On Dad
I remember receiving a call from my dad one night, apologising for “letting us down”. I found him sitting by the convenience store, a lone figure in the dark, mumbling incoherently to the floor. Few empty beer cans littered around him like a protective barrier.
I couldn’t make out the half Chinese, half Hokkien words he was vomiting but it was along the lines of how he had screwed up. By the time my uncle and I helped him home, it was past 2 am. He crashed on the floor in the living room quickly.
At about 5 am, I heard the door unlatching. He was leaving for work.
We have never spoken about this incident. It remains the first and last time I had seen my dad drunk. He went back to being the dad who kept problems to himself while maintaining a silly demeanour around me. He joked about sneaking durian into my food or feeding me till I’m round like him (at one point I was a proud member of the infamous TAF Club). I didn’t know how to help him so I laughed. He taught me how to do that.
At 17, I wasn’t able to comprehend the pressure he felt (I’m 30 now and still don’t know). I knew he had relocated his humble yet thriving hawker stall to a shophouse, starting from scratch and multiplying the bills and loans threefold (living the Singaporean dream). And he had just gotten back on his feet post-bankruptcy.
People thought he was nuts. They weren’t wrong to think so. In the early days, trays of uneaten food sat in the trash, wasted and soon forgotten. ‘I told you so’ has never been this unhelpful. At a time when I was likely obsessed with my looks and being cool, my dad was living a lonely decision, one that he made in an attempt to better our lives.
Despite everything, he got up and went to work every morning before the sun came up.
I often wondered what went through his mind as the alarm rang; as he put on his ‘uniform’, a paper-thin white T-shirt and black shorts with visible stains. Did he feel trapped as the breadwinner of our family? Were his bad knees further burdened by responsibilities? What does it mean to be the oldest of seven siblings, the eldest son to my ailing grandparents? Was he doing everything he wanted with his life?
Growing up, we might have been scraping by but I never felt poor. We could and could not afford everything. Family dinners meant trips to hawker centres where dad ordered so much the table would disappear, leaving passersby in wonderment: is this a meal for ten (we were 4)? He was also generous with my pocket money—I was the envy of friends and I spent frivolously every week. No questions asked.
But as I got older, it became hard not to see things in a different currency. It cost 150 bowls of porridge to put money in my pocket every week. 6,000 for my first MacBook Pro and 14,500 to put me through Temasek Design School.
My dad uses an eighty-cent toothbrush that defies every known feature of a good toothbrush—an option born out of circumstance but grew into choice. He says that cooking is a mode of survival, “to pay the bills”. Perhaps that was how it started but I saw the light in his eyes each time he tossed deliciousness in a wok or when he’s deep in conversation with a fellow foodie about Chinese herbs and spices.
Pursuing a passion is a concept foreign to my dad and most of the sandwich generation folks. Yet despite the options that we, the privileged generation, have been given, we are not necessarily leading richer lives. But here’s one thing I learnt witnessing my dad at work—showing up every day to serve a purpose greater than yourself (and having some fun along the way) likely leads to job satisfaction.
It took a couple of years for Soon Soon to garner a reputation as a little institution for Teochew Porridge. Standing in the corner on a crowded weekend, you can feel the place buzzing as people walked in one after another, lining up to the door. Dad’s sisters stood their ground at the front of house, always going the extra mile to make sure everything was running smoothly. Witnessing everyone at work was like watching a human-machine powered by adrenaline and then some pride (though they will never admit it).
The volume of customers enabled dishes to be sold at a pace that minimised food on display, maximising freshness. Unfortunately, it also meant that my dad was on standby to recook and hardly caught a break. It didn’t help that he was a maximalist. His dishes were made with 真材实料, the best ingredients as much as possible and he went to the market every morning to make sure of that. Oh yeah, he sucks at delegating.
Making food like that comes with sacrifice. At the end of every workday, I heard him drag his feet home some fifty metres away, not because of a bad habit, but it was the only way he could walk.
Teochew Muay, no matter how good, has been condemned to a stagnant market rate that is apathetic to rising costs. I sometimes wonder if businesses as such will perish someday because the amount of work is unproportionate to profit. It is possible to replace herbs and spices to keep costs low or cut down steps to minimise effort but I know for dad, there is invaluable currency to be made when repeat customers drive some 13 kilometres every weekend to eat his food.
11 years, 4 months and 23 days after the opening of Soon Soon (and two surgeries later), my dad let the business go. It was at its peak. Again, to the bewilderment of many.
Having worked all his life, he claimed that he wanted to take a break. Within a month of this said ‘retirement’, he opened another Teochew Muay business with the money he made selling Soon Soon and even took up new loans to finance it, confusing everybody.
Maybe he can’t stop. Maybe he needed a new beginning. Who knows? He is a mystery to me.
One of dad’s foreign worker once told me that it is dad’s destiny to cook. He was a bad chef in heaven who had been banished to Earth to learn humble ways. She said that, matter-of-factly, I kid you not, as she helped herself to a generous portion of the day’s staff meal that dad had fired up. It was char kway tiao. I was taught to be wise so I followed suit.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions on what makes a successful life but I know from dad and my aunts that the ingredients to work happiness is the commitment, a lot of heart and going at it even when you’re down.
In my dad’s lifetime, he has worked as a bus driver (how he met my mother), a gambler (a bad one), fish porridge and curry rice seller (his first F&B ventures in the 90s) before settling on Teochew Muay—at first a hawker stall from 1997 at Serangoon Central, then a shophouse at Simon Road and now at 1096 Serangoon Road where he has combined his two loves (Teochew Muay and Steamed Fish).
Despite these being deemed by society as ‘work for the uneducated’, the long hours and hard labour, my dad is one of the happiest people at work that I’ve ever witnessed.
Being able to taste his food makes me feel incredibly lucky to be alive.
His signature dish, the Braised Duck. I grew up eating it. I loved it so much that I would get called out by my grandmother for it. It made me feel special.
