What’s A Local?

 Went out to an English Pub yesterday. I grew up in a small English town and the pub was the centre of communal life. You could say the Pub is to an English village what a Kopitiam is to a Housing Estate Singapore. It’s officially a place that serves food and drink but it’s also so much more. The pub is what you could call the heart and soul of communities. People in any given community gather in pubs. Hence when someone talks about “my local,” they mean the “local pub.”

So, given that I am spending the better part of my trip in the UK in a small town called Margate, I thought I would try and get a bit of nostalgia and went found a local English pub called the Whig & Pen.

 

Was a great experience. The place was fairly empty as one expects at two in the afternoon. However, it had the feel of the pubs that I remembered from 23-years ago. There was a variety of beers and I decided to go for a local ale.

 

 Since I was a little peckish, I wanted to grab a small bite, thinking I’d get something like a small pie. Wet outside to look at the menu that was pasted proudly onto the wall.

 

 

Yes, a local English pub in the middle of nowhere was proudly displaying that the food it was serving was Thai. The tourist in me thought “WTF.” I mean, I didn’t fly all the way out to England to have Thai food, which is practically everywhere in Singapore.

However, it did hit me that the pub owner knew what he was doing. There was clearly a demand for Thai food and the customers who were predominantly white Englishmen felt that it was perfectly natural to have Thai food as part of their daily lives.

As much as the tourist in me was disappointed not to get “English Grub” in an “English Pub,” I realised that this was something to be celebrated. Something which was exotic to the community had become part of the community.

There’s nothing wrong with being exotic. I had fun as an ethnic minority for seven years of my life. Everyone knew my name and it did feel good to be easily noticed. When things go right, being exotic makes you stand out.

There is however, a downside to it. When things go wrong, you are an easy scapegoat. Again, I make the point that I am ethnic Chinese and I live in the only country in a region where the ethnic Chinese are the majority. As any Indonesian Chinese will tell you, its pretty darn easy to end up on the wrong end of things when you are “exotic” to the majority.

So, normalisation is actually something to be celebrated. Englishmen having Thai food in a pub or going for a curry after the pub as if it was the most natural thing in the world is in fact a wonderful sign of how things should be.

Food is essential to existence. Cuisine is a vital part of any culture. We end up growing up with certain flavours and smells as part of our identity. I think of one of chefs I used to work with at the bistro. He cooked beautiful French and Italian food. However, when we out at night, it was always for kway teow.

So, if you look at how food plays such a vital role in our emotional identity, sharing our food is like sharing who we are. If anything, food is probably the easiest step in creating cross cultural bonds. Think of it this way. I may be predisposed to hating a certain ethnic and religious group. However, if I taste a dish from that said ethnic and religious group, I may find that I find it delicious. Then you get the idea that anyone who comes up with something this good might not be so bad after all. Then you make the psychological leap of reaching out to people in the group that you were trained to hate from the start.

Race relations in the UK are far from perfect. However, this a country that has welcomed its first Prime Minister from an ethnic minority (though as my Indian friends point out – he is a coconut – brown outside and white inside). Well, I’ve argued that Rishi Sunak is whiter than white and brown man who is acceptable to a white majority. However, it also takes two to tango. The public in the UK had to discover the joys of curry first. Once they discovered the joys of curry, they then decided to make curry their own. Once curry became part of the mainstream, it became easier to accept the people from the curry making community as part of the mainstream.

It starts with sharing a meal. So, as much as the tourist in me was disappointed not to get something typically English in that most English of institutions, I will celebrate the fact that English pubs take pride in serving Thai food.