Posts tagged "chineseness"

Swatow

When my people speak of who we are and where we come from
We do not say, China.

When my relatives reclaim our collective past,
Those words—China—dance on our lips, foreign.

We do not say China.
We do not say China at all.

Instead, we are the people of the coast.
We are the subjects of the Tang Dynasty.
We are the rejects of the imperial court, cast out into the Nanyang sun where we sweat with the sons of the land.

My grandfather was an upright man,
So upright and uptight his wooden backscratcher formed the curve between his back and the rosewood chair.

My grandmother would only ever wear a two piece Chinese suit
Made of silk and cotton. I can still see her, smelling like mothballs
Speaking, summoning, reaching out to me

in Teochew.

What is your native place,
They ask me from Kanyakumari to Rameswaram.
In Tiruvanamalai, I finally cave. I say,
It is not China.

We could have been anywhere.
Semarang, Sri Lanka, Calcutta.
These sea routes go unmapped and undiscovered
From Swatow to the rest of the world.

I want Swatow to remain a shorthand
For the mythical land where I can chase demons,
Exorcise my grandmother,
Write poetry and wrap myself up in a giant band-aid of ignorance.
The less I know about Swatow
The more the idea of China lands with a heavy plod

This is a language I speak perfectly
Without my soul.

Mee Lay

When I was growing up, I thought all families had the same weekend lunches as mine: a giant cauldron of yellow noodles, simmered so long in an anchovy broth that they fell apart when you picked up your noodles with chopsticks. You had to use a spoon.

Ah ma made them every Sunday, but ah gong made the chilli. Even today, I have difficulty accepting anyone else's roasted chilli in my soupy noodles. Kin Kin's legendary chilli pan mee comes close, but nowhere close to my grandparents'.

We'd all go for seconds, thirds, and Ah ma would not touch the noodles until she was satisfied we'd all had enough. "I don't like chicken wings and drumsticks, ew. I much prefer the tips." Her life was one of sacrifice, and of idiot grandchildren who ate all the chicken wings because we believed she only liked the tips.

In love and life, when you have been loved so fiercely, quietly, and sacrificially, it takes years of learning to learn not everyone will love you like that.

Thank you, Ah ma, for all the mee lay, chicken wings, kiam chye ark tng and pomfrets you made me have. I will be here with you even if you don't know it. I hope in heaven they have people cooking noodles for you, and I'm fairly sure it has an endless supply of pomfret eyeballs and soya sauce. Thank you for teaching me how to love.

To the Mountain

Going to the mountain.

In all of my 29 years, my grandparents had been such a big part of my life that I could have never conceived of a life without them. Like the 1128-episode TV serials they watched, Ah Gong and Ah Ma just went on and on.

In the background, their voices blended in with the voices of the Chinese TV stars I loved in the 1980s. In our tiny little flat where my parents, grandparents, brother and I lived, my grandparents and I drank tea, ate porridge, watched bad TV and forged a home together on stuffy Singapore afternoons so humid that the air wore thin. My parents were young parents; their parents even younger. My grandmother became a grandmother at the age of 44. She was also my defender, provider of tasty hot drinks, and full-time worrier: the act of not eating rice, at any time (even after lunch), was grounds to bring on DEFCON 1. No possibility of relenting until I had eaten another bowl of rice. This would repeat every hour.

I was the weird, silent, brooding grandchild, who said little and spent more time in my head than on the playground.

"I love you, ah girl," she said. "You are my little mouse. So soft, so quiet. I never know what's in that head."

What was in my head was any of the following things:

"I'm going to live in a hut on a farm and make cheese, Ah Ma!" (Much further than going to the moon, for a kid from a country with nowhere to go but the sea and large buildings)

"That sounds fun. Will you make me some?" Ah Ma smiled. She smiled kindly all the time, at everyone, but especially to her grandchildren.

"When I grow up I'm going to travel the world, Ah Ma!"

"That's nice, the world has many people for you to help."

She indulged my fantasies, and believed I could and would do all the things I said I would.

Everything my brother and I did, no matter how small or mundane, made her wide-eyed in wonder.

"Wow! You took a bus home successfully without getting kidnapped! Good job!"

"Wow! You managed to cook instant noodles without causing a fire! Amazing!"

"Wow! The both of you managed to go a week without arguing! Great job, kids!"

If you have kids, I hope you believe unconditionally in everything that they dream of. We do too little of that in spite of our modern accomplishments.

There are certain places where life seems to go on in the way one's forefathers have always lived. Singapore of the '80s was not one of them. My grandparents held different paperwork and nationalities in their lifetimes. My grandfather was a Chinese subject in Sun Yat-Sen's Republic, an illegal immigrant to then-Malaya where he may or may not have been a British subject. He was then, in the 1940s, a Japanese subject in occupied Malaya. With every decade he seemed to switch papers, though not by choice. In the late 1950s, a citizen of newly formed Malaysia, before finally arriving at the citizenship he would take to the grave: a Singaporean, finally, in 1965, at the dawn of the country's birth. Even as a child, I had a vague notion of this: the distance between my parents' lives and mine, was nothing compared to the one between theirs and their parents'.

My grandparents' world was, and still is, a black hole to me. Ah Gong did not like talking about his childhood in China: he did not appear to like it much. Ah Ma did not talk about her younger days in Malaya much; she did not appear to know that modern Singapore and Malaysia are now different countries. To her, home was Clementi, in the western parts of Singapore. Then there was her old home-in Johor, in another country. She just somehow needed a passport now to see her family. Theirs was a life of the tragedies of war, the chaos of a great fire, the unending struggle with poverty. The fear of unknown elements hiding out in dark corners: Ah Gong was attacked on the head with a cleaver once. He survived and did not seem to think much of it, for he never spoke of it. Their world was foreign to me.

To all who came to see me at the home I shared with my grandparents well into my early 20s, my grandparents were a constant presence. No one understood a word of what they were saying. They spoke a specific strain of Teochew with a perfect high pitch, in tones so song-like they seemed to have never left Swatow. If you had come to my house to work on a school project or to eat a meal, you would have only known of my Ah Ma as the kindly lady with a glint of generosity in her eyes, who often chattered at you in a language you had never heard.

I would have translated, "she asks if you would like Milo or coffee? If you'd like to have porridge? What about pork ribs? Noodles?"

It was as though I shared a secret language with my grandparents, the language of Chinese elves (so high-pitched, so strange, so song-like, most of my friends would say I sound like a fairy whenever I spoke to her). In our world, the one I inhabited whenever I spoke this language of elves and fairies with her, it was a world of love, kindness and happiness. I cannot be angry or upset at someone in Teochew, because the only people who spoke it to me taught me only the words of love.

Two weeks ago, my beloved Ah Ma left us after a long battle with dementia in which she degenerated and atrophied tremendously.

When I first learned of the concept of death as a child, I interviewed my family members about their thoughts on death. To my horror, Ah Gong said he hoped, wished, desperately, that Ah Ma would die first.

"How can you be so mean?" I poked his singlet-covered beer belly, before running into my room to cry secretly. The idea of my grandmother dying, even at 5 years old, even as a passing remark, was too much for me to bear. To me, grandma and grandpa just went on and on. They woke up every morning at the same time. They walked for the same amount of time at the same place every morning. They ordered the same food after the same walk. They took the same route home. They peppered their lives of sameness with jokes and tenderness.

When I stood in front of her coffin two weeks ago to say a few words about her, I, of course, broke down. Ah Gong, who once said he hoped she died before he did, had in fact been astute and well-prepared. She slipped away, never to return, after he died a few years ago. He made sure to prepare her funeral portrait, as one of the last things he would do for her.

My grandmother had few friends, I recalled, but she had a world of fans. People came from Malaysia to tell us how she had, as a teenager, refused to let her nephews and nieces go homeless. Despite having not very much, she found them a home. My dad spoke of how, as a child with her as a mother, he was acutely aware of how poor they were. Yet she would make it a point to feed the neighbours' 11 children because their mother had eloped and left home. She had a kind word for everybody, and kinder acts for anyone who needed it.

After gathering myself, I managed to squeak out a few things about her.

I used to be ashamed of my full name, I said. My grandparents gave it to me. It's the sort of name that's so full-on Teochew, so obviously old school, that once you saw it you would immediately know where my family came from.

You're a Teochew girl, aren't you. You sound like you never left the homeland-every time you ask me for fried shallots, I wonder why a little girl like you talks in such a funny, old school way.

That made me hate my name and my accent, but I no longer do.

I did not know my grandparents' names for most of my childhood, I said. I honestly thought their names were Tan Ah Gong and Tan Ah Ma.

Many of my peers in Singapore can barely communicate with their grandparents: the Speak Mandarin campaign coupled with the English-first policy made sure to eradicate any ability to speak the Chinese dialects. I was lucky to have had a window into the world, into my past, through the both of them.

I don't even need a map to know that Swatow's cemetaries were probably on mountains or hills. The language gives it away. The act of taking the body to its final resting place, be it a crematorium or a burial site, is known as chuk sua. Going to the mountain.

So to the mountain, we went. You're supposed to follow the hearse, dressed in white and black, and you're supposed to beat your chest and cry and weep loudly all the way to the mountain. But in super urban Singapore, all that we could do was to follow her for 50 metres to the edge of the carpark, before hopping into a bus to the crematorium.

After the fire.

When Ah Ma was 26 years old, there was a Great Fire near the house. She, along with tens of thousands of people, would run from their homes in search of safety on a hot, infernal afternoon. Ah Gong came scurrying back to the house from por doi to look for them, panicking when he found nothing but ashes. He thought his young bride unprepared and ill-equipped for the dangers of the world. Yet she had demonstrated uncharacteristic resourcefulness: she had been hiding in a temple with their children for hours, picking that place as it was one of the few landmarks left standing after the fire.

After. All that was left of her was a box of bones and ash. We took turns moving her bone fragments into an urn. Parts of her bone fragments had the pigmentation of the various medicines administered to her late in life; they were frail and brittle, just as she had been.

We put her on her shelf. We stared helplessly at her marble engraving. We vacillated between the loving, silly moments with our adorable nieces, and the hopeless sadness that filled us.

My grandma lived 80 years of her life in poverty and in fear. Her hope and her love overcame all of it. All I can hope for is for all of us who have received her unconditional love to carry her with us in the rest of our lives.

That our hearts are large enough to carry the world, because she showed us how.

Mahabandoola

At the hotel I had the receptionist scribble the name of my lunch spot in Burmese. Lunch that day was to be outside my sphere of Yangon familiarity: I had never been there, but I had been told by some locals that I must have a typical Burmese lunch at Aung Thu Kha.

So to Aung Thu Kha I went.

After gesticulating at each other for a while, my taxi driver stared at the piece of paper, looked up at my face and laughed: you speak Mandarin, don't you?

I speak Mandarin, don't I? I think I do.

I have always been perturbed at how people seem to be able to deduce secrets about me just by peering at my face. This happens at alarming frequency whenever I travel. Some days, I'm told I must be Burmese of Chinese origin. Other days, I'm Thai. In northeast India I am accepted by all of their tribes; my linguistic inability explained away for me by what must be my probable fluency in some another tribal language. Yet in China, the country of my grandparents' birth and heritage, I am too Southeast Asian. Too dark. Too English-speaking. I am the colour of the sun beating the earth, and China is a distant, lost memory a long way away from the sun.

So yes, I speak Mandarin. The ability to converse in it has followed me throughout the world, sometimes paying handsomely with access few other languages can offer.

He asks the inevitable. "How do you find Myanmar?"

Like everyone else who has asked that before me, before I have a chance to reply he gripes, "It must be terrible for you. It's terrible. All of it."

"I love the city and its people - surely all signs point to improvement!"

"Yes. Improvement also leads to traffic jams," honking angrily as a car tried to cut our place in a jam in a tiny residential lane.

In our brief conversation I learned he was the grandson of Yunnanese immigrants, economic refugees in their time. In the thirties, Rangoon was the shining light of Asia. Its opulent hotels filled with important people. Its white-only clubs invented cocktails such as the Pegu Club. The Yunnanese of China's deep south fled south to seek their fortune. Some have done exceedingly well; they have assimilated, in a way, taking on Burmese names and speaking Burmese fluently on top of their Chinese identities, preserved and left the way it was when they left in the thirties.

I wanted to know what languages they spoke at home, what they ate. He indulged me.

"My parents made us speak Mandarin at home when we were kids. If we slipped into Burmese, we got fined. They were born here, but they wanted us to stay connected to our Chinese identities as well. Oh, and Burmese food is way too oily," he shook his head as he dropped me off. "Let me know if you want Yunnanese or Dai food when you're back in town. It's better."

When 1962 happened, among the many atrocities that ensued: Chinese schools closed. Burmese citizens not from the Barma ethnic group were banned from attending certain institutions of higher learning. Just like that the lights went out in Asia's leading metropolis, and stayed off for a very long time.

In 2014, some of those lights have come back on. And with them, traffic jams. The unpaven road outside a bank near my hotel was, two days later, a pavement. For some, it's a clear sign Burma is going to be the gold rush of the east of this century: five star hotels' bars and Chinatown noodle stalls are similarly filled with businessmen from mainland China seeking fortune and glory.

"Perhaps I'll buy factory equipment from back home and ship it here," an enthusiastic new arrival announced loudly at a Cantonese-run noodle stall on the streets of Chinatown, rattling off his entire business plan in Mandarin while the other customers looked on uninterested.

Maung Maung, a middle-aged Cantonese-Burmese man jumped up with an oversized Chinese phone and pulled out a floor plan. They looked at it intently. Maung Maung went back to his noodles, slurping. (Maung Maung of just a few moments ago: "My Chinese name, lady, is Jin Bo. Jin for GOLD!")

"We'll make plans. See what help you need. I can help," Maung Maung told the newcomer.

"Do you have my phone number? I still don't remember what it is," the young mainlander said in a way that sounded like a plea for help. He'd either just gotten here or still hadn't shaken off his "overwhelmed by Burma" look.

"Of course I do," Maung Maung laughed as he perked up. "I sold it to you."

A Drinkable History of My Family

The following piece is an original piece written specially for Ceriph #3, published by Math Paper Press. It's on sale at my favourite bookstore, BooksActually, and also at Kinokuniya..

Fish Sauce

We are Teochew, people of the coast.

Fish sauce, more than hot food, opera, more than even yam paste desserts - is what defines us as a people. It is what we live for, what fuels us; there is no life without it. We live for the very hot, and the very salty.

My grandfather was a sturdy, if a little tiny, Teochew man who was much shorter than his wife. Like many patriarchs of his generation, if he even had a name, you would have never known. You simply thought of him as ah gong. On his birthdays when we sang birthday songs to him we did so in Mandarin, Teochew, and then in English. Every time we got to his name we were usually stumped. He did not like us saying his name anyway - it sounded too much like "turtle", he said - so we clapped, said "happy birthday ah gong tee hee hee", laughed at the incongruence, and stuffed our faces with cake.

Ah gong introduced me to fish sauce. He must have. We were close for a Chinese grandparent-grandchild duo of the eighties - we played Chinese chess, and snakes and ladders, in near silence most afternoons - but he was at his most animated when we ate porridge with preserved vegetables and steamed fish. Which was every afternoon.

If you hold your chopsticks that way you are going to move very far from home.

Kopi-C Siew Dai

Utter silence punctuated by occasional outbursts of snark. That hum of snarky silence dominated our lives, or at least mine. On hot Singapore afternoons in our tiny three-room flat, I never noticed the silence. Those damned SBC afternoon dramas masked the silence. The plod of Grandma's food processor distracted me from the silence. The jingle of the Raymond Weil sponsored news programmes were so loud I could not hear the silence. But the snark always jumped straight through the roof.

Next to fish sauce, we liked coffee most. It was any kind of caffeine really, but coffee was king. More than that, it was the promise of a decently made local coffee, the sock kopi, with two fingers' worth with condensed milk and a very loud kopitiam server shouting in Hokkien, that we liked best. Those damned Hokkien people can't talk softly.

We went to the kopitiam together in the mornings, on the mornings when I could wake up anyway. Ah gong liked routine, so much so that I have never seen him in anything other than a singlet and a pair of blue bermudas and brown, serious grandpa sandals. He had a wardrobe full of the same thing for different ages. He could dress you up exactly like him if you asked him to. This routine man's routine began before daybreak at the seaside.

He would walk by the seaside, smirking at the taichi parade, not understanding why anybody would submit themselves to the torture of wearing red shirts with white pants. He would walk by the streamers of the Chinese dance contingent fielded by the neighbourhood's grannies, not understanding why anybody would wave little pieces of cloth around to awful music at 7 in the morning.

He would understand, or at least try to, why the kopitiam could never get his order right ("because Ah Zoh got fired from his job and Ah Orh, who was hired to replace him, is a little slow in the brain"). He could fathom everything he needed to know in a second, but he could never understand why his coffee was never-quite-right everywhere he went.

Lou Swa Ga Hai

When the people of the coast speak of our motherland, we do not say China. We do not say we are zhong guo ren - when we speak of the zhong guo ren we are speaking of those people who look like us but who are really from someplace else. We say we are the people of the Tang Dynasty, we say we are the people from the coast. In our language there is no way of saying we are anything else. Even today we say our "home", this home most of us have never been to, is in the mountain, by the sea.

The zhong guo ren eat rice and vegetables. We eat real porridge, unlike the Cantonese who break their rice grains and pretend to make soup. If a single rice grain breaks we throw all our porridge away, and start again.

There is more water in our porridge than there is grain, but not too much. The grains should clump together, but not too much. The porridge should, like us, be of the mountain and of the sea. A bowl of porridge must physically resemble a mountain in a sea, swa ga hai. Mountain and sea.

If the Cantonese, who believe themselves to be the masters of Chinese cuisine, have perfected the roast, we are the kings of the braise.

A bowl of our porridge might taste of nothing unless you are one of us. If you were one of us, our gaginang, you would know how to eat it - with the amount of fish sauce, with a dozen side dishes. With a salted egg and with a big bowl of braised pork and eggs.

Eating the rest of the meal is simple, anyone can get that.

Every time ah gong ate his Teochew porridge, which was everyday at lunch, he would pour a large amount of braise sauce into his porridge, making it become the colour of dark earth.

Lou, ga swa ka hai. Braise, and seas and mountains, he would say.

Without a comma, and with one small shift in intonation, eating this meal with him everyday was about raising, not braising, seas and mountains each time he spoke at length with me.

Ah gong may have been a man of few words but we drank the sea and ate the mountains together everyday.

Bubble Tea

At the hospital he was in some pain. Not a lot, but you could tell no matter how naturally stoic he tried to remain, he was not going to make it. I had to go to see him from Europe, made it just barely in time, and I like to think he waited for me. Or for something.

In the year since I moved out of the country I had been back only for Chinese New Year, and I had missed his last moments where he had been confined in a wheelchair. He could no longer go on daily walks, nor could he go to the toilet unassisted, but he kept his mind steely by asking everyone endless questions about their lives. He kept his wits about by observing our neighbours and their daily lives from his vantage point, his wheelchair.

The telephone was not made for people like my ah gong. Skype was an invention he could tolerate a little better, and only for the joy of watching someone on the other side of the world appear on the screen. The moment your image was formed he was no longer interested in speaking in sentences to you. That whole year all we ever spoke about was about burqahs and bak chor mee. I was in the Middle East that whole year and he was convinced I led a bak chor mee – less existence inside a burqah. Which was only half true (the pork, not the fashion sense).

For someone like ah gong who led a relatively difficult life and who was not really a part of the modern world with all its trappings and assumptions, he did not get to - nor did he want to - experience anymore than what he already had, which was adoption, migration, war, poverty and distance.

He had few cravings other than for Teochew porridge and preserved olive leaves, steamed fish and fish sauce.

When we were by his side, teary, he could not speak much by that point. He had no teary goodbyes or pent-up messages for anyone. He had no epiphanies but silence.

But he asked for his daughter.

When she, crying as only she could, sidled up to him he gathered his breath and whispered, "Bring me bubble tea. Apparently it's delicious."

We searched everywhere for bubble tea, we really did, but did not search fast enough. He could not wait.

And then Michael Jackson died the next day and the whole world forgot about the man who had never had bubble tea.

Sometimes I wish could have been there when he finally gave up on life and on bubble tea. He would have ranted, in Teochew, that tea isn't meant to be this milky, and what the hell are these bloody balls?