A house guest on the other side of the world
Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days. It’s an old saying, but old sayings stick around for a reason. It’s even worse in now that we’re in the days of Airbnb and Couchsurfing, where guests can be near-strangers. Where someone you barely know is living in your house, sometimes even expecting you to show them around an unfamiliar city.
It’s no picnic on the other side of that equation, either. Especially if you have, like I do, a compulsive need to be liked. I have a hard enough time imposing on people I know, and as my airplane touched down in Malaysia I was already anxious about staying with someone I had barely met.
Amita was my roommate’s brother-in-law. Both he and his sister grew up in Kuala Lumpur (locally referred to as KL). His sister studied in America and married my roommate’s brother. I had met Amita briefly when he visited Boston earlier that year and when I decided to travel across Southeast Asia, a stop in Malaysia to see him was deemed necessary by my roommate’s entire family.
Even with their blessing, I was worried about imposing. I didn’t know anything about Malaysia. I read a guidebook, but it wasn’t helpful. I would be relying on Amita not just for a place to stay, but to pretty much hold my hand during the first days of my first serious trip abroad. He’d been nice, but we hadn’t exchanged much more than jibes about English football. Was that back-and-forth enough to justify all I was going to ask of him?
Also, was I really going to stay with a Chelsea guy?
Still, I already knew that any chance to get off the backpackers trail of hostels and tour groups is a blessing. And who knows, a few beers with people he knows and I might even finish my time with some new friends. So there I was, walking out of the airport into the crushing jungle heat of KL. The humidity hit me all at once and from every direction. The hangover I thought was over returned in force. Sweating, I negotiated the cab stand and merged into the 24-hour traffic jam that was KL.
As the cab crawled down the freeway, I realized that the comparisons I’d heard about between KL and Los Angeles were apt. Everyone drove and a destination was always described as “20–30 minutes away,” a number that meant absolutely nothing once you factor in traffic. The best food is found in malls, side streets, and — at one dinner — an after-hours sidewalk restaurant operating out of an entirely different restaurant. Cars were not only mandatory for getting around, but tiny air-conditioned oases. This meant that I was also dependent on Amita for getting around and doing… anything.
Getting dropped off involved putting the cab driver on the phone with Amita, where they conversed rapidly in a language I didn’t recognize. The driver finally made his way through the maze-like streets to Amita’s building, which reminded me of a Florida condo complex. Amita retrieved me at the gate, greeting me politely and showing me around.
Amita is a small guy with dark hair, a laconic manner, and a perennial whisp of a mustache. He’s lean, but with a powerful frame that lets him play defense in a pretty intense recreational soccer league. In my time there, I never saw him wear anything but t-shirts and flip flops, but then again that was true of pretty much everyone in that punishing heat.
After I dropped my bags, I triumphantly presented him the Japanese scotch he had asked me to pick up at the airport, plus the lip balm he had asked me to bring him from America.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, “What do I owe you?”
“Uh, nothing! This is a gift! Of course!” I replied nervously, feeling awkward that what I had thought was a gift was a transaction.
Had I embarrassed myself already?
Our first stop was a local Chinese restaurant. Or — Amita corrected me — Chinese-Malaysian. It was chaotic and loud, and Amita flagged down a waiter and ordered a half dozen things in a language different from the one I had heard him speak with the cab driver. Soon plates appeared, and we slurped Hokkien Noodles, dark with oyster sauce, and pried tiny clams from their shells. He began to expound upon his favorite topic (beside soccer): Malaysian food.
He explained that Malaysia is a culinary Galapagos Islands. Waves of immigrants from every country in Southeast Asia settled here, bringing their own traditions with them — including Amita’s family, who were ethnically Chinese. Once here and cut off from the mainland, individual cuisines began to forge their own evolutionary path. A dish could have the same name — and even most of the same ingredients — but the Thai-Malaysia version is radically different than the Thai version.
That evolution gets even more granular than that, he continued as he attacked a bowl of hot and sour soup. The same noodles we were having in KL would be completely different in Penang, only 20 miles north.
After dinner and over drinks with some friends, Amita laconically mentioned he had just listed his company on the Malaysian stock exchange, which was in the process of crashing, and that his wife wasn’t going to be around because she had a family emergency. “The perfect time to be hosting someone you don’t know,” I thought as I ordered another beer and wondered what a hotel might cost.
I’ve been there. I’ve had friends or parents visiting for a 3-day weekend, and run out of things to do by 2 pm on Saturday. I’m walking them around my neighborhood, desperate to think of something interesting beyond, “I like that book store.” In dark moments, I’ve wondered if 4 pm is too early for dinner or if “Let’s go back home and watch Cheers on Netflix” is an acceptable tourist activity. I tried to tell Amita I was happy to amuse myself if he had things to do, but he insisted he didn’t and we both knew that without a car I was stranded.
I’m still not 100% sure what Amita does. The company he listed makes bamboo flooring, which he assured me you can find in the Chinese version of Home Depot. But we also stopped by a hipster coffee shop he was opening and a coconut ice cream parlor of which he had just purchased a franchise. He mentioned “passive income” a few times. As I found out about each venture or project, I wondered anew how he had time to show a sweaty stranger around the city.
But he did, taking most of the day, every day, to show me around the sights KL.
Or, more accurately, to show me the sights that were adjacent to places he liked to eat
“Here’s the Buddhist temple where I got married. Annnnnd here’s the great pork noodle place next door.” He chatted amiably with the owner and corrected me quietly when I positioned my chopsticks incorrectly in the bowl of thick udon-style noodles and bits of pork.
Then, “well, I can take you to the famous Chinese Buddhist temple, and it’s right next to this great Indian place.” Once there — basically an open-air garage with tables — inexplicably bow-tied waiters dumped food on giant banana leaves placed in front of us and made fun of me when I didn’t finish all of my fish head curry.
Requests to stop by sights from my guidebook were quietly ignored, probably because there wasn’t anything to eat. More than once my question of, “what do you think I should do now?” was answered with a pause, a sigh, and a muttered “fuck it, let’s go eat.”
We talked about Malaysian politics (corrupt) and American politics (Trump). We talked business. I found out more about what it was like to grow up in a bizarre mess of a city. Still, I always felt some kind of distance, which my brain interpreted as him hating me and tiring of having me around.
Then again, maybe I was wrong and he was warming to me. One night, drinking with his friends, I decided to go with one of them to the Petronas Towers the next morning, causing Amita to scoff and protest.
“What? Did you have plans?” his friend asked.
“Well… I thought we might get breakfast,” he said under his breath, seeming for all the world like he was sulking. Was he upset we weren’t going to hang out? Or was he just upset that he was going to miss breakfast?
In the afternoons, the heat became too unbearable or torrential thunderstorms hammered the city. We retreated to Amita’s apartment, sat under the ceiling fans, and sipped scotch. Some days he worked in his home office while I napped and fought jet lag. It was all very British Raj.
One day he stormed out of his office, laughing hysterically at a story I had posted on Facebook about a man running into a burning building to save a side of ribs. Maybe I was breaking through? Or maybe it was the scotch.
He was a snob for his city in the best way. Any food in the world I mentioned — noodles, dumplings, burgers — he would say that the best version could be found in KL. The more I ate, the more I believed him. The night before I was supposed to leave, I mentioned how much I liked dim sum and of course, “Oh, you can get the best dim sum in the world in KL!”
I said it was a shame I wouldn’t have time to have any, since my bus left at 8 am the next day.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter, the place opens at 4, we’ll just go before,” he said nonchalantly. I was taken aback. Was he serious?
He wasn’t only offering to take me to the bus station, but to get up at 5 am to take me to get dumplings before the bus?
But there we were, sitting on the sidewalk in the pre-dawn darkness discussing whether Jürgen Klinsmann would be able to build U.S. Soccer into a real international contender. The tiny plastic tables around us were filled with fashionable Malaysians. They wore shiny clothes and talked in loud, slurred voices indicating they had come straight from the fancy skybars and penthouse discos that we saw in the distance, still pulsing with colored lights even as dawn crept closer.
The sun was just rising over the buildings and we could barely see the plates of food as waiters circulated around us, but I noticed a distinctive shape of one and pointed.
“Hey, are those chicken feet?” I asked.
“Yeah I think so,” Amita said carefully.
“Oh man I love those, let’s get them,” I said, grabbing for the plate with a now-practiced Southeast Asian aggression.
Amita seemed, for the first time I’d seen him, flabbergasted. He watched me thoughtfully as I gnawed on the feet and licked sauce off my fingers. Soon, he started chuckling to himself.
“Man… a white boy who likes chicken feet. I’ll just… damn,” he said, sounding surprised, amused, and, I realized happily, impressed.
For a moment, I was glad it was still mostly dark. That way he couldn’t see the huge and goofy grin that was spreading across my face. I don’t know if I had been a good guest, but for a moment I didn’t care.
