A Tiger in the Kitchen (25 page)

This was the first I’d heard of this. I’d been told only the stories of a loathsome, selfish man with an addictive streak. The weakened, lonely shell he became had never been discussed. Before I could dwell on it for long, however, Uncle Ah Tuang had bounded away, eager to show me more of the neighborhood. “This was where we used to play in the alley,” he said. “This was where the Pepper King lived. He was this really rich guy who owned a pepper empire. Or something.”

“Uncle Ah Tuang ah,” I began, suddenly thinking of a question I’d always wondered about, “my dad always says he and Uncle Soo Kiat were in a gang at Emerald Hill. Is that true?” His eyes widened, and a peal of boyish laughter immediately followed. “No lah, I don’t think so,” he finally said. “But they were young boys here long before I lived here—so I really don’t know.” (I made a mental note to ask my older family members when I saw them.)

“Did your dad ever tell you about the
meepok
man?” Uncle Ah Tuang asked. I shook my head. “It was the best
meepok
”—a tagliatelle-like noodle, tossed in a spicy sauce with fish balls, pork, and fish cakes—“in town, and the guy used to go through the neighborhood every day making this
tok-tok
sound. When you heard it, you’d have to run outside and order it. It was so good. I remember one time I was sick at home and your ah-ma bought some for me—
so
good.” I’d had a large lunch that day but was feeling hungry all over again. I was starting to see where my obsession with food might have come from.

“You know there used to be a gambling den in the house, right?” Uncle Ah Tuang said at one point. “Your ah-ma used to have her friends over to play
see-sek,
” the four-color card game.

“No!” I replied. My Tanglin ah-ma had been so scarred by my grandfather’s gambling, it floored me to think of her actually gambling herself, much less running any sort of pseudo-professional operation, even if it was to make a little money. So, both my grandmothers had gambling dens?

“Yah, and she used to make food for the gamblers—
pua kiao beng,
” he said. Gambling rice? I was intrigued.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“It’s basically rice that is easy to eat while you’re gambling. You fry up cabbage, pork belly, mushrooms, and some other things; then you mix it all together with rice and cook it in a rice cooker,” he said. “Very
shiok,
” Uncle Ah Tuang added, using the Singapore slang word for “feels good.” “You serve it in one bowl so gamblers can hold it in one hand and carry on gambling.”

“Is it hard to make?”

“Very easy—even I can make!” he said. “Your auntie Khar Imm can also make. Ask her to teach you lor.”
Pua kiao beng
was suddenly top on my list of dishes to learn.

As we rounded another corner, I finally asked the question I’d had on my mind. Uncle Ah Tuang had lived in my family home when my mother married into the Tans and moved in. I’d always wondered what happened between my mother and grandfather—had she really slapped him? Had that, perhaps, been the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage?

“Why did my parents move out of the house?” I asked. “Were they all really not getting along?” Uncle Ah Tuang, ever the peacemaker, ever the sprightly, jocular younger brother, paused for a moment. “Well . . . there was one really loud argument,” he said. “But I didn’t really hear what they were saying, and I didn’t know what was going on.

“Anyway,” he finally added. “It was so long ago.”

And he was right—it was a long time ago. The events back then had already shaped us into the people we’d become. And it all had led somehow to this moment on a Saturday, me and my uncle Ah Tuang circling the old neighborhood with the tropical afternoon sun beating down mercilessly, thinking about the Pepper King and the old
meepok
man while mincing over the footsteps of ghosts.

Back at home, I was inspired to try to cook some of these recipes I’d been learning. My mother had bought a duck, and so I set about making soup. My Tanglin ah-ma’s soup, by way of Auntie Khar Imm, that is. With my notebook by the stove, I slowly went through the steps—chopping up the salted cabbage, preparing the duck, tossing the ingredients in, and then leaving the concoction alone to “boil, boil, boil!”

Taking my first sips after the boiling was done, I thought,
Damn, this is not bad at all.
I packed the rest up in a thermos and dropped it off at Uncle Soo Kiat’s office the next day. “For Auntie Khar Imm to try,” I said. “See whether I pass or not.”

The next day, the verdict came. “Not too bad,” my cousin Jessie texted on behalf of her mum. “Just that not saltish.”

Not quite the reaction I’d hoped for. But it didn’t sound like a fail.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The first few times my family met Mike, they were perfectly polite.

Yes, he was a little older—our age difference spans fourteen years—and he was American, not some
guai
(Mandarin for “obedient”) Singaporean boy that they’d always hoped I’d end up marrying. But he was half Asian—Korean, to be specific—and that, in the end, did count for something.

And so they were perfectly accepting as we fell in love, got engaged, and began planning a wedding . . . until one day my father happened to be in Honolulu for business and suggested meeting Mike’s mother, who lives there. At the appointed cocktail hour, they met—my father and my future mother-in-law, Ai-Kyung Linster, a spunky, opinionated woman who unabashedly speaks her mind, often chasing a particularly feisty comment with “Korean women—we are all stubborn, you know!”

Though they were meeting for the first time without either of us there, drinks were going swimmingly. And then Mike’s mother decided to test the few Chinese phrases she knew on my dad, who was suitably impressed.

“How do you know Mandarin?” he asked.

“I lived in Shanghai when I was a kid,” she replied. “My grandfather was Chinese, you know.”

This, suddenly, changed
everything.

My dad immediately called my mother, barely able to contain himself. “Mike’s
Chinese
!” he said. And as soon as my mother could get off the phone with my dad, she called me, bellowing into the phone, “
Why
didn’t you tell us Mike’s Chinese?”

“Um,” I responded, “because he’s only one-eighth Chinese? Why does that matter?”

But of course, to my parents, who had hoped for the tiniest thread of kinship with the person who was marrying their firstborn, this mattered tremendously. And that was the moment Mike truly became a part of my family.

Mike’s mother understood this perfectly as well. She had been thrilled from the moment we met, seeing as how I was Asian, not
haole,
as the Hawaiians call Caucasians. And her acceptance was instantaneous. As we sat in her Honolulu living room shortly after we had gotten engaged, one of her first questions wasn’t about wedding planning or how work was going. Instead, she got right to the point: “When are you having a baby?” (I considered asking if it might be possible for her to let us get married first but thought better of it.)

It had been a few years since I’d seen her, Honolulu being something of a trek from New York City. So, leaving Singapore after about a month of cooking, I flew to Honolulu to meet Mike for a visit with his mother. Before I got there, he had told her about my cooking lessons in Singapore; by the time I landed, she was eager to corral me in her kitchen.

Although Ai-Kyung had emigrated to the United States from South Korea, just outside Seoul, she had spent several years in Shanghai as a girl when her parents worked for the Japanese Army’s medical units there. As World War II ended, the family went back to Korea. There, years later, she met a handsome, tall Iowa engineer who was building power plants in the country. The relationship ended up not working out, but from that union, Mike was born and brought back to Iowa. Ai-Kyung stayed on in Korea, moving to Honolulu a decade later when she married another American.

Whenever we saw her in Honolulu, we were treated like royalty. After having spent so many years away from Mike—they reunited only when he was in his twenties—she treasured every minute with him, the son she had watched grow up only in pictures his father had taken care to send to her every year around his birthday. As a result, even though I’d been in Ai-Kyung’s breezy apartment, which overlooks the famous Ala Moana shopping mall and the slender Ala Wai canal that outlines Waikiki, dozens of times before this trip, I’d always felt like a visitor in her home. Mike and I would perch on the best seats of the sofa—the ones with the fluffiest cushions, the best view of the television; Ai-Kyung simply wouldn’t let us have any others. Never would she let me clear plates off the table, help in the kitchen, or clean a single dish. “Charlie will do it,” she would say, waving to Mike’s half brother, who lived with her, gesturing for him to take care of it later on. And always, the cooking would already be done by the time we got there—she rarely got to see us, after all. And she probably didn’t think we wanted to waste any time watching her cook when there were picturesque beaches to be explored, tans to be worked on, sandy naps to be taken.

All this changed the moment she found out that I was learning to cook.

“Cheryl!” she cried when I walked in, grabbing me with her thin, strong hands, holding me to her in a firm, long hug. “You looking good! How are your parents?”

“They’re good!”

“Your sister? Not married yet?”

“No, no. Still single.”

There was a grimace. I could almost see her thinking,
Kids these days, I tell you.

“Mike says you learning how to cook? I bought some stuff to teach you,” she said, starting toward the kitchen. Clearly, I was to follow.

There was nothing bubbling on the stove this time, no smells of spicy Korean stews or Mike’s favorite—steak—to signal that dinner was on the cusp of being served. Instead, carefully arranged on the counter were various ingredients: shredded chicken, garlic cloves, large, bunched-up sheets of dried, black-green seaweed.

“Seaweed soup,” she said, holding up the crinkly sheets and waving them at me. “Korean recipe—good for women to clean the . . .
you know,
” she added, dropping her voice a few levels while pointing to her nether regions. “Good for making more milk after you have baby.”

I could see where this was going.

Before I could protest, Ai-Kyung was off and running. “You take three pounds of chicken—whole chicken—then you boil it in a big pot of water,” she said, holding up the bowl of chicken she’d prepped before we arrived. “Then you take the chicken out, drain the soup with a sieve, and you keep the water in the pot.” The chicken, by this point, had been shredded coarsely. The seaweed had been soaked in cold water to just the right softness and then cut into small pieces. “Don’t soak too long,” Ai-Kyung cautioned. “Just twenty to thirty minutes. You want it a bit crunchy, not mushy.” After soaking, “you massage the seaweed with your hand and rinse a couple times,” she said. Then she tossed four cloves of bashed garlic into the pot of reserved broth, brought it to a boil, and turned down the heat to let it simmer, adding a scant teaspoon of Hawaiian sea salt and one to two tablespoons of soy sauce. “You put one in first,” she said, pausing and raising her index finger to get my attention, “then you taste and see if you want more.” After that, she let the broth simmer for thirty to forty minutes, added the shredded chicken, seaweed, and a dash of sesame oil, and suddenly we had a simple, clear soup that tasted clean and comforting at the same time.

“Good for ladies,” Ai-Kyung said, as she watched me slurp up her soup, which was truly delicious. “After I gave birth to Mike, I had to take it every day. Make a
lotta
milk.”

While the very well-intentioned milk-making soup was perfectly lovely, there were other Korean recipes I had my eye on. Whenever Mike craved Korean food, he wanted two things:
kalbi,
grilled beef short ribs, and
mandoo,
pork and cabbage dumplings. Specifically, he wanted
his mother’s kalbi
and
mandoo.
The one time I’d tried to make
kalbi
at home in Brooklyn—with a recipe from the James Beard Award–winning Korean American chef David Chang of Momofuku fame, no less—Mike thought it was nice and all. But it just wasn’t his mother’s
kalbi.

Ai-Kyung, of course, was thrilled to hear this. “It’s so easy!” she said, laughing and turning away. I could tell she was touched to hear that Mike missed her food.

Naturally, the next afternoon when we arrived, there was a mound of beef short ribs on the counter. Working quickly once again, Ai-Kyung started on the marinade, mixing half a cup plus one tablespoon of sugar with one cup of water, three-quarters of a cup of soy sauce, two tablespoons of sesame oil—pausing for a moment to sniff at the bottle and say, “I hope this is sesame oil!” before laughing and moving on—one tablespoon of minced garlic, and one teaspoon of coarse sea salt. “Some people use mashed papaya or kiwi—makes it tender,” she stopped to say. “But I don’t like the papaya flavor. If you’re using papaya, though, mash it up before adding it in.” Many
kalbi
recipes call for apple juice as a tenderizing agent. Ai-Kyung, however, had a secret alternative. “I like guava juice,” she said, pouring half a cup into the marinade. Once she’d mixed in three coarsely chopped scallion stalks—“Green parts, too!”—and a one-inch piece of ginger, peeled and thinly sliced, the marinade was ready to go. “Put it in the fridge for seven hours or overnight,” she said, squinting at the clock and realizing that this meant we wouldn’t be able to eat until 10:00
P.M.
“Or at least three to four hours is fine.”