I was born in the year of the Tiger with a lucky star over my head and a knife in my hand.
Based on the time I was born and the fact that I was a dynamic and aggressive Tiger, I was already destined to be sharp, intelligent, and incredibly ambitious. But with the additional star to guide me, I was headed for a sparkling future, one that I would sail through with ease, gathering money and a great deal of success along the way.
Instead, the moment I pushed into this world, growling and crying, I took the knife in my hand and stabbed at the star, snuffing it out. In that moment, a fighter was created—a person who knew she would have to work doubly hard to compensate for her dead lucky star, often stubbornly wandering off, heeding no one, and charting a path of her own.
This is the story that my family’s fortune-teller tells. And for years, much of it appeared to be true.
Despite the fact that I’m female, I’d always been raised to be somewhat masculine.
Before I was born, my parents chose my name: Brendan.
Because I was the firstborn of the eldest son in a traditional Chinese family in Singapore, there was plenty of hope that I would be male. A son who would carry the family name, a child in whom my father would nurture his ambitions.
Well, I’m female. So my dad, Soo Liap Tan—a practical man who ended up with two daughters—made do with what he got.
Singapore, an island city-state of almost 5 million that straddles the equator, for all its modernity remains a rather old-fashioned Asian society in some ways. Boys are valued. But while girls aren’t bad things, you generally don’t expect too much of them.
My father believes this to a certain extent, but he’s also ambitious. So when his firstborn arrived and it was a girl, he adjusted accordingly.
When I was six, he gave me a dictionary of legal terms. “You don’t have to look at it now,” he said. “But if you want to look anything up, it’s there.” I never touched it, but the message was clear. I was headed for law school. My father pressed me to read voraciously, to be good at math, and never once told me I had to clean or learn how to cook in order to be a good wife. He never let me beat him at Scrabble and raised me with all the love a Chinese parent wasn’t supposed to show. He challenged me to be outspoken, to question authority, and to always, always let creativity be my guide.
But above all, he told me stories. As much as he encouraged me to shirk my female role in society, he wanted me to know and understand my culture, my heritage, my family. He wanted me to be Chinese, to never forget from where I came.
From the time I was a child, it had been impossible to escape the tales of my ancestors. These oral history outbursts often came when I least expected them. “Dad, I landed this big interview today—” I would start, before being interrupted with his pleased response to praiseworthy things. “Yes! You are Teochew. Aiyah, don’t you know, our people are known for being pirates, smugglers, and great businessmen. [The Hong Kong billionaire] Li Ka-shing is Teochew, you know!” (I always thought Dad was exaggerating until we visited Shantou, China, many years later and I realized that the area my father’s family is from is like the Sicily of China. Some of the major triads in Asia first blossomed in Guangdong.)
Much later, when I was in my early twenties and called to tell my parents about a new boyfriend, there was a sudden silence after I mentioned his name. “Nakamura . . . ,” my dad said quietly. “My two sisters were killed by the Japanese, you know!” (I would have to tell him several times that the boyfriend was a third-generation American and could not possibly have been responsible for the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II.)
But the longer stories of my father’s boyhood, of his family’s hopes and dreams for all he’d become, would emerge as we huddled over late-night suppers of take-out noodles from Singapore’s hawker stands after my mother and sister, Daphne, had gone to bed. The slippery fried shrimp noodles we adored came sprinkled with chewy circles of squid. The noodles, wrapped in industrial-strength wax paper, were generally so greasy that the oil penetrated the paper, filling it with dark spots. I always looked forward to the moment when we would carefully peel back the wax paper and steam would rise, fogging up our glasses. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t see—we just grabbed our chopsticks and stabbed away at the mound. When the noodles disappeared and the toothpicks were put aside, Dad would begin. “When I was a boy, my grandfather used to hoist me onto his shoulders and lead me through his banks and factories and say, ‘All this will be yours one day.’ ” As the firstborn son of the eldest son, my father had been expected to succeed my great-grandfather. “And then the war came,” Dad would continue. “We lost all the money when he died.”
These unfulfilled dreams and childhood disappointments were threads that had raced through my father’s life for decades. We could never drive past pockets of Singapore without him sighing and murmuring, “My grandfather’s company used to have warehouses along this whole stretch, you know! Aiyah . . . you could have been born into a rich family.” Specters of this unled life fueled my father’s ambitions, leading him to plunge into a lucrative career working for a string of beverage and luxury goods distribution companies after casting aside an early dream to spend his life teaching high school mathematics at Saint Joseph’s Institution, the alma mater that had been his refuge from a tumultuous home life. The more his father—a man whose major accomplishment in life was to drink and gamble away the family money—beat him, the more my father had turned to schoolwork and idyllic Saturdays building campfires and volunteering as a Boy Scout. “I saved all my pocket money and bought my father a birthday card once, you know,” my father said late one night as we sat in the kitchen, mirroring each other with our legs propped up, still rubbing our bellies over the feast we had just had. “You know what he did? He tore up the card and slapped me for wasting money! You are so lucky your father is not like that.”
And indeed, he wasn’t. The kind of father he was was involved in showing me a world beyond the one most children would know. With insomnia as a shared affliction, we would stay up way past my bedtime, sitting in our bright living room, quietly reading. We discussed international politics, the economy, whether Liverpool or Arsenal was going to win the English Premier League that year. One afternoon, I emerged from my first-grade classroom in a weathered colonial building along busy Victoria Street near downtown Singapore to find my father’s car waiting for me just outside the gates. “Come, we’re going for lunch,” he said, whisking me into the car. I assumed we were going to a hawker center for a quick meal before he had to jet back to work. Instead, minutes later, I found myself sliding into a chair at the Western restaurant of the posh Dynasty Hotel, nervously smoothing down the starched, white tablecloth before me as I wondered why we were there. It wasn’t my birthday—or his. And I couldn’t think of any special reason that would have earned such a treat. We were simply having lunch, it turned out—an excuse to show me what it was like to eat at a nice restaurant without my mother ordering for me or family members grabbing pieces of chicken with chopsticks and filling my plate. Terrified that I might do something wrong, I ordered the item on the menu that I had eaten and understood before—a large bratwurst. I remember it being delicious, but not as delicious as the feeling of being an adult, sitting with my father, talking about school, about work, as we leisurely had lunch.
When I was nine, my father took a job in Hong Kong, commuting to Singapore for long weekends just once every three weeks. I missed him terribly. This was a man who occasionally chased me around the dining room table with a cane in hand just to get me to practice the piano. But the same man would sometimes wake me up in the mornings by standing quietly at the window, peering out very intently, until I sleepily asked, “What’s happening outside?” “OH,” he’d reply. “There’s an elephant walking down the road,” which would always prompt me to jump out of bed and run to the window for a peek. (It took me many years to figure this one out.)
When my father left for Hong Kong, I might have lost my partner in insomnia, but I gained a pen pal. Dear Cheryl, he wrote to the ten-year-old me. Thank you for your two letters. I’m sorry I have not written lately. You can imagine how busy I’ve been. . . . When I next return to Singapore, can you remind me to order the Reader’s Digest for you? Meanwhile, I am always dreaming of the beautiful sunshine in Singapore and our swimming pool. Love, Papa.
September 20, 1984, on hotel letterhead bearing the words “Honey Lake Country Club” and “Shenzhen, China”: Dearest Cheryl, I am now in China for the first time in my life. This evening I spent my time walking around the town to see how people live. The streets are full of bicycles as people here are too poor to afford cars. There are so many bicycles moving in the streets that you worry very much about being knocked down by a bicycle—just imagine that!! Today I visited two towns or cities—Shekou and Shenzhen, both very close to Hong Kong. These two areas are industrial areas—many factories. We are negotiating to buy three factories—a flour mill, biscuit factory, and a feed mill. I hope one day that I can bring all of you to visit China. China is famous for beautiful sceneries, and also it is a chance for you to see how poor people are. With lots of love, Papa.
Sometime the following year, on stationery from the Prince Hotel in Hong Kong: Many thanks for your letters and postcards. When I read the letters and cards, I can feel how strongly you love me. Papa is very happy and proud. So proud and happy that I will continue to be a good papa to you and Daffy. . . . I am sad to realise that when I was in Singapore during the Chinese new year holidays I have not heard you play the PIANO ONCE!! What a pity! Especially when Mummy and I struggled so hard to buy you a piano! I’m ashamed. Cheryl, Papa and Mummy love you and want you to enjoy your life and work. Love and good luck, Papa.
Shortly after that, when my parents had bought me my first computer: Dearest Cheryl, While the computer may do wonders for you, I still prefer to read your letters in your own handwriting. Your handwriting reflects to some extent your personality. So I hope I will not miss my dearest daughter’s handwriting. What do you think of my personality from my writing? Confusing?
April 15, 1986, a year after my parents bought me a dog, a shih tzu my sister and I named Erny: Looking back at your letters, you keep mentioning ERNY. Shouldn’t we be tired of talking about him now—after more than 1 year? (Or less?) . . . Went to a movie “Out of Africa” last night. Do you know that it won 6 Academy Awards or “Oscars” as they call it in the movie world? The movie’s great but I think would be boring for you. It shows or rather teaches us FORTITUDE and DETERMINATION. Love, Papa.
On religion, and my growing curiosity about Catholicism: It is not easy to understand or appreciate the Taoist religion that my family has practiced and followed for generations. (To confess, I don’t quite understand it either.) But I guess that since Mum and I embraced it when my father passed away in 1976 as a matter of duty to my father and mother . . . the Taoist faith has become a part of our lives. That does not mean that you are bound by tradition to follow the same course. Having a religion is important in life—whether it is Buddhism, Catholic, Islamic etc. We are all children of God and religion helps us to communicate better with God. So feel free to believe in the Catholic faith if it helps you to communicate with God better. . . . Well, this is a rather long letter. I love you, Daphne and Mummy & miss you all. (Ooops. I forgot Erny.) Love, Papa.
September 6, 1987: Dearest Cheryl, Please forgive if my handwriting does not look steady. I am having a sore eye and have been applying eye lotion. . . . I have to keep the affected eye closed to allow the lotion to work. . . . Before I go on, I must be frank that I am shocked that you have not mastered the art of “paragraphing” yet—or at least not in the letters you write to me. A good and well written letter deserves at the same time proper paragraphing—it strains the eyes of the reader! Now, I have just found out the reason for my sore eye.
Each of my father’s stories had a point. He was determined not to be the father that he had had. He wanted to show me the world and all its possibilities. And while he had a tremendously successful career—at one point becoming the director of marketing for Vitasoy, one of the largest beverage companies in Asia—he was even more determined that his firstborn would go further than he himself had, having had the advantages of a loving, supportive father that he had so craved. But as I got older, I broke my father’s heart and chose journalism over law. Then I broke my mother’s heart by insisting on coming to the United States for college. My family protested. I would be too far, I was a girl, and why journalism? But my father had always told me I could be and do anything, and he wasn’t going to stop me. He simply asked, “How much will it cost?”
On occasions such as these, my mother often would sigh, shake her head, and blame the fact that I was born in the year of the Tiger. “Why did I have to have a Tiger daughter?” she would lament. “So stubborn and rebellious. If you were born in the olden days in China, you would have been killed at birth!” Sometimes, however, faced with my horrified looks, she would end on a reassuring note: “You know,” she once said, “with Tiger girls, they used to pull out one of her teeth so she wouldn’t be so fierce and eat up her husband. But don’t worry, I didn’t do that with you.”
Once I moved to the United States, my father visited me at least twice a year. We didn’t have the fried shrimp noodles, but we started having a beer after dinner some nights. Now, during my college years, my Singaporean male friends—and even less so my female ones—were hardly ever granted the privilege of bonding with their dads over a beer. (Nice girls didn’t drink.) But in my father’s eyes, my independence in school, in building my career, had given me the license. Even so, our bar visits often began with “Your mum would kill me if she knew,” and “I won’t tell her if you won’t, Dad.” (We also never told her about the cigarettes we would smoke surreptitiously.)
As I built my own career, my father’s ambitions became my fuel. And I could never shake the feeling that he was disappointed, somehow. In my early twenties, as I grappled with the guilt I felt over having chosen to stay in the United States, where I saw far greater opportunities in journalism than anywhere in Asia, I looked forward to his trips all the more, for the smallest sign or assurance that I continued to do him proud. The lectures continued—how was my job at the Baltimore Sun going? Was I writing stories often enough? Why was I covering something inconsequential (in his eyes) like police or county politics when I could be writing substantial stories about the world of finance? “How come you still don’t know how to cook?” he once asked, as he surveyed the suspiciously pristine kitchen of my Odenton, Maryland, apartment. “You cannot just eat gongzai meen [ramen] for dinner all the time, you know?” My father knew that while I loved food, I had a checkered past with the act of actually putting it on the table. I’d never cooked as a teenager in Singapore. And when the fourteen-year-old me had persuaded him to let me get a summer job waiting tables at Ponderosa in Singapore (instead of taking summer art classes or studying) because the notion of earning extra pocket money had become fashionable among my friends, my experience had not been entirely stellar. After one too many times in which I’d brought soup to a diner with the tip of my uniform’s skinny red tie still making laps around the bowl, and one busy lunch hour in which I successfully delivered a plate of fried chicken to the table . . . only to watch the chicken slide right off onto the customer’s lap, I was reassigned to salad bar duty. My father had taken my sister to lunch at Ponderosa shortly after this job change. Silently, they sat at a table near the salad bar, shushing me when I tried to make eye contact or say hello to them—because it just wouldn’t have been professional to chitchat with customers while I was on duty, he believed. I watched my father’s pride melt away when he saw that my “job” consisted entirely of refilling tubs of corn and canned beets. And since salad wasn’t a popular lunch choice in Singapore at the time, any such action was actually a rare occurrence. Mostly, my father and Daphne just sat there watching me stand in the salad bar island, shifting from foot to foot.
Even so, I couldn’t help but feel that I was letting him down in my Maryland apartment. On the last night of that trip, we sat at the rickety IKEA table I had somehow assembled so that one leg was shorter than the other three, my father with his glasses off, sipping a beer and looking back on the days he had just spent, visiting my desk at work—“Why is it so messy?”—and getting to know my life in Maryland—“Make sure you always put the chain on your door when you come home.” After a few moments of silence, as I wondered what he was really thinking of this life away from my family that he would never have chosen for me but that he had allowed me to choose, my father finally spoke. “You know, years and years ago, my grandfather left his family in China as a young man to travel to Singapore and seek a better life,” he said, squinting hard at the bare white walls of my cheap rental apartment as if looking at something in the distance. “And now, years later, here you are. My daughter left Singapore to travel to America and seek a better life.” My father smiled and reached over for his glass, raising it, saying, “Our family’s journey continues.”
Somewhere in the midst of my American life, I began to heed my father’s advice and look beyond ramen in the kitchen. My initial early obsession with American food was a surprise: meat loaf. The first time I encountered meat loaf, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was a loaf. But made of ground beef? How had I not tried this before? This was a revelation amid the cloud of yearning for Singaporean food that set in the moment I entered college, in the mid-1990s. Any Singaporean will tell you that we don’t eat to live, we live to eat. Food—or makan, as we call it—is a national obsession. My friends and I can spend hours passionately debating where to find the best chicken rice on the island. In a 2007 New Yorker piece about Singapore cuisine, Calvin Trillin observed of Singaporeans: “Culinarily, they are among the most homesick people I have ever met.” In the fifteen years that I’ve lived in the United States, I’ve often said to American friends that, when it comes to Singapore, I miss the food first and then my family. They think I’m joking.
My fondest memories of growing up in Singapore all revolve around eating. On special Sundays, my parents would take the family out for bak kut teh, a mouthwatering, peppery pork rib broth that’s nearly impossible to find in the United States. And when I was a primary school child, my neighborhood friends and I used to sneak out to a nearby hawker center for ice kacang, a dessert of sweet corn, red beans, and jelly topped with shaved ice smothered in evaporated milk and syrup. In fact, food is of such importance to Singaporeans that many restaurants and hawker centers have become landmarks. Even now, people know exactly where my family lives when I tell them it’s near the old Long Beach Seafood, a seaside eating hole that hasn’t been at that spot in more than twenty years.
The complex flavors of Singaporean food stem from British colonization in the nineteenth century. The country on the tip of the Malay Peninsula, near Indonesia, was once a quiet island of fishing villages. In 1819, the British discovered the island and established a bustling trading port, attracting settlers from India, Europe, and China. Today, Singapore remains one of the world’s busiest ports. However, some might argue that the more significant consequence of this colonization unfolded in the kitchen. As the years passed, Chinese, Malay, Indian, and European cooks took cues from one another, stirring together methods and spices culled from distant homelands such as Gujarat, India, and Xiamen, China, while sprinkling in culinary touches brought over by British and Dutch traders and their families.
The flavors meshed, giving rise to new dishes. A plethora of seafood and a love of spices gave birth to chilli crab, a signature Singaporean dish of crab fried in a vermilion, egg-streaked gravy. The influence of the British—whom the locals called Johns when Singapore was a colony—inspired the Malay dish of roti John, which features a baguette topped with beaten eggs, minced mutton, and onions that’s then quickly panfried and served with a spicy tomato dip.
As a college freshman in Illinois, I spent many a night dwelling on the long, cold months I’d have to endure before my next taste of roti John or chilli crab. In early 1994, when we were all discovering the Internet, an enterprising Singaporean somewhere out in the ether set up a Web site where he posted a handful of pictures of foods like satay and Hainanese chicken rice. Immediately, e-mails with this precious URL raced around the world from one homesick Singaporean to another. I began braving glacial lakeshore temperatures to trek to the computer lab after classes, logging on just to stare with titanic longing at these pictures of dinners far, far away.
At the same time, I was getting a good schooling in a new genre of food. In the heart of my first Chicago winter—and a whopper of one at that, with windchills pushing seventy below one memorable day—I was getting well acquainted with the “classics” of American food. Pancakes, sloppy joes, pizza, buffalo wings—my dorm cafeteria pushed them all. I’d sampled some of these before, of course, Singapore being fairly cosmopolitan. (It even had a Denny’s, although I never did find out whether a Singaporean Grand Slam is the same as a Grand Slam in Peoria.)
Meat loaf, however, mystified me. I’d never even heard of it. But from my first bite, I was smitten. Crusty, juicy, moist, and meaty all at once—this brick of red meat was heaven to me. For the first time, I was gripped with the urge to cook something—something that wasn’t ramen or instant porridge, that is. I’d hardly eaten beef while growing up in Singapore—pork is generally much more widely used in Chinese home cooking there. So beef held great sex appeal to me. And having never tried meat loaf before, I was hooked.
The meat loaf I began making was basic. After I had dabbled with various mixes, Lawry’s became my brand of choice. Jazzed up with an egg, a generous stream of soy sauce, and milk instead of water, this meat loaf mixture remains my go-to recipe even today. In the years since, I’ve experimented with elaborate meat loaf recipes that have graced the pages of glossy food magazines, perfectly delicious gourmet or ethnic versions conjured up by chefs like Ming Tsai. And yet, this is the one meat loaf that I make when a craving sets in. In fact, it was over this very meat loaf that I fell in love with my husband, Mike.
A rudimentary cook in my twenties who still often made dinners built on the salty shoulders of a can of Campbell’s soup, I didn’t actually turn a culinary corner until Mike entered my life.
In the summer of 2000, I flew to San Francisco for the Asian American Journalists Association’s national convention. I’d been attending the convention since 1995—so had Mike, it turned out. We had many of the same friends in the organization; we’d been to many of the same parties. But somehow, we’d never met—until one evening, when he walked into the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco and spotted me talking to one of his colleagues at The New York Times. Mike didn’t know who I was, but he was pretty sure that if he walked across the lobby to say hello to his colleague, Merrill would introduce us. The next day, Mike and I met at a panel on covering the transgender and gay communities. And coffee. Then drinks. Then dinner. Not long after, he began traveling down to my home in Washington, D.C., to see me on weekends.
A bona fide food lover who’d grown up watching his stepmother make pancakes and pork chops in their rural Iowa kitchen, Mike soon began teaching me little things—how best to melt chocolate, what a food processor actually did, the importance of, oh, lighting the burner before putting the pan on so you don’t burn your eyebrows off. For a gal who’d grown up being instructed to stay out of the kitchen, these were key revelations.
We soon began cooking together whenever he hopped on a train from New York City to visit me. One of our earliest collaborations involved making creamed spinach from scratch with a generous sprinkling of freshly grated nutmeg—to go with my Lawry’s meat loaf, of course. It was a simple side dish. Nothing special to most cooks, I’m sure. Except that, until that dish, I’m not sure I was fully aware of what nutmeg looked like, much less that it had to be grated. (I’m almost certain I’d not grated anything before then.) Heck, the notion of being able to put creamed spinach on the table without first opening a frozen box had been unfathomable to me until that point.
I fell in love—and not just with the idea of actually being able to make delicious, restaurantlike dishes from scratch.