by Cheryl Tan
They’re generally drawn-out affairs, grand and long. For my grandmother, the wake took place over seven days. Each morning, my sister and I pinned black squares of fabric onto our right sleeves, the mark that we were mourning for a paternal family member, and headed over to my Tanglin ah-ma’s apartment building. In the void deck—the ground floor—of the complex, an imposing display had been set up. A series of large, colorful blankets, which the Chinese in Singapore sometimes send in lieu of flowers to grieving families, cordoned off a space that was filled with dozens of tables for visitors and family. And at the head of the display was a massive altar bearing offerings of food and tea and my grandmother’s picture. Behind the picture, my grandmother lay.
My cousins and I had a few tasks, which we attacked with great enthusiasm when we weren’t playing gin rummy or poring over issues of Beano and Dandy, British comic books about a group of rather naughty boys. We had to help with the burning of incense and paper money for my grandmother—until we were permanently relieved of the duty on the second day, when Royston, Jessie’s brother, almost set the funeral tent on fire. Our main job, however, was to help Auntie Khar Imm make sure that guests were properly fed when they arrived. By day, we ferried guay zhee (dried melon seeds), tea, and bowls of piping hot porridge to the tables on command. But when night fell, our duties changed—we had one task, and it was a significant one.
The Chinese in Singapore believe that if a cat jumps over a coffin, the body inside will awaken as a zombie, rising up to hop around stiffly, as if both feet were tied firmly together. With their arms stretched out washboard straight, these zombies will keep hopping along until they encounter a human. When that happens in Chinese horror movies, death by washboard arms is inevitable.
Naturally, the task of chasing stray cats away from the coffin fell upon us. And boy, did we take it seriously—around and around the void deck we went, keeping our eyes peeled for those little zombie-making buggers, running at them at full speed when we spied one. At the end of each night, when my Tanglin ah-ma’s coffin was intact and she remained not a zombie, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. It had been a good night’s work.
Emboldened by all I was learning, I decided to try picking up some Teochew. I’d learned some Hokkien (or Fukienese), a dialect similar to Teochew that’s spoken by my mother’s side of the family. The Teochews and Hokkiens are generally proud folks who like to keep their identities separate, even though they hail from the same region of China. I was confident that, since I knew some Hokkien, Teochew couldn’t possibly be that hard.
For days, I listened hard to Jessie and my aunts. Little by little, my confidence grew. One day, as I was about to ask Jessie to take a look at something, I paused and then proudly said, “Le kua!” thinking I was saying “You look!” Her reaction was instantaneous. “Aiyoh! Mm see kua, see toi!” Jessie exclaimed. Of course, I had used the Hokkien word for “look,” kua, instead of the Teochew toi. The ultimate insult.
By the time the seventh day rolled around, I was starting to feel sad that I’d be going back to my regular life, with no older Teochew cousins to school me on the mores and choice words of my people. Before my grandmother’s cremation, however, we had to escort her to Heaven.
On the last night, we donned beige hooded robes made of rough gunnysack material—so scratchy that we would be feeling external in addition to internal pain over my grandmother’s death. With a great deal of pomp, we set a multistoried paper house, filled with servants, a car, and a driver, aflame; this was an offering for my grandmother, to ensure a good life for her on the Other Side. Then I knelt next to my father, the firstborn son, in the front, trying to follow along as a priest from a Taoist temple chanted.
When my father started crying, I was surprised to discover that my own eyes were wet. I hadn’t felt close to my grandmother at all. I’d known her largely through her food. And I wasn’t sure why I was crying, except that, over the last week, I had finally felt a sense of connection to her, to my father’s side of the family. And as stressful as it had been to be on zombie-fighting duty, I was grateful for that.
As the chanting drew to a close, the priest signaled us to get up. The time had come. My grandmother’s spirit was ready to enter Heaven. And we were to escort her. Slowly, he led my Tanglin ah-ma’s hooded flock around the void deck, walking in single file in a large circle before we got to a five-foot-long aluminum “bridge” that had been installed earlier that day. Gingerly, we crossed the bridge, having tossed coins into basins of water by its side before stepping on—even heavenly bridges have their tolls, it seems. We circled and crossed the bridge three times, wailing as we went, until finally we reached the gate of Heaven. Outside of this gate we stood, weeping and whispering our private good-byes.
My grandmother entered. Our job was done.
Memories of grandmother’s funeral came back to me as I looked out at the flickering lights of Singapore from my descending airplane from New York. The funeral had been the last chunk of time that I’d spent with my father’s side of the family. In the sixteen years that I’d lived in the United States, I had had hardly any contact with them, in fact, beyond a handful of Chinese New Year visits and my wedding, of course. And I often came away from those visits with the feeling that I was seen as too wayward, too different, for pouring my energies into my career and the never-ending climb instead of cooking or bearing children.
Yet here I was, the prodigal niece, heading home to spend two days making cookies and pineapple tarts with my auntie Khar Imm and her sisters, who now assumed my Tanglin ah-ma’s baking mantle every Chinese New Year. While I have close relationships with the aunties on my mother’s side, I couldn’t remember having a one-on-one conversation that lasted longer than a minute with my auntie Khar Imm. An uncertainty started setting in. How would I survive two days? What on earth would we talk about?
But I had asked, and they’d generously invited me over.
I had been too late to learn before. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
CHAPTER THREE
I knew I was in for it when I walked into the room and there were not one, not two, but seventy pineapples jammed into tubs.
Stunned, I quickly looked around my auntie Khar Imm’s mother’s kitchen—there were just five of us there. Exactly how many tarts were we making that weekend?
I started to panic.
I was nervously fumbling for the oranges that I’d bought at the market as a gift, and Auntie Khar Imm stepped forward to welcome me. I hadn’t seen her since a visit to her home during Chinese New Year a year or two before. The visit then had been very brief, as all our visits to her home had been since my Tanglin ah-ma died. Somehow, I had always been a little afraid of my auntie Khar Imm—not for any justifiable reason. I’d just always gotten the sense that Khar Imm wasn’t the biggest fan of our relatively irresponsible branch of the family. Our visits were often a little stilted and perfunctory.
Now, years later, in her mother’s kitchen, where we were to make the pineapple tarts, she stepped forward, kind and warm. “Ah Lien ah, chi bao le mei you?” she gently said, asking in Mandarin if I’d eaten.
It took me a while to respond—it had been a long time since anyone had called me Ah Lien, my Chinese name. The name sounds so much like Ah Lian, which is a derogatory Singaporean nickname for women who are gauche in both manners and style, that I was relieved when my parents started calling me Cheryl instead as I got older. I get the Ah Lien treatment only from my maternal grandmother and my friends—when they want to embarrass me in public.
“Chi le, chi le,” I replied, telling her I’d eaten, as I watched her disappear in a rush to get her guest a glass of water.
There was some clucking over the fact that I’d brought a gift. “Aiyah, buyong lah!” Auntie Khar Imm exclaimed, looking pleased nonetheless as she handed the oranges to her mother. She was wrong; a gift was needed, as I was a guest in her mother’s home. (I was suddenly thankful that my own mother had remind
ed her Americanized daughter of the necessity the very day before.)
After introductions were made—I’d never met her mother or sisters—and pleasantries were exchanged, I realized I was already behind. The process had begun without me. At dawn, Auntie Khar Imm’s family had gone to the market to pick up the pineapples they’d ordered. The plan that weekend was to make three thousand tarts—more than twenty years after my Tanglin ah-ma’s death, dozens of friends and family members still request jars of them every Chinese New Year.
As I entered the kitchen, I marveled at its expanse. The room itself was large—about the dimensions of a sizable dining room—and it opened out into a white-tiled backyard lined with kitchen cabinets stuffed with cooking utensils, shelves, and a row of burners. In the heat of this big backyard, my aunt’s family had spread out in a tart-making production line—each one was hard at work prepping the pineapples for the jam we would make that day. In one corner, Auntie Khar Imm’s mother was in a half-sit, half-squat position above a foot-high wooden stool as she hunched over a stack of pineapples, holding a large chopper. With muscular whacks, she worked methodically, chopping off the tops of the pineapples and their tough, thick skins before tossing them into a large red pail. From there, Auntie Khar Imm’s two sisters took over. Perched on similarly short stools, they were using small knives to slowly gouge out the eyes from each fruit.
Surveying this hubbub, I wasn’t sure what to do. After the obligatory hellos, they immediately bent back over the pineapples, working deftly, silently. They seemed to have it pretty much covered. And it was true, they’d been doing this for decades, since they began helping my Tanglin ah-ma make the tarts, learning the recipe along the way. They certainly didn’t need this dilettante around.
But I had come all this way—and I certainly didn’t travel 9,500 miles just to watch my aunties make pineapple tarts. No, guest or not, I was making these tarts.
I asked Auntie Khar Imm for a knife and jumped in—well, sort of. For starters, I was having problems feeling my fingers or getting them to move in the general direction they were supposed to go in the filmy plastic gloves they’d instructed me to put on to keep out the tart pineapple juice. And then there was the issue of maneuvering the knife in said gloves in a way that actually resulted in the eyes getting gouged. Over and over I jabbed, trying not to stab myself as the gloves skidded across my palms like roller skates on ice. The few holes I managed to create were massive and slushy from multiple stab wounds. I could feel the aunties surreptitiously surveying my work—all of them too polite to scold me for wasting chunks of pineapple with my mammoth gouges. The more I stabbed, the more mortified I was. But no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t get my fingers to obey.
Finally, one auntie walked over and handed me a Chinese soupspoon. “Try this,” she said, gesturing for me to use the handle to scoop out the eyes. With that, my fingers complied. And I started to fit in.
In silence, we worked—my inability to speak much Teochew being a major social hindrance. But as we carefully dug out the hundred or so eyes that were in each pineapple, the stories emerged. Auntie Khar Imm, of course, began by asking the question I’d been getting since I became engaged seven years ago: “When are you having a child?” My clucking answer—that I was just too busy with work, with life, in New York to even fathom producing anything that would depend on me for just about everything—was unacceptable, of course. After a short silence, her sisters nudged me to take a break and eat something, gesturing to a large pot of jet-black liquid on the counter. “Ter kah dieo,” Auntie Khar Imm said in Teochew, stopping to explain further in Mandarin when it was clear that I had no comprehension of what she had just said. It turned out the dish was a stew of pigs’ trotters braised in black vinegar and ginger. “Good for after giving birth,” Auntie Khar Imm said. “Very easy to make.”
Point taken.
When the seventy pineapples had been cleaned, prepped, and cut into large chunks, Auntie Khar Imm began running the slices through a juicer, dumping the pulp into a massive wok and preserving the juice in a pot. Into the wok went cinnamon sticks, knotted pandan leaves—from a tropical plant that’s similar in scent to vanilla and is used in many Southeast Asian desserts—and a few cups of the juice. And then the truly laborious work began. For the next several hours, we sweated over the stove, stirring the pineapple concoction in several woks, pausing now and then to taste the gradually congealing jam to see if the mixture needed more sugar or juice. Actually, to be more accurate, Auntie Khar Imm sweated over the stove. As she did the bulk of the stirring—with me pitching in now and then when she had to take a break—I hovered with my notebook and camera, trying to document every moment, believing that this would be the best way to ensure that I would remember every sliver of this process.
Watching Auntie Khar Imm stir with ease and calm in her mother’s sweltering backyard kitchen, I felt increasingly puzzled. She looked nothing like the frazzled bundle of nerves that I was in my own kitchen, where I often found myself glued to a printed-out recipe or instructions on my BlackBerry, not daring to make a move without first rereading the recipe for the twentieth time. Sometimes I would attempt to be bold, but my definition of culinary bravado meant that I would first read the 150 comments on an Epicurious.com recipe for additions that other cooks had made, and after much thought and more Web research about the pros and cons of an unorthodox move that hadn’t been sanctioned by the mighty editors at Gourmet or Bon Appétit, I would make the addition, my heart filling with fear laced with the tiniest dash of excitement. Auntie Khar Imm, however, displayed none of this trepidation. Instead, I watched in shock as she would sample the tiniest spoonful of the boiling jam, then cavalierly slit open giant bags of sugar, hoist them over the woks, and give them a hefty jiggle, inspiring landslide amounts to tumble forth. “Wait, wait,” I sputtered, “how much are you putting in? How do you know how much to put in?” These questions, at first, confused Auntie Khar Imm, who immediately started laughing once she figured out what I was asking. “Aiyah—buyong measure lah!” she said. “Just taste, taste, taste and then agak-agak lor!”
I didn’t know it then but agak-agak, a Malay phrase meaning “guess-guess” that’s pronounced “ah-gahk ah-gahk,” would be a refrain I would hear over and over during the two days of tart making—usually uttered following some laughter on my aunties’ part over my attachment to the preposterous notion that cooking should be precise. I wasn’t seeing much humor in the kitchen that day, however. I had been hoping to learn a recipe, one that I would be able to replicate back in New York. I had never done the “agak-agak” thing in my kitchen. How would I know if I was completely screwing up?
And so I attempted to grill Auntie Khar Imm. “But, really—how much sugar do I put in?” Patiently, she explained, “You see how sweet your pineapple is lor! Very sweet then add less, not so sweet then add more.”
This was patently unhelpful, I thought.
“Um, but how can you tell how sweet your pineapple is? Are pineapples of a certain shade sweeter? Can you tell by their smell? If it’s sweet, how much sugar do you add? If it’s not so sweet, how much do you add? What is your definition of sweet?”
Now it was her turn to look confused for a moment—before erupting once again in laughter. “Aiyah,” she finally said when she caught her breath. “Just taste, taste, taste, and then agak-agak!”
I was starting to get truly panicked. I had traveled from half a world away in order to learn my Tanglin ah-ma’s pineapple tart recipe—but it was starting to look like I’d return to New York with vague instructions built on the nebulous foundation of agak-agak. After about the fifth time that we had this exchange, however, Auntie Khar Imm decided to humor me by measuring the sugar she was adding—while giggling at the ludicrousness of the practice.
She had learned to make the tarts—and to cook—from my Tanglin ah-ma not by measuring, taking pictures, or writing things down, of course. She’d learned from watching, from helping, from cooking alon
g with her. There had never been any need for words or lessons. They simply had a job to do—to put food on the table—and they just rolled up their sleeves and did it. If something tasted too sweet or too salty one day, they’d just add less sugar or salt the next. Cooking wasn’t a science; it wasn’t meant to be perfect. It was simply a way to feed the people you loved.
No one knew where my Tanglin ah-ma had learned to make pineapple tarts—or any of the other dishes she mastered. But what everyone did know was that she was a formidable woman. From the stories I’d heard, she’d been handed a trying life. Born in rural Singapore to a farming family, she entered into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man who turned out to be as in love with betting on horses as he was with drink. (And, everyone suspected, women.) After watching her husband squander his wealth, she turned to hand washing the neighbors’ laundry in order to buy schoolbooks for her three children, my father, my auntie Leng Eng, and their younger brother, my uncle Soo Kiat. But above all, she was devoted to feeding her family. “She would wake up very early to make breakfast,” Auntie Khar Imm said, noting that Tanglin Ah-Ma occasionally rose at three or four in the morning to make bak-zhang, the pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings that Singaporeans sometimes have for breakfast. I tried to think hard of my childhood and the bak-zhang I’d had. Did I remember what my grandmother’s dumplings tasted like? But no matter how hard I dug into my recollections of life pre-eleven, I just wasn’t sure. I had been so young—and more obsessed with Chicken McNuggets than with these sticky dumplings—that I didn’t recall having eaten them very much. Thinking about my grandmother rising in the darkness just to make them for all of us, I felt ashamed.
As we talked and stirred, the jam got denser, darker, turning a woody shade of ocher. It would have to cool overnight before we could bake. As I left that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking of my grandmother’s bak-zhang. I had taken them for granted; now, I desperately wanted to learn how to make them.