Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • First Mee Hokkien

    I recently learned that I am no longer allergic to shellfish. I first received a diagnosis of a shellfish allergy back in 2004 after undergoing the standard allergy test, but since then had never experienced an adverse reaction despite several incidents of involuntary exposure. Curious as to how this could be possible, I visited a different allergist in summer 2016, who conducted the same allergy test that was conducted twelve years earlier, and gave me the opposite diagnosis. It’s not clear if I somehow grew out of my allergy, or if the first diagnosis was in error.

    One consequence of my diagnosis in 2004 is that I have never before tried some of the most classic dishes of Indonesian and Malaysian cuisine. Never before have I eaten chilli crab, or most versions of curry laksa, or char kway teow, or any number of other signature dishes featuring prawns or squid.* As I find myself in Kuala Lumpur for the next week, I now have an opportunity to try all of these things that I’ve never tried before.

    For my inaugural Indolaysian shellfish meal, I chose Hokkien mee, a dish that I’ve always lusted after. I chose “KL-style” over “Singapore-style” as it’s the version I first came to know, and because I tend to enjoy the dark sweet soy sauce noodle flavor. I visited a place called Mun Wah Hokkien Mee on the recommendation of several internet sources that claimed it was among the best places in central KL for Hokkien mee. Here is what we have.

    Glistening, glorious Hokkien mee
    Glistening, glorious Hokkien mee

    Visible here: those fat Hokkien-style noodles, little pork cracklings, sliced pork, squid, veg. Not visible here: wok hei, shrimp, and the pig liver that is the Mun Wah signature touch and which creates an ultra-rich sauce. The verdict: those cracklings are oh so fun, and the mouthfeel of the slippery mee is just as good as I had hoped, but this dish was not as good as I expected! I suspect that I would have preferred a liver-free version. I found the occasional ocean-y bite to be not unpleasant, but not particularly delicious either.

    Mun Wah the restaurant was quite the experience. I infer that despite serving Hokkien mee, the restaurant is run by Cantonese speakers, as they kept referring to me as the gwai lo rather than the ang mo. The proprietor (and also the chef) spent quite a bit of time explaining all of the other dishes that I should also order to try, despite the fact that he speaks no English and I speak no Cantonese. I tried to speak Malay to him, but no dice.

    NOTE

    * It’s actually worse than it sounds. One of the consequences of my (alleged) allergy was that I had to be extra careful about ordering even those dishes that don’t normally have shellfish in them, like many versions of nasi goreng and otak-otak. I learned this the hard way in Sydney on our honeymoon, when I ordered hot and sour soup and it came with prawns floating in it. Incidentally, I have also never eaten a Moreton Bay bug.

  • Berman on Fascism

    Sheri Berman has written an excellent essay at Vox on fascism, populism, and president-elect Trump. Read the whole thing here, but here are the main points.

    As a student of fascism and National Socialism, particularly in the 1930s, I side with those who say that Trump still falls on the “populist” side of the spectrum. That hardly means that he or the people who claim to be part of his movement do not pose a threat to democracy, but the type of threat differs from that posed by “classical” fascists.

    Still, given how prevalent the term fascism has become in American and European political debates — and there is a parallel discussion across the Atlantic over whether France’s Front National, led by Marie Le Pen, or Germany’s Pegida party, or Austria’s Freedom Party ought to be described as fascist or populist — it is worth carefully considering what made fascism distinct and so politically powerful. Doing so will allow us to gain a better handle on whether we face similar dangers today to those of the ’30s.

    Academics have fought passionately over how to define fascism, but scholars generally focus on four crucial characteristics. First fascists were nationalists: They believed the nation, rather than individuals (like liberals) or classes (like Marxists), was the key actor in political life; that it existed above or separate from the citizens composing it; and that it had a special mission or “soul” that needed to be nurtured and protected from internal and external enemies…

    Second, fascists shared a deep suspicion of capitalism, because it disrupted and divided national communities and destroyed national traditions. They therefore advocated a level of state intervention in the economy surpassed only by the contemporary Soviet Union…

    Third, fascists were deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic. Liberalism was rejected for its promotion of individualism and individual rights, its emphasis on reason and rationality, its acceptance of pluralism, and its cosmopolitanism. As Mussolini once argued, “The man of fascism is [not merely] an individual, he is nation and fatherland.” The good life, he suggested, is one “in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realized that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.” (Self-denial and the sacrifice of self-interests are not qualities that Trump is especially known for.)…

    Fourth, fascists embraced violence as a means and an end. Fascism was revolutionary: It aimed not to reform but to destroy the modern world — and for this, a constant and probably violent struggle would be necessary. Violence was not merely the method through which revolution would be accomplished; it was valuable in and of itself, providing supporters with powerful “bonding” experiences and “cleansing” the nation of its weaknesses and decadence….

    I recommended Berman’s treatment of social capital and the fall of the Weimar Republic in my post on Comparative Politics and the Trump Administration, as the interwar years provide an excellent example of what the rise of fascism actually looked like. One key point that I take from Berman’s work on the rise of the NSDAP in Germany is that fascists organize.* Fascists don’t crush unions, they embrace them so that they can be used. EDIT: This is a fine point. In the German case, independent trade unions were smashed almost immediately, with workers reorganized into a compulsory centralized union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Fascists don’t want people to be politically anesthetized, eyes glued to the popular media, they want people to sacrifice time and money to show their might as a movement. What made the NSDAP distinctive in interwar Germany was not its virulent anti-Semitism, but rather its ability to organize a political movement and later the administrative machinery to act upon that anti-Semitism.

    The phenomena to look for in anticipating fascism—in the US and anywhere—are corporatism, syndicalism, and organized mass mobilization. Not celebrity, cronyism, and politics by tweet.

    NOTE

    * It is in this sense that Indonesia’s Golkar (“functional groups”) under the New Order—with its embrace of (heavily controlled) labor unions, its forced mass mobilization, and metaphors of nation as body and family—was the closest thing that Southeast Asia has ever had to a fascist organization.