“Have You Eaten Yet?” Malaysia Hospitality

I was only in Georgetown for a day, but I knew I needed to complete my research for my article on Malaysian food. I kept getting lost in Penang— the winding streets reminiscent of an ancient walled city, where the one thing you could count on is that, map in hand, you would still end up walking around in loops, like the character with literally two left feet in “Waiting for Guffman.”

My quest for Malaysian food started long ago when my lips first tasted roti canai. At first, I thought it had been with my ex-boyfriend Gene, a Malaysian native— but then I realized that it’d been before that, well before, when I picked up and moved to Manhattan. It was a strange time; I had just returned from a couple of years in Japan where I found all things foreign to be amazing, and I was absolutely convinced that there was no better place than Japan to lose yourself in crazy food culture.

Then, I met Kevin.

Truth be told, Kevin, a Singapore-native, was the most clean and conscientious roommate I have ever had. I would trudge back home in three feet of snow, wind-blown from the tunnels between buildings and frozen to the pinky (who in their right mind moves to Manhattan in January anyway?) from my maitre’d at an upscale sushi restaurant on Park Avenue wondering what I was doing with my life. Several times a week, I was going to “cattle calls,” auditions with two to three hundred people minimum, and I couldn’t even go to the calls half the time due to my schedule at the restaurant. These thoughts weighing me down, I would trudge up four flights of stairs and the door to our apartment would open even before I reached the doorknob. Kevin would be standing there, looking half glad that I arrived back alive and half concerned at the blue hue to my skin, take my coat brushing off the snow, and ask if I’d eaten yet. I never had; somehow I managed to always miss the staff meal. In a flash, Kevin would dash off to get takeout. As a side note, the only person who knew how to cook among the four of us roommates was me, but the only groceries I could afford were peanut butter and jelly. A sad state of affairs— thus the kitchen in our apartment was never used except as a laundry facility for our roommate Monica’s underthings.

Most of the time, Kevin would bring back noodle dishes, char kway teow or hor fun, and we would sit on the couch -the one place TO sit in the apartment- eat and talk about our days. We couldn’t have had possible led more different lives. Kevin was a tax lawyer at Baker & McKenzie with rows of identical suits which he brought to get dry cleaned every day, and me clad in leotard and tights. I’m sure he must have been under a lot of stress— the funny thing was, he never showed it. He had a quiet voice, and very slow, conscientious way of speaking which was very calming somehow. When I think back to our conversations, it almost seems like he was singing lullabies to me.

Over time, we got to know each other, mostly through our takeout talks. I also started having many a sleepless night where I would climb down from my loft bed and sit on the couch in the living room in the dark. One night, sitting there, I heard the water boiling — Kevin emerged with two mugs of some kind of beverage. That was when I discovered Milo— a popular chocolate malt developed by Nestle in Australia, but popular in Singapore and Malaysia, which from then on I began to associate with sleep. Over time, this middle of the night, chocolate drinking became a nightly ritual. Sometimes we wouldn’t even talk, just sit and sip, listening to the sounds of the hot water heater.It was comforting and I would start drifting off.

As our friendship deepened, Kevin started to tell me more about Singapore and his life before moving to New York, and I opened up to him about the reverse culture shock I experienced after coming back from Japan, my longings to move back there, and my feeling of being out of place. Inevitably, however, our conversations would always turn to food. I learned very quickly that the standard way to say “How are you?” in Malaysia and Singapore is “Sik Bao May?” Literally, “Have you eaten yet?”

And now here I was in in the foodie capital, Penang, with a purpose, writing an article about food and love.

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