A Tiger in the Kitchen (24 page)

“It’s getting late. I shouldn’t bother you anymore,” I said, starting to pick up our teacups to bring into the kitchen.

“No need, no need,” Auntie Leng Eng said, gesturing for me to stop clearing up. “My maid will take care of it.”

As I gathered my belongings, however, Auntie Leng Eng motioned for me to wait. Uncle Paul, her husband, disappeared for a moment, returning with a flat woven basket the size of a large bicycle wheel. “Your ah-ma when she died gave me the millstone that she used to grind rice into flour, but I didn’t have room for it, so we gave it away,” Auntie Leng Eng said, chagrined. “But this, I kept.” Around this basket, my Tanglin ah-ma had gathered her children, and together, they had made
tangyuan,
the glutinous flour dumplings served in a lightly sweetened soup as a dessert or snack on special occasions. Because of its roundness, the dumpling is symbolic of unity of the family. And my grandmother used to have her children sit around the basket. Each would be assigned a section; each had to fill his or her section with the tiny white balls of dough. It was an activity even my father, the firstborn son, was roped in to do. Family is family, after all.

I lay my hand flat on the basket; it was cool to the touch. And I imagined my family. My auntie Leng Eng, my uncle Soo Kiat, and my father, whom I’d always believed had never cooked a moment in his life, gathered around the basket, carefully rolling little white balls, making unity dumplings, bound in a circle.

My mother’s side of the family was getting ever more enthusiastic about my quest.

“You
must,
” I kept hearing over and over, “learn your ah-ma’s
ngoh hiang
!”

As soon as any of my mother’s relatives heard about my cooking lessons, anyone who’d ever sampled my maternal grandmother’s cooking immediately ordered me to put
ngoh hiang
on the list. The dish, whose name is Hokkien for “five spices or fragrances,” is a summer roll that’s filled with a mélange of minced shrimp, mushrooms, pork, scallions, and crunchy water chestnuts, and flavored with salt, white pepper, and Chinese five-spice powder. The rolls can be steamed or deep fried—I don’t think I need to say which version I prefer. Their origin is Hokkien, the dialect group of my mother’s family, which originally came from Xiamen, a now cosmopolitan coastal city in southeastern China, and my maternal grandmother was well known for hers.

As soon as Auntie Alice could gather us together, she and I were back in my grandmother’s kitchen with
ngoh hiang
ingredients at hand. I’d loved eating
ngoh hiang
as a child, but by the time I was a teenager, my grandmother had all but stopped cooking, preferring to leave it up to the maids to take care of things in the kitchen. In New York, I’ve ordered
ngoh hiang
whenever I’ve seen it on the menu at Simpson’s restaurant, where he calls it Malaysian wedding rolls. But it had been more than two decades since I’d had homemade versions. My mouth began to water as I thought of the rolls, crunchy on the outside from a little deep frying of the bean-curd skin wrapper yet soft on the inside and bursting with the complex taste of five spice powder, a combination of star anise, cinnamon, ground fennel seeds, cloves, and pepper that’s supposed to give you a flavor bomb of sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy all at once.

Once again, Auntie Alice had requested the presence of Erlinda, my mother’s maid, as sous chef. Meekly, we sat by the kitchen counter as we watched my ah-ma direct her to
chop small small! Aiyoh, no! Smaller!
By now, Erlinda knew the drill and was patiently barreling along. The chopping was accomplished fairly quickly and painlessly. When the half cups of scallions and shrimp and two cups of water chestnuts had been minced, Erlinda turned to the half cup of dried Chinese mushrooms, which had been hydrated in water and then drained, chopping those up finely as well. Auntie Alice and I flitted about, gossiping about our relatives. “Has Alvin set a wedding date yet?” I asked. My cousin, her second son, had recently decided to marry the woman he’d been seeing in Dongguan, China. They’d been dating for years, and we’d all been hoping this would happen. “No, but I’m going up there to see them and her parents soon,” she said with a hopeful wink.

Once everything was chopped up, the
ngoh hiang
making was a cinch. That morning my mother had gone to the tofu man in our neighborhood wet market—an open-air market where the freshest produce, fish, and meats are sold, an area that is hosed down so often that you can find yourself plodding through puddles as you shop—and purchased several large sheets of dried tofu skin. Under my ah-ma’s watchful eye, we had carefully used scissors to cut these starchy sheets into six-by-six-inch squares and gently wrapped the stack of squares in a slightly damp towel to soften the sheets for easy folding. Taking out a large mixing bowl, we listened to Ah-Ma and mixed the minced pork, shrimp, scallions, water chestnuts, and mushrooms together, then added six teaspoons of corn flour and two teaspoons each of five-spice powder, white pepper, and salt.

The mixture looked good—it smelled great, too. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other, wondering how we would
agak-agak
this one to figure out whether it needed anything more. Ah-Ma pushed us aside to get at the bowl. I could practically see her thinking,
Novices!
Grabbing the mixing bowl, she pressed a finger to the meat and shrimp mixture, then stuck her finger into her mouth, tasting it. “Aiyoh, Mummy ah—cannot like that lah!” Auntie Alice cried out. “It’s raw meat! You’re not supposed to taste raw meat like that!” Ah-Ma just waved her away, instructing me to do the same. The way I saw it, I had a choice: face
E. coli
or face my grandmother’s wrath. The decision was pretty clear. Gingerly, I pressed my own finger to the meat, then licked it. I couldn’t really taste anything. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell my grandmother that and risk having to try again. “
Mmm,
it tastes good,” I said, smiling way too broadly. Auntie Alice winced, then leaned over and whispered, “Well, you can always just wash your mouth out, in case there’s bacteria.”

Now that the mixture was perfect—going by Ah-Ma’s
E. coli
–inducing test and my unsubtle fakery—we were ready to start wrapping. Ah-Ma took a slightly softened square, placed about five tablespoons of the meat-shrimp mixture on it, forming a five-inch log, carefully folded the delicate skin over the log, rolled it up, and sealed it. Because the skins were just slightly damp, the rolls sealed easily. Then she gestured for an oiled plate to be brought to her and set the roll on it, moving on to the next
ngoh hiang.
Auntie Alice and I joined in, rolling with such immediate ease that my ten-year-old cousin Matthew, who had set aside his homework and been watching us intently, asked, “Can I try one?” This was a little unconventional for a ten-year-old boy in Singapore—cooking barely interested ten-year-old girls—but he’d been watching the hive of activity, the barking, the chopping, the mixing, the rolling, all afternoon now. I could see why he might want in on the action. “Sure,” we said, moving aside to make room for him at the counter. The boy, of course, turned out to be a
ngoh hiang
rolling whiz, applying the same focus and care to folding up these summery rolls that he did to creaming his younger brother at yo-yo stunts. “Look at Matthew,” my beaming Auntie Alice said to Ah-Ma. “He’s so clever!” I couldn’t tell who looked prouder, Matthew, my grandmother, myself, Auntie Alice, or Matthew’s mother, Auntie Donna. Somehow, this was a moment I’d not envisioned happening. I wondered if we might just have the beginnings of a little Jean-Georges on our hands.

With so many hands at the counter, in no time we had almost twenty rolls on various plates. “You can steam it or fry it,” Ah-Ma said. “Or you can steam and then fry it.” Since we weren’t sure whether we would eat all of them that day, we decided to steam up the lot and fry those that we thought we might eat, preserving the rest for leftovers. We started a wok of water boiling, set a steamer rack on top, and quickly cooked the rolls for about ten minutes, setting about half of them aside while we deep-fried the rest. And my grandmother’s
ngoh hiang
were as perfect as I’d remembered—lightly browned and crispy on the outside, with a tasty, crunchy filling on the inside. We sliced a few rolls into pieces and devoured them rapidly, saving a few for dinner.

By the time my kuku, whose home we were in, got back from work, we were almost ready to have dinner. All we were waiting for was the special treat he had ordered.

“You’ve never tried a Golden Pillow?” he asked incredulously.

I was flummoxed. Many thoughts ran through my head about what
exactly
a Golden Pillow might be—none of which I could share in front of Matthew or his seven-year-old brother, Zachary. I thought for a second. “Well,” I finally said, “I guess I haven’t!”

Soon enough, the Golden Pillow arrived—two, in fact. Each came in a box; Kuku carefully removed them one by one, placing each in a large bowl. I got my camera ready. The Golden Pillow turned out to be a bun about the size of a soccer ball. Using a pair of scissors, my uncle slowly snipped slits into the top of the bun. Steam instantly hissed out. Once the top of the bun had been cut open so that triangular slivers fanned out from the center like petals on a lotus flower, Kuku got to work on the star of the show—the bulging plastic bag of chicken curry that had been cooked within the bun as it baked. He snipped that open, and curry showered forth. “Eat it while it’s hot,” he said. We didn’t need to be told twice. Grabbing bits of the bun and scooping curry onto our plates, we instantly dug in. The bun was sweet and just slightly spongy, the curry was flavorful and not too spicy.

“You should bring this to New York,” Kuku said. “I think it would do well.”

Surrounded as I was by my young cousins, my aunties, my kuku, and my grandmother, who loved me dearly, New York couldn’t have felt farther away. And yet, there it loomed—the place that I now called home. The place I’d have to return to fairly soon.

Each time I went back to New York, however, I was returning with more and more of my true home. Bits of my family, dishes that I now knew how to make.

So, sure, the Golden Pillow could work in New York. But if not, I had a pretty mean
ngoh hiang
recipe.

A few days later, another “must” was fulfilled.

I packed up a few
ngoh hiang
as a gift and met my uncle Ah Tuang, the man who had grown up with my father, regarding him as a brother. I’d not known much about Uncle Ah Tuang except that my Tanglin ah-ma had taken him in and raised him as her own. The family had been telling me, “You must go and see the Emerald Hill house,” the town house in downtown Singapore where my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather had lived. They’d been forced to give up the home decades ago when the owner sold it just as the area was being redeveloped into a trendy stretch of bars and restaurants. As astute as my great-grandfather had been in business, he had never had the foresight to buy any property, even this very home, which had been offered to him by the owner. It is a regret that my father and his siblings harbor to this day.

The spacious, two-story town house at 53 Emerald Hill Road was where my family’s fortunes rose and fell. It was where my great-grandfather lived as he built his business, where his son would live as he squandered it. It was where my father lived as a young man, gathering up the courage to leave a comfortable teaching job to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and strike out in the business world. It was where my parents first lived after they married; it likely was where I, my father’s firstborn, was conceived.

I don’t remember much of this house, except that it had a large living room that opened onto a massive, open-air courtyard in the center. This was a handy form of ventilation for colonial-era row houses in Singapore. Uncle Ah Tuang parked as close to the house as he could get, growing increasingly excited as we got closer to the building. Tall, gleaming white, and pristine, the corner house was clearly well kept by a well-to-do family that seemed to have given it a recent paint job. “That window there—that was where the family lived when Cantonese Ah-Ma made everyone move upstairs!” Uncle Ah Tuang said, so excited to be back at the old homestead that he was jabbing at the air. “And here was where the drivers’ sheds were,” he noted, pointing to the side of the building as we walked around to the front. “Your great-grandfather used to have this big black car, and his driver slept and lived in this small shed on the side. There were several sheds there for drivers of other families. That’s where my dad stayed.”

Slowly, he explained that his father was a driver for a family in the neighborhood. He never married but wanted to have an heir—so late in life, when he heard of a woman in my Tanglin ah-ma’s
kampong
who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, he generously offered to adopt her child. That child was Uncle Ah Tuang. “My dad was very busy, so he couldn’t really take care of me,” Uncle Ah Tuang said. “So he asked your ah-ma to take care of me.” Naturally, Uncle Ah Tuang became part of our family. In fact, in my grandfather’s final years, he became the only person who would listen to his stories.

By the time Uncle Ah Tuang, who is more than twenty years younger than my father, joined the family, my grandfather’s selfishness had run its course. He’d given up the gambling, the drinking, and the womanizing. Unfortunately, his family’s patience with him had also run its course. “Nobody talked to him,” Uncle Ah Tuang said quietly. “I was his only friend—me and this stray cat that he loved. Wah, he really loved that cat, man.” Weakened by the vagaries of his youth, my gong-gong spent his waning days sitting on a chair in the living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “He had hemorrhoids, so he was only allowed to sit on this one chair,” Uncle Ah Tuang said. “He would just sit there all day and talk to me because I was the only one who would listen.”