In 1963, a student essay for a weekly writing competition held by local Malay newspaper Berita Harian dubbed the bicycle the ‘economic vehicle’. One of the five winners, Yeow Peng Keat, contemplated its ability to overcome distance, as vendors tracked dirt paths and newly laid roads between settlements, bringing necessities to kampungs:
‘Kita selalu menyaksikan orang penjaja membawa barang keperluan ka-kampong dengan basikal.’
‘We always witness hawkers bringing necessities to kampungs with bicycles’Berita Harian, 6 February 1963 (All Malay translations by author)
Bicycles were affordable, the egalitarian vehicle that bridged towns, cities, coasts, and hinterlands. ‘Reachable by bike’ became a horizon of travel to many. Much as the developments of phone lines and mail transformed the speed and scale of communications—forming the network of empire and carrying words, orders, and assurances between correspondents—wheels made tractable daily life across places at different times in ways previously unimaginable. People could commute to work and school; visit people, city amenities, and places of worship; travel for leisure, scouring hills and bracing the tropical wind, witnessing sights still and in motion. Vendors could haul the produce of squatter farmers, nestled at the rural periphery, to urban towns for sale, and they could return with newfangled commodities difficult to attain outside of sites of regional trade. Increasingly modern consumer items, like household brushes in 1962, with their plastic bristles, were the product of manufacturing and imports only found in urban centres such as Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Johor. More than a vehicle to cross distances and navigate terrain, the bicycle was a marker of radically different rhythms of work and life in the twentieth century.
The bicycle was one of many vehicles that enabled personal movement and transportation for street Malay(si)an trade—which included wheeled stalls, the kandar, tricycles, and motorcycles (Malay(si)a refers to both Malaya, which achieved independence in 1957, and Malaysia, when the country had later united with Sabah and Sarawak in 1963). Their popularity attests to the evolving regional economies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which people moved across the seas and between towns, in search for meaningful work in the interstices of imperial networks. Reminiscent of the characteristics of early trade across Southeast Asia, there was a certain sensibility that literally anyone could vend their wares at a suitable path teeming with traffic, catching the attention of passers-by craving for food or snacks as they went about their days. Food markets followed the changing flows of people across time and space—Chinese labourers from mines at Kinta, Perak and Batu Arang, Selangor, Tamil plantation workers residing in rubber estates from Port Wellesley to Johor, and Malay villagers in kampongs from Eastern and Western coasts made up different needs across the Malayan peninsula. As the Straits Settlements and later the Malay(si)an government oversaw fluctuating patterns of work, the immigration and repatriation of people, and the shape of hunger, so did hawkers bring their meals and wares about, shaping the dynamic food economies that were a feature of towns in the Southeast Asian region.
Vehicles extended the limits of movement, and hawkers became more visible as figures of public imaginary. In the 1960s, the news followed closely new hawker sites, municipal woes, and street food trends in rural and urban areas. Across race and class, street hawkers were conduits of Malay(si)an foodways, and one could feel their absence when in want of a meal. Che Hasnah, a single mother and widow who had just moved into Kampung Pandan, a new village built in Kuala Lumpur in 1963, worried over the sparseness of her community market space:
‘Tak ada penjaja sayor dan ikan datang kamari. Hanya sa-kali saja. Itu pun harga-nya berlipat kali ganda mahal-nya. Ta’ mampu hendak membeli-nya…Pasar jaoh dari sini. Tambang bas-nya saja 50 sen pulang balek.’
‘There are no vegetable or fish hawkers who come here. Only once. Even so, their prices are several times more expensive. I can’t afford to buy…the market is far from here. Bus fees alone cost 50 sen to go there and back.’Berita Harian, 27 October 1963
To bear with hawker absence thus, Hasnah subsisted mostly on rice and ikan bilis (‘anchovies’). Hasnah’s worries over the frequency of hawker visits, food prices, and bus fare spelled out the attention needed to navigate the economic terrain of foodways after independence, a mark of persisting insecurities that hobbled the new nation.
The government’s inclusion of market spaces in settlements old and new, like Kampung Pandan, was a nod to supporting community trade vital to food commerce—practices that, combined with squatter agriculture in rural hinterlands, helped Malaya to barely avert outright famine in a crisis of supply chains that materialized during the Japanese Occupation in the 1940s. Such was part of their attempts to legitimize and formalize food hawking, which had a legacy of obstructing state rule. Yet hawkers were ubiquitous in everyday life to locals and visitors. In East Peninsula, Malay women in headcloths, scarves, and batik, with all manner of produce on woven tikar mats were ever present in rural markets like in Kota Bahru—the vibrant spread of food and people across the open ground had become vivid scenes of art and marketing that stirred touristic fantasies and artistic interest. Works by Malaysian painters in the 1950s and 1960s depict markets as features intimate and cozy to the structural logic of town landscapes. Different forms of shades, such as the five-foot ways, rooves, umbrellas, and cloths, provide moments of reprieve from the often-unforgiving weather of Malaysia that alternates between hot sunny streaks and torrential rain. They also intimate the spatial dynamics that differ between urban and rural scenes (see Pitt Street, Penang and Market in Trengganu), evincing nuances that blurred or heightened boundaries between market and street spaces at the time—aspects mediated by municipal interventions to varying extents.
The cautious embrace of hawking—enacted alongside new modes of regulation and enforcement—by the new Malay(si)an government was a departure from the strategies of previous colonial authorities. Historically, the organic flows of hawkers in reaction to shifting colonial economies and livelihoods had met the resistance of British and Japanese administrations. Hawker licensing meant to control numbers in colonial towns, but enforcement was difficult when one could easily tear down and move their implements and wares, scuttling away in search of safer sites. Hawking evinced the fluid capacity of people to adapt and make do in an extractive economy that offered no guarantees. Personal vehicles further abetted vendors in peeling away from the tendrils of administration and policing. Controlling traffic and public sanitation was more successful—market hotspots in Kuala Lumpur and Kinta, Perak were routinely quelled of occupants deemed illegal and unsightly by Sanitation Boards; or entire stalls could be relocated if they obstructed traffic.
But while friction over the management of food production and the use of public spaces continued, administrative relationships were formed between hawkers and authorities through correspondence, dialogue, and protests. Hawkers had been organizing politically as well, forming associations to negotiate their rights as citizens of a new Malay(si)a. The country’s newfound independence in 1957 ushered in a wider embrace of hawkers as working subjects of the new nation. Though regulation of trade and space continued well into the present day, towns and cities recognized hawkers as artisans quintessential to Malayan food trade, providing jobs and affordable meals. As Malaya reeled from longstanding troubles of poverty and malnutrition bequeathed by the end of World War II, administrations sought to buttress the potential of hawkers to reach into the heart of communities and feed people.
The new nation’s attempts to incorporate hawkers under municipal governance continue to structure present-day market landscapes. Local municipalities across the country have since built and maintained dedicated market spots for food vendors, though everyday negotiations, official and informal, continue to happen between officials and traders in relation to access over public spaces. The opening of Tapak Street Dining sites, dedicated spots catering to food truck vendors, and the introduction of state-sponsored financial schemes for food truck entrepreneurs, is a sign of continuing shifts in engagements with space and mobility in food hawking. But the growing complexities of urban traffic and the rise of transregional extremities—including the pandemics and climate change-induced extreme weather—have introduced new factors that complicate the operations of street food trade, cordoning vendors off into new sites and digital approaches. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, then-Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin has referred to ‘Makcik Kiah’, the archetype of a hardworking citizen who sells pisang goreng (‘banana fritters’) and lives at the Desa Tun Razak People’s Housing Project, as the ideal beneficiary of the cash aid programs meant to aid workers affected by the inability to do business physically during a series of nationwide lockdowns that spanned two years. The linkages between hawkers and the open contours of urban landscapes remain indelible, for grappling with current hawking troubles is a window to simmering anxieties over the futurities of working, and being, in physical spaces.
With thanks to Ong Kar Jin for his advice on Malaysian artwork in the 1950s and 1960s.