Celebrating My Malaysian Heritage Through the Beauty of Rojak

One evening, sometime in mid-January 2020, I was craving rojak. I thought of the tanginess of the dish, the crunchiness of the peanuts, the satisfying melange of sweet, savory, and sour flavors that would dance on my tongue with every mouthful. But what I yearned most for was the punishing heat of the sticky sauce that the entire dish would be slathered with. It made my mouth water.

We were in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia—the city where I grew up, next to the capital, Kuala Lumpur. My husband and I were weaving through the maddening crowds in a pasar malam, foraging for food. The night air was sultry and thick with smells, but at least I could breathe freely instead of through a mask. It was pre-Covid. Our daughter was under the care of my aunt and cousin as we savored our day alone, the first since she was born, at the local night market.

Everyone in Malaysia has a different version of their favorite rojak. The one I was craving was typically made by the local Chinese community and served roadside from a food van, in hawker centers or in pasar malams. Rojak buah, or fruit rojak, is usually made up of unripe mangoes, sliced cucumbers, green apples, pineapples, jicama, deep-fried tofu, and, occasionally, water spinach. They’re tossed together in a bowl with a thick sweet-sour dressing made from shrimp paste, lime juice, chilies, and sugar. It’s garnished with crushed peanuts and sesame seeds.

To call it just a fruit salad would be deceiving. No fruit salad looks and tastes like rojak. The dish, drenched in a kind of black sauce, tastes tart, pungent, and sometimes fiery hot—all at the same time. To an untrained palate, it could even be stinky.

Darkness was already falling when we arrived at the SS2 pasar malam. The teeming stalls seemed to come alive by the minute. Diesel fumes, grease, and tungsten light bulbs hung suspended in the balmy air as smells of sizzling oil, fermented shrimp, and durian wafted toward us.

When I was a kid, my mom would take me to these night markets. With my sticky hand in hers, she would lead me from stall to stall, asking me what I wanted for dinner. Instead of being delighted at the prospect of being given a choice, I only complained about something in the air stinging my eyes. Or the fact that I had to come along when I could have stayed home to finish an exciting chapter of a book I was reading.

At the SS2 pasar malam with my husband, I cringed at the memory of my whiny bookish younger self and felt a pang of regret. I’d since then learned to love night markets, but Mom was no longer around to enjoy them with me. Now, taking in the vivid scene in front of me, I wanted to go everywhere, try everything. I darted from stall to stall and emerged from the lines triumphant with plastic bags of oily char kuey teow and slices of apam balik—but no rojak.

My husband stared at me, with half bewilderment and half admiration, as he witnessed me bargain with and cajole vendors in all the languages of my childhood.

“How is it that you aren’t like that in Germany?” he teased.

In Germany, where he was born and where we currently live, I was often quiet. My inability to make small talk in German had rendered my usual lively self shockingly reserved. It wasn’t that I lacked the vocabulary, since I’d learned German to an advanced level. But no matter how much I learned, or how adept I became at passing German language exams, I still hesitated at speaking my mind. Was it my self-consciousness, my reluctance to make mistakes in a language that I’d learned only in my thirties, that made me avoid situations where I would appear as a stuttering fool?

I clammed up in social situations where only native German speakers were present. “Ying is so quiet,” my mother-in-law once remarked. Whenever I told good friends about this, they’d laugh: “You, quiet? Never!”

At home, my voice boomed and commanded. There was something about being in Malaysia that allowed me to move with grace and ease. Perhaps I just didn’t feel the need to do anything different or be anyone else because I knew, here, I claimed space by default.

*

In Germany, I would pour over YouTube videos in order to recreate quintessential dishes from home, but I’d never tried to make rojak. Perhaps, I thought, eating rojak wouldn’t be the same without the context that comes with it. It’s perhaps best enjoyed on plastic stools, where the outdoor heat and humidity are near maximum. Perhaps it is best shared with friends and family, indulging in the dish, talking over each other, speaking in bahasa rojak, in which grammar is mere suggestion; one must simply get the point across.

Rojak has another meaning, you see. According to the fourth edition of Kamus Dewan, rojak can also mean “mix” or “eclectic.” Ask any Malaysian their mother tongue and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one correct answer. Instead, most Malaysians grow up conversant in a multitude of languages spoken by their immediate families and extended families, in school, and in other social spaces.

I come from a third-generation Chinese family that lives in a country once colonized by the British; English was the main language at home. I picked up conversational Mandarin from my brother, who attended vernacular Chinese primary and secondary schools. My dad’s family spoke Hokkien among themselves, and my mom’s family spoke Hakka. I went to a public all-girl’s convent school, established in 1899 by British nuns; in my time, the medium of instruction was mainly English and Malay. My classmates also spoke a smattering of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tamil.

On the streets, everyone was conversing in rojak language. Going beyond code-switching between languages and dialects, the rojak language sometimes employs words in English, Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien within a sentence. An example from the cover of TimeOut Kuala Lumpur: “Wei macha, you want to makan here or tapau?”

Given that there are three main ethnic groups in Malaysia—Chinese, Indian, and Malay—and more than fifty other ethnic and subethnic groups in the country, we grow up seeing ourselves as part of a big mix, a big rojak. And as with rojak, we can always tailor the recipe to our preferences. Like rojak, our fluid and hybrid identities, I believe, make us more tolerant and accepting as a community. Mixture is celebrated instead of shunned.

*

A few months ago, an Indonesian Instagrammer posted a video on his feed, asking, “What’s considered classy if you’re white but trashy if you’re a person of color?” He answered with a giggle: “Speaking a second language.”

The fact that the eight-second video garnered 280,000 likes and 2,202 comments saddened me a little. The video’s message resonated with so many people: In a world where white supremacy still reigns, double standards are practiced everywhere. In that world, being white flings open doors to countries, opportunities, and hearts, but the very same doors remain locked to others whose passports and skin are not the “right” color.

This was clear to Nita Handastya, a backpacker from Indonesia whom I got to know through my travel blog. Nita once saw a “Help Needed” sign posted in a hostel in Vietnam. She went in to express interest. The lady at the reception said the job was for foreigners only. Handastya was a foreigner, but not the right kind. What they wanted, in actual fact, were white people.

When I first started backpacking, I realized quickly that other travelers were quick to dismiss my presence. It wasn’t that I expected acknowledgment. Backpackers on the road were generally a friendly bunch. Casual conversations were easily struck up when one backpacker spotted another, usually in the shared spaces of a hostel, in a café, or on public transportation. But somehow, unless I made the first move, the warmth was never extended to me.

I once took a twenty-four-hour bus ride from Vientiane to Hanoi. While waiting for the bus to leave, I watched the other backpackers—all pale-skinned, mostly traveling solo—board the bus, scan around for a free seat, and slowly shuffle down the aisle to sit next to other white backpackers. The seat next to mine remained free. A latecomer, another white backpacker, eventually sat there. The other seats were already filled. I flashed him my friendliest smile, but he only fished out his headphones and blasted music into his ears. Later, when we stopped for a toilet break, I overheard him complaining to another white backpacker about the long, boring ride.

There was something about being in Malaysia that allowed me to move with grace and ease. . . . Here, I claimed space by default.

It dawned on me: Despite the scuffed backpack that I carried on my back, the fraying friendship bracelets that adorned my wrists, and my fisherman pants, which usually made up the typical backpacker garb, my appearance didn’t immediately signal that I was one of them. To them, I wasn’t. Because of my Asian features, I was often pigeonholed as a non-English speaker. Meanwhile, white backpackers from places like France or Italy, who sometimes spoke little or no English, escaped the same label. As long as you were white, it seemed, you were already part of the team.

I caught on fast. As I traveled, I erased more and more of the rich Malaysian heritage I was born with. I scrubbed my accent and inflected my English to sound more American. I didn’t want to be rojak; I was afraid it might be an acquired taste. Rather than take pride in my multicultural heritage, I aspired to be accessible and popular. Cozy, clean, and adored around the world. Like Starbucks.

Sik Hung Ng and Fei Deng write in “Language and Power,” “It is ironic that as the spread of English has increased the extent of multilingualism of non-English-speaking nations, English native speakers in the inner circle of nations have largely remained English-only.” As I made myself more accessible and presumably more worldly, I grew more disillusioned. I always felt I had a lot to prove. While I no longer felt isolated, I constantly felt like a fraud and like someone was going to find out.

On an Italian cruise ship where I was working as a language trainer, a fellow crew member once asked me what my job was. When I answered, she smiled and cooed, “Oh, how lovely! I would love to learn Chinese from you!”

No, English! My insides squeezed so hard that I couldn’t correct her without feeling deeply ashamed. I teach English!

*

My daughter was born in windy Hamburg, Germany, home to the third-largest seaport in Europe. She will spend summers smelling like strawberries and sunscreen, winters smelling like cinnamon and spekulatius. If I do my job right as a mother, her childhood will be nothing short of idyllic. In the future, she will have freedom at the tips of her fingers, the world at her feet. Her burgundy passport will unlock all doors in the world.

She will grow up surrounded by forests and people who don’t look like her mother. She will grow up wielding the double consonants in the German language, but she might never understand her mother’s languages, her bahasa rojak. Will she grow up questioning her identity, her sense of belonging? Will she see herself as less of a German because she’s of mixed race? Will her future schoolmates pull their eyes into slits and call her chinesisch? There will be a point where she will bury her otherness to compensate, but I will remind her that fitting in doesn’t have to mean forgetting, that belonging starts from within.

But what if I start by stepping out of my shell and learning to take up space in all my rojak glory? Perhaps she will learn to claim what’s hers. I will not let her grow up mourning for a lost identity. I will not let her forget.

At the SS2 pasar malam, the rojak stall appeared at the end of the road, just as I was about to give up my search. I ordered a large box to take away. I watched the rojak uncle toss the fruits and vegetables in a bowl. I caught a whiff of the shrimp paste. Rojak’s charm is the fact that it’s an orchestra of textures and flavors. The fruits and vegetables on their own don’t amount to much, but put everything together, mix it up with some awful-looking sauce, and you get magic in a dish.

It was at that moment, among the stalls and smells I never loved as a child, I realized that I could teach my daughter about her heritage through street food from Malaysia. When she goes out into the world and gets lost, as long as she can smell and taste, she can always find her way back home.

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