SOME of you may or may not know what nasi kangkang is. Nevertheless, let’s rewind the clocks to January — you may remember a story about how an Indonesian maid mixed her menstrual blood into the rice she served her employers.
Pretty disgusting, right? And you’re also probably thinking she must have done so out of revenge, like a waiter spitting into a customer’s drink ... but her intentions were vastly different.
She thought by doing so, her employees would he treat herbetter.
A pretty weird thing to do, we know. But it’s apparently a more common thing than we think.
What is nasi kangkang?
A common thing in bomoh folklore, nasi kangkang (in English: crotch rice) is basically cooked rice over which a woman squats over without pants or undergarments — letting her sweat and fluids drip down into the rice.
The belief behind this is that it would act as a love potion.
Forbidden in Islam
Bomoh culture is sometimes believed to be related to Malay culture. But the thing is, Bomoh is just the Malay word for shaman — and shamans exist in almost all cultures.
And for Muslims (since Islam and Malay customs go hand-in-hand), black magic/shamanistic practices are forbidden.
In fact, under the Quran it says:
“...And indeed they knew that the buyers of it (magic) would have no share in the Hereafter...”
It’s not a Malaysian thing
Given that the maid mentioned earlier was Indonesian, obviously nasi kangkang isn’t solely a Malaysian thing. In fact, there are similar practices in other parts of the world.
Apparently all the way in the Carribean country of Trinidad, they have a similar practice call ‘sweat rice’, and we sure hope deodorant would be part of the practice.
