The Mentee Programme

The Serumpun Sarawak chapters — Launch in Kuching, Osaka, Mulu, the Kuching Finale — are the visible architecture of the founding year. Beneath them, a quieter architecture has been at work since the movement's first day: the In Motion mentee programme, the parallel thread through which the next generation of Sarawak culinary practitioners has been brought into the kitchen, the table, and the discipline.

In Motion is editorially distinct from the four chronological chapters. It is not a chapter. It is the thread that connects all four. The mentees were present in Kuching at the launch, in Osaka at the international debut, in Mulu in the rainforest, and at the Kuching Finale that closed the cycle. The work they carried forward across those nine months is the Serumpun movement’s most important succession argument: the cuisine does not move forward without the practitioners who will inherit it.

This sub-page is the In Motion chapter held on its own terms — restraint over surfacing, succession over spotlight.

Why a Parallel Thread

The decision to run In Motion as a parallel thread rather than as a discrete chapter is itself part of the editorial argument. Mentorship surfaced as a chapter would risk the same flattening that befalls most state-cultural mentorship narratives — the mentees framed as beneficiaries of the chef’s work, the chef framed as patron. The Serumpun architecture deliberately refuses that frame. The mentees are present in every chapter as practitioners, not as recipients. They cook. They carry plates. They speak with diners. They learn the discipline by holding it.

In Motion as a parallel thread holds the relationship correctly. The chapters are public. The thread is generational. Both are real; neither replaces the other.

What In Motion Held Across the Four Chapters

At the Launch (July 2025). The mentees were present in Kuching for the unveiling — introduced to the institutional partners, the press, and the wider Sarawak culinary community. The launch was their introduction to the public-record register of the work.

At Expo 2025 Osaka (August 2025). The mentees travelled with the kitchen to Seaside Studio CASO. For practitioners early in their careers, presence at the international debut of a cultural-diplomacy programme is the kind of formative chapter no curriculum can replace. Osaka was the chapter where the mentees saw the cuisine carry on the world stage.

At Mulu (October 2025). The mentees returned with the kitchen to the rainforest. Mulu was, in many respects, the chapter where the discipline became most visible — the mentees holding indigenous-cuisine work in its ancestral landscape, in proximity to the communities whose practice the wider arc honours. Mulu was the chapter where the mentees saw the cuisine return.

At the Kuching Finale (April 2026). The mentees closed the cycle in the city where it began — the handover chapter, the moment the founding year passed from a single chef’s curatorial discipline into a shared generational discipline. The Finale is where the mentees finished the cycle as practitioners in their own right.

What In Motion Argues

The Serumpun work is not a one-chef movement. It cannot be. The thirty-four indigenous communities whose cuisine the wider arc honours hold a body of practice that no single career can hold on its own — and certainly not into perpetuity. In Motion is the architectural answer to that mathematical reality: the discipline must be transferred, not preserved.

The mentee thread also carries a second argument, quieter but no less important. Conservation work — of indigenous ingredients, indigenous techniques, indigenous food memory — is not done by chefs alone. It is done by communities, by farmers, by foragers, by the next chef who will cook a Bidayuh dish twenty years from now and remember who taught them. In Motion is where the Serumpun movement makes that succession explicit.

What Carries Forward

In Motion does not close at the Kuching Finale. It continues — into year two, into the wider movement, into the careers the mentees will build of their own. The discipline of holding mentorship as a parallel thread, not as a chapter to be ticked, is the operating commitment of the Serumpun movement going forward.

The cuisine moves. The cuisine returns. And in the years that follow, the cuisine will be carried by those who held it across the founding cycle.

The mentee roster — names, ages, indigenous communities, and per-chapter participation — is held pending compilation for the sub-page’s full register. Each mentee has consented to public surfacing; the discipline of the In Motion thread is to honour that consent at the editorial standard the work asks for.