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It's been a hard week, and I've been feeling a bit homesick about the country I grew up in - Malaysia. Having been born there, I didn't see it as anything particularly special, and I didn't use to understand why people would willingly go to these countries, but now I do. And I started writing about it, and it grew into a whole essay, so here you go.
I lived there for sixteen years of my life, and after having seen many other parts of the world I can confidently say there's really no other place like it. Maritime Southeast Asia is a ridiculously colourful and culturally heterogenous place, with Malaysia being no exception, and this seems to rear its head in virtually every part of society. Even the groups stemming from prehistoric Malaysia are stupidly multiethnic, with the famous current day Orang Asli hunter-gatherer population being highly heterogenous and having populated Peninsular Malaysia in distinct waves of migration. The Malay ethnic group itself is subdivided into many ethnolinguistic subgroups and the first time a coherent Malay identity arose was only during the 15th century Sultanate of Malacca, which introduced many aspects of modern-day Malay culture and syncretised the Old Malay language with Arabic and Persian influences, merging them with its original Austronesian roots. All while this was happening the first Chinese properly immigrated to the Malay peninsula, in a period of good relations between Ming China and the Sultanate of Malacca. Some of them settled down and intermarried with Malays, and an extant syncretic ethnic group and culture called Peranakans originated from this process. Minangkabau from Indonesia also came to the peninsula over the years, forming large permanent communities in many states. Tamil traders settled in the capital city of Malacca, forming yet another hybrid group called the Chetti Melakans who speak a Malay patois with many Tamil loanwords, and Malacca slowly became one of the most important cities for trade, welcoming people from many corners of the globe.
The Portuguese arrived in the 1500s and occupied Malacca as a possession of the Portuguese East Indies, attempting to snatch up this crucial choke point in order to get the upper hand over Venice. They, too, ended up forming a longstanding syncretic community in Malacca called the Kristang, a group with primarily Portuguese and Malay ancestry and which developed their own minority creole language still spoken today. Portugal also encouraged the immigration of mixed-race Catholic converts from India, and still others made it to Malacca from Portuguese colonies in Brazil, East Timor, Africa, and Macau. Then the Dutch captured Malacca and employed a lot of Malaccan Chinese, whom they found industrious, to construct Dutch buildings. The flow of Chinese and Indian immigration continued throughout the colonial period, and peaked during British colonisation specifically. British officers made their first incursion into Malaysia with the 1786 settlement of Georgetown and slowly expanded into the rest of the peninsula, and as they did so millions of Chinese immigrated to work in pepper cultivation and tin mining. By the 19th century, nearly five million Chinese had immigrated, and stable communities quickly formed. Tamil Indians were employed in plantations through the Kangani system, and their population boomed. Chinese populations took a hit during Japanese colonisation and specifically during Sook Ching, when they conducted organised mass killings of Malaysian Chinese men (an event that had wide-reaching effects, including on my own family; Japanese officials called up the brother of my great-grandfather for interrogation and no one ever saw him again), but regardless these populations remain very prominent up into the modern day.
Got all of that? Good, I've explained maybe 5% of the whole story and there are very many more cultural shifts and migrations to cover, but that would require an entire history book to fully explain. In any case, the sheer amount of cultural variety that exists here shows up very prominently in the language and cuisine and urban landscape. "Melting pot" doesn't even begin to describe it. Virtually everyone in Malaysia is multilingual, and it's not uncommon for their sentences to consist of a schizophrenic blur of Malay and Cantonese and Hokkien and Tamil and English. They're not even necessarily speaking formally recognised creoles, they're just finding the best word from every local language to convey what they mean and seamlessly blending different syntax rules as they go. Even aspects of life as mundane as public holidays have been profoundly affected by this - the list of holidays has become mindbogglingly long, just so every major ethnoreligious group's holy days can be accounted for. The religions themselves have also begun to syncretise and form strange little micro-cultures of their own; for example Chinese communities on the peninsula have long worshipped local Malay-Muslim guardian spirits collectively called Datuk Kong, and you can see little red shrines dedicated to them all around Malaysia. When Chinese devotees pray to them, they customarily abstain from consuming pork or alcohol on that day, and offerings also exclude those things as a gesture of deference to the Malay origin of these deities.
The historic port towns of the straits, Georgetown and Malacca, are particularly good examples of this cosmopolitanism. They play host to a gaudy and eclectic soup of different cultural traditions, featuring everything from Dutch colonial squares that now host open-air markets operated by ethnic Chinese and Malays and Indians, to stately British government buildings and Anglican churches nestled amongst rows and rows of vibrant Wes Anderson-esque Peranakan shophouses, to fragrant, incense-filled Taoist-Buddhist-Confucian temples located just down the street from Islamic mosques and Hindu temples, to waterside heritage mansions with a fine view of traditional stilt clan villages built into the waters of the strait, and so on. Sometimes you find really unexpected things in the urban sprawl, like a polyglot letterpress printing house in Malacca that happens to be one of the oldest in the world, or an unassuming heritage home in Georgetown where Sun Yat-Sen made his plans to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, or a colourful 1850s working temple in the suburbs of Penang filled with free-roaming pit vipers that are believed to be the reincarnated disciples of a deified monk. These straits cities are unpretentious places in a perennial state of glorious decay, swamped with humidity, buffeted by monsoons and assaulted with swarms of flies and mosquitoes, but the urban fabric blends an unimaginable number of disparate traditions together in a way that feels completely natural. Outdoor markets are everywhere, and they're packed to the brim with a mindboggling array of foods that borrow influences from varied parts of the globe. There's Chinese-Malaysian fare like char kway teow and bak kut teh (respectively: wok-fried flat rice noodle and herbal pork ribs soup), there's Malay delicacies ranging from ikan pari bakar to nasi lemak to air bandung (spicy grilled stingray, rice cooked in pandan leaf with homemade sambal, and rose syrup milk), there's weird hybrid cuisines like Peranakan cuisine that offer up dishes such as asam laksa, otak-otak, cendol (tamarind and mackerel noodle soup, spiced fish cakes wrapped in banana leaf, pandan jelly shaved ice), and more. Maritime Southeast Asia features a syncretism you don't really find anywhere else and it's simultaneously overwhelming and kind of magical at the same time. You think it’s bewildering reading about it? Try living there. If you ever get the chance to visit, I recommend it and think an outsider would have a great time in spite of all the obvious third world-ness. Malaysia's a lot of things, but it's never boring.
That's the good side of multiculturalism - in fact, it's multiculturalism at its very best, seeing all of these different traditions and value systems bump up against each other and interact in interesting ways. The darker side is that multiculturalism is typically not a terminal value for most ethnic groups; it is superseded by many other group-based considerations and affiliations in spite of all the syncretism, and the "melting pot" contains all these fine little gradations of difference which quickly resolve into large-scale tribal groups once you look a little deeper. And it's necessary to note here that people are typically not actively expressing prejudice towards each other in broad daylight, in fact they live with each other quite frictionlessly in day-to-day life, but all of that finely tuned ethnic tolerance is reliant on - how do I say this - peace treaties and other such understandings negotiated between the various ethnic groups that maintain the cosmopolitan state of affairs. Not all of their terms are good or even remotely reasonable. These treaties have failed before, and when they fail, people die. Hell, Singapore was ejected from the federation in no small part because of racial politics, and all the way back at the founding of Malaya as an independent nation, the cracks in this multicultural vision were already beginning to show. Malaysia possesses one of the longest-standing and most egregious examples of racial affirmative action I've encountered, established to placate ethnic Malays after tribal conflict escalated to the point where they massacred a good number of Malaysian Chinese in Kuala Lumpur for eroding their traditional majority in Parliament and supporting the principle of colour-blindness and also just doing too well economically, with bodies disposed of in unmarked graves near leper colonies and thrown into rivers. Any vaunted dream of a melting pot without ethnic conflict was just that - a dream, and it's part of the reason I left in the first place. But I can't help but look back at all of the good stuff and feel a little bit wistful about it all. The culture is fascinating, the food is among the best you'll find in the world, and there's a buzziness and vibrancy to it that's honestly infectious.
There's probably many people who think of Malaysia as some kind of irrelevant backwater, but it's actually surprisingly developed for a Southeast Asian country. For a good couple decades the country has been charging headlong into economic modernity, and the level of infrastructure you can find in parts of Kuala Lumpur might be surprising for the average outsider. Frankly, that's not without its discontents - there's a strong nostalgia for an older, sweeter, more innocent Malaysia, one where the cities were quieter and more traditional, one where people regularly lived in kampungs and cycled through groves of primary rainforest just to visit other nearby villages. It's like the Malaysian analogue to the 80's nostalgia in the West, except possibly even more potent; my dad has regaled me with stories from his childhood about a much more rural Penang, a beautiful mix of reality and fantasy where he could ride his bike down to the beach without seeing a single modern condominium and follow isolated, traffic-free trails into the hinterlands of the island where monkeys and chickens freely roamed. Cartoonists like Lat who paint intimate pictures of childhood in a Malaysian kampung are highly popular within the country, and strike something buried deep in the heart of national consciousness that seems to yearn for the good old days, filled with stilt houses and cycle rickshaws and other icons of Old Malaysia. This idyllic image of a Malaysia that once was has become a source of national identity, as much as their melting-pot cities are, and many spots in the city now attempt to foster that traditional vibe. But the constant cultural shapeshifting hasn't stopped, and it won't any time soon.
I'm actually considering going back someday just to see all the stuff I missed when I was living there. It's a bit strange thinking about all the things you don't notice about your own home country when you grow up there, realising that you've only come to appreciate them when you're gone.
You have made Malaysia sound very charming! I had already planned to do a combined Singapore-Kuala Lumpur trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, and you’ve inspired me to want to visit more of the country! I’m nowhere remotely as well-traveled as @2rafa, so I’ll almost certainly hit you up for some tips and recommendations once my trip idea actually starts congealing into concrete plans.
(EDIT: I picked a random spot in Malacca on Google Street View, and I’m immediately confronted with a food truck advertising, in English, “Luojia Stinky Tofu.” I am committed to being as adventurous an eater as possible during this trip, but I may have to draw the line at anything where “stinky” is considered a selling point.)
It is very charming, and I'm glad I made you want to see more of Malaysia! I'd be happy to offer specific recommendations at any point, but will say upfront that many locals see Ipoh, Georgetown and Malacca as nice towns, and I would agree they're must-sees if you're interested in cultural sites - the old-town areas of Georgetown and Malacca have been inscribed as UNESCO world heritage sites, if that's worth anything to you. Penang in particular is widely acknowledged as having good food (though any discussion about which city/state has the best food in Malaysia inevitably devolves into a regional flame war). For more natural things to do, I distinctly remember climbing into a wooden boat as a kid and having a local man sail my family and I around the coastal mangroves at night, seeing the swampy thicket get lit up with thousands upon thousands of fireflies. There are a number of places in Malaysia where you can do this, I won't claim to know which one offers the "best" experience.
From a brief google search it looks like that food truck is selling the Changsha variant of stinky tofu, which is a popular Chinese dish made by immersing tofu in a brine of fermented milk, meat and vegetables, then deep frying until it's black and crunchy on the outside. I have tried it before and think it's really good when done well, but isn't necessarily a core part of Malaysian cuisine (it's more associated with Mainland China). Still, it’s nice and there are a lot of very fermented foods in Malaysia that are worth trying, anything with shrimp paste in it for example - also, there's some Malaysian takes on stinky/fermented tofu as well.
This is a big ask, but if you're from the area, can you outline the general cultural and economic circumstances of each Southeast Asian country? I have thought that someday learning a language of Southeast Asia could be fun and enlightening on how other (poorer) cultures see the world, but I'm not sure which one yet. Indonesian/Malaysian seems like the easiest one of them, and it gets bonus points for being a relatively well off nation, sharing a language with Singapore, and also giving me some insight on how Islamists view reality.
The other option is using my kanji knowledge from Japanese to learn some Chinese, but I cracked open a textbook a few months ago and thought "dude, screw this".
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