Word: malays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...arrive by ekspress in Belaga on a sweltering Monday afternoon. The fellow passengers offer a fair representative slice of the Rajang's recent social history: an itinerant Malay dentist who'll pull that blackened molar for $3; Hokkien merchants whose families came from Singapore in the 1870s as traders, glued to the John Woo DVD playing onboard; and longhouse dwellers. Some of the latter are older, with distended earlobes and inked skin, but most are young couples returning from market hubs like Kapit, where Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, built a fort (still standing...
...British academic Duncan McCargo counters such heartless defeatism with Tearing Apart the Land, an introduction to a scandalously underreported conflict. Most of the 1.8 million people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces are Malay-speaking Muslims, but they make up only 2% of a largely Thai-speaking Buddhist country. For a century, attempts at assimilation have been met with resentment and rebellion. The current hostilities erupted under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose hard-line response to what he dismissed as banditry turned sporadic militant attacks into a full-blown insurgency...
...that makes it hard for rights-abusing soldiers and police to be prosecuted, and his vow to boost the halal-food industry and other local projects does not address the conflict's complex roots. By blankly rejecting Amnesty International's recent claims that the Thai military was systematically torturing Malay Muslims, Abhisit also struck a yoga position familiar in Thai politics: saving face by burying your head in the sand...
...prawn-laden broth thickened by the spices of China, Malaysia and India - Peranakan culture has been simmering since the Chinese began migrating to the Straits in the early 16th century. Originally small-time traders under the Portuguese colonialists of Malacca, the Chinese Peranakans subsequently parlayed their mastery of Malay and English to become compradore merchants under British rule, spawning a prosperous Anglophile and anglophone class that aspired to attend Oxford and Cambridge but which, at the same time, spoke among itself in Baba Malay. (See 10 things to do in Singapore...
...known as belachan. For dessert, go for the sago gula melaka, a mixture of boiled sago, warm coconut milk, palm sugar and shaved ice. The cost of an average dinner for two (without alcohol) is around $50, a modest tariff for food that is invariably sedap. That's Baba Malay for "delicious," and a word that will hopefully live for a long time...