Mother Talks to 11-Year-Old Self at Bedok Hawker Centre

by Max Pasakorn

First published in Tigers Zine on 24 June 2022. Click the arrow (>) to learn more about this piece. Content warning: eating, death of a loved one

1. There is a stall here that is as old as you. It has seen how the concrete rises and falls. An ice palace built and torn apart with the same magic. Yet, they’ve stayed, choosing to dig scoops and scoops of Chwee Kueh from thin metal moulds like scooping ice cream out of an endless vat. Water cakes, these white jiggly delights translate to. You imagine them as boats floating in chili oil, the way you loved splashing in bathtubs as a child. One overzealous spoonful and the grated radish oozes down the side, pleading you to include it in the next bite. I didn’t know you would like this so much. A two-dollar power booster in the morning hidden by a relentless queue of customers. No wonder they’ve got a Michelin star. Generations on generations of wisdom in each gelatinous mound. Now, if only you could cook.

2. It is so funny when they try to pronounce กระเพรา in English. They treat it like a comic book superhero, complete with an exclamation mark behind. But at home, we say it gently, imagining those basil leaves swaying down from a height, into a wok with pork and sauce. There is a loud sizzle before the aromatics envelop the kitchen, the leaves wilting as they expend their flavour to the dish. The English try to make it sound fancy, by calling it bolognaise. It’s just white rice and a mincemeat stir fry. But it reminds you of home, much more than any other dish that the world claims the most authentically Thai. Maybe, it is the fish sauce. But there’s something comforting about the smell of this dish when it is piping hot, with the กระเพรา scattered everywhere, exhausted, having given their all. It reminds you of lazing around on a Sunday afternoon, when you drum your belly slowly to another pop song.

3. Every time we eat, the government tells us that we barter and trade our lives through what we push down our throats. Less salt, less sugar, less gravy. Once, I stopped you from buying a can of Coke, and you sulked, saying, “What’s the point of living if all you’re doing is just trying to stop death?” I sighed, and asked you to walk over to the supermarket across the street, where you could get the Coke for 50-cents. I guess that is what happens when a child is raised on food cooked so squarely from the heart.

4. There were a few times the critics came to try our food. I wanted them to like it, so that maybe we’d have a photo with a famous person pasted at the front of our shop, like so many of the stalls here. This person would either have a very complicated English name, or a Chinese name from a dialect I haven’t learnt to speak. I’m too old to learn a new language. Flavours will do just fine. We got a gold star from some association, but no picture. Opposite, there’s a chicken rice stall that has somehow been endorsed by Lee Hsien Loong. They don’t get long queues, but people stop by sometimes to talk about the photo. I don’t know the hawkers’ names.

5. When they upgraded the interchange, I had already stopped cooking. We took Bus 9 every day to the hospital. In Thai, the word nine sounds like the word leap. kao. So you felt like we were frogs, hopping around in the February rain, aimless with destination. I could feel my hands, corned and calloused from work, grip yours, small and tender, as the bus shook on the rough pavement. I asked you once if you preferred it this way. You said yes, because you had nothing to do sitting outside the stall in an empty hawker centre, waiting till the lights went out. Now, we could sit on a bus and watch the buildings wave by. And I agreed. How much better life would be if I had only picked up the spatula in our home, where no one would come between us and the rice. How I’d probably known that you’d grow up to be a great storyteller with each empty plate. How much more time we’d have to feel the warmth of each other’s palms.

---

Max Pasakorn is a queer, Thai-born, Singapore-based writer. Their work has been published in and is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Strange Horizons, Middleground Magazine, EXHALE and Freeze Ray Poetry. Max’s debut nonfiction chapbook, A Study in Our Selves, won the OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition (Nonfiction) and is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press. Learn more about the author at www.maxpasakorn.works, and follow them on Instagram at @maxpsk_writes.

Did you enjoy this piece? If you’d like to send the author a tip, you can do so via PayPal.

Thank you for reading! Pandan Weekly is a weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region. If you have a previously published piece you’d like to share with Pandan Weekly, you can check our submission guidelines.