Tuesday, May 23, 2006
A simple dish
I was at my grandmother’s for dinner the other day. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, since campus living and studying seemed to overwhelm just about every other aspect of my life. She came from Guangdong, as did my grandfather, and speaks the sei yap variation of Cantonese, though over the years much local slang has crept into her lingo. In my younger days I remember her loud booming voice (of which I inherited some) admonishing myself and my cousin for various infractions, though I never quite completely understood her. To this day, my knowledge of Cantonese remains patchy.
She lives with one of my uncle’s family in a simple 3-room HDB (public housing) flat, and she’s always had a maid to look after her. Amazingly, every maid that comes and goes finds a way to communicate with her in pidgin Cantonese, no mean feat considering that most of them came from Indonesia.
Coming to 90 years of age, in recent times she’s been in and out of hospital for a number of ailments, at times coming close to death but for the intervention of skilled doctors, a keen desire to live longer and generous doses of good old-fashioned luck. Her once heavy-set face has long since given way to folds of jowls and her hair, which used to be grey, is now predominantly white, but she occasionally displays her prowess in numbers at Blackjack or Mahjong. Once, even after coming out of hospital from a close-shave and still in a weakened state, she still had the presence of mind to meticulously count the stack of notes that my father gave her as her monthly allowance.
Which brings to mind my father’s reminiscence of his grandmother’s reputation at the market as a terror, someone who would remove the banana stumps from a bunch of bananas or the heads off prawns before weighing, and giving hell to any stall-holder who dared to question her questionable practices.
But back to dinner. Another amazing thing is how she managed to teach each maid to cook the dishes and make soup exactly the way that she used to. One dish that graced the table that evening was a personal favourite of mine and my father’s from those days. By culinary standards it was nothing spectacular, simply a haphazard stir-fry of diced long beans, tau kwa and chai poh (pickled turnip, I think) sprinkled with sliced red chillies, but since yours truly has a penchant for both crunchy and spicy stuff, this dish was the perfect combination of ingredients.
And I recalled the old place where she lived before this, before my grandfather passed away from lung complications. It was a pre-HDB, 4-storey block that never saw a new coat of paint after the first, designed with fully utilitarian intentions rather than aesthetic. There was an identical block opposite with a small open patch of overrun grass in between. A cracked cement path running down the middle branched off to the entrances, flanked by old gnarled pong-pong trees that deposited their fruit all over the place. It was in this grass patch that my cousin and I kicked a soccer ball (or pong-pong fruits) around, played badminton or otherwise made merry. The whole place is now a grass patch, and the closest equivalent to this kind of public housing still in existence today can be found in the old parts of Tiong Bahru.
A large drain canal ran on the side of these 2 blocks, with a smaller canal running perpendicular to it just outside the balcony of my grandmother’s unit, which faced the opposite side of the grass patch. Not exactly river-side living, but at least there was the smell of the sea. Sort of.
And inside it was congested. 1 living room, 2 small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen, and it was in this tiny kitchen that the extended family took turns to have dinner. Once the foldable wooden table was opened and people sat around it to eat, there was hardly any space for anyone to walk in or out. I always remember the place with a heavy yellowish tinge, dimly illuminated by a lonely lightbulb in a quaint lampshade overhead. Electrical sockets were solid affairs in cast brown bakelite on thick wooden boards, and there was even one of those old style cupboards specifically meant for plates and utensils and for keeping food, the kind where the doors had some green netting to keep out flying insects and the legs stood in metal dishes filled with water meant to trap crawling insects. If anyone can remember what they were called, do shout it out.
It was on that same foldable table in that tiny kitchen that I saw this familiar dish regularly. Food was never wasted, and any infractions were again met with admonishment from my grandmother. Even watermelon slices had to be eaten cleanly, arbitrarily defined as the resultant peel surface not being more than 50% red.
Of course, these thrifty habits have faded off, since my grandmother now lives a relatively more comfortable lifestyle. Still, I guess there’s a part of me that remembers where it all came from, when we’d pour the soup into the plate of rice and drink it off the plate to make sure every grain of rice was consumed.
“Ah Fai*, zong oi fan moh?” (Do you want more rice?)
“Mm oi lah, ngo ho bao” (No, I’m quite full already)
I still managed a few mouthfuls of diced long beans, tau kwa and chai poh though.
* That’s an abbreviation of my Cantonese name.
She lives with one of my uncle’s family in a simple 3-room HDB (public housing) flat, and she’s always had a maid to look after her. Amazingly, every maid that comes and goes finds a way to communicate with her in pidgin Cantonese, no mean feat considering that most of them came from Indonesia.
Coming to 90 years of age, in recent times she’s been in and out of hospital for a number of ailments, at times coming close to death but for the intervention of skilled doctors, a keen desire to live longer and generous doses of good old-fashioned luck. Her once heavy-set face has long since given way to folds of jowls and her hair, which used to be grey, is now predominantly white, but she occasionally displays her prowess in numbers at Blackjack or Mahjong. Once, even after coming out of hospital from a close-shave and still in a weakened state, she still had the presence of mind to meticulously count the stack of notes that my father gave her as her monthly allowance.
Which brings to mind my father’s reminiscence of his grandmother’s reputation at the market as a terror, someone who would remove the banana stumps from a bunch of bananas or the heads off prawns before weighing, and giving hell to any stall-holder who dared to question her questionable practices.
But back to dinner. Another amazing thing is how she managed to teach each maid to cook the dishes and make soup exactly the way that she used to. One dish that graced the table that evening was a personal favourite of mine and my father’s from those days. By culinary standards it was nothing spectacular, simply a haphazard stir-fry of diced long beans, tau kwa and chai poh (pickled turnip, I think) sprinkled with sliced red chillies, but since yours truly has a penchant for both crunchy and spicy stuff, this dish was the perfect combination of ingredients.
And I recalled the old place where she lived before this, before my grandfather passed away from lung complications. It was a pre-HDB, 4-storey block that never saw a new coat of paint after the first, designed with fully utilitarian intentions rather than aesthetic. There was an identical block opposite with a small open patch of overrun grass in between. A cracked cement path running down the middle branched off to the entrances, flanked by old gnarled pong-pong trees that deposited their fruit all over the place. It was in this grass patch that my cousin and I kicked a soccer ball (or pong-pong fruits) around, played badminton or otherwise made merry. The whole place is now a grass patch, and the closest equivalent to this kind of public housing still in existence today can be found in the old parts of Tiong Bahru.
A large drain canal ran on the side of these 2 blocks, with a smaller canal running perpendicular to it just outside the balcony of my grandmother’s unit, which faced the opposite side of the grass patch. Not exactly river-side living, but at least there was the smell of the sea. Sort of.
And inside it was congested. 1 living room, 2 small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen, and it was in this tiny kitchen that the extended family took turns to have dinner. Once the foldable wooden table was opened and people sat around it to eat, there was hardly any space for anyone to walk in or out. I always remember the place with a heavy yellowish tinge, dimly illuminated by a lonely lightbulb in a quaint lampshade overhead. Electrical sockets were solid affairs in cast brown bakelite on thick wooden boards, and there was even one of those old style cupboards specifically meant for plates and utensils and for keeping food, the kind where the doors had some green netting to keep out flying insects and the legs stood in metal dishes filled with water meant to trap crawling insects. If anyone can remember what they were called, do shout it out.
It was on that same foldable table in that tiny kitchen that I saw this familiar dish regularly. Food was never wasted, and any infractions were again met with admonishment from my grandmother. Even watermelon slices had to be eaten cleanly, arbitrarily defined as the resultant peel surface not being more than 50% red.
Of course, these thrifty habits have faded off, since my grandmother now lives a relatively more comfortable lifestyle. Still, I guess there’s a part of me that remembers where it all came from, when we’d pour the soup into the plate of rice and drink it off the plate to make sure every grain of rice was consumed.
“Ah Fai*, zong oi fan moh?” (Do you want more rice?)
“Mm oi lah, ngo ho bao” (No, I’m quite full already)
I still managed a few mouthfuls of diced long beans, tau kwa and chai poh though.
* That’s an abbreviation of my Cantonese name.
# posted by BloozeGit @ 3:22 pm 
