Speaking at the Singapore Biennale, Jan 25th
Dear friends in Singapore, if you have nothing better to do on Jan 25th, do join Dr Khairudin Aljunied, a Malay Studies professor, and me for a discussion on Malaysian and Singaporean history, as part of the Singapore Biennale. I will be chatting about themes related to my first book, Floating on a Malayan Breeze. He will look at “History as Controversy:….in an increasingly … Continue reading Speaking at the Singapore Biennale, Jan 25th
More problems at Singapore’s mainstream media channels
One of the great ironies of modern Singapore’s media development is that even as politicians, establishment supporters and other conservatives continue to heap scorn on internet sites, the mainstream channels keep making mistakes, sometimes egregious ones. It is as if they are doing their utmost to make a mockery of their fans.
2013 proved a particularly horrible year for Singapore’s mainstream media channels, and they have started off 2014 on the same shot-riddled foot. Pointing out these errors is important not in order to have a laugh–although one can hardly blame Singapore’s beleaguered bloggers for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude.
The bigger reason is that, like so many other sacred cows of the Singapore model, media policies here are based on a seemingly immutable national orthodoxy about the role of elites: Singapore society must rely on a tiny, enlightened group of people, rather than the distributed intelligence of all Singaporeans. This belief manifests itself in everything from a government-knows-best attitude to the presumption that our restricted, elite-led mainstream media model is serving our country well. Continue reading “More problems at Singapore’s mainstream media channels”
From Kerala to Shaolin: Thanks to supporters
Dear friends, 2013 has been a crazy, fun, wild year. For the first time since college in the US, I spent more of the year outside than inside Singapore, my home. In completing my longest research trip to date, I travelled overland more than 20,000 km from Kaniyakumari at the southern tip of India to Beijing in China, crossing Nepal and the Tibetan plateau in … Continue reading From Kerala to Shaolin: Thanks to supporters
Loving Singapore’s “cheap” hawker food
“I love local hawker food. There are not many countries in the world like Singapore where one can easily find reasonably priced food with the same high level of hygiene and great variety.” – MP Baey Yam Keng, in the wake of his recent $2.50 nasi padang.
Many people in the middle- and upper-classes love to cheer Singapore’s delicious cheap food. When my foreign friends ask me what’s great about Singapore, I often cite this (among other things).
Unfortunately for us all, it is a boast loaded with classist undertones. The main reason a country as rich and expensive as Singapore has such cheap hawker food is that many labour inputs are underpriced. Everybody from the lorry driver to the dish washer to the hawker is being underpaid. Indeed, for a country with a negligible agricultural sector, one would expect (the imported) food to cost more than in many other countries. Continue reading “Loving Singapore’s “cheap” hawker food”
Letter from China: Guangdong and Fujian
Note: This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.
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A continuation of First letter from China: Sichuan
Bust of Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s shifu, in Foshan, Guangdong
Buses
When we try to leave Sichuan for Guangdong (Canton), Jeffrey Chu, my Shanghai-based Taiwanese-American friend, Kirit Kiran, the Delhi-based photographer, and I are faced with the contemporary traveller’s worst scheduling nightmare: the Chinese national holidays. Our journey comes near the end of the weeklong holiday around October 1st, the national day of the People’s Republic of China, when in 1949 Mao Tse-Tung declared that “The Chinese people have stood up!”
There is certainly a lot of standing to be done. We stand in Emei, as hordes of domestic tourists—some with walking stick and camera, others dressed to the nines—flood the usually peaceful Emei shan, mountain. When we reach Chengdu, we stand outside the quaint boutique hotel I booked through booking.com; they are overbooked, and don’t have a room for us, and so after two hours of calling around they find us another hotel thirty minutes away.
Culinary post from China: Sichuan
Mapo doufu
This post is meant to accompany my First letter from China: Sichuan. Since digestive difficulties have prevented me from tasting Chengdu’s wonderful food on this Kerala to Shaolin trip, I will instead narrate a story from April 2012, when I visited for the first time with my wife Li Ling.
Barely 15 minutes after reaching Buddha Zen, our hotel, we are on our way out. Ling has gotten directions to a local restaurant and we are walking briskly, after pulling on a thin extra layer for the crisp Spring evening. Unfortunately, we cover only about 300 metres before I get distracted by skewers of raw meat lying next to a charcoal grill. Perhaps more importantly, there is a wide tray of chilli flakes sitting next to it.
A few minutes later, the eager, young Chinese BBQ master is brushing the chilli onto sizzling meat cubes, using a giant paint brush, the kind one uses to paint walls. The meat is good enough, but we are to have much better.
I am ecstatic, though, that my mouth is finally on fire. I had spent months dreaming of this moment—my first chilli high in Sichuan. It is, I imagine, much like one’s first scotch in Scotland; or joint in Jamaica.
First letter from China: Sichuan
Note: This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.
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A continuation of Postcard from Tibet: Drinking yak butter tea
Chengdu streetfood
Chengdu
When I find out that our mainland China trip will begin in Chengdu, I am overjoyed. Before this Kerala2Shaolin research trip, I had visited only a few mainland Chinese cities: Chengdu, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Zhuhai. By some distance, Chengdu is my favourite.
Li Ling, my wife, and I had visited in April 2012. Ling, on her first ever visit to the land of her forefathers, was filled with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, worried about a week of musky hotel rooms, smoky restaurants and squalid, squatting-only toilets.
Deciding on Chengdu back then was easy. Ling wanted to look at animals and I wanted to eat them. Few places attract animal lovers and carnivores so effortlessly: Chengdu is home to the world’s foremost Panda sanctuary; it is also one of Asia’s gastronomic capitals, the centre of Sichuan cuisine. After five days we were smitten, by the comical, goofy pandas, by the irresistible “mala” spice (ma: numbing; la: spicy) and, unexpectedly, by the charming, laid-back people of Sichuan, who seem less interested in China’s hot growth than China’s hot tea. (For a more detailed digression into mala and Sichuanese food, see Culinary post from China: Sichuan)
CNA – Chat about From Kerala to Shaolin
Dear friends, I appeared on Channel News Asia earlier this morning to talk about my current book project. Click here to watch. Continue reading CNA – Chat about From Kerala to Shaolin
Postcard from Tibet: Drinking yak butter tea
This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.
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A continuation of Postcard from Nepal: Teej and trout
Tibet has us in raptures.
Impossibly blue skies that look fake, like creations from a Pixar lab; hills and mountains of varying shapes, sizes and colours, whose endlessness lulls you into taking them for granted, only to realise their true grandeur after you’ve left the rooftop of the world; monasteries that have somehow survived, that transport you to a bygone era of spirituality; rivers so pure, so clean, you can drink from them, bathe in them, live in them; and people so warm that the very concept of “stranger” soon evaporates, and you can almost imagine a oneness of humanity that predates Lennon’s poetry by generations.
All these elements are unwilling participants in the eternal clash between tradition and modernity, which is played out everywhere around you, in Lhasa’s glitzy new malls, along kilometres of power cables that line green valleys, in some monasteries that seem more intent on squeezing hapless tourists than lighting butter candles.
Continue reading “Postcard from Tibet: Drinking yak butter tea”
Postcard from Nepal: Teej and Trout
This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.
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A continuation of Last letter from India: Manipur
I go to Nepal to get to Tibet.
It is all part of “maintaining the integrity of my trip”, as Jeffrey Chu, my Shanghai-based travel companion in China, puts it. When I first sketch out the broad outlines of this trip, one guiding principle is my desire to travel overland—no flights—from the southernmost point of India to the northernmost point of China. My experience while researching my first book, Floating on a Malayan Breeze, when Sumana Rajarethnam and I cycled around the whole of Peninsular Malaysia, taught me the importance of observing transitions in climate, land, vegetation, people, in understanding a large, diverse country.
While I am not bothered about travel within India and China, I worry about how I’m going to cross the Himalayas to get from one country to the other. Tibet, therefore, emerges as the potential Achilles Heel of this trip. Continue reading “Postcard from Nepal: Teej and Trout”