I was leaving Singapore with a heavy heart this time. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. But at the same time I knew I’d learned so much that I’d be carrying bits of my family back with me to Brooklyn. And this included bird’s nest soup, something that I’d never thought I’d be eager to learn.
For decades, this clear, sweet soup with floating bits of gelatinous “bird’s nest,” which look alarmingly like clumps of cloudy phlegm, had been the bane of my days in Singapore. Bird’s nest is not cheap—the Chinese fervently believe in the healing properties of the soup, which is eaten hot or cold, usually as a dessert. My mother always says it’s what keeps skin looking youthful, and it restores the body’s energy. As a result, I usually see a bowl of it on my bedroom table the very morning after I arrive from the long journey between New York and Singapore. (For a while, during my teenage years, my mother took to believing that the body best absorbed the bird’s nest if you drank the soup while half asleep; she took to rousing Daphne and me at ungodly hours of the early morning and attempting to shove spoonfuls of it into our mouths even before we had time to fully open our eyes.)
Beautiful skin and great health, however, is still never enough to get me to finish the bowls of it she makes without complaining bitterly. The idea of eating what essentially is birds’ saliva is simply not worth the Shangri-la youthfulness it supposedly offers.
As my year at home drew to a close, however, I realized that my time ahead in New York was devoid of bird’s nest soup. The euphoria I thought I’d feel wasn’t there. Instead, there was a pang. “Mommo ah,” I said one afternoon. “Can you teach me how to make birds’ nest?” If she had been sitting on a chair, I’m certain my mother would have fallen off it. “You sure?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I should learn.”
The process of making bird’s nest soup was simple—you need, in essence, just four main ingredients: water, bird’s nest, rock sugar, and pandan leaves. My mother adds a little ginseng to hers for added health benefits, but it’s really not necessary. “You soak the bird’s nest in cool water for half an hour to one hour,” she said, speaking slowly so I could write everything down. “Until the hairs all come out—once they’re loosened then you take tweezers and you pluck all the hairs out.” This seemed like a very essential step—I suddenly thought of all the mornings when I had wailed and complained whenever she’d tried to foist this soup on me. I now realized how difficult it had been. I remember watching her bent over a bowl, squinting hard into a semi-clear glob for long stretches, tweezers in hand, meticulously pulling out hair after hair. My mother always was driven in this task; she would only pause now and then to quickly rub her tired eyes. I had always chosen to ignore this whenever I saw it—if I didn’t think about her painstakingly preparing the bird’s nest, I wouldn’t have to think about eating it in my very near future.
“After all the hairs have been plucked out, you drain it and ‘wash it clean,’ ” she said. “Then you put the bird’s nest, three to five pieces of pandan leaf, and eight or nine small pieces of ginseng into a pot and put enough water to cover it—just boil over a small fire for half an hour. Toward the end, add rock sugar to taste.”
“How much sugar should I add?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“Aiyoh, you don’t ask me how much lah—very difficult to tell you one!” she said. “Just until you think it’s sweet enough lah.”
It seemed simple enough, once the hair part had been dealt with, that is. “Oh, when you make it ah, make at least five pieces,” my mother said, noting how the nests were generally sold in bits that were about three inches long and about two inches wide. “You make just one or two—it’s just wasting time to make. Make more.”
My mother looked at me keenly, seeming to wonder whether I would actually bother to do all this back in Brooklyn. “It will cool you down, help you bu shenti—strengthen your body,” she said. “Mummy always sees you running around, so busy. You’d better take care of your health, okay? Listen to Mummy.”
I promised that I would try.
“Cheryl ah,” Auntie Alice said in a phone call the day before I left. “So how did your dinner go?”
“Good, good,” I said, telling her about the text that I’d gotten from my cousin Jessie the next day: “Thanks Cheryl for your dinner. the food was great. . . . especially the braised duck . . . my mum said yrs is so much better than hers. . . . You Won her heee . . . heee . . . real good. . . .”
“Wow!” Auntie Alice said. “Not bad ah! Clever already ah!”
I started to say “No lah, no lah” before she cut me off.
“You know, there’s this Chinese saying: Jingde liao chu fang ye jingdeliao dating,” she said. “It means you are skilled enough to be in the kitchen but also skilled enough to be in the great hall.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can do both—you’re a superwoman!” she said, laughing. “You have really grown up, Cheryl.”