Back in New York, Mike had his instructions.
He was allowed to try my pineapple tarts—but just one, maybe two. (Three, if he did the laundry.) The rest, after all, had to be my lifeline.
There was snow on the ground. New York Fashion Week was just around the corner. My days and evenings were once again gobbled up by writing, reporting, and haranguing publicists, retailers, and designers for information and fashion show invitations. And, with the retail industry imploding, I was once again chained to my BlackBerry at all hours of the day; when it’s 3:00 A.M. in New York, it’s daytime somewhere in Europe and Asia, after all. I was sleeping with my BlackBerry by my bed; I was jumping up whenever I heard it buzz, terrified that I was missing some crucial development in the rapidly unraveling economic landscape that I’d need to write about or include in The Wall Street Journal fashion blog I was managing. I was barely sleeping. And when I did, I woke up to find alarming amounts of my black hair strewn about my bed. I had never felt more like a hamster on a wheel—a soon-to-be hairless hamster, at that.
At this point, even baking couldn’t save my sanity. All I had were my grandmother’s tarts. Just opening the fridge and seeing they were there made me feel better. And when I particularly needed a fix, I’d gingerly take one out and slowly nibble, thinking about home.
The home that I knew and loved had recently splintered. Two years before, after thirty-two years of marriage, my parents had suddenly divorced. The signs of marital stress had been evident for a long time. My father’s job postings overseas may have drawn us closer as I poured my adolescent thoughts into long letters to him, telling him about the hopes, apprehensions, and dreams that filled me—things I could never tell my mother, who essentially was left to function as a single parent for weeks on end and play the role of the strict enforcer who kept the trains running on time. But his absence thrust a wedge in their relationship. The fracture grew over the years. In the end, however, the tipping point involved a Beijing woman. I did not know much about this woman—just that they had met when she was assigned to be my father’s translator and assistant when he went to Suzhou on frequent business trips. She hailed from a rural part of Anhui, China, where she’d grown up on a farm. Eventually, she moved to Beijing, where my father had begun spending half his time in the mid-2000s. There, she continued to help him as a girl Friday of sorts. She spoke very little English but wanted an English name she could use. And so my father named her Ketty. “I don’t know why,” he said, when I asked. “It just sounds like her.”
Watching my family unravel from 9,500 miles away through tear-soaked phone calls in the middle of the night and lengthy e-mails that clearly offered little comfort, I had never felt farther. Divorce is still fairly uncommon in Singapore, even among those in their twenties and thirties. For those in my parents’ generation? Virtually unheard of. While I knew of many men my father’s age who had mistresses on the side, in the end, they always came home to their wives and families. The feudal Chinese concubine system—in spirit, even if not in law—remained firmly in place in twenty-first-century Singapore. So why deal with the legal hassle of divorce and asset dividing when you didn’t have to?
My mother was blindsided. So were Daphne and I. My weekly conversations with Dad became strained. I wasn’t sure how to react, what to think. And I felt a little replaced—this new woman turned out to be younger than I was. Was my father now giving her the same pep talks he had always given me? Was I as important? And were my sister and I to blame? I had always felt some guilt over the fissure in my parents’ marriage. “We could have gone to Hong Kong with your papa when he went there to work, you know,” my mother would often say in low moments during my childhood as she pined for my father. “But your schooling [in Singapore] was more important.” I always felt that my parents’ marriage might have turned out differently if only they hadn’t had me. Now, once again, feelings of guilt began gnawing at me.
The divorce had been largely cordial—my father, who was now running a Singapore-based moving company, still stayed in our family home when he was in town. When he was in Singapore, he and my mother shared a car, had dinner almost every night, and ran errands together. It was just easier—logistically and financially—that way. And they did still get along as friends, after all. Even so, feelings were a little raw all around. And my parents had started avoiding the rambunctious, large dinners my mother’s family organized just so they wouldn’t face uncomfortable questions—or silences. Of all the developments that had unfolded since my parents’ divorce, this struck me as among the saddest.
No one pressured me, but as the firstborn, I felt duty-bound to be there. Daphne now lived in Hong Kong and made the four-hour flight to Singapore to visit my mother whenever she could. Being a good twenty-hour-plus flight away, I wasn’t exactly able to head home to see Mum whenever a long weekend presented itself. My mother had given me so much—it was she who had taught me to read, after all, by patiently guiding me through a hefty series of beginning readers’ books when I was a toddler. And now, in her time of need, I was far, far away in New York—writing about stilettos. And then, just a few months before my trip home to make pineapple tarts, my father remarried. I didn’t know the details—I didn’t want to ask. All I knew or cared about was “Is Mummy okay?”
“Wouldn’t it be great,” I said to Mike one day after much thought (and some pineapple tarts), “if I could just go home for a bit and learn how to cook and also spend time with my family?”
He looked worried. (I suspect the words “Um, what about your job?” flashed across his mind.) But this lasted for only for a moment. (After all, I’d managed to marry a man who is fervent in his belief that I can do anything—which, let me tell you, is a rare and invaluable quality.)
The job, we decided, was an issue. In this economy, it would be impossible to get weeks—much less months—off. To ask for any time away from my desk and BlackBerry at this pivotal moment would likely be construed as a sign of weakness, a lack of dedication to the job. And to ask for time off in order to go to Singapore to cook? I suspected my parents would remarry each other before giving me their blessing to commit such career suicide.
And then, just a few days later, my editor summoned our entire fashion bureau to a meeting. When I said I would have to be late because I’d scheduled a hard-to-arrange interview with a chief executive officer at that same time and was immediately told to move the interview, I knew something serious was about to happen. Feeling a little ill, the team of reporters slowly made its way to the conference room. On the other side of the door, a neat stack of crisp envelopes lay on the table. We looked at one another—this was it. We’d spent months covering the massive layoffs and restructuring in the retail industry. Now it was our turn to be “restructured.”
What ensued was a blur. I remember only the final words of the human resources woman with any clarity. If we had any questions, she asked us to call, e-mail, or look her up in her office—but only for the next two weeks. It turned out that the person who was laying us off had just been laid off herself.
The first feeling was numbness. Then, panic. The media industry was crumbling as quickly as others were—faster, in fact, than many. Newspaper companies, magazines, broadcasters were laying off people by the dozens, the hundreds. What could possibly be out there for me?
Then, almost instantly, I thought about my grandmother’s bak-zhang. For days I’d been lamenting the fact that I couldn’t take a year off, go to Singapore to spend time with my family and learn how to cook, because I had this job that I simply couldn’t leave. Now, suddenly, the path was clear.
By the time I got back to my desk, I knew what I wanted to do.
There was some confusion, at first, over what exactly I was doing back in Singapore.
“Are you opening a restaurant?” my relatives asked.
Well, no.
“Are you writing a cookbook?”
Um, no.
“What about your job?”
I was laid off.
“Oh.”
Silence. And then . . .
“But who’s cooking for Mike when you’re gone?”
The last question, in fact, was the one I would get the most frequently during my time in Singapore. The subtext, of course, was that I was being a bad wife by leaving my husband to fend for himself for weeks at a time while I was off gallivanting in my aunties’ kitchens, forcing him to have to buy or, horror among horrors, cook himself something for dinner. At first, I would tell them that he was very happy for me and fully supported my going home to spend time with my family, to learn how to cook. It soon became clear, however, that the only correct answer was “Well, he’s very excited that I’m learning how to make these dishes so I finally can cook him good Singaporean dinners.”
And it was true, that was a goal—but just part of the goal. I wanted to make delicious Singaporean dinners for my husband, yes. But much greater than that was my desire to learn the cuisine of my people before the chance to learn disappeared. This had been a part of my culture, my heritage, my family, that I’d never known with any intimacy or clarity, thanks to my determination to ignore it as I bulldozed through my career. Also, I had been ambivalent about having children for years, but now that I was in my mid-thirties, it suddenly occurred to me that, if I ever had them, I’d want to be able to make them pineapple tarts, bak-zhang, and more. And if they were curious, I’d be honored someday to be able to teach them how to cook, telling them about their great-grandmother, the legendary pineapple tart baker, along the way.
And so the plan was to travel back to Singapore for a few weeks at a time over the lunar calendar year—between the time I’d learned to make my Tanglin ah-ma’s pineapple tarts and the next Chinese New Year, the following February. I wasn’t sure what I’d learn, but I was eager to find out. The women of my family had fed me well for years. At the end of the year, I hoped I’d know enough. After all this time, it was my turn to feed them.
The first night I landed in Singapore, my mother was waiting. A petite woman, she could be hard to spot in a crowd—except that, well, she’s gorgeous. When she’s happy, her smile is expansive, infectious, and her eyes are bright and sparkling. When I was a child, she would often bring out mugs of home-brewed hot chrysanthemum tea, nudging grumpy, reluctant me to drink up by dramatically fluttering her eyelids and saying, “This will give you beautiful eyes!” The desire to have my mother’s pretty eyes was often more than enough for me to hoist the mug and drink up. (For some years, anyway.)
That May night at the airport, my mother was more tired and grumpy than happy, nonetheless. She didn’t fully understand why I was coming home; as always, she didn’t want herself to be the priority in our lives. We always came first and were most important, after all. At any dinner table, she would spend most of the meal twirling the lazy Susan about, hovering over the heaping platters, chopsticks poised to pounce and grab the fattest morsels of pork, the duck with the crispiest, brownest skin, and plop them onto the plate of Daphne, me, or my father. Her family came first—and she liked it that way. “Aiyah, don’t worry about me—I can take care of myself!” she said and shrugged whenever any of us expressed concern for her. This, too, became her refrain as she went through the dark discomfort of the separation. This wasn’t a piece of meat or a plump abalone we were talking about, however. This was her life. And I was happy to give up New York for a while—to come home and see how she was doing, to spend time with my family.
The moment I saw my mother at the airport, her first words, as always, were “Are you hungry?” And our years-long tradition immediately was set in motion. We would hug, park the bags in the car, and then head to a nearby hawker center. Under the bright fluorescent lights, hawkers ran from table to table, delivering sizzling hot plates of chunky radish cakes stir-fried with chili and soy sauce or platters of freshly fried oyster omelets. It wasn’t until I tasted my first spoonful of bak-chor mee, a bowl of thin egg noodles still simmering in a peppery broth with minced pork and a hefty dose of hot, sliced red chilis, that I felt it—I was home.
Once my mother was done running around to order drinks, food, and tissue paper for cleaning off the table, I asked, “Hey, are you okay or not?”
“Yah, I’m fine—don’t worry about me!”
“But . . .”
“Aiyah, you know me, I’m very independent. I’m okay lah. Just worry about yourself!”
I looked at her closely. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it. So I asked her, “How’s school?”
My mother had briefly clung to her Singapore Airlines job in the 1970s, keeping her wedding a secret, since SIA stewardesses—the ones in ads who were supposed to be available and “in love with you”—weren’t allowed to be married at the time. But her jet-setting dreams were dashed when she became pregnant shortly after getting married. “You were a wedding night baby, you know!” Dad would always proudly say. With my father traveling frequently for business and the arrival of another daughter just three years after me, my mother devoted herself to raising Daphne and me. It was only when I was a teenager that she went back to work as a customer service representative for United Airlines. After more than twenty years with the airline, she’d recently retired to pursue another dream, enrolling in a six-year diploma course in a traditional Chinese medicine school. At the end, our family would have its first true doctor.
“It’s tough, you know—all my textbooks are in Chinese!” she complained. Mandarin had never been a forte of my mother’s; she’d been educated at St. Margaret’s, an English-language Anglican school in Singapore. And suddenly here she was spending hours in class poring over detailed anatomy charts written entirely in Chinese characters. Having spent twelve years in an English-language Catholic school in which my friends thought it was “cool” not to be good at Mandarin, I couldn’t even fathom attempting the same.
I told her about my job, about the freelancing I was starting to do.
“Well, that’s good—so you get to try different things lah,” she said. “And the money’s okay?”
“Yeah, it’s actually really interesting. I’m happy, Mummy. Don’t worry about me!”
“Okay. As long as you’re okay, I’m happy. Don’t forget to call your dad when we’re home.”
Back in the two-story semidetached home near the beach on Singapore’s East Coast that my parents had moved into when I was in tenth grade, my bedroom remained almost as it was when I left for college, at age eighteen. The posters of the 1990s soccer stars Roberto Baggio, Marco van Basten, and Jürgen Klinsmann had long since fallen off the walls, but the giant West German flag that the World Cup–obsessed sixteen-year-old me had hung up still fluttered in the gusts of the ice-cold air-conditioning. The now-faded picture of Northwestern University that had inspired me to study harder remained pinned up at my desk. The bouquet of roses my parents had given me on my sixteenth birthday that I’d carefully dried and kept was still propped up in a corner. In my closet, my powder blue Catholic high school uniforms still hung, neatly pressed.
In this room, I’d had fervent dreams of the life I was about to lead. I would go to America, become a journalist, travel to war zones with the bravery of Murphy Brown, and retire from journalism at age thirty to start writing books. I’d win two Pulitzer Prizes—one for journalism and one for fiction. I would live in France, Italy, England—and have season tickets to soccer league matches. I might have a child—with or without a husband, as, really, that bit just wasn’t terribly essential—but only one. A girl. And, of course, I’d be so busy being me that I’d have time to marry only when I was forty. (I did plan to make an exception to this last bit, however, if Jürgen Klinsmann ever proposed. In fact, I’d already prepared for this stage of my life by scrawling “Mrs. Cheryl Klinsmann” in Wite-Out on the desks of my tenth-grade classroom.)
Sitting on my sliver of a single bed in my frothy peach and gray–hued room at age thirty-four, however, I realized I’d fallen a little short. The most exciting place I’d been sent for work was not Iraq or Afghanistan but cushy Milan, where the only battle zones I encountered were the ones involving throngs of the Beautiful shoving their way into fashion shows. The closest I came to covering a war zone was when I found myself in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, putting aside my fashion show coverage to race down to Ground Zero as fast as I could in three-inch heels. The Pulitzers? Nonexistent. I’d ended up married ten years ahead of schedule—and not to Jürgen Klinsmann. (Although, I suppose that could still be fixed.) And somehow I’d wound up back here in my teenage bedroom with no job to speak of and an inexplicable quest to learn how to cook—the very thing I’d scorned during my years in Singapore.
I was certain the eighteen-year-old Cheryl would have been terribly unimpressed.
The next morning, however, I was ready to forge ahead with cooking. But first, there was a more pressing matter presented by my mother. “I’ve started going to this dancing class,” she said one day. “Do you want to come?”
I’d loved to dance as a child, having endured ten years of ballet lessons and weekly bouts of wrestling with bandages bound around bloodied toes from point shoes. Ballroom dancing, however, was something I’d never encountered. The main point, though, was to spend time with my mother, to meet the new friends she was making as she started venturing out on her own.
And so, on a Friday night, wearing rubber-soled ballerina flats, the most practical shoes I had brought, I found myself walking into a small, mirrored dance studio, trailing behind my mother. The class was small—and everyone was at least twice my age. Women outnumbered men, which didn’t really matter as my mother was obviously the belle of this ball. Patiently, the men waited to take a spin around the room with my mother, who looked radiant in her orange-tinged red lips, chrysanthemum tea–fueled bright eyes, and short, pixie hairdo. (And it was great that she was such a star because it turned out I had two left feet when it came to the waltz. Long after the night was over, I could still feel the frustrated grip of Francis—the slender, affable man in his sixties whom my mother had asked to teach me—around my waist, jerking me back to the right position as he firmly said, “Concentrate!”)
Watching her glide around the room with the grace of Michelle Kwan, I started to feel like things were going to be okay for her. My mother was happy. Men adored her. It was good to watch the coquettish mother I’d seen glimpses of as a child gradually return.
“You were great out there!” I told her the next day.
“Aiyoh, no lah,” she said, waving me away. “I’m just starting.”
“No, you were really good!” I insisted. After a silence, I asked. “So, what about that Francis guy? Do you like him?”
“No lah!” she said.
I believed her. But still, it was good to think that someone might be out there for my mother. And at least she was putting herself in that line of fire.
Having failed at the waltz, I started itching to cook. The first person I called was Auntie Alice, my mother’s older sister. Of my mother’s three siblings, Auntie Alice—whom I call E-Ma because she’s also my godmother—was the one who grew up knowing how to cook. She was drafted to cook for her younger siblings when their father had suddenly died and their mother had had to work. I’d told her that I was coming home to learn how to cook, and that I hoped she and my maternal grandmother, whom I called Ah-Ma, could teach me. For starters, I wanted to learn how to make Ah-Ma’s kaya, a sweet, eggy coconut jam that’s just lovely spread over the thinnest veneer of butter on a slice of toasted white bread.
There was one small snag, however. “I told Ah-Ma,” Auntie Alice said. “And she said, ‘Aiyoh! I don’t know if I can remember how to make it!’ ” It had been more than ten years since my grandmother had made kaya, it turned out. And as she was eighty-five, the years were starting to get the better of her memory. Nonetheless, Ah-Ma had some rough sense of the ingredients that went into it, and a few days later, I found myself arriving at my grandmother’s home bearing a crate of eggs, grated coconut, sugar, and green pandan leaves, lush and fragrant, freshly snipped from my mother’s garden.
“Ah-Lien ah, le deng lai liao ah!” Ah-Ma said in Hokkien, hugging me tightly while kissing me and smoothing down my hair, as she always does, and crooning “Chao gao kia,” which means “smelly puppy.” (This is a pet name none of her grandchildren have ever understood.) Yes, I’d come home, I said. “Your husband didn’t come?” she asked. And I began to brace myself for the next question. “You didn’t bring a baby back for Ah-Ma to carry?”
I remained a disappointment to my grandmother in this regard. Month after month, she’d ask: When was I going to give her a great-grandchild? “Ah-Ma is not getting any younger, you know,” she’d plead over the phone or whenever she saw me. “I don’t want to die until I’ve seen my great-grandchild.” Sometimes, she would simply come right out and say it. “Ah-Ma is dying already—you’d better have a baby soon!” The pressure, which had begun as soon as I got married, in 2004, only intensified as the years passed. Nothing quelled her determination—not protestations that I was too busy, that we didn’t have any family in New York to help us, that I had absolutely no idea how to raise a child, that I believed I would be a bad mother. (Her solution to all those problems always was the same—“Move back to Singapore! We’ll help you!”) Eventually, however, I came up with a way to halt the interrogation. “Ah-Ma ah,” I’d say quietly and gravely, “didn’t they tell you? I’m infertile!” She would recoil, swatting my hands as she spit out “Choi! Choi! Choi!” a refrain meant to ward off any evil or bad luck. My words always worked—she’d stop the questioning. (For a few weeks, at least.)
I always felt a little bad for causing Ah-Ma any further distress. Her life, as related to me when I was a child, had been pockmarked with loss, pain, and poverty. I knew few details, but the black-and-white picture of her wedding day perched in her living room spoke volumes. In the photo, Ah-Ma is a porcelain-skinned twenty-year-old, smiling tentatively while seated next to a older man, tall, dark, and rakish. Gong-Gong had come from Xiamen, China, to find his fortune in Singapore. Although he was a good ten-plus years older than my grandmother, he had won her family over with his chiseled features and high forehead, which the Chinese in Singapore believe is a mark of intelligence and great potential for success. Together, they had four children, and life was blissful—until Ah-Ma learned of her husband’s wife and children back in China and decided to take it upon herself to help bring them to Singapore so they could live together as one happy family. The moment Wife No. 1 appeared in Singapore, of course, Family No. 2 was kicked out. Ah-Ma raised her four children in a one-bedroom apartment that was tiny even by New York City standards, always teetering on the brink of complete poverty and seeing my grandfather only when he could sneak away.
I know little of this handsome polygamist from Xiamen except that I probably inherited his great love for soy sauce, which I drizzle over everything—noodles, fried eggs at brunch, hamburgers, you name it. “Aiyoh, you cannot eat so much soy sauce!” my mum would frequently yell. “Don’t you know that Gong-Gong died of kidney failure?” In fact, when my grandfather died, my fourteen-year-old mother only found out days later. The family heard from someone who’d heard from someone that he’d passed away in Wife No. 1’s home. That night, my mother and her siblings sprinkled flour all over the floors of their kitchen and living room, hoping that they would find footprints in the white mounds, offering proof that their papa’s ghost had returned to say good-bye. When they awoke the next day, there were none. And Ah-Ma gave everyone a good spanking for wasting perfectly good flour.
Dreams of my grandfather would haunt my mother for years. In her dreams, her papa would come to her, telling her he had lucky lottery numbers, a gift for his beloved family, for whom he had left nothing. Gong-Gong would try to hand her a piece of paper with the winning numbers, but my mother, generally terrified of ghosts, would squeeze her eyes shut, refusing to look as her father pleaded with her, telling her that even in death, he was the same man she had loved. Just then, a rooster would crow. The sun would start rising. It was time for him to leave for the Other World. My mother would open her eyes and call out to her father, but he’d already be gone.
This story still draws violent reactions from my aunties whenever it’s recounted, usually at the dinner table of some family gathering, where talk inevitably returns to the old days. Past regrets and a thousand should-haves are ever-present in my family’s life. “Ah-Tin ah, why you never open your eyes?” Auntie Jane, my mother’s younger sister, would moan. “We could have been rich, you know!” Ah-Ma did go on to have a good life, however—her children all became successful and also married well. In her twilight years, she was living with my uncle and his family in a plush house in Singapore’s Holland Village, a neighborhood that’s popular with well-paid expats.
That day, in Ah-Ma’s comfortable living room filled with a stylish, modern couch and antiques my uncle had collected in his travels through Asia, I chose not to invoke any tales of the past. We had a task at hand, after all. There was no time to waste on clucking over babies, ghosts, or bad luck. There was kaya to be made! We began by bundling up the freshly grated coconut in cheesecloth and wringing out its milk, white and thick as paint. After squeezing out all we could, we added some water to the coconut and wrung it out again; the milk from the second squeezing was thinner than that from the first but smelled fragrant nonetheless. Ah-Ma perched herself on a bench by the kitchen, watching us prepare the coconut milk while loudly lamenting that she didn’t fully remember how to make kaya. “Ah-Ma’s old, of no use anymore,” she said in Mandarin, sighing and shaking her head. Just when I started to get worried, however, she switched into the firm, bossy Ah-Ma that I knew as a child and began barking out instructions.
Making kaya was simple, she said. We quickly got to work in my uncle’s modern kitchen, which he’d kitted out with sleek appliances and a large, gleaming countertop. First, we cracked ten eggs into a large bowl and whisked them together. Then we added about a cup of sugar and the coconut milk, mixing it all up well. Next, Ah-Ma instructed us to place the mixture in a glass bowl, add a few knotted pandan leaves, perch that bowl atop a rack in a wok, and just let it steam for forty-five minutes or so. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other. “Mummy ah, we don’t need to stir it, meh?” Auntie Alice gently asked. Ah-Ma shook her head and hands vigorously. “Mieng, mieng!” she said in Hokkien. Auntie Alice and I looked at each other again. This just didn’t sound right. Kaya is supposed to be smooth, creamy, and easy to spread. I hadn’t spent that much time cooking at this point, but I did feel I knew enough to predict how steaming a bunch of eggs, untouched, for forty-five minutes would end up. Just letting the eggs, sugar, and coconut milk steam for forty-five minutes without any stirring was likely to produce a dense, cakelike custard—one that I envisioned us being able to cut up into neat slices, not spread easily over crusty, hot toast. Could Ah-Ma—who had spent the morning telling us that she couldn’t quite remember how to make the dishes she had been known for—possibly have misremembered?
I had been afraid of not having enough kaya for three households—my mother’s, Auntie Alice’s, and Ah-Ma’s—so I’d brought enough ingredients for two batches. “Well . . . ,” Auntie Alice finally said, giving me a meaningful look, “since we have enough for another batch, why don’t we just make one batch Ah-Ma’s way and one batch that we stir during steaming? Just try lah—experiment!” Ah-Ma shrugged, giving us a distinct “you’re wasting your time” look. Auntie Alice and I immediately got to work, whipping together the second batch of kaya. Onto the steamer that went, and we started stirring it periodically. Looking at the two kayas side by side, we were glad we had decided to try the second batch our way. Ah-Ma’s method was yielding a kaya that resembled a pudding. The yellow-green custard was puffing up slightly and looked distinctly solid. The kaya that Auntie Alice and I were diligently stirring, however, was looking nice and soft. As the smell of coconut and vanilla-like pandan seeped into the air, we were feeling good about our kaya. I began to envision the breakfast of kaya toast, hot and buttery, that I’d have the next day.
After forty-five minutes, however, our impressions changed. When we removed the two bowls of kaya, Auntie Alice and I smiled knowingly at first, as we noticed that Ah-Ma’s remained pudding-like while ours looked like a chunky rubble of jam. Then Ah-Ma gestured to us to stir up her kaya. It yielded easily to our spoon, forming a creamy, silken mass as we stirred. The version that Auntie Alice and I had concocted, however, remained lumpen and unappetizing no matter how much we tried to whip it into a smooth froth. And when we spread both kayas on bread, ours had an alarming grainy texture while Ah-Ma’s was perfectly smooth. Just as it should have been.
Ah-Ma didn’t say anything. Auntie Alice and I winced. The students had been arrogant enough to second-guess the teacher—someone who had brought decades of experience to the kitchen counter only to be given the fish eye and sidelined. And we had learned a lesson, indeed. Silently, I vowed to listen to my grandmother more.
Quietly, we packed up our kaya and hugged Ah-Ma good-bye. Just before letting me go, however, my grandmother gave me one final instruction: “Next time, bring a baby for Ah-Ma.”