A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  The mixture looked good—it smelled great, too. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other, wondering how we would agak-agak this one to figure out whether it needed anything more. Ah-Ma pushed us aside to get at the bowl. I could practically see her thinking, Novices! Grabbing the mixing bowl, she pressed a finger to the meat and shrimp mixture, then stuck her finger into her mouth, tasting it. “Aiyoh, Mummy ah—cannot like that lah!” Auntie Alice cried out. “It’s raw meat! You’re not supposed to taste raw meat like that!” Ah-Ma just waved her away, instructing me to do the same. The way I saw it, I had a choice: face E. coli or face my grandmother’s wrath. The decision was pretty clear. Gingerly, I pressed my own finger to the meat, then licked it. I couldn’t really taste anything. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell my grandmother that and risk having to try again. “Mmm, it tastes good,” I said, smiling way too broadly. Auntie Alice winced, then leaned over and whispered, “Well, you can always just wash your mouth out, in case there’s bacteria.”

  Now that the mixture was perfect—going by Ah-Ma’s E. coli–inducing test and my unsubtle fakery—we were ready to start wrapping. Ah-Ma took a slightly softened square, placed about five tablespoons of the meat-shrimp mixture on it, forming a five-inch log, carefully folded the delicate skin over the log, rolled it up, and sealed it. Because the skins were just slightly damp, the rolls sealed easily. Then she gestured for an oiled plate to be brought to her and set the roll on it, moving on to the next ngoh hiang. Auntie Alice and I joined in, rolling with such immediate ease that my ten-year-old cousin Matthew, who had set aside his homework and been watching us intently, asked, “Can I try one?” This was a little unconventional for a ten-year-old boy in Singapore—cooking barely interested ten-year-old girls—but he’d been watching the hive of activity, the barking, the chopping, the mixing, the rolling, all afternoon now. I could see why he might want in on the action. “Sure,” we said, moving aside to make room for him at the counter. The boy, of course, turned out to be a ngoh hiang rolling whiz, applying the same focus and care to folding up these summery rolls that he did to creaming his younger brother at yo-yo stunts. “Look at Matthew,” my beaming Auntie Alice said to Ah-Ma. “He’s so clever!” I couldn’t tell who looked prouder, Matthew, my grandmother, myself, Auntie Alice, or Matthew’s mother, Auntie Donna. Somehow, this was a moment I’d not envisioned happening. I wondered if we might just have the beginnings of a little Jean-Georges on our hands.

  With so many hands at the counter, in no time we had almost twenty rolls on various plates. “You can steam it or fry it,” Ah-Ma said. “Or you can steam and then fry it.” Since we weren’t sure whether we would eat all of them that day, we decided to steam up the lot and fry those that we thought we might eat, preserving the rest for leftovers. We started a wok of water boiling, set a steamer rack on top, and quickly cooked the rolls for about ten minutes, setting about half of them aside while we deep-fried the rest. And my grandmother’s ngoh hiang were as perfect as I’d remembered—lightly browned and crispy on the outside, with a tasty, crunchy filling on the inside. We sliced a few rolls into pieces and devoured them rapidly, saving a few for dinner.

  By the time my kuku, whose home we were in, got back from work, we were almost ready to have dinner. All we were waiting for was the special treat he had ordered.

  “You’ve never tried a Golden Pillow?” he asked incredulously.

  I was flummoxed. Many thoughts ran through my head about what exactly a Golden Pillow might be—none of which I could share in front of Matthew or his seven-year-old brother, Zachary. I thought for a second. “Well,” I finally said, “I guess I haven’t!”

  Soon enough, the Golden Pillow arrived—two, in fact. Each came in a box; Kuku carefully removed them one by one, placing each in a large bowl. I got my camera ready. The Golden Pillow turned out to be a bun about the size of a soccer ball. Using a pair of scissors, my uncle slowly snipped slits into the top of the bun. Steam instantly hissed out. Once the top of the bun had been cut open so that triangular slivers fanned out from the center like petals on a lotus flower, Kuku got to work on the star of the show—the bulging plastic bag of chicken curry that had been cooked within the bun as it baked. He snipped that open, and curry showered forth. “Eat it while it’s hot,” he said. We didn’t need to be told twice. Grabbing bits of the bun and scooping curry onto our plates, we instantly dug in. The bun was sweet and just slightly spongy, the curry was flavorful and not too spicy.

  “You should bring this to New York,” Kuku said. “I think it would do well.”

  Surrounded as I was by my young cousins, my aunties, my kuku, and my grandmother, who loved me dearly, New York couldn’t have felt farther away. And yet, there it loomed—the place that I now called home. The place I’d have to return to fairly soon.

  Each time I went back to New York, however, I was returning with more and more of my true home. Bits of my family, dishes that I now knew how to make.

  So, sure, the Golden Pillow could work in New York. But if not, I had a pretty mean ngoh hiang recipe.

  A few days later, another “must” was fulfilled.

  I packed up a few ngoh hiang as a gift and met my uncle Ah Tuang, the man who had grown up with my father, regarding him as a brother. I’d not known much about Uncle Ah Tuang except that my Tanglin ah-ma had taken him in and raised him as her own. The family had been telling me, “You must go and see the Emerald Hill house,” the town house in downtown Singapore where my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather had lived. They’d been forced to give up the home decades ago when the owner sold it just as the area was being redeveloped into a trendy stretch of bars and restaurants. As astute as my great-grandfather had been in business, he had never had the foresight to buy any property, even this very home, which had been offered to him by the owner. It is a regret that my father and his siblings harbor to this day.

  The spacious, two-story town house at 53 Emerald Hill Road was where my family’s fortunes rose and fell. It was where my great-grandfather lived as he built his business, where his son would live as he squandered it. It was where my father lived as a young man, gathering up the courage to leave a comfortable teaching job to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and strike out in the business world. It was where my parents first lived after they married; it likely was where I, my father’s firstborn, was conceived.

  I don’t remember much of this house, except that it had a large living room that opened onto a massive, open-air courtyard in the center. This was a handy form of ventilation for colonial-era row houses in Singapore. Uncle Ah Tuang parked as close to the house as he could get, growing increasingly excited as we got closer to the building. Tall, gleaming white, and pristine, the corner house was clearly well kept by a well-to-do family that seemed to have given it a recent paint job. “That window there—that was where the family lived when Cantonese Ah-Ma made everyone move upstairs!” Uncle Ah Tuang said, so excited to be back at the old homestead that he was jabbing at the air. “And here was where the drivers’ sheds were,” he noted, pointing to the side of the building as we walked around to the front. “Your great-grandfather used to have this big black car, and his driver slept and lived in this small shed on the side. There were several sheds there for drivers of other families. That’s where my dad stayed.”

  Slowly, he explained that his father was a driver for a family in the neighborhood. He never married but wanted to have an heir—so late in life, when he heard of a woman in my Tanglin ah-ma’s kampong who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, he generously offered to adopt her child. That child was Uncle Ah Tuang. “My dad was very busy, so he couldn’t really take care of me,” Uncle Ah Tuang said. “So he asked your ah-ma to take care of me.” Naturally, Uncle Ah Tuang became part of our family. In fact, in my grandfather’s final years, he became the only person who would listen to his stories.

  By the time Uncle Ah Tuang, who is more than twenty years younger than my father, joined the family, my grandfather’
s selfishness had run its course. He’d given up the gambling, the drinking, and the womanizing. Unfortunately, his family’s patience with him had also run its course. “Nobody talked to him,” Uncle Ah Tuang said quietly. “I was his only friend—me and this stray cat that he loved. Wah, he really loved that cat, man.” Weakened by the vagaries of his youth, my gong-gong spent his waning days sitting on a chair in the living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “He had hemorrhoids, so he was only allowed to sit on this one chair,” Uncle Ah Tuang said. “He would just sit there all day and talk to me because I was the only one who would listen.”

  This was the first I’d heard of this. I’d been told only the stories of a loathsome, selfish man with an addictive streak. The weakened, lonely shell he became had never been discussed. Before I could dwell on it for long, however, Uncle Ah Tuang had bounded away, eager to show me more of the neighborhood. “This was where we used to play in the alley,” he said. “This was where the Pepper King lived. He was this really rich guy who owned a pepper empire. Or something.”

  “Uncle Ah Tuang ah,” I began, suddenly thinking of a question I’d always wondered about, “my dad always says he and Uncle Soo Kiat were in a gang at Emerald Hill. Is that true?” His eyes widened, and a peal of boyish laughter immediately followed. “No lah, I don’t think so,” he finally said. “But they were young boys here long before I lived here—so I really don’t know.” (I made a mental note to ask my older family members when I saw them.)

  “Did your dad ever tell you about the meepok man?” Uncle Ah Tuang asked. I shook my head. “It was the best meepok”—a tagliatelle-like noodle, tossed in a spicy sauce with fish balls, pork, and fish cakes—“in town, and the guy used to go through the neighborhood every day making this tok-tok sound. When you heard it, you’d have to run outside and order it. It was so good. I remember one time I was sick at home and your ah-ma bought some for me—so good.” I’d had a large lunch that day but was feeling hungry all over again. I was starting to see where my obsession with food might have come from.

  “You know there used to be a gambling den in the house, right?” Uncle Ah Tuang said at one point. “Your ah-ma used to have her friends over to play see-sek,” the four-color card game.

  “No!” I replied. My Tanglin ah-ma had been so scarred by my grandfather’s gambling, it floored me to think of her actually gambling herself, much less running any sort of pseudo-professional operation, even if it was to make a little money. So, both my grandmothers had gambling dens?

  “Yah, and she used to make food for the gamblers—pua kiao beng,” he said. Gambling rice? I was intrigued.

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “It’s basically rice that is easy to eat while you’re gambling. You fry up cabbage, pork belly, mushrooms, and some other things; then you mix it all together with rice and cook it in a rice cooker,” he said. “Very shiok,” Uncle Ah Tuang added, using the Singapore slang word for “feels good.” “You serve it in one bowl so gamblers can hold it in one hand and carry on gambling.”

  “Is it hard to make?”

  “Very easy—even I can make!” he said. “Your auntie Khar Imm can also make. Ask her to teach you lor.” Pua kiao beng was suddenly top on my list of dishes to learn.

  As we rounded another corner, I finally asked the question I’d had on my mind. Uncle Ah Tuang had lived in my family home when my mother married into the Tans and moved in. I’d always wondered what happened between my mother and grandfather—had she really slapped him? Had that, perhaps, been the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage?

  “Why did my parents move out of the house?” I asked. “Were they all really not getting along?” Uncle Ah Tuang, ever the peacemaker, ever the sprightly, jocular younger brother, paused for a moment. “Well . . . there was one really loud argument,” he said. “But I didn’t really hear what they were saying, and I didn’t know what was going on.

  “Anyway,” he finally added. “It was so long ago.”

  And he was right—it was a long time ago. The events back then had already shaped us into the people we’d become. And it all had led somehow to this moment on a Saturday, me and my uncle Ah Tuang circling the old neighborhood with the tropical afternoon sun beating down mercilessly, thinking about the Pepper King and the old meepok man while mincing over the footsteps of ghosts.

  Back at home, I was inspired to try to cook some of these recipes I’d been learning. My mother had bought a duck, and so I set about making soup. My Tanglin ah-ma’s soup, by way of Auntie Khar Imm, that is. With my notebook by the stove, I slowly went through the steps—chopping up the salted cabbage, preparing the duck, tossing the ingredients in, and then leaving the concoction alone to “boil, boil, boil!”

  Taking my first sips after the boiling was done, I thought, Damn, this is not bad at all. I packed the rest up in a thermos and dropped it off at Uncle Soo Kiat’s office the next day. “For Auntie Khar Imm to try,” I said. “See whether I pass or not.”

  The next day, the verdict came. “Not too bad,” my cousin Jessie texted on behalf of her mum. “Just that not saltish.”

  Not quite the reaction I’d hoped for. But it didn’t sound like a fail.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The first few times my family met Mike, they were perfectly polite.

  Yes, he was a little older—our age difference spans fourteen years—and he was American, not some guai (Mandarin for “obedient”) Singaporean boy that they’d always hoped I’d end up marrying. But he was half Asian—Korean, to be specific—and that, in the end, did count for something.

  And so they were perfectly accepting as we fell in love, got engaged, and began planning a wedding . . . until one day my father happened to be in Honolulu for business and suggested meeting Mike’s mother, who lives there. At the appointed cocktail hour, they met—my father and my future mother-in-law, Ai-Kyung Linster, a spunky, opinionated woman who unabashedly speaks her mind, often chasing a particularly feisty comment with “Korean women—we are all stubborn, you know!”

  Though they were meeting for the first time without either of us there, drinks were going swimmingly. And then Mike’s mother decided to test the few Chinese phrases she knew on my dad, who was suitably impressed.

  “How do you know Mandarin?” he asked.

  “I lived in Shanghai when I was a kid,” she replied. “My grandfather was Chinese, you know.”

  This, suddenly, changed everything.

  My dad immediately called my mother, barely able to contain himself. “Mike’s Chinese!” he said. And as soon as my mother could get off the phone with my dad, she called me, bellowing into the phone, “Why didn’t you tell us Mike’s Chinese?”

  “Um,” I responded, “because he’s only one-eighth Chinese? Why does that matter?”

  But of course, to my parents, who had hoped for the tiniest thread of kinship with the person who was marrying their firstborn, this mattered tremendously. And that was the moment Mike truly became a part of my family.

  Mike’s mother understood this perfectly as well. She had been thrilled from the moment we met, seeing as how I was Asian, not haole, as the Hawaiians call Caucasians. And her acceptance was instantaneous. As we sat in her Honolulu living room shortly after we had gotten engaged, one of her first questions wasn’t about wedding planning or how work was going. Instead, she got right to the point: “When are you having a baby?” (I considered asking if it might be possible for her to let us get married first but thought better of it.)

  It had been a few years since I’d seen her, Honolulu being something of a trek from New York City. So, leaving Singapore after about a month of cooking, I flew to Honolulu to meet Mike for a visit with his mother. Before I got there, he had told her about my cooking lessons in Singapore; by the time I landed, she was eager to corral me in her kitchen.

  Although Ai-Kyung had emigrated to the United States from South Korea, just outside Seoul, she had spent several years in Shanghai as a girl when her pare
nts worked for the Japanese Army’s medical units there. As World War II ended, the family went back to Korea. There, years later, she met a handsome, tall Iowa engineer who was building power plants in the country. The relationship ended up not working out, but from that union, Mike was born and brought back to Iowa. Ai-Kyung stayed on in Korea, moving to Honolulu a decade later when she married another American.

  Whenever we saw her in Honolulu, we were treated like royalty. After having spent so many years away from Mike—they reunited only when he was in his twenties—she treasured every minute with him, the son she had watched grow up only in pictures his father had taken care to send to her every year around his birthday. As a result, even though I’d been in Ai-Kyung’s breezy apartment, which overlooks the famous Ala Moana shopping mall and the slender Ala Wai canal that outlines Waikiki, dozens of times before this trip, I’d always felt like a visitor in her home. Mike and I would perch on the best seats of the sofa—the ones with the fluffiest cushions, the best view of the television; Ai-Kyung simply wouldn’t let us have any others. Never would she let me clear plates off the table, help in the kitchen, or clean a single dish. “Charlie will do it,” she would say, waving to Mike’s half brother, who lived with her, gesturing for him to take care of it later on. And always, the cooking would already be done by the time we got there—she rarely got to see us, after all. And she probably didn’t think we wanted to waste any time watching her cook when there were picturesque beaches to be explored, tans to be worked on, sandy naps to be taken.