A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  The next morning, I arrived bearing chocolates.

  Once again, there was the clucking, the cries of “buyong lah!” and the offering of water to the guest. Auntie Khar Imm and her sisters had already begun by the time I arrived. And once again, they didn’t seem quite sure what to do with me. My boisterous cousin Jessie was in the kitchen, too. I’d hardly seen her since we were children, but within minutes of catching up, our banter felt natural. After flitting about, trying to figure out where to fit in, I decided to latch on to my cousin, trailing after her as I’d done as an eleven-year-old at my grandmother’s funeral. Jessie, who works in the accounting department of an interior design firm, had missed the jam-making process because she had to work the day before. But now that she was in the fray, Jessie, who as a twelve-year-old had been able to boss adults around, held court once again, brimming with confidence as she dumped butter, flour, and egg yolks in a mixer to prepare the dough for the cookie base.

  Having grown up living with my Tanglin ah-ma, Jessie had been roped in to help in the kitchen, learning how to cook along the way. Watching her stride around, mixing and rolling dough with confident authority, I couldn’t help but be in awe. Once again, I was the bookish, sheltered eleven-year-old, wanting to be like my fearless older cousin. From Jessie and her auntie Khar Moi, who I was told was the baker of her family, I learned some things—how to mix the buttery dough, create sunflower-shaped rounds with a cookie press, and fill the holes of the rounds with dough. We would then lightly brush the cookie bases with beaten egg yolk, roll up balls of the jam, which by now had hardened a little, place them atop the cookies, and send the cookies off to Auntie Khar Imm, who was squatting on a low stool, manning the oven.

  As we kneaded, brushed, and rolled, I gently prodded my aunties to tell me about my ancestors. I’d heard the story of my great-grandfather’s immigration from Shantou, in southeastern China, to Singapore in search of a better life. I’d wanted to visit the village for years—here was my chance to find out more. Auntie Khar Moi, who’d actually visited the area, told me about the tiny village called Teo Ann Kim Sar, colloquially referred to as Sar Leng Tan (akin to Village Tan), where my great-grandfather was born. She didn’t know much except that it was somewhere between Chaozhou and Shantou, two fairly major industrial cities in Southern China. The more questions I asked—and the more cookies I made—the more they seemed to embrace me, this almost-alien ang moh, as one of their own. When a friend of mine stopped by to watch us cook and teased me, saying that I was “very fierce,” my auntie Khar Imm immediately leapt in to defend me. “Aiyah,” she said, “Sar Leng Tan girls are all very fierce one!”

  My Tanglin ah-ma, too, had had this quality, I found out. Among the Chinese New Year cookies she would make was a tiny white cookie called kueh bangkit. Now, this sweet, tapioca flour cookie is not easy to execute; when done right, it’s supposed to have such an airy consistency that it virtually melts on your tongue. But most versions you buy in stores are so dense that they’re not going to disintegrate unless you start chewing.

  My Tanglin ah-ma’s kueh bangkit, of course, was perfect. In the kitchen that day, I learned that each year before Chinese New Year, she would haul her charcoal stove out of her tiny high-rise apartment kitchen and into the corridor. To nail the consistency, Jessie said, you’ve got to make sure the tapioca flour is super dry. Some bakers spread the flour out on a baking sheet and stick that in a hot oven to dry out. But this easy method was beneath my Tanglin ah-ma. Instead, she did what she’d always done. She’d fill a large wok with tapioca flour, light up her charcoal stove, squat over a low stool, and just start frying, tossing the flour high into the air in the narrow hallway that she shared with her neighbors. “Aiyoh, the neighbors used to get so angry,” Jessie said, laughing. “She would get flour all over the place!” The floor, the walls, the doorknobs would be covered with white powder by the time she was done. The neighbors would yell—oh, they would complain. Unfazed, Tanglin Ah-Ma would just keep on frying.

  As the evening seeped in, we started packing up. We’d made close to three thousand tarts that weekend. And I had sore arms, still-sticky fingers, and a healthy dollop of pride to show for them. As we said our polite good-byes, my aunties pressed way too many jars of the tarts onto me, insisting that I take them back to my family, back to America.

  I left content. I’d emerged with the recipe I’d come for—but I’d also gotten so much more. I thought back to how I’d never given these tarts, the kueh bangkit, even the bak-zhang, much thought before. I’d enjoyed them while eating them, sure, but I’d never considered making them, having dismissed knowing how to cook as one of those things that weakened you as a female. And yet there my grandmother had been, cooking with a ferocity that I should be so lucky to have.

  I knew now that I’d been wrong all along. And—I really wanted that bak-zhang recipe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back in New York, Mike had his instructions.

  He was allowed to try my pineapple tarts—but just one, maybe two. (Three, if he did the laundry.) The rest, after all, had to be my lifeline.

  There was snow on the ground. New York Fashion Week was just around the corner. My days and evenings were once again gobbled up by writing, reporting, and haranguing publicists, retailers, and designers for information and fashion show invitations. And, with the retail industry imploding, I was once again chained to my BlackBerry at all hours of the day; when it’s 3:00 A.M. in New York, it’s daytime somewhere in Europe and Asia, after all. I was sleeping with my BlackBerry by my bed; I was jumping up whenever I heard it buzz, terrified that I was missing some crucial development in the rapidly unraveling economic landscape that I’d need to write about or include in The Wall Street Journal fashion blog I was managing. I was barely sleeping. And when I did, I woke up to find alarming amounts of my black hair strewn about my bed. I had never felt more like a hamster on a wheel—a soon-to-be hairless hamster, at that.

  At this point, even baking couldn’t save my sanity. All I had were my grandmother’s tarts. Just opening the fridge and seeing they were there made me feel better. And when I particularly needed a fix, I’d gingerly take one out and slowly nibble, thinking about home.

  The home that I knew and loved had recently splintered. Two years before, after thirty-two years of marriage, my parents had suddenly divorced. The signs of marital stress had been evident for a long time. My father’s job postings overseas may have drawn us closer as I poured my adolescent thoughts into long letters to him, telling him about the hopes, apprehensions, and dreams that filled me—things I could never tell my mother, who essentially was left to function as a single parent for weeks on end and play the role of the strict enforcer who kept the trains running on time. But his absence thrust a wedge in their relationship. The fracture grew over the years. In the end, however, the tipping point involved a Beijing woman. I did not know much about this woman—just that they had met when she was assigned to be my father’s translator and assistant when he went to Suzhou on frequent business trips. She hailed from a rural part of Anhui, China, where she’d grown up on a farm. Eventually, she moved to Beijing, where my father had begun spending half his time in the mid-2000s. There, she continued to help him as a girl Friday of sorts. She spoke very little English but wanted an English name she could use. And so my father named her Ketty. “I don’t know why,” he said, when I asked. “It just sounds like her.”

  Watching my family unravel from 9,500 miles away through tear-soaked phone calls in the middle of the night and lengthy e-mails that clearly offered little comfort, I had never felt farther. Divorce is still fairly uncommon in Singapore, even among those in their twenties and thirties. For those in my parents’ generation? Virtually unheard of. While I knew of many men my father’s age who had mistresses on the side, in the end, they always came home to their wives and families. The feudal Chinese concubine system—in spirit, even if not in law—remained firmly in place in twenty-first-century Singapore. So why deal
with the legal hassle of divorce and asset dividing when you didn’t have to?

  My mother was blindsided. So were Daphne and I. My weekly conversations with Dad became strained. I wasn’t sure how to react, what to think. And I felt a little replaced—this new woman turned out to be younger than I was. Was my father now giving her the same pep talks he had always given me? Was I as important? And were my sister and I to blame? I had always felt some guilt over the fissure in my parents’ marriage. “We could have gone to Hong Kong with your papa when he went there to work, you know,” my mother would often say in low moments during my childhood as she pined for my father. “But your schooling [in Singapore] was more important.” I always felt that my parents’ marriage might have turned out differently if only they hadn’t had me. Now, once again, feelings of guilt began gnawing at me.

  The divorce had been largely cordial—my father, who was now running a Singapore-based moving company, still stayed in our family home when he was in town. When he was in Singapore, he and my mother shared a car, had dinner almost every night, and ran errands together. It was just easier—logistically and financially—that way. And they did still get along as friends, after all. Even so, feelings were a little raw all around. And my parents had started avoiding the rambunctious, large dinners my mother’s family organized just so they wouldn’t face uncomfortable questions—or silences. Of all the developments that had unfolded since my parents’ divorce, this struck me as among the saddest.

  No one pressured me, but as the firstborn, I felt duty-bound to be there. Daphne now lived in Hong Kong and made the four-hour flight to Singapore to visit my mother whenever she could. Being a good twenty-hour-plus flight away, I wasn’t exactly able to head home to see Mum whenever a long weekend presented itself. My mother had given me so much—it was she who had taught me to read, after all, by patiently guiding me through a hefty series of beginning readers’ books when I was a toddler. And now, in her time of need, I was far, far away in New York—writing about stilettos. And then, just a few months before my trip home to make pineapple tarts, my father remarried. I didn’t know the details—I didn’t want to ask. All I knew or cared about was “Is Mummy okay?”

  “Wouldn’t it be great,” I said to Mike one day after much thought (and some pineapple tarts), “if I could just go home for a bit and learn how to cook and also spend time with my family?”

  He looked worried. (I suspect the words “Um, what about your job?” flashed across his mind.) But this lasted for only for a moment. (After all, I’d managed to marry a man who is fervent in his belief that I can do anything—which, let me tell you, is a rare and invaluable quality.)

  The job, we decided, was an issue. In this economy, it would be impossible to get weeks—much less months—off. To ask for any time away from my desk and BlackBerry at this pivotal moment would likely be construed as a sign of weakness, a lack of dedication to the job. And to ask for time off in order to go to Singapore to cook? I suspected my parents would remarry each other before giving me their blessing to commit such career suicide.

  And then, just a few days later, my editor summoned our entire fashion bureau to a meeting. When I said I would have to be late because I’d scheduled a hard-to-arrange interview with a chief executive officer at that same time and was immediately told to move the interview, I knew something serious was about to happen. Feeling a little ill, the team of reporters slowly made its way to the conference room. On the other side of the door, a neat stack of crisp envelopes lay on the table. We looked at one another—this was it. We’d spent months covering the massive layoffs and restructuring in the retail industry. Now it was our turn to be “restructured.”

  What ensued was a blur. I remember only the final words of the human resources woman with any clarity. If we had any questions, she asked us to call, e-mail, or look her up in her office—but only for the next two weeks. It turned out that the person who was laying us off had just been laid off herself.

  The first feeling was numbness. Then, panic. The media industry was crumbling as quickly as others were—faster, in fact, than many. Newspaper companies, magazines, broadcasters were laying off people by the dozens, the hundreds. What could possibly be out there for me?

  Then, almost instantly, I thought about my grandmother’s bak-zhang. For days I’d been lamenting the fact that I couldn’t take a year off, go to Singapore to spend time with my family and learn how to cook, because I had this job that I simply couldn’t leave. Now, suddenly, the path was clear.

  By the time I got back to my desk, I knew what I wanted to do.

  There was some confusion, at first, over what exactly I was doing back in Singapore.

  “Are you opening a restaurant?” my relatives asked.

  Well, no.

  “Are you writing a cookbook?”

  Um, no.

  “What about your job?”

  I was laid off.

  “Oh.”

  Silence. And then . . .

  “But who’s cooking for Mike when you’re gone?”

  The last question, in fact, was the one I would get the most frequently during my time in Singapore. The subtext, of course, was that I was being a bad wife by leaving my husband to fend for himself for weeks at a time while I was off gallivanting in my aunties’ kitchens, forcing him to have to buy or, horror among horrors, cook himself something for dinner. At first, I would tell them that he was very happy for me and fully supported my going home to spend time with my family, to learn how to cook. It soon became clear, however, that the only correct answer was “Well, he’s very excited that I’m learning how to make these dishes so I finally can cook him good Singaporean dinners.”

  And it was true, that was a goal—but just part of the goal. I wanted to make delicious Singaporean dinners for my husband, yes. But much greater than that was my desire to learn the cuisine of my people before the chance to learn disappeared. This had been a part of my culture, my heritage, my family, that I’d never known with any intimacy or clarity, thanks to my determination to ignore it as I bulldozed through my career. Also, I had been ambivalent about having children for years, but now that I was in my mid-thirties, it suddenly occurred to me that, if I ever had them, I’d want to be able to make them pineapple tarts, bak-zhang, and more. And if they were curious, I’d be honored someday to be able to teach them how to cook, telling them about their great-grandmother, the legendary pineapple tart baker, along the way.

  And so the plan was to travel back to Singapore for a few weeks at a time over the lunar calendar year—between the time I’d learned to make my Tanglin ah-ma’s pineapple tarts and the next Chinese New Year, the following February. I wasn’t sure what I’d learn, but I was eager to find out. The women of my family had fed me well for years. At the end of the year, I hoped I’d know enough. After all this time, it was my turn to feed them.

  The first night I landed in Singapore, my mother was waiting. A petite woman, she could be hard to spot in a crowd—except that, well, she’s gorgeous. When she’s happy, her smile is expansive, infectious, and her eyes are bright and sparkling. When I was a child, she would often bring out mugs of home-brewed hot chrysanthemum tea, nudging grumpy, reluctant me to drink up by dramatically fluttering her eyelids and saying, “This will give you beautiful eyes!” The desire to have my mother’s pretty eyes was often more than enough for me to hoist the mug and drink up. (For some years, anyway.)

  That May night at the airport, my mother was more tired and grumpy than happy, nonetheless. She didn’t fully understand why I was coming home; as always, she didn’t want herself to be the priority in our lives. We always came first and were most important, after all. At any dinner table, she would spend most of the meal twirling the lazy Susan about, hovering over the heaping platters, chopsticks poised to pounce and grab the fattest morsels of pork, the duck with the crispiest, brownest skin, and plop them onto the plate of Daphne, me, or my father. Her family came first—and she liked it that way. “Aiyah, don’t worry
about me—I can take care of myself!” she said and shrugged whenever any of us expressed concern for her. This, too, became her refrain as she went through the dark discomfort of the separation. This wasn’t a piece of meat or a plump abalone we were talking about, however. This was her life. And I was happy to give up New York for a while—to come home and see how she was doing, to spend time with my family.

  The moment I saw my mother at the airport, her first words, as always, were “Are you hungry?” And our years-long tradition immediately was set in motion. We would hug, park the bags in the car, and then head to a nearby hawker center. Under the bright fluorescent lights, hawkers ran from table to table, delivering sizzling hot plates of chunky radish cakes stir-fried with chili and soy sauce or platters of freshly fried oyster omelets. It wasn’t until I tasted my first spoonful of bak-chor mee, a bowl of thin egg noodles still simmering in a peppery broth with minced pork and a hefty dose of hot, sliced red chilis, that I felt it—I was home.

  Once my mother was done running around to order drinks, food, and tissue paper for cleaning off the table, I asked, “Hey, are you okay or not?”

  “Yah, I’m fine—don’t worry about me!”

  “But . . .”

  “Aiyah, you know me, I’m very independent. I’m okay lah. Just worry about yourself!”

  I looked at her closely. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it. So I asked her, “How’s school?”

  My mother had briefly clung to her Singapore Airlines job in the 1970s, keeping her wedding a secret, since SIA stewardesses—the ones in ads who were supposed to be available and “in love with you”—weren’t allowed to be married at the time. But her jet-setting dreams were dashed when she became pregnant shortly after getting married. “You were a wedding night baby, you know!” Dad would always proudly say. With my father traveling frequently for business and the arrival of another daughter just three years after me, my mother devoted herself to raising Daphne and me. It was only when I was a teenager that she went back to work as a customer service representative for United Airlines. After more than twenty years with the airline, she’d recently retired to pursue another dream, enrolling in a six-year diploma course in a traditional Chinese medicine school. At the end, our family would have its first true doctor.