22. How To...Aténg

A man lights a bonfire on the beach as the mist is lifting and the cold morning wind flaps the folds in his sarong. It is the start of the monsoon, before the Monsoon Cup which now seems to have driven away the wind, but in Trengganu the word anging (wind) has at least two meanings, one of which is reserved for one who lives beyond his/her means, or one who aspires to wasteful things. But our man who lights the fire is none of that: his wife Mèk Song has gone to sell kkölèh lemök in the market, and he is seeking warmth. As the fire is in full glow and the man, let’s call him Pök Téng, is basking in the heat, dreaming of ikang duyong (mermaids) and other lascivious Trengganu things, a real life lady appears before his eyes with hands clutching tapioca roots (ubi kayu). "Tupang sikik gök!" she says, as she dumps her manioc into the blazing fire of Pök Téng.

Now that is the Trengganu way of tupang, or, to give it its technical term, aténg.

Aténg, as you may have now guessed, is a free ride, the sharing of someone else’s thing, with or without as much as by his leave. It is energy-efficient and a welcome or an unwelcome intrusion. For Pök Téng, his mermaids fizzled away and his dreams interrupted, the real world of Tanjong has come back to him in the shape of tapiocas and the edentate Mök Song, now stoking his fire and poking and turning the ubi in the sand.

Aténg is a togetherness word, often at another’s expense. It is tagging along without bearing the burden, an opportunistic grabbing of the opportunity and the moment – a root in someone else’s fire, a personal fulfilment in someone else’s ceremony, a beating of another when someone else has got him down. A true aténg player is no chance seeker, he looks for real opportunity, and then — with charm and without let or hindrance — he stokes his ubi into the fire and gatecrashes a party and dispersing the mermaids to the back of Pula Wang Mang. And as you already know about Duyong, its difficult to bring her back when she's gone.