In Malaysia, it has always been quite common for larger households to employ live-in domestic help. Nowadays it is usually through a labour agency specialising in Filipino or Indonesian housemaids, but when my parents were young in the 60s and 70s, they were fortunate enough to be able to secure the assistance of 2 local ladies to help about the house. Both were live-in domestic workers. One lady was general housekeeper and child-minder. Another lady was, and still is cook-general. My mum is very capable, but even she couldn’t manage caring for 3 small children, handling my dad’s business paperwork, and looking after the house! The big thing mum couldn’t do was that she didn’t like cooking. So we have always had a cook at home.
These ladies have been part of my family for the last 3 to 4 decades. It is such a long time, that they have become sisters and all-round confidantes of my mum, and favourite aunties of us kids. You couldn’t do anything without their scrutiny. Haircuts, homework, school grades, exam results, choice of outfit and footwear, school bag, choice of future profession, literally everything. Heck, you couldn’t even bring a special male friend into conversation without them doing in-depth analyses of their suitability as a suitor. As we hit teenage years and started to socialise more outside the home without family, they would cast a critical eye over the way we dressed before we left the house. Our joys were theirs, as were our sorrows.
My mum managed to learn how to speak their Chinese dialect from hanging out with them, and they picked up hers (Hokkien and Hakka, respectively). So ours was definitely a multi-lingual household. Mum would speak to them in Cantonese and Hokkien, the ladies would speak to her in Cantonese and Hokkien, but they would speak to my dad only in Hokkien. They would speak to us in Mandarin (those were the days when the Singapore education department was trying to reduce the use of dialects at home - considered less cultivated, huh). They would use the local Malay language to vendors and tradespeople. But my parents would speak to each other in English, so through years of exposure, they’ve each picked up a smattering of English too. My mum would be on the phone to her own parents in Hakka. A complete hodge podge would result, with a sentence often containing several languages.
Anyway, this sketch captures the cook-general auntie in action. We have always called her Soofen Jie 姐, roughly translates to Sister Soofen. She is an immensely talented cook, and whenever we go out for food, she will come home and try to figure out recipes with her colleague, the housekeeper. More often than not, her attempt at a dish will turn out pretty close to the original version. Then the both of them would snort, and say they could have cooked it at home for much cheaper, which would make us laugh. My mum would shop in the wet markets, bringing home the best and freshest produce she can find.
In their hey day and youth, when we were all still young children and young teenagers, they would make all sorts of snacks and desserts such as curry puffs, various sweet sticky cakes (what we call “kueh”), coconut dessert soups, pineapple tarts, fried bananas coated with icing sugar, fried yam slices and so on. They used to make all sorts of delicious savoury dishes too. Of course, now with a combination of factors such as us kids all moving out of home, everyone being more weight-conscious, and them ageing, the motivation for them to really cook up a storm has gone.
In the last few years, Soofen Jie’s health has deteriorated somewhat, with what I suspect is some kind of seronegative arthropathy, and has needed a total knee replacement. So she started using a high stool in the kitchen. Since the housekeeper retired, my mum has also started employing a couple of other part-time live-out domestic helpers to do the heavier physical chores around the house.
I wish that people never had to get old.
Four Sonnets About Food
1
Words can’t do
what bird bones
can: stew
to the stony
essence
of one
small soul, the spent
sacrifice boiled down
to the hard white
matter that nourishes
the mighty
predator, who flourishes
on the slaughtered
animal and water.
2
Who feeds
another is like bones
to him who eats
(I say “him” only
because it is a man
in my house
who eats and a woman
who goes about
the matter of sustenance),
food being always
a matter of life and
death and each day’s
dining
another small dying.
3
Scallops seared
in hot iron
with grated ginger,
rice wine,
and a little oil
of sesame, served
with boiled
jasmine rice, cures
the malaise
of long, fluorescent
weekdays
spent
in the city
for money.
4
I am afraid
I can’t always be
here when you need
a warm body
or words; someday
I’ll slip
into the red clay
I started with
and forget
who you are,
but
for now, here’s
my offering: baked red
fish, clear soup, bread.
From Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Adrienne Su.
