1. 46 ELLE.MY
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WRITING
Five of our most brilliant and
acclaimed writers tell us what
Malaysia means to them
SMALL THINGS
BY TAN TWAN ENG
N
ear my mother’s house is a tai-chau restaurant where
she sometimes goes to ta-pau dinner. One evening,
shortly after my father’s death, I walk with her to the
restaurant. It’s six o’clock, but the cooks are already
firing up their stoves by the stagnant back drains.
She and my father have been going to that restaurant
regularly for over 10 years. The cooks greet her. They ask if
Uncle wants his usual yin-yong horfun with extra crackling.
They know that my father was ill, and they ask after his health.
They are saddened when she tells them that he has died. We
order and wait at a table by the open cooking area, declining
offers from pirated-DVD sellers.
“Eh.” My mother nudges me. “See that boy there?”
She indicates one of the kitchen helpers, a skinny boy of
about 15 or 16. Occasionally he smiles at my mother as he
chops cabbage and chicken for the rice and noodles going into
the cooks’ woks. His movements are deft; there’s an easy-going
banter between him and the other helpers.
“He keeps smiling at you,” I say. “Your boyfriend is it?”
“Choi!” my mother says. “But his complexion very nice,
isn’t it?”
I look again. The boy’s face is tofu-smooth. “Very nice.”
“It wasn’t always so smooth, you know,” says my mother.
The boy, she tells me, used to suffer from terrible acne.
He didn’t talk much and was always looking at his feet when
customers spoke to him. A few months ago, she took the boy
aside. “You should put some medicine for your face,” she said.
The boy looked confused. “Hah? Medicine?”
According to her, the boy had probably not even
finished his Form One; he seemed quite ignorant and naïve.
“Yes, go to the pharmacy. They’ll tell you what to use for
your acne.”
The boy mumbled something and rushed back to work
when one of the cooks shouted to him.
A week later my mother went to the restaurant again. As
the boy handed her the packet of yin-yong sarhorfun, she
pressed something into his hand. “Nah, take this. Rub it on
your face every morning and every night,” she told him. It was
a tube of acne cream she had bought at the pharmacy.
The place is filling up. The boy brings the plastic bag with
our food to our table. We pay, and he gives my mother another
quick, shy smile.
“Very nice complexion,” I tell her as we walk home.
“Last time we went to the shop, I told your father to look at
the boy. I told him what I’d done.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I shouldn’t be so kaypoh. He was worried I’d
offended the boy. But I told your father, aiya, it was just a small
thing only-lah.” She paused. “He shook his head, but he was
smiling too.” She paused again. “It was the last time he went to
the restaurant. He became too ill after that.”
In the fading twilight I glance at her. Maybe what she did
wasn’t so special, I think. It was, as she said, just a small thing.
But perhaps, every day all over KL, all over our country, people
are doing such similar acts of unsolicited kindnesses, these
small things, for complete strangers. I hope so, even if that
means diminishing what my mother did for the tai-chau boy
into something commonplace and unremarkable.
Outside her house gates, she hefts the plastic bag up to my
face. I can smell the fried rice; it’s making me hungry. “Yah,
and now that boy always gives me extra prawns and chicken
whenever I order from him,” she says, smiling.
Tan Twan Eng is the author of The Gift of Rain, longlisted for the
Man Booker Prize, and The Garden of Evening Mists, shortlisted for
the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize.
PEOPLE
ONCE UPON A COUNTRY
BY PREETA SAMARASAN
I
’m not convinced that the nation state is the best thing
for our planet or its peoples. I have no attachment or
allegiance to governments or borders; I carry a passport
because we’ve built a world in which one needs a
passport to move around. What I do have a profound
attachment to is place. Geography, history, food,
language, culture. And these things do not respect arbitrary
political borders. What matters to most of us — the idea
of home that makes the heart ache — runs deeper than
the vagaries of immigration policy. The Malay peninsula
sits almost exactly between South Asia and East Asia; this
position has shaped our history and our identity despite
the continuing efforts of chauvinist politicians, religious
literalists and corporations to erase that identity. Paul
Kingsnorth, who has explored the links between identity
and place at great and brilliant length, writes: “A nation
is a story that a people chooses to tell about itself, and
at its heart is a stumbling but deep-felt need for those
people to be connected to the place where they live and to
each other.” What will we do when nothing is left of the
place our parents and grandparents knew? When all we
have is shopping malls and American coffee chains and
American accents? I look at what Malaysia is becoming,
and then I look at the Malaya of P. Ramlee’s films, or even
“What matters to most of us — the
idea of home that makes the heart
ache — runs deeper than the vagaries
of immigration policy.”
the Malaysia of my own ‘80s
childhood, and I mourn for what
we have already lost. What it
means to me to be Malaysian —
to belong to this place — is to
feel fiercely protective of all our
stories, of the particular way we
tell them, of Manglish, the only language that fully conveys
all the nuances of the Malaysian experience. It is to seek
out grubby roadside stalls instead of hotel buffets. It is to
celebrate all the festivals and share all the food. It is to ache
for every demolished shophouse. It is to dream of limestone
hills and the arches and domes of a white railway station,
twenty-three years after I left them behind.
Preeta Samarasan is the author of Evening is the Whole Day,
which won the Hopwood Novel Award, was a finalist in
the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was longlisted for the
Orange Prize for Fiction.

2. 48 ELLE.MY
Leroy Luar won the Asia-Europe Foundation Short Story Contest at the 2013
Ubud Writers and Readers Festival for his short story, The Evidence of Us.
His work has also appeared in anthologies KL Noir and Love in Penang.
DEAREST MALAYSIA
BY LEROY LUAR
ELLE. MY 49
PEOPLE
THE MALAYSIA I CARRY WITH ME
BY SHIRLEY LIM GEOK-LIN
T
he Malaysia I carry with me is Chinese —
jok, ee char kwey, hum chee peng — and
Indian — thosai and putu piring — in
the morning; Malay — petai, sambal,
satay with shallots and ketupat — in the
afternoon; and Peranakan — pongteh,
buah keluak — in the evening. As a child this is
what my body understood as being Malaysian.
But food is not merely physical ingestion; it is
cultural heritage and symbolic action. My new
poetry collection includes a praise poem to buah
keluak, a dish made with the jungle nut whose
earthy flavour is akin to the truffle.
Buah Keluak
Uncrackable nut, poisonous nut
of childhood my Nyonya mother soaked,
washing mud to extract its cyanide
signature. Case tough as teak, robbed
gems for the five-year-old’s treasure cave,
which shazams years after the fruit’s
been picked in a Sumatran jungle.
Ah, that little ball of sweet dark earth
perfumes the mouth with delicious bitterness
only defanged poison long laved in rempah,
buah keras, belachan and chicken
yields. Like the story of stone soup
whose onions, cabbage, salt beef and thyme
sate the page. Except the stone nut had opened
its heart, except the mother had softened
its core, except the pithy poison’s leached,
that the mouth so blessed also opens
to praise the kitchen, so the dead will be
remembered and blessed in the eating.
The poem equates the mother’s labour,
transforming the poisonous nut to delicious
nourishment, to loving service the daughter
now understands as the blessings of family. As
I prepare Nyonya dishes in my California kitchen,
this is the Malaysia I’ve carried to the United
States, in my hands, my mouth and my work.
Shirley Lim Geok-Lin is the author of Monsoon
History, Among the White Moon Faces and
Joss and Gold, and a Commonwealth Poetry Prize
and American Book Award winner. Her latest poetry
collection is The Irreversible Sun.
Shih-Li Kow is the author of The Sum of Our Follies and Ripples
and Other Stories, nominated for the Frank O’Connor International
Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
A PIN ON THE MAP
BY SHIH-LI KOW
I
don’t leap out of bed in the morning thinking, “Yes! I am
Malaysian.” No, my patriotism is a covert emotion that
surfaces unexpectedly under duress and sometimes when
presented with a carelessly uttered “I am a global citizen”.
Rather, the business of being Malaysian is the mundane
reality that creeps up on me on my daily drive to work. The
sights are familiar, the people outside are strangers who look
familiar and I’m listening to the clever people on the radio
tell me stuff about the state of my country. Sometimes, I’m
entertained. Often, I worry.
Then I get to the office and I’m with people. We talk, work,
eat and do whatever it is that we do. With a little effort, like
exercising good manners, we navigate the layers of divides
and boundaries present among us. We choose the language
we speak, we remember taboos and we instinctively leave
space for differences to exist. It isn’t so difficult. Sometimes,
I hardly notice. Sometimes I do and it’s great.
To me, being Malaysian today is also to remember that
we were, not so long ago, gloriously cosmopolitan in our
own backyards. The world was here before ‘Truly Asia’
became a jingle. It is to know that to be good, we need not be
homogeneous. It is to see parts of me in others, to recognise
the same and different threads that make the same cloth and
not an opposing flag.
I’m not here as a token obeisance to my forefathers,
who came, loved and stayed. Neither am I here for the
schoolbook history of our independence, the food, the
festivities or the delight of hearing a well placed ‘lah’. I’m
here because I cannot imagine being this version of me
anywhere else and I’m thankful. This is, after all, my small
place in the sun. An uncertain place but a place nonetheless.
And a precious one at that.