Tag: Malaysia

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Peranakan Fair – Be there!

Peranakan Fair

The Peranakan (or Baba Nonya ) community produce the best cuisine I’ve tasted. Really. I’m no expert so do go to their facebook page for the drum on this facinating culture and cuisine.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Peranakan-community-of-Perth-WA/173911992698690

I do know that Peranakan refers to the fusion of Chinese and other cultures. The Chinese being the consummate traders and travellers have developed various cultural offshoots as the settled and intermarried in new lands. It’s a similar story to the intensely varied regional  cuisine of the Jewish Diaspora.

I am most familiar with the Malaysian/Chinese fusion.

The Perth Peranakan community is holding an all day fair on Sunday 24th Novemeber where you can find out more about this culture and purchase  food, clothes and artefacts as well as sharing the experience.

I’m familiar with dishes like Penang Laksa ( more sour and redolent of tamarind than the Singaporean version we are familiar with); and Nonya chicken curry – fragrant, hot and rich with thick coconut milk.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend a couple of their functions thanks to my colleague at Murdoch Uni and fellow foodie Christina Tan.

The first was a lunch. Here are my colleagues Erika Wright and Kai-Ti Kao  and my daughter Zenna suitably blissed out on the fragrant spiciness of this divine homemade food.

Several women provided their special dishes – as in 200 serves each. We were treated to about 8 main courses. Just imagine the best family meal ever and shared with a couple of hundred strangers. Love was in the air!

One dish I’d not tried before was fish that had been baked into an eggy/fishy loaf. Wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but satisfied my desire for something completely different. It just reminded me of gefilte fish – a festive Jewish dish not widely appreciated.. a bit like vegemite!

Then we attended an afternoon tea which was informal but also great. Held at a now defunct café in the Langford shopping centre, we were happy to be the only non-Nonyas there as our new Nonya pals took us under their wing, carefully explaining and providing critique of all the dishes.

We began by fighting over the Singapore style noodles till we realised we were meant to eat a whole plate each.

But along with this, curry puffs (delicious, not oily, in fact great flakey pastry) and some fine spring rolls. Then the sweets, gorgeous jellies bright  green with pandan leaf and rich coconut flavour.

We couldn’t eat it all,  we took away.

The Peranakan fair which will be selling lots of these foods. You can buy tickets in advance – $5 tasters and I guarantee value and flavour you won’t find anywhere else in Perth. This is how I see it. When offered food we can sometimes take it or leave it, but when I’m offered something “my mother made”, anyone’s mother,  the only answer is yes. The fair will be overflowing with food that someone’s mother cooked – just say yes!

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Civility: A thing of the past?

A recent trip to Singapore and Malaysia brought me face to face with the sharp contrast between fast and slow cultures. Okay, no-one is going to call Singapore slow. It is a city on the move, often derided as an oversized shopping mall in which all traces of tradition have been bulldozed to make way for more shops.

What struck me most strongly in both countries is their (sigh) intense civility.

We know Singapore is a deeply regimented society and that much of what takes place there is mandated. So it’s no surprise folks actually wait until you have stepped from the train, rather than crushing you as you disembark.

We spent two days in relentlessly multicultural Melakka, during which time we witnessed an amazing late night gathering in the neighbouring kampong, which I assume had only been preserved because of its touristic value. There was music, sound and colour.

Exploring the kampong a couple of days later I was engaged in conversation by a friendly local. I got the old “where do you come from” routine. This of course doesn’t happen much here in Oz. I’m told that we Aussies are friendly when approached but we do not approach strangers in this manner, in fact even when we see travellers clearly in distress we tend to ignore them.

So I asked this Malay gentleman what the hubbub the other night had been about.

“Ah” he said, “ my hero was here to meet us” with hand over heart as he pointed to the large poster of ex-PM Mahathir. I thought it best not to remind him of Mr Mahathir’s lowly opinion of Aussie’s in general and Paul Keating in particular.

He asked me why we hadn’t come down to the kampong to see for ourselves, telling me: “we had so much local food you would have been welcome to join us”. I thanked him anyway and wandered off contemplating his words. Did he have any idea how far removed from our cultural practices his question was? Imagine if I told him about the overseas student who said, regarding her three years in Australia: “ I’ve really loved being here, I’m, just sorry never to have been inside an Australian home”.

We Australians are sick of having our culture criticised and very sick of the claim that we have none. I’m reminded of a wonderful woman called Joy Burn. Joy was raised in Cunderdin in WA’s wheat belt and was a stalwart of the CWA. Privileged to interview her, I arrived at her home to be greeted by the smell of fresh baked Anzac biscuits.

Joy Burn was old-school, an Australian of the Depression and War years, who invited neighbours round and offered a cuppa, even to “new Australians” like my family. That Aussie hospitality still exists but sometimes we need to be reminded to open our doors wider.

 

Dr Felicity Newman is a member of the Centre for Everyday life at Murdoch University