Last week, I had the pleasure of going to Kuala Lumpur for some, shall we say, administrative reasons. I went there briefly last year, too, but this time I was doing it more as a splurge trip: I was in a nicer hotel and spent some more money doing nice things than the backpacker cheap-as-chips stuff I did last year. One of these things was a food tour.

The food tour promised a lot: 14 dishes, in the same area that Anthony Bourdain travelled around when he was in Kuala Lumpur. I can eat a lot, but even I felt the need to prepare: only having a light brunch and exercising during the day to best prepare myself. I was glad I did this, because I felt so full by the end that I worried I was going to be sick along the sidewalk. Of course, the tour was not just about the food, but about the whole experience. So while we did learn about the food, our wonderful guide, Kiran, shared her insights about growing up in Kuala Lumpur, her experiences with food, but also her perspective on how Kuala Lumpur is changing.

I took this photo towards the end of the trip, just a short walk from the famous twin towers where the tour ended, about 10 minutes later. It’s prime real-estate, surrounded by skyscrapers on all sides… and yet, the local community is holding strong and refusing to sell, for now. But some of these houses are already being sold — the government continues to get more money and can offer more for the land. The good thing is, they can’t really work with individual plots of land: they need the whole area to make it into the 5 star apartment zone that they’d like. So for now, we end up with incongruous views like this.

The land is home to kampung baru, a famous food-zone that has been in the area for over 150 years. Currently, it is also home to one of the famous Ramadan bazaars, where even more foodstalls appear after dusk to satiate the end of a day’s fast for the local muslims. It’s an area steeped in history and community, and it could disappear within the next five or ten years to make way for more skyscrapers and 5 star hotels.

Part of me wonders about progress for progress’s sake, if we can even call this progress. A large group of skyscrapers may be more modern, but have we lost something in the rush for modernity? Something I admire about the Asian cultures I have visited is how the food and community intersect. Eating out is cheaper, relatively, than Western countries. In Kuala Lumpur, it’s common to go to a food court and eat out with friends on a lunch break. In Indonesia, this seems less common (at least where I have travelled to), but local eating places are havens for quick lunchtime meals before continuing with the day, or stopping in for a tea, or, as was the case in Banda Aceh, coming together to watch the Football World Cup. This in turn encourages people to see their local community, reducing loneliness – a huge problem especially in the Western World right now. (Of course, none of this is to say that there aren’t negatives to the Asian systems either). When (not if) kampung baru disappears, will those skyscrapers have the same community aspects as kampung baru? I’m unconvinced.

I think about this in relation to college. At my college, everything was designed to force people to interact. It was damn hard to go about your day without being forced into seeing someone else, no matter how hard you tried not to. You had to get food in a communal dining hall, so even if you sat by yourself you were still seen by and saw others. Each floor had a communal lounge, where people would play board games or watch TV, sport, and movies. If you were going to your room, you had to pass by these groups and maybe you’d join in if it was interesting. The final season of Game of Thrones came out in my first year and there was something incredible about the organisation of multiple watch parties in multiple common areas so that there was enough space to sit everyone who wanted to come and watch. In my third year, I hosted an MCU watch-party every night in the leadup to Endgame, and while not everyone came to every movie, the final one was packed with people who wanted to rewatch Infinity War. The Cricket World Cup was so loud it woke my friend who had a room next door — also a cricket lover, he decided to get up and join in watching it rather than trying to get back to sleep. He was a bit annoyed, but he also got to watch some great cricket he otherwise would have slept through. When COVID hit, it was so hard to reduce the communal aspect of the building, as it was antithetical to the design philosophy. I’m not sure how people would feel about apartments being designed like this, but I wonder if there’s something there, a way to preserve the communal feel within a giant steel building that would otherwise isolate people into small rooms.

The Kuala Lumpur food tour I did was A Chef’s Tour – Sambal Streets. I am not sponsored by them nor did I receive any benefit for including them here, I just really enjoyed the tour and can recommend.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing. Your email only goes to my subscriber list and no-one else. Sharing my posts with others also helps me a lot. Finally, I do read all comments, so if you have anything to share, please send one in below this post.