Notes on the Malayan Tiger

When visiting a new country, I like to read books set in that country – like A Room with a View before going to Florence, A Fez of the Heart before my Turkish holiday, and Independent People before visiting Iceland.

On a recent trip to Malaysia, I read The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo – a novel set in the 1930s, when Malaysia (then called Malaya) was a British colony. I took this pic on my night flight to Kuala Lumpur.

I like when airplanes have this little folding table above the main table; it makes life easier for those of us who like to eat while reading. Yangsze Choo's author bio says she too "loves to eat and read (often at the same time)."

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Soon after I moved to Singapore, I read an edited volume of essays called Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene (for which, if I may brag, my friend Xiaoyun wrote the titular chapter). A subsequent chapter called 'Consuming Tigers' has this line which made a deep impression on me:

In 1930, the last wild tiger of Singapore was shot in Choa Chu Kang.

The story was reported in the Straits Times of October 27. Stuff like this is a powerful reminder of how quickly Singapore was transformed from an island which was mostly jungle, to the highly urbanised city-state that we see today.

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Ng Xin, author of 'Consuming Tigers', says:

Since I began writing this chapter, I’ve started to notice tigers everywhere. They’re on beer cans and balm pots, on airplanes and bank facades, in the living room of Crazy Rich Asians and the Singapore state crest.

I had a similar experience after reading The Night Tiger, which features tigers as well as a character who may or may not be a weretiger.

Klang, which is near Kuala Lumpur, has some nice street art. This tiger is painted on a door, but the metal gate makes it look like it's in a cage.

I liked these tiles outside Cheah Kongsi, a temple in Penang:

...and I brought back this fridge magnet – a gift from Juliet which now adorns my whiteboard:

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In a previous post I wrote that I have a 19-inch monitor, but I recently got a 24.5-inch one (Acer EK251Q P6, if you must know). The first film I watched on my new monitor was a documentary called Malaysia's Last Tigers.

It's on YouTube, but that version has a few minutes missing. You can watch the whole thing on Māori+ if you are in New Zealand (or use a VPN).

One of my favourite bits of the documentary is around 24:00 where they show footage of all the other animals which were captured by the National Tiger Survey's camera traps. They show lesser mouse deer, sunbear, wild dogs, binturong, yellow-throated marten, serow, pig-tailed macaques, Indian civet, crab-eating mongoose, Malayan tapir, Asian elephant, clouded leopard, marbled cat, leopard cat, golden cat, and my favourite, a black panther. And that's just the mammals.

Rainforests are really something.