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Eat Malaysia – by Alex Dimopoulos – “Malaysia Truly Asia” is a slogan you will have seen everywhere if you’ve been to Malaysia -- and especially at airports – but it’s also gone abroad, into places like London. Only the other day I was travelling on the tube and two girls pointed out a fellow passenger with a bag carrying the quote; they laughed, one saying “Japan, China Asia? No! But Malaysia is Truuuuely Asia.” Why? Malaysia is in a bit of an identity crisis; counting native Malaysian people, Indian Malays, Chinese Malays, and even Eurasian Malaysians, this only names a few of the types of people who live there.
The government is trying to get all these groups within the country to unite and become one, producing songs like “Satu Malaysia” which means “One Malaysia”, and running adverts on the radio, urging that everybody remembers that, when you think of Malaysian people, “they are not India Malaysian, they are not Chinese Malaysian or even Eurasian Malaysian. But they are Malaysian.” I did some work a few years back for a new Malaysian restaurant chain on a similar idea to Wagamama or Pingpong, and the one thing they struggled with was trying to explain what its brand
was and what its food was about: it was trying to compete with the likes of the big boys of the Asian world; Chinese, Thai or Japanese food, which we all love and understand. But Malaysia’s beauty and its curse, as the propaganda-like materials show, is its diversity. As one of my heroes Rick Stein said “I would like to be able to sum up the cuisine of Malaysia but it’s practically impossible. Malaysia is a crossroads where so many different nations have had influence - Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, British, Indonesian, Thai and Burmese - that no clear identity arises.”