Hi all, I have not been active on this forum for a while, mainly because I moved with my family to live for almost a year in Malaysia. We left beginning of December 2018 and got back beginning of September 2019. While doing this project for the last two years, I’ve been very busy with work and mostly away from home, so growing fruit has not been at the top of my mind.
We went because the small Massachusetts technology company I work for had the chance to build a pilot scale factory near Kuala Lumpur on the campus of our partner company Hanwah Q Cells, a Korean headquartered maker of solar panels. We have machines with new technology which can make a silicon solar wafer for about half the cost of the traditional process.
I mostly spent the summer of 2018 in Korea building the machines for the project near Asan with Hanwha Machinery. Korean food is amazing, and I got to try quite a few things I had never had before. The best fruit I had there were amazing Korean grapes in July and August. Sometimes you can find them in the US at an asian grocery, but they are usually not that fresh and very expensive. My coworkers thought I was crazy when I would return to the hotel with a whole flat of grapes to jam into my hotel fridge.
After coming back, my garden was quite overgrown, having been taken over by weeds and the gourd vines my son had planted. Over the next couple months I tried to get things in shape, did a little fall pruning, and spread some hay over everything. Then the whole family left for Malaysia.
In Malaysia, we lived in a small city about 45 mins outside of KL called Cyberjaya, about 5 minutes by car from where our factory was being built. Many foreigners lived in this city, but no Americans other than the ones from my company. The town had two universities, which were popular with students from the middle east. So the middle eastern restaurants in town were truly top notch. There were lots of immigrants from Indonesia and Myanmar doing lower level jobs at the factory. There were quite a few Koreans and a few Brits living in our development. Malaysia itself is highly multicultural, with the majority being Malay, but a large percentage of the population is descended from Chinese and Indian immigrants. You can get great Chinese, Malay, and Indian food of course, and a lot of “Malaysian” dishes have elements from more than one of these traditions.
My family all had a fantastic experience being there. A coworker of mine brought his family too and we arranged to live in the same development so my two younger kids were perfectly happy to hang out with his kids. Every day they swam (olympic pool about 200m from our house), did homework (homeschool), and had outings with the moms. We explored many places in and around KL, and also visited to Malacca and Penang. There is a low cost airline there called Air Asia with extremely low fares and we lived about 30 mins from the airport, so we tried to get around to see other things in Asia while we were there. We went to Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea. I wish we had time to go other places as well like Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, China, and Taiwan, but it was hard to take vacation since I had to work a lot.
We kept a travel blog of some of our experiences there which you can view here:
https://gatewaytomalaysia.blogspot.com/
I had never eaten Rambutan or Mangosteen before this trip. Wow, they are delicious! My favorite was Mangosteen. This fruit has a dry, spongy, purple outer covering, and is about the size of a plum. The green cap frequently harbored loads of ants. Once you crush the fruit a little, you can peel off the purple outer covering to reveal the moist, segmented, white insides. Looks a bit like a head of garlic. These segments are very sweet and fruity; smaller ones are seedless and larger ones have a seed which you can spit our or swallow. We would buy mangosteen 5kg at a time and finish them within a day or two. They make a lot of debris when eating, so they are banned from many hotels and on busses and airplanes.
My second favorite was Rambutan. The malay word for “hair” is Rambut - hence the name. This fruit tastes like lychee but I think had a little more tartness. Longan was also abundant, but I found these too annoying to peel, and also too sweet without any tart. Rambutans are bigger than lychee and easy to peel. You are not supposed to eat the seed since it is poisonous in quantity. These also harbored loads of ants so we would usually put them in the fridge, which slowed the ants down enough so they wouldn’t spread out of the fruit bag.
You can sometimes see Rambutan at asian markets in the US, but I have never seen Mangosteen.
Another great fruit in SE Asia is Mango. We were unfortunate that there wasn’t an open local market close to our house, but there was a high end grocery store about 1km from the house which we could walk to. So many types of mangos were available that I had never tasted before. Check out the selection at our grocery store:
One day I took a car to a big local market in an adjacent town and came home with 6 different types which really did taste quite different. Here is a really large variety:
The street market we visited in Phu Quoc, Vietnam, was the best one I have ever seen. Such variety, so many stalls, all very fresh, and an impressive selection of seafood as well.
My two young kids hated street markets (hot, crowded, smelly, stray cats and dogs eating weird stuff off the ground, tobacco smoke, mopeds, etc.). So we didn’t get around to as many as I would have liked to see.
Probably the worst thing about Malaysia was the heat. We lived 3 degrees North of the equator, so you can believe it was warm! When we first arrived it was hard to be outside for any time at all. However by the end of our stay I felt like I could be outside all day as long as I didn’t have to be in direct sun during the middle of the day. I sweat just as much as at the beginning, but it somehow didn’t seem as oppressive and uncomfortable. So you do get used to it eventually. And it was nice to have the weather always be predictable - weather app on my phone was basically useless. Every day about 28-34C, probably with a thunderstorm. Sometimes it would go a few days with no rain, sometimes there would be two thunderstorms in a day. While the thunderstorms would drop sometimes outrageous amounts of rain, it would usually clear up and be sunny again within an hour or two. We got to see lightning like I’ve never seen before. The sky was always full of dramatic cloud formations. Sunset and sunrise were very brief, being so close to the equator. Now that I’m back to experiencing a dreary winter in the northeast, I’m wishing for Malaysia weather again.
While our project there was pretty successful technically, business conditions became much worse over the two year duration of the project. Hanwha, our partner company, had previously been supplying mainly the US market, so they were heavily impacted by the import tariffs the US put in place against solar panels. Also, the government of China abruptly changed it’s subsidy policy, causing the chinese market to drop off sharply, leading to massive overcapacity worldwide and thus plunging prices for panels. Hanwha Q cells lost hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter and dismissed their CEO. They were out of cash and the new CEO was not a believer in our technology (which after all is a risky new thing from a single company and not fully scaled up). So the plans for a large factory in Malaysia were cancelled and our partnership came to an end, meaning my family moved back to the US.
Coming back was tough for me. I felt like we had been on this amazing adventure together as a family and now it was just over and we had to go back to ordinary life. Also, the house was dusty and full of cobwebs, and we noticed with new eyes how dingy and cluttered it was compared to our place in Malaysia, which was bright, huge, modern, with almost no stuff in it. The yard was packed solid with 2m high weeds and everything was overgrown. All my apples had somehow been taken off the trees (probably squirrels, since I wasn’t around to trap them). The car broke down immediately, the dishwasher broke, and the internet wasn’t working. Ugh. It was hard to get excited about anything, even things I enjoyed before we left.
However, there were some good things about coming back. Having taken nearly a year away, we found that a lot of the clutter in the house were things we could live without, so we did a major reorg and gave away or threw out a lot of stuff. We repainted and fixed things, pulled all the weeds in the yard. All the perennials and trees I cared about had survived ok, though clearly in need of pruning. Our Mars and Marquis grape vines were loaded with fruit.
Now having been back for a few months and getting things settled, I’m starting to feel excited about the garden again and ordered seeds this week. I found myself interested in reading GrowingFruit again, so here I am. Glad to see the community is still active and vigorous!
