by Cheryl Tan
As Auntie Leng Eng spoke, she grew gentler, softer. I’d never spent much time chatting alone with her before—and now I realized that I should have, a long time ago. The vice principal demeanor was a veneer, one that quickly disappeared around those she loved. I just hadn’t taken the time to be there for that.
“What was Ah-Ma’s childhood like? Do you know?” I asked.
“Well, your ah-ma grew up in bua gia hng, which is ‘crocodile area’ in English,” Auntie Leng Eng said. I’d heard snippets of this story before, but only that my Tanglin ah-ma had grown up on a farm in the northern part of Singapore, where many Teochews lived. “She was the youngest of three girls; there were six of them. Three girls and three boys. And she was the youngest of all of them. My grandmother had two husbands, I think. We were not too clear because we never asked about such things. But if I am not mistaken, the first husband passed away after she had two children, then she remarried, and when she remarried, she had another two boys and another two girls. Your ah-ma was the youngest.”
When Auntie Leng Eng and her two brothers were in school, my Tanglin ah-ma began sending them away to this rural area during their long school holidays in June and December. “We were in primary school, and I remember they used to set up these ge tai, which were these traditional [Teochew] opera shows,” she said, her eyes getting a little dreamy as she began to remember. “We were awed by all those figures in their bright costumes, and we were very taken with all the little stalls selling food around the stage. That was all just part of the fun.”
My great-grandparents had stopped farming by that point. Roofs made with the broad, dried leaves of the tropical atap tree (a form of palm tree) were popular, and my rural family was earning its keep by sewing atap leaves together. “In the mornings, there was no show, so I also went to learn and help them sew,” Auntie Leng Eng said. “They used these long rods to pick the atap leaves, folded them, and then stitched them together. It was very interesting. There was a group of ladies in the kampong [village] that did it. It was like a whole industry!”
Life in the kampong was different from life in downtown Singapore, where my far richer father’s family lived. “All the buildings were very close to each other—you can peep into your neighbor’s house!” Auntie Leng Eng noted. “Everybody was very friendly because you knew everybody in the area. We were like very, very special people because we were from the city.”
As I tried to imagine my citified father and Auntie Leng Eng in this village setting, it occurred to me that I had no idea how my grandmother had left this existence. Though Singapore is a small country, it would have been highly unlikely that a farm girl could have crossed paths with a rich city boy, much less gotten married to him.
“They were match made,” Auntie Leng Eng said. “In those days, your grandfather was supposed to be from a very wealthy family. My grandfather was in the rubber business, and he was the eldest in the family—he controlled the business with his brother and cousins. They had factories in Indonesia. Grandfather used to travel to Indonesia all the time. In those days everybody thought, Oh, Grandfather was very rich, so it was a good match, you know.”
After Tanglin ah-ma married, however, the troubles began. Having married into a city family, my kampong-raised grandmother was scorned as a sua deng, or mountaintop person. “Country folk,” Auntie Leng Eng explained. “She didn’t have a very good time. Your grandpa’s sister—she was quite domineering. And your ah-ma had a lot of hell from her. Your ah-ma had to submit to them and do everything in the house. But she was by nature a very forgiving person. She never bore any grudges, and she got along very well with everybody. She just kept quiet and did whatever she could.”
With few resources, my Tanglin ah-ma turned to her cooking to win her new family over. “She had to cook for everybody in the family. So she improved her culinary skills all day,” Auntie Leng Eng went on. “She used to grind rice with a millstone to make into flour, you know!”
The main person who adored my Tanglin ah-ma, and who thought her very good for his son, his family, was my great-grandfather, a man I’d heard only glowing reports of since I was a child.
“Yah,” I said. “I’ve heard he was a great man.”
Auntie Leng Eng paused, agreeing. But then she said, “he was an opium smoker—almost every day. I watched him. He would have friends who would come to the house. They would spread a mat on the floor, and they had these hard pillows shaped like a loaf of bread and they would be cooking the raw opium. Now, of course, I realize they were cooking opium, but as a young child I didn’t know what they were doing. I was just attracted to the fragrance of the opium as they were cooking or puffing.”
I was floored. The idea of my straitlaced Auntie Leng Eng as a child getting a contact high from opium fumes was mind-boggling. “There was one period when the government forbade people to smoke opium, but your grandfather was addicted. They then had to boil the raw opium in water in the middle of the night in the bathroom upstairs over a small charcoal stove. If you’re awake, you can smell it lah. But they tried to hide the smell by hanging up koo chye [Chinese chives]. The smell of opium is almost similar to that.”
I was still processing all this information about the model great-grandfather I’d thought I had. I’d been taught to be proud of him for decades. He’d left a tiny, impoverished village near Shantou as a young man, boarding a ship to Singapore in search of his fortune, and ended up building a very successful business, a trading company named Tan Yong Kee that thrived even during World War II. In all the family stories my father had told me—the legacy that he was passing on to me as his own firstborn—it was his father, my grandfather, who had been the shame of the family. My great-grandfather, the paragon. I could feel the cracks of my family racing open into a chasm.
“I was a courier for his opium, you know!” Auntie Leng Eng continued.
“What?” I said.
“Yah, I didn’t realize it at the time,” she said. “One evening I was asked to go in the car and the driver would bring me somewhere. They told me, ‘Oh, you will collect a basket.’ So I just dutifully went along and collected a basket. Later on, I realized I was carrying opium for them. My grandfather was arrested once, you know. He had to spend the night in prison for smoking opium. They came to the house to arrest him, and we were all so frightened. This was around the early nineteen fifties. In those days, to get arrested! We were just traumatized. After his arrest the smoking all stopped, but then he had opium deprivation and the illnesses started to come. I remember the day he passed away; it was pneumonia. It was a school day. I was in school, and when I returned home, he was lying on the tabletop in the house. Your uncle Soo Kiat was in primary school. He was so frightened he went to hide under the bed.”
An addictive streak, it turned out, would run in the blood of the firstborns of my family. It was my grandfather’s addictions that ended up breaking my Tanglin ah-ma’s heart. This was a story I’d also heard in bits, told to me as a child by my father, still nursing his bitterness over his failed father. “Your Gong-Gong was a great gambler,” Auntie Leng Eng said matter-of-factly. “Wine, women, and song—that’s what he was all about.”
My grandfather, she said, had a nickname, Ah Sia Kia, which means “rich man’s son” or something like “spoiled child.” “No sense of responsibility,” she said. “My grandfather had a factory that produced some kind of resin. He got my father to work there, but of course, he was not interested in work. He was only interested in spending money. Your grandfather was a very intelligent person, very well educated in both English and Chinese. But he gambled away whatever he had.” My father had told me this, remembering that, when he was a child, the family had almost been shipped back to China, so my grandfather could learn something about hardship and hard work. “This was just before 1949,” Auntie Leng Eng recalled. “His father felt he wasn’t doing anything good for his business, so he wanted to send him back to China and we all had to go back to China with him. I remember we w
ere told to get all these warm flannel clothes.”
Then, a stroke of luck: the Communists took over China and my great-grandfather changed his mind. My family remained in Singapore. Had this not happened, I most certainly would have been born in that tiny village in Shantou. I wondered how different my life would have been then. Would I have ended up in New York City? Would I have pursued writing? Would I have had any role in the world of fashion—other than perhaps working in one of the many garment factories that dot the cities of Southern China? It seemed unlikely. I thought back to all the times that I had criticized Chinese Communism in classroom debates or parties.
My family’s troubles didn’t stop with the thwarted move to China, however. When my great-grandfather died, a few years later, his much younger wife, whom everyone called Cantonese Ah-Ma because she was Cantonese, took over the household, banishing my grandparents and their three children to a single room on the second floor, forcing them to pay rent, and allowing them to use only that room for all cooking, eating, and sleeping. In this little room, my Tanglin ah-ma protected her family the only way she knew how—by taking in the neighbors’ laundry for extra money and cooking simple meals. “She would make porridge with a little bit of salted egg and bean curd and some chye poh [pickled vegetables],” Auntie Leng Eng said.
What little money my grandmother earned, she was careful to hide from my grandfather, who would leave the house all day, return late at night, and try to pry any cash she might have from her fingers. “Just before every Chinese New Year, I remember, she would start saving up a little bit of money and send me to the pawnshop,” Auntie Leng Eng said. “She would ask me to take out a few pieces of the jewelry that she’d pawned so she’d have a few things to wear at the holiday.” It broke my heart to hear about my grandmother having had to pawn her precious items to put food on the table for her children, then scrimping and saving in order to borrow back a few pieces of jewelry to have some face at Chinese New Year. She lived in a big house along Emerald Hill, a lovely stretch of row houses in downtown Singapore, after all. As the wife of the firstborn son, she still had to have some pride.
“I used to have to do all this research for my father, you know,” Auntie Leng Eng said. “He used to give me these notebooks and have me record all the horse-racing statistics of each day. That was my job.” It was becoming clear why Auntie Leng Eng pursued a life on the straight and narrow the very first chance she got.
“Did you have any fond memories of your childhood at all?” I found myself blurting out.
My auntie Leng Eng pulled out a photo album, pointing to a handful of black-and-white photos, square and small, with the ornately pinked white edges of 1950s photographs. In the photos, my grandfather is in a park with his children—there’s Auntie Leng Eng, dressed in her Sunday best. My father and Uncle Soo Kiat are small and yet unformed; both boys have pants so formal and high they seem to end just beneath their arms. It is a starched, dressed-up moment—one unlike the many fractured moments that bind their childhood together. And yet everyone is smiling. My auntie Leng Eng is beaming from ear to ear, my father has his “I’m smarter than all of you” smirk, my uncle Soo Kiat looks mischievous.
I felt relieved that at least there were, by some appearances, happy moments.
“There was this one time,” Auntie Leng Eng says, “when my father took us all to the amusement park. We were so excited, you know. It was a family excursion! But when we got to the park, he gave your ah-ma some money and said, Go take the children around the park and meet me back at this park bench at this time, and he went his own way. That evening, we went to the park bench, and we waited and waited and waited. He didn’t show up. We were so scared, you know—it was so dark. We didn’t know where he was, we didn’t know what happened to him. And then finally, your ah-ma said to me, ‘Go into that dance hall over there and ask your father to come out.’ So I went inside, and he was dancing with this woman. I asked him to come out; I said we were waiting for him. He just said, ‘Go, I’ll meet you in a while.’ So I went back out, and we waited and waited until it was very late. And then finally he came out and we went home together.” I thought of my father as a young boy, his siblings with him, his mother, so virtuous and selfless, sitting in the dark on that park bench, waiting for my grandfather, Ah Sia Kia, not knowing when he might emerge from that dance hall. I suddenly understood why I had never seen a photo of myself with my grandfather, who had died the year after I was born. My father would spend decades loathing him. That night, perhaps, had been the beginning.
Auntie Leng Eng grew silent. Our tea had grown cold; twilight was setting in. We’d talked far more than we’d ever talked before. My mind was racing from all it had been absorbing all afternoon. My great-grandfather and my grandfather had both had addictive and selfish personalities. My father himself was prone to some of these tendencies. In fact, he and I, both firstborns, have always been alike in being drawn to risk, making sacrifices in order to live lives on the edge, whether by investing in the stock market or leaving loved ones to cross the world and seek success. As for gambling, I did tend to get weak-kneed around mah-jongg and blackjack tables. As a high schooler, I once arrived at a beach chalet my friends had rented for the week to find a mah-jongg table folded up in a room. We proceeded to play mah-jongg for three days straight, catching only a couple of hours of sleep here and there. By the third day, we were all so ill from staying up all night that we abandoned the chalet and went home. We had not seen the beach even once that whole time. What if this was intrinsically a destructive quality that would end up ruining me?
“It’s getting late. I shouldn’t bother you anymore,” I said, starting to pick up our teacups to bring into the kitchen.
“No need, no need,” Auntie Leng Eng said, gesturing for me to stop clearing up. “My maid will take care of it.”
As I gathered my belongings, however, Auntie Leng Eng motioned for me to wait. Uncle Paul, her husband, disappeared for a moment, returning with a flat woven basket the size of a large bicycle wheel. “Your ah-ma when she died gave me the millstone that she used to grind rice into flour, but I didn’t have room for it, so we gave it away,” Auntie Leng Eng said, chagrined. “But this, I kept.” Around this basket, my Tanglin ah-ma had gathered her children, and together, they had made tangyuan, the glutinous flour dumplings served in a lightly sweetened soup as a dessert or snack on special occasions. Because of its roundness, the dumpling is symbolic of unity of the family. And my grandmother used to have her children sit around the basket. Each would be assigned a section; each had to fill his or her section with the tiny white balls of dough. It was an activity even my father, the firstborn son, was roped in to do. Family is family, after all.
I lay my hand flat on the basket; it was cool to the touch. And I imagined my family. My auntie Leng Eng, my uncle Soo Kiat, and my father, whom I’d always believed had never cooked a moment in his life, gathered around the basket, carefully rolling little white balls, making unity dumplings, bound in a circle.
My mother’s side of the family was getting ever more enthusiastic about my quest.
“You must,” I kept hearing over and over, “learn your ah-ma’s ngoh hiang!”
As soon as any of my mother’s relatives heard about my cooking lessons, anyone who’d ever sampled my maternal grandmother’s cooking immediately ordered me to put ngoh hiang on the list. The dish, whose name is Hokkien for “five spices or fragrances,” is a summer roll that’s filled with a mélange of minced shrimp, mushrooms, pork, scallions, and crunchy water chestnuts, and flavored with salt, white pepper, and Chinese five-spice powder. The rolls can be steamed or deep fried—I don’t think I need to say which version I prefer. Their origin is Hokkien, the dialect group of my mother’s family, which originally came from Xiamen, a now cosmopolitan coastal city in southeastern China, and my maternal grandmother was well known for hers.
As soon as Auntie Alice could gather us together, she and I were back in my grandmother’s kitchen with ng
oh hiang ingredients at hand. I’d loved eating ngoh hiang as a child, but by the time I was a teenager, my grandmother had all but stopped cooking, preferring to leave it up to the maids to take care of things in the kitchen. In New York, I’ve ordered ngoh hiang whenever I’ve seen it on the menu at Simpson’s restaurant, where he calls it Malaysian wedding rolls. But it had been more than two decades since I’d had homemade versions. My mouth began to water as I thought of the rolls, crunchy on the outside from a little deep frying of the bean-curd skin wrapper yet soft on the inside and bursting with the complex taste of five spice powder, a combination of star anise, cinnamon, ground fennel seeds, cloves, and pepper that’s supposed to give you a flavor bomb of sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy all at once.
Once again, Auntie Alice had requested the presence of Erlinda, my mother’s maid, as sous chef. Meekly, we sat by the kitchen counter as we watched my ah-ma direct her to chop small small! Aiyoh, no! Smaller! By now, Erlinda knew the drill and was patiently barreling along. The chopping was accomplished fairly quickly and painlessly. When the half cups of scallions and shrimp and two cups of water chestnuts had been minced, Erlinda turned to the half cup of dried Chinese mushrooms, which had been hydrated in water and then drained, chopping those up finely as well. Auntie Alice and I flitted about, gossiping about our relatives. “Has Alvin set a wedding date yet?” I asked. My cousin, her second son, had recently decided to marry the woman he’d been seeing in Dongguan, China. They’d been dating for years, and we’d all been hoping this would happen. “No, but I’m going up there to see them and her parents soon,” she said with a hopeful wink.
Once everything was chopped up, the ngoh hiang making was a cinch. That morning my mother had gone to the tofu man in our neighborhood wet market—an open-air market where the freshest produce, fish, and meats are sold, an area that is hosed down so often that you can find yourself plodding through puddles as you shop—and purchased several large sheets of dried tofu skin. Under my ah-ma’s watchful eye, we had carefully used scissors to cut these starchy sheets into six-by-six-inch squares and gently wrapped the stack of squares in a slightly damp towel to soften the sheets for easy folding. Taking out a large mixing bowl, we listened to Ah-Ma and mixed the minced pork, shrimp, scallions, water chestnuts, and mushrooms together, then added six teaspoons of corn flour and two teaspoons each of five-spice powder, white pepper, and salt.
