Before the Second World War, the Hakka were generally impoverished, and largely subsisted on vegetables from their own gardens. Today, health consciousness and a fear of high-cholesterol food has led to the resurgence of thunder tea rice, which contains at least seven or eight, and sometimes as many as ten varieties of vegetables. In today’s prosperous society, where people are fearful of meat, thunder tea rice is the most suitable dish to serve visitors at Chinese New Year. The custom was to serve it on the eighth day of the New Year with eight types of vegetables, and on the tenth day with ten types, but in today’s urbanised, commercialised society in which the Chinese only get a couple of days off for the New Year, this practice has faded.
Unlike most vegetable dishes, thunder tea rice requires fine chopping—whether of green leaves or beans—and quick frying in a tiny amount of oil without salt or any other flavouring. The vast amount of shredded vegetables covering the table is what makes this dish so eye-catching. Then, a big pile of raisins, dried tofu and peanuts is fried, and used in lieu of seasoning. Diced shrimp is also served separately for non-vegetarian diners to help themselves.
This resembles a Western-style meal, at which people are encouraged to add their own seasonings and condiments—pepper, salt, hot sauce and so on. Thus, a post-colonial eating style emerges. Because the vegetables must be freshly prepared and eaten as soon as they’re cooked, this dish is hard to mass produce or serve in restaurants. That said, there is one thunder tea rice stall in Singapore’s VivoCity food court, as well as specialist shops along Katong district’s nostalgic Joo Chiat Road. You can also find it in certain Skudai and Kulai coffee shops.
Even if you do find a restaurant serving thunder tea rice, they tend to bring you the bowl of vegetables and rice with seasonings already apportioned out, unlike at Hakka family meals where each component appears in its own bowl on the table and guests are invited to assemble their own dish, a style of communal eating that’s ideal for getting conversation flowing.
In recent years, little tea stands have sprung up all over Taiwan serving leicha, but the beverage has gone down the route of mass production; the tea is ground into powder and, like three-in-one coffee or black tea, wrapped in little rectangular packets and sold in large quantities on supermarket shelves, for consumers to bring home and brew in hot water. It’s manufactured and marketed more like a health food.
Leicha itself, the real thing, consists of all kinds of aromatics—tea leaves, basil, coriander, mint, peanuts, sesame and white pepper, all placed in a mortar and ground to a paste, then mixed with ninety-degree hot water for pouring over rice or drinking as a soup. It has a bitter, astringent flavour that many people, especially the young, find difficult to cope with—a primeval herbal taste. I’ve observed the soup component now seems optional with thunder tea rice. Fans of Taiwan’s leicha, such as the delicious brew available at Ma Yu Shan, will not be able to imagine how different the Southeast Asian version is.
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The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures discusses four methods of comparing different literatures: national or regional models; race-based models; comparative models of complexity; and hybridity and syncreticity. These are not discrete, and frequently cross into each other’s territory. Although devised with reference to English-language post-colonial writing, by applying these techniques to the various Chinese literatures in Southeast Asia, we can investigate how the Chinese diaspora have fashioned their own body of work, taking into account geographic or cultural influences. Similarly, they also help us understand how Chinese food has evolved through the inevitable interaction with new environments. The merging and naturalisation that led to thunder tea rice is a pertinent example.
Among the vegetables grown by the Southeast Asian Hor Poh, you’ll always find the vinous four-angled bean and the cekur manis bush. As a result, these two are always included in the mixture of thunder tea vegetables, whether in Kuala Lumpur, Kuching or Singapore.
Four-angled beans are originally from Southeast Asia and other tropical islands, and can also be found, albeit rarely, in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hainan and Taiwan. Their flavour is delicate and fragrant, and once topped, tailed and sliced into two-millimetre segments, each thin slice looks like a four-cornered green star, crisp and refreshing. Popular with both the Malay and Chinese communities, the four-angled bean is suited to frying with spicy prawn paste—a traditional Southeast Asian dish—but can also be cooked without flavourings to bring out its natural flavour, as when used in thunder tea rice.
Cekur manis, called shuzaicai (‘shrub vegetable’) in Chinese, and also known as palace-guard, Vietnam vegetable, Sabah vegetable, fence vegetable, tree-goji, and scientifically known as Sauropus androgynus, is an evergreen tropical shrub, its tender stems and leaves edible. A native of Nanyang, this shrub is easy to propagate, requiring only a small cutting to be placed in soil. The plant resembles the wolfberry, but without thorns, and has a distinctive light fragrance. A hardy species, it can deal with rough handling, is resistant to pests, and copes with being parched or soaked. Village people frequently grow this vegetable, and I have several in the back garden of my house in Singapore. When I haven’t harvested them for a while, my neighbour’s domestic helper sometimes asks me for some, and I’m always happy to oblige her.
The final ingredient deserving of mention is the pandan leaf, that pungent addition to Southeast Asian cuisines from the Philippines to Thailand, Vietnam to Malaysia, and added to food, drink and especially snacks. The plant is classified as a screwpine for the way its sword-like leaves grow in a spiral around the stem.
Pandan plants also grow easily, and will flourish in soil or a pot. The leaves have a cooling effect, and are used widely in Southeast Asian cooking—in pandan fried chicken, pandan layer cake and other desserts including green or red bean soup—where only a few leaves need be used for the flavour to permeate. Only a single leaf is added to thunder tea rice, enough to lend this dish a uniquely Southeast Asian flavour. For decades now, Singaporean taxi drivers have used a bunch of pandan to scent their vehicles, removing the need for artificial air fresheners.
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Food consumption patterns are intimately connected to a community’s lifestyle and history. Leicha sailed from Jieyang in Guangdong to Nanyang, where a different environment and post-colonial society transformed it from a drink to a filling meal for the working classes. During the time of farming villages, the community enjoyed eating vegetables they’d grown—Sabah vegetables, four-edged beans, naked oats and chives, all commonly found in Hakka gardens. Labouring under the scorching tropical sun, it was easy for the workers to become over-heated. These vegetables, which the Hakka claimed to have a cooling effect, really do possess detoxification properties. Their inclusion in thunder tea rice today is a legacy of the early settlers who opened up the land, as is the guava wood pestle used to grind the ingredients for thunder tea paste; in the Southeast Asian countryside, wild guava trees can be found everywhere.
Tracing the evolution of Hor Poh thunder tea rice and the responsiveness to change of other communities’ cuisines is always interesting. Now the fashionable health food of a prosperous society, bowling over young and old in trendy, post-modern VivoCity’s Food Republic, on Katong’s Joo Chiat Road with its tourists and nostalgic natives, it is a symbol of the transcendent power of post-colonial culture. This repackaged dish with its new English name has been elevated to the ranks of local delicacies, at once evoking memories of immigrant Chinese missing their home villages and adjusting to their new lives in Nanyang, not to mention the international outlook of contemporary food culture. According to Ms Ye Feng Jian, the owner and chef of Mrs Leong’s Hakka Ham Cha Restaurant in Skudai, because thunder tea rice is presented as multi-cultural and healthy, it wins over visitors from the West, Japan, Korea or India, and even Malay people unable to enter a non-halal restaurant will buy a packet to take home.
Good food still has the powe
r to bring the Hakka community together. During Chinese New Year in 2006, I travelled with several relatives from Singapore and America, who are mostly Hakka, to visit other branches of our Hor Poh family in Penang, North Malaysia. Their home was originally in the farming region of Balik Pulau, largely populated in the early days by the Hor Poh. Our Penang relations welcomed their Singaporean and American New Year visitors with thunder tea rice: a spread of ten or so bowls of vegetables from which we were encouraged to help ourselves, conversation spreading as we passed plates along the table, the traditional food reminding us of our shared Hakka heritage and history. In this Hor Poh family with the surname Wu, even the younger, English-educated generation ate the thunder tea rice with relish, chatting away in the Hor Poh Hakka dialect.
This clan shows the migration patterns of the Hor Poh in miniature. The earliest Chinese settlers in Penang were largely Hokkien and Teochew, and lived mostly by the sea, where some became merchants, and some fishermen or labourers. The Hor Poh Hakka, by contrast, settled far from town and port at Balik Pulau, in the interior of the island, opening up the untouched land to agriculture, just as the Hor Poh were doing all over the region.
Taiwan’s Hakka Cultural Centre, set up by the Hakka Commission, has plans for an exhibition of the various Hakka cultures around the world, having requested the Academia Sinica’s Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies to assist in their research. In January 2009, Taiwanese academics from the Southeast Asian Hakka Research Centre came to Malaysia, choosing three venues at which they hoped to exchange ideas with local scholars, beginning to unravel the mysteries of Malaysian Hakka culture. Their first stop was Johor Bahru, followed by Penang and Sarawak. The dean of National Tsing Hua University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Chang Wei-an, visited the Hakka new village at Kulai’s Kelapa Sawit with other members of his team, where most of the community was Hor Poh Hakka. According to the report in Sin Chew Jit Poh of Southern University College’s Director of Chinese Studies Onn Huann Jan, the Taiwanese visitors hadn’t known before this trip that leicha was now a meal, not just a drink:
“There was nothing new to say about Sawit’s cuisine, its reputation having preceded it. On the contrary, Professor Chang Wei-an and his entourage were in raptures over thunder tea rice, chorusing, ‘This is a Hakka dish we’ve never tasted before. What a delicious flavour, most appetising.’ Sawit’s Hor Poh thunder tea rice has a refreshing flavour, and the Taiwanese academics enjoyed two large bowls each, praising it all the while. Sprinkling over it the villagers’ homemade ‘rice-fragrance’ enhanced the flavour further. Although looked on as an ordinary food, to the Taiwanese visitors this was a rare marvel. In Taiwan, leicha is not eaten but drunk, and is more sweet than savoury.”
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From the Ming Dynasty onwards, people have emigrated in large numbers from China, especially so in the 20th century, from all levels of society. Factoring in the internal migration of the Chinese diaspora within Southeast Asia, what it means to be Chinese has changed a great deal. Professor Wang Gungwu and other scholars have pointed out that the varieties of Chinese immigrants are growing, and it’s impossible to find a single term that describes them all. We have the Chinese overseas, Overseas Chinese, ethnic Chinese, huaqiao, huayi, huaren, haiwai huaren, Chinese diaspora, and so forth. Each term has its merits, and also its limitations. The Chinese identity is constantly changing, and the Chinese beyond the borders of China have constructed entirely new cultures for themselves.
There are Chinese people in every country in the world, but these communities are structured differently, affected by the physical environment, cultural conditions, political realities, the group’s composition, and the host society’s way of thinking, cuisine and other concerns. There is a huge gap between the culture and political situation of the Singaporean Chinese and Thai Chinese, and even though a Singaporean Chinese and a Chinese American both speak English, their world views will be very different. Many varieties of Chinese people means many varieties of Chinese literature, just as the Chinese have different faces—such as the Southeast Asian Chinese, whose facial features evolved in just one generation to suit their new climate, turning a deeper brown beneath the year-round sun. In Singapore and Malaysia, I have only to look at someone’s face to know whether they are English- or Chinese-educated, whether local or a recent immigrant from China. The Chinese will never be able to make themselves non-Chinese—their Chineseness will always be present in some form. Thus the complexity of what it means to be Chinese. The first time Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese visit China, they’re always startled to realise how different they are from the Mainlanders.
In the same vein, leicha, a highlight of Chinese food culture, varies in different regional Chinese communities, from the cheerfully decorated packets of ready-mixed tea on Taiwanese supermarket shelves to the many bowls of vegetables on a Southeast Asian Hor Poh Hakka family’s table, different in appearance, composition and preparation.
Thunder tea rice, increasingly fashionable in Singapore and Malaysia, is a familiar example of the fluidity of Chinese food, how it crosses cultures and absorbs influences, its vitality and international appeal stemming from this ability to adapt. Taking advantage of the global trend towards vegetarianism and healthy eating, thunder tea rice has stepped forth from the narrow confines of Hakka cuisine and made great strides towards the world. This universal popularity is a form of soft power that cannot be ignored.
Mystic Fish
I HAVE SAID before that the origins of magic-realist literature are different in every country. In Southeast Asia, the tropical rainforest, Nanyang and colonialism are three conditions—natural, cultural and political—that have given rise to our version of magic realism, causing the region to possess a mysticism that mingles with everyday life. To start with, the tropical climate and environment, the plants and animals found here, all have a surreal feel to them. Nanyang represents the new culture that arose after immigrants from China came to live amongst tropical rainforests, to set down roots in a strange land, intermingling with the local customs and culture, with magical results. The earliest settlers’ offspring, the Straits-Born Chinese, were called Baba if male and Nyonya if female. From the ancient settlement of Temasek, through the 14th century Lion City Singapura, to the 19th century British colony, the subjugated island produced interesting collisions between native and incoming cultures, leading to unexpected results. By the time of independence in 1965, the juxtaposition of old and new, and the friction between East and West in the post-colonial society, was creating ever weirder manifestations.
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Every culture on earth has its own origin myth, a story of how it all started, explaining why the tribe lives where it does, speaks as it does, lives the way it does—a source of shared sensations and memories, sometimes used as justification for political expedience, highlighting how it is similar to or different from other countries. In my book The Merlion Myth, I analysed how various Singaporean authors construct this legend through their work, using two poems as examples, one English and one Mandarin. The writers have different racial identities and desires, and so adopt different cultural signifiers in their mythologising. To write a legend, whether historical or invented, is to begin with particular images stemming from racial, national or societal identification. Writers of different ethnic origins or languages describing Singapore’s iconic Merlion will adopt different angles to explain how it came into being.
This legend isn’t unique to Singapore, but follows a Southeast Asian paradigm. Today a statue of a lion with a fish’s tail stands at the mouth of the Singapore River, an odd beast spewing water constantly from its mouth—the Merlion. According to the ancient text The Malay Annals, in the 12th century Prince Sang Nila Utama from Palembang (present-day Indonesia) came to the mouth of the Temasek River, where he saw a peculiar animal, about the size of a ram with a black head, red body and torso covered in white fur. Its oddly shaped body was nimble and quick. When he
made enquiries, no one knew what the creature was, but it resembled the lion in legends, and so it was agreed the name of the island should be changed from Temasek to Singapura, or Lion City. The prince established a city here, turning the small island into a trading centre of Southeast Asia. This was in 1106. The present-day Merlion statue at the mouth of the Singapore River has become a must-see for foreign tourists, thus becoming a national symbol.
The original inhabitants of the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests had jungle animals as their totems, while those on islands relied on fish for survival, so inventing a creature that combined the king of the jungle and a creature from the sea seemed obvious, fitting both psychological and imaginative needs. This, I think, must be the earliest example of a native Southeast Asian cultural model. Sang Nila Utama’s family was originally Indian, but after arriving in Indonesia renounced Buddhism and converted to Islam—demonstrating that from ancient times, Southeast Asia has always had a population of diverse origins and cultural backgrounds.
To modern Singaporeans, the fish and lion represent ocean and land, demonstrating that Singapore possesses both Eastern and Western cultures, ethics and spirit, and that this society is a unique combination of the Western rule of law and Eastern values. The hybridised nature of this multi-cultural society is an advantage, not a weakness. Singapore has absorbed the strengths of East and West, of cultures from across Asia, to produce a particular experience and way of being. In recent years, there have been many public debates in which Singaporeans have once again chosen the Merlion as their symbol. It has stood the test of time, woven from the native imagination of Southeast Asia.
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Even the Western colonialists’ imperialist, orientalist historical narrative contained a certain native mysticism. On 28 January 1819, the colonist and explorer Stamford Raffles sailed for the first time into the Singapore River with his naval fleet. This would later be presented by the colonial powers as his ‘discovery’ of Singapore, even though the island had already been developed into an important trading centre in the 14th century. No sooner had the British commandant, Major William Farquhar, landed with his troops, than his dog was eaten by a riverside crocodile, which was in turn shot dead by British guns. This was the beginning of the ‘new world’ that British historians would locate here. Even though this incident really happened, we cannot help receiving it as somewhat surreal, full of symbolism and exaggeration, a nonsense story. Yet the crocodile is a native of the land, and the British dog an accessory to the colonial powers, so its devouring could represent opposition to the foreign power, and the crocodile’s subsequent demise the violent suppression of local resistance, followed by massacres, subjugation, invasion and finally, colonialism.
Durians Are Not the Only Fruit Page 6