Black on black stack mangosteens
Pity the kemuning as its flowers fall
My dark-skinned beauty is sweet to behold
A light-skinned woman is no use at all

Hitam-hitam si tampuk manggis
Sayang kemuning luruh bunganya
Hitam-hitam kupandang manis
Putih kuning apa gunanya

A turn to the risque!  Although this pantun is hardly, uh, progressive, it is interesting.  In modern Malaysia, white skin is overwhelmingly seen as a mark of beauty. There is a huge market for skin whiteners, Malaysians with European heritage are all over the TV, family photos are retouched to bleach everybody out. But in this poem at least, taken from the Malay Civilization pantun database, it is the darker woman who is praised, by comparison to the mangosteen.

Si tampuk manggis

Mangosteens, or manggis, are fruits with a hard purplish-black rind and a sweet, juicy flesh that I have written about previously.  Kemuning, Murraya paniculata, is a common flowering shrub with small, fragrant, creamy white petals with a yellowish center. Alas, the little flowers bloom for only two or three days before wilting and falling.  Thus the light-skinned woman is described as trifling like the fleeting kemuning bloom.

Kemuning shows up in several other pantuns in a similar way, as a symbol for fickle or weak light-skinned women.  It’s not fair to the kemuning!  It flowers often throughout the year, it is pretty hardy, takes pruning well, and even makes a fine bonsai specimen.  Even when the kemuning is not standing in for Si putih-kuning, it rarely comes out of a pantun looking good:

Kemuning wrapped ’round fence’s edge
A garden of tea with a thorny hedge
Boastful talk from scanty knowledge
Is a great big spoon for little porridge

Kemuning melilit di tepi pagar
Pagar berduri di kebun teh
Ilmu sedikit cakap berdegar-degar
Kurang bubur sudu yang lebih!

The pembayang  here is less clear in its relation to the pemaksud, but the pairing still doesn’t reflect that well on the Kemuning. Don’t ask me why – I think it’s a lovely shrub. Its close relative is even more famous:  the curry tree,  Murraya koenigii.

Everybody knows curry the dish.  It is practically a staple food for the British, I’ve heard.  But Waugh’s Curry Powder contains no M. koenigii.  Which is not to put anybody down: Malaysian curry powders are mixes of turmeric, coriander, cardamon, and more… but are also Murraya-free.  Curry, like ketchup, has drifted far from its origins.  The leaf of the curry (kari) tree is what gives South Indian cooking its special aroma.  The leaves are thrown whole into curries and sambars, fresh, fried or pan-roasted.  I don’t know that it imparts so much flavor, but the smell is very strong.  The plant, shown here in my yard, can grow into a small tree, but I plan to keep mine shrubby.  The pungent cloud of scent wafting downwind of a  full-size curry tree can knock you over.  Curry the tree has inspired no pantuns of record, but curry the dish shows up in a pantun in Sarawakian dialect:

Let’s cook lempah, pass me that pot
Pufferfish curry cooks up fast
I’ve told you before, have I not
Don’t waste time regretting the past

Ambik periuk memasak lempah
Ikan buntal dimasak kari
Agik dolok kamek dah madah
Jangan menyesal belakang belakang hari

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Coffee beans spread upon a tray

Jasmine blooms on the ledge do rest

I’ve been dreaming till break of day

My sweetheart sleeping upon my chest

“Buah kopi di atas loyang

Kembang melati letak di bangku

Saya bermimpi hampirkan siang

Jantung hati tidur di pangku”

Island South-east Asia produces a lot of coffee.  The word Java, now perhaps most famous as a computer language, came to English as a word for coffee because so much of it was grown on the island of Java, the home island of Indonesia.  This was before Juan Valdez came on the scene. Coffee lovers are probably aware of Sumatra Mandheling, the fine beans from the highlands of Sumatra island.  And if you’re a real coffee snob, you may even have tried the coffee prepared from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of an Indonesian civet cat: kopi luak.

And yet, local people are not drinking any of that.  All the really good stuff gets exported to the West and simply cannot be found in the marketplace even at export prices.  What we get instead are bins of greasy beans of uncertain provenance roasted in a traditional process: margarine and sugar are mixed in with the beans as they are stirred over a fire.  In the end you get a very black bean with a milimeter or two of oily sugar glazing on it.  Virtually all coffee you drink in Malaysia will be prepared from this stuff, usually by pouring boiling water over a pot of grounds.  This yields French press coffee or cowboy coffee, depending on whether you find this method sophisticated or crude.

The bean itself is almost certainly not arabica, which comes from the first species to be brought under human cultivation, Coffea arabica.  Originating in the highlands of East Africa, it doesn’t grow all that well here in the hot humid tropics.  An epidemic of coffee rust, Himileia vastatrix, wiped out the bulk of Coffea arabica several decades ago in SE Asia, and what is still grown in the cool uplands of Java and Sumatra goes straight to export.

The second species to be commercialized was Robusta, C. conephora.   Robusta is more productive, easier to take care of, and less picky about climate, but is considered inferior by discerning coffee drinkers.  Thus, most robusta enters the global coffee-stream mostly as powdered or instant coffee, or as a cheap filler for blends of beans.  At the moment, discerning drinkers turn up their noses at robusta, but it may be we’ll all be drinking it in the future.  Arabica production in the Americas is threatened by the same disease that wiped out most arabica plantations in SE Asia originally.  Industrial growing conditions are likely at fault, according to University of Michigan Prof Vandermeer. If there is an arabica holocaust in the Americas, what will we drink?

It turns out Coffea is a big genus, and there are apparently many species that yield caffeinated beans that are more or less untested.  In Sarawak, down in the sweltering lowlands where I live, robusta is grown together with a third species of coffee, Coffea liberica.   Liberica is a larger tree than arabica or robusta, with cherries larger than arabica and more oblong than robusta.  It is much more resistant to rust and has been used in hybrid breeding programs for hardier arabica.  As arabica wanes, selection and improvement of liberica varieties may well yield the coffee of the future.  If you want to try tomorrow’s coffee today, you need to head down to Carpenter Street in Kuching.

One of the few remaining streets of the historic Chinese district in Old Kuching, Carpenter Street begins at a large red arch opposite the old courthouse complex.  The narrow one-way lane winds through several blocks of shoplots, including a large number of jewelers, before terminating at a Chinese temple and former Chinese open-air theater.  The best coffee shop in Kuching is the second to last storefront before the temple:  Black Bean Coffee Shop.

Gracious and low-key, the cafe has been doing business essentially unchanged since I got here ten years ago, before the first Starbucks arrived, before our local Starbucks competitor chain, Bing! Coffee, opened up.  To the best of my knowledge, it is the only place in town you can find locally grown coffee, which the proprietor sources from individual growers in the area and roasts himself.  Several times I’ve walked in to find big bags of green beans in various stages of processing at the rear of the small store, someone picking and tossing defective beans by hand.

Coffee beans upon the shelf

The key is the roast.  The same beans that produce one flavor roasted in sugar and margarine become something very different after a skilled dry roast.  The espresso drinks at Black Bean are made from two parts liberica to one part robusta, scooped out from the big glass jars in front of you.  The coffee is delicious.  And exceedingly potent:  Robusta and Liberica beans contain roughly double the caffeine of arabica.  Adjust your dosage accordingly.

Before a ring better a necklace

A necklace graces the entire body

Better mustached than cleanshaven

With a mustache you can strain your coffee

“Daripada cincin eloklah rantai

Rantai dibuat penghias diri

Daripada licin elok bermisai

Misainya dapat menapis kopi”

Gracious and low key

Pantuns courtesy Malay Civilization
Translations mine.

The Jungle is Neutral

The memoir of a British lieutenant in WWII Malaya who conducts guerilla warfare against the Japanese. It’s not a very gripping story. All the successful guerrilla work takes place in the first quarter of the book, and from there on it is one long anticlimax of malaria, dysentery and thrashing through the jungle. Managing not to die in the jungle for a few years is a pretty good feat for a foreigner but he’s surrounded by locals who do it with less effort, and he doesn’t have much interesting to say about it beyond the bare facts. His major accomplishment between all the not succumbing to illness is training up the Malayan Communist Party cadres in tactics. The book ends with the war so I’m left wondering to what degree the post-war MCP insurgency against the British was more effective because of the good lieutenant’s training.

I’ve been trying to read more books about Malaysia. It hasn’t been easy. There are surprisingly few of them, at least what shows up on Amazon. Of those that I’ve found, very few have anything to say about Malays. Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy novels didn’t have one sympathetic Malay character. Likewise TJIN: there isn’t a single named Malay in the whole book. What ‘s a good book about Malaysia I should read next? Any genre welcome.

Asad lived an amazing life which he describes beautifully. Meetings with future kings of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran before their ascension, espionage into Fascist-controlled Libya and British Iraq: Asad covered a lot of ground. He nests his recollections like the 1001 Nights, one scene inside the other, going further back in time with each one. Yet the book seemed so dated. Asad (1900-1992) was a man of the 20th century, and his Modern rationalist outlook, his Islamist politics and his extreme attachment to the House of Saud feel like relics of a previous age here in the Post-modern, Post-binLaden 21st.  The Road to Mecca was a fascinating historical document but not particularly inspirational to this reader.