Well, not as much as others, because I work from home and I work on the internet, so I live and think and create in that hyperspace, that nowhere/everywhere world where if they don’t speak your language, an online translator is just a hop skip, mouse click away, and everyone speaks music.

My PC speaks Deutsch, but my internet speaks English so I find the language I pick up is of the strangest non-functional species in real world terms.

My daughter who now is grade 3 going on grade 4 speaks both English and Deutsch fluently, and I find that along with strange technical terms that I pick up from my pc (which has NO sense of humour by the way) I pick up bits and bobs from kids TV and gossip that she brings home with her.

Still does not help when I need to buy vegetables at the local market.

The fact is, as a natural outsider, I love my strange life here. I have my family and the world of music and I ‘meet’ hundreds of fellow artists every day. I love that in Europe knowledge and curiosity are thought to be good things in the pursuit of independent rock n roll and that with a few € in my pocket I can go quietly mad and get oh so much new CDs and surround my self with the strange passion that only people involved in the rock world can bring.

I do get out though, I play as a DJ at the Hard Rock café in Köln (or as rest of world calls it: Cologne) and that is a strange experience worthy of a blog entry all of its own. In addition, I am a somewhat reserved shy tourist who slowly, very slowly, loves to explore this new world he finds himself in.

So yes, the opening ceremony of the 2006 World Cup draws closer and I start to feel like, mmm I am German, maybe, after all, must be the songs and the way the TV is not just being nervous but also totally dancing around with unusual glee for a Teutonic appliance.

The weather is humid and reminds me of Africa and for once, I don’t feel homesick for my beloved cricket. ( OH, I wish South Africa had qualified, but perhaps its for the best, now I can pick another underdog with slightly less guilt.)

Written by Guest Blogger: Martin Smit

Check out Martin’s show at http://nextbigthing.libsyn.com/ where you can also subscribe to his regular podcast showcasing an eclectic mix of great new music from great new bands and singers.

It takes an extraordinary person to transform a personal tragedy into a vision of hope for hundreds of children.

Dana Roskey is one such extraordinary man. Out of his personal grief, he gave hope to children in Ethiopia by founding the Tesfa Foundation to provide schooling for young kids. I spoke to him when he passed through London recently. He told me about culture shock arriving in Ethiopia for the first time, coffee and the path that led him to fulfill the dreams of the woman he loved.

Listen using the embedded player below.

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Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

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“Tesfa” means hope in Amharic.

To find out how you can help in this extraordinary project for the schoolchildren of Ethiopia, go to www.tesfa.org or www.tesfa-uk.org.

This is a beautiful and romantic personal story from Rebecca Jane, who emailed me a few weeks ago.

She writes:

My English name is Rebecca Jane; my Chinese name is Zhang
Bei-qi. I grew up in an American town outside of Chicago, Illinois.
In the Midwest where I grew up, about the only association my
community made with China was take-out food and fortune cookies. When
I was 21-years-old, I met a man who introduced me to Chinese language.
Nine months after meeting, we married. Thus began my fusion journey.

My fusion story is a romance, so it contains fair doses of love
and disappointment. I can promise you the tension did not heat up
over different languages or crossing cultures. My husband and I
proved adaptable, wise, and agile in clearing those hurdles. The
tension heated up when I attempted to go where I discovered there are
no real boundaries or borders—I attempted to create art and beauty.

I had been married to Yong-xiang for less than a year when
we’d agreed that I would travel to China to meet his parents, whom he
hadn’t seen in eight years. He didn’t have a green card and was
attending law school. My solo journey was the best arrangement we
could make, and I wanted to meet my in-laws. They welcomed me to
Guangzhou in April 1999. I’ll never forget my first car ride through
those crowded streets. The gridlock. My intense desire to be able to
read every sign in every shop window. ‘I will stay in China,’ I
thought ‘until I become literate here.’

I fulfilled that promise. My mother-in-law read to me from
children’s readers. She read the romantic novel Hong Lou Meng and the
strange ghost stories of Pu Songling. I focused, practiced, and
labored, wrote Chinese characters every day, looked everything up in
my dictionaries thrice.

I surprised myself when I started writing my own creative
fiction in the Chinese language. While living in Guangzhou, I secured
a job teaching English at a nearby university. My students submitted
impressive English essays to me. I was astonished by their expressive
ability with the English language. As a gesture both humble and
proud, I showed them my efforts to write a short story in Chinese.
Sitting in a circle with nine Chinese students who helped me edit and
rewrite that story was the most profound collaborative experience of
my life.

To this day I have not found another audience or institution
interested in my efforts to write fiction in Chinese. I have only
written a couple of stories and have given up the pursuit to focus on
writing in English. I have put the idea on the back burner. But I am
hoping one day to return to my bi-lingual creative writing.

Here is a prose poem I wrote while living in China. It is
called “Raindance in Guangzhou.”

The rain echoes; it falls in strings that vibrate forever. I am
listening for your notes. Do you stretch toward me and wrap around
like the wind? Or do you strum in the heart of the rolling thunder?
But what of these wordless sounds? I want to write to you; I want to
write with you, but I want to speak to you in a language no one
understands. Even more, I desire to listen to you. I sit on my bed
with my legs crossed, my head drops. I have closed my eyes. My hands
cover my ears. When my elbows touch in front of me, my knees also
fold into my body as naturally as hands folding together in prayer. I
am curled up in this way, and all noises wash over me like water
around a rock: brooms lifting dust, people breathing behind dust
masks, men spitting out nicotine throats, buses hiccuping fuel, a
shirtless beggar crying at the road’s edge with his body curving
toward a hole in the center of his chest, a motorcyclist avoiding a
pothole and just missing slamming into a busload of people who worry
about pickpockets, the voice-over on the bus shouting out the stop and
more people shoving in and pushing their way out, a guard standing
watch at this gate shouts something to the guard watching that gate—he
removes a lighter from his pocket and tosses it to his comrade—another
man lighting a cigarette, children’s running feet carry them to the
shade to cover them from the fiery sun, bicycles clapping their tires
over hot pavement, a crowd cheering for an approaching parade:
millions of wild rabbits jumping followed by a dancing dragon
swerving, the clashing, the drum beating—a sweet voice calls to me,
“Beiqi, Ni kan yi kan!” Look. I see sun flickering in the dragon’s
eye, white fire swirling around a dark spot, the drum sends tremors
through my entire body; Mama says, “Beiqi, ni e la ma? Wo men hui jia
ba!” Hungry? Let’s go home. We follow some stray rabbits down the
narrow lanes, and then comes the rain with drops as bis as dragon’s
eyes. Our hair sticks to our necks and we drip with the sky’s grief,
so at home Mama combs through my hair until it is dry. Then she makes
soup with flowers and green vegetables; we drink rice wine and eat
bitter melon, winter mushrooms, grass mushrooms, cabbage, corn, white
gourd, sea cucumber, rice, snow peas, carrots, bai cai, and turnips.
Then Baba’s hand wraps around the bottle and he pours me another glass
of wine saying, “He jiu! Drink wine.” As if those two words are an
epic poem. He tells me a story about the wine being brewed in some
far off northern place. My mind wanders, and I think of his enormous
hands, hands that can tell a thousand stories far better than his
words can. I wish I could use his hands as pillows at night and fall
asleep to the sound of the blood rushing through them—and I am still
as a rock, listening, hearing thunder within, hearing you.

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You can visit Rebecca Jane’s blog at http://rjaneflashfiction.blogspot.com

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Find out how to tell your story on Fusion View - go to the Announcements section in the middle sidebar of the Fusion View homepage at www.fusionview.co.uk and click on Tell Us Your Fusion Story.

David Grey is a filmmaker and former sociologist, psychotherapist and teacher. He is the founder of Village Film and the Dog and Hat Film Society, based in South London. He contributes this thought-provoking piece to the Fusion Stories series.

David writes:

This is a great project. What fascinates me is the assumption that people have “a” (sic) “culture from their country of origin” and that they can “live in another culture”. How does this apply to me?

I was born in (French-speaking) Senegal, first went to a (French) school in Finland. Grew up alternating between London and parts of France, where I was educated bilingually. I could have taken French nationality having been born in Senegal. “France” was of course a construct based on conquest and the repression of languages and cultures in Brittany, the Languedoc, Provence, and Corsica. Judging by my grandparents, I am 3/4 Welsh and 1/4 English, yet I think of myself as English, as in the Cricket Test.

English being a linguistic fusion of several different peoples speaking similar but different branches of the Germanic languages, themselves a branch of the Indo-European languages, linking peoples from India to the Atlantic in a common linguistic tradition. I grew up within a family divided between Lancashire and Yorkshire / Derbyshire parents. At school I was mocked for having a “northern accent”. When visiting relatives on Merseyside, I was mocked for being a “Cockney”. Whatever I “am” now, I also think of myself as a “South Londoner” and a “European”.

My son has me and an “English” mother. Her father was a Polish Jew who fled to Russia then London in the last war. Her mother is a Swiss of Germanic background, but also Jewish, and of intermediate Russian origin. And speaks French. And has dual UK / Swiss nationality, not to mention the right to settle in Israel via that country’s law of return. (As does my son and his mother)

Please can you tell me what is the “culture from my country of origin”? And am I or am I not “living in another culture”?

Ditto my son? As a Jew he is rooted in a 3,000 year old middle eastern culture. And would doubtless qualify for extermination in any future Nazi state. And he supports Chelsea and says “wicked!” and eats bacon ‘cos he likes it.

My conclusion: MOST if not ALL of us have “fusion” stories to tell.

During the Third Reich a large number of people were killed who had not even known they were “Jewish”, because grandparents or parents had converted and they had not been informed of their origin, hence a bit of a dual shock on the train to Auschwitz. Being inclusive, the Nazis exterminated people with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, even though within the Jewish tradition that made them “goyim” or non-Jews.

“England” (formerly Wessex, Mercia etc.), “Great Britain” (formerly England, Scotland and Wales) and “United Kingdom” (GB + Northern Ireland - itself a fusion of Irish, Scots and British, with some Viking genes thrown in) are ALL fusion concepts, BEFORE anyone comes here from anyone else. And many Cornish people argue they do not belong in any of those constructs.

Then, to take you as an example, you don’t have to spend long studying “Chinese” history to discover that “Chinese” is also a fusion construct, even before people migrate to Malaysia etc., and on elsewhere. And which is your country of origin - China or Malaysia?

Did you know that Icelanders reveal overwhelming mitochondrial DNA (passed from the mother) with Scottish origin, indicating that the original Icelanders were made up of Norse men and Scottish women. But then “Scottish” is a concept that refers now to an alleged nation North of England, but originally “Scottii” was the Roman / Latin name given to a tribe from the Irish island who conquered what is now Argyll.

Humans have been a fusion species since we started wandering out of the Rift Valley. Palaeontologists are still arguing whether or not we used to mate with the Neanderthals!

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: David Grey

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You can view the 5 minute version of David’s film about political prisoners the Grenada 17, Here’s Some They Locked Up Earlier, at the Channel 4 documentary site:

http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/film/film-detail.jsp?id=8061

This Guest Blog is part of the series of Fusion Stories. For more about the Fusion Stories series, go to the Category called Fusion Stories in the sidebar on the far right.

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Photo: Azman (left) and Ian (right).

Ian writes:

What would a British born Chinese know about Malaysian food? Very little it would seem, and that was certainly the case before I met my wife, who’s Malaysian Chinese. I’ve always been passionate about food (a little too passionate, my GP tells me) but Malaysians are even more so and it’s not surprising since their cuisine is simply sublime, with a wide range of tastes that reflects the melting pot of cultures in Malaysia.

On our trip to Kuala Lumpur last December, which is always a culinary delight, I tried some buns made by my wife’s aunts (4 sweet little old ladies who are fiendish in the kitchen). The buns had a savoury chicken filling, while the bread was of the softest, fluffiest texture. I asked the aunts to teach me their secret recipe for the buns, which they did, and so, armed with the recipe, we went back to London and tried it for ourselves.

Our bun making was quite a success, but we found that each time we made them, we couldn’t finish eating all the buns (12 in a batch) ourselves, so I thought, why not sell them? I used to frequent a Malaysian stall at Leadenhall Market run by a Malaysian couple, Azman and Naza. They do the most delicious nasi lemak and curry puffs. I had become familiar with Azman and thought that I would ask if he would let me sell the buns at his stall. I was really pleasantly surprised when he said yes.

I started off with a few chicken buns and gradually experimented with other fillings. I’ve now ended up with four different fillings, including sambal ikan bilis, which is typically Malaysian.

Market days are Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The buns are prepared beforehand (it takes about 3 hours to make a batch) and are baked in the morning. This is sometimes a frenzied affair if the buns don’t turn out for one reason or another and I have to keep baking until I have the requisite number of pretty looking marketable buns. I suppose I’m a bit of a perfectionist in that way! We typically set up the stall at about 11am when Azman trundles up in his 4×4 laden with food and apparatus. Azman’s offerings include rendang wraps, murtabak, bagedils, spring rolls, kuih bakar, cucur udang, nasi lemak, curry puffs and mee goreng. Everything is home cooked by Azman and Naza and is made from family recipes.

It doesn’t get busy at the stall until about 12pm, so we pass our time chatting with the other stall holders. There’s Annie and her aunt who sell cool ethnic jewellery, Borza who sells delectable olives, and Stuart who sells home made fudge, to name a few. The atmosphere at the market is great– all the stall holders are friendly and we help one another out, covering each other’s stalls when needed. Azman and I sometimes find ourselves waffling about the finer points of olives or the current jewellery trend!

Things start to pick up at the stall at about 12pm and continue up to about 2pm. Traffic at the stall is dependant on the weather (a big factor), what day it is (Fridays are good) and also the time of month (end of the month is best). We have our regulars, who come nearly every day. It’s a great feeling to know that people really enjoy our food! Although we have quite a number of Malaysian and Singaporean customers, they don’t make up the majority, which shows how cosmopolitan London is. Some of our customers also ask us to source items of Asian/Oriental food for them, which we are happy to do.

On a good day, we sell out everything at the stall and on a bad day, we have leftover food for dinner (great for my wife)! Our day at the stall typically ends with one of the stall holders buying a round of coffee while we compare notes on how well we did.

Work doesn’t end there though, as Azman and I dash back to our respective homes to prepare food for the next day if it’s a market day. For me, that involves preparing and making the buns from the time I get home up to about dinner time. On non-market days, I cook the fillings for the buns, which is a time consuming affair. Our kitchen now looks permanently like a war zone, with ingredients and kitchen implements taking up most of the room, much to my wife’s chagrin. We also try and experiment with new recipes, and one that we’ve just introduced is a chicken sambal puff. We try to keep things interesting for our customers!

We sometimes set up stalls at various festivals in London. You may see us at the South Bank festival later this year. We are also in the process of applying to set up stalls at various other markets in London, including Borough Market, so that we can share a taste of Malaysian food with more Londoners.

It’s hard work and tiring, but really satisfying to see people buying our home made food and giving us encouraging feedback. It’s also a nice change not to be at a desk job with a lunatic boss. One of the perks of the job, of course, is the constant supply of Malaysian food! Now, who can say no to that?

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: Ian Lee

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