A Tiger in the Kitchen (17 page)

If I want? “How soon?” was the more appropriate question.

A few days later, Auntie Alice arrived at my Singapore home armed with two ducks and a bag of ingredients, and the tutorial began. First, we peeled and sliced galangal, peeled and bashed several garlic cloves, and measured out some sugar and dark soy sauce. (This sauce is thicker, much sweeter, and has a more intense flavor than regular soy sauce.) Then we cleaned the duck, which entailed chopping off its behind and head, carefully washing it inside and out, and snipping off as much loose skin as we could get to. (Duck skin is incredibly fatty and will make the sauce very greasy.)

For a moment of full disclosure, when I say
we,
in some instances this would actually mean my mother’s maid, Erlinda. Auntie Alice was whizzing through the steps so fast that she was directing Erlinda to chop off the duck’s skin, behind, and head, knowing that she would be much quicker at it than I would likely be. Auntie Alice had arrived with her one-year-old granddaughter, Bernice, in tow, after all. She had little time to spare.

Next, “we” mixed together some five-spice powder and salt and rubbed it all over the outside and inside of the duck. Then we stuck the duck in the fridge to let it marinate for at least two hours.

Once the duck was marinated and ready to go, we heated up the wok over low heat and added some sugar, stirring until it melted. Then we tossed in the sliced galangal and bashed garlic and stir-fried it until the mixture turned brown. Next, in went the dark soy sauce. Then we lightly rinsed off the duck and slid it into the wok. Using a metal spatula, Auntie Alice carefully coated the duck with sauce, turned it over, and poured enough water into the wok so that the liquid covered half the duck. Once the liquid came to a boil, we covered the wok.

Every fifteen minutes, we uncovered the wok and turned the duck over before covering it up again. As we waited for the duck to cook, Auntie Alice and I watched over Bernice, who had an endless curiosity about her surroundings, picking at invisible objects on the carpet, slipping her tiny feet into the massive wooden clogs my parents had bought in Holland decades ago.

Inevitably, of course, the question came. “You don’t want one yourself, meh?” Auntie Alice asked. Immediately, I launched into the same litany of excuses—I was too busy, Mike was too busy, I didn’t have family near me in New York, I was traveling too much. She didn’t want to press the issue, so instead she just let me watch Bernice play. It wasn’t as tiring as watching Giselle jump and sing ceaselessly, but I felt a tremendous responsibility nonetheless. If we looked away for just one second, who knew what Bernice would pick up off the floor and put into her mouth? I still wasn’t convinced I was up for this. No, I decided, at the moment, the freedom to go out to dinner—or Rome—on a whim and be able to stay up all night playing Scrabble was far more important. I understood my family’s concerns that, being so far away, I’d have no one to look after me when I was older, especially if Mike passed on first. Yet having a child remained far too abstract an idea for me still.

After fifty minutes to an hour, Auntie Alice pulled out a chopstick, showing me how to poke it into the fattest part of the duck to see how easily it would go through. The meat had been simmering so long that the chopstick pierced it with great ease; the duck was finally done. We let it rest for ten more minutes, and it was ready to serve. As Auntie Alice hoisted the duck out of the wok, it struck me: The whole procedure was so easy I started to feel cheated that I’d gone all these years without making Teochew braised duck.

But I needn’t have fretted, because just a few days later, when I was in my auntie Khar Imm’s kitchen, she hauled out two ducks and announced that
she’d
be teaching me how to make
lor ar
. Her method, which she’d learned from my Tanglin ah-ma, was a little different. Instead of using five-spice powder, Auntie Khar Imm used actual spices—whole star anise and cinnamon sticks, to be precise. And she used those only in the braising part, choosing to rub the duck inside and out with salt instead and letting it marinate—at room temperature—for a few hours.

Once the duck was sufficiently marinated, she carefully washed it inside and out—twice—to get rid of excess salt. Then she rubbed the inside of the duck with salt, stuffed it with four thick slices of blue ginger, and slid it into the wok, already bearing a simmering liquid of dark soy sauce, several rice bowls of water, star anise, cinnamon, and more blue ginger. While the duck simmered, Auntie Khar Imm prepared several hard-boiled eggs. “You can also put tofu into the gravy,” she said. As the simmering neared an end, Auntie Khar Imm pulled out a chopstick. She’d shown me her method of gauging the doneness of meat so many times that no explanations were necessary.

Hearing Auntie Khar Imm mention the eggs and the tofu immediately brought me back to the special meals of my childhood. Back then, I’d avoided eating the duck, but I’d loved drenching bowls plump with rice with the rich, dark gravy and devouring the rice with a hard-boiled egg and tofu that had been steeped so long in the sauce that it had turned the color of milk chocolate. My mother had never known how to make it—so it was a dish that I looked forward to whenever we visited my Tanglin ah-ma’s home.

And here I was, decades later, with not one but two braised duck recipes. Both were equally delicious; both were made and handed down to me with equal love and care.

Someday, perhaps, I might have someone to hand these recipes down to. The thought suddenly didn’t seem so terribly unappealing after all.

CHAPTER TEN

It was around this time I discovered my maternal grandmother is a liar. Well, it’s not that she
lies,
per se. It’s just that she has developed a selective memory.

Auntie Alice and I had decided to get to the bottom of our collective family history. One afternoon, we took a break from cooking and met in my grandmother’s bedroom, sitting on the floor at her feet as we plied her with questions.

That she’d lived a hard life was indisputable. All my life, though, I’d wondered why she’d made the decisions she had. Why marry my grandfather? Why bring his first wife and family over from China?

This much we had known: My grandmother had come of age during World War II. Just as she was blossoming into a young woman, the Japanese occupied Singapore, renaming it Syonanto and beginning a reign of terror that poisoned daily life. “I was afraid to go out,” Ah-Ma says in Hokkien. “We were always afraid that Japanese soldiers would rape us.”

It was around this time that a handsome man began calling. He worked in a coffee shop across the street and had befriended Ah-Ma’s brother. Soon he began coming by after work to play cards. Almost as soon, he began expressing interest in my grandmother’s hand in marriage. Fearing for her safety as a young, single woman during the occupation, my grandmother consented. “I was so afraid—just anyhow get married is safer lor,” she says, sighing. “Aiyah, I was so silly, everything also didn’t know.”

Fast-forward to the picture of my grandmother on her wedding day, dressed in white, wide-eyed and tentative, with the faintest of smiles; a tall, dark, older man, fourteen years her senior, the protector she had sought, towering next to her. Then fast-forward yet again to the moment of discovery—that the man she’d married had another wife, another family back in China. Instead of anger, instead of frustration, Ah-Ma felt only pity. “People in China,” she says, “they were suffering at the time.” Besides, her own father in Xiamen had had four wives, she says. She understood how love, or something like it, could be sometimes. And so she cleared out a room in their home for this other wife, sewed together new pillowcases for her, implored her husband to bring over his first wife. “I thought we could all live together,” she says. “I was so, so stupid.”

From the beginning, things were difficult. “I cooked for her to eat,” Ah-Ma says. The first wife, of course, only complained ceaselessly. Ah-Ma became an outsider in her own newlywed home. Finally, Ah-Ma moved out, and the first wife proceeded to lord over the home that once was hers. “Your marriage was so messy!” Auntie Alice suddenly exclaims. Her face is wrinkled in disgust at the hardships her mother had to endure. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have stood for it, you know,” she whispers to me, putting her hand to her face to shield her mouth.

But times, of course, were different. In 1940s Singapore, a young married woman with children had few options—especially if she was the second wife, even if she hadn’t known it at the start.

My grandfather started sporadically coming by to drop off provisions and cash for Ah-Ma and their growing family. Auntie Alice was born, then my mother. Then Auntie Jane and my kuku. It was difficult to determine when Gong-Gong would come. This is when the selective memory starts to kick in.
“Wah mana eh gi!”
Ah-Ma says of this time, saying she doesn’t remember much of what her new life as the exiled second wife was like. “My memory is that Papa rarely came back—right?” Auntie Alice asks softly. “He worked seven days a week. He didn’t have Saturday and Sunday off.” (Leaning over, Auntie Alice whispers to me, “I think she remembers—she doesn’t want to say.”)

“Aiyah,” Ah-Ma finally says. “If he wants to come, he comes. If he doesn’t want to come, he doesn’t come. I was very stupid before,” she adds quietly, sighing again. “But did I have a choice?”

Years went by, and Ah-Ma’s little family grew up. Auntie Alice suddenly remembers the one family outing her father took them on. “He came on a bicycle to fetch us. We went to have dim sum,” she says. “That’s the only outing I remember, you know. As a father figure, I don’t think there was much communication. But it was really a nice feeling, a once-in-a-lifetime outing with your parents.” Shuat Giau, the first wife, too, stopped by to see Ah-Ma. “I was in Primary Six, and she came to the house. I remember I opened the door and I didn’t even know what she was saying. But next thing I knew, I got slapped,” Auntie Alice says.

And then one day, my grandfather fell in the bathroom and hit his head. A few days later, he was dead. “People came to notify us, but Shuat Giau didn’t want us to attend the funeral,” Auntie Alice, then a teenager, says as her own memories return.

Privately, the second family mourned. And then Ah-Ma went to work; the neighbors’ laundry became her business. Auntie Alice began taking care of the household, cooking for her younger siblings, watching them after school. Instantly, this teenager became a young mother. “And then you started having gambling in the house, right, Ma?” Auntie Alice says. The selective memory kicks in again. “No lah, I don’t remember that,” Ah-Ma says. “Don’t write that down,” she adds, pushing my pen away. (Once again, Auntie Alice leans over and quietly says, “There
was
a gambling den in our house—but only for a few years.”)

The hardships this man had brought on Ah-Ma didn’t diminish her desire to see if he was okay, however. She missed him; she was curious. Shortly after Gong-Gong died, she went to a psychic with a reputation for being able to call up the souls of dead loved ones so the living could see how they were doing. The message was one that Ah-Ma would remember for decades. “Gong-Gong said, ‘Right now you are suffering, but your life ahead will only become better and better. I know you had a hard life, but don’t worry, you will have good days ahead. And this woman who made your life difficult, within three years, I will take her with me to the Other World.’ ”

Ah-Ma wasn’t sure what to make of it. But within three years of my grandfather’s death, his first wife died. And as for her own life, my grandfather had been right—it only got better and better. Her children all grew up and became successful professionals, making them all the more able to grant her the comfortable life she’d craved and had always, always deserved.

Ah-Ma was tired, the trip through a thicket of unwanted memories having exhausted this spry eighty-six-year-old.

“People need to have ups and downs,” Auntie Alice finally says, as we hug our good-byes. “It’s only if you have downs that you’ll get to have the ups.”

At this point, I was beginning to feel a change whenever I stepped back into my New York kitchen.

I’d approached meals, cookies, and certainly, breads with some degree of confidence before, but it was always laced with the unshakable fear that something was not going to work out. Or explode. Or perhaps even both. Each time I returned from Singapore, however, I was feeling this fear dissipate. The attitude from the first egg cracked, the very first stirrings, was gradually becoming one devoid of doubt. Things were likely to work out, I started believing—and even if they didn’t, well, so what? I could always try again. My looser approach was freeing, and amid the lack of fretting, I discovered that I was truly starting to enjoy cooking.

I was still making my way through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge. On the docket this time, however, was a bread that was anything but titillating. The last time I’d baked a bread, what emerged from the oven was a loaf of casatiello, a gorgeous hunk of Italian bread studded with salami and oozing with hot cheese. I’d started priding myself on being able to tackle focaccia, beautifully braided challah, breads that I’d never even contemplated making, much less producing versions people marveled at and couldn’t keep themselves from clawing.