A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  “It’s tough, you know—all my textbooks are in Chinese!” she complained. Mandarin had never been a forte of my mother’s; she’d been educated at St. Margaret’s, an English-language Anglican school in Singapore. And suddenly here she was spending hours in class poring over detailed anatomy charts written entirely in Chinese characters. Having spent twelve years in an English-language Catholic school in which my friends thought it was “cool” not to be good at Mandarin, I couldn’t even fathom attempting the same.

  I told her about my job, about the freelancing I was starting to do.

  “Well, that’s good—so you get to try different things lah,” she said. “And the money’s okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s actually really interesting. I’m happy, Mummy. Don’t worry about me!”

  “Okay. As long as you’re okay, I’m happy. Don’t forget to call your dad when we’re home.”

  Back in the two-story semidetached home near the beach on Singapore’s East Coast that my parents had moved into when I was in tenth grade, my bedroom remained almost as it was when I left for college, at age eighteen. The posters of the 1990s soccer stars Roberto Baggio, Marco van Basten, and Jürgen Klinsmann had long since fallen off the walls, but the giant West German flag that the World Cup–obsessed sixteen-year-old me had hung up still fluttered in the gusts of the ice-cold air-conditioning. The now-faded picture of Northwestern University that had inspired me to study harder remained pinned up at my desk. The bouquet of roses my parents had given me on my sixteenth birthday that I’d carefully dried and kept was still propped up in a corner. In my closet, my powder blue Catholic high school uniforms still hung, neatly pressed.

  In this room, I’d had fervent dreams of the life I was about to lead. I would go to America, become a journalist, travel to war zones with the bravery of Murphy Brown, and retire from journalism at age thirty to start writing books. I’d win two Pulitzer Prizes—one for journalism and one for fiction. I would live in France, Italy, England—and have season tickets to soccer league matches. I might have a child—with or without a husband, as, really, that bit just wasn’t terribly essential—but only one. A girl. And, of course, I’d be so busy being me that I’d have time to marry only when I was forty. (I did plan to make an exception to this last bit, however, if Jürgen Klinsmann ever proposed. In fact, I’d already prepared for this stage of my life by scrawling “Mrs. Cheryl Klinsmann” in Wite-Out on the desks of my tenth-grade classroom.)

  Sitting on my sliver of a single bed in my frothy peach and gray–hued room at age thirty-four, however, I realized I’d fallen a little short. The most exciting place I’d been sent for work was not Iraq or Afghanistan but cushy Milan, where the only battle zones I encountered were the ones involving throngs of the Beautiful shoving their way into fashion shows. The closest I came to covering a war zone was when I found myself in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, putting aside my fashion show coverage to race down to Ground Zero as fast as I could in three-inch heels. The Pulitzers? Nonexistent. I’d ended up married ten years ahead of schedule—and not to Jürgen Klinsmann. (Although, I suppose that could still be fixed.) And somehow I’d wound up back here in my teenage bedroom with no job to speak of and an inexplicable quest to learn how to cook—the very thing I’d scorned during my years in Singapore.

  I was certain the eighteen-year-old Cheryl would have been terribly unimpressed.

  The next morning, however, I was ready to forge ahead with cooking. But first, there was a more pressing matter presented by my mother. “I’ve started going to this dancing class,” she said one day. “Do you want to come?”

  I’d loved to dance as a child, having endured ten years of ballet lessons and weekly bouts of wrestling with bandages bound around bloodied toes from point shoes. Ballroom dancing, however, was something I’d never encountered. The main point, though, was to spend time with my mother, to meet the new friends she was making as she started venturing out on her own.

  And so, on a Friday night, wearing rubber-soled ballerina flats, the most practical shoes I had brought, I found myself walking into a small, mirrored dance studio, trailing behind my mother. The class was small—and everyone was at least twice my age. Women outnumbered men, which didn’t really matter as my mother was obviously the belle of this ball. Patiently, the men waited to take a spin around the room with my mother, who looked radiant in her orange-tinged red lips, chrysanthemum tea–fueled bright eyes, and short, pixie hairdo. (And it was great that she was such a star because it turned out I had two left feet when it came to the waltz. Long after the night was over, I could still feel the frustrated grip of Francis—the slender, affable man in his sixties whom my mother had asked to teach me—around my waist, jerking me back to the right position as he firmly said, “Concentrate!”)

  Watching her glide around the room with the grace of Michelle Kwan, I started to feel like things were going to be okay for her. My mother was happy. Men adored her. It was good to watch the coquettish mother I’d seen glimpses of as a child gradually return.

  “You were great out there!” I told her the next day.

  “Aiyoh, no lah,” she said, waving me away. “I’m just starting.”

  “No, you were really good!” I insisted. After a silence, I asked. “So, what about that Francis guy? Do you like him?”

  “No lah!” she said.

  I believed her. But still, it was good to think that someone might be out there for my mother. And at least she was putting herself in that line of fire.

  Having failed at the waltz, I started itching to cook. The first person I called was Auntie Alice, my mother’s older sister. Of my mother’s three siblings, Auntie Alice—whom I call E-Ma because she’s also my godmother—was the one who grew up knowing how to cook. She was drafted to cook for her younger siblings when their father had suddenly died and their mother had had to work. I’d told her that I was coming home to learn how to cook, and that I hoped she and my maternal grandmother, whom I called Ah-Ma, could teach me. For starters, I wanted to learn how to make Ah-Ma’s kaya, a sweet, eggy coconut jam that’s just lovely spread over the thinnest veneer of butter on a slice of toasted white bread.

  There was one small snag, however. “I told Ah-Ma,” Auntie Alice said. “And she said, ‘Aiyoh! I don’t know if I can remember how to make it!’ ” It had been more than ten years since my grandmother had made kaya, it turned out. And as she was eighty-five, the years were starting to get the better of her memory. Nonetheless, Ah-Ma had some rough sense of the ingredients that went into it, and a few days later, I found myself arriving at my grandmother’s home bearing a crate of eggs, grated coconut, sugar, and green pandan leaves, lush and fragrant, freshly snipped from my mother’s garden.

  “Ah-Lien ah, le deng lai liao ah!” Ah-Ma said in Hokkien, hugging me tightly while kissing me and smoothing down my hair, as she always does, and crooning “Chao gao kia,” which means “smelly puppy.” (This is a pet name none of her grandchildren have ever understood.) Yes, I’d come home, I said. “Your husband didn’t come?” she asked. And I began to brace myself for the next question. “You didn’t bring a baby back for Ah-Ma to carry?”

  I remained a disappointment to my grandmother in this regard. Month after month, she’d ask: When was I going to give her a great-grandchild? “Ah-Ma is not getting any younger, you know,” she’d plead over the phone or whenever she saw me. “I don’t want to die until I’ve seen my great-grandchild.” Sometimes, she would simply come right out and say it. “Ah-Ma is dying already—you’d better have a baby soon!” The pressure, which had begun as soon as I got married, in 2004, only intensified as the years passed. Nothing quelled her determination—not protestations that I was too busy, that we didn’t have any family in New York to help us, that I had absolutely no idea how to raise a child, that I believed I would be a bad mother. (Her solution to all those problems always was the same—“Move back to Singapore! We’ll help you!”) Eventually, however, I came up with a way to halt the interrogation. �
�Ah-Ma ah,” I’d say quietly and gravely, “didn’t they tell you? I’m infertile!” She would recoil, swatting my hands as she spit out “Choi! Choi! Choi!” a refrain meant to ward off any evil or bad luck. My words always worked—she’d stop the questioning. (For a few weeks, at least.)

  I always felt a little bad for causing Ah-Ma any further distress. Her life, as related to me when I was a child, had been pockmarked with loss, pain, and poverty. I knew few details, but the black-and-white picture of her wedding day perched in her living room spoke volumes. In the photo, Ah-Ma is a porcelain-skinned twenty-year-old, smiling tentatively while seated next to a older man, tall, dark, and rakish. Gong-Gong had come from Xiamen, China, to find his fortune in Singapore. Although he was a good ten-plus years older than my grandmother, he had won her family over with his chiseled features and high forehead, which the Chinese in Singapore believe is a mark of intelligence and great potential for success. Together, they had four children, and life was blissful—until Ah-Ma learned of her husband’s wife and children back in China and decided to take it upon herself to help bring them to Singapore so they could live together as one happy family. The moment Wife No. 1 appeared in Singapore, of course, Family No. 2 was kicked out. Ah-Ma raised her four children in a one-bedroom apartment that was tiny even by New York City standards, always teetering on the brink of complete poverty and seeing my grandfather only when he could sneak away.

  I know little of this handsome polygamist from Xiamen except that I probably inherited his great love for soy sauce, which I drizzle over everything—noodles, fried eggs at brunch, hamburgers, you name it. “Aiyoh, you cannot eat so much soy sauce!” my mum would frequently yell. “Don’t you know that Gong-Gong died of kidney failure?” In fact, when my grandfather died, my fourteen-year-old mother only found out days later. The family heard from someone who’d heard from someone that he’d passed away in Wife No. 1’s home. That night, my mother and her siblings sprinkled flour all over the floors of their kitchen and living room, hoping that they would find footprints in the white mounds, offering proof that their papa’s ghost had returned to say good-bye. When they awoke the next day, there were none. And Ah-Ma gave everyone a good spanking for wasting perfectly good flour.

  Dreams of my grandfather would haunt my mother for years. In her dreams, her papa would come to her, telling her he had lucky lottery numbers, a gift for his beloved family, for whom he had left nothing. Gong-Gong would try to hand her a piece of paper with the winning numbers, but my mother, generally terrified of ghosts, would squeeze her eyes shut, refusing to look as her father pleaded with her, telling her that even in death, he was the same man she had loved. Just then, a rooster would crow. The sun would start rising. It was time for him to leave for the Other World. My mother would open her eyes and call out to her father, but he’d already be gone.

  This story still draws violent reactions from my aunties whenever it’s recounted, usually at the dinner table of some family gathering, where talk inevitably returns to the old days. Past regrets and a thousand should-haves are ever-present in my family’s life. “Ah-Tin ah, why you never open your eyes?” Auntie Jane, my mother’s younger sister, would moan. “We could have been rich, you know!” Ah-Ma did go on to have a good life, however—her children all became successful and also married well. In her twilight years, she was living with my uncle and his family in a plush house in Singapore’s Holland Village, a neighborhood that’s popular with well-paid expats.

  That day, in Ah-Ma’s comfortable living room filled with a stylish, modern couch and antiques my uncle had collected in his travels through Asia, I chose not to invoke any tales of the past. We had a task at hand, after all. There was no time to waste on clucking over babies, ghosts, or bad luck. There was kaya to be made! We began by bundling up the freshly grated coconut in cheesecloth and wringing out its milk, white and thick as paint. After squeezing out all we could, we added some water to the coconut and wrung it out again; the milk from the second squeezing was thinner than that from the first but smelled fragrant nonetheless. Ah-Ma perched herself on a bench by the kitchen, watching us prepare the coconut milk while loudly lamenting that she didn’t fully remember how to make kaya. “Ah-Ma’s old, of no use anymore,” she said in Mandarin, sighing and shaking her head. Just when I started to get worried, however, she switched into the firm, bossy Ah-Ma that I knew as a child and began barking out instructions.

  Making kaya was simple, she said. We quickly got to work in my uncle’s modern kitchen, which he’d kitted out with sleek appliances and a large, gleaming countertop. First, we cracked ten eggs into a large bowl and whisked them together. Then we added about a cup of sugar and the coconut milk, mixing it all up well. Next, Ah-Ma instructed us to place the mixture in a glass bowl, add a few knotted pandan leaves, perch that bowl atop a rack in a wok, and just let it steam for forty-five minutes or so. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other. “Mummy ah, we don’t need to stir it, meh?” Auntie Alice gently asked. Ah-Ma shook her head and hands vigorously. “Mieng, mieng!” she said in Hokkien. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other again. This just didn’t sound right. Kaya is supposed to be smooth, creamy, and easy to spread. I hadn’t spent that much time cooking at this point, but I did feel I knew enough to predict how steaming a bunch of eggs, untouched, for forty-five minutes would end up. Just letting the eggs, sugar, and coconut milk steam for forty-five minutes without any stirring was likely to produce a dense, cakelike custard—one that I envisioned us being able to cut up into neat slices, not spread easily over crusty, hot toast. Could Ah-Ma—who had spent the morning telling us that she couldn’t quite remember how to make the dishes she had been known for—possibly have misremembered?

  I had been afraid of not having enough kaya for three households—my mother’s, Auntie Alice’s, and Ah-Ma’s—so I’d brought enough ingredients for two batches. “Well . . . ,” Auntie Alice finally said, giving me a meaningful look, “since we have enough for another batch, why don’t we just make one batch Ah-Ma’s way and one batch that we stir during steaming? Just try lah—experiment!” Ah-Ma shrugged, giving us a distinct “you’re wasting your time” look. Auntie Alice and I immediately got to work, whipping together the second batch of kaya. Onto the steamer that went, and we started stirring it periodically. Looking at the two kayas side by side, we were glad we had decided to try the second batch our way. Ah-Ma’s method was yielding a kaya that resembled a pudding. The yellow-green custard was puffing up slightly and looked distinctly solid. The kaya that Auntie Alice and I were diligently stirring, however, was looking nice and soft. As the smell of coconut and vanilla-like pandan seeped into the air, we were feeling good about our kaya. I began to envision the breakfast of kaya toast, hot and buttery, that I’d have the next day.

  After forty-five minutes, however, our impressions changed. When we removed the two bowls of kaya, Auntie Alice and I smiled knowingly at first, as we noticed that Ah-Ma’s remained pudding-like while ours looked like a chunky rubble of jam. Then Ah-Ma gestured to us to stir up her kaya. It yielded easily to our spoon, forming a creamy, silken mass as we stirred. The version that Auntie Alice and I had concocted, however, remained lumpen and unappetizing no matter how much we tried to whip it into a smooth froth. And when we spread both kayas on bread, ours had an alarming grainy texture while Ah-Ma’s was perfectly smooth. Just as it should have been.

  Ah-Ma didn’t say anything. Auntie Alice and I winced. The students had been arrogant enough to second-guess the teacher—someone who had brought decades of experience to the kitchen counter only to be given the fish eye and sidelined. And we had learned a lesson, indeed. Silently, I vowed to listen to my grandmother more.

  Quietly, we packed up our kaya and hugged Ah-Ma good-bye. Just before letting me go, however, my grandmother gave me one final instruction: “Next time, bring a baby for Ah-Ma.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My father was skeptical.

  And this was fairly new to me. Now, this was a man who had ne
ver been stingy with praise for my grades or Chinese brush paintings, which he’d proudly framed and hung in his office when I was a child. And yet, whenever I produced something I’d slaved over for hours in the kitchen during his visits to the United States, he’d chew quietly and say almost nothing. Knowing that he adored chocolate mousse, I once searched online for days for a recipe that had the largest number of positive comments and spent the better part of an afternoon making the mousse just before he arrived in New York. The mousse was met with silence. When I tried out my tau yew bak on him during another dinner in New York, there it was again: silence. (Prompted by Mike’s mmmms and other effusive and overcompensating grunts of enjoyment, however, my father finally said, “The meat was a little tough.”)

  It wasn’t that my father thought cooking was a waste of time; he’d given me a lecture in my mid-twenties about my inability to make much besides ramen for dinner, after all. It was just that his mother’s food was seared on his heart; nothing else could possibly come close. (My mother never even tried to impress him in the kitchen, leaving everything up to her maids.) And I knew that, of all the people who would be sampling my attempts at re-creating her dishes over the following year, he would be my toughest critic. I began bracing myself for the silence.

  It was May in Singapore—the days were getting more and more fiery as the hot month of June approached. And I was about to learn a rather difficult dish—bak-zhang, the pyramid-shaped dumplings filled with pork and mushrooms and wrapped in bamboo leaves that had been one of Tanglin Ah-Ma’s signature dishes. The dumplings were an annual treat for my family, although they can now be found year-round in Singapore. They’re traditionally eaten in June around the time of the Dumpling Festival, or Duan Wu Jie, which commemorates the death of the Chinese poet and patriot Qu Yuan, who became distraught over the state of his country and committed suicide by throwing himself into a river. When his supporters learned of his death, they threw rice dumplings into the river both as a sacrifice to his spirit and to feed the fish so they wouldn’t nibble on Qu Yuan’s body. Now, every year, Chinese all over the world celebrate the day by eating bak-zhang—which is more commonly known by its Mandarin name, zongzi—and having Dragon Boat races. (Those also stem from Chinese lore. As one story goes, Qu Yuan’s admirers, after learning of his suicide, immediately hopped into boats and paddled out into the river, hoping to rescue him or find his body.)