I miss the flavours of South East Asia :( A small window into my experiences. [View all]

[Locut0s]

Being severely depressed of late has gotten me to thinking about times when I was happier. One of the happiest time of my life was WAYYY back when I was 5-6 yrs old living in Malaysia. I'm 1/2 Chinese (mother is Chinese, father is White) and my mother was born and raised in Malaysia. I lived in Asia for 4+ years as a young child and have been back a number of times. One of the things I really miss about the atmosphere there was the hot humid, lazy / languid and yet paradoxically crazy nightlife.

It's hard to describe if you have never been to Asia or the tropics but there is something wonderful about many of these countries come 7-8pm or so. I guess the best I can do is describe what was an average night for us back in those day (late 80s Malaysia):

We lived with my grandparents back then in a large house which had no air conditioning but which more than made up for it with an open floor plan with plenty of fans, stone floors and windows always open. Come sunset a cool breeze would blow through the house. In much of the tropics people try to limit their activity during the daytime as it's just too hot to do much. But come evening everyone goes out to enjoy the cool breeze and have some fun (cool being relative term here being the tropics lol). Quite often around 7 or 8pm we would walk across the street from my grandparents house to the local night market. Picture rows of small little hawkers stalls each specializing in some specific dish, along with people selling trinkets and what not. Some places were larger sit down restaurant type affairs but still open to the street, no windows. These places were usually run by a "drink" seller who would sell you the beverages and rented out his floor spaces to other hawkers who would sell you the food. And what amazingly good food it was, stir fries of every possible variety you can imagine, rice and curry cooked in banana leafs, fish head curries and soups, seafood, cured meats, desserts, ice katchang, dumplings, steamed buns, "pulled" coffee, coke and other pop from those oldschool little glass bottles, I could go on and on.

Of course Like everything in SE asia at the time, and still is, it was a messy, dirty affair. No such thing as a health inspection department and the stalls were all set up along side the street ditch. And yet we never got sick once eating out. Each stall ran off of groups of rather dubious looking propane tanks, with their burners turned up beyond max. All this lit with jerry rigged strings of florescent lights running from one stall to the next. Just being there is an intoxicating experience, a drunken mix of heat, chaos, wonderful (and sometimes awful) smells, amazing tasting food, the freshest fruit and vegetables you can imagine (you have not eaten fruit till you have tried it in the tropics!), crowds of laughing happy people out enjoying the night life.

You get your food and drink and sit down to a wobbly little metal foldaway table, surrounded by old worn out plastic chairs. Perhaps you are closer to the concrete sidewalk, by the ditch, or right next to the slow moving street traffic. Everything is too bright, too loud, too much, too hot, too wet, too dirty, done in too much of a hurry. And yet it's perfect too. Again it's an intoxicating mix if you have ever had the pleasure of experiencing it. After our meal we would walk slowly around the neighbourhood enjoying the sight and sounds and cool breeze. You'd see clusters of people walking along in the dark mumbling or laughing. Despite all the chaos it had an amazingly languid relaxed lazy feeling to it all.

I really miss that atmosphere. Having lived now in North America the past 25 years or more (in Vancouver Canada), there just seems something, missing. It's probably my depression speaking but there was something about that hot humid chaos in which things just didn't seem to matter to much, and those things that REALLY did matter were much more apparent and close at hand. Our world seems to be one increasingly of rules and regulations, perfectionism, getting things DONE, it's a cold world by comparison at times.