Amazing Char Siew

For some of the best char siew, look no further than Meng Kee, in 13 Tengkat Tong Shin, Kuala Lumpur. It’s quite hard to locate, but.. damn. It really does taste like “bak kwa on steroids and pimped up with a greasy sugary coating… [like] pork-flavored candy with a greasy after-taste”, according to the Travelling Hungryboy. He’s right. But it isn’t just that—this stuff is heavenly.

My attempt at clearer directions: if you’re familiar with Jalan Alor (behind Bukit Bintang), this place is pretty nearby, on Tengkat Tong Shin itself. There’s a brick building somewhere opposite Number Eight Guesthouse (great place to stay, by the way)—there isn’t a sign or a signboard, but a tiny little counter in the corner with some chickens and pork has a small “Meng Kee” sign written on it. You’ll know it’s the right one when you see the queue, and the chaotic char siew sellers shouting at each other (and the customers) in Cantonese.

This stuff is so good I think I can die in peace because I had it yesterday. They start at 10:45 am and sell out by 1pm or earlier.

While you’re at it, also help yourself to the famous Ngau Kee beef noodles on the same street. Malaysian hawker food makes me depressed. Why can’t I have good hawker food in my city too?

Conquer the Chinese Language, Conquer the World

Almost exactly a year ago, a crazy old man told me (in Chinese, of course) that I will be phenomenally successful, “not just regular successful”. That before this can happen, I had to unlock the secret to my success. Apparently the key to success is different for everybody, but I had the good luck to be stuck with the hardest of them all: “conquer the Chinese language, my girl, and you will conquer the world.” That scared the hell out of me. Why couldn’t I have something… simpler?

It’s a fine language, a beautiful language, that much I’ll grant you—there is no other language quite like it. Four words in the Chinese language come together to say so much more, so much more eloquently and spectacularly and succinctly, than what I could say in four sentences in English. It’s my native language, and, contrary to popular opinion, I speak it everyday, along with one other Chinese dialect. I’m not entirely Chinese illiterate. While I can’t read classical Chinese texts (who can, other than the Chinese literature students?), I do fine with reading history books, newspapers and novels in either simplified or traditional Chinese. But reading and writing Chinese is hard; being a master of it takes years. If you want to know how hard the Chinese language is, read this article. When I say it’s hard, I don’t mean it’s hard to speak it well. I mean it’s hard, in my opinion at least, to read and write Chinese at the same level of sophistication that most people, myself included, are able to attain with written English or most other languages in a relatively short while. That’s what I’m struggling with at the moment—I want to write better in Chinese. My brain just doesn’t work that way yet, apparently. Maybe it’s because I never read as widely or as obsessively in this language, as I did in English.

The writing system is beautiful, I can’t stress that enough. Any writing system that works without alphabets is, to my easily impressionable mind, a work of art and an utter mystery. It’s like painting, sometimes, like when three dots on the left hand side mean that word has to do with water (representing water droplets). My Chinese teacher in primary school liked emphasizing: if you look at the old Chinese character for love, it’s quite literally the various components depicting “warmth over a roof over a heart over a friend” (this sounds so much better in Chinese). Which she then extrapolated into—love is a friend you love with a roof over your heads, which creates great warmth! I think our ancestors got that right. Then there’s the problem challenge of the four sounds. Remember how the Chinese language doesn’t have an alphabet? As it turns out, it not only doesn’t have an alphabet, it gets better: the word, cong, would sound to the untrained ear, almost exactly the same as chong, and I’d wager you’d have trouble telling those apart from zong and zhong too. It doesn’t help that those are all distinct syllables, and that in each of those syllables there are then four possible sounds. So cong1, cong2, cong3 and cong4 are entirely different beasts—and! It gets better, because in each of the sounds of each syllable, like cong1, there are hundreds of different possibilities, entirely distinct words.

I never hated the language. I hated the way the Chinese language was being taught here in Singapore, how it made whole generations of people perceive this to be a dead, and deadly boring language whose rewards were never quite worth the effort. And it took effort, a lot of it. Like many people here I think I hadn’t used it in a few years ever since passing my last major Chinese examination, but a variety of things have led to a recent, relentless pursuit of improving my reading and writing skills. That strange old man’s proclamation may have something to do with it. My pet research topic—my current academic writing and freelance journalism efforts focus mostly on post-world war Chinese and Southeast Asian military history; think the Communists, Kuomintang, the transnational themes of the time, the Malayan Communist Party, the Emergency, etc—have the majority of sources, references and texts in Chinese books and essays. And at this point it appears my full time photojournalism career will take place mostly in and around China. I wish I was just slightly better at this. It’s one thing to read a Chinese newspaper or romantic novel, and quite another to find yourself wading at the deep end of the pool, dictionary in hand, reading academic, literary Chinese.

The strides have been tremendous. I think I started getting serious about wanting to improve my Chinese about two months ago. I started by exploring the Chinese web, reading Baidu news instead of Google news. That progressed to Chinese articles I find myself enjoying more than I thought I would. These days I find myself standing in the peak hour trains, scanning the back and front pages of the Chinese news in several seconds, something I was never able to do before (I used to read slowly and deliberately, with a habit of pondering upon every character I saw). Just yesterday, in the middle of dinner with an amazing scholar and his Chinese writer friend, it hit me—I’m not too bad! I’ve managed several hours of talking about the Malayan Communist party, the transnational guerilla war, and sociological themes… in Chinese (with a Chinese scholar who speaks the way he writes—in highly literary Chinese), without even realizing it! I find that in the span of two short months, I have made tremendous progress. Reading comes very easily to me now. It wasn’t so much a struggle in the past as it was a mental ‘dragging of the feet’, but it (my brain) now flies along. Next step: writing natively.

For some reason, all this has suddenly become important to me. A major project I’ve recently undertaken involves the Malayan Communist Party and that fascinating period in our part of the world. The English accounts are by and large staid, academic, and clinical. The Chinese transcripts, oral histories, books, memoirs, outnumber the English version by several times, and also seem to tell the story of this history that I love, so much more vividly, comprehensively, being the untranslated voice of the ‘losers’ of this history, after all. It’s a struggle, no doubt, but I feel lucky that I’m coming from the middle and trying to do this starting from somewhere (i.e. slightly literate), rather than from scratch. So this might take 10 years, instead of 20. And then when I get there, wherever it is (being published in Chinese?), given the way this language works, I’ll probably realize: oh my God, there’s another lifetime ahead of me, in learning this crazy language of mine.

That’s why Chinese people work so hard. We’re used to it, everything else seems easy.

P.S. Having nciku the amazing web dictionary open in another tab makes this process a whole lot easier!

My City

My city is often made out to be a boring business city, sterile and lifeless. Not entirely. No amount of protestation at how we’re really unique, though, is effective in driving home the truth about (some parts of) my city—how there are bits you can really love, if you look hard enough.

My city, tonight, started off innocuously enough, with a solo train ride back to the city from the airport. Wondering around the east, feeling like I’m exploring a new country altogether, one I only go to in order to leave and return to the country, before running back towards the familiarity of the places I know and the places I love.

Little India was my first love. It was here where I wandered about, as a kid visiting relations, demanding ice cream and discovering kulfi, my first taste of something new, different, bold—pistachio, spices, cream, all the better to quench the heat. Then as a teenager, discovering the back roads of Little India, talking to everybody, wandering into every shop; how I can always count on being fed for free by Indian hawker families who now treat me as their own niece, how after twenty years, I am still in awe, still finding new places, new tastes, and new people. Then going to places like Triplicane, Chennai, and feeling entirely in my element, knowing where to find things and occasionally, what to say.

Then Arab Street, adjacent, separated only by that canal. It is a walk I make often, in either direction, past the thieves’ market at Sungei Road where I followed my father to as a child, complaining, sweating under the heat looking at old, dirty things and deciphering rude Hokkien shouts they call Hokkien conversation, which I now love. Past Kelantan Road, which I know for the laksa my mother loves. Jalan Besar: that Chinese fringe of Little India. Kitchener Road, Maude Road, Tyrwhitt Road. The parts in which I find myself, often, thinking of as Scissor Cut Curry Rice, Pu Tien (Henghwa restaurant), Min Chung (Henghwa coffeeshop, amazing clams), and Northern Thai (what was once my favourite tomyam soup haunt, with fried fish).

My city, tonight. First off the train into the city, then Haji Lane, Bussorah Street, Arab Street, Kandahar Street. These are the streets where my memories, both happy and tragic ones, were made. Then that walk across that canal and into Little India; years before I was born my grandfather worked at that huge market in the area, now I know it almost instinctively. Desker Road—you know it for the transvestite brothels—I know it for Usman, the Pakistani coffeeshop at the end of the street, in bright blue. Shahi paneer, fried dhal, kadai chicken, and the first palak paneer that even remotely agreed with my by now demanding tastes for food from this region. They knew us, we regulars; after all this is where I once ran up a tab for the copious amounts of tea I used to drink here. Tonight I was here with someone more regular than I, someone who could actually speak their language (someone so regular they deliver to his doorstep when he asks!). My rudimentary Hindi won me plenty of points.

If you don’t know a thing about South Asian cultures, you might find Little India one big, scary, monolith (I still find it appalling that Chinese people here think there is a language called “Indian” and one uniform “Indian identity”). But you get the South Indian, Tamilian influence everywhere along Little India, them forming the primary Indian population after all; but the further north you get, the more diverse. Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants and shops, sporadic and not entirely large enough to form Little Pakistan or Little Bangladesh, but thousands of miles out of the subcontinent, co-existing in harmony. Tonight, I wolfed down my lovely Pakistani meal, had a never-ending discussion about travel in Pakistan and Mughal-e-Azam, then popped over to a Bangladeshi restaurant on “Bangla Square” to get us a misti doi each.

Cultures clash so often in this part of the world, I really shouldn’t be surprised anymore—but as I made vain attempts to show off what little Bengali I knew (this doesn’t take very much effort for a yellow girl), the owner of the place spun around from the hilsa he was scooping and said: ni zai wo de guo jia… zou lai zou qu ma? (were you walking around in my country, Bangladesh?), and was happy I’d been to his “native” (Rongpur). He apparently worked in Taipei for a while, and his Mandarin was probably as bad good as my Bengali. But still. The misti doi was great. The misti doi made me ache a little for the subcontinent. As a parting shot, I took a stab in the dark and asked if he would know where I could buy Hemanta Mukhopadhyay’s Bangla music. This being Little India, after all, he shouted out of his shop—someone came running by waving a TV controller about shouting “what is it?”—and promptly led me away to a little cornershop in an alley. The name? Dhaka Corner. They had my Mukhopadhyay, as well as the Ornob album I wanted, and recommended a new Bangladeshi popstar called Habib, who really is excellent. All this, just a stone’s throw away from where I spend so much of my time, Mustafa Centre. So in one evening alone, I had dinner at a Pakistani restaurant with a Nepali boy and some Chinese friends (and generally felt like we were showing them around a new country), bought misti doi from a Chinese-speaking Bangladeshi, found the Bengali music I’ve wanted for ages, then long conversations about Lahore with random intriguing Pakistanis.

Some nights, I really love my city. Tonight was one of them.

Fly Yeti

I don’t know how this slipped off the radar!

Another interesting development in the Asian low cost carrier space—Air Arabia, that huge Sharjah-based low cost airline with an extensive network in the region (Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Armenia, Jordan, India, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, etc), is now in a joint venture with Nepal’s Yeti Airlines. The new carrier, Fly Yeti, uses Kathmandu as a hub to Delhi, Bangkok, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Hong Kong, and… Kuala Lumpur! A friend of mine from Sharjah who studies in Singapore just booked herself a return flight home at S$680 with taxes all in—compared to her usual price of $1800. The layover in Kathmandu isn’t a bad thing at all :)

This is superb news, second only to AirAsia X actually starting their flights to Europe, if when that ever happens.

I’ll be trying to get myself on one of these Fly Yeti flights, just so I can say I’ve flown Nepal’s first low cost airline (so crazy expensive to get in and out of that country, previously, by my admittedly low standards). I’ve flown many low cost carriers named for animals (Tiger, Druk, and Nok on their short-lived Bangalore-Bangkok route), and thought Nok—which means Bird—was weird enough in introducing their cabin crew with a Nok prefix to all their names (bird this, bird that).

But. To fly an airline named for the abominable snowman? Amazing.

The Miele Guide

I’ve spent the last couple of months working on a handful of projects.

Most of them don’t look like they have anything to do with each other, but they allow me to spend my time dealing with the things I love.

It must be apparent that one of my great passions is food, given how much I talk about food; I love all forms of it. Asia’s amazing variety of street food is my first love—nothing beats sitting in some hole in the wall somewhere in Syedpur, Bangladesh, eating rui (a fish; my fave part of Bengali food, a cuisine I heart to bits but get too little of) with my hands. But I also love, in equal amounts, restaurants. Fine dining, wine, the works.

So I did what any food lover would do. Get involved in an exciting food-related project. The Miele Guide, Asia’s first truly independent regional restaurant guide, has gone online. The site is fairly bare at the moment but will, from next month, play host to an online voting process which will help shape the contents of the upcoming publication. Big thanks to Aen and Uzyn, the wizards I hired to put this project online, and the rest of the Miele Guide team. That Michelin announced what it did yesterday only makes this space that much more exciting. :)

If you love food too, do please sign up at the site to be notified when voting begins.