16. Whining About Wine

This week’s blog entry will stray off the language learning/teaching path but it does involve a large dollop of cultural conundrum. I spent a good part of this summer overseas in several countries working on my language training website, www.sulantra.com. On the way home to Japan, I had a rather messy journey due to a well-meant present received from friends in Sofia, Bulgaria. Later, I wrote a message with words of warning about future gifts for overseas visitors which I e-mailed to a few select friends. They all enjoyed my effort and suggested that I upload the adventure tale to my blog; thus, I present the story below. Enjoy!

LETTER TO A FRIEND IN SOFIA:

Just a quick note from the Narita Express train. I am almost home after living out of a suitcase for six weeks. But before I arrive and the memories subside, I want to spin you a cautionary tale. You really, really must tell everyone in Sofia NEVER to give a present of Bulgarian wine to someone heading to the airport. No matter how delicious the contents, it may sour considerably on the road. This is my sad story.

I packed the precious bottle of wine that Mitko and Beti gave me very carefully in my suitcase – in a mailing tube surrounded by a cotton sweater then tied in a Japanese wrapping cloth for added effect. At first, things seemed to go relatively well. Upon my arrival in Istanbul, I claimed my excessively heavy suitcase (32.4 kilos!) and proceeded to my hotel. So far, so good.

The next day, I bought a few more things (several kilos of olives, CD’s, the usual evil eye trinkets) then carefully repacked my suitcase so that the new purchases would fit in perfectly. I carefully placed the “wine tube” at the bottom of my suitcase to balance the weight and, armed with my passport and a printed version of my online ticket, confidently headed to Istanbul’s Attaturk Airport to check in for my flight. Upon arrival, I was smiling my way through the security check when an official abruptly stopped me. It seems something had shown up on the scanners. Was I carrying a bottle of wine perhaps?

I had to completely unpack my suitcase in front of many curious official Turkish eyes then repack it as a crowd gathered. Everyone was particularly impressed by my wine tube creation. One young female Customs official even nodded her approval and complimented me on my incredible fussiness.

The entire process felt like a form of public humiliation (“Do you tourists really need to take pictures?”) and took forever. I now found myself dashing about lugging a horribly overweight suitcase as I faced more lines, more officials, and glares from other travelers as I tried to jump assorted queues. Still I managed to check-in without being charged for excess baggage so I shouldn’t really complain.

Next stop: Doha, Qatar. This time I was a tad stressed crossing the border since it had occurred to me in-flight that I didn’t have a visa and wasn’t sure if I needed one. I dreaded the official interrogation which obviously lay ahead. As I stood in line for Qatari Immigration, the sweat beads began to form on my brow. Would I be detained, held in custody in a small windowless cell? I’ve watched a few too many inflight movies...

As things turned out, the procedure was relatively painless – a few questions followed by a credit card payment for 100 lira. But wait. Could that be a bottle of alcohol in your suitcase?

Once again, I had to unpack EVERYTHING in front of curious eyes and produce the notorious bottle of Bulgarian wine. This time they confiscated the contraband and provided me with a receipt, all the while chiding me that alcohol was illegal hereabouts. I was told that, if I left the country within a two-week period, I could pick up my precious bottle; otherwise, the goods in question would be destroyed as all evil things should be. The entire process took about an hour, which meant my good friend, Ozgur, was forced to wait outside for over an hour in the Arrivals area uncertain as to whether I had missed my flight – or worse – in Istanbul. Welcome to Qatar.

My time in Doha was short and busy with visits  to Qatar University’s women’s campus and a surreal interlude at a shopping center that resembled a Las Vegas hotel without the alcoholic trimmings. Before I knew it, I was heading once again for Doha International Airport. I left plenty of time in order to pick up my elusive bottle of wine but I wasn’t exactly sure how I would go about retrieving it.

At the check-in counter for my flight they said that I could pick up the bottle after I checked in my suitcase and cleared Immigration. I dutifully did both then wandered about looking for a “Confiscated Alcohol and Other Wicked Items” office. It turned out to be hidden in the back of the terminal with a mountain of contraband goods piled outside the door. I knocked but there was no answer. Again I waited.

After several minutes, an attendant finally popped his head out and before he could scurry away, I produced my receipt and asked for my bottle of Bulgarian wine. He looked rather irritated and said that it would take 20-30 minutes to retrieve since it was in another terminal. I said that I could wait. He mumbled something under his breath and sauntered off.

I spent about 40 minutes checking out the duty free area where I purchased several boxes of dates, the local “must have” souvenir. Then I headed back to the “confiscated alcohol” office. No one was in sight so I waited and waited... and waited!

Finally, a woman walked out of the office and I pounced. I politely explained that I was going to miss my flight, that I didn’t really drink and the only reason I was waiting so long for the bottle of wine was because it was a gift from dear, dear friends and not because I am an alcoholic. The woman sighed, disappeared behind the closed door and did not reappear.

Eventually the original official walked past and I asked about my bottle of Bulgarian wine. Ah, yes, the Bulgarian wine. He reappeared with the goods in question, which I seized and frantically tried to stuff into my carry-on bag. Thanks to my newly purchased dates, this was impossible. I had to unload the carry-on bag, rearrange my boxes of dates, computer, etc. and FINALLY managed to get everything loaded before frantically rushing to board my plane. Safe at last – or so I thought.

There proved to be one last hurdle. My travel agent neglected to tell me that my flight did not go directly to Tokyo but made a stopover in Osaka where everyone had to de-board and GO THROUGH A SECURITY CHECK!! Of course, the Japanese officials insisted on taking the bottle of wine in my carry-on bag. Of course, I insisted that it was a gift from dear, dear, DEAR friends and that I would slit my wrists in front of their surveillance machine if I had to part with it.

A Qatar Airways staff member was called to assist with this difficult passenger. She was not happy. I was told that the bottle would be put in a large plastic bag then tagged, but that it would have to go into the baggage hold with all of the other luggage. If it broke, Qatar Airways could not be held responsible.

Thinking on my feet, I hurriedly pulled out my neck pillow, inflated it with lightning speed, and attached it to the bottle by wrapping the pillow in my pajama bottoms which I always carry at times like these. I then removed my computer from its protective case and stuffed the bottle into the latter. There was no place for the QA woman to attach her baggage tag but I was one step ahead of her. I quickly produced a collapsible bag and put the now rather weird shaped package into it. I crossed my fingers as the attendant attached the baggage tag to the bundle and then stuck the claim stub to my ticket glaring as she did so.

When I arrived at Narita Airport in Tokyo my suitcase was the first item off. I happily loaded it on to a baggage cart then waited for The Bottle... and waited... and waited. Of course, it was the last item to appear on the carousel and I was probably the last person to leave Narita from my QA flight. The good news is that the bottle somehow survived all of this pandemonium. The bad news is that I have most likely been blacklisted by Qatar Airways and will never be able to board one of their flights again.

Next time you are asked what a nice gift would be for someone returning to Japan perhaps a hot pan full of steaming banitsa pastry covered in yogurt sauce would be easier to transport.

P.S. My life is now back to normal – although I suspect that the psychological scarring from the above adventure(s) is permanent.

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, http://en.sulantra.com/, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German , Korean and Italian!)

15. Homeward Bound

At 20, I decided to change my studies from Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa and major in Southeast Asian Area Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I said a tearful good-bye to my Malaysian family (see entry 14), a “two boxes of kleenex” event as my aunt Gwen would say, then began the long trek back to the West Coast along the Trans Canada Highway. Having limited funds, I decided to hitchhike the 3,500 kilometers (2200 miles) home, staying with CWY/JCM alumni here and there to save money. About half way to Vancouver, I stopped to visit two of these friends, Donna and Claude, in Winnipeg, Manitoba where I stumbled upon a job for the summer.

The Manitoba provincial government had several work programs for their youth, including tutorial positions in creative programs for local kids. Armed with Donna’s Winnipeg address and experience with my Malaysian family, I landed a teaching job working with native children and soon found myself on a bus headed to the small Manitoba town of Cranberry Portage.

The program that I was hired on had two very different goals for three groups of students. The first goal over the initial two two-week terms was to help native children from isolated northern communities adjust to a more structured classroom environment. The participants would have to leave their rural homes and move to larger towns and cities in order to complete their secondary school education, and we were supposed to assist them in this major transition in their young lives. The second goal of the third and final term was to give kids from Winnipeg’s tough inner city the chance to escape their rough and tumble daily life for two weeks of fun by a lake while working on school subjects – a kind of summer school in the wilds.

I was responsible for instructing the kids in mathematics, a subject that I enjoy and, given the level, felt qualified to teach. As for outdoor activities, I was supposed to train everyone in canoeing, including the intricacies of canoe-over-canoe rescue techniques just in case a craft started to sink. But there was a slight problem: I couldn’t tell which end of a canoe was the front!

Fortunately, we were given a crash course in “how to hold a paddle” and by the time the first group of children arrived I was ready to impart my newfound wisdom on them, or so I thought. As it turned out, the children taught me some things since all of them were at home in a canoe. Some even helped their parents manage trap lines (fur trading was a source of income for many of their families), skillfully gliding their boats over lakes and rivers much better than I ever would.

The children were from one of Canada’s largest First Nation’s groups, the Cree, and they communicated in their mother tongue as we paddled along. The bad news was that they spent most of their “training time” on the water cracking jokes about my less than stellar canoeing skills. The good news was that they taught me a range of Cree phrases connected to life on the lake.

Working with these kids I began to realize that I didn’t need to wander far to experience a completely new world. They told me which plants were edible as we trudged along forest paths. They explained the complex process of skinning an animal then tanning the pelt so that it could be used for clothing. I was taught how to cook a beaver (you boil the meat first to remove the large amount of fat) and I even learned how to do traditional Cree beadwork, a hobby I enjoy to this day. Each of these activities was important in their culture but the language needed sometimes did not even exist in English.

Learners of a new language may desperately search for an equivalent meaning in their mother tongue for every word or phrase. Too often they view unique items with frustration asking “How do you say this?” when there is no exact answer. Each language is filled with culturally-based terms and concepts which cannot be translated directly. You just have to accept them at face value, developing an innate understanding, a “feel” for the meaning based on the context and examples around you.

I recently spent time in Sofia, Bulgaria with some local friends. Over dinner they referred to one of their group as being “sert”. When I asked for clarification, everyone started piling definition upon definition.

“Well, someone who is kind of hard-headed.”

“No, more like strict… or serious.”

“Kind of uptight.”

“Yes, but not mean or nasty.”

This went on for a while and I began to panic. Then I looked across at the young woman they were referring to. Confident, organized, a person who helps but does not suffer fools. Ah, “sert”!

Unique terms like “sert” should be appreciated for the special “flavour” they impart to a language. They are a gift of knowledge and help you to better understand a culture.

A few years ago, Tomson Highway, a prominent Canadian author of Cree descent, stayed at my home in Japan for several days. When I mentioned that I still remembered some of the language the children had taught me that distant summer in northern Manitoba, he decided to test me. As I blurted out phrases he suddenly began to smile. Apparently the kids had done their job well and my accent was pretty good. But the phrase I thought meant, “You have a nice canoe.” had a much more risqué meaning. The kids had taught me a thing or two – and gotten the last laugh!

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, http://en.sulantra.com/, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German , Korean and Italian!)

14. Reintegration: Coming Home

At 19, I returned from Malaysia a mess. I was homesick for a place that a year earlier I didn’t even know existed and was suffering from a severe case of “reverse culture shock” (see Blog 13). After spending a few months of hell with my family on Vancouver Island, I moved to Ottawa and attended Carleton University where I began to reinvent myself. I found a house with occupants from Quebec and Indonesia so that I could use French and Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia regularly, made new friends from Columbia to improve my Spanish, and worked with CWY/JCM’s Fijian program as a volunteer. (I can still sing the Fijian welcoming song.) At school, I created an animated short film called “Learn a Language, Learn More” as part of my Journalism program, which was Carleton’s entry in a national animation festival.

I was thrilled to be living in Ottawa with its eclectic markets catering to embassy families from around the world, but I couldn’t afford the goods on display. I was a starving student and needed part-time work so I began knocking on doors, including the Malaysian High Commission’s. There I landed a job as the private tutor to the family of the newly-appointed Deputy High Commissioner – my first language teaching job!

Before heading to the High Commission, I had prepared a 5-minute speech in Malay about the wonders of my CWY/JCM experience. Buffalo leeches crawling up my legs in rice paddies, a weekend spent at the Sultan of Kedah’s mountaintop palace, sleeping under a basket of skulls in an Iban longhouse in Sarawak – I think you get the picture. I marched into the High Commission and asked to see “someone in charge” (these were pre high security days) then poured out my monologue for the unsuspecting cultural attaché standing in front of me.

As it turned out, he was Indian-Malaysian and didn’t really understand much of what I said (at least this is what his open mouth and frightened gaze suggested). However, the Malay secretary who had summoned him jumped up and squealed, “Bagus! Bagus!” (Great! Great!). Within a week I was the private English and French tutor for the Deputy High Commissioner’s family. They had arrived in Canada just two weeks earlier and my job consisted of language classes each week with his wife, five daughters ranging in age from 3 to 14, and two brothers-in-law. In retrospect I probably used a lot of Malay with smatterings of English and French. Writing this, I have guilt pangs about how little I taught them, particularly since it was my involvement with this wonderful family that saved me, that finally brought my head back home.

Working with people from other countries living in your culture can not only help maintain or even improve your language skills, but might also open your eyes to the uniqueness of your own world. Too often we take for granted what sits in front of us. By assisting others, we really begin to think about who we are, about the beauty – or hardship – of where we come from. At least this was true for me.

And my Malaysian family? I taught in their home two days a week for peanuts, but was always well-fed and treated as one of them. My joy at being immersed in a Malaysian atmosphere was evident as I made every effort to assist each member of the family as they adjusted to life in Canada. For the reality was that they were helping me reintegrate into my own culture.

I became a kind of chaperone, escorting family members out into the big, bad world of Ottawa. This included accompanying the High Commissioner’s wife to official functions and acting as her personal translator. Despite my limited language skills, it wasn’t difficult since everyone seemed to ask the same innocuous questions at the cocktail parties she dutifully attended but hated.

To break the monotony of the party circuit, we sometimes made up silly answers to the sillier questions just to see if the polite questioners were really listening.

“How do you like Canadian food?”

“Oh, the blueberries are wonderful in curry...”

I think people must have found us a disturbing pair – a tall, gangly youth escorting an older Asian woman dressed from head to toe in traditional garb with her face showing through a voluminous scarf, giggling in the corner over our little pranks.

One brother-in-law of the High Commissioner published a newspaper article in a Kuala Lumpur newspaper about a “crazy Canadian” who babbled in Malay after only a few months in Malaysia, wore sarongs at home, and ate the hottest of curries with his hands (a feat Malays feel most foreigners are incapable of). While in CWY/JCM, I had brought several Malaysians home for a week on Vancouver Island so that my family could join the experience. Unfortunately, these friends sent clippings of the article from Kuala Lumpur to my family home.

When my mother opened the first letter, a newspaper clipping dropped to the floor. All she could see was a cropped picture of her eldest son smiling out from an incomprehensible newspaper article. She assumed that I had returned to Malaysia and became frantic, leaving hysterical messages with my housemates in Ottawa, none of whom understood what she was babbling about. (Quebecois and Indonesians, remember?) Their reports made me think that SHE had flown to Kuala Lumpur since I was not aware the newspaper article had been written!

But my mother was justified in worrying about me. I was truly addicted to things Malaysian. By the end of my year at Carleton, I had decided to change my major from Journalism to Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, specifically Southeast Asian Area studies. To my knowledge, I was the first student ever enrolled in this program and might have been the last, since it no longer exists.

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, www.sulantra.com, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German and Korean!)

13. Walk the talk – into a shock!

I spent a year as a participant in Malaysia on the Canada World Youth/Jeunesse Canada Monde program and the experience left its mark. I fell in love with my host country – the people, climate, food, customs, EVERYTHING – and returned to my family on the West Coast of Canada a complete wreck. I remember staring blankly at a TV screen while being wrapped in a blanket to ward off the chill – in AUGUST. Or sprinkling chili powder on my mashed potatoes to unsuccessfully duplicate the spicy taste of the food that I missed so much. My parents wondered what kind of creature their son had turned into. So did I. Now I know that what I was going through is called “reverse culture shock”, and I was suffering from a bad case of it.


You expect differences when you leave and travel for an extended period overseas; however, it is very unsettling to discover that sometimes when you return home, nothing is the same. In my case, my brain felt twisted in knots. I was homesick for the wilds of Malaysia – and I mean seriously wild. At the end of my Malaysian sojourn, I had lived for six weeks with an Iban family in a longhouse in the jungles of Borneo with a net full of etched skulls suspended over my bed to protect me from evil (although I can’t say that I would want to protect anyone if it was my skull stuck in that net!), staring down at me as I went to sleep each night. Now I was staring at walls in my parents’ home wondering why I didn’t want to step outside. If I had had the choice, I never would have boarded the plane back to Canada.


I came to realize that the family nest would never be the same, would never come close to providing the excitement that I had experienced outside of my own culture. I would watch as the eyes of close friends glazed over within minutes of me describing adventures in Malaysia. Fish head curries, Borneo jungles, skulls suspended over beds – these were not part of their reality. I soon learned to limit my travel talk if I brought it up at all. I became silent and sullen, homesick for a land far away and the friends who had shared my experiences there, while gradually growing apart from the people I had known before CWY/JCM. These were my darker days.


With language comes cultural experiences that may change our tastes and perspectives in ways we do not bargain on. Getting deeply involved in another culture may result in separation from your own. Or maybe we just see the home front differently, are more critical of things we took for granted and accepted in the past. You become a different person, not better, nor worse. Just different. And such in-depth experience has an impact on one’s language, too.


Once after moving to Japan, I was at home in Canada talking with a friend in Japan when I felt my mother’s stare. After I hung up, she said quietly, “Do you know that you bow when you talk on the phone now?” I had never thought about it, but she was right. Most of my body language – the bows, the nods – had a distinctly Japanese flavor. And when I shook hands, I always brought my right hand back to my heart as the men do in Malaysia. As for my speech, I still gasp, “Aiya!” when I am surprised by something, a Chinese manifestation picked up in Mandarin class at university long ago. Yes, I have incorporated a variety of influences into my speech from the languages that I have studied over the years and have become a Heinz 57 of foreign idiosycracies, both in speech and gestures.


And I am not the only one. Several friends who have lived long term in Japan then returned to their home countries slip unknowingly into the patois of Japanese and their mother tongue they used to communicate in Japan, even years after being back home. I have a close friend, Miss D, whose sympathy noises or tag questions are always delivered in Japanese when I visit her in Vancouver. For me, this “mixing of languages” holds an intimacy. It brings back memories of shared experiences from another time and place, acknowledging that we have a special history together.


They say that once you have lived overseas for an extended period you can never go back home. Maybe not, but you can create a new home and possibly even a new language shared with the most intimate of friends.


Fortunately, after returning from Malaysia and spending a few months of hell with my family, I moved to Ottawa to begin studying Journalism at Carleton University. I found a house with half of the occupants from Quebec and the other half from Indonesia, so I got to practice French and Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia on a daily basis. Maybe I was avoiding reality, but I prefer to think of it as creating a new one.


(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, www.sulantra.com, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German and Korean!)

12. A Strategy for the Street: Eliciting

If you have taken language classes in school then your understanding of how to pick up new vocabulary may be a little distorted. It probably involves memorizing endless lists of words out of context then regurgitating them for exams where you are penalized for minor spelling mistakes that native speakers make even though the essence is intact (think “seperate” vs. “separate”). Afterward, the vocabulary you “learned” grows fuzzy and harder to recollect as you move on to the next list of arbitrarily selected “useful” words and phrases.


At the tender age of 18 I ended up on the streets of Malaysia and realized that 99% of the language that I had studied was not going to get me very far. I had never learned the name of that exotic fruit which looked like nothing I had ever seen before. How was I supposed to bargain for a pair of sandals or a tube of toothpaste? What in the world was the word for diarrhea – and the medicine that I needed to stop it? No, the typical language class doesn’t stray as far off the beaten track as I had. How would I ever pick up the language that I needed?


I presently teach in a technical university, working with students from a range of engineering backgrounds. I do not delude myself into believing that I can provide them with all of the language they will need to function should they end up in a workplace overseas. What I can give them, however, is a strategy for collecting language. I call it eliciting and it works like this.


The first stage of eliciting is to recognize when you don’t know a word and need help. This may seem obvious but a surprising number of second language learners just don’t do it. Why? Because they have been conditioned to show what they do know in class and on exams, not what they do not. To suggest their knowledge of a new language is incomplete is considered “bad”, a reflection on their limited ability. Which is very ridiculous. How in the world are you going to improve, especially on site, if you don’t ask those around you for assistance?


Once you admit that a word or phrase is not at your fingertips, you send up a warning flag to the person you are talking with and make them aware of your predicament, psychologically setting them up to help. In English, you might begin with “How do you say...?” or “What do you call...?” Next, you focus their attention on the type of word you want, for example, “How do you say a thing used for…?”, “What do you call a person who…?”, or “What is a place where you…?”


Finally, start throwing out ANYTHING that will get your meaning across. You want the other person to understand and give you the necessary language. The explanation does not have to be grammatically correct, or spoken at all. Gestures can often convey what you want much more effectively than words.


After a struggle of this kind, the language will probably be much more memorable than if you had looked it up in a dictionary, not to mention the other person will have remained engaged in the conversation. There is nothing worse than having a conversation with someone armed with a dictionary. Key words are painfully located by the endless flipping of pages as eyes glaze over and other engagements are suddenly remembered. Dictionaries are fine for writing essays or love letters, but disastrous in face-to-face encounters. They cut the conversation into pieces generating words that, given the time lag, lose their meaning and may be incorrect by local standards anyway. One man’s “spatula” is another’s “fish slice”... or “lifter”!


Instead of being “book-based” (or “battery-based” in the case of electronic dictionaries) in a conversation, I use the words I have already learned combined with gestures to elicit the words that I need from the other person. It can be challenging at first, but you will be surprised at how willing people are to help. The more you go out on a limb to get your meaning across, the more successful you will be at building up your vocabulary.


Many years ago, my youngest aunt, Gwen, visited me in Japan along with my mother. During the course of their visit, Gwen became afflicted with constipation. As we passed a pharmacy, she suggested picking up some medicine to relieve her uncomfortable condition. She dragged me up to the counter where I stood stupidly staring at the pharmacist. At the time, I had some spoken Japanese but didn’t know the word for “constipation”.


Oh, sure, I managed to blurt out “How do you say... a kind of sickness... you travel... too much rice...?” The pharmacist was completely engrossed by my babbling but had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to say. Suddenly Gwen said something like, “Oh, for goodness sake!”, pushed me aside and began to gesture. She did a remarkably authentic rendition of someone seated on a toilet and straining to produce... well, you get the picture. And so did the pharmacist and a gathering crowd of onlookers. There was a spontaneous chorus of “Bempi!”, the word in question, which I have never forgotten.


My first realization of the importance of asking for words took place when I was about thirteen years old. My youngest brother, Keith, was about one year old and sitting on my lap. I was testing to see how many words he could remember by asking, “What’s that?” and pointing at assorted objects in the living room. Suddenly he interrupted, pointed at a ladybug crawling across the table that I had not noticed at all, and said “Whazzat?” I stared, then blurted out, “A ladybug.”


Although he had absolutely no idea of how many words he had just stated, Keith (or Keithie as I called him in those days) sounded like a native speaker. He had learned this key question as a “chunk”, or “formula”, and was now armed to pick up the words HE wanted to learn, not what others intended to “teach” him. A question like “What’s that?” or “How do you say this?” can be easily introduced and learned from the moment you start studying a language. I know because I have done it many times in a range of languages, and have incorporated it into my language training website.


Asking for the language I needed in Malay when I was 18 served me well and I still remember many of the words that I picked up to this day. And, if I don’t, I can very easily get them again by eliciting.

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, www.sulantra.com, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German and Korean!)

11. Food for Thought

When I arrived in Malaysia at the tender age of eighteen, I was totally unprepared for what I encountered. The climate was too humid, the smells around me too intense, and the food was like nothing I had eaten before. For someone who had never tasted a chili before, the spicy heat of my first local dish was brutal. The burning sensation seemed to scorch my tongue, shred my throat and melt my very toenails! I ended surviving on a steady diet of bananas and lost about 15 kilos in my first few weeks. Finally, I was told by the coordinators that, if I didn’t start eating properly, I might as well go home.

This was the magic bullet. The idea of heading back to a gray winter on Vancouver Island was even more terrifying than the local cuisine and, after  surprisingly little effort, I soon found myself in love with the spices, eating with my hands, wearing sarongs and sleeping on the floor. In other words, I had adapted and gone native.

I once taught in a small college at the base of Mount Fuji which had a study program with a school in Bulgaria. When they arrived from Sofia, the young women who attended our college impressed everyone with their linguistic skills. Not only could they understand the lectures and carry on a reasonable conversation in Japanese, but they were competent in the written language as well. They had even studied the tea ceremony for several years before arriving in Japan! But there was one hitch: the Bulgarian ambassadresses had trouble with Japanese food.

In all of the years that they had studied the language, these young women had not really had a chance to try Japanese home cooking and the ingredient that seemed the most repugnant for their Slavic tastebuds was dashi, the fish stock ubiquitous to most Japanese dishes. They didn’t like the smell of it and passed judgment on food which contained it long before a morsel had reached their mouths. Dashi was for them what chilies had been for me in Malaysia  repulsive.

As things turned out, the women from Sofia eventually grew accustomed to the Japanese version of fish stock. Now when I visit them in Bulgaria, they request the instant version as a souvenir. And as for my aversion to chilies, I carry around a bottle of hot sauce with me at all times.

I feel sorry for those “ex-patriots” who wrap themselves in the safe cocoon of friends from the homeland while dining primarily on familiar foods just like mom  or Macdonalds  used to make “back home”. These same people more often than not never make an attempt to learn the local language, pleading its complexity as an excuse while creating a quasi version of their home away from home that is safe, secure, and ultimately limiting.

If you obviously enjoy the cuisine of a country, you have opened a very large door to the culture. People feel good when you show an appreciation for their typical diet. I now realize that refusing to sample a dish that someone has gone to the trouble of preparing for you can be very offensive. To me, there is nothing ruder than saying “No, thank you.” before even giving something a try. Some of my students do this when I invite a class to my home for dinner. It leaves a bad taste.

So, if you are heading to a country, prepare yourself by tasting the local delicacies in advance on your home turf, either by going to a restaurant or finding recipes online that you can prepare in the safety of your kitchen. The effort may be more valuable than you can imagine.

After returning from Malaysia and before coming to Japan, I began to explore the dishes of Asia with friends in Canada. Fortunately, I first lived in Ottawa where the presence of embassies guarantees a steady supply of exotic ingredients in the local market. Later, I moved to Vancouver, a city which seems to have a restaurant from every corner of the globe on each street. Among the dishes I discovered, sushi was one of my favorites. And this love of raw fish and rice helped me land my first job in Japan.

A friend was in the final stages of being hired for a job in Japan but developed cold feet. Instead of going to the last interview in Los Angeles, he handed me his ticket (you could do things like that in those days) and said, “You have more experience. Go instead of me.” So I did.

When I walked into the interview, the three men sitting across from me in business suits were nonplussed. When they realized that the young man in front of them was not the person they had intended to rubber stamp and hire, they held a rather tense discussion in Japanese at the end of which they suggested we go for lunch. This plan suited me fine since I was starving. As we ate, I extolled my virtues, explaining that I had much more teaching experience than my friend, all the while stuffing myself with succulent morsels of raw fish and rice. And I got the job!

I discovered the truth about a year later when one of the men who had interviewed me showed up at my workplace to see how I was doing. We went out in the evening and, over drinks he confessed that I had presented them with a major headache that day in Los Angeles. They needed a teacher badly, but were mortified since I was a complete stranger. Then they decided on the plan of taking me for lunch. It seems my predecessor was not a fan of Japan’s cuisine and made life miserable for his superiors. In my case, I might turn out to be a mediocre teacher, but at least I wouldn’t starve and create problems for the Personnel Section.

Yes, food can be an excellent entry to another culture  and a new job!

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, http://en.sulantra.com/, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German , Korean and Italian!)

10. Malaysia: Sensory Overload!

In my 18th summer, I was notified that I had been selected to join the inaugural year of Canada World Youth/Jeunesse Canada Monde, an exotic exchange program to develop international understanding between my homeland and the rest of the world, and would soon be heading to Malaysia. I had really wanted to go to Mexico and improve my nascent Spanish and was not overjoyed with the new destination. I didn’t even know where Malaysia was on a map! But after putting in a little time at the library I realized that, of the five possible CWY/JCM destinations, Malaysia was the furthest away, hovering above the equator on the other side of the planet. That was enough incentive for me.

As it turned out, the coming year was life-changing. I made friends who would last a lifetime and fell in love with Malaysia, a country that was off the beaten track and like nothing I had experienced thus far. But it wasn’t all easy going. Sure, I had wandered the streets of Montreal and Paris babbling in broken French. But there was still some familiarity, the feeling that you weren’t too far from home. When we touched down on the tarmac of Kuala Lumpur International Airport in January of 1973, it was like landing on the moon!

Although many instructors approach language training with neat and tidy formulas in self-contained boxes, the reality is a lot messier. With language comes the wild card: culture. Food, fashion, feelings are all part of the loaded package you receive when you take those first shaky steps in a new tongue. In the case of Malaysia, simply getting there opened the door to “culture shock”.

In the good old days direct flights didn’t exist to Southeast Asia. Our group of eighty participants left Canada in the freezing winter, spent a day in the cold drizzle of London, England, refueled in the middle of the cool, dry desert night of Dubai then landed in the intense mid-day heat of Kuala Lumpur. The acclimatization process had been put on fast forward and none of us was prepared for the dense humidity of KL. Disembarking the plane, it felt like walking into a wall of steamy dampness, a wet sponge that pressed against your face and seemed to smother you. Just breathing was a struggle as the tropical world surrounding us moved in slow motion.

And it wasn’t only the climate. We were whisked away on a bus to spend our first evening in a kind of training camp where we partook of our first real Malaysian meal. Sure we had practiced “makan dengan tangan” – eating with our hands – during orientation in Ontario and had tasted a watered down version of the local food, but nothing could prepare me for that first meal.

We sat on benches at long tables as local staff placed oversized bowls of a suspicious yellow liquid in front of each person. With a tense smile glued to my face, I dipped my spoon into the smelly broth (which I now recognize as curry) and from the depths of the murky liquid, a grotesque creature emerged – literally! My spoon had dredged up the large, bulbous-eyed head of a fish, its mouth hanging open with the curry broth dripping from between the rows of little teeth. For a boy from the Prairies who only knew fish as something that came in a can, that first meal was like being cast in a horror movie!? Listlessly moving my spoon around in the bowl so as not to disturb the contents, I eventually pushed it away mumbling something about not being hungry.

As it turned out, all Malaysian food was a challenge for me because the main ingredient seemed to be chilies. By the end of the first week, I was surviving on bananas (fortunately, Malaysia has an amazing range of them). Between the heat and fear of the local cuisine, I was soon losing drastic amounts of weight – about 15 kilograms in my first month.

Then there was the language. In fact, Bahasa Malaysia was surprisingly easy, particularly the version used in the marketplace, called pasar melayu. The pronunciation was painless (no exotic tones like Chinese) and the grammar was a breeze – put the word “telah” before the verb and you were speaking in the past tense, say “akan” before the same verb and you were discussing the future. Even plurals were simply formed by saying the word twice. Two scripts were used, the ABC’s and “jawi”, or Arabic script, and the writing system was phonetic with many words from English. “Teknoloji” (technology), “sains” (science), “sekolah” (school) – with a little effort I could soon figure out the signs in the marketplace or read a restaurant menu.

When I tried to communicate the real hurdle was my lack of vocabulary. I just didn’t have enough words for the things I needed to do each day. I was forever pointing and asking “Apa cakap ini?” – “How do you say this?” But little by little, the words came, the sounds and smells grew familiar, and I became more comfortable walking about in my sarong than in the long trousers I had brought from Canada for official functions.

Language is only the wrapping paper for an amazing gift – the chance to enter another world, to grow and move in new directions. Years later the first group of CWY/JCMers still has reunions to celebrate our youthful adventure, to acknowledge the road we wandered down so many years ago. Some of us went back to our hometown with a deeper appreciation of who we were and where we came from. Others, like me, became gypsies, wandering from country to country, culture to culture. But later experiences have never been quite so deep, disturbing or delightful as that first time in Malaysia.

(If you are really a fool for languages, check out my language learning website, http://en.sulantra.com/, with courses from and to English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, German , Korean and Italian!)