Mar 09 2009
Postcards: An Exchange of a Different Sort
It began with a post; these things often do. Lynne, from A Malaysian Abroad, brought forth one of the most awesome blogging ideas I’ve seen yet: The Postcard/Link Exchange of 2009. The deal was simple: during her trip to Malaysia, she’d send postcards back to anyone interested, as long as they were willing to leave a link. Since I love a chance to see things beyond my own borders, I volunteered. (The name alone would probably have sold me on it; title parallelism, rah!)
A few days ago, I received the postcard. The picture is of a bustling market in Malaysia; baskets and baskets of fruits and vegetables arranged in squares around the marketplace for people to look through and purchase. The closest I’ve ever come to something like this was the La Mesa Farmer’s Market, and that’s nowhere near the same—it’s only two rows of tables, more spaced-out, and the foods themselves don’t tend to be packed quite as close together. It’s also probably a lot quieter.
A market, to me, is practically a breeding ground for stories. The obvious is looking at the people; everyone buying food is probably in the middle of something bigger. Preparing for a social event, perhaps? In a hurry to get home for some reason? Taking care of someone? There’s also the potential for chance encounters; when you have this many people showing up this regularly, I’d find it hard to believe there wouldn’t be conversations of some sort, and I doubt a day goes by without someone backing into someone else with an armload of groceries, or dropping something and someone else picking it up. How many tales begin this way?
And in the postcard text itself, I had a reminder of one other thing that the market can do for a worldbuilder: the sheer number of interesting facts you can get from even one fruit. Lynne gave me a challenge with this card: To find the “King of fruits”. I’m lucky; I’d heard about it from my gamelan instructor, back in college.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, the “King of fruits” is the durian. Imagine if you will a foot-long fruit, the outside a completely solid and very spiky shell. Its pulp is a whitish-yellow color, and has a rather slimy texture. The grandiose nickname is generally attributed to a combination of factors: the size, the spines, and the aroma and taste, which are—distinctive is one word for them. Either you like durian or you don’t. (I, personally, am all right with it as an ingredient for food, but I prefer not to eat it straight.)
Most of the stories I’ve heard involving durian itself have related to its more offputting characteristics. Though the smell has its fans, many people are detractors. Not only is the scientific name, coined by Linnaeus himself, a reference to the Indian civet cat (to be fair, it could be because the fruit could be used as bait to trap the creatures, but it could also be a reference to the smell), but people I know who have been to Indonesia have reported hotels with the following sign in the window: “No guns. No drugs. No durian.” For someone who likes being complete about their uses of fruit, the smell isn’t the only potentially weaponizable aspect of it; I’ve also heard tales of cars getting flat tires from the rinds, and people who harvest the things wear hard hats for fear of head injury.
And then there are the beliefs that spring around it. It’s seen as an aphrodisiac in Java (as they say, durian jatuh sarung naik, or “the durians fall and the sarongs come up”), or likely to warm the body in most of Southeast Asia. Apparently it’s a very considerate fruit, for all its lethality; some say that it has eyes to see where it falls and avoids falling when someone might get hurt, and Alfred Russel Wallace wrote that durian-impact-related wounds rarely get infected because of all the blood washing them out. As it is popular among both animals and humans, it can symbolize humans’ animalistic aspects. And what food would be complete without some sort of mythological creature acquiring a taste for it?
And all that’s just from one fruit! How much can you get out of a marketful?
So where’s the durian? I found two piles I could definitely count. Can you find it in the big picture?
(Durian facts heavily researched on Wikipedia.)
I wouldn’t call it quite like that; the impression I got was more like eating uzura (raw quail egg–tried it once, never want to touch it again) with an overpowering flavor to cover it. The flavor’s pretty decent, but if you’re texture-sensitive, the pulp might be a deal-breaker.
I have no idea how to describe the experience of eating a durian… the atmosphere factors in greatly, too, btw. I’d much prefer to be with a group of friend squatting by the roadside stall, with the vendor cutting open one fruit after another as my friends and I dive in and gorge
One way to counter the “heatiness” of the fruit is to pour water into the rind, then drink said water out from the rind. No idea if it really works. The last time I pigged out on durian was way back in2000 or so, and I was on a detox program at the time, so my next morning BM was…. very “fruitful”, LoL!! (was that tmi?)
I had durians on my postcard, too–and I also looked them up and wrote about them in a blog post (http://journeysandadventures.today.com/2009/03/15/the-durian-another-postcard-from-malaysia/). Finding out about it was really interesting!
Swung by and saw that one; I didn’t comment since I wasn’t sure if there was anything I could add that hadn’t already been covered. Was a great piece.