A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  So this time, faster than you could say “chicken,” I was in Auntie Alice’s sunny kitchen with my notebook and pen in hand.

  Auntie Alice moved quickly, washing two cups of rice and rinsing the chicken. I’d dealt with so much raw duck at this point that I didn’t even wince when I saw the cold, white chicken sitting in her sink. Auntie Alice saved me from touching it, however, grabbing it and deftly cutting off its head and trimming off its backside. “Make sure to cut off the extra skin ah,” she said. “Otherwise it will be too fatty.” Instead of tossing out the skin, however, Auntie Alice placed it in a bowl, gesturing for me to note that the skin should be saved. Next, she grabbed some salt, waving me off as I started to ask her how much. “I just use my hand to agak-agak lor,” she said, taking what looked to be about a teaspoon of salt and rubbing it all over the inside of the chicken. Then, she bashed up nine garlic cloves and a two-inch piece of ginger—“You want to bring the smell out,” she noted—placing them inside the chicken together with two stalks of scallions. With that, she pinched together the skin around the chicken’s behind and sealed it with a sharp toothpick.

  Taking out a large pot, Auntie Alice brought some water—“enough to cover the chicken,” she said—to a rolling boil. Once the water had boiled, she placed the chicken in the pot, breast side down, covered it, and let it simmer over medium heat for twenty minutes.

  As much as I love the chicken and the rice aspect of chicken rice, I also adore the little bowl of salty soup that usually comes with it. At hawker stands and restaurants, this soup is often flavored with monosodium glutamate, which I try not to use in my own kitchen. So I was curious to see how Auntie Alice would flavor her chicken rice soup. Shiitake mushrooms, apparently, were her secret. And so was dong cai, which are briny, brownish flecks of preserved Chinese cabbage. I’d never cooked with dong cai before. In fact, I’d never given it much thought beyond Hey, this salty stuff tastes awesome when I encountered it in soups. Auntie Alice pulled out a little bit to show me how it looked. “No need to use too much of it, just enough to add some flavor,” she said.

  While the chicken simmered, we sat for a moment, putting our feet up and enjoying a light breeze in her large living room, which opened out into a little garden, as she kept one eye on her granddaughter, Bernice. Now, Auntie Alice had learned to cook as a teenager out of sheer necessity. With my grandmother having to work to put food on the table, Auntie Alice simply had to become the person making the food. Her repertoire then, of course, included nothing near as fancy as chicken rice. “I remember when I learned to fry fish for the first time,” Auntie Alice said, scrunching up her face and hunching over the table as she often did when she was getting to the meaty part of a story. “I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and when I slid the fish into the oil, all this oil splattered everywhere. I had blisters so big I had to go to the doctor, you know,” she added, pointing at me as if reminding me to always be careful when frying fish. (Being a big red-meat eater myself, I’d not attempted any fish frying before. I supposed it was good that I’d not attempted it without first hearing this sage advice.)

  My mother and her younger sister, Auntie Jane, had always joked about Auntie Alice being “fierce” as a teenager. “We used to call her the dowager!” my mother had told me that very week. “She was so strict!” My mother’s recollection of those days largely involves Auntie Alice being a tyrant with a broom, yelling at her three siblings to keep their feet off the floor as she raced through the house, trying to sweep it clean.

  Auntie Alice laughed when I mentioned the word dowager. “Aiyoh, your mummy ah,” she said, shaking her head. “In those days, your mum and Auntie Jane were younger, they didn’t do much housework, and they were so naughty! I was the one who had to learn how to keep the house clean, you know. If I’m cleaning the house, whoever stepped on something, I would just scream at them!” Housework was just one of her worries at the time. “Your ah-ma had a little gambling den on the weekends,” she said. “We were living in Selegie House,” a building in a neighborhood that currently is dotted with karaoke and KTV lounges, where everyone knows the girls usually can be paid to do more than just sing. Well, into just a microphone anyway. “We used to have gamblers come over and play see-sek,” Hokkien for “four colors,” which is a popular Chinese card game involving slender, long cards of four colors. With gamblers filling the house on weekends, Auntie Alice and her sisters were relegated to being girl Fridays who fetched tea or noodles from the nearby coffee shops when anyone got hungry.

  “Did you ever get upset over having to do this?” I asked, thinking about my pretty auntie Alice and her sisters having to deal with hungry, sketchy, sometimes angry men in their own living room. Auntie Alice’s large, bright eyes widened, which often happens when she’s really thinking about something, giving her face the look of an innocent girl on the cusp of some amazing discovery. “It didn’t occur to me at that time, you know!” she finally said, erupting in soft laughter again.

  And that was that. Being the tea girls for strange men in their mother’s illegal gambling den on weekends was just something practical. You didn’t question it. If you wanted to be able to put food on the table, you just did it. I started thinking about my question and how silly it had been. I’d grown up in a comfortable home with not even a whiff of want, much less poverty. I’d approached life with the view of the pampered—expecting the right to a myriad of choices, never having had to suffer or do something I loathed in order to make a few dollars for my family. I realized how fortunate I’d been. Or unfortunate, perhaps, as I didn’t appear to have as much figure-it-out spirit as my auntie Alice had. As much as I adored chicken rice, I’d never thought of trying to figure out how to make it. And there Auntie Alice was, curious about chicken rice, then questioning hawkers or professional cooks she met, trying to figure out on her own how to put the dish together.

  The chicken, by this point, was almost done. Auntie Alice grabbed a chopstick and poked it through the bird at its thickest part. “If there’s no blood, then the chicken is cooked,” she said. With no blood in sight, she hoisted the chicken out of the pot and set it aside to cool, saving the water it had been boiled in. Heating a large wok over high heat with a little bit of cooking oil, she tossed in the snipped-up chicken skin that she’d saved and started frying it. “You must fry until it’s crispy and all the oil has been extracted,” she said, swirling the sizzling skin around the wok as it became smaller and smaller. Once the bits of skin had gotten about as small, brown, and crispy as they were likely to get, she gently removed them, replacing them with minced garlic, shallots, and ginger, frying the combination until its heady smell started hitting our nostrils. Next, in went the uncooked rice, which had been washed and drained, and six knots of pandan leaves from my mother’s garden. Quickly, she fried up the mixture, trying her best to make sure that the rice grains were evenly coated, that the minced garlic, shallots, and ginger were getting distributed evenly. After just a minute or two, she moved the mixture to a rice cooker, added the cooking water from the chicken, and turned it on.

  As the rice cooked, Auntie Alice set about chopping up the now cooled chicken and making the soup. There was still some water left over from boiling the chicken; into it, she tossed some dong cai (about one to two teaspoons, by my sense of agak-agak) and began bringing that to a boil. “You can put some little cubes of tauhu [tofu] in the soup if you want,” she said, as she sliced up a few shiitake mushrooms to add flavor. Next, she heated a little bit of sesame oil in a wok, stir-fried some whole scallions in the oil until we could smell the scallions, then drizzled the oil over the cut-up chicken.

  Soon enough, the rice cooker button popped and we were ready to eat. The chicken was delicious and tender, just as it should be. And the rice and soup, though not as flavorful as MSG-laden restaurant versions, were divine. As I nibbled on the rice, Auntie Alice asked why I wasn’t eating much. “I need to lose weight!” I said, noting that I’d started to see an alarming rubbery tir
e around my waist as my year of cooking, bread baking, and eating progressed. “Aiyoh!” she exclaimed. “If you need to lose weight, that means people like us no need to eat already lah!”

  With that, I began to really tuck in. Auntie Alice smiled as she watched me. “Cooking ah,” she said. “If you do it with your whole heart, then it tastes good, you know. If you do it grudgingly, then better don’t do it at all.”

  I thought back to the meals I’d made, the meals I hoped to make. Whenever I’d been rushed or busy or just plain stressed about putting dinner on the table, there hadn’t been much enjoyment involved—making the meal was tiresome. If I tried to carefully yet quickly follow steps in a recipe, the food was often only okay, and the actual act of sitting down to eat always felt forced.

  Auntie Alice was right. I had slowed my life down so I could try to watch, to listen, to learn. And slowly, I hoped, I was learning to cook with my heart.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There is a moment in the lives of eighteen-year-olds in Singapore when panic inevitably kicks in.

  Singapore, a Commonwealth country, adopted the British school system decades ago, meaning that your entire academic career culminates in the taking of a single big exam at age eighteen. The A levels grade will determine which university you’ll attend. Or if you’ll be able to attend university at all.

  Now, this may seem unfair to those used to the American school system, where cumulative grades and academic performance dictate your college prospects. But for someone who tends to perform best only when there’s a fire ablaze under her butt, this Britty school system worked perfectly fine.

  For my two years in junior college (the equivalent of eleventh and twelfth grades in American schooling), I threw myself into a host of activities—debate club, of which I was president, representing my school in national oratorical and elocution competitions; and student government, where I, a social butterfly at age seventeen, was fittingly drafted for the social events committee. Schoolwork was important, of course, and I did fine. But it wasn’t until a few months before the A level examinations that I really turned my focus to my studies.

  Which is not to say that I turned my attention to studying per se.

  Faced with this killer exam, almost everyone I knew was spending hours and hours “mugging,” memorizing facts and essays that would answer the likely questions. This was particularly difficult for history, a subject in which we’d spent two years covering a wide range of topics—Singaporean, Mesopotamian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese history. Each year the exam entails writing long essays in response to five or six questions over the course of three hours. It was insanity to try to commit all of this information flawlessly to memory in order to answer just six questions—or so we thought. Kevin, my food-obsessed best friend, and I had a far better idea. Through a friend who’d recently done the A level history exam himself, we’d gotten our hands on a thick stack of papers on which thirty years of the exam questions, drafted each year in Cambridge, U.K., were printed. So we poured our energies into creating a giant chart on which we mapped out the questions asked since the early 1970s. Inevitably, a pattern emerged. It was like that exhilarating moment in The Matrix when all suddenly becomes clear. Instantly, we felt, we could see the exact sequence of questions that were asked every few years—and we could see what questions were likely to appear on our exam.

  Oh, we had the best of intentions—initially. We’d mapped out thirty questions we should really focus on, and then a shorter list of fifteen, should we find ourselves with less time to study, and then an even shorter list of ten. And in case we found ourselves truly desperate and short on time, we’d made a list of six questions that we were almost certain would appear. Preparing only for those six questions would be foolish, we told ourselves. Yet weeks rolled by, and after cramming for our other exams, Kevin and I suddenly found ourselves at 2:00 A.M. the morning of our A level history exam, on the phone, hopped up on much too much Chinese tea, adrenaline and terror pumping through our veins, saying the words “Okay, I guess we have no choice. Which are the six questions again?”

  The junior college cafeteria the morning of the exam was dark, lit only by the grayish glow of a few fluorescent lights. Huddled over the sea of lunch tables were our fellow classmates in powder blue Catholic school uniforms, all flipping through pages of notes with silent, frantic energy. “Oh my god, you guys are so dead!” Nette said as she surveyed our ashen looks, surmising that we’d stayed up all night and in the end done what we’d said we’d only turn to as a last resort: really focus on just six questions. Perhaps she was right. Our entire futures hung on a little chart that we had plotted out. What had we been thinking? Could this be the end of our academic careers? I steeled myself. We had believed in our chart. And our methodology had been thorough. Over and over, we had examined the pattern. There was a recurring sequence that simply could not be ignored. There was no way we could be wrong. Ignoring Nette, we flipped through our notes one last time before slowly trudging up the stairs to the examination room, a calm dread lacing every second. Finally, the moment came. I sat down at my square, gray desk and flipped over the exam to look at the questions. And immediately, I had to quell the urge to scream.

  Our chart had worked—we had been right all along. Needless to say, we sailed through the exam. I scored an A. Kevin and I became heroes in our little circle. And this would be a tale of glorious triumph that we would share for years with anyone willing to listen.

  It was this sometimes unorthodox approach to studying, to rigid Singapore life, that always made me feel slightly out of step at home, however. Particularly when it came to my father’s somewhat by-the-book family.

  Whereas I had busied myself thwarting the Singapore school system, my auntie Leng Eng was a bastion of success within it. Having started teaching in her late teens at Singapore Chinese Girls’ School, Auntie Leng Eng worked her way up to vice principal, overseeing the entire primary school before retiring. She had terrified me when I was a child. Her generally stiff demeanor with just a whiff of sternness always made me feel that I was doing something wrong. Or that if I was merely thinking something wrong, she’d know right away. Now, when she invited me over for tea, I was a little apprehensive.

  “So how are the cooking lessons going?” Auntie Leng Eng asked, once we’d settled into cushy chairs in her neat, high-ceilinged living room and the green tea had been poured.

  “Good, very good! Auntie Khar Imm is a really wonderful teacher,” I said. “I’m really learning a lot.”

  Auntie Leng Eng nodded with just the slightest smile. I felt heartened that she appeared to approve.

  “When we were young,” she began, “we used to dread the times when your ah-ma was going to make something, because it meant that we were going to be very busy. When she was making dumplings, we had to clean all the bamboo leaves. She would soak them in a big bucket, and I would sit there and have to wash leaf after leaf after leaf. Whenever she made anything, it would be by the hundreds, because she would be giving them to all the neighbors, the relatives, and all her friends. Later on, when the neighbors knew that she made such wonderful dumplings, they would place orders with her. If I’m not mistaken, she would make them by the thousands.”

  “Daddy never helped?” I asked, instantly drawing an incredulous look from Auntie Leng Eng.

  “They were young,” she said kindly. “Most of the time, I was doing the helping.”

  After a short silence, Auntie Leng Eng softly added, “She never thought of passing on recipes at that time. We were all young. We were all very young, still schooling. Later, when I started work, she realized that I was very busy, so she never actually told me, ‘Oh, you better come and learn because I won’t be around all the time.’ ”

  The helping truly stopped when Auntie Leng Eng married, moved into her own home, and quickly had two young children to raise. “I just enjoyed the food,” she said, smiling. “Every time she was done making she would ring me up and say, ‘Oh, I’ve d
one this—you come and collect!’ Then we all just enjoyed the eating.”

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like, growing up around all that cooking. I felt a fierce wistfulness that Auntie Leng Eng, who didn’t cook at all herself, had never learned to cook from her own mother, whom I was admiring more and more as I spent more time learning her recipes. As I started to dwell on what a waste that had been, I realized I had been guilty of the reluctance to learn, too. I’d been in my Tanglin ah-ma’s home many times as a child—and not once had I volunteered to help in the kitchen or expressed any desire to learn anything. Anne Tyler and Ernest Hemingway were far bigger heroes to me than my own grandmother at the time.

  “Your ah-ma was very generous, you know,” Auntie Leng Eng continued. “In the nineteen seventies, we had a neighbor who gave birth to a baby with, what’s that condition where there’s a lot of water in the brain? Hydrocephalus? His head was very big. The doctors predicted that he wouldn’t live very long, and he had to undergo several operations. The mother already had a daughter, and she didn’t want to look after him herself, so at that time the lady approached Ah-Ma to say, ‘Can you look after my baby for me?’ Ah-Ma was already looking after Uncle Ah Tuang, but she took this baby in also.” Once the baby was in my grandmother’s home, she kept him bundled up in a lengthy sarong fashioned into a mini-hammock and suspended from the ceiling by an elasticized length of rope in the middle of the living room. “Everybody was helping to rock him,” Auntie Leng Eng said. “He became everybody’s baby.”