A Tiger in the Kitchen (28 page)

I dejectedly began to wonder what they must think of this unruly, Americanized female. I also questioned whether I had any real connection with this place that had been my ancestors’ home.

Just then, however, the conversation steered toward Barack Obama. As the chatter took a slightly negative turn, someone stopped, gesturing toward me and shushing the others because they might be offending the New York girl.

Immediately, however, one of the ah-cheks piped up. “I know she’s American, but she still has black hair!” he said in Teochew. “She is still Chinese.”

Just how Chinese I was would be challenged the next day.

The village was a hive of activity the moment we arrived, once again in the chief’s plush car. The clan association’s great hall had been dressed up for the ceremony for our ancestors. Two massive lambs had been slaughtered, skinned, and were splayed on high benches near a massive altar bearing tablets noting our ancestors’ names. On top of each lamb was a large, skinned pig, splayed as if caught in a bizarre sex act. Flies were all around. I started to feel ill.

We were a curiosity, hailing from faraway Singapore—but I was the far bigger curiosity for many of the villagers. I was a woman, yet I was being shown some modicum of the respect that my father and other men were. I had traveled from afar, after all. And, while they weren’t exactly sure what I did, they knew I did something professional in glitzy New York. I shrugged off the questioning looks and decided just to act as if I belonged.

Michael took my father aside for a short conversation and my dad returned looking grim. “The donation now is a ‘suggested amount’ of at least 1,000 yuan,” he said. The figure was about 150 U.S. dollars—certainly far more than any amount that we would have considered a mere “token.” “What should we do?” I asked, feeling terrible, as this whole trip had been my idea. “No choice,” my father said, shrugging. “We just have to pay.” This “family” that we were seeking out and reconnecting with suddenly seemed like a bad idea to have in our lives.

Just then, however, the festivities started up.

Villagers packed into the great hall, women largely in the back or standing by the side, reserving the front rows for the men. The elders took turns kneeling on the ground, reading words off large sheets of thin pink paper. “They’re calling to our ancestors, asking them to join us,” my dad whispered. Just then, we both noticed a tall, skinny man at the center of the activity. Wearing a long brown robe, he looked like he was in his seventies or eighties, and he was dutifully obeying as the master of ceremonies called out various instructions, prompting him to get up, kneel, and make shows of respect on our behalf to our ancestors, who were, presumably, now present.

When this man turned around to face the audience, my father’s eyes grew massive. “He looks exactly like my father!” he whispered. “Quick! Take a picture!” The man became our new obsession. I sprang into action, snapping as many pictures as I could of him. I’d seen some pictures of Gong-Gong, and I could tell that my father was right. This man was a dead ringer for my grandfather. “Maybe my grandfather had another son in China before he left?” my father wondered. I pondered the possibility; it wasn’t inconceivable.

As we watched the ceremony unfold, with me understanding very little of it, my father grew very quiet. And when it ended, we wandered the halls of the association, looking for my faux grandfather. Finally, we found him in a back room, sitting down to eat with a large group of men. Gingerly, my father approached him, introducing himself.
“Wa see Tan Soo Liap—Singapore lai eh,”
he said, gesturing to ask whether we could have a picture taken with him. The man raised his eyebrows, looking puzzled as he touched his hand to his chest, the universal signal for “A picture with me?” My father scooted behind him before he had a chance to change his mind as I whipped out my camera. “Smile!” I said in Mandarin. And the man did—displaying a broad cavity containing only two teeth. I was shocked. My doppelgänger grandfather was different, after all. My actual grandfather had had access to great dental care in Singapore and had a handsome smile throughout his life. I was beginning to see the life he—and possibly I—would have led had my great-grandfather never left.

While the village elders had planned an elaborate lunch of lamb, lobster noodles, and pricey fish maw, my father had other ideas. He’d struck up a conversation with a young woman holding a toddler while waiting outside for the ceremonies to start. The woman and her family were regular villagers who couldn’t afford to be part of the feast that was under way. Instead, her family was going to make
char kway teow,
a stir-fried flat noodle that I’d grown up eating in Singapore. Would we like to join?

My father and I followed this woman, wending down narrow lanes, dusty and quiet. Her name was Tan Neo Soon—we all had the same last name in this village, it turned out—and she was just twenty-two. With bright eyes and an impish smile, Neo Soon looked far younger than her age. She appeared to belong more in a mall on a Saturday, trying on lipstick with her high school girlfriends. Instead, she was here in a small Chinese village, balancing a three-year-old son on her hip and nipping away to a nearby room that was her makeshift work studio whenever she could. There, she unpacked large boxes of plastic and glass parts, assembling coffee presses by hand to be sold in larger cities nearby.

When we got to her home, my father and I suddenly felt like giants. Neo Soon, her husband, her sister, her parents, and her grandmother all lived in a row house so tiny even Hobbits would not have found it a luxury. Their living room, I realized, felt slightly bigger than my closet of a kitchen in Brooklyn, which I often complained about. Their “kitchen” was in an open-air back alley, next to a well from which all their water came. Neo Soon’s son sat on the stone paving of this alley, playing with a utensil, while his father started on lunch. “He’s the one who cooks,” Neo Soon said sheepishly. “He learned from his mother.” Neo Soon and her husband, Cai Chu Ju, had met while working in a stainless steel factory years ago, and when they’d gotten married, they’d made the unconventional move of having her husband—who was from another village, as indicated by the fact that his last name was Cai and not Tan—move in with her family instead of the other way around. This was simply a practical matter; her family had more space. I looked around at the miniature living room and the alleyway kitchen and wondered what “less space” looked like.

Working quickly, Chu Ju chopped a whole cabbage into slender, long slivers, heated up a little cooking oil in a wok, and stir-fried those slivers. After they’d gotten a little soft, he added a bag of cooked noodles and stirred it all together before adding soy sauce, a smidge of monosodium glutamate, and a few shakes of a chocolate brown powder I’d never seen in any of my aunties’ kitchens. “What’s that?” I asked, pen poised, notebook in hand.
“Sha cha fen,”
Chu Ju replied, showing me the packet. I continued to be perplexed—
sha
is the word for “sand.” I had no idea what
cha
was, and
fen
is powder. When my father saw me panicking, he swooped in to help, taking off his glasses so he could squint at the ingredients, listed in Chinese characters. “Well, I think it’s five-spice powder mixed with onion powder, garlic powder, ground peanuts, and a few other things,” he finally said. It also turned out to be the main flavoring agent for the noodles, which were done in a matter of seconds. Once the ingredients had been adequately heated through and stirred, lunch was ready.

Their tiny dining table was only large enough for three people to comfortably sit down to eat—and Neo Soon insisted I sit the moment the noodles were set out, practically shoving me onto the seat when I began to politely resist. With her grandmother, sister, and husband watching carefully, I took a small bite of the noodles. It wasn’t the most flavorful dish I’d had. I imagined trying it back in my New York kitchen jazzed up with shrimp or slivers of pork belly perhaps. And maybe a few dashes of oyster or chili sauce. In Neo Soon’s home, however, I realized they had to make do without these accoutrements. This was all they had—and it wasn’t much.
“Hen hao chi ah!”
I said to Chu Ju, praising his food. Then I wiped my mouth and said I wasn’t very hungry after all, gesturing to Neo Soon’s grandmother to please sit down and eat. The platter of noodles wasn’t huge, after all—and there were many mouths to feed that day.

Standing out on the road, my father reflected. “My grandfather’s wish was to come back to the village and die here,” he finally said. “I told my grandfather I had come back for him.”

I nodded, silently. All these years later, we had fulfilled his wish.

Surveying motorbikes and cars racing by in terrifying zig-zags, my dad suddenly smiled. “Imagine if I got knocked down and died here,” he said. “I’d also be fulfilling my grandfather’s wish.”

“Choi!”
I said, suggesting that it was time that we go back into the great hall for the annual picture-taking session.

In the Singapore clan association building, and throughout the village’s meeting rooms, I had seen these pictures. In them, rows of stern-looking men in stiff suits are seated on benches, staring straight at the camera, largely unsmiling. When the camera was whipped out, I was unsure whether I should join them—even though I desperately wanted to. My dad moved aside, making room for me. “Of course you should be here,” he said.

Michael and the elders looked at me with disapproval. I knew I really shouldn’t have been in that picture. But I was my father’s firstborn, after all. I had my great-grandfather’s blood. Ignoring the stares, I stood unflinching as the camera flashes went off.

I had asked many questions during my time in the village. Why do overseas Chinese call Shantou or mainland China
dengsua,
which means “long mountain,” for example. “Perhaps because as their boats sailed away from Shantou, they’d look back at the long mountain range in the mist and wonder how long it would be before they saw it again,” someone had volunteered. (It was also likely that it referred to Chinese people, called Deng Nang in Teochew, and the mountain range from which they came.) Where did the Teochews in our village come from? “A family of seven brothers who emigrated from Fujian Province centuries ago and formed seven small villages—ours was one of them,” the village chief had said.

Before we left, however, I had one final question. I hadn’t been sure whether I would ask it. But it was one of the few Teochew phrases I had heard while growing up. I had to know if it was something that was commonplace here or just something said in Singapore.

“Lau chek ah,”
I said to the village chief as we made our good-byes. He already looked a little miffed by my refusal to pry myself from his all-male photo session, so I figured I had little to lose.

“We have a funny Teochew saying in Singapore,” I began. “It’s
Teochew nang kacherng ang ang
. Do you say that here also?”

His face instantly puffed up. “I’ve never heard of that before!” he sputtered out.

“Oh, okay, thank you,” I said, gathering my things and getting ready to scurry out. “For everything.”

The trip back to
dengsua
had been as eye-opening as I’d hoped. My first instinct had been right; we may have come from there, but there certainly wasn’t a place for us in that village anymore. Definitely not for me. My great-grandfather had given us, given me, a tremendous gift when he left almost a century ago to find a better life in Singapore. As our car sped away, I looked out at the long mountain range in the blackening sky and said a silent thank-you to the great-grandfather I’d never before known.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

My love for all things Italian had been etched on my heart decades ago.

Granted, the seeds had been planted by the smoldering Roberto Baggio and formidable Walter Zenga of the 1990 Italian World Cup squad. But the love affair continued through little discoveries: a hearty bowl of cioppino, filled with fish and delicately balancing briny sea flavors with sweet, sweet tomatoes; an effervescent Bellini, sipped at Harry’s Bar in Venice after a long twilight stroll along the city’s picturesque canals.

It was through baking bread, however, that this affection truly deepened. Through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge, I was introduced to
casatiello
—a light, spongy loaf that came studded with dry-cured salami cubes and heavenly pockets of melted provolone; and pane
siciliano
—hearty, pecan-hued, crunchy breads in the striking shape of giant
S
’s. The week I met
panmarino
, I knew this was it—the bread I had been looking for. This garlicky bread made with mashed potatoes and fresh rosemary was intoxicating from the moment the dough hit the oven and its scent began invading the crevices of my apartment. By the time I slipped the first sliver into my mouth, I knew I had found it. This was the one I was bringing home.

I had tried to explain my bread-baking quest to my aunties and mother—making homemade loaves was something I’d never considered within the realm of my abilities. Bread was something you bought at a store—an item so basic that it didn’t warrant the (sometimes) days of effort that went into each loaf. This was certainly something my mother believed, too, even though she was a great lover of bread—buns filled with red-bean paste or airy clumps of sweet pork “floss” (dried pork that’s somewhat akin to beef jerky), or topped with shredded cheese and baked to crispy perfection, had been staples in my Singapore home since I was a child. And while I had always favored heaping plates of salty noodles for breakfast, my mother liked nothing more than to begin her days with a cup of Nescafé coffee and a slice of toast with a hefty layer of salted butter scraped on and a generous Chinese soup spoon of sugar sprinkled on top. “Bread? Might as well just buy, right? So
leceh
,” she would say, using the Malay word for
troublesome,
when I told her of the wheat breads and braided loaves I was attempting.