Durians Are Not the Only Fruit

by Wong Yoon Wah

  • • •

  One generation of Singaporeans had the opportunity to live through extraordinary times, for better or for worse. Born while the country was under British control, they witnessed the Japanese Occupation, the chaos afterwards, merger and independence, followed by the extraordinary economic transformation that saw a hitherto low-rise island suddenly acquire high-rise apartment blocks as quickly as a Sim City game.

  Many people of my generation have experienced a more stable world, and it is hard to imagine undergoing such radical changes of circumstance. I have enjoyed working so closely with Dr Wong’s pieces because he is one of that group that was born into one place and, without having to move, ended up in quite another. In his essay about the tembusu tree, he talks about what sights this century-old tree might have seen, but I’m personally more excited by the sights the writer himself has witnessed.

  Dr Wong has travelled widely since leaving Temoh, having been attached to universities in Taipei and Iowa, and seen a great deal of the world. His collection of essays offers an exciting array of perspectives, particularly as they were written at different times. This posed a challenge to me as a translator, since it wasn’t always clear what “here” or “now” meant. I’ve tried to smooth over some of the gaps, but overall it seemed best to leave things as they were, so we find ourselves in Taiwan one minute and Selangor the next, switching between the 20th and 21st centuries.

  In a way, we’ve all travelled great distances to be here. The history of Southeast Asia is, in no small part, a history of immigration, and the Chinese diaspora Dr Wong describes converged on Nanyang—the ‘South Seas’, meaning Malaya—for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, forging new existences here. He mentions that Singaporean Chinese are often startled to visit China and realise how different they are from the Mainlanders—but of course, the two countries have developed in different directions, and the China that our ancestors left a century ago no longer exists. Nanyang is all that is left to us now, and for all that, our roots here are still comparatively shallow.

  • • •

  I recently visited Temoh for the first time in thirty years, not having been there since early childhood. My mother hasn’t been back for more than a decade. I didn’t know what I expected to find there, but felt compelled by something akin to nostalgia—a longing for a past that I didn’t own, yet somehow felt like part of me.

  In the middle of translating Dr Wong’s essays at that point, I’d brought along the manuscript to work on, only to find his writing replicated all around me: in the rubber trees, the tropical fruit orchards, the remnants of rural life. Temoh was exactly as he described it, still known as ‘Sixth Mile’, its location defined in relation to the urban centre. Wandering the dusty roads of this Perak settlement, I felt I’d dropped out of the modern world. This was not a place I could ever be part of—as Dr Wong says, anyone who’s lingered too long in the city becomes unable to return to the paradise of nature, let alone those of us who are urbanites by birth.

  Wandering around, I saw signs that this idyll was slowly expelling its humans. The town centre consisted of a single road with shops on either side, yet one row was entirely dilapidated—the side where my grandfather’s shop once stood—the roofs collapsed, plants flourishing in what had been the interiors. How long would the rest of it last? But this is only to be expected. Once the tin had been fully extracted and rubber decreased in importance, Temoh lost its reason to exist. As for the rubber plantations and fruit trees described so lovingly by Dr Wong, they have been completely forgotten. The land has been dug up and replanted with oil palms—a squat, greasy crop without any of the poetry of rubber trees, with their silvery bark and eerie, slender presences.

  In the end, there was little to be gained there. I found one old man who remembered my mother as a little girl, but he was deaf and only spoke Cantonese, so we didn’t get very far. Living in cities, it’s easy to believe that we are at the centre of the world. It is only the diligence of writers like Dr Wong that reminds us there is life on the margins, and that no point of view can truly encompass the sum of humanity. Dr Wong has found a way to use his privileged position at the centre to describe his origins on the fringes, and in doing so shows us where, ultimately, we come from, and what we have lost.

  JEREMY TIANG

  SECTION ONE

  The Kingdom of Tropical Fruits

  The Pettiest Tree

  THROUGHOUT THE VARIOUS countries of Southeast Asia, the durian is considered the king of fruits. It appears frequently in books of the Ming and Qing dynasties such as Ma Huan’s The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, Ong Tae Hae’s account of the Malayan archipelago, and Huang Zunxian’s Within the Human Realm. Ma Huan called it “a smelly fruit of the first rank”.

  After the May Fourth New Literature Movement, many writers began using the vernacular: more vivid work such as Xu Jie’s The Coconut and the Durian, Wu Jin (Du Yunxie)’s Tropical Landscape, Qin Mu’s Nectar and Bee Stings, and Zhong Meiyin’s Yesterday at the Mekong were produced as a result. In the Chinese literatures of Southeast Asia, in both classical and contemporary poetry, descriptions of durians are even more plentiful: Durian Poems edited by Tang Chengqing, Pan Shou’s eponymous collection, Wu An’s Ode to the Durian, or my collection The Rubber Tree. And also in novels and essays, including Zhou Can’s Under the Durian Tree, Bi Cheng’s The Final Durian, Yongle Duosi’s Yongle’s Scribblings, or my A Walk Amongst Autumn Leaves. Idly leafing through these books, you’ll find plenty of legends about durians.

  Writers and travellers from the West have left their share of writings about the durian. To them, this fruit seems more mythical.

  Here, I’d like to solemnly begin my account of eating durians with a poem of Pan Shou’s:

  A thorny hero defeating illness and infection,

  A true king of the forest fruits.

  No harm if his armour’s unappealing,

  Weakness and warmth have the same smell.

  In the world, men brag of eating giant dates

  While beauties crumble spring onions with smiles.

  We pawn our possessions, live for a moment’s pleasure

  And addicted to the durian, we do not fear poverty.

  • • •

  Throughout the jungle regions of Southeast Asia, on either side of every road, you can see the green silhouettes of tropical fruit trees. Whether in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia or the Philippines, there are more than twenty common varieties: the chiku, soursop, jackfruit, starfruit, papaya, lime, durian, mangosteen, langsat, duku, mango, rambutan, guava, jambu, banana, pineapple, pomelo, and so on. In kampung areas, fruit has an intimate relationship with people’s daily lives, and is often used as medicine or in cooking, not to mention as a source of income. In the afternoon when temperatures are at their highest, villagers enjoy sitting under fruit trees outside their homes, chatting or napping. In these regions, not only are there many species of fruit, but each comes in a great number of varieties. The banana, say, as eaten in Singapore and Malaysia, has more than ten variations in colour, size, shape and taste. No wonder Nanyang is regarded as a fruit paradise.

  And yet, the lord of this paradise, the durian, is ugly in outward appearance, and has such a peculiar smell that people are often scared to approach it.

  The durian is called liulian in Chinese, transliterated from the Malay, but it should really be called the thorn fruit. It is sometimes round, sometimes oval, and can be as small as a papaya or pineapple or as large as a human head. The peel is covered with little spikes, a centimetre and a half long, very hard, very sharp, and therefore impossible to hold in the hand—usually, it’s carried by its thick inch-long stem. When eating the fruit, being prickled by its shell feels like the price one has to pay, and anyone injured in this way certainly shouldn’t curse the durian for it.

  The durian is a tropical deciduous tree, and probably originates from the Malaysian peninsula and Borneo. At present, the fruit’s production
is greatest in Malaysia and Thailand. Grown from a seed, it takes nine years for a tree to reach maturity and bear fruit. The tree grows straight up and can reach a height of more than thirty metres. Apart from the coconut, it may be the tallest tropical tree, and also the longest-lived—an ordinary tree can still produce flowers and fruit in its fiftieth or sixtieth year. Standing beneath one of these giants, I am made deeply aware of my own insignificance.

  Among Chinese Singaporeans and Malaysians, many hold the belief that when Admiral Cheng Ho landed in Nanyang, he relieved himself in the jungle, and the steaming puddle of shit and piss evolved into the durian tree. To put it less elegantly, the mounds of flesh inside the durian resemble a row of little turds, resting neatly in a boat-shaped husk.

  • • •

  The durian tree bears fruit once or twice a year, with two seasons—the first in June and July, the second in November and December. It takes three months for its small rice-yellow flowers to transform into giant fruits. Other tropical fruits can or must be harvested from the branch, continuing to ripen as they’re transported to market. The durian tree does not permit humans to climb it and pluck its fruits though. When ready, the fruit falls to the ground—though I have heard there are exceptions with some Thai varieties. Rural folk believe that once the durian is picked, it will not continue to ripen, and as a result, there is no such thing as ‘durian harvesting’ in Singapore and Malaysia, only waiting for the fruit to come to earth in its own time. The story is that the durian is practically human, and doesn’t forgive a slight—if molested by human hands, its flesh will remain spitefully unripe, neither sweet nor fragrant when eaten, as flavourless as an inferior sweet potato—in fact, such specimens are known as ‘raw sweet potatoes’. Not only that, but a durian tree that’s had its fruit wrenched from it will suffer injury, and forever after produce only half-ripe durians, and not many at that. Nantah’s Yunnan Garden has a durian tree, almost twenty years old, that’s never borne fruit—or rather a few have occasionally appeared, but they were inedible. A colleague told me this was because in the tree’s early life, someone climbed the tree and plucked its fruit, forever disabling it.

  When I was little, my family owned two rubber plantations in Malaysia’s Perak state, which were next to two hectares of durian groves. One durian season, a horde of wild monkeys arrived and swarmed up one of the trees, almost a hundred feet high, and hurled hundreds of the ripening orbs to the ground. Because the fruit stops maturing once off the branch, the orchard owner lost a lot of money. After that, this tree really did only bear deformed, half-ripe fruit. I remember my mother often saying that if you slash a durian tree several times or hammer a nail into it, that tree will stop bearing fruit, at most producing only stunted specimens.

  Villagers keep these warnings firmly in mind. They know that the durian is the pettiest tree.

  • • •

  When the durian fruit first appears, it’s as small as a lychee, but already covered with tiny thorns. The ripe fruit can weigh up to three kilograms, dangling from a thick branch, and will have turned from green to muddy yellow, its spikes slightly further apart and blunter than before. The durian’s flesh is softer than a papaya’s but hidden beneath a one-centimetre-thick shell, and remains intact even when dropped from a hundred-foot tree.

  At first sight, the tall durian tree, its sturdy branches full of spiky fruit, immediately gives rise to the question: What happens to people walking underneath? Wouldn’t an unlucky pedestrian, hit by one of these ripe missiles, have his brains dashed out? Yet those of us who’ve grown up here have never heard of someone losing their life in a durian-related accident. As a schoolboy in Malaysia, I walked beneath durian trees every single day. We had a kind of superstition—that the durian was a magical fruit, possessing a pair of eyes so as not to tumble blindly onto the heads of the innocent.

  I, too, had my childish superstitions about this tree—I had to pass daily beneath its branches, watching the labourers stand guard in the neighbouring plantation during the season, collecting fallen fruit, a temporary attap hut as their only shelter. These workers patrolled the plantation day and night, yet were never hit by durians. A more scientific explanation is that the durian fruit only drops at particular times, usually at night. In the daytime, the fruit will not fall unless brought down by forceful winds or rain.

  • • •

  In Singapore, as our society becomes more commercialised, the durian is starting to disappear. The country roads of Malaysia, meanwhile, grow fragrant with the scent of durians during the season, and everywhere you can see trees laden with the fruit. Roadside stalls made of bamboo poles and attap leaves spring up, displaying spiky rows of the fruit. In the kampung districts and within the rubber plantations, you can usually find a few isolated durian trees, appearing there by serendipity—a seed flung carelessly from a window, say. They are free agents before the flowering season, but once the fruit begins to appear, the villagers look at them differently.

  There are various reasons why the durian is called the king of fruits. Apart from the legends surrounding it, its smell and odd shape, a major factor is that it’s the most expensive. A small or medium-sized durian, sold directly from the roadside, can fetch two or three American dollars. And usually you’ll need a couple of those to feed your addiction.

  A few durian trees can make a great deal of difference to a kampung-dweller’s life. With two fruiting seasons, each tree can produce three or four hundred durians, selling at three dollars each—a significant amount in a rural context. The king of fruits thus takes care of its subjects, earning its crown.

  • • •

  ‘When the durian appears, off comes the sarong’ is a Chinese saying that illustrates how fervent the Malays and Peranakans are in their durian eating. During the season, in order to get their hands on fruit they couldn’t otherwise afford, some would sell their clothing. Of course, there’s another layer of meaning these days—it’s been discovered that the durian contains a stimulant that can make it function as an aphrodisiac, allegedly so electrifying the body that hitherto infertile women become pregnant. Due to the taboos of the past, conservative people didn’t dare mention that this fruit could arouse the most primitive urges, fanning such passions.

  But actually, many Chinese people in Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention those from other regions—particularly Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan—especially love the durian because it brings vigour and desire, and when travelling will persist in their obsession with the fruit. In the few years after I returned from America, when durians appeared in the market, as soon as the urge struck I’d leap into my car and head to Chinatown for my fix, even though the trip would take a couple of hours and use a fair amount of petrol.

  What most mystifies outsiders is the number of people who eat durians as a main meal, or mix the durian flesh with rice. It’s probably the fruit most able to stave off hunger. And in fact, the durian was a staple food of the indigenous people.

  The durian resembles Korean ginseng, a high-energy tonic, full of heatiness. Its consort, the mangosteen, has been called the queen of fruits, and shares the same season. One normally eats mangosteen after partaking of durian, because the former is ‘cooling’, with a more subtle, delicate flavour, leaving one relaxed. This combination is ideal for generating lust, the two fruits working together, one filling you with vigour, the other teasing out the longings crammed in your heart.

  • • •

  The durian might be expensive, but it has never been accepted by the establishment. In posh Singaporean and Malaysian hotels, the grand restaurants proudly display a row of tropical fruits outside their doors, but the king of fruits is always excluded. It is, in fact, forbidden in expensive hotels and even supermarkets, because upon ripening it acquires a strong, impenetrable smell. A ripe durian, even before it’s been opened, will disperse its scent throughout every corner of a building.

  My family used to live in Singapore’s Parkview Apartments, on the sixth of ten storeys.
If any of our neighbours above or below us had bought durians, we’d definitely smell it in our own apartment. My durian cravings were often incited by these stray fragrances. Sometimes they wafted to us from the rubbish bins.

  Even after the durian has been eaten, the spiky discarded rind releases the same scent, still as pungent two or three weeks later. In the durian season, the ferocious stench of rubbish left under the hot sun is transformed into something more pleasant. This is the only time I don’t need to hold my nose while walking past our bins.

  • • •

  I attended a village primary school. Beyond its classrooms were rubber plantations, interspersed with many tropical fruit trees. One day, close to noon, we were midway through our final class, Composition, when we heard the unmistakable sound, one field away from us, of a durian falling to earth. We knew the positions of all the surrounding fruit trees, and deduced instantly which one it must have fallen from. Our teacher having just left the room, one of my classmates instantly darted out and ran towards the jungle, returning full of laughter a short while later, bearing a ripe durian. Under our admiring gaze, he placed his trophy in his wide desk drawer. When the teacher returned, it took her only a moment to detect the presence of durian—its scent was too penetrating to conceal.

  Another time, during my secondary school holidays, my sister and I arrived at our family’s rubber plantation before dawn. We noticed the neighbouring durian orchard was completely silent, and realised no one had arrived yet to collect the fruit that had fallen in the night. Greedily, we harvested more than twenty, stashing them in bushes on our own land, camouflaging them with dead leaves. We didn’t expect the Malay watchman, when he arrived, to realise immediately that the two tastiest trees had no fruits at all beneath them. Guessing that one of the nearby smallholders must be responsible, he made a quick round of the plantations and, by following the trail of durian scent, easily discovered our hiding place.