“When I was passing through Bangkok recently, a friend took me to dinner at a fashionable restaurant, nestled at the end of a narrow soi behind a nondescript business hotel. We ate a dazzling array of traditionally prepared, farm-to-table dishes in a room that was painted black and gold; the music was a funky mix of Thai disco from the 1970s. But somewhere between the ginger martinis and the amuse-bouche of shredded river fish infused with rice liquor, I began to feel—as I quite often do in smart restaurants—a longing for one simple dish, as if my palate wasn’t up to the task of discerning the myriad flavours on offer. Then the waiter delivered a bowl of old-fashioned chicken curry, ready to be spooned over a heap of steamed rice. Instantly, I felt grounded.
From the age of six to 16, I spent all my school holidays with my grandparents, who lived on the banks of a great muddy river in the heart of Malaysia. Their village was only 120 miles from Kuala Lumpur, where I grew up, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the construction of the highways that now cut through the jungle, the drive there from the city took more than six hours; it felt as if we were going to another country. Indeed, in some ways, it was a foreign land. I had the ways and appearance of a kid who lived in the capital: Western-style clothes, decent English, a burgeoning interest in computer games. I didn’t speak the same dialect as my cousins and the other children in the village, so we communicated in a weird patois of Malay, English and at least two Chinese dialects, which made me feel hugely dislocated. I didn’t have any of my cousins’ rural skills; I didn’t know how to hunt for catfish or set traps for birds; I hated the bats that lived in the rafters of the timber house. At times, these holidays felt like a prison sentence.”
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