It was around this time I discovered my maternal grandmother is a liar. Well, it’s not that she lies, per se. It’s just that she has developed a selective memory.
Auntie Alice and I had decided to get to the bottom of our collective family history. One afternoon, we took a break from cooking and met in my grandmother’s bedroom, sitting on the floor at her feet as we plied her with questions.
That she’d lived a hard life was indisputable. All my life, though, I’d wondered why she’d made the decisions she had. Why marry my grandfather? Why bring his first wife and family over from China?
This much we had known: My grandmother had come of age during World War II. Just as she was blossoming into a young woman, the Japanese occupied Singapore, renaming it Syonanto and beginning a reign of terror that poisoned daily life. “I was afraid to go out,” Ah-Ma says in Hokkien. “We were always afraid that Japanese soldiers would rape us.”
It was around this time that a handsome man began calling. He worked in a coffee shop across the street and had befriended Ah-Ma’s brother. Soon he began coming by after work to play cards. Almost as soon, he began expressing interest in my grandmother’s hand in marriage. Fearing for her safety as a young, single woman during the occupation, my grandmother consented. “I was so afraid—just anyhow get married is safer lor,” she says, sighing. “Aiyah, I was so silly, everything also didn’t know.”
Fast-forward to the picture of my grandmother on her wedding day, dressed in white, wide-eyed and tentative, with the faintest of smiles; a tall, dark, older man, fourteen years her senior, the protector she had sought, towering next to her. Then fast-forward yet again to the moment of discovery—that the man she’d married had another wife, another family back in China. Instead of anger, instead of frustration, Ah-Ma felt only pity. “People in China,” she says, “they were suffering at the time.” Besides, her own father in Xiamen had had four wives, she says. She understood how love, or something like it, could be sometimes. And so she cleared out a room in their home for this other wife, sewed together new pillowcases for her, implored her husband to bring over his first wife. “I thought we could all live together,” she says. “I was so, so stupid.”
From the beginning, things were difficult. “I cooked for her to eat,” Ah-Ma says. The first wife, of course, only complained ceaselessly. Ah-Ma became an outsider in her own newlywed home. Finally, Ah-Ma moved out, and the first wife proceeded to lord over the home that once was hers. “Your marriage was so messy!” Auntie Alice suddenly exclaims. Her face is wrinkled in disgust at the hardships her mother had to endure. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have stood for it, you know,” she whispers to me, putting her hand to her face to shield her mouth.
But times, of course, were different. In 1940s Singapore, a young married woman with children had few options—especially if she was the second wife, even if she hadn’t known it at the start.
My grandfather started sporadically coming by to drop off provisions and cash for Ah-Ma and their growing family. Auntie Alice was born, then my mother. Then Auntie Jane and my kuku. It was difficult to determine when Gong-Gong would come. This is when the selective memory starts to kick in. “Wah mana eh gi!” Ah-Ma says of this time, saying she doesn’t remember much of what her new life as the exiled second wife was like. “My memory is that Papa rarely came back—right?” Auntie Alice asks softly. “He worked seven days a week. He didn’t have Saturday and Sunday off.” (Leaning over, Auntie Alice whispers to me, “I think she remembers—she doesn’t want to say.”)
“Aiyah,” Ah-Ma finally says. “If he wants to come, he comes. If he doesn’t want to come, he doesn’t come. I was very stupid before,” she adds quietly, sighing again. “But did I have a choice?”
Years went by, and Ah-Ma’s little family grew up. Auntie Alice suddenly remembers the one family outing her father took them on. “He came on a bicycle to fetch us. We went to have dim sum,” she says. “That’s the only outing I remember, you know. As a father figure, I don’t think there was much communication. But it was really a nice feeling, a once-in-a-lifetime outing with your parents.” Shuat Giau, the first wife, too, stopped by to see Ah-Ma. “I was in Primary Six, and she came to the house. I remember I opened the door and I didn’t even know what she was saying. But next thing I knew, I got slapped,” Auntie Alice says.
And then one day, my grandfather fell in the bathroom and hit his head. A few days later, he was dead. “People came to notify us, but Shuat Giau didn’t want us to attend the funeral,” Auntie Alice, then a teenager, says as her own memories return.
Privately, the second family mourned. And then Ah-Ma went to work; the neighbors’ laundry became her business. Auntie Alice began taking care of the household, cooking for her younger siblings, watching them after school. Instantly, this teenager became a young mother. “And then you started having gambling in the house, right, Ma?” Auntie Alice says. The selective memory kicks in again. “No lah, I don’t remember that,” Ah-Ma says. “Don’t write that down,” she adds, pushing my pen away. (Once again, Auntie Alice leans over and quietly says, “There was a gambling den in our house—but only for a few years.”)
The hardships this man had brought on Ah-Ma didn’t diminish her desire to see if he was okay, however. She missed him; she was curious. Shortly after Gong-Gong died, she went to a psychic with a reputation for being able to call up the souls of dead loved ones so the living could see how they were doing. The message was one that Ah-Ma would remember for decades. “Gong-Gong said, ‘Right now you are suffering, but your life ahead will only become better and better. I know you had a hard life, but don’t worry, you will have good days ahead. And this woman who made your life difficult, within three years, I will take her with me to the Other World.’ ”
Ah-Ma wasn’t sure what to make of it. But within three years of my grandfather’s death, his first wife died. And as for her own life, my grandfather had been right—it only got better and better. Her children all grew up and became successful professionals, making them all the more able to grant her the comfortable life she’d craved and had always, always deserved.
Ah-Ma was tired, the trip through a thicket of unwanted memories having exhausted this spry eighty-six-year-old.
“People need to have ups and downs,” Auntie Alice finally says, as we hug our good-byes. “It’s only if you have downs that you’ll get to have the ups.”
At this point, I was beginning to feel a change whenever I stepped back into my New York kitchen.
I’d approached meals, cookies, and certainly, breads with some degree of confidence before, but it was always laced with the unshakable fear that something was not going to work out. Or explode. Or perhaps even both. Each time I returned from Singapore, however, I was feeling this fear dissipate. The attitude from the first egg cracked, the very first stirrings, was gradually becoming one devoid of doubt. Things were likely to work out, I started believing—and even if they didn’t, well, so what? I could always try again. My looser approach was freeing, and amid the lack of fretting, I discovered that I was truly starting to enjoy cooking.
I was still making my way through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge. On the docket this time, however, was a bread that was anything but titillating. The last time I’d baked a bread, what emerged from the oven was a loaf of casatiello, a gorgeous hunk of Italian bread studded with salami and oozing with hot cheese. I’d started priding myself on being able to tackle focaccia, beautifully braided challah, breads that I’d never even contemplated making, much less producing versions people marveled at and couldn’t keep themselves from clawing.
So you might understand why I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next challenge loaf: light wheat bread. After the sexy Italian, wheat bread seemed like the yawner of a boy next door. (You know, the ugly one.)
But after having spent several weeks in Singapore without an oven at my disposal, I was itching to bake something. Anything. And as it turned out, this plain boy next door had his surprises.
This bread began as several others do. First, I mixed together the dry ingredients, which in this case were bread flour, whole wheat flour, powdered milk, and yeast. Now, in this recipe by Peter Reinhart, the wheat flour accounts for only 33 percent of the total flour, so it’s not as hard-core as whole-grain loafs. If you’re more of a white-bread kind of person, this loaf’s for you. Next, I added in some shortening, honey, and room-temperature water. And after mixing and kneading, it was time to let the ball of dough ferment at room temperature for ninety minutes. (This bread turned out to be a real riser—it more than doubled in size during that time.)
Next, it was time to press that dough ball out into a rectangle and then roll up the rectangle into a loaf and let it sit for another ninety minutes or however long it took until the dough “crest[ed] above the lip of the pan.” I set the timer and, of course, proceeded to forget to check on whatever cresting activity might be happening. So when the timer went off, this was what had happened: My dough had grown so much it was on the verge of sprouting hands and lifting itself out of my loaf pan. Into the oven it went, and less than an hour later, this gorgeous, caramel-hued loaf came out.
Now, when it had been baking, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of this bread.
Unlike the casatiello or the impressive-looking double-decker braided cranberry-walnut celebration bread that I’d made in previous weeks, this loaf did not fill my apartment with any discernible smell during baking. There was no provolone fog or clouds of cranberry mixed with lemon. When I sliced it open, however, there it was—the simple, sweet smell of freshly baked bread.
Toasted and slathered with blueberry jam, this bread was just divine. And it was even better buttered with Dijon mustard and a little mayonnaise, and topped with cheddar and thickly sliced bone-in ham from the fancyish store down the street. And for the next few days, Mike and I would be reminded over and over, as we pulled it out to savor with breakfast or lunch, that sometimes it’s important to nail the basic as well as the fancy—a lesson whose importance extends far beyond any kitchen, really.
As bread goes, this light wheat bread may not have been my first choice. Oh, how I’d sneered at it! But in the end, it turned out to be basic, yes, but also versatile and surprisingly satisfying—the sort of bread that really grows on you.
You know, just like that boy next door often does.