A Tiger in the Kitchen Read Free Page B

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