A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  A Tiger in the

  Kitchen

  a memoir of food

  and family

  Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  For Daddo, Mommo, and Daffo,

  who loved me enough to let me go.

  And for Mike,

  who caught me on the other side.

  Contents

  FAMILY TREE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Recipes

  TANGLIN AH-MA’S PINEAPPLE TARTS

  AH-MA’S KAYA

  TANGLIN AH-MA’S BAK-ZHANG

  SIMPSON’S POPIAH

  AUNTIE KHAR IMM’S SALTED VEGETABLE AND DUCK SOUP

  AUNTIE ALICE’S TEOCHEW BRAISED DUCK

  AUNTIE KHAR MOI’S PANDAN-SKIN MOONCAKES

  MY MUM’S GREEN BEAN SOUP

  TANGLIN AH-MA’S OTAK

  AI-KYUNG LINSTER’S MANDOO

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  I distinctly remember the moment that I knew: I should have been less of a rebel.

  I was in my twenties. I was feeling on top of the world as a fashion writer for the Baltimore Sun, a paper I had aspired to work at for years.

  And I had decided to teach myself to cook.

  Even though I had grown up in Singapore, a somewhat traditional place despite its modern, impressive skyline and reputation as a Southeast Asian economic powerhouse, I had deftly managed as a child to avoid setting foot in the kitchen to learn the wifely skills that my girlfriends were encouraged to pick up.

  Instead, I had poured my teenage energies into raku pottery, ballet, Chinese brush painting. Basic fried rice? I hadn’t the faintest clue how to put that together.

  Nevertheless, I had a Singaporean grandmother who was both a force of nature and a legendary cook. And so I believed it was in my blood to excel in the kitchen—or at least kill myself trying.

  What unfolded was a series of rather unfortunate episodes. Fried rice was so burned that brown, charred chunks of rice seared themselves almost permanently to the wok. (How was I supposed to know that nonstop stirring action was essential to the process?) A stab at fried noodles yielded an inedible, gelatinous mass. (Periodically peering into a pot of boiling water, apparently, was not the way to tell if noodles were getting gummy and overcooked.) An Oreo cheesecake pie I attempted for Thanksgiving turned out so lumpy that one guest gently inquired if I owned a whisk. (Hello, if I needed one, perhaps the recipe printed on the back of the piecrust label should have said so?)

  The pièce de résistance, however, was a dish of hello dollies I very enthusiastically attempted after spying the recipe on a bag of chocolate chips at the grocery store. All morning one Saturday I slaved, opening cans, mixing and assembling. As the bars baked in the oven, the heady smell of chocolate, condensed milk, and coconut started filling my Washington, D.C., kitchen. I began to envision the afternoon that lay before me: I would walk into my friend’s home perhaps wearing gingham oven mitts and a matching red and white apron, bearing my baking dish of delicious hello dollies. My friends would inhale the bars, grabbing at seconds—thirds, even! But when they showered me with compliments for my baking, I would merely blush, coyly turn my head, and wave them away with the elegance of Princess Diana.

  This, I thought to myself, would be what they call “nailing it.”

  Naturally, this was not how it went. In a frantic rush, I had gotten to my friend’s apartment with no mitts and no apron. And when I sliced into the pan to cut up the bars, my knife emerged dripping with a slick, brown and taupe goo flecked with bits of white coconut. As I watched my friends politely lick at the liquid mounds of chocolate and condensed milk I had scooped onto paper napkins—I had avoided serving plates, having had a fervent, if misguided belief in the solid nature of my bars—I realized, I am not the cook my grandmother was.

  Growing up in Singapore, I had taken my Tanglin ah-ma for granted.

  My paternal grandmother, whom I called Tanglin Ah-Ma because she once lived in the Tanglin neighborhood of Singapore, was a true legend in the kitchen. A slender, birdlike woman with a nest of short, wavy hair that she kept pulled back from her face with black bobby pins, my Tanglin ah-ma was a mystery to me when I was growing up. We rarely visited her, and when we did, my inability to speak any Teochew, the Chinese dialect that she spoke, meant we mostly sat around with me feeling her eyes scan over me, inspecting this alien, Westernized granddaughter she had somehow ended up with. During these visits, I would learn small things about her—that she kept a wooden, rectangular block that functioned as a pillow, for example. It was a habit that Singaporean Chinese of a certain generation, who had had no access to plush feather pillows, were clinging to. However many times I saw or touched her wooden pillow, though, I never understood it.

  While we didn’t have the words to communicate, Tanglin Ah-Ma spoke eloquently to me, to her family, by feeding us all. She would routinely rise in the early hours of the morning to fire up the charcoal stove in order to put breakfast on the table. Soy-sauce-braised duck, hearty salted vegetable soups, and even tricky bak-zhang, the pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves that require such work few women bother to make them at home anymore—Ah-Ma churned them out with such skill that an ever-growing circle of relatives, friends, and then friends of friends would regularly request them.

  The crowning moment for my Tanglin ah-ma, however, was Chinese New Year, a time of great feasting in Singapore when people devote entire days to hopping from house to house, catching up with friends and relatives while stuffing themselves with platters of noodles, candy, and above all, cookies.

  Amid the sanctioned bacchanalia, one indulgence was supreme for me: pineapple tarts. Each year, I looked forward to the bite-size cookies that are the hallmark of the festivities. And I considered myself a connoisseur of the treats, which comprise a buttery shortbread base topped with a dense, sweet pineapple jam. As we traveled from house to house, I would attack the tarts first, choosing not to sully my palate or waste calories on other, lesser snacks. And at each home, I would, inevitably, be disappointed. The tarts would always be too crumbly, too salty, or not crumbly enough. None compared to my Tanglin ah-ma’s tarts—this was, simply, fact.

  Despite my love for the tarts, however, I never bothered to learn how to make them. As a child, I had been steadfastly determined not to pick up any womanly skills, least of all cooking. I was more intent on reading, writing, learning about the world—and plotting how I was to eventually go forth and conquer it.

  Cooking, I thought, could always come later. Blithely, I assumed that I would someday ask my Tanglin ah-ma to teach me how to make her pineapple tarts. And then, when I was eleven, she died.

  Watching the disaster that was my hello dollies unfold that afternoon in Washington, I felt a sudden pang of regret.

  Over the next ten years, as I ventured more deeply into the kitchen, growing ever more ambitious—and, I’d like to think, skilled—this kernel of yearning would only grow. Each stew I made, each cookie I baked only made me wonder what my Tanglin ah-ma would
have thought. Nothing I baked or cooked, of course, compared in my mind to anything she made.

  I had missed the opportunity to get to know her recipes, to get to know her. By now, I’d achieved the success I’d craved as a child—I was based in New York City, covering fashion for The Wall Street Journal, one of the largest newspapers in America. And yet, no matter how high I climbed, the hole stubbornly remained.

  I started to think about home—which, to me, isn’t just New York, or Singapore, or anywhere in between. Home, rather, is rooted in the kitchen and the foods of my Singaporean girlhood—the intoxicating fog of turmeric and lemongrass seeping into the air as bright orange slabs of otak, a curried fish mousse, steam on the stove, or the scent of sliced mackerel and minced ginger doused in white pepper drifting out of the kitchen, heralding a hearty breakfast of fish porridge.

  After almost sixteen years in the United States, I realized I had, indeed, become ang moh (a Chinese term that means “red hair,” implying Westernized). I did not know, after all, how to make these dishes, the food of my people. They aren’t recipes that you’ll find in Chinese cookbooks; many are uniquely Singaporean and, in some cases, regarded as not “special” enough to put on restaurant menus. Because of recent generations of women just like me who were intent on avoiding cooking, some of these recipes are slowly fading from the culinary awareness.

  In the dead of winter, in a city that’s just too far away from the sound of banana tree leaves rustling in the tropical breezes, I started to dream. In my daydream, my Tanglin ah-ma is there. She’s come to me with a piece of paper bearing her cherished recipes. When I open my eyes, it becomes clear that it’s time.

  And so I decided to take a leap. I journeyed home to Singapore, finally ready after all these years to learn to cook, to learn about my family, to learn to be a woman—but intent on doing it on my own terms.

  On the other side of the world were my maternal grandmother, my aunts, my mother. Patiently, they stood by with arms open—ready to welcome me into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was born in the year of the Tiger with a lucky star over my head and a knife in my hand.

  Based on the time I was born and the fact that I was a dynamic and aggressive Tiger, I was already destined to be sharp, intelligent, and incredibly ambitious. But with the additional star to guide me, I was headed for a sparkling future, one that I would sail through with ease, gathering money and a great deal of success along the way.

  Instead, the moment I pushed into this world, growling and crying, I took the knife in my hand and stabbed at the star, snuffing it out. In that moment, a fighter was created—a person who knew she would have to work doubly hard to compensate for her dead lucky star, often stubbornly wandering off, heeding no one, and charting a path of her own.

  This is the story that my family’s fortune-teller tells. And for years, much of it appeared to be true.

  Despite the fact that I’m female, I’d always been raised to be somewhat masculine.

  Before I was born, my parents chose my name: Brendan.

  Because I was the firstborn of the eldest son in a traditional Chinese family in Singapore, there was plenty of hope that I would be male. A son who would carry the family name, a child in whom my father would nurture his ambitions.

  Well, I’m female. So my dad, Soo Liap Tan—a practical man who ended up with two daughters—made do with what he got.

  Singapore, an island city-state of almost 5 million that straddles the equator, for all its modernity remains a rather old-fashioned Asian society in some ways. Boys are valued. But while girls aren’t bad things, you generally don’t expect too much of them.

  My father believes this to a certain extent, but he’s also ambitious. So when his firstborn arrived and it was a girl, he adjusted accordingly.

  When I was six, he gave me a dictionary of legal terms. “You don’t have to look at it now,” he said. “But if you want to look anything up, it’s there.” I never touched it, but the message was clear. I was headed for law school. My father pressed me to read voraciously, to be good at math, and never once told me I had to clean or learn how to cook in order to be a good wife. He never let me beat him at Scrabble and raised me with all the love a Chinese parent wasn’t supposed to show. He challenged me to be outspoken, to question authority, and to always, always let creativity be my guide.

  But above all, he told me stories. As much as he encouraged me to shirk my female role in society, he wanted me to know and understand my culture, my heritage, my family. He wanted me to be Chinese, to never forget from where I came.

  From the time I was a child, it had been impossible to escape the tales of my ancestors. These oral history outbursts often came when I least expected them. “Dad, I landed this big interview today—” I would start, before being interrupted with his pleased response to praiseworthy things. “Yes! You are Teochew. Aiyah, don’t you know, our people are known for being pirates, smugglers, and great businessmen. [The Hong Kong billionaire] Li Ka-shing is Teochew, you know!” (I always thought Dad was exaggerating until we visited Shantou, China, many years later and I realized that the area my father’s family is from is like the Sicily of China. Some of the major triads in Asia first blossomed in Guangdong.)

  Much later, when I was in my early twenties and called to tell my parents about a new boyfriend, there was a sudden silence after I mentioned his name. “Nakamura . . . ,” my dad said quietly. “My two sisters were killed by the Japanese, you know!” (I would have to tell him several times that the boyfriend was a third-generation American and could not possibly have been responsible for the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II.)

  But the longer stories of my father’s boyhood, of his family’s hopes and dreams for all he’d become, would emerge as we huddled over late-night suppers of take-out noodles from Singapore’s hawker stands after my mother and sister, Daphne, had gone to bed. The slippery fried shrimp noodles we adored came sprinkled with chewy circles of squid. The noodles, wrapped in industrial-strength wax paper, were generally so greasy that the oil penetrated the paper, filling it with dark spots. I always looked forward to the moment when we would carefully peel back the wax paper and steam would rise, fogging up our glasses. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t see—we just grabbed our chopsticks and stabbed away at the mound. When the noodles disappeared and the toothpicks were put aside, Dad would begin. “When I was a boy, my grandfather used to hoist me onto his shoulders and lead me through his banks and factories and say, ‘All this will be yours one day.’ ” As the firstborn son of the eldest son, my father had been expected to succeed my great-grandfather. “And then the war came,” Dad would continue. “We lost all the money when he died.”

  These unfulfilled dreams and childhood disappointments were threads that had raced through my father’s life for decades. We could never drive past pockets of Singapore without him sighing and murmuring, “My grandfather’s company used to have warehouses along this whole stretch, you know! Aiyah . . . you could have been born into a rich family.” Specters of this unled life fueled my father’s ambitions, leading him to plunge into a lucrative career working for a string of beverage and luxury goods distribution companies after casting aside an early dream to spend his life teaching high school mathematics at Saint Joseph’s Institution, the alma mater that had been his refuge from a tumultuous home life. The more his father—a man whose major accomplishment in life was to drink and gamble away the family money—beat him, the more my father had turned to schoolwork and idyllic Saturdays building campfires and volunteering as a Boy Scout. “I saved all my pocket money and bought my father a birthday card once, you know,” my father said late one night as we sat in the kitchen, mirroring each other with our legs propped up, still rubbing our bellies over the feast we had just had. “You know what he did? He tore up the card and slapped me for wasting money! You are so lucky your father is not like that.”

  And indeed, he wasn’t. The kind of father he w
as was involved in showing me a world beyond the one most children would know. With insomnia as a shared affliction, we would stay up way past my bedtime, sitting in our bright living room, quietly reading. We discussed international politics, the economy, whether Liverpool or Arsenal was going to win the English Premier League that year. One afternoon, I emerged from my first-grade classroom in a weathered colonial building along busy Victoria Street near downtown Singapore to find my father’s car waiting for me just outside the gates. “Come, we’re going for lunch,” he said, whisking me into the car. I assumed we were going to a hawker center for a quick meal before he had to jet back to work. Instead, minutes later, I found myself sliding into a chair at the Western restaurant of the posh Dynasty Hotel, nervously smoothing down the starched, white tablecloth before me as I wondered why we were there. It wasn’t my birthday—or his. And I couldn’t think of any special reason that would have earned such a treat. We were simply having lunch, it turned out—an excuse to show me what it was like to eat at a nice restaurant without my mother ordering for me or family members grabbing pieces of chicken with chopsticks and filling my plate. Terrified that I might do something wrong, I ordered the item on the menu that I had eaten and understood before—a large bratwurst. I remember it being delicious, but not as delicious as the feeling of being an adult, sitting with my father, talking about school, about work, as we leisurely had lunch.

  When I was nine, my father took a job in Hong Kong, commuting to Singapore for long weekends just once every three weeks. I missed him terribly. This was a man who occasionally chased me around the dining room table with a cane in hand just to get me to practice the piano. But the same man would sometimes wake me up in the mornings by standing quietly at the window, peering out very intently, until I sleepily asked, “What’s happening outside?” “OH,” he’d reply. “There’s an elephant walking down the road,” which would always prompt me to jump out of bed and run to the window for a peek. (It took me many years to figure this one out.)