“If you don’t eat up those bits left on the plate, your future husband’s face will look just like that.” As a young child, I saw a glimpse of my own face past the mess on the reflective porcelain, and imagined this seemingly predictable future. After a while, I would obligingly finish up my food. Forward a decade and I know now that my mother was not a great fortune teller, nor a psychic, but a great mother. I get really irritated seeing people leave grains of rice scattered all over their plate, or just a few strands of noodle left swimming in cold soup. I mean, does it really take so much effort to down a few more mouthfuls? It is not so much the aesthetics, or the lack of it, but the value of being grateful for what we have.

These days, we are troubled during meal times, not by not having enough to eat, but by immense variety that is available. Chicken rice? Fishball noodles? No, too much of the local fare…maybe a Western ribeye steak? Japanese teppanyaki? Korean bibimbap? Few of us actually realise that these are luxuries in the eyes of many – including my parents, who lived on a diet of porridge and Marmite when they were my age. My parents would always launch into their soliloquy about how meat, even chicken, would only be seen during festivities such as Chinese New Year. Eggs were also uncommon enough for them to be used sparingly. The lack of variety in terms of ingredients led to much creativity however, as they tried to create their own variety with what they had.

Once, I saw my mother dip you tiao (fried dough fritters) in the laksa soup that my sister had left over during our breakfast together as a family. She caught the quizzical and skeptical look that I had shot across the table. “Try it,” she said, and I fell in love with the savory combination at once.

On another occasion, she had cooked a pot of green bean soup that my siblings and I love so much. Whilst we indulged in the mush of green beans, gula melaka and sago, she went to the fridge and dug out the small box of durians that we had bought the day before, and proceeded to expertly separate flesh from seed before adding it to her own bowl of soup.

Yes, I did eventually try that strange concoction though the taste was too strong for my liking. In any case, whenever I ask her of the origins of these weird yet ingenious recipes, she would say, “Everybody ate it this way!” These episodes would just serve as timely reminders that my parents had lived in a different day and age, and that even as they unknowingly pass down some old practices and memories, some would be lost forever when they pass on. Thus, once in a while when I have the chance, I would ask my parents about their childhood ambitions, their school days, their teenage concerns…at least, even if I did not share these memories, I would be able to keep them and understand my parents more holistically as two ordinary persons that fell in love, and not just the two main authorities in my life.