It's a Girl!

Since the ultrasound on Thursday, we've been laboring through Labor Day, and here is the result, minus a few final touches. We're pretty sure no child of ours is actually in danger of thinking she's a princess, so we went a little crazy with pink, reveling in her girliness.

Thank you to the generosity of our family for putting this together. I never thought I'd have a room this cute in my house.

Dinner at home

Look who's sitting at the table and ready to dive in. MEEEE!

Yum yum yum. To my utter delight, Palm likes food exactly the way I do, with lots of veggies. She has an impressive collection of healthy cookbooks, many with an Asian theme. We collected our ultra fresh goods from the morning market and created this dinner with me acting as sous-chef. Impressed are ya?

Dishes: Steamed prawns, Stir-fried bean sprouts and julienne carrots with ginger and fish balls (fish beaten to a paste and made into balls), Chinese broccoli, bok choy wiht julienne carrots, steamed fish, and a side of Thai sauce (I can't remember the exact ingredients now, but it was GOOD.). For dessert there was dragon fruit (pink), mango, and pineapple.

Jay

So, the huge gap in posts has partly to do with being busy but also because I just can’t seem to get this story to come out right. I don’t know if it will be as meaningful to you as it was to me, but. I’m just going to give it my best shot so I can show you the rest of this vacation!

Jay’s story:

Ricky and I were really just tagging along on this lunch date where Palm and Scott were saying goodbye to their friend, Jay. I admit that my expectations were low for this meal, with a stranger, in a mall restaurant. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip.

Jay was a refugee from Pakistan. He and his brother fled Pakistan after his father’s murder and mother’s subsequent death (stress-related heart attack). Jay was about 18, and I could hardly imagine being that age with both parents gone. The reason for our lunch celebration was that my/our home country, the USA, had accepted Jay as a refugee, and he was on his way to a new home.

So the story of the murder is simply that Jay’s dad was a Christian. In case you’re worried, the purpose of this post is not to bash Islam, but this meeting did flood me with appreciation for both Jesus and my country. While many people have and still do perform horrible acts said to be in the name of Christ, I always fail to find any biblical foundation for their conclusions. While US citizens have and still do impede the true practice of freedom of religion, there is no constitutional backing for such behavior.

So from Pakistan, in the wake of the deaths, Jay had escaped to Malaysia, but he had not fared much better there. While Malaysia technically offers religious freedom, it is heavily Muslim-dominant, and several months prior to our meeting, Jay had been thrown over a second floor balcony by some Pakistani Muslims, again for his Christianity.

At this point I was floored. Here was this soft-spoken man, 10 years younger than me, with experiences such as these. Yet here he was, filled with joy, appreciation, and headed to America.

Jay had just finished his week-long introductory course on America. I wanted to know what he had been taught, what he expected to like or dislike in America. After all, America has both pros AND cons. He responded immediately with, "Everyone is free!" He then said he felt like he was heading for his own promised land.

Learning about Malaysia – People & Religion

(The following is a prelude to my next story about lunch with “Jay.”)

Malaysia is about 55% native Malays, 25% Chinese, 7% Indian, 11% other local indigenous people, and 1% other. Malaysia is considered “multicultural,” which it definitely is, but it was a very different feeling being in the <1% category, as compared to multicultural America, where I am among the majority.

Islam is the official religion of Malaysia, a religion thought to have been brought over by Indian traders. Muslims make up 60% of the population. There are 20% Buddhist, 9% Christian, and 3% traditional Chinese religions (Confucianism, Taoism). Religion is heavily tied to one’s country of origin. The Malaysian constitution guarantees religious freedom, however all ethnic Malays are constitutionally defined as Muslim. This was an interesting concept for me. The Malay are technically allowed to leave the religion, but in doing so, they lose certain privileges and must go through a formal process. Muslim women often work, but are required to wear headscarfs at all times. As much as I would hate wearing so much clothing while living essentially on the equator, I loved this niche of fashion. If it were me, I’d have to go for black, since I’d be sweating through my headscarf on a daily basis.

Privileges of being Malay: The native people are more broadly considered “Bumiputera.” When Malaysia became independent from Britain in 1957, most Bumiputera were indentured laborers, whereas Chinese were significantly involved in the commercial sector, and the new government felt it was appropriate to give the natives a leg up in their homeland. The new economic policies include preferential entry to public tertiary education, projects earmarked for Malay contractors, minimum percentages of bumiputra in business ownership, employment, and housing development ownership. It is an interesting concept, given that the Malay are of the overwhelming majority. The efficacy and fairness of policy is a subject of debate and flux.

Day 2 - Chinatown

In between meals 1 and 2, we spent quite a while in the Pasar Seni = Central Market, aka Chinatown market. It is packed with stalls, akin to “El Mercado” in San Antonio but imagine changing out the Tex-Mex merchandise for Chinese-Malay-Indian fare. For those of you unfamiliar with El Mercado, it's an indoor mall made up of tiny stores, often selling similar items, and admixed with portable booths as seen in American malls or on Boston Common.

With Palm’s help, I practiced bargaining. We rounded up a few gifts for the family (shhh!). Ricky & Palm were incredibly patient. We ultimately didn’t experience the “Doctor fish,” but you should know about these in case you visit. You pay a small fee to put your feet in a tub with these fish, and they nibble off your dead skin.

Day 2 - Meal 2

After a brief eating break, we met up with a special friend of Scott & Palm’s for our second meal of the day. We'll call him "Jay," and I'll tell you more about him in the next post. It was in a restaurant within a mall. The mall was much like an American mall. Now for the food! We tried a few more classics.


Palm and I ate rojak (top pic) – salad doused in a peanut-sauce dressing that may contain shrimp paste. It was a mixture of familiar vegetables, like cucumbers with a few fruits, one of them similar to a hard pear. The sauce tasted mostly like molasses to me.






Ricky and Jay ate a dish I can’t remember the name of, but it’s supposedly a Malaysian classic combination of rice, chicken, hard boiled egg, peanuts, and dried prawns.

Credits: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2592306435_4c66ed1659_o.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga0ekIvaNayEG-yCw7K88R1ch1WH-zr_bdtBeb12_AmUSVOcCdWf1N3fLenDKVKkIMlAWm3rzCtB8AGprID_NNLMTqPZhzQAFGtdQAlqlOFlZ2o3QhEJTO94qAZdbAiwRaD9P25Tz4fCQ/s400/800px-NasiLemak.jpg

Day 2 - Meal 1

For brunch, we ate at our first Hawker stall. The Hawker stall was a new concept for me, but they truly are EVERYWHERE in Malaysia. It’s sort of a cross between a food court and a carnival food stand. They’re housed in an open indoor/outdoor space filled with chairs and tables in the middle and rimmed by independently operated portable cooking booths that will whip up a selection of dishes.













For lunch, Palm had congee (aka Chinese porridge) – think rice made with too much water, cooked much longer and then add bits of chicken, green onion, ginger, cilantro +/- a few other things or variations.



Ricky had char kway teow (which immediately became one of his favorites) - wide rice noodles stir-fried with cockles (saltwater clams), prawns (like shrimp), Chinese sausage (think small salami), eggs, bean sprouts, and soy and chilli sauces.


I had Hokkien mee (or I think it was Hokkien mee) – yollow noodles fried with sliced meat, boiled squid, prawns and strips of fried egg.



I had to borrow the congee photo from: http://taidaexchange.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/congee.jpg
and the Hawker photo from: http://www.malaysiasite.nl/hawkereng.htm