a feeling of malaise

I must confess, it is not the first time I have been in this country. My very good friend has many relatives, and we meet in LA and in London and places like that. I even met some at a Manchester United football match. I was there to watch Peter Schmeichel, and I was a teenager then.

So I have been talking a lot with all these Asians, some are Ost-Asians, some are Sonder-Asians, some are Mal-Asians. When I heard that in a public drinking house in Dublin, I asked, "Why do you call yourselves Mal-Asians?" This very tall Chinese guy named Lim (who taught me Hokkien later) laughed and smirked at the same time, while not letting it ruffle his Guinness. He said, "That's because we are from Mal-Asia. Haha. But I am not, I am from Eapoe."

I found out that he was joking in many ways. Ipoh is a place in Malaysia but his family acts as if it is their own amt. Other people told me that 'Lim-peh' rules a lot of Ipoh. Then they laughed some more. I never got the joke till six years had passed.

I found out that Malaysia is like Danmark. It has an eastern section too, like Sjaelland, and the main part is a peninsula, like Jylland upside down. But Malaysia is more spread-out. [We have bridges connecting our 400 (or so) islands. It is a pity that the Swedes get in the way of Bornholm.] Like Malaysia, we used to be a nation of pirates that everyone was afraid of. Now we are a peace-loving people.

Anyway, Lim made another bad joke. I will not repeat it here because I hear that East Asian countries have very strict race laws. He made clever use of the French(?) word 'malaise'. As usual, I did not get the joke till later. Why is it that people make these silly jokes with words? Ah, I will tell you more about this tall Lim person in future postings. He claims drinking is his surname.