The write to move...

She pulls her thick chestnut ringlets back into a loose ponytail. Lifting the lid of the rice cooker, she lets the extravagant saffron aroma escape across the apartment. She unplugs the pot, skillfully flipping the now-crispy chicken rice onto a waiting platter.

“We eat this at home,” Soubadeh says slowly, wistfully.

Home is 3,700 miles away in Tehran, where she left her life as a medical doctor to study toxicology in Malaysia. Only over meals is she able to speak about her life in Iran, about the family she left behind, about the clothing restrictions she no longer observes since moving to Malaysia, the friends of friends who were jailed and never heard from again.

After lunch, we head to the grocery store in search of avocado, imitation crab and roasted seaweed. As we pick our way through the heavy humidity and musty streets, we hear the haunting aria of the noon-time call to prayers from the local mosque reverberating through the open sewers -- a perfect, low-budget, city-wide sound system.

The sushi Soubadeh makes that evening are neater and prettier than ours. The pupil has surpassed her teachers in one tasty roll.

“I will bring this back to Iran,” Soubadeh smiles shyly. “I want to teach all my friends.”

The next day on the beaches of Batu Ferringhi, I’m struck by the strangeness of it all: Saudi men in skimpy speedos, their wives cloaked from head to toe in austere black, clinging to the back of jet skis. And the thick-eyebrowed Syrian man and his small son who have joined us for a competitive game of Ultimate Frisbee.

We spend another dinner with Soubadeh and a large group of mostly Chinese students, making dumplings in an assembly line of mixers, wrappers and boilers. A beautiful, smooth-skinned Indian student sweats over her bubbling, gargantuan pot of spicy, rich lamb curry, shooing away those hovering, clamoring for a taste.

“The joke,” my friend Matthew tells me, is that in Malaysia, “Muslims don’t eat pork, Hindus don’t eat beef, and Chinese eat everything. The only thing everyone agrees on is chicken.”

That night we commiserate over an uninvited guest -- a wriggling caterpillar that seems just as surprised to see us as we are to see it. We only discover him after splitting open a stinky, spiky green durian with the thud of a cleaver, sending all the girls into a screaming frenzy.

“Still good,” Matthew says with a mischevious grin, scooping a piece of the fruit and plopping it into my hand. The kitchen erupts as I try desperately to swallow the half-slimy, half-creamy durian, my eyes watering and throat revolting. You either love it or you hate it, I’m told.

We end the festivities with shots of strong Chinese tea from tiny clay cups. All of us -- American, Chinese, Indian, Iranian -- making horrible distorted faces together. It seems appropriate; so many different people exist side by side in Malaysia, devouring the delicious and swallowing the bitter.