Biawak II: Son of Biawak

The Biawak returns [See the first appearance]! Late this afternoon, as maghrib approached, my wife heard a rustling in the back yard. About five feet from our back stoop was an enormous biawak, apparently stalking a young cat sitting atop our recyclables. I rushed to get my camera, but it was on to me and made for the jungle. It would have gotten away, except it ran to the corner of the fence that I had recently reclaimed and propped back up [See The Yard: Adventures in Tropical Horticulture]. Trapped, it started ramming the fence.

The pictures are crummy because it was getting dark, but if you click on the image, you make it out pretty well.

It even managed to climb halfway up the fence I share with my neighbors, a bunch of single Chinese guys. It would have surely met its doom if it had succeeded, because three of them had emerged from the house with a parang, a cangkol and the ultimate multipurpose Malaysian tool, a length of belian. Biawak is good eatin’, I’ve heard, and they might have eaten well if that was their intention, because this thing was well over four feet long, and thick in the middle. But it couldn’t scale the fence, and after dropping back down, it was scared enough to run straight in my direction along the fence till it reached the downed portion, and clambered off into the jungle. I may have to delay my plan to get a few chickens until the fence is fully functional. I don’t know if the biawak would’ve taken out the cat or not, but chickens are a definite staple of the diet for any biawak living close to humans.

Petai

Interesting texture on the woody knobs
Interesting texture on the woody knobs

Some pictures of petai, a green bean used in Malay home cooking. It grows in long pods on a very large tree of the Legume family, Parkia speciosa. The beans are very pungent. I’ve most often seen it cooked in sambal tumis ikan bilis, a fried chili paste with dried anchovies. It is also eaten raw dipped in some kind of spicy sambal. A lot of vegetables in the diet are eaten raw with chili sauces instead of salad dressing, a practice known as ulam. I can eat petai on occassion, but mostly I just like the cool texture on the woody knobs that bear the pods (picture 2). Petai is believed to have a beneficial effect on the kidneys and urinary tract. I imagine this is due to the dark brown foul-smelling urine you will pass the day after a petai meal.

The green beans are inside the leathery pod. Some cook the bean together with the pod and eat both.
The green beans are inside the leathery pod. Some cook the bean together with the pod and eat both.

Petai is semi-wild; it is often encouraged to grow on the outskirts of kampungs. It is also gathered directly from the forest. In The Economic Valuation of Parkia speciosa in Peninsular Malaysia, Woo Weng Chuen estimates the domestic market at between RM8-24 million per year. Due to the whole smelly brown urine thing, though, I don’t think Petai has much future as an export crop, aside from supply to southeast asian communities in diaspora.

Eid amidst the coconuts

Miniature chickens or <em>ayam serama</em>
Miniature chickens or ayam serama

The kids had a great time for Eid. We all flew back to West Malaysia to my wife’s village, just got back last night.. It was the first time my wife had been there for Eid in 8 years, and my first time ever. The kids got along great with all their cousins and second cousins, and were spoiled
rotten by all their uncles and aunties. All 7 of my mother-in-law’s children came back this year. She was very very happy. She has 10 grandkids now and 12 step-grandkids. I’m finally getting fluent enough with Bahasa to keep track of what’s going on in the family, and beginning to really remember all my cousins-in-law. My wife must have first cousins in the triple digits. The custom here is to go visiting neighbors after the
eid, to have tea and snacks and then move on the next house. Kids are given a little bit of money from everyone they visited. Long cleared 55 RM. He was a little avaricious banker by the time it was all over, counting and recounting his money in the corner of our room.

The worst incident of the whole trip was when KakNgah got attacked by our neighbor’s rooster. He’s lived next door all his life, knew my wife’s late father very well. He’s also a distant cousin. Well, he likes to keep chickens, and they peck and scratch in our yard too. One old rooster is a little daft, and the d*mn thing attacked KakNgah. Luckily she had the good sense to turn around and run, so she was only pecked on her back and arm. But the bites ripped her shirt and drew blood. This would all be terrible
on its own, but the worst thing is, this all happened to Long three years ago! The same damn rooster! At the time, back in 2000, we were quite upset of course, but since it had never happened to anyone, we just let it lie. Then it attacked my three year old nephew a little while later, after we went back to the US. That was the last I heard about it, and I just assumed the rooster had wound up in the stock pot after it’s second offense. But in fact, the rooster was spared. Then it attacked our neighbor’s own grandson and tagged him right above the eye. His son-in-law demanded the chicken’s death but our neighbor would not relinquish the bird, claiming it was good
luck. The son-in-law took his wife and kid and has not been back. Well, I was furious, but social ettiquette just would not allow raging at the old man, and besides, if he denied his own grandson justice, he certainly wouldn’t grant it to me. So I plotted to kill the rooster. If it was dead and gone, I could simply apologize and he would have to accept. But I failed. I had a good go at it with a machete, and several times with a
slingshot, but I couldn’t bag it. After every failed attempt, it would crow upon reaching safety. Sometimes, when it was in the yard, it would see KakNgah and crow some more. What a cock.

The Yard: Inherited Plants

A sprig of lemongrass
A sprig of lemongrass
As the yard was being cleared of brush, I came across a few plants of some value that I spared the parang for. The first is a very common seasoning in Malaysian cooking, Lemongrass or serai, Cymbopogon spp. Not surprisingly, it was planted just outside the kitchen door. From a distance it is hard to distinguish it from other grasses, though it tends to form a dense, rounded outline. Sometimes you can make out a reddish-brown tinge near the base. But just
A clump of lemongrass, <em>serai</em>.
A clump of lemongrass, serai.
touch it with the weed-whip and the smell is unmistakeable: a very pungent lemon scent. The base of the stalk is what is used in cooking. It is very woody, so it is often blended, or pulverized with a mortar and pestle before adding to the dish. If you’ve eaten at a Thai restaurant you’ve probably tasted some. It can be grown in Michigan, but only as an annual. And the spindly growth I got when I tried hardly made it seem worth it.

Asam Terung, or "sour eggplant", directly translated.The next survivor is the Terung Asam, or sour eggplant. It is a vegetable commonly eaten here in Sarawak. I don’t remember ever having it in West Malaysia, but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve it there. This report on rare and wild fruits of West Malaysia lists Terung Asam as “Wild” in West Malaysia. From what I can decipher of the report, this would simply mean that it is primarily gathered rather than

The Asam Terung plant, in sorry shape.
The Asam Terung plant, in sorry shape.
cultivated. It is listed only as Solanum spp, which does put it in the same genus as Eggplant. Personally, it is not my favorite vegetable. It doesn’t have a very pronounced flavor except for a bitter aftertaste. The Terung Asam in my yard is a very sad specimen, by the way. The fruits are typically bright yellow-orange when sold in the market. I don’t know if mine is overripe or has some affliction.

The last plant was in the back on the edge of the jungle. It is Pandan, Pandanus spp, a common ingredient in kuih, snacks/desserts. It is called Screwpine in English. It is a subtle flavor, but a lot of sweets just don’t taste right without it. If you’re eating a dessert with any kind of green color, it is probably made with pandan. Its leaf is also fashioned into a wrapper for some sweets. It can also be bunched up and thrown in a pot of rice for flavoring.

Pandan, or Screwpine
Pandan, or Screwpine

The plant itself is very wild-looking. It grows on long rootstalks that sometimes trail, sometimes stick upright. It grows into a big tangled mass after a while. My wife reports that snakes are fond of lurking under pandan. My plant is quite overgrown, so I’m fixing to give it a regenerative thrashing pruning with the parang.

The Yard: Adventures in Tropical Horticulture

Our new home is in fact several years old. The house itself is quite nice and liveable as is, but the yard… The yard needs a lot of work. I wanted a house with a lot of land, and I got that in the sense that the area is spacious. But it is missing about 18 inches of soil from the kitchen stoop to the back fence. It is common practice for developers to save costs by skimping on landscape, or even to sell homes with bare earth only. But I’ve never encountered a project where the developer just decided not to backfill at all. But that’s what I’ve got: a yard that is more like a hole.

Still! Lots of possibilities abound for doing something nice and interesting when the time comes to fill. But first, I have to deal with the jungle that has grown up in the last seven years. Here is the yard when I took it over:

The original backyard: chest-high in lalang and swamp beyond
The original backyard: chest-high in lalang and swamp beyond

After cutting and burning all the brush and grass, here is where I am now, two weeks later:

The backyard after two weeks of thrashing
The backyard after two weeks of thrashing

(I had some help. Mind you, this is Ramadan, so I’m good for about an hour of work before dusk. Start any earlier in the day and there is no water to quench your thirst when you’re done.)

Now I have found that the back fence has not just been overgrown, but has been completely vanquished. At least one tree has toppled on to it, and I fear there is another trunk under the last big mound of vegetation. While the fence has been down, all manner of viney, creepy plants have wound in and out of the fence, tying it to the ground. So my next step is to reclaim my property line with the aid of my trusty parang. The parang is the local version of a machete, but with nice heft and weight, curved and balanced for easy swinging. They sell straight-from-Brazil machetes in the hardware store too, but in my opinion, the parang is a better tool.

Stay tuned: my adventures with the yard will be chronicled in breathless detail here as events unfold.

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Strong back weak mind: Filling the backyard with dirt a wheelbarrow at a time without the benefit of an honest shovel.

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got: Building a dry laid stone wall with my bare hands.

 

White Minority

Sharon Gallagher is white but she knows what it is like to be part of an ethnic minority. For the past 18 months she has lived with her three children in the predominantly Asian district of Manningham in Bradford. This was once a white area, but over the past 30 years most of the whites have left; today Manningham is home to Pakistanis and Bengalis, halal
butchers, Islamic book stores and mosques. And it is home to the Gallaghers. They are the only white family on their street and one of the last left in
Manningham.

Putera Buana forwarded me this great article from UK’s Gaurdian. For the kids in the neighborhood, you’re either a Paki, that is, a muslim, or a Porkie, that is, everybody else. I also grew up as a white minority, in Detroit, so I giggled to read the 11-year old son in the family say

“I
know they have troubles in places like Detroit,” Jake
tells me, “but if a white person from there came to
Manningham for a week they would come home crying.”

I never had trouble getting along though. I had more animosity for the white folk who had fled the city than I did for the black people who I lived among. And the only violence I ever received was at the hands of white Detroiters. That’s beside the point anyway, since Jake’s take is a little off. Manningham isn’t like Detroit, despite what he may think from listening to too much Eminem. Jake and his sister’s experience is probably closer to white kids in Dearborn or Hamtramck, where the majority population is or is fast becoming muslim. And it’s his sister’s story that is really amazing: she wants to be a muslim. The full article is here.

Biawak!

Yesterday, the fourth day in my new home, I opened my front door and found an enormous monitor lizard, or biawak. I had my camera in hand but by the time I exclaimed and pulled it out of the pouch, the creature had sped off around the house. Its long nails clacked and clattered on the cement as it ran. It was easily over three feet long (that’s meter in Bahasa Malaysia) from nose to tail. I followed around but it had disappeared into the jungle that forms the back edge of my property. I’m not sure what kind of Monitor it was, though I caught a rerun of Animal Planet at the airport, with that crazy Australian, and he was manhandling what looks like the same kind. Monitor lizards are all Varanus spp. Here’s a fan page with lots of neat pictures.

Biawak II: Return of Biawak

Biawak III: Behold, the Biawak