Eggs, Soldiers & Opium
Entry 009 | 1.12.24
The place looked like it’d been carved out of the side of a shipping container. Thick steel slats in a fading-freight red framed a cavernous rectangular entrance, and out of the shadow sprawled rows of plastic trestle tables coloured a deep ocean blue and speckled with gold and clustered around were low stools the colour of the sky and atop all of these, hunching Malaysians, busy mopping up breakfast, sipping sweet masala tea and assumably chewing the first fat of the morning.
We wondered if indeed this was the fabled establishment, and for a while wandered around out front, strolling this way then back, peering in and out, all the time holding a phone in the air, gawking at the screen like a pair of twin gimps, until finally a kindly Indian gentleman ushered us in, having probably witnessed the same clueless dance from a thousand foreigners before.
He sat us at the last two stools on the closest trestle to the sidewalk. Here we were happy, under the awning’s shade and in the company of two Malaysians, a burly man, compact and powerful like a pitbull, a tight black lycra t-shirt and durag hugging his thick frame and square sweating head, his wrist and hands burdened by weighty gold bracelets and ornate rings like knuckledusters and a fat yellow G-shock wrapped around the other wrist. Who I assumed to be his wife found greater modesty in her black hijab, but the designer handbag hanging from her shoulder did its best to carry the show. They smiled when we sat and continued eating as we communicated to the kindly Indian gentleman that we’d have two of whatever they were having.
Mornings in Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
In fact, all the staff were Indian. Inside and to the right of the dim room was a long kitchenette, stacked with those plastic cups brought out for only one occasion back home, children’s birthday parties, and for only one beverage, Just Juice diluted to an inch of its existence by your Aunty Jane. Besides the neat stacks of cups towered two steel behemoths, an industrial thermos a piece for Milo and tea, and besides those, a giant flat roti pan sizzling away. A few men worked hard and fast behind this assembly line, sloshing hot Milo onto chunks of ice, frothing back and forth teh tarik from great heights, and slinging rotis with all the elegance and grace of the very best Napolese pizzaiolo.
Indian. Indian. Indian. Why must I keep making this distinction?
It’s not that we’d never met a kindly Indian gentleman before, they’re as abundant as daisies in a meadow — so beautifully common you might take their existence for granted. Nor because Indian gentlemen are of any real fascination to me (Memphis, I cannot speak for). No, we made that walk in that desperate heat under that commanding Lumpuran sky with no real time at all before our bus to catch because Malaysia has a magnificent rigidness to its multiculturalism. A rigidness that influences its politics as abhorrently as its cuisine wonderfully. My days spent perusing museums and monuments throughout Asia, as well as wandering the limitless halls of Wikipedia, continue to remind me of the crises ethnic distinctions may alight when society withers from forest to tinder. Yet, my nights amongst cheap tables and low chairs speak to the vibrant fusions that may be manifested when they endure. For Malaysia’s decaying colonial facades are as colourful and eclectic as the people who live behind them. The filigree and fretwork, as perfect a blend of flourish and balance as the dishes served beneath. Its recent history, proportionally imbalanced, charred and sour, at times deadly-violent and still simmering under the surface like the curried blend wafting over to where we sat.
Decaying fades, rigid culture.
Melaka, Malaysia
Same same, but different.
Melaka, Malaysia
The modern nation-state comprises two distinctly different geographical regions, originally split by colonial manoeuvring between the British and Dutch and physically entrenched by the South China Sea. To the West — Peninsular Malaysia, formerly British Malaya — shares its northern border with southern Thailand, is built up, coloured by colonialism and a couple centuries of migration. Three distinct peoples cohabit here in some contemporary surface-level harmony — the Ethnic Malay, Malaysian Indian, and Malaysian Chinese. The food, you ask? It’s alright.
To the East lies Malaysian Borneo, the formerly independent states of Sarawak and Sabah (speaking of Wikipedia wandering, Sarawak has a fascinating history as it was formerly ruled by the Brooke family — the ‘White Rajas’ — a hereditary dynasty of British explorers, whom I hope to touch on in the future, but in the meantime, I urge you to look up James Brooke), is a megadiverse region with pristine, translucent waters lapping against white shorelines that exist for a bright and brief but beautiful moment before disappearing into what’s left of the jungle. A place where lone orangutans trudge through ashen forest slash, confronting twenty-ton diggers like the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, armed with nothing but hairy knuckles and a common fury imbued in all gingers. I have never been, and hear there is still some jungle and the odd surviving orang left to see.
But a thousand kilometres to the west and back across the South China Sea, it was morning, and mornings in Kuala Lumpur call for but one delight — the glorious and esteemed roti canai. A Malaysian breakfast staple, roti canai are, to me, a flaky, buttery kind of flatbread naan and are courtesy of the Mamak Muslim Indians — a diaspora from Tamil Nadu in Southern India, who bought their culinary traditions along with their work ethic when seeking prosperity in Colonial Malaysia. We’ll get to that later, right now, we’re yet to eat.
Cohabiting in some contemporary harmony — the arches of Islam, the sloped roofs of China.
Melaka, Malaysia
Above our table waved two Stripes of Glory (Jalur Gemilang), the Malaysian flag, which is almost identical to the American, only you add a stripe to make fourteen equals of states and government, and the stars make way for a gold crescent moon and a fourteen-point sun (Bintang Persekutuan) representing unity between those fourteen parties. These waved gently in the morning draught that rose from between the cement banks of the canal and along the busy street to which the murky water ran parallel. The flags, the blues and golds and reds, and the slats, and table and chairs, and the speckles, they all made for one scene of accidental patriotic harmony. Like a diner lost somewhere in the midwest, the red trucks and hats and flags all out front in the desert dust and breeze, an accidental, intentional salute.
More accurately, roti canai are reminiscent of South Indian flatbreads like paratha and chapati — slightly thinner but still fabulously fluffy, lightly toasted, tossed and flipped and bathed in oil. In KL, you can find one slung off just about any sidewalk occupied by the inevitable streetside vendor.
Reddit reckoned Maison Tea Stall to have the most fluffy of all canai and that early morning was the best time to acquire the most fresh. Of course, morning is the most suitable time for anyone, Malaysian, Indian, Chinese or not, to eat poached eggs. So, without further ado, I now introduce to you: the breakfast roti canai.
Served warm and fresh on a clean metal tray, behold the soft brown disc of pastry before you, observe its circular charing like shadowed craters on a pale morning moon, and cloud white eggs split and spilling, a yellow yolk rising from behind, shining down upon plains of earthen sauce, and all this strikingly set against the all-too-familiar stainless steel glance. I’m sitting on my child’s stool — check — on a linoleum floor — check, check. The omens are here, the indicators are lighting up the horizon, and now I’m mopping up sauce and egg with a weightless roti. My teeth sink softly into the whites, and spice slathers my tongue as I chew the soaking pastry.
I’ve always loved extra yolk on my toast. It’s the perfect counter-texture, filling the sense void between crunch and velvet, between crust and oozing dollop of melted butter. Good food is interplay of textures, senses and tastes. A good dish requires bridging between the senses, a passageway from one sensation to another. For good food is many brief but mindful experiences in succession, each vividly pulsing the senses, and I mop up more egg and sauce and bite down again; I feel the soft and flake and flame; I smell the spice and sun and rain. I try to be mindful of each short volt of something new, like a blind man imagining what the fireworks must look like. Oh, how these textures and flavours are so different yet familiar! I can taste it; I can see it! The cream-yellow block of butter already soft in its ceramic dish, a metal knife smoothly slicing down its face; the butter liquifies as it’s spread across Mum’s homemade bread. Her bread is fresh out the hot metal box; the steam rises in the cold spring morning, and the seeds and grain are still asleep in their bed of warm crumb. There’s dew on the grass, and the last of the morning’s mist sits low, blanketing the valley. The paddocks and plains are frosted silver, and everything sparkles in the soft light of certain dawn.
Because good food is transcendence through the senses, and such moments of culinary mindfulness transport me back to times like these. Maison Tea Stall’s glorious and esteemed breakfast roti canai seems to be one such passport, and I look out for these transcultural portals wherever I can. Because being somewhere far away is as much about experiencing the strange and new as it is about realising how much is quite the same. And with this simultaneous embracement that the world is so big and different but all so really the same, you can feel a renewed connection to it all, to them all, us all, as you sit beside her or him or them in the open air, enjoy the gentle morning light and birds chirping by the canal, and the soft sound of the flags as they flip and flap in the breeze, and the server’s courteous attention, and the welcoming energy toward two very different looking people so far from home, the passerby’s smile and the contentment radiated by new company, even if no common word can be spoken.
Malaysian mornings call for but one delight (and two beverages).
Maison Tea Stall, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Because when I think it over, it’s such a familiar yet peculiar state of affairs across these Bahasa-speaking lands. For here is the home of Milo and Mie Goreng fanatics, champions of regional staples not too dissimilar from many Kiwi teenagers’ first hour or so after getting home from school. And in this familiarity, there is a certain charm.
Skidding your mountain bike across the loose stones on your driveway or stepping off the bus onto the bubbling country tarmac, it is the pantry that awaits you. From the top shelf you fumble the thin plastic, pull three packets of the good stuff down and split them open, dry crumbs scattering across the kitchen floor. While that boils, you pour a tall glass of cold milk, both topped and bottomed with heaping tablespoons of the barley madness: some to mix in, the rest for texture. A similar split strategy for the noodles, half the seasoning in the boil, drain two-thirds of the water, the other half of the seasoning now mixed in, then sprinkle on whatever noodle crumbs avoided the floor. And the same textural arrangement for the inevitable mid-afternoon desert: seven Weetbix into a bowl, all split in two, a helping of cold milk and brown sugar, into the microwave, ‘nuked’ for thirty seconds as my Pater might say, back out and cooled with more milk, sliced banana before the microwave or after, or not at all, depending on the occasion. Because good food is interplay of textures, senses and taste, I said, and if there’s one thing a pimply teenage boy peering into the microwave of his mother’s kitchen and an old Chinese matron taming the flame of her grand blackened wok on the curbs of Kuala Lumpur can concur on, it’s that good food transcends budget.
The passerby.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Of course, it was not until my twenty-fifth year on this good green earth that I discovered an entirely superior method to making Mie Goreng. Memphis Lun, of Kiwi Chinese heritage, introduced me to the simple additions of bok choy and Chinese sausage to the boil, egg in shortly after, soy sauce, sesame oil and shallots to finish. The vibrant fusions that may be manifested when ethnic distinctions endure, I said.
But all of this imagery. These semi-familiar scenes, thermos of Milo, cane shutters rolled across hole-in-the-container-wall joints revealing dedications to the green god, the Nescafe red and much more. The calls back to mornings of baked bread and Mie Goreng afternoons; Malaysia does its best to re-present some simple pleasures I had long forgotten. Even that assembly line, the plastic cups and hot Milo, does it not stir memory back to times spent queuing in a post-tangi marae? Piping-hot Thermonuclear Milo burning your hands through the plastic and then the tip of your tongue, half an hour later and it’s still not cool to taste! Similar measures of beverage austerity have been adopted by both Aunty Jane and Whaea Jerry, it seems. And what of these yokey eggs and half-baked bread I see along the streets of Bukit Bintang, Chinatown and beyond? It appears the penchant for partially cooking one’s breakfast is not entirely of my own yolk-loving ingenuity! Nor the Indians’ for that matter. In fact, like much else in this world, it is courtesy of another enterprising cohort.
Gracing sidewalk menus propped on orchestra stands around the city, there is a symphony of half-boiled eggs, half-toasted bread, and half-baked rice; if only you will lend an ear — this is The Art of Almost Done, a curious practice of the Malaysian Chinese. At first, we assumed them to be a very rushed peoples in the morning, that maybe they all slept in late, or perhaps the alarm clock had not yet reached this part of the world. What we now understand is that this is another Malaysian staple arising from the primal echos of my childhood, as deeply etched into the cave walls of my psyche as the spring-morning bread memories — for these breakfasts are one of many British habits burdened upon the Chinese. They managed to kick opium, but what about egg and soldiers?
Grand and romantic buildings.
Ipoh, Malaysia.
From the late 18th century until 1957, the Empire controlled various Malaya and Singaporian states, extending the reach of the vast British Raj that dominated the Indian subcontinent. Our British cousins exerted their hegemony in the name of empire and enterprise, built roads, railways, and ports, established legal codes and systems of government and bureaucracy, constructed grand and romantic buildings in neoclassical, Victorian, and Palladian styles, stripped the land through immense logging of teak, burgeoning rubber plantations and deep mines for tin, and gave the people a hunger for eggs and bread at breakfast, jam on toast, pastry, afternoon tea, and opium. And for dessert, madam? Eventually, independence.
As with other European powers, Great Britain relied heavily on colony labour to fuel their global ambitions. In exchange for their toil, workers from Africa to Asia were promised passage to the colonies from their troubled, famine-stricken or overcrowded homelands, with basic necessities and a pittance perhaps included. Many of these workers came to be known, in other, more archaic terms, as ‘coolies’. Work conditions were often harsh, wages negligible or non-existent and livelihoods bound to employers through exploitative contracts. Both the Indians and Chinese were drawn to Malaya — what the British used to call the area of the Malaysian Peninsular under their control — through this indentured labour system or ambitions of better prosperity on their own accord.
‘It has been noted that 95 percent of Indians arriving into Malaya over the last 2,000 years seem to have entered the country between 1786 and 1957 (Sandhu, 1969, p. 13)... An increase in colonial agricultural activities in Malaya led to a demand for manpower, which could not be met by the local populace. The demand was satisfied by labour migrants from India, although such migration was seasonal.
…An alternative mode of recruiting labour for Malaya developed during the latter part of the 19th century. Known as the kangany system, it supplied most of the labour to the Malayan coffee and rubber plantations till 1938. Kangany is the Tamil word for overseer or superior. Unlike the indenture system whereby mostly males migrated, the kangany system paved the way for more families to migrate to Malaya… Before the large movement of labour into Malaya in the 1800s, Indian settlements in Malaya comprised mostly merchants and traders.
…The Indians arriving in Malaya as labourers were mainly from South India. Primarily because the Indian government* had allowed recruitment for Malaya only from the Madras state, 90 percent of the labour migrants to Malaya were Tamil-speaking people. The rest of the migrants were Telegus and Malayalees from South India.’
Markeswary Periasamy, Senior Reference Librarian, National Library of Singapore
Tamils endured long and arduous sea voyages, sailing leagues in over-crowded ships festering with disease and lacking provisions. If they survived the up to 30% mortality rate voyage, they were greeted with backbreaking work on plantations, estates or mines and existed in the most basic of arrangements.
Entrance to Batu Caves, a Hindu religious site courtesy of, and in particular importance to, Tamil Hindus (just north of KL).
Batu Caves, Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia
The shrines are built into a limestone cave complex (formerly occupied by the Temuan of the Orang Asli indigenous Malay).
Batu Caves, Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia
Reverse view.
Batu Caves, Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia
For whom the bell tolls.
Batu Caves, Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia
While China had long been a significant trading partner for Western powers, its government maintained strict control over foreign access and trade until the Opium Wars. Toward the end of the 18th century (in a dynamic not too unlike America’s inner-city crack epidemic a century and a half later), British merchants established a monopoly over the opium trade in imperial China, with the British East India Company having monopolised opium cultivation in the Indian province of Bengal. The British used the profits of addiction to purchase Chinese luxury goods in high-demand back home, such as porcelain, silk, and tea.
A burgeoning opium trade led to widespread addiction and social crises in China, prompting the incumbent Emperor and government to turn the screws. But the British enjoyed the massive fortunes they were making off pushing drugs to the Orient and responded to crack-downs and seizures on their smuggling with crown-backed military force in the First Opium War (1839-1842). With superior weaponry and naval prowess, they easily defeated the Chinese, thence imposing the unequal Treaty of Nanking. This treaty forced China to open several ports to foreign trade, notably Shanghai, cede Hong Kong to Britain, and pay a large indemnity.
Further sanction-reactive conflict in the Second Opium War (1856-1860) with France and other Western powers aligning with England led to additional concessions from China, including the legalisation of opium and the opening of more ‘treaty ports’. These wars and treaties weakened the incumbent Qing dynasty and increased foreign influence. With improved access to ports and growing economic hardship, famine and political instability – a result of a contracted economy from the wars, but more so from the Taiping Rebellion and Dungan Revolt — many Chinese sought opportunities abroad. The expanding British colonies in Southeast Asia, including Malaya, offered opportunities to the Chinese. Such as Tamils, newly formed networks and kinship ties facilitated chain migration.
For further context, the backdrop to much of this is the shifting tides of slavery and the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, mainly at the behest of the British. The trade of ‘coolies’ partly supplemented the transition of cheap human labour in the colonies. Perhaps telling that nations dealing in opiates would have to ween themselves off one of their own bad habits. The trade of coolies and opium gave way to the term ‘poison and pigs’, the comparison to swine an accurate allusion to the fact that conditions and treatment on board the emigrant ships were no better than shipments of livestock.
‘With the abolition of slavery in the British territories in 1833, there was an even bigger demand for labour. This demand was precipitated by the “Industrial Revolution and the development of large-scale production in Britain” and the need to tap the British colonies for raw materials (Sandhu, 1969, p. 48).’
Markeswary Periasamy, Senior Reference Librarian, National Library of Singapore
And the Chinese have their own limestone shrines — the Bhuddist Perak Tong Cave Temple near Ipoh.
Ipoh, Malaysia
A closer shot, we had this place to ourselves, which I will write about it in a future entry.
Ipoh, Malaysia
Since independence, Malaysia has experienced the typical instability and political turmoil that new states often endure when finding their feet after colonial influence. Political acronyms have risen and fallen and are mentioned with such frequency that trying to follow recent history feels much like reading the nutritional information of an energy drink.
But what, exactly, am I trying to say? I suppose that what I call magnificent rigidness might also be called echoes of division engrained by colonial governance. That such rigidness is a sign that three peoples endured, preserving heritage, customs and cuisine, none allowing their traditions to go up in the smoke of burning rubber and teak. That I now get to enjoy a collection of three of the very great cuisines, all within walking distance.
All of this has probably been a little too much history, and of course, it is all rather reductive, surface-level, uncited, and more than likely riddled with errors. But it’s important to establish a clear cultural backdrop to this place so that I might properly venture into some of the sights, smells, and tastes I am yet to tell.
And if you want some real, honest history, then here it is: the years I spent under my mother’s imperial rule imbued with me a strong sense of nation, an ancient code of chivalry, love for king and country and, of course, a life-long fascination with egg and soldiers.
I still have my eyes peeled and nostrils wide for a sight or sniff of opium. But, for now, back to Maison, my delicious meal, my clean tray.
The entrance to Maison Tea Stall.
Maison Tea Stall, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Links & EXTRAS
Memphis Book Club: Chanel Miller — Know My Name. “A memoir on the infamous Brock Turner case, written by the victim herself. Immensely insightful.”
Essential travel purchase(s): Carabiners can be your best-friend. I clip them on my bag, dry-bag and satchel and can quickly clip on my hat or shoes or whatever else to free up an extra hand. So good, plus you look like an adventurer. But don’t buy expensive ones at home; they can be found throughout Asia for cheap, like much else.
Some resources I used:
Indian Migration into Malaya and Singapore During the British Period
Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957)
