Archive for the 'Malaysia' Category

It was only one week. I was in KL for only one week. And yet, I seem to have got very round and chubby from all the eating I did.

My parents and I spent much of the time trying to work out which restaurants I absolutely had to go and eat at. I only had a limited number of mealtimes in my week - lunch and dinner times 7 days equal 14 meals only! I needed to maximise them efficiently - rather like the best 5 Malaysian books to bring back with me in my suitcase, I had to identify the best 14 meals to have.

Let me say that of those 14 meals, the ones below ranked in the top 3:

Pic 1: Roast Suckling Piggy at Green View Restaurant, Petaling Jaya. Crispy, crunchy pork crackling to die for!

Pic 2: Giant prawns in chilli and garlic sauce, also at Green View. The pic is a bit blurry as I was too excited by the site of them! Each one was larger than my hand and full of succulent, tasty flesh.

Pic 3: The best “char siu” (barbecued pork) in the world, with roast duck, curry chicken, sour spicy vegetable and “archar” (curry pickle) at Siew Ngap Fei, Pudu. In London, the char siu is usually dyed red to con you into thinking it’s barbecued but here, it is truly barbecued with a caramelly, crunchy juicy crust. I used up two lunches eating here!

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A while back, I asked Sharon Bakar, the KL- based creative writing teacher, to recommend 5 books by Malaysian authors for me to take back with me to London when I went out to Malaysia for my week’s visit. She put the question to the readers of her blog and local readers and writers recommended a whole range of books. I limited it to 5 books in my request as that hopefully focused everyone on the best books that they could think of. I printed out their list and after one of my book events at an MPH bookstore while I was in KL, I bought the following books - in the end, more than 5 books after all!

A Malaysian Journey by Rehman Rashid - a personal memoir of one man’s journey to discover his homeland. The second edition has just come out, self-published by Rehman. In his introduction to the second edition, he writes movingly about how the success of the book co-incided with the collapse of his marriage and disasters in his journalism career. He had to bring the second edition out himself because no local publisher would touch it, due to elements of the subject matter. I have only just started reading it -he writes very well and evokes Malaysia vividly - and I am intrigued as to what elements in the book caused him such difficulty.

Silverfish New Writing 6 - a collection of short stories by various writers with a Malaysian connection. Some live abroad and others are Westerners living in Malaysia. The standard of writing is very high and the sense of place is stronger than in a number of the other short story collections I’ve come across. and I have been enjoying all the stories I’ve read so far.

This End of the Rainbow by Adibah Amin - a novel by a prominent Malaysian writer and columnist. I haven’t started it yet.

Dark City by Xeus aka Lynette Kwan - a collection of dark and macabre short stories. They are well-written and very readable though the first story made me a bit queasy with it’s graphic and detailed description of sexual abuse and rape, which for an Asian writer is pretty daring, I would say. Xeus has now turned editor and is calling for submissions of dark stories from other Malaysian writers for a second collection Dark City 2 - visit her blog to find out more. The one thing I’d like to see more of in these writings is a greater sense of place, a sense of Malaysia’s city/ cities as places which perhaps are characters in these dark stories or which may contribute to the darkness within the souls of the people who wander through these stories.

Write Out Loud - this was actually a gift by one of the short story writers whose story is in this collection, Ted Mahsun, a Fusion View regular reader and commenter. His surreal story about a a blender being rescued by alien electrical goods made me smile in its charming absurdity. Again, it would be good to get more of a sense that the stories in this collection are taking place in Malaysia - there is a feeling of generic “anyplace” about them which for me weakens their uniqueness as Malaysian stories.

Honk! if You’re Malaysian by Lydia Teh - this was a gift from the author when we met for lunch the other day. She has donated three copies for the Fusion View prize draw and generously added a fourth as my personal copy.

Photo: thanks to stockport.gov.uk

While I was in Malaysia, I met up with Lydia Teh, the current No. 1 bestselling local author. We caught up for a late lunch and talked about writing and all things Malaysian. Lydia writes a column on English usage in The Star, a national newspaper in Malaysia and has already published a number of books, collecting together her essays about Malaysian life. She blogs at Life’s Like That at www. lydiateh.wordpress.com. She wrote as a Guest Blogger for Fusion View a while back, about writing and publishing in Malaysia and it was an email from her asking about writing and publishing in the UK that prompted me to start the Getting Published series here on this blog. This was the first time I met her and I found her warm and kind, just as she comes across in her writing.

Her book “Honk! if You’re Malaysian” came out late last year and has alread sold out its first print run. A second edition is on its way. The book is a collection of writings about being Malaysian and also about the hot topics in the recent Malaysian news - for example, she talks with great humanity about the kerfuffle last year where a couple were arrested for holding hands in public. She also writes about the stereotypes of the Chinese, Malays and Indians that make up Malaysia in a warm and witty way that reaches across racial boundaries. If you are Malaysian, this is a fun book that will make you laugh in recognition. If you are not Malaysian, “Honk!” is a great introduction to all things Malaysian.

Lydia has generously donated three signed copies of “Honk! if You’re Malaysia” for the Fusion View prize draw. Winners will be chosen at random from my email subscribers list so do subscribe now if you haven’t already done so. Subscription is free and I will not use your email address for any other purpose. You can also unsubscribe at any time. You can view my subscription policy here.

The closing date for the prize draw is Monday 30 April 2007.

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Here are some pics from the Readings event on the Saturday afternoon, when I had the privilege of reading my work alongside talented, local writers.

Pic 4: With Sharanya Mannivanan, poet, and Eric Forbes
Pic 5: With Wong Pui Nam, celebrated playwright; Shan Mughalingam, well-known writer and his friend Christina
Pic 6: With Ted Mahsun, writer and blogger and his friend, Amina
Pic 7: With Mike, journalist for The Star and blogger
Pic 8: With Sharon Bakar, literary hub of the KL writing scene and Chet, writer
Pic 9: Reading from my work in progress

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I’m now back in London after a week in Kuala Lumpur and most importantly, I’m back at my computer and able to do fun things like upload photos and blog in writing about my whirlwind visit to my hometown.

Breakfast with Litbloggers

I will start off my series of written posts about my KL trip with a recap of the book events I was invited to in KL last Saturday. In the morning, I spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Breakfast with Litbloggers series organised by booksellers and book publishers, MPH. You can listen to my phoneblog (episode 6) about the event here. It seemed that anyone who was anyone in the blogging world was there - and I was thrilled that the latest UK-published Malaysian-writer Tan Twan Eng was also there. You can also read Sharon Bakar’s write up of the event over at her blog in her post Litbloggers Breakie and Yang-May for Breakfast - she also has some great photos, some of which I’ve reproduced below.

Pic 1: The Breakfast Club at MPH
Pic 2: With Eric Forbes, editor at MPH Publications
Pic 3: With Tan Twan Eng, author of The Gift of Rain

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While I am in Malaysia in the next 10 days or so, I will be having a go at Phone Blogging. The player below will be updated with a new episode every time I report by phone on my Malaysian trip. This page will headline Fusion View until Monday 05 March 07.00 am GMT.

Why Phone Blogging? Because I will be staying with my parents and the most up to date technology they have is an electric typewriter… So, I will not be able to update this blog using text.

I won’t be able to do any editing to the phone blog so it will essentially be like a live podcast from my phone

Also, I won’t be able to add any written notes to my phone report so the player will show only Episode 4*, Episode 5* etc. You can listen to each episode by clicking on the relevant episode in the player below. I will aim to record a report every other day so check back from time to time to hear the latest episode.

I hope you enjoy this experiment!

Alternatively, to launch a standalone version of the player, click on the button below.

* It starts with Episode 4 - I used up the previous episodes with “testing, testing”!

Photo: thanks to makinasu from flickr.com

I will be flying out to KL at the end of this week. On Saturday morning 24 Feb at 11am – 12.30pm, I will be speaking at the LitBloggers Inaugural event with Sharanya Manivannan at MPH Bangsar Village Phase II.

Kenny Mah has created a great banner for the event – at the end of this post. Thanks, Kenny! Do copy it and put it on your blog or email it to your friends.

If you can’t make the Saturday event, I will be at MPH Midvalley on Sunday 25 Feb at 3pm – 4.30pm doing book signings and to chat informally.

If you have any specific questions or issues on blogging or writing you’d like me to discuss at either of these events, why not add a comment or email me this week. Please do so by Thursday 22 Feb 6pm Malaysian time – I will be offline after that travelling.

Hope to see you this coming weekend!

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We’ve been having a great discussion about language and identity on Fusion View recently, with a number of comments from American and European perspectives as well as the East/ West view. I’ve also featured the longer comment by Matthew G on how being bi-lingual in English and Japanese brings out different aspects of his personality.

I had all these thoughts present in my mind this week when we went out to eat in London and found ourselves yet again having an extortionately expensive and depressingly untasty meal. It’s tiring to have one’s tastebuds dismayed and one’s wallet emptied so many times in London. It’s not just English food I’m feeling grumpy about - it’s cuisine from anywhere in the world served up in England, and specifically London. Perhaps in London and the high rents and a sense that the city is so huge that you don’t really have to offer great food, there’ll be enough people coming along to keep your restaurant afloat. Or perhaps it’s a state of mind.

When talking about food in Chinese, we have the word “heong”, which has no direct translation into English. In my mind, it means a combination of tasty, delicious, aromatic and lip-smacking. The taste occurs in the nose and palate as well as just the tongue. It involves more than just a taste like salty or sour or sweet - there are flavours and aromas and scents that happen as you chew and savour your mouthful. Sometimes, it’s about fried garlic or caramelized soy sauce or coriander or any other spice and other times it’s just about the aroma and flavour of whatever is the essence of the dish emerging.

I think it’s significant that there is no direct equivalent word or direct translation of this concept in English. If you don’t get the concept, how can you get the thing itself?

So if no-one around you cares about food being “heong”, why bother to try and create that experience for them just as a matter of course?

It is of course not true to say that all restaurants in England are awful and I am not saying that at all. I just think that there are a great many that are outrageously priced for the kind of tasteless dishes they offer up and it takes a lot of effort to find a good reasonably priced restaurant in England. In Malaysia, you can go to any road side stall run by someone from the back of their motorbike and have a really yummy laksa or fried noodles or satay for the equivalent of 50p. People expect their food to be “heong”, even at that end of the spectrum. Sigh. I feel very homesick for some “heong” food right now!

There’s been a flurry of comments in the last few days and I haven’t had a chance to respond to all of them. Some of them are quite thought provoking so I thought I’d highlight them all in a post.

First, thanks to yeeton for your helpful factual corrections on planes and the Canadian constitution.

My Great-Uncle Jackie has also visited to listen to the podcast of his eldest brother, my Grandfather telling the story of our family. He says, “He (Grandfather) sounds wonderful… just like the good ole days.”

There’ve been three comments on my podcast about my Two Voices. Mika, who is Japanese, pokes a little fun at herself and her effort to speak English. David, who is English, is reminded of how he had to learn to switch from “army speak” (ie lots of swearing) to “civvy speak” (more genteel polite language) with his family at home. Jennifer, who is American I believe, describes how she has learnt to switch from her higher-education voice to her working class voice as she moves between her working life and her family. I am fascinated by these stories of two voices within what seems to my eye a single linguistic culture ie English-English and American-American. In particular, to my ear, all American voices sound the same - except for the exaggerated elongated vowels of the Deep South that one hears in cowboy songs and movies. I am going to ask Jennifer if she will do a longer guest post for us to tell us more about her two voices and I hope she will agree.

Jennifer also comments on the unavailable video of the Star Trek mash-up and the conflict between copyright and the wide enjoyment of artistic endeavours. My view is that these mash-ups and parodies and excerpts that are put out on the web are done by fans who want to share their passion for a particular movie or show. I say: what a great way of free advertising and marketing for the originator of that movie or show. The free viewings on the web don’t take a piece of the pie from the film etc - in fact, it increases people’s interest in the real thing. Take the ad for Molson beer that’s several years old, where Joe talks proudly about being Canadian - it is parodied by William Shatner (who of course himself is parodied in the Star Trek mash-up). Its being shown on YouTube raises millions of people’s awareness of the brand all over the world and not just Canada - a wider audience, I bet, than the original audience numbers when the ad was first aired on Canadian TV. The parody of it by William Shatner does the same, by making people go and seek out the Molson ad that it parodies. So Molson should be overjoyed about the ad being shown on YouTube rather than insisting on it being removed from this free viewing platform.

I also got a visit from Jim, the Grey Surfer I featured. I just love the weaving of the web and how so many connections can be made through comments and links with a diverse range of people who share one thing - the passion to communicate.

And speaking of oldies who blog, my Dad’s post on Memories of Malaya have been very popular. The most recent comment was from Khairudin, another young guy, this time in Singapore. It’s great that blogging seems to be reaching out across the generations.

Pey and Lydia, two Malaysians, have taken part in my Book Lovers Poll - and hopefully, they attest against the statement I heard that Malaysians only read 2 books a year. If you haven’t yet taken the poll, you can do so now by going to the blue box in the sidebar on the right. It’s anonymous and takes only one click, so please do take part!

And I must thank Pey for expanding on my post about the use of “-lah” in Malaysian English. It’s all about tone. So if I were to try to cajole you in Malaysian English to take the Book Lovers Poll, I would say, “Go on-lah. Takes only a second. Just for fun only-wat. Do the poll-lah.” “Wat”? What’s “wat”? That’s another cajoling noise like “-lah”: it just felt natural to put it there!

So this post is a bit of a chop-suey (English version of Chinese for mixed vegetables!) or campur-campur (Malay for mixed bag) but I wanted to thank everyone who left a comment and also highlight some of the comments that made me stop and think.

Working on the Malaysian English of my third novel has made me think about that peculiarly Malaysian word “-lah”. It’s not really a word, I suppose - more a suffix used from time to time in colloquial Malaysian English as an emphasiser. “-Lah” is used only in Malaysia, as far as I know.

There’s a great entry in Wikipedia about Malaysian English with a section on the use of “-lah”. The entry implies that it derives from Chinese rather than Malay, although there is a suffix “-lah” used in Malay. I believe that the usage and context of the sound in Malay and Malaysian English are different - the “-lah” of Malay is a grammatical element that is integral to the language whereas “-lah” in Malaysian English can be dropped without changing the meaning. This is my lay person’s understanding - if there are any linguists or academics out there who would like to comment or deepen our understanding on this point, please do add a comment!

There’s also long discourse on Malaysian English - aka Manglish to afficionados - at Malaysia Uncut.

I speak in Manglish with my family and Malaysian friends and happily slip into “-lah” this and “-lah” that. If an English friend is also present, I can switch to full English English in the same breath as I turn towards them. My English friends who have visited Malaysia use “-lah” when remembering the fun times they had on their visits - but it sounds weird when tacked onto a proper English English sentence!

I’d love to hear from Malaysians living in Malaysia or abroad about your emotional connection with “-lah” and/ or Malaysian English. And also any migrants to Malaysia from other English speaking countries - have you got the hang of Lah-Lah land?

Photo: thanks to gamleys .co.uk