• • •
Perhaps the rambutan tree provides insects with some obscure nutrient. This may be why several species of tiny ants—the type that don’t bite people—live amongst its branches. When the fruits appear, the ants shift their lodgings to the red fuzz. We believe the more ants a rambutan harbours, the sweeter its flesh will taste.
Village children like climbing rambutan trees every bit as much as the ants. When I was in primary school, every town and city in Malaya was in danger of infiltration by combat-uniformed Communists. In order to cut these insurgents off from their supplies, the government ordered the scattered population of the countryside and rubber plantations to be moved within guarded compounds on the fringes of the jungle. Many rural dwellers had rambutan trees behind or in front of their houses, which now stood abandoned. After school, we liked to ride our bicycles into the countryside, choosing a tree laden with abundant fruit to climb and recline in its branches, idly chatting as we feasted on rambutans. Closer to the exams, we even brought our textbooks up into the tree to study as we ate. It was cool and breezy up in the branches, where we whiled away many afternoons, our mouths full of the delicate flavour of rambutans.
• • •
There were five rambutan trees in the back garden of our home in Perak. One of them was a rare yellow variant. My classmates always loved coming to my house to eat fruit from our trees. They were all fine specimens, two of them grafted to be short-bodied so their clusters of fruit practically touched the ground, their flesh clean-tasting and luscious. My mother’s superstition was that our fruit tasted better than other people’s because they were untouched by female hands. She believed that if a woman, especially a pregnant one, was allowed to go up a tree, it would forevermore bear sour fruit.
In 1966, when Dan Ying was still my fiancée, she came for a short visit. She ate a fair number of rambutans, but because she knew the concubine of fruits was jealous of other women, didn’t dare pick any herself, much less climb our trees. As children, whenever we heard stories of women killing themselves, it was always rambutan trees they hung their nooses from. Perhaps this is why females were generally discouraged from contact with these trees.
We sold this house in 1970. My younger sister said it fetched a high price despite being old and in poor condition, because the buyer adored the fruit trees in our garden. In the condominium I live in now, the thing I miss most is having a space to plant trees in. In April 1979, when Lo Ch’ing came to visit from Taipei, it was such a hot afternoon that Dan Ying served him peeled rambutans straight from the fridge; he never got to see the gaudy beauty of the concubine in her natural state. If we’d still lived in the old place, I’d have invited him to climb a tree with me. We’d have lounged comfortably in a cradle of branches, continuing our conversation as we chewed on delectably fresh rambutans.
Costly Bananas
IN THE MIDDLE of May 2005, banana prices hit the Taiwanese headlines as rapid increases made them all but unaffordable. A kilogram fetched 45 to 50 Taiwanese dollars (about S$2.50), meaning a single banana cost fifteen dollars—equivalent to the price of four or five eggs.
After the typhoon, Taiwan’s bananas might as well have been made of gold—they certainly attracted enough criminal attention. The farmers of Pingtung and Kaohsiung, fed up with their crops getting stolen, let fierce dogs loose on their compounds, and patrolled their land day and night on motorcycles, setting up searchlights to remove the cover of darkness, even digging traps for unwary thieves.
Yet, for me, bananas have been the cheapest, most populist fruit.
At Chinese New Year, I returned to Singapore and Malaysia where, whether at the MRT station, the fruit market, or just by the roadside, bananas were everywhere, and at low prices too. Twenty of them could be had for a dollar. Malaysia’s bananas come in many varieties—at least twenty-eight, each with a different flavour and texture. Places that regularly sell the fruit usually feature at least ten varieties, their shapes and colours varying as much as their insides. The golden-yellow, finger-sized ‘rice-grain’ banana is incomparably fragrant, and each one is eaten in a single mouthful—I usually have five or six at a time. The green-skinned banana is so called because its peel remains the same colour even when ripe, and though its flavour is intoxicating, mothers don’t let their children eat too many because it’s said to be ‘cooling’, which can cause a cough. The Malay people love Dali bananas with their dull-red skin, a rare breed with a fine-grained flesh and floral fragrance—the Chinese call them ‘red-meat’ bananas. And there’s another species with purple-red skin, its pulp yellow, coarse and unappetising. Such varieties, neither sweet nor scented, are best battered in flour and fried in oil as goreng pisang, the tasty Malay dessert.
When I’m away, I miss the bananas of Singapore and Malaysia—the true Kingdom of Bananas. Banana trees are a frequent sight in gardens there, whether cultivated or wild. When I was young, a river passed in front of my family’s home, and opposite us was a hectare-large banana plantation, where several varieties were grown. When we felt like a banana, we were bound to find a ripe one somewhere across the river. Banana theft was rare at this time, since most households had a tree—only the birds could be accused of stealing them.
After three years in Taiwan, where banana prices were truly startling, I began missing the availability and variety of bananas found at home. And each time I returned to the Banana Kingdom, the first thing I’d do was buy some of that ambrosial fruit.
SECTION TWO
Chinese Food After Cheng Ho
Thunder in a Bowl
SINGAPORE AND MALAYSIA, both on the equator, share a tropical climate, meaning year-long summers with frequent thunderstorms. When I was a child, these storms always arrived at dinnertime, peals of thunder rolling off the distant green hills, seeming to echo in our rice bowls. The title of my essay refers to this, but also to the Hakka dish that comes from leicha, or ground tea—but because lei sounds like the character for thunder, it has taken on that meaning too. Leicha, with its origins in the Hakka Hor Poh tribe from Guangdong’s Jieyang area, came all the way to Nanyang, taking root and evolving first in the British colony and then in post-colonial society, its name distorted as the Chinese diaspora spread and its food acclimatised to the tropics, resulting in the dish we now know as ‘thunder tea rice’. It may share the DNA of Hakka leicha, but is very much a Southeast Asian dish, incorporating the particular ingredients of this region—the vegetables such as cekur manis or four-angled beans, and flavourings such as shrimp—becoming a healthful meal transcending race or religion. From a simple Hakka beverage, it’s evolved into a delicacy; from a tea drink only seen in the homes of one dialect group, it’s become a symbol of our multi-cultural society, a fashionable food suitable for entertaining. The changes that leicha has gone through, from ultra-local to international, is a model of the spread of Chinese culture, and how it has been able to take root in foreign lands, melding with local customs while also showing how Chinese culture outside China can merge with Western elements to create something new.
• • •
On 16 August 2009, I was on a plane from Singapore to Taipei when I flipped open The Straits Times to the food and drink page, and my eye was drawn to the large-type headline ‘Thunder in a Bowl’, with a correspondingly large picture of the interviewee Anna Eng, holding up a huge bowl brimming with a layer of rice covered in vegetables in various shades of green, dried tofu, and shelled peanuts. In another picture, Ms Eng brandished a guava-wood pestle, in the act of ‘grinding’ the leicha—the action from which it takes its original Chinese name.
Ms Eng is a typical Malaysian-Chinese—post-colonial and English-educated. She uses an English name, and being Hakka, her surname, pronounced Wu in Mandarin, becomes ‘Eng’ in her dialect. This is a legacy of the colonial government’s regulations. Today, the surnames Wong or Ng tell you whether the possessor of the original name, whether Huang, Wang, or Wu, is Hakka, Cantonese or Hokkien. The early immigrants used their dial
ect groups as a means of organising themselves, so the British rulers paid a lot of attention to the political dimension of names and their divisions.
Although Anna Eng studied at an English-medium school, while wandering through her village as a child with her grandmother, the neighbours would often invite them in for some thunder tea rice, and so she grew up enjoying this Hakka dish. While her education was Westernised, as indicated by her name, it couldn’t eradicate the complex layers of her multi-cultural life. When she got married, her mother included in her trousseau the pestle and mortar used to grind the various spices that go into thunder tea. How post-colonial, to be named Anna but receive traditional tea implements as part of your dowry—a blend of cultures you’d only see within a diaspora.
That ‘leicha rice’ has become ‘thunder tea rice’ is an obvious misreading, creating a breach with the original Chinese name—yet the result is innovative and eye-catching. Who wouldn’t be intrigued to hear of thunder, tea and rice, all mixed together in a single bowl? Anna Eng does acknowledge the misnomer, saying, “The Chinese word for this action, lei, is a homonym for thunder in Mandarin, hence the English name of the dish.” The bigger transformation is actually from leicha, a drink, to a kind of food, one that has proliferated from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to Kuching, so that the name leicha now evokes green vegetables and rice, eaten from a large bowl such as the one held up by Anna Eng. Nowadays, especially amongst young people, there’s a vogue for eating thunder tea rice as plain as possible, sometimes not even having the drink at the end—its various flavourings give it a herbal, medicinal tinge that isn’t to everyone’s taste. The earliest immigrants to the region, particularly the Hakka, were mostly engaged in clearing the jungle and planting crops. Leicha was originally enjoyed as a leisurely afternoon tea, and featured in wedding ceremonies; it manifestly had no place in the lives of the labouring masses. So do we call the resulting change evolution or error?
Thunder tea rice happens to also fit into the recent trend for healthy eating, and has gained more attention of late—again, a case of tradition renewed, assimilated, internationalised, finally creating something to be enjoyed around the world.
In the 1970s, the American critic Harold Bloom created a theory of misreading in poetry, delineated in his books The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading and Poetry and Repression. He recognised that each new generation of writers strenuously resisted being affected by those who’d gone before them, as their influence was a potentially destructive force, inhibiting the creativity of the younger poets, leading to uncertainty as to whether they’d truly be able to break through and establish a place for themselves. The critic’s job is to pursue this resistance to its origin, understanding how the new generation has used different tools to create deliberate misreadings, thus destroying the imaginative space occupied by their predecessors’ poetry, finding a new, broader territory for themselves. Thus the greatest, most inspired poems are the result of constant misreadings of what has gone before.
For the Hakka leicha to become thunder tea rice is similarly a case of rebellion against one’s ancestors, using misreading as a strategy of resistance to create something new. What Harold Bloom terms ‘intertextuality’ is, in this case, a form of assimilation, melding the cultures of old and new homes, coming up with something fresh.
• • •
Language contains elements specific to place and culture. The Chinese diaspora, responding to a changed environment, have had to alter the structure of their language in order to truly reflect their new experiences and the world around them. This has created something called huawen, the Chinese language, instead of zhongwen, the language of China.
In all former British colonies, the English spoken by local people contains idiosyncrasies, from vocabulary to pronunciation, manifesting a huge number of dissimilarities from the language as used in England, a product of the different cultures, environments and mother tongues of the colonised. Many post-colonial writings take pains to differentiate the two by using a capital E in British English, and a small letter e for the other varieties of english.
A similar branching of languages can be seen in Chinese, necessitating the huawen-zhongwen split. Because a new setting requires different things of a language, huawen came into being to express fully the thoughts of the Chinese diaspora, allowing them to capture their experiences in new homelands with greater clarity.
After huawen set down roots and began to evolve, greater complexity crept into the language, so that even the varieties spoken in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand began to diverge. Malaysian huawen came into being when writers who’d been born and bred there found zhongwen inadequate to describe their lives in this new climate. Local writers such as Wu Jin (the pen name of Du Yunxie) began boldly transforming the rules of the language, with the objective of creating a form of words that more closely matched their experience of the world.
Chinese people all over adapt language to reflect the peculiarities of their societies, as well as the objects and phenomena they see around them. Regional dialects thus incorporate terms such as ringgit and dato in Malaysia or zuwu, meaning HDB flats, in Singapore, and baba and kampung in both countries. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Chinese similarly have words and phrases not found anywhere else.
‘Thunder tea rice’ too has entered the lexicon, and is also used to refer to the restaurants that serve the dish. In Southern Malaysian towns like Kulai or Skudai, Hor Poh people refer to leicha as ‘salty tea’, because when the tea paste is made into a drink, it has a salty flavour. New foods have enlarged the Nanyang vocabulary in this way, such as the names of vegetables like shuzaicai (known as cekur manis in Malay), or sijiaodou (four-angled beans, also known in Hakka as four-edged beans), or local herbs like the pandan leaf. Leicha might have originated in Guangdong, but it now possesses a distinct Southeast Asian flavour, having been transformed into an overseas Chinese speciality. The name itself, which English-educated Chinese have mistranslated as ‘thunder’, referring to a dish created by the incorporation of local ingredients, is an example of the post-colonial processes of hybridity and syncreticity.
Not all Southeast Asian Hakkas eat thunder tea rice; in Singapore and Malaysia, including Sarawak and Sabah, only the Hor Poh really know how to make this dish. Sometimes called the ‘Hor Poh Hakka’, this community speaks a version of the dialect that resembles the Hailu Hakka spoken in Taiwan’s Zhudong region, with ancestry that can be traced back to the Western Jieyang county in Guangdong. According to the website of the Hopo Corporation in Singapore, the term ‘Hor Poh’ includes six distinct yue, or districts. Formerly known as Lintian county, when the old territorial designations were abolished in 1911, it was redesignated as District Number Five, a location administered by Sizhu Township. Later it was promoted to the county seat, directly under Jiexi. The region is lushly green, forested with rivers running through it, a thoroughly pleasant landscape, not to mention fertile and ideal for farming—and so the Hor Poh Hakka living in Southeast Asia were hardworking agricultural folk. In the middle of the 19th century, however, farming no longer sustained them, and they were frequently caught up in neighbouring wars. When the restrictions on sea travel were lifted, many left, seeking a new life across the South China Sea in Nanyang, where there is now an estimated Hor Poh population of between one and two hundred thousand. They came to the various states of Malaysia including Sabah, Sarawak, Perak and Johor, and each state soon had its own Hor Poh Clan Association. In Singapore, the community congregated around Choa Chu Kang, Lim Chu Kang, Jurong, and Admiralty, setting up pig, chicken and vegetable farms.
And so the Hor Poh popularised leicha, turning the beverage formerly reserved for the leisured classes into food for ordinary folk. There are two stages in the preparation of this dish, the first being the grinding of tea into a kind of soup paste, which once used to be served in cups to guests on formal occasions, and has now been relegated to an after-the-event soup.
INGREDIENTS:
One bow
l peanuts, shelled and peeled, fried till fragrant
Half a bowl sesame seeds, fried till fragrant
Ten white peppercorns, fried till fragrant
Small number of tea leaves
One bowl mint leaves, washed and chopped finely
One bowl basil, washed and chopped finely
One bowl coriander, washed and chopped finely
METHOD:
Place all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and grind with a pestle. Mix with water heated to 90ºC. Add salt to taste.
To prepare the thunder tea rice, add fried garlic, a couple of pandan leaves and a little salt to the rice, then cook till fragrant. All kinds of vegetables may be used as a topping, but the best are strongly flavoured ones without too much moisture, such as celery, garlic bolts, chives, scallions, or various beans (long beans, green beans etc.), green leafy vegetables (choi sum, kai lan, cekur manis), or the tender leaves of long beans. After washing and chopping these vegetables, fry some garlic till fragrant, add salt, then quickly cook the greens. Lastly, garnish with the essential accompaniments: fried skinned peanuts, chopped fried shrimp, fragrant raisins, and dried tofu.
Cooking is an art, and the making of thunder tea rice even more so. Each family has its own method, all different, all mouthwatering.
The recipe above was provided by Singapore’s Ms Anna Eng; its ingredients and cooking method are typical of a green meal created by the Hor Poh Hakka of Southeast Asia—an interesting way of serving rice with vegetables. The earliest immigrants were labourers, and in order to get enough nutrition to do their work, instead of just drinking their tea, incorporated it into this dish of cheap ingredients. A huge bowl was required in order to contain so much food, with the tea-soup poured over it if more moisture was desired.
Durians Are Not the Only Fruit Page 5