Story 3. The Durian Story

“Wait, wait!! Is that a durian stall?”
“Yes..?”
“Can you stop the car? I want to eat durians.”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
“You are a very unusual Korean I know of!”
“You didn’t know I am already a local, leh?”

Our friend C, a well-positioned, single businessman likes to hang out with us whenever we can. He particularly likes my company for I am a non-threatening married woman of his good friend. Afraid to go out with woman for being a shy man as he is, he enjoys socializing. He is good at marketing with an Oxford law degree under his round tummy. He lives with his younger brother who is newly married and is the business partner as well, and with his wanna-be-a-nun sister who is notorious for spooky cleanliness inner and outer. They don’t like durian and hawker foods. C is a durian lover and a gourmet. The siblings are worried over his bulging tummy, so they control his food, especially durian, because it stink the whole car and their new bungalow house. Poor C, there is no fun eating durian alone and therefore he seldom gets to eat.

One evening, my yoga center was black out and I had to cancel the classes. He happened to call my husband to go out for dinner and I joined them together. No, we didn’t go to a Korean restaurant but a famous street restaurant in Old Klang Road and ordered the very exquisite Malaysian foods with curry fish head, which is my favorite. After 11 years of living in Malaysia with the husband who is a food lover with an exotic taste bud, I also came to like all kinds of local food including durian. C was surprised to see me eating durian like a local. After dinner, we went to our house together with a bag full of durians. Perfect dinner, perfect desert with perfect companies, as he was saying… He wants to do this as often as possible. Sorry, we are not so free especially in the evening, unless my yoga center gets black out again.

My first encounter with durian was when we were still in the US. One day my husband discovered a frozen durian from the Asian grocery store in the town. He was excited because he hasn’t had it for over ten years during his US stay. Me? Of course, it was the first time. He said the taste of durian is like eating an ice cream in a toilet. When he opened the cover, really, really, its smell was something like that! He laughed with my sour face. The first year when we were back in Malaysia, I found myself surrounded with durian smell all over. It was the hottest durian season in June. With the choking humidity and dryness of air coupled with durian smell, I wondered how I am going to adopt this weather, strange smell and the foreign country.

And yet, when another durian season arrived next year, the smell wasn’t that repulsive. By the third year, as my body became more adjusted to the tropical weather, then, I became a durian eater. My neighbor friends warned me, I will get headache if I eat too much of that. But I never got that because my stomach got full first before it goes up to the head.

It really became a “durian life.” As I get used to the weather, diverse culture, and people of Malaysia, the more I came to appreciate its exotic flavor of durian. Soft, sweet, rich but hard seed in the middle with the unique smell…Life in Malaysia was like that; simple and yet rich, with its people from different races, languages, cultures and religions, but simply embracing it all in harmony with easy smile and conversation even among the strangers (although sometimes too “kepoh” to ask me “where are you from?” “what do your husband do?” instead of selling veggie to me in the morning market.) It symbolized everything that is different or that I didn’t have in my home country.

Growing up in the small country with full of hills and mountains, still divided into two military rulings, I used to carry rather an uptight and tense disposition with me like many other Korean people. I was not aware of my rigidity until after few years of living in Malaysia. The weather that is summer all year around, clothes that you don’t need to change every season, so much insects and creepy lizards that won’t go away no matter how much I spray the insecticides… As I slowly give up tracing after the ants’ trail, and don’t care about the lizards’ choir behind the furniture, I start to become more like a Malaysian not only inside but outside as well. Easy going, fun loving and more tolerant of differences and diversities, though the core value inside me is still remain much of a Korean. I still can’t appear late in my appointment time, I still like to speak up when somebody cuts in the line from the supermarket. I still can’t enjoy eating supper late at night. The rest pretty much ok, I think, including my suffix of “loh, eh, ma, ya-kah?, etc” at the end of the sentence. I found my home, life’s direction and meanings, friends, love, happiness and peace, from a foreign land that which I never knew existed before I met my husband. Life is really, “you never know”.