Mee Siam was a special treat in our house whenever my mother made it, she would tell me more about Great Grandmother. My great grandmother herself came to Malaya from Siam – traversing virgin jungle on the back of an elephant, which was the mode of transport then. These are all Nyonya dishes, though the last may have come from Siam, now Thailand, and was subsequently adopted by the Nyonyas. Occasionally, she would make a noodle dish known as “Mee Siam.” Mee Siam, photo credit: Alpha. When my school held fun fairs, my mother would spend hours making extra-spicy chicken curry accompanied by turmeric rice to raise money. Whenever someone celebrated a baby’s first month, orange-red sweet cakes called angkoo, filled with crushed mung beans, would be delivered in tiffin-carriers. “Nyonya” became a word I associated with ferocious women, delicious food, and special events. The Nyonyas were no more, but their cooking lived on. I was fascinated by this, and by the wonder that was Nyonya cuisine. Seventy years after her passing, she was still spoken about with awe by those who had met her. Or perhaps that epithet was reserved for my great grandmother, whose reprimands were said to be as ‘eye-watering’ as her food. I never saw a Nyonya woman when I was growing up I only heard about the Chinese women who had once dressed in Malay attire and were very fierce. By the time I was born, little was left of it. Gradually, in the changing melting pot that was British Malaya, Nyonya culture declined.
Parents even sought out Nyonya wives for their sons, in the hope that their offspring would be well-fed! Nyonya food became famous throughout Malaya. The community that resulted had a distinctive style of dress, lingo and especially, cuisine. My two worlds were alive: Chinese and Malay rolled into one, blended by the centuries that had passed.” “A Nyonya, I told myself, is a woman who breathes two worlds – not just one or the other, not more one than the other, but both equally. Like Great Grandmother, the protagonist is a Nyonya: a female descendant of the Chinese traders who had married Malay women centuries before and whose ancestors spent hundreds of years experimenting with cultural fusion. This maternal great grandmother was so formidable that she inspired my debut novel, The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds. My mother turned out a great cook, but her grandmother was apparently even better – superb, by all accounts. And Malaysian cuisine, in reflecting the diversity of a country with three major races – Malay, Chinese and Indian – meant endless variety in food choices.Īt the time the kitchen was the domain of women, who were expected to be able to cook. We talked a lot about food too, especially around the dining table, where we would muse about what to have for a late-night supper while still munching through dinner. My earliest memories are of family and food: eating under a star-filled sky, the aromatic smells of garlic and lemongrass, and freshly plucked exotic fruit whose juices dribbled down my fingers.
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