A Tiger in the Kitchen (31 page)

I felt my face start to redden, but he was right. How could I possibly outdo the teacher? Perhaps this had been madness all along. Amid the laughter, Auntie Khar Imm leapt to my defense. “Aiyah, don’t listen to your daddy!” she said, smiling. “I’m sure it’ll be very tasty!”

The next morning Willin texted me. “How are you doing? Everything OK?”

The outpouring of my insecurity began. How would I ever compare? My aunties were phenomenal cooks. My grandmother had been a goddess in the kitchen. Why did I think I could do this?

“That’s the thing about being measured” against others, he immediately replied. “Since everyone knows they are great cooks, you have nothing to lose if you don’t cook as well. Everyone knows you don’t cook like that daily unlike them but if you do, everyone will be amazed. Either way, you win, so no sweat!”

Willin’s words would ring through my head for the rest of the day, as I chopped, steamed, stirred, and boiled. I was so frazzled that at one point I peeked out to the dining room and noticed that not only was my sister sitting at the table wrapping
mandoo
but my father and Mike had joined in the process as well. I had never seen my father cook in my life. Just as I started to tear up, my dad showed me one of his dumplings; it was a
mandoo
wrapper filled with spicy orange
otah
filling instead of pork and cabbage. “I’m calling it
jiao-tah,
” he said, referring to the Mandarin word for dumplings—
jiaozi
—and combining that with
otah
. “I think it’s going to be a hit!”

As the afternoon raced by, I felt like I had everything under control. Then, at 5:00
P.M.
, with guests arriving just two hours later, I suddenly noticed that my massive pot of salted vegetable and duck soup wasn’t boiling. This would be because I had completely forgotten to start the process—the duck wasn’t even in the pot. The salted plum and tamarind leaves were still on the counter. I could not believe it. This was a process that should take at least two hours, more if you wanted your soup to be flavorful. I started to feel shooting pains in my head. I couldn’t believe I had screwed up one of the compulsories. Ignoring my second braised duck, I turned my attention to the soup. How could I get it to be more flavorful in this shorter period of boiling? In a panic, I tossed in extra chunks of smashed ginger, extra tamarind leaves, an extra sour plum. It would just have to do. By the time this was done, I checked back in on my duck to find that its skin had burned through and was firmly stuck to the wok. This was turning out to be nothing short of a disaster.

Right about then, I noticed the piles of softened clear vermicelli and sliced cabbage, carrots, bean curd, and shiitake mushrooms that I had scattered about the kitchen counter in little bowls. The
chap chye
! Just a few weeks earlier, I had begged my Auntie Alice for some time in her busy schedule before she flew to Dongguan to spend Chinese New Year with her second son. I’d wanted to learn to make my mother’s family’s
chap chye,
a dish of mixed vegetables and tofu with clear noodles that’s eaten for luck during the New Year festivities, but my mother, crazed with school homework, had been too busy to teach me. The dish is easy enough to make—the prep is what takes the most time. But with my soup catastrophe, a slightly burned duck, and the trauma of hard-boiled eggs that weren’t peeling right since I hadn’t boiled them long enough, I was in no frame of mind to set all that aside and whip together
chap chye
. I considered skipping it altogether—we did have an awful lot of food on the table. What was one dish less?

“
Chap chye
must eat one!” my mother clucked. She was right—it was a good luck dish. In fact, during Chinese New Year, my mother often adds
fu chook
, a black fungus that looks exactly like clumps of human hair, to her
chap chye
for added luck. (The name of the fungus sounds like the Chinese word for prosperity.)

Even so, I simply could not muster the energy to pull together a dish of
chap chye
. Standing in the kitchen, I began to understand how it must feel to be on the precipice of a meltdown. My head was pounding. A film of sweat coated my entire body. My T-shirt had glued itself to my skin. My hair was a tangled mess bundled up into a raggedy ponytail. From the way my mum was looking at me, I could tell I had a manic look in my eyes. “Go up and change,” she said, waving me out of the kitchen. So I took a break, putting on a cheery pink floral Tracy Reese blouse and a comfortable black skirt. I washed my face, combed my hair, and spritzed on a few pumps of Paris by Yves Saint Laurent, the perfume I’ve worn for years to job interviews and major meetings—situations in which I aim to walk in feeling as if I own the world. With a dash of lip gloss, I was looking halfway normal, so back down to the kitchen I went.

My mother was at the stove this time, whizzing about quickly and surely, grabbing bits of cabbage, carrots, and vermicelli, and flinging them into the wok with the confidence of Rachael Ray. Despite her many protestations over not really knowing how to cook, of course, she did all along. And it was lovely to watch. I was stunned—and very grateful. With her stepping in, the
chap chye
would be made, after all. She even tossed in bits of the good luck fungus, which I’ve loathed and avoided for years but certainly didn’t mind in the least this Chinese New Year.

Biting my lip and feeling completely terrified, I began setting dishes out on the table. There were my two braised ducks—one looking okay, the other looking charred and a little too caramelized. The gravy for the duck was peppered with tofu and chunks of mushy yellow bits from several disintegrated hard-boiled eggs. I’d not boiled them long enough, making them impossible to peel cleanly. My grandmother’s chicken curry had turned out to be a bit of a disaster. I had used canned coconut milk instead of fresh to save the step of squeezing the milk out in cheesecloth. This meant that the much more concentrated canned milk made the gravy incredibly thick; instead of it being like a thick soup, it was a little like ectoplasm. And the salted vegetable and duck soup—I had no idea how it tasted. I was just hoping for the best.

I did, however, stand by my
otah,
my
mandoo,
my gambling rice, and the pork adobo, a dish that I love to make in my Brooklyn home, which I’d added to the mix.

The moment my family arrived, I hid in the kitchen, peeking out periodically.

First Uncle Soo Kiat circled the dining table, then Uncle Ah Tuang, who enthusiastically pointed at the salted vegetable and duck soup, saying, “Good, good—you made this. This one is a
must
.” Auntie Khar Imm’s eyes widened when she saw the spread. “Ma ah, these are all your dishes!” my cousin Jessie exclaimed.

Among all the guests, however, there was a face I wasn’t familiar with. It was a woman my family called
Niajeh
, a cousin of my Tanglin ah-ma’s who had grown up with her and cooked with her. The moment I saw her, I grew even more terrified. Niajeh was a legendary cook, and she had known my grandmother. How could I possibly measure up?

Willin’s words, however, piped through my mind. There was nothing more I could do. The dishes had been made. I went out to watch everyone eat.

“This one, only okay,” Uncle Soo Kiat said, pointing at the gambling rice. “But this one,” he added, gesturing to the
otah,
“very good!” I started to feel relieved. I was so afraid that I could barely eat, but as I sat at the long table in my family’s garden, watching my aunties and uncles—even Niajeh—wolfing down my
otah,
my duck, going back for seconds, I started to feel like perhaps I hadn’t screwed up. More important, I realized that the point hadn’t truly ever been the food.

There was my family, several branches that had been fractured over time, rarely spending time with one another, sitting around a dinner table, everyone thoughtfully chewing and picking apart each dish. I watched as my father held court, my sister flitted about, seeing if anyone needed refills of wine or water, and Mike could not stop eating. Even my mother, who had been adamant about not seeing my father’s family ever again in the wake of the divorce, was smiling.

I realized that I was glad—no, I was thankful that I had come home.

As the meal wound down, Uncle Soo Kiat started telling me about Niajeh and her amazing
mee siam,
the Malay noodle dish that’s spicy and sour all at once. “It’s the Indian kind of
mee siam,
” he said. “You really cannot find it anywhere else now.”

“I’d love to learn,” I said.

“Well, she lives in Australia. Maybe you should go there next!”

I wasn’t sure what the future held, if a
mee siam
adventure in Australia was in the cards. All I knew was that, for one night, we were there, together, eating a meal culled from the women who had made me—my mother-in-law, my auntie Alice, my auntie Khar Imm, my mother, my ah-ma, my Tanglin ah-ma.

As my aunties left that night, I gave them long hugs good-bye. And when Niajeh asked for Tupperware to bring leftovers home, I almost teared up once again.

“When will you come back?” my aunties asked.

I said I wasn’t sure.

“Thank you,” I finally told Auntie Khar Imm. “Thank you for everything.”

“No need lah,” she said. “You passed already.”

EPILOGUE

I was leaving Singapore with a heavy heart this time. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. But at the same time I knew I’d learned so much that I’d be carrying bits of my family back with me to Brooklyn. And this included bird’s nest soup, something that I’d never thought I’d be eager to learn.

For decades, this clear, sweet soup with floating bits of gelatinous “bird’s nest,” which look alarmingly like clumps of cloudy phlegm, had been the bane of my days in Singapore. Bird’s nest is not cheap—the Chinese fervently believe in the healing properties of the soup, which is eaten hot or cold, usually as a dessert. My mother always says it’s what keeps skin looking youthful, and it restores the body’s energy. As a result, I usually see a bowl of it on my bedroom table the very morning after I arrive from the long journey between New York and Singapore. (For a while, during my teenage years, my mother took to believing that the body best absorbed the bird’s nest if you drank the soup while half asleep; she took to rousing Daphne and me at ungodly hours of the early morning and attempting to shove spoonfuls of it into our mouths even before we had time to fully open our eyes.)

Beautiful skin and great health, however, is still never enough to get me to finish the bowls of it she makes without complaining bitterly. The idea of eating what essentially is birds’ saliva is simply not worth the Shangri-la youthfulness it supposedly offers.

As my year at home drew to a close, however, I realized that my time ahead in New York was devoid of bird’s nest soup. The euphoria I thought I’d feel wasn’t there. Instead, there was a pang. “Mommo ah,” I said one afternoon. “Can you teach me how to make birds’ nest?” If she had been sitting on a chair, I’m certain my mother would have fallen off it. “You sure?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I should learn.”

The process of making bird’s nest soup was simple—you need, in essence, just four main ingredients: water, bird’s nest, rock sugar, and pandan leaves. My mother adds a little ginseng to hers for added health benefits, but it’s really not necessary. “You soak the bird’s nest in cool water for half an hour to one hour,” she said, speaking slowly so I could write everything down. “Until the hairs all come out—once they’re loosened then you take tweezers and you pluck all the hairs out.” This seemed like a very essential step—I suddenly thought of all the mornings when I had wailed and complained whenever she’d tried to foist this soup on me. I now realized how difficult it had been. I remember watching her bent over a bowl, squinting hard into a semi-clear glob for long stretches, tweezers in hand, meticulously pulling out hair after hair. My mother always was driven in this task; she would only pause now and then to quickly rub her tired eyes. I had always chosen to ignore this whenever I saw it—if I didn’t think about her painstakingly preparing the bird’s nest, I wouldn’t have to think about eating it in my very near future.

“After all the hairs have been plucked out, you drain it and ‘wash it clean,’ ” she said. “Then you put the bird’s nest, three to five pieces of pandan leaf, and eight or nine small pieces of ginseng into a pot and put enough water to cover it—just boil over a small fire for half an hour. Toward the end, add rock sugar to taste.”

“How much sugar should I add?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

“Aiyoh, you don’t ask me how much lah—very difficult to tell you one!” she said. “Just until you think it’s sweet enough lah.”

It seemed simple enough, once the hair part had been dealt with, that is. “Oh, when you make it ah, make at least five pieces,” my mother said, noting how the nests were generally sold in bits that were about three inches long and about two inches wide. “You make just one or two—it’s just wasting time to make. Make more.”