From the back of a small white van, a man named Muhammad sold rojak in takeaway containers. The shopping mall on the other side of the parking lot boasted a KFC, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks. A big McDonald’s did a lively business one block away. But Muhammad usually had at least three or four customers lined up at his truck, waiting for him to scoop their orders from his assortment of plastic tubs.

The mixture of cucumber and pineapple chunks included various pieces of jicama, mango, apples, bits of puffy fried tofu, and bean sprouts. The sauce tasted strongly of shrimp paste cut with sugar, hot chilies, and lime juice. A generous sprinkling of chopped peanuts completed the dish.

Like most Malaysians, Muhammad thought a white person like me would not like rojak. “Spicy,” he warned me politely. It’s not for everyone.

Few people in the United States know anything about Malaysia. Why should they? The peaceful Southeast Asian country is half a world away from either one of our shores, its history obscure to us.

“They’re Buddhists there, aren’t they?” a university colleague asked me as I rushed around the office, making last-minute preparations near the end of 2004 to leave for an eight-month stay. No, he must have been thinking of Thailand.

Scuba divers, however, know Malaysia — its clean, white sand and clear, tropical waters. Europeans fly down for beach holidays. Saudis come during the hottest part of the year, Western-looking men in jeans and polo shirts, with multiple black-robed wives in tow — they find both the Muslim culture and high humidity welcoming.

Islam came to the lands occupied by Malays certainly before the 14th century, and maybe as early as the ninth century, 200 years after the death of the prophet Mohammed. One sees evidence of Islam everywhere, from the halal Chinese restaurants that serve no pork, to the sarong-clad boys on motorbikes converging on mosques each Friday afternoon. The official state religion is Islam, and the country has an official doctrine of tolerance and religious freedom.

I met Maria and her family in Kuching, a city in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. They enthusiastically introduced me to paper dosa, a gigantic crispy pancake imported from southern India. Maria’s daughter was waiting to hear whether she had won a place in the university, a process based on academic testing, controlled by the national government. Why should she worry? I asked, assuming that because the family is Iban, one of the native tribes of Borneo, the girl would be assured a place.

“You’ll get a place. You are bumiputera,” I said, using the word assigned to all Malay ethnic groups, regardless of religion.

“We are second-class bumiputera,” Maria said dryly. “We are not Muslim.”

The winds of the southwest monsoon brought Arab and Indian traders to the Strait of Malacca hundreds of years ago. The Chinese merchants came in on the winds of the northeast monsoon. During the inter-monsoon season, the traders waited in port for the wind to turn to blow them home again, their ships laden with pepper, cloth, gold, tin, products of the wet forests, and sinuous inland rivers. In the meantime, they mingled — with each other and with the Malays, Javanese, and Sumatrans who lived there year-round.

Great Hindu civilizations flourished there — Srivijaya and Majapahit — empires never mentioned in my American schoolbooks. Much later came the Portuguese sailors, then the Dutch, and finally, the British.

I went on a trekking excursion in Borneo, and there was one Englishwoman in our group, a nurse in her early 30s. As we sprawled on a beach by the Sulu Sea, shaded by leaning palm trees, she said, “I’ve always wanted to visit Borneo. It’s been my dream since I was a little girl.” I mulled over the idea that a child in England, born almost 30 years after the end of World War II, had grown up on stories of the exotic lands once controlled by the British Empire.

My friend Kiranjit was born and grew up in Kuala Lumpur, the national capital. She lives there still. Of her 12 brothers and sisters, all but two have moved abroad, either to Australia or to England. Their parents were Sikh, immigrants from India.

“Why should they raise their children in a place that doesn’t want them?” she said, explaining the exodus. Even more so than Maria’s daughter, their chances of winning places at a public university are low.

On another day, I visited Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and met with a group of lecturers. “You know, people have their loyalty to their home country,” a UKM professor told me as we drank coffee and munched on curry puffs. “People like your friend Kiranjit — of course, her real home is in India.” When I explained that I had a different impression, the professor was quite surprised.

I felt exasperated by his assumption that my friend was allied with a country she has never lived in. “She’s Malaysian,” I said. “She speaks Malay and English. She doesn’t know any Indian languages.” He seemed pleased by the idea that my friend identifies herself as a Malaysian — but also a bit perplexed. I was reminded of the expression on the face of Muhammad, the rojak vendor, as he watched me smile after I had chewed and swallowed the spicy fruit salad.

Chatting with that group of Malay professors, I wondered whether the fabulous rojak culture of Malaysia had yet to be digested by their generation, the generation born in the years just before and after independence. They ate it, drank it, served it at their own dinner tables, but they seemingly did not realize that it is the variety of flavors and textures that makes their country great. When the rojak does not include mango, I really miss it.

Before 1957, there was no “Malaysia.” On the Malay Peninsula and on the island that foreigners call Borneo lived various groups of people with strong ethnic or tribal identities. Sultans controlled, more or less, certain geographic territories, but borders are hard to draw inside jungles, and even harder to enforce. Chinese immigrants worked in tin mines. Indian immigrants tapped the rubber trees on plantations. Malays, under the British policy of “divide and rule,” took jobs in the civil service. As in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, the recipe for Malaysia followed a European logic.

My friend Siti closed the door to her office, unclasped an ornamental pin near her throat, and removed her hijab, the Muslim head covering which the Malays call tudung. She pushed at her hair with her fingertips. “It gets so hot, Prof,” she said. She told me that she did not wear the scarf until she was married, and she did not ask her daughters to wear the scarf, but rather left the decision to them.

“All this scarf-no scarf business — we didn’t have that when I was young,” Siti said. “Then we were all in school together, Chinese and Malay, some Indian girls too. And we went to each other’s houses, lah. We didn’t think anything about eating in the Chinese girl’s kitchen. Her mom made us some mee, lah, and we just ate it.”

This August, Malaysia will celebrate the 50th anniversary of merdeka, their independence. They have been inventing a new nation for 50 years. They started with a diverse collection of cultures, beliefs, customs, and languages, but that’s hardly new. Their country is the product of several hundred years of collaboration and trade, extending from the western edge of Arabia to the southern tip of India (and Sri Lanka) and onward to the eastern edge of China.

The great beauty of Malaysian culture comes out of this mixing of people, in which they maintain the pure flavor of their ancestors’ religions, languages, clothing, and customs — like the separate fruits in rojak — but at the same time, they are transformed by the sauce, the spicy-tart flavor that brings all of them together. If they try to separate, to reinvent a purity that vanished centuries ago, I worry that they will lose the unique strength they have gained from being mixed.

Mindy McAdams

My house is fat. I still love it as I did when my husband and I bought it with dreams of a future in which the house was to be slender and beautiful.

But I have to say, the physical attraction is waning.

Once upon a time we lived in a tiny 1930s house, the kind where you could grab the toothbrush off the sink and get your shower running while sitting on the toilet. Not that I’ve done that. Back then, Dave and I vowed not to let our house turn into the cluttered mess we knew most American houses become. No exploding closets, no cars in the driveway because the garage is filled with Christmas decorations, no favorite clothes kept around just in case they come back into style.

Use it or lose it was the motto. And for a while, it worked.

Then we moved into a bigger house. Not a McMansion by any stretch of the imagination — we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a cardboard box costs $400,000 — but a decent, three-bedroom home with closets, cupboards, and a two-car garage. We needed to buy a few things to fill it out. And then, in replacing some of the old drab stuff, we bought new items and put the old ones — an old couch, chair, and tables — in the garage. Temporarily, of course.

And then we had a baby. Suddenly, there was no time to sift through our belongings and take trips to Goodwill. As baby products consumed every room, we shoved mattresses, cookbooks, and our daughter’s impressive wardrobe into every nook and cranny. And that old couch in the garage? You never know if a sibling or friend might need furniture. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.
 
As the house’s waistline grows, I know we should watch our intake, but I can’t seem to help myself.

I like stuff. I want stuff. Stuff makes me feel good.

I rarely walk into a baby store without buying an outfit for Sarah, even though her grandparents do a marvelous job of keeping her in high style. She has 18,000 toys, all of which she eats. We, the adults, have a mammoth television, Christmas plates, and half a closet dedicated to gift wrap. Recently, while reorganizing, I came upon a forgotten heart-shaped casserole dish. And still, as I perused Crate and Barrel for a media stand to hold our new TV, I wanted more. It got me thinking: Could I ever expect to have one of the thin, beautiful homes we see in the catalogs that rain down on us every week? Or is that dream as unrealistic as waking up to find I look like a supermodel?

Pottery Barn is one of these beauty magazine offenders. About every four hours we get a new catalog from them, and each one shows myriad, perfect rooms with a throw blanket and a pair of slippers at the foot of the couch. There’s no pile of bills, no overflowing laundry basket, and you certainly don’t find last season’s Pottery Barn décor shoved under the stairs. It’s perfectly sparse. It’s the skinny model I always wanted my house to be.

Instead, I open my kitchen cabinets and Tupperware tumbles out like rolls of fat over too-tight jeans.

Rather than purge belongings, a lot of people become manic about organization. Places like The Container Store have been established to satisfy this need. There are nearly 40 across the United States, and like gyms we go to for a week each January, they pretty much exist to make us feel like we’re getting our acts together.

I am guilty of this. I buy color-coded boxes, plastic bins, and shelf dividers, and bring them home to clear out the garage with the aim of driving my car into it. Ultimately, I just have too much stuff in nice bins.

You’d think Americans would catch on. We buy things in an attempt to improve our lives. Next, we believe that if we could just get our stuff organized, everything would be okay. Unfortunately, The Container Store can’t match the army of Pottery Barn locations in the United States, so our consumption is likely to far outweigh our efforts to get in shape.

Our society definitely makes it hard to live a lean lifestyle, but outlets exist to get our homes in fighting condition. On Earth Day, we dumped a TV and yards of extra cords at an e-waste recycling center. There are numerous places to donate clothing, furniture, and appliances to the less fortunate. And if we are really determined, we could just say “no” to buying things.

For our house, that’s not going to happen — at least not for a while. I’m resigned to it being on the chubby side, junk and all.

Summer Batte

Halfway through my senior year in college, I came down with the flu twice along with pneumonia. For several weeks, I swallowed only Thai chicken soup and soy smoothies that were brought to me while I lay on my dorm room bed, coughing my lungs out. When the illness left, it had done what no amount of dieting or exercising had ever accomplished. I had lost every pound I’d gained since high school — not just the fabled “freshman 15” (okay, more like seven), but also the “sophomore four,” the “study abroad six,” and the “new boyfriend three.”

My lack of waif-like features had been an anomaly at my perfectionist Ivy school, but I coped. A proud feminist, I made a point of carrying my extra weight confidently. I felt as though my dress size separated me from the girls who played into sexist ideals and mournfully poured vinegar over their dinner carrots. Of course, negative body image drove me to distraction in private, but I could never wholeheartedly tackle the gargantuan — and in my mind, hypocritical — task of getting more than a few pounds skinnier.
 
And now I was sure I’d never have to. Back home for the holidays, I tried on my old clothes. My red dress from “sweet 16” parties fit perfectly. My embroidered cowgirl jeans fit, with room to spare. It didn’t matter that I would never have occasion to wear these ridiculous things again.
   
I was infinitely relieved. A chapter of my life spent feeling fat — and then feeling guilty for caring about my jean size when there was so much else to worry about — had melted away.

But it was naïve to think that all the emotional weight had left with the pounds. In our society, particularly in hypercompetitive niches like my college, size is crucial to our identities, reaching nearly as important a status as race and gender.

You can’t just sneak from fat to thin, or thin to fat.

The first comment I got after my recovery was from a friend whom I bumped into at a late-night campus joint. I was wearing a bulky ski parka, but this girl, who was particularly diet-conscious, saw right through my winter layers. “Oh my god,” she said accusingly from across the restaurant. “You got so ridiculously skinny. You must have lost 10 pounds in a week. Or was it 15?”

I was shocked. When I had been on the chubbier side, people didn’t comment on my body in front of others like that. An unspoken rule says that small bodies of various degrees are okay to moan over (“I’m so fat!”) and compliment (“You’re so not!”). But people who aren’t diminutive face a damning public silence. I was flummoxed. To revel in my friend’s scrutiny would have been impossible: “Thanks, girlfriend. That mucus in my chest really helped create a new me!” But I had been psyched to fit back into that red dress. I felt unusually speechless.

The attention came in a steady parade — some positive, some envious, some suspicious. “You look emaciated,” a close friend told me at a party that spring with a disapproving tone that was sounding like a familiar refrain. Again, my body — not my improving health — was being parsed in a critical way.

While once I was concerned about girth, I was now paranoid about girlfriends. I feared that my new size had thrown some secret pecking order off balance — that my friends had counted on my fuller figure and my feigned comfort with it to make them feel better.  Despite my idealistic aspiration toward a “we are all sisters” kind of feminism, my inner voice warned that I might have to get more stupid now that I was thin, or at least act more self-deprecating. I felt like a walking, talking threat to all the women I knew.

Back when other women had championed the South Beach Diet last year, I had scorned their agonizingly achieved slimness. Now their pissy attitudes about my change in size were forcing me to see that our bodies are always battlegrounds.

So I celebrated the “new me” by joining in a chorus of self-effacing comments. I would never have called attention to myself by stuffing a doughnut in my mouth and saying, “I suck,” when I was 15 pounds heavier. Now I could do exactly that, and I felt like I was joining a heretofore members-only club. And yes, I felt guilty about it.

But whether my self-criticism was silent or tellingly open, it was still there. Unlike the success stories trumped by women’s magazines, we women on all parts of the body-size spectrum still don’t think we’re good enough. And instead of turning against the society that makes us feel this way, we often turn against the woman who eats an extra slice of pizza or refuses dessert, shops one size up, or is a slave to the treadmill.

Engaging in this perverse group exercise of wailing about our waist sizes doesn’t do us any favors. Until we women stop being complicit in our obsession with weight, our relationships will be strained by the relentless need to measure ourselves, literally, against each other.

Sarah Marian Seltzer