Bin Gregory Productions

Ramadan Mubarak

Sunday night was the first night of Tarawih prayers here in Malaysia. By the grace of God, I was able to move into our new house Sunday afternoon, in time to walk to the surau, small mosque, in our new neighborhood for prayers. Now I’ve successfully survived a day of fasting in the tropics. The fasting period is considerably longer here than I’ve been accustomed to in Michigan, not to speak of the hot weather. By the end of a day of unpacking and settling house, I was parched and dizzy.

In Michigan right now, the nights are still longer than the days. Since I converted ten years ago, Ramadan has fallen in the winter months. My first fast was in March. Since the lunar calendar loses about ten days a year against the solar calendar, Ramadan has marched backwards through the months over the years. In December, the fasting interval was only around ten hours long. I think that is a hidden wisdom of the lunar calendar; if Ramadan was fixed to the solar calendar, those living further from the equator would be permanently struggling or having it easy. As it is, over the course of a lifetime, it balances out. So those of my friends laughing in Michigan right now, just wait another eight years till the fast is in July!

More Kuching Waterfront

Here’s one last picture that should have gone with the last set. It’s the city hall of North Kuching, perched on a hill. Some of the older neighborhoods of Petrajaya, the city’s north bank, can be seen in the middleground. Kuching is split into two separate cities, North and South Kuching. It’s a very arbitrary divide; the boundary doesn’t really follow the river or any other natural division. In fact, the city was split only several decades ago. If I had to speculate, I’d say it was a political move. Kuching North is majority Malay, Kuching South majority Chinese. What I’m still curious about is the origin of the name Petrajaya; is it synonomous with Kuching North? I don’t know. Kuching South has a very pretty city hall as well; I’ll try to get a picture some time.

Pop Shuvit Reads BGP

Some time ago, I wrote an appreciation of the traditional Malay music form of Dikir Barat and it’s similarity to hip-hop. By way of contrast, I made some generally derogatory comments about Malaysian rap music, singling out the group that was freshest in my mind, Pop Shuvit. (Or were they? I may in fact have gotten them confused with the equally silly Too Phat. My bad!)

I was a little surprised to get some hate mail (In future, if you want your outrage at my opinions about hip hop to be taken seriously, you MUST run them through the Snoopinator first, to ensure proper gangster patois. Fo’ shizzle!). But I was stunned when I got a comment from JD of Pop Shuvit himself!!! OMG!!! That’s, like, better than an autograph! Such a nice guy too, very complimentary. If the internet works this well, next I’m going to write about Siti Nurhaliza! Just goes to show you, you never know who might end up reading your stuff on the internet. I suppose I should remember that the next time I want to write something critical, like about the leader of the free world, for example.

Kuching Waterfront

The hotel district skyline as seen from the waterfront

Here’s a few shots from the Kuching Waterfront, the biggest tourist attraction in town. It runs for about a kilometer along the Sarawak River, from the historic wharf district with its wet market and shophouses to highrise hotels and shopping malls on the far end. One lovely thing about Kuching is that from almost any point in town it is possible to see tree-covered mountains in the distance.

There was a very famous man-eating crocodile around here known as

Gambier Market as seen from the waterfront

Bujang Senang, the carefree bachelor. The name evokes the same feeling to me that the “merry widow” does in English. Crocodiles possibly lurking in the water doesn’t stop the river from being used for all sorts of events, including longboat races that were held here a few weeks back.

[Click on thumbnails for larger images]

P.S.A.

**This is not an abandoned weblog**

Whoo, this month has been unbelieveably hectic, next month looks about the same. Planes, trains and automobiles; two jobs but no paycheck for 4 months; buying a house; finishing a PhD (that’s the wife but I feel her pain); maid problems; and more! I doubt I’ll be posting much until life slows down a bit or I get a laptop, whichever comes first.

**This is not an abandoned weblog**

Strange Fruit pt. 5: Jackfruit

Monstrous Jackfruits, known as <em>nangka</em> — Monstrous Jackfruits, known as *nangka*

In Michigan, where I’m from, we have large fruit; watermelons and pumpkins for example can reach great size. Sensibly, these fruits grow on trailing vines, right on the ground. But imagine a fruit that size that grows suspended from a tree! Aiee! Maybe it’s called Jackfruit because it will jack you up if it lands on you. Actually, the cultivated trees are not that tall, only a few meters, so we’re not really talking Durian kill-factor here. Still, seeing something that size just sprouting out the side of a tree is very odd, like a tumor or something. That’s my six-month-old there in the background, for scale.

Jackfruit is nangka in Malay, Artocarpus heterophyllus botanically. It is in the same family and genus as the previously mentioned Terap and the Cempedak. Underneath the green warty skin is a great mass of fleshy, sticky yellow fibers surrounding a dozen or two fruits surrounding large smooth seeds not unlike avacado seeds. The fruits themselves are also yellow, sticky and somewhat sweet. I’d have given you pictures, but Good Lord, one of those monsters can set you back 30 or 40RM! ~~So instead here is a website with lovely photos.~~

The flavor is not particularly pronounced. Maybe for this reason it is frequently used like a vegetable in cooking. Often it is cooked together with coconut heart, umbut, in a coconut milk sauce.

The pictures you see were taken at the wonderful Ming Kiong Gardens on Airport Road. The place is a little pricey but they grow superior fruit from hybrid and improved varieties. You can be sure you’ll get a tasty orchard fruit, not some wild-gathered thing. They carry their own variety of golden mango that is available nowhere else. They also have a Jackfruit-Chempadak hybrid called nan-chem that is better than both mother fruits, in my opinion. It is more like cempadak in flavor but less gassy, and more like nangka in texture.

Beyblade!

I’ve been here in Malaysia for eight months already (!) so maybe I’m out of touch with what’s happenin’ on the playground back in the States. But I can tell you what is on the minds of every 4- to 7-year-old kid I’ve met here: BeyBlades! What’s a beyblade? To my son, “A beyblade is when you get your beyblade and you fight ’em and you see whose is powerful. Mines is powerful!”
It is a spinning top, gasing in Malay, that you battle your friends with. There’s no batteries necessary, they’re not easy to break, and a kit of a top, a ripcord and a spinner only costs 2.50RM. By contrast, a single old GI Joe retails for 20RM+! That’s a starter kit of course, and you can trick them out endlessly from there: longer ripcord, arena, heavier weight ring. It’s a great toy. In fact, it’s not just the preschool set; kids as old as 10 or 12 play too. One of the cooler accessories is a weight ring with little bits of flint embedded in it. A good collision and the sparks will fly, literally.
Now I’ve been told that these beyblades are really just a new version of an old kampung favorite, the wooden top with a nail embedded point-down for spinning on. Those are spun with a length of string, and can be similarly tricked out with broken glass, fearsome war paint and so on. Good fun too, I’m sure, though I think it would take a little more dexterity than a five-year-old has.

TS Eliot: Four Quartets

The great poet TS Eliot uses Ailanthus altissima in his poem “Four Quartets”.Â Here is the opening stanza of the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

Here is the full poem.Â The English student G. Michael Palmer writes about the garden and nature imagery in Four Quartets:

It is through flowers, and especially the rose, that Eliot is most connected in Four Quartets to his own poetry (as it is through fruit and gardens that he is connected with Milton).Â Through the growth and withering of flowers Eliot allows us to experience both pain and resurrection, as the poem contains both the endless “withering of withered flowers” (DS 80) and the rising “lotos” “in the pool” “of light” BN (36; 38; 37).Â The generic flowers of the poem, and the flowers such as the ailanthus and the sunflower serve, much like the specific fruits in the poem, to introduce a sense of duality, and in a more overt way, a strong sense of decay.Â The ailanthus is “rank” (DS 12), and “the dahlias sleep in the empty silence” (EC 22).Â The “hollyhocks…aim too high” (EC 55) and die, and there is always “the silent withering ofÂ autumn flowers” (DS 50).Â This flowery withering is explicitly Eliotic, and a common image in his poetry for conveying spiritual decay.

This is great stuff; Ailanthus as metaphor for “spiritual decay”!Â Palmer’s not a good botanist though; Ailanthus is not a flower but a tree.Â And the whole thing stinks, but especially the leaves.