Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • Munching Through KL

    (Many readers may not realize that this blog started off nearly 10 years ago as basically a travel and food blog for two twenty-somethings spending a year in Southeast Asia. This post is written in that earlier mode.)

    I haven’t been back to Kuala Lumpur in awhile. It’s changed since I’ve been here: more traffic, more new construction, and a new urban vibe. I went to my first Malaysian “third-wave coffee” shop, which is a new trend in KL. My guess is that we’re seeing a new transformation in Malaysia’s middle class, one that might prove just as important as the first conspicuous transformation of the late 1980s/early 1990s. I know that this is a rather banal statement for longtime Malaysia watchers, but it’s good to see it first hand.

    But enough about that. I really came here to eat, and that’s what I’ve done. I had 16 hours from arrival in downtown KL to departure for the airport. Here’s what I did.

    Stop 1 (Friday, 5 PM): Bangsar

    Sri Nirwana Maju is the first place JM and I ever had banana leaf rice. It’s also one of my favorites.

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    Inside, uniformed waiters walking around with pulses, pickles, and lots of good things.
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    A classic banana leaf plate, with iced lemon tea on the side.
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    Stop 2: (Friday, 7:30 PM): Jalan Alor

    I believe that this is the first place that JM and I ever went out to eat in KL. It’s in the Bukit Bintang neighborhood, which was always touristy but which strikes me as noticeably more so than it did when we first came here.
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    My friends and I tried “W.A.W,” which comes recommended by many.
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    Normally, JM and I liked to get the whole grilled fish plus lemon chicken. My friends had other ideas, and they were excellent choices.
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    In the back, fried kangkong with garlic and grilled stingray. In the front, Marmite Frogs Legs. Yes, you read that right—colonialism for the win!—and they were delicious.

    Stop 3 (Saturday, 7 AM): Mesjid Jamek

    A morning bite: karipap from a hawker, enjoyed at sunrise looking over Mesjid Jamek.
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    Stop 4 (Saturday, 7:45 AM): Pasar Sentral

    KL’s Central Market is closed this early in the morning, but there is a nice mamak restaurant located nearby that feeds a lot of the people setting up to open the market later.
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    They do a pretty good roti canai. It’s chewier than I prefer, without the crispness that sets the best roti canai apart.
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    But the curries and teh tarik were outstanding.

    Stop 5 (Saturday, 8:30 AM): Jalan Petaling

    The last stop before heading back to catch my train is Jalan Petaling, which has a couple of nice Chinese hawker places nearby.
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    After all of that food, even a small plate of pork cheong fun was almost too much. Almost.
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  • MH370: What’s up, ASEAN?

    I haven’t had much to say about the MH370 tragedy. Several reasons. First, I’m generally afraid of flying so I don’t like to even think about air disasters. Second, I don’t have any thing penetrating or insightful to say about the fate of the lost plane, so any comments there would be simple speculation and rumor-mongering. Third, I’m actually not so interested in using this tragedy as a way to criticize the Malaysian government for how it has been handled. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize the current government, and such a mysterious case such as the MH370 disappearance would have proven frustrating for any government.

    But here’s something that jumps out at me as important about the MH370 crisis, and something that’s perhaps not obvious to most observers: the complete irrelevance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    This is not just a tragedy affecting Malaysia and China, it is a regional emergency with safety and security implications for several ASEAN member states. And yet we have

    1. Unilateral search efforts, led by individual countries rather than by ASEAN as a group
    2. Failure of Thailand to report a potential radar sighting of the plane
    3. Failure of Indonesia to grant overflight privileges to parties searching in Indonesian waters

    I could go on, but the point has been made, and you can also read Jessica Trisko Darden’s discussion at the Monkey Cage for more. Not only has ASEAN as an regional intergovernmental organization been remarkably absent in a crisis that clearly affects it, but the supposed knock-on benefits of having ASEAN as a regular forum that eases communication and collaboration among the members don’t seem to have materialized. Yes, there is an ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting every year, and it

    aims to promote mutual trust and confidence through greater understanding of defence and security challenges as well as enhancement of transparency and openness

    but when Thailand’s air force doesn’t feel the need to share information about unidentified aircraft in its air space in the context of a regional search for a missing passenger jet, something has gone wrong. There’s also a Transport Ministers Meeting every year, and plenty of other multilateral fora that are designed to avoid exactly what has happened to ASEAN during the MH370 crisis: failures of communication and an inability to coordinate when faced with rapidly changing events that affect multiple members. In fact, it was only on March 19, 11 days after the disappearance of the jet, that Foreign Ministers Surapong Tovichakchaikul and Anifah Haji Aman announced that they would meet to discuss a joint search for the missing plane.

    Of course, I’m an ASEAN skeptic. There are others who think that ASEAN is more important, that the process of negotiating and meeting is creating something like an ASEAN identity or at least a set of shared understandings about common interests and behaviors (see e.g. Alice Ba and Amitav Acharya). Nothing about the MH370 crisis and ASEAN’s non-presence is inconsistent with what they’ve argued. But it does clearly underscore the limits of regionalism, and how far ASEAN has to go to fulfill its own mission.