Eating Together: Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, by Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo EATING TOGETHER

Home , Burmese salads, Cynthia Koh, Jeanette Aw, Joanne Peh, Kopi tiam, Mamak stall

EATING TOGETHER Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy General Editor: Ken Albala, Professor of History, University of the Pacific ([email protected])

Food studies is a vibrant and thriving field encompassing not only cooking and eating habits but also issues such as health, sustainability, food safety, and animal rights. Scholars in disciplines as diverse as history, anthropology, sociology, literature, and the arts focus on food. The mission of Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gas- tronomy is to publish the best in food scholarship, harnessing the energy, ideas, and creativity of a wide array of food writers today. This broad line of food-related titles will range from food history, interdisciplinary food studies monographs, general interest series, and popular trade titles to textbooks for students and budding chefs, scholarly cookbooks, and reference works.

Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Erica J. Peters Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, by Ken Albala Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet, by Signe Rousseau Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America, by Mark McWilliams Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America, by Bruce Kraig and Patty Carroll New Orleans: A Food Biography, by Elizabeth M. Williams (Big City Food Biographies series) A Year in Food and Beer: Recipes and Beer Pairings for Every Season, by Emily Baime and Darin Michaels Breakfast: A History, by Heather Arndt Anderson (The Meals series) New Paradigms for Treating Relationships, edited by Jill Savege Scharff and David E. Scharff Celebraciones Mexicanas: History, Traditions, and Recipes, by Andrea Lawson Gray and Adriana Almazán Lahl Food History Almanac: Over 1,300 Years of World Culinary History, Culture, and Social Influence, by Janet Clarkson The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community, by Kimberly Wilmot Voss Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods, by Suzanne Cope Eating Together: Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, by Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo EATING TOGETHER

Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore

Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo

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Duruz, Jean, author. Eating together : food, space, and identity in Malaysia and Singapore / Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo. pages cm Summary: “Analyzes cultures of eating together in Malaysia and Singapore. It explores everyday spaces, such as street stalls, hawker centers, and coffee shops. Reflecting on these as sites for people’s ‘different’ culinary exchanges, the book captures resonances of national, ethnic, cosmopolitan and multicultural identity” — Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-2740-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-2741-5 (electronic) Food habits—Social aspects—Malaysia. 2. Food habits—Social aspects—Singapore. 3. Malaysia— Social life and customs. 4. Singapore—Social life and customs. I. Khoo, Gaik Cheng, 1969– author. II. Title. GT2853.M4D87 2015 394.1'209595—dc23 2014030099

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America Jean: For my family—all good eaters, who relish eating together and the diversity we bring to this

Gaik: To my supportive parents, especially my mother, for her cooking that umbilically ties me to my Nyonya heritage

CONTENTS

Glossary ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Making Rojak . . . or Eating “Together-in-Difference”? 1

1 Kopitiam: In Search of Cosmopolitan Spaces and Meanings in Malaysia 25 2 Spreading the Toast of Memory: From Hainanese Kopitiams to Boutique Coffee Shops in Singapore 45 3 “Mamak, Anyone?”: Tamil Muslim Eateries in Malaysia 67 4 Growing Up Transnational: Traveling through Singapore’s Hawker Centers 95 5 Dumplings at Changi: Singapore’s Urban Villages as Spaces of Exchange and Reinvention 123 6 The Little Nyonya and Peranakan Chinese Identity: Between Commodification and Cosmopolitanism 151 7 Currying the Nation: A Song and Dance about Multiculturalism 173

Notes 195 Bibliography 239 Index 255 About the Authors 261

vii

GLOSSARY

BN—Barisan Nasional, the National Front led by UMNO and consisting traditionally of two other communal-based parties, the MCA and MIC Bumiputera—Sanskrit, lit. “sons of the soil”; describes Malays and other indigenous peoples of Malaysia CMC—Community Mediation Centre CMIO—Chinese Malay Indian Other; used in Singapore to describe the ethnic population and mix DAP—Democratic Action Party, Malaysian Opposition party led by longtime stalwart Lim Kit Siang FT—Foreign Talent; legal term to describe imported skilled labor and white-collar worker immigration into Singapore HDB—Housing Development Board, which develops and manages public housing in Singa- pore Jakim—Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia, the Department of Islamic Development Malay- sia KL—Fond acronym for Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur Keadilan—The Justice Party led by Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim MCA—Malaysian Chinese Association, component political party in the Barisan Nasional (National Front) MIC—Malaysian Indian Congress, component political party in the BN NEP—New Economic Policy (1971–1990); a series of five-year plans meant to eradicate poverty across all ethnic groups and change the links between ethnicity and occupation that came to be seen as a racist system meant to privilege ethnic Malays over other minorities. The NEP was subsequently replaced by other economic plans with different names that essentially kept its pro-Malay agenda. PAP—The Singaporean People’s Action Party, in power since 1965 PAS—Parti Se-Islam Malaysia, the Pan Islamic Party of Malaysia, an Opposition Party PJ—Petaling Jaya, a middle-class, mostly Chinese suburb in Selangor, Malaysia PRC—People’s Republic of China SS2—A suburb in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia UMNO—United Malays National Organisation, ethnonationalist party in power in Malaysia since Independence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people and places make a book, especially one that has been simmering since 2004. Jean would like to thank: Colleagues at the University of South Australia and University of Adelaide, in particular Peter Bishop, Susan Luckman, Kit Mac- Farlane, Suzanne Franzway, Pal Ahluwalia, and Carol Johnson, for their ongoing critical comment and emotional support; Colleagues elsewhere in Australia, especially Lisa Law, Jeannie Mar- tin, Sian Supski, Amanda Wise, Selvaraj Velayutham, Cecilia Le- ong-Salobir, Katrina Schlunke, Elaine Swan, Rick Flowers, Ter- ence Lee, and Simon Choo, all of whom have provided lively occasions for discussion and debate; Overseas colleagues, including, in England, Phil Crang, Ian Cook, Ben Highmore, Sasha Roseneil, Fran Tonkiss, and Susan Par- ham; in Hong Kong, Sidney Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng; in the United States, Krishnendu Ray; in Japan, James Farrer; in Singa- pore, Chua Beng Huat, Lai Ah Eng, Tim Bunnell, and Hong Suen Wong. Such networks have not only kept me on my toes conceptually but have also been extremely generous in extending hospitality. And, here, I also wish to thank my co-writer, Gaik Cheng Khoo, for her acute intellectual insights, her persistence with the project, the warmth of her companionship, and her excellent cooking!

xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In terms of institutional assistance, I am indebted to the Hawke Research Institute of the University of South Australia, particularly to its director and deputy director, Anthony Elliot and Jenni- fer Rutherford, respectively, for providing a stimulating and congenial environment in which to write, and for conference and travel support; Thanks are also due to members of the Research Centre for Gender Studies within the Hawke Research Institute for collegial support throughout the entire project and a contribution to research funding. I have also appreciated the day-to-day assistance given by the institute’s professional staff, especially Maureen Cotton and Phoebe Smith, whose patience and efficiency have been ex- emplary. I also want to acknowledge the School of Communication, Interna- tional Studies and Languages within the University of South Aus- tralia for granting periods of research leave that enabled fieldwork to be conducted in Singapore. Likewise, I’d like to acknowledge the University of Technology, Sydney, New York University, Royal Holloway University of London, and both the Geography Department and Asia Research Institute of the National Univer- sity of Singapore for periods of attachment there as Academic Visitor. These attachments have helped to shape my theoretical analyses and knowledge of the region’s food cultures in useful and distinctive ways. In Singapore, I particularly wish to thank all the people who participated in the fieldwork for this project— whether named here or quoted anonymously. The time they were prepared to commit to interviews and their capacities for reflective comment have enriched my thinking and writing immeasur- ably. I also wish to thank Singapore friends Tony Tan, Dawn Mok, Marcel Heinan, Colin Chee, and Linda Chee—heritage activists and food lovers in the best Singaporean tradition—who have all stretched my knowledge of Singapore’s urban landscapes and foodways, and ensured fieldwork trips were intellectually challenging and convivial. Thanks also are due to many Australian and overseas friends, especially Sybil Pike, Paul van Reyk, Beate Echols, Judy Thomson, and Liz Bluff, who have offered listening ears and provided lively food talk, as well as comfort, home cooking, and adventurous ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

eating out. The sites of my “eating together” and food talk should also be acknowledged, with thanks due to all the people in food businesses who have sustained me during this project—Maria and Nicky of Lucia’s, the Ayubi family of Parwana, Zed and Mel and family of Addis Ababa Cafe, Dom of Modinetti’s, Suzanna of Wah Hing, Ling of Kopi Tim, and Chef Cheong Liew, formerly of The Grange, but equally associated with Adelaide Central Market, where he has long been a convivial and fossicking presence. Finally, to my immediate family members—Carol, Abby, Carol, Piers, Jasmine, Zachary, and Rob, together with all my siblings and extended family—heartfelt thanks and, of course, without whom . . .

Gaik would like to thank: For chapter 1, my thanks go to fellow postdoctorates at the Asia Research Institute in 2004–2005: Nir Avieli for his academic generosity, and David C. L. Lim for organizing the conference that motivated the genesis of this paper and book. My visit to Hai Peng Kopitiam, Kemaman, could not have happened without the invitation to what turned out to be a memorable road trip from two key friends and their families: Noritah Omar and Washima Che Dan. Likewise, I would like to thank Yeoh Seng Guan and the late Benjamin MacKay for being such good sports in advanc- ing the cause of commensality at Yut Kee Kopitiam with me. Gratitude goes to Elaine Wong, Jack Lee, and Mervyn Lee for their time. For chapter 3, sincere thanks to fellow Malaysians who provided leads, took me mamak stalling with them in Kuala Lumpur, helped translate, shared their mamak stall stories, and provided food for sustenance and thought: “Yen Yen,” Darryl Mak, Nesa Sivagnanam, Carolyn Mak, Raman, Yeoh Phek Chin, Shunmu- gam, Salma Khoo Nasution, Hassan Muthalib, Jamil Muthalib and family, and Nat Tan, Soon Li Tsin, and Cheryl Withaneachi at AdilSembang. I am grateful for the time taken to speak to me by the busy proprietors and workers at various eateries, especially Haja Noordhin B. Bashir. Lastly, my grateful thanks go to the xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Australian National University for conference and travel funding to present an early version of this chapter at the Crossroads Cul- tural Studies conference in Jamaica. For chapter 6, I received warm hospitality, wonderful meals, and cultural insights in Singapore from Kevin Tan and Kwa Chong Guan and their families, Dawn Mok, James Khoo, and Ch’ng Kim See. In Penang, I am indebted to my dear mother for chauf- feuring me to field sites and for her extensive contacts with other Nyonyas like Helen Khoo and Wee Keow Hoon; I am forever captivated by Grand-aunt Tan Gek Kooi’s stories about our past, my uncle and collector Raymond Kwok, and my aunt Ang Gaik Suan alias Alice (for her devil curry). Lastly, in Kuala Lumpur, I’d like to thank Pearlly Chua. Although their many anecdotes did not make it into the chapter, they collectively provide a strong foundation for my understanding of the subtle differences among Peranakans in the three cities. I received institutional support during my sabbatical from the Australian National University (ANU) and the Asia Research Institute in 2010, which enabled me to do fieldwork. While at the ANU, Simon Choo, Cheah Hwei F’en, and Jacqueline Lo supported me with friendship and information on all things Peranakan. My gratitude goes to my cousin Tan Thean Peng and Ren Publishing’s design team for making it possible to print the family picture of my aunts. Chapter 7 could not have been written without the kind support of Alfian Sa’at in providing me with a copy of his play script and facilitating the process of obtaining photographs from W!LD RICE Ltd. for which I am eternally indebted. Lastly, I would like to thank Chua Beng Huat, Tim Bunnell, Lisa Law, Selvaraj Ve- layutham, and my partner-in-crime, Jean Duruz, for taking my work seriously and for their support in my venturing into geography and food.

Together, we would like to thank: Ken Albala, general editor of Rowman & Littlefield’s series Studies in Food and Gastronomy, for his enthusiasm for the project in the first place and his insightful comments on the final manu- script ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv

Suzanne Staszak-Silva, executive editor; Kathryn Knigge, assistant editor; and Flannery Scott of Rowman & Littlefield for their advice, encouragement, and meticulous attention at all stages of the production process Kate Leeson of the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, for her diligent copyediting Erin Zimmerman for her prompt and able assistance with the management of notes and references Pang Khee Teik for the beautiful photograph on the cover and friends Dayaneetha de Silva and Fuad Rahmat for volunteering to model the very picture of muhibbah

PERMISSIONS

The publisher would like to thank the following for permission to repro- duce photographs or written text: Cengage Learning Asia Pty Ltd for Figure 2.1 (The tale of a village boy in Singapore – Ya Kun Kaya Toast), author’s photograph of book cover of William Koh, The Top Toast Sean Lowcay for Figure 2.2 (Local foods, artefacts, charm and conviviality at Toast Box, Singapore, 2014), his own photograph of Toast Box interior Tan Thean Peng for permission to use Figure 6.1 (Penang Nyonyas, the author’s aunts, in Shanghai dress) Fred Chong, producer of Nasi Lemak 2.0 for Figure 7.1 Alfian Sa’at and W!LD RICE Ltd for Figure 7.2 from the play, Cook a Pot of Curry Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint “Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity in Malaysian Culture and Media,” in Everyday Multiculturalism, eds. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham, 2009. This includes Figure 1.2 (Hai Peng Kopitiam in Muslim-majority Kemaman).

INTRODUCTION Making Rojak . . . or Eating “Together-in-Difference”?

Imagine a moonlit night at Gurney Drive Hawker Centre. We are on the coast road of the island of Penang in Malaysia. The air is heavy with the sounds and aromas of cooking: the hiss of the grill, the scrape of the wok, and the pungent, fishy smells of cuttlefish and squid. Imagine an outdoor table crowded with traditional dishes that everyone insists we try: oyster omelet, cockles, chicken satay, rojak. . . . Of these dishes, it is rojak—a distinctive mixed salad, its name in Malay meaning “mixture”—that has acquired iconic status. This dish is usually made of chopped cucumber, green mangoes, yam bean, shrimp paste, roasted peanuts, and sesame seeds. It is covered in a sauce of chilies, shrimp paste, tamarind juice, and soy. Rojak then becomes, in the mouth, the crunch of raw vegetables and fruit; on the lips, a sticky promise of a sweet-sour-salty hit; between thumb and fingers, a set of agile maneu- vers with toothpicks to secure elusive pieces of shredded turnip and cucumber. As we sit and eat, choosing from shared plates, it is likely we talk, not surprisingly, about food. Probably, these drifts of conversation include, for newcomers, explanation of rojak’s mixed provenance—its origins in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia—and multiple forms— Indian rojak (known as pasembur in Penang), mamak rojak, Penang rojak, Indonesian fruit rujak. Probably too, there is mention of “typical” rojak—resolutely embedded in the “local” despite (or rather, because of) its history of border crossings.1

1 2 INTRODUCTION

For this book, however, we intend to deploy meanings of rojak somewhat differently from those found in narratives of origin or in celebrations of culinary community. Instead, rojak constitutes a useful set of images for reflecting on the politics of commensality, intercultural exchanges, and identity hybridity and belonging. “The object invested with sensory memory speaks,” says Seremetakis,2 echoing, perhaps, Lévi-Strauss’s “food is not only good to eat, it’s good to think with.”3 So, in Eating Together, rojak, together with its compelling imagery of mixture (whether of ingredients, ethnic origins, national inscriptions, or political relations), becomes a language for talking with, and about, food, in all its viscerality and contradictory elusiveness. It is our engagement with the tangible yet profoundly symbolic. In this book we take up the challenge of rethinking connections between food, space, and identity within everyday places of “public” eating in Malaysia and Singapore—places such as street stalls, hawker centers, markets, coffee shops, restaurants, designated “food streets,” and “ethnic” neighborhoods. Our rethinking stems from the desire to avoid the tendency simply to replicate guidebook talk (for example, “the colourful, multicultural traditions of the region offer the food lover a spectacular gastronomic experience like no other”4). This deliberate act of eschewing guidebook-style celebrations is in spite of how much we, personally, might savor the richness and variety of these nations’ dishes, produced in the sensorium of their streets and informal eating places. From our perspective, then, Eating Together is not intended primarily as a process of mapping different foodways—trawling city spaces for diverse flavors and exotic combinations of ingredients—and neither is it simply a critique of such a project.5 Instead, rojak itself is our leitmotif for figuring complex everyday interactions in what are, undeniably, two of the most cosmopolitan and food-savvy nation-states of our region. In a sense, the guidebook does not lie, after all! However, the typical guidebook does not take us quite far enough into those sensory landscapes of the streets. In our mapping, we want to emphasize the “making” in the phrase “making rojak” to create a strong sense of the dynamics of how different people live, eat, work, and relax together, and to trace the challenges, negotiations, and accommodations that shape these dynamics. The motif of rojak, then, enables us to move beyond the immediacy of street eating and beyond its specific geographies of exchange and cultures of remembering to the political MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 3 tensions of “different” people living together, and to the search for home and identity in a world on the move. Rojak, then, in our book is loaded doubly with symbolic value: On one hand, it is used to describe a hybrid, mixed culture by those fond of the dish and who embrace discourses of ethnic diversity and state-sanctioned policies of multiculturalism; on the other hand, kebudayaan rojak, meaning rojak culture, is a derogatory term used by Malay Malaysian ethnonationalists wanting to preserve Malay hegemony and linguistic and cultural purity, in the face of the claims of other groups and identities also seen as “Malaysian” (such as “Chinese Malaysian”).6 Adopting the tensions implicit in rojak talk, the critical question for our book becomes: How do different people live and eat together? How does the practice of eating in food stalls, cafes, and markets connect with broader regimes of power that shape cities and regions, and movements of people and goods across the globe? We believe that our focus on ubiquitous forms of everyday street/public life in Malaysia and Singapore—on commensalities, cultural exchanges, and shared food/spaces—constitutes an innovative, grounded way of thinking through race relations, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism in these two countries. In their turn, these reflective insights might take us beyond the olfactory landscapes of Singapore coffee shops or Malaysian mamak stalls (Tamil Muslim eateries) to intimate the contradictions and challenges facing the region.7 As well as exploring the nuances of the rojak metaphor, our intention is to rework Ien Ang’s conceptualization of “together-in-difference” as “eating together-in-difference.” This reworking provides a running thread throughout the book.8 While Ang’s concerns here are the ambi- guities and tensions of hybrid identities (in her case, as a Chinese- Indonesian who grew up primarily in the Netherlands and does not speak Chinese), her “together-in-difference” captures the ambivalent pleasures and “fundamental uneasiness” in our relations with people who are different from us.9 Ang continues:

[H]ybridity is not only about fusion and synthesis, but also about friction and tension, about ambivalence and incommensurability, about contestations and interrogations that go hand in hand with the heterogeneity, diversity and multiplicity we have to deal with as we live together-in-difference. . . . [We have to learn to live together] in a world in which we no longer have the secure capacity to draw the 4 INTRODUCTION

line between “us” and “them”—in which difference and sameness are inextricably intertwined in complicated entanglement.10

In our book, we explore the “complicated entanglement” chiefly through the immediacy of food, its acts of eating, but also through the conceptual framing of such acts by meanings of space, time, and identity. By adding “eating” to Ang’s evocative phraseology, food becomes an ensemble of interactions with difference; it becomes symptomatic of life in the global city. In the chapters that follow, each chapter desig- nates a different space for exploring these cultures of “mixedness” and the contradictions they pose—whether these involve “old” and “new” forms of sociality, struggles over meanings of place, competing imperatives of commercial expansion and cultural maintenance, frissons of pleasure and risk in eating “differently,” meanings of cross-racial desire, and moments of tension embedded in cosmopolitan sensibilities. Thus our book acknowledges the process of cultures-in-the-making, both in its title and in its cartography of everyday spaces of interethnic exchange. Primarily, however, this mapping occurs at a visceral and sensory level: Simply put, Eating Together is about understanding the complex forms of multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore through the tongue, the nose, and the eyes. At the same time, Eating Together teases out the politics of different people living together—the ways food can be put to work for purposes of excluding or including particular communities (for example, the rejection of curry smells by mainland Chinese in Singapore; see chapter 7). Let us begin at the beginning with food itself, and its centrality in Singapore and Malaysia’s national imaginaries.

MAD ABOUT FOOD . . . OR MAD ABOUT HOME?

Food certainly resonates throughout practices of everyday life and cultural identity in Malaysia and Singapore.11 Available everywhere and almost around the clock, food is cheap and represents a diverse range of cuisines for the tasting, together with a plethora of the kinds of places available for communal eating—street stalls, hawker centers, food courts, cafes, and restaurants. Indeed, urban dwellers in these countries are spoiled for choice. Not only is there a wide array of “local” cuisines MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 5 on offer—Chinese, Malay, Indian—but there is also a wealth of global fast-food chains and national cuisines from the region—Thai, Burmese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean—and elsewhere. All of these have become part of the gastronomic landscape. Food—in particular, its diversity of tastes and textures—is not only discussed with national pride and promoted by the state in tourism efforts, it is also featured in many personal blogs. Indeed, Malaysian and Singaporean food bloggers tend to dominate foodie networks with their digitally savvy images resembling food porn, their blogging about their visits to various restaurants, their food reviews, and the posting of recipes.12 These food blogs—where Malaysians and Singaporeans share recipes and exchange knowledge of how to obtain particular ingredients, where to find the tastiest food, or what cooking tips and shortcuts are most helpful in preparing dishes—provide a virtual community that connects Malaysians and Singaporeans “at home” with Malaysians and Singaporeans and their descended families in the diaspora. “Local” food knowledge is seen as significant cultural capital—as the culinary baggage of being “Singaporean” or being “Malaysian,” whether at “home” or elsewhere. Meanings of food, then, support communities in ways that challenge the imaginaries of communities confined to national boundaries. For example, Malaysians who participated in the discussion about Penang rojak on the Rasa Malaysia food blog identified themselves as living in distant places like Istanbul, Utah and Milwaukee in the United States, and Germany.13 As worldly cosmopolitans based overseas, they still maintain a connection to their homeland through taste memories of a diverse, “mixed” cuisine, associated with place identities of childhoods or more recent pasts. This home palate is already perceived as multicultural, adaptive, and hybrid, marked by blending of ingredients and interconnected foodways that defy, according to Chua and Rajah, the neat ethnic essentialisms that, supposedly, compose the multicultural nation.14 Love of the diverse and distinctive food choices characterized as “Malaysian” or “Singaporean,” together with nostalgic memories their tastes might engender, is garnered for the project of “migrant home building” (as described by Ghassan Hage in a different context15). For our purposes, such home-building practices might include cooking typically Malaysian food as a form of nurturing for citizen-subjects when overseas—familiar tastes among landscapes of “strange.” 6 INTRODUCTION

Ghassan Hage disputes the common assumption that the nostalgia migrants feel is associated with homesickness. He suggests, instead, that nostalgia is “nothing more than a memory of a past experience imagined, from the standpoint of the present, to be homely.”16 In that sense, anyone, and not only migrants, can be nostalgic for that imagined/remembered homely past. All might foster these nostalgic feelings actively in the present in order to make the new place and time a better, more comfortable, more emotionally sustaining home for themselves. Hage defines home building as an affective construct, and one that is based on four key feelings: security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility.17 Nostalgia can be triggered among migrants and others when, experiencing a lack of such homely feelings, they want to re-create these feelings in landscapes that, otherwise, seem alien. Bor- rowing Hage’s analysis then for our own, we find that food, memory, taste, and place come together in complex “entanglements.”18

A TIME FOR NOSTALGIA?

There seems to be no better time and place for nostalgia than the present. The past decade has seen the rise of nostalgia in the form of historically themed restaurants in Singapore and Malaysia.19 A particular phenomenon that Wong discusses is the increasingly popular Peran- akan restaurants in Singapore. These draw on the collective memories and hybrid cultures produced historically from the intermarriage of “foreign” Chinese traders and “local” women in the port of Melaka.20 Such marriages took place from the fifteenth century onward. Later, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, marriages were mostly among descended families and immigrant Chinese, and mostly in those settled areas that had become known as the Straits Settle- ments—Melaka, George Town (Penang), and Singapore.21 These “localized” families and their descendants were known as Straits Chinese or Peranakan, meaning, variously, “mixed blood” or “locally born.”22 The distinctive “mixed” cuisine that resulted from such marriages is now ubiquitous in tourism and heritage marketing. Wong argues that the recent trend toward historically themed restaurants—referencing Peranakan communities, among others—was prompted by the desire on the part of individual entrepreneurs to revive localized historical MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 7 identities and cultures that were under threat from Singapore’s massive urban renewal of the 1970s. At the same time, Wong notes that the commodification of such cuisines and cultural pasts is also aligned with the Singapore Tourism Board’s promotional narratives.23 In Malaysia, the commodification of nostalgia, taking the form of the gentrified kopitiam (coffee shop), is a local response to the encroach- ment of global American coffee chains like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. These chains began to appear in Malaysian and Singapor- ean urbanscapes in 1996.24 In chapter 2, we examine the phenomenon in Singapore as a “yuppification” of the traditional kopitiam, discussed in chapter 1. Interestingly, and perhaps contradictorily, nostalgic imagery and meanings are packaged using modern, rationalized techniques of standardization and up-to-date media and computer technology (such as digital short films, websites, and television commercials) to promote an older, lost way of life. Indeed, implicit in the slogan for the business Old Town White Coffee (“Old Town . . . where life is happy because we take our time”) is a critique of modernization for “speed[ing] up the whole tempo of life” to create a simultaneously dynamic, exciting, and unstable way of life, dependent on the capricious nature of capitalism.25 The increasing pace of modern urban living, then, replaces that sense of community and belonging with anonymity and alienation. In a one-minute television commercial, a narrative of Old Town White Coffee begins with a group of marathon runners who seem happy to slow down and be taken in by the charm of this “special little town.” These runners make a detour here and end up having coffee and interacting with the townspeople, who are shown playing chess on the lawn, taking loving care over details in their woodcarving, and in the service of others. A young man who downs his coffee in one gulp is silently admonished by his father who demonstrates how to enjoy a cup of coffee slowly. The implication is that intergenerational bonding occurs among family members who help one another. It is also a place for romance, as the advertisement suggests: If one does not slow down, stop, and pay attention, one could lose one’s opportunity to meet that special someone. This commercial succinctly displays a conscious attempt to re-create nostalgic homeliness by offering the four key feelings that underlie Hage’s conception of home building: security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility (here construed as romantic). In this case, meanings of time and place are critical too. Here, in 8 INTRODUCTION the comforts of a re-created “past,” we can find nourishment for the future. A sense of time, then—past and future—is also threaded through the entangled relationships we wish to tease out here.

LIFE IN THE UNHOMELY PRESENT: THE OFFICIAL STORY

What, then, is the source of this yearning for the past . . . for romanticized spaces, “better” or “slower” and more convivial times, for the tastes of “tradition,” and—we would add—for the possibility of eating “together-in-difference”? This nostalgia for a more homely past implies an unhomely present. In this book, we suggest that the present is constructed as unhomely through a combination of social, cultural, economic, and political imperatives, such as racialization and racial governmentality,26 state developmentalism, and, in the case of Singapore, “state-manufactured anxiety over the fragility and survival of the nation- state.”27 Goh and Holden comment that many middle-class Malaysians and Singaporeans who grew up during the 1960s and early 1970s remember a time when race/ethnicity was not as important a governmental category.28 They attribute the hardening of ethnic divisions in Singapore to 1980s policies that structured racial governmentality—policies such as the bilingual education policy, ethnic self-help groups, and the Speak Mandarin Campaign targeted at Chinese Singaporeans—and in Malay- sia, the New Economic Policy’s pro-bumiputera policies in the late 1970s.29 More recently, former Malaysian finance minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah in a keynote address to student leaders in Kuala Lumpur explained that it is not mere nostalgia that “makes us think there was a time when the sun shone more brightly upon Malaysia.”30 In a speech entitled “We Were Once Malaysians,” he attributed ethnic divisions and economic malaise to racial politics and corruption. A critical factor in Malaysia’s racial politics that has trickle-down effects on culinary cultures and everyday conviviality is the rise of Is- lamic consciousness on the part of Malays (constitutionally defined as Muslims in Malaysia) since the 1970s.31 The effect of increasing Islam- ization is the shrinking of space for a national pluralist or cosmopolitan “we-ness.” On the ground, this has led to the disappearance of commensality between Malays and Chinese—common into the late 1960s MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 9 in Chinese restaurants and hawker centers—due to the Muslim taboo of eating nonpermissible/haram food like pork.32 While the taboo existed before the 1970s, today it is reinforced by a level of heightened religious sensitivity and a sense of a Malay panopticon of laws and restrictions that did not register so strongly in the past.33 This reading of Islam as a religion that highly regulates social identity and behavior (rather than merely serving as a spiritual guide) potentially alienates liberal Muslims (who feel that religion is a private matter between them and Allah) and non-Muslims in the public sphere (who are deemed kafir or disbelievers by this conservative type of Islam). In short, most Muslims seldom eat at the same table with non-Muslim friends unless they are at a halal (permitted by Islam) restaurant.34 However in Malay- sia, cultural adjustments, accommodations, and tolerance are practiced on many fronts by non-Muslims in order to avoid interethnic/religious conflict and to respect Muslim cultural sensitivities. This is so whether it is a case of coping with traffic jams and parking violations outside the mosque during Friday noon prayers, with the heightened volume of broadcast lectures from the mosque during azan prayers, or with requirements of others’ halal consumption practices.35 Across the causeway in Singapore, sensitivity in regard to consumption of non-halal food and to the danger of contamination of utensils in public canteens and food courts requires observance of certain rules of dining, and sometimes excludes the possibility of the “eating together” part of our book title. To appease orthodox Muslims in Singapore usually means, inadvertently, to separate them from non-Muslims. Not only are there trolleys for collecting dirty plates labeled “for non-Muslim” and “Muslim only,” but sometimes there is a whole section that sells only Muslim food that is separated from the non-Muslim section (and plates and utensils from this section are not allowed to be taken out of the area). This presumes that only Muslims would eat Muslim food at certain food courts. As well, this makes commensality impossible for non-Muslims who favor eating Muslim food or for Muslims who might want to sit with friends who are not eating Muslim food. As a Chinese Malaysian in Singapore, Gaik noticed that, as far as she could tell, while eating frequently at a particular food court, very few Chinese ate in the Muslim section of that food court. On the other hand, in Malaysia, it is still possible to negotiate ethnic-religious differences. Chapter 4, for example, focuses on food courts in Singapore and the strategies friends 10 INTRODUCTION might develop in observing each other’s dietary practices; these are on- the-ground responses to “official” policies of “eating together.” And here we are reminded of de Certeau’s description of people’s “everyday creativity”: “the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it.”36

THE STORY FROM THE GROUND I: FEARS AND GRIEF

Velayutham writes that Singaporean official multicultural policy following the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other (CMIO) model ensures equality for ethnic minorities but runs the risk of reinforcing such ethnic categories; moreover, it fails to acknowledge hybrid identity formations, such as those of Peranakans and Eurasians, and does not explicitly encourage intermixing.37 On the ground, however, there is much evidence of cultural hybridization and intercultural exchange, and none more evident than in food and foodways that are unique to the region. These foodways reflect the long history of Chinese and Indian communities’ migration to and settlement of the Malay Peninsula. Indians and Malays adopt Chinese ingredients like noodles, tofu, bean sprouts, and bean paste, giving rise to dishes like mee rebus, mee goreng, and mee Siam, while Indian and Chinese foodways in the region show evidence of adaptations of local or Malay influences to produce those uniquely hybrid dishes such as Indian rojak (pasembur in Penang) and Penang rojak. Rojak, we remember, is that fruit and vegetable salad with a shrimp paste sauce eaten in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, but its name is also used as a shorthand way of describing a hybrid culture. Although, as we mentioned earlier, kebudayaan rojak, meaning “rojak culture” in Malay, is sometimes deployed in a derogatory fashion, at the same time and in opposition to ethnonationalists, rojak is used by liberal Malaysians. In this case, rojak becomes a food metaphor about national identity that is embraced as inclusive and reflective of Malaysian cultural diversity. A contemporary example of this liberal attitude is illustrated by the short animation Rojak!, one of a series of fifteen short films called 15Malaysia, made as a political and artistic expression of the issues Malaysia faced in its fifty-second anniversary of independence in MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 11

2009.38 This film is narrated in Tamil by a roadside rojak seller. The film cleverly imposes a naive voiceover on scenes that capture the social reality of contemporary Malaysia: corruption, rising rates of street crime, bullying, repression of demonstrators, and Islamic moral polic- ing. Yet through it all, the film suggests that, ultimately, the power to bind all fellow Malaysians (whether members of the public or coercive forms of state apparatus) lies in their need for and love of food. The film ends with a scene of commensality: the hectoring religious figure sits down at a table with the young couple he had caught kissing in their car; the transsexuals comfort the boy who had been bullied by other boys and the Chinese woman whose purse had been snatched by a mat rempit—an illegal street racer39; the police and the protestors are talking peacefully instead of throwing tear gas canisters, on one hand, and being gassed, on the other. The rojak seller says, “Anyway, can you see? In the end despite the problems, we are together. The food that we eat brings us together. That’s what we are like . . . like rojak.” Arguably, the short film Rojak! takes the easy way out, advocating tolerance and a “live and let live” attitude on the part of the ethnic minority Tamil Muslim rojak seller. This solution is offered in preference to a vociferous critique of the powers-that-be that have led the nation to its current socioeconomic challenges. Looking at the sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in Malaysia over the past three decades, it seems that the sense of familiarity, community, and possibility has become elusive with the onset of rapid industrialization, urbanization, Islamization, and ethnic politics, neoliberal economic development, and privatization. This is manifested quite viscerally in the urban landscape, with the proliferation of Islamic-themed buildings, mosques, and a piety meant to uphold Malay ethnic privileges, best exemplified in the construction of Putrajaya (a planned city, serving as Malaysia’s seat of government).40 In Singapore too, constant construction work, renovation, and change all disorient the casual walker. In the heady rush to modernization, tradition embedded in “the cultural memory of a previous way of life, of ‘old Chinatown, the bustle of lights of the street hawkers packing the roadsides selling New Year fruits and flowers’” is dismissed by the state leaders as “not real history but an- always-already sepia-toned nostalgia and therefore a ‘soft’ view of cultural identity.”41 Alternatively, as with the themed restaurants Wong describes, the “sepia-toned nostalgia” might be transformed into a com- 12 INTRODUCTION modity, with the Singapore government’s attempt to re-create “ethnic neighborhoods,” such as Chinatown and the Malay Village. In chapter 5, we focus on the neighborhood of Katong, tracing the contradictions of preserving its “heritage,” particularly the built environment and local foodways, in the face of the erasure of its history or the re-creation of history as a “themed” product. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the story from the ground tends to look rather grim, even overwhelming. Shopping centers “sprout up everywhere like secondary jungle undergrowth,”42 and Islamic-themed buildings proliferate. Former Tamil plantation workers driven to the city to find work live in competitive urban squalor alongside foreign workers from Indonesia, India, Nepal, and Myanmar who are busy constructing postmodern architecture in Kuala Lumpur. Modernization appears to produce feelings of stress and alienation. While the New Economic Policy (1971–1990) successfully created a broad Malay middle class by the 1990s, there was also a visible urban Malay underclass whose marginalized youth became the subject of moral panics: they became urban folk devils, the boh sia and boh jan of the 1990s and the mat rempit of the 2000s.43 Moralistic discourses of urban youth devi- ance lay the blame on working parents and local pop culture, such as comics and films, rather than on the socioeconomic structures that contribute to the dearth of community spaces and community social programs for underprivileged children and youth.44 The sense of community and neighborliness commonly associated with kampung (village/ traditional neighborhood) living seems lacking in the city where rents are high and working-class families live in crowded flats.45 Meanwhile, thrill-seeking young men, looking to escape from their parents’ squab- bles and family, seek like-minded youths. For these youths, motorbikes are associated with freedom and mobility. A similar tale of developmentalism, tabula-rasa urban planning, and destruction of local culture could be told about Singapore.46 A poignant example is found in Kim Cheng Boey’s Between Stations, as he recalls the ritual walks with his father through Change Alley near Singapore’s waterfront in the 1960s:

It was my first whiff of abroad, of peoples and places far away. . . . Every inch of available shop space was packed with merchandise. Even the ceiling was hung with toys, bags, batik shirts and dress- es. . . . The Alley was a microcosm of the multi-ethnicity that is the MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 13

DNA for what Singapore has become. . . . There was competition for customers, but the atmosphere was largely convivial, the inhabitants trading jokes, gossip and friendly taunts in a mixture of Bahasa, Chi- nese and English.47

Exchanging memories with a former shop owner from Change Alley, Boey continues:

At last here is someone who shares my scent-memory. That is the essence of the place—a musty, fusty, slightly urinous odour, a shade of age and decay fused with a sense of life, sunlight and the salt sea air that permeated the Alley.48

However, in spite of the pleasure of shared remembering, Boey experiences a sharp sense of loss from Singapore’s changing landscapes, and his book becomes not only an elegy to a lost father and to childhood but also to the nation itself:

Change Alley. How fitting a name in retrospect. The name is emblematic of the character of the nation. . . . It has been feverishly rein- venting itself. . . . The changes started after 1965, slowly, but gathered pace in the 1980s, and accelerating into a mania of demolition and rebuilding in the 1990s. Change Alley survived until 1989.49

These stories, shot through with fears of folk devils, with grieving for lost landscapes, become almost mythic in character. While recognizing their power and the political and cultural conditions that give rise to their expression—the fears and losses are genuine, in effect, with bases in material circumstances—we wish to complicate these analyses of searching for meanings of “home” in the “unhomely present.” For example, we might trace a very different narrative from one of disaffected youth and moral panic if we turn to Singapore’s hawker centers. These, we will see, might serve as good “third spaces” between home and the world for young men developing cosmopolitan sensibilities (chapter 4). And again, we might find an alternative narrative to one of loss and destruction of the built landscape through a focus on the “kampung effect” and its mobility—its transfer from the village-like spaces of Ka- tong to Singapore’s high-rise public housing (chapter 5). In other words, it still might be possible to capture a sense of de Certeau’s “microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between ma- 14 INTRODUCTION nipulating and enjoying” . . . a sense of creative “activity at play with the order that contains it.”

THE STORY FROM THE GROUND II: SPACE, TIME, AND SCENT MEMORIES

Doreen Massey, in For Space, complains about the lack of attention given to space itself in intellectuals’ thinking and writing about the world. This is in spite of its underlying presence in their conceptual frameworks: “Produced through and embedded in practices, from quo- tidian negotiations to global strategizing, these implicit engagements of space feed back into and sustain wider understandings of the world,” she says.50 Eschewing grand narratives of progress, decline, fatalism, or cultural gatekeeping (for example, the colonizers’ “discoveries,” the in- evitability of globalization, protection of the “local” against “others”), Massey continues, declaring these narratives “a failure . . . of spatial imagination. Failure in the sense of being inadequate to face up to the challenges of space; a failure to take on board its coeval multiplicities, to accept its radical contemporaneity; to deal with its constitutive complexity.”51 Instead, Massey calls for a recognition that “space presents us with the social in the widest sense”—a social of interrelatedness, multiple practices, and negotiation with diverse other people and communities. This, she claims, is the “ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured.”52 This is the “sociability” that our book seeks to untangle, exploring it in the confines of mundane urban spaces. In fact, imagining our project as one of tracing different and multiform “sociability” in “ordinary” spaces returns us to the quandaries that prompted this book in the first place: How do different people live and eat together? How does eating in food stalls, cafes, and markets connect them with broader regimes of power that shape cities and regions, and movements of people and goods across the globe? Wanting to accept such challenges as Massey’s, for this book we have embarked on a very long journey. As with all writing and research (whether explicitly acknowledged or not), the journey is also embedded in our personal/intellectual/spatial histories. As a Chinese Malaysian, MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 15

Gaik has developed research interests focused on the region’s plural cultures and politics. Her search for interethnic spaces led her, initially via the medium of independent filmmaking, and later through analysis of web resources, from the Chinese kopitiam to the Tamil Muslim mamak stall in Malaysia. Meanwhile Jean, as an Anglo-Celtic Austra- lian, had her curiosity aroused by the popularity of the Peranakan dish laksa in her hometown of Adelaide, Australia. Mapping the movements of laksa from Kedah, Malaysia, and Singapore to Adelaide, Jean then followed the laksa trail back to Singapore to its hawker centers and to the neighborhood of Katong, the ancestral home of Singapore’s Perana- kan communities.53 In our book’s first five chapters, these are the literal spaces that we embrace: the kopitiam, the mamak stall, the hawker center, the “yuppie” coffee shop, and the “mixed” ethnic neighborhood. These we see as affordable public spaces, as sites of cosmopolitanism where various ethnic groups can sit and eat “together-in-difference.” We also stretch our meanings of spaces of interaction to include the virtual: films, television, and blogs, for example. At this point, Lefebv- re’s conceptualization of “representational spaces” in both senses he intended—as formal prescriptions of space and of the meanings and memories that people attach to these spaces—becomes a useful analytical tool for us.54 Whether sitting in the kopitiam or watching an episode of The Little Nyonya (see chapter 6) or following web debates regarding the smell of “alien” food (chapter 7), the critical question continues to haunt: How have all these food spaces and food identities, with their very specific transnational or migration and ethnic histories, changed and adapted through time and space, with Islamization, developmentalism, urban expansion, gentrification, and the seductive pull of mall culture? This is evident if we trace the changes that the Hainanese kopitiam has undergone, its move from the colonial shophouse into air- conditioned malls and its expansion from small-scale “mom and pop” shops to chain stores and multiple branches nationwide. Not only our earlier example of Old Town Ipoh but also chains like Ya Kun Kaya Toast and Killiney Kopitiam embody this shift, as they battle to wrest a share of the market from American coffee chains like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (see chapter 2). Yet, more than simply presenting an ensemble of familiar tastes, these local food spaces represent a density of social practices, based on nostalgia, memory, movements 16 INTRODUCTION across the globe, and layers of cultural meaning—from the past, in the present. In such spaces then, is it possible that the “unhomely” can be challenged? How do citizens from these two neighboring countries actively foster a sense of nostalgia in the present in order to make the new place and time a better home for themselves? How can they construct the familiar and a sense of community? What part do food exchanges play in providing the comfort of the known for global cities experiencing unsettling dynamics of modernity?55 Within these spaces, are there, in turn, spaces for different narratives than those associated with government prerogatives—spaces for the expression of difference, for the negotiation of commensality, and for “grounded” and “grassroots” meanings of cosmopolitanism to emerge?56 Are there ghosts in these spaces of Massey’s complex imagery of sociality and of the ways this sociality can be “configured”? It seems that any discussion of space and spaces leads us toward meanings of time. If space is not to be considered as fixed and bounded, then, following Massey, neither should time. According to Driver, “the past does not bequeath an immutable legacy, if only because history is continually rewritten by its inheritors.”57 Narratives of time and place then are not static, nor are they necessarily marked by linear progres- sion. Instead, these narratives undergo continuous revision. Further- more, at any one time, diverse meanings of time compete for positions center stage in personal and collective imaginaries. Kong and Yeoh express the tangled relations of space and time as follows: “As the pal- impsests on which people write their stories, not only are places repositories of history and memory, they often contain multiple levels of sedi- mented history.”58 In chapter 4, for example, the hawker center trans- forms itself into a densely nostalgic and, at the same time, predictive space to perform the contradictions of transnational belonging. We see how three friends accommodate each other, culinarily speaking, and their alliances and compromises. In chapter 2, “yuppie” coffee shops represent a playful account of the connections of history, memory, nostalgia, and commodification, and of shifting temporalities—of forms of belonging forged across time and space, and sensed through ritual tastes of coffee, coconut jam, and griddled toast. In chapter 1, we describe how cosmopolitan accommodations are produced and negotiated through strategic calls on nostalgia and, alternatively, on development. MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 17

Contradictory imperatives of movements toward “past” and “future” are enshrined in the “mix” of the kopitiam’s “eating-together.” In Eating Together, then, the mobility of space and time cultures, together with their interconnections in everyday spaces, should be viewed as a microcosm of broader regimes of connection—through ethnicity, religion, the state, consumer cultures, urban development—and of the constantly shifting dynamics of public life in Malaysia and Singapore. Methodologically speaking, however, we should note the ways that time itself intervenes in our analyses. For a project several years in the making (our initial discussions took place in 2004) and one that has involved site-specific observations (whether actual or virtual), we have snatched a number of different “moments in time” for our reflections. Obviously, the physical, cultural, and political landscapes in both Ma- laysia and Singapore have not stood still during the course of our project, as Boey’s imagery of Singapore as perpetual change indicates. For example, the Malay Village, a focus of chapter 5’s discussion of re- created “ethnic villages,” itself has been subject to demolition and redevelopment, while the dark and rather battered spaces of the hawker center at Taman Jurong, remembered so evocatively by young men who frequented these in their school days (see chapter 4), are now part of the Singapore National Environment Centre’s glitzy program of hawker center upgrading.59 Meanwhile, since we completed our analysis of a walking tour through Joo Chiat/Katong in chapter 5, the neighborhood itself has been declared a heritage site.60 In Malaysia, mamak stall and kopitiam culture have come under increasing competition from trendy Hong Kong–style tea cafes (cha chaan teng) offering quick fusion food and milk tea that appeal to mostly Chinese youth and the health conscious.61 Nevertheless, in our book, consideration of time and its concomitant shifts is not to be reduced to noting changes in the built environment and in their possibilities for commensality. Rapid and pervasive change in the political cultures of both Malaysia and Singapore provide another layer to the analysis—a retrospective lens through which to view our original reflections on everyday food exchanges in the kopitiam, mamak stall, hawker center, or coffee shop. And indeed, much has changed. In Malaysia, since the Opposition made substantial inroads in the 2008 general elections and even won the popular vote in the 2013 elections, Malaysians have become emboldened and freer with their political 18 INTRODUCTION speech, whether this is at political rallies or in everyday casual eating places. Thus, chapter 3, with its focus on mamak stalls, and on the conditions that make some of these spaces more conducive for political conversations than others, only could have been written to describe the pre-2008 situation. Some laws have been amended to allow political speech but mainly it is because Malaysians have been “conscientized” by mass street protests, especially Bersih 2.0.62 Meanwhile, in Singa- pore, there is increasing frustration and popular anger at government policies that aim to increase the population figures substantively (to 6.9 million by 2030) through immigration. Tolerance for foreigners seems at an all-time low. Singaporeans perceive foreigners as taking away “their” jobs, competing for public housing, raising property prices beyond the affordability of the middle-class wage earner, and not integrat- ing well. They express anger against the People’s Action Party (PAP, the political party in power since Independence) and the Population White Paper, but this is manifest as well through xenophobic statements about foreigners (“foreign talent”), and the circulation of negative stereotypes.63 The final chapter of the book (chapter 7) is an attempt to provide some temporal and emotional balance to the collection—to write about food cultures and public life in Malaysia and Singapore and their tensions from a vantage that is closer to the present. Here, it is important to note that for us the slipperiness of time is not to be excused as simply a methodological stumbling point; instead, it provides, in itself, a multitemporal approach to our analyses. Conceptu- ally, as we have just established, the ghosts of times past and of imagined futures hover in these everyday spaces we have identified as significant. In order to elaborate on this argument, we have found that Bliss Cua Lim’s Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique is helpful. Lim’s arguments readily capture a sense of time’s mobility, multidimensionality, and capacity to haunt. Drawing on Berg- son, Chakrabarty, and Fabian to develop a critique of the assumption of time as linear, homogeneous, and empty, Lim searches Filipino films for ghosts—heterogeneous temporalities where the past and present intermingle, and where “ghostly” time is not considered anachronistic.64 Applying this logic to the spaces of the kopitiam, the mamak stall, or an episode of The Little Nyonya, we, in our turn, might ask: To what extent do structures of feeling—landscapes of sensory experience, awareness of the contemporaneousness of multiple temporalities—shape the am- MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 19 bience of everyday spaces where different people meet and eat together? “Haunted places are the only ones we can live in,” de Certeau reminds us, “and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.”65 In Singa- pore’s Katong neighborhood, the Malay Village, as embodiment of the ghosts of the kampung, might, in its turn, be reduced to rubble. Never- theless, it produces its own ghosts in the form of touristic meanings of “Malayness,” as well as the ghosts of how the state intervenes to re- create, and then to destroy/replace, “ethnic” imaginaries. So, in spite of the Malay Village’s absence in the Singapore landscape, fragments of remembering retrieved by those on the “ground” ensure such hauntings continue. Tied to the mobility of memory is the viscerality of sensory experience. To talk about, think about, consume, and remember food is to experience “meaning embodied.”66 This is not simply the embrace of a familiar, much-loved taste but a way to relive this taste in the body, in the gut. Such food spaces as the kopitiam, the mamak stall, and the hawker center have the power to evoke collective memories of intergenerational bonding, ambience of place, and precise smells, tastes, and textures, as evidenced in this autobiographical account: “While I was still a young kid, my grandpa used to bring me to a old chinese kopitiam to have coffee in the morning. I still can remember the smell of the coffee, the toasted bread with butter kaya and the half boiled egg! yum yum!”67 Yum yum indeed! Tastes and smells assume significance here that elsewhere might be overlooked. David Sutton describes the privileging of the visual at the expense of other senses, such as taste and smell, as the prerogative of Western anthropology, and Western culture more generally. This privileging, he says, produces the “hierarchy of the senses.” This is one in which taste and smell are seen as baser and less refined, less “intellectual,” than the sense of seeing in particular (manifest in practices tied to appreciation of art). Sutton, in his turn, challenges the “hierarchy,” arguing for the recuperation of taste and smell through a focus on food cultures. As well, the significance of the inter- play of memory and the senses resonates throughout his arguments.68 Nevertheless, for the body of scholars writing about the ways we shape our worlds through the senses, these senses are hardly “natural” or innocent.69 The meanings we attach to sensory perceptions are shaped by our own political/conceptual frameworks or, in the words of 20 INTRODUCTION

Nadia Seremetakis, “a politics of sensory creation and perception [is] a politics of everyday life.”70 Lisa Law presents a poignant example of this “sensory creating and perceiving” in her account of (mostly) Filipina domestic workers gathering at Central in Hong Kong on their “days off.”71 Against the backdrop of powerful colonial symbolism—think of the immensity of Statue Square, with its colonial associations—Law draws out a different discourse. This is not, she says, the obvious one of underdog resistance. Instead, if we follow olfactory and gustatory maps—the smell of cooking, the taste of familiar food—we find a different identity for a state-sanctioned community of “homeless” domestic workers emerges.72 This is an agentic identity invested in reinvented forms of cosmopolitan subjectivity. At the same time, smells that bind might also divide. A whiff of durian (a thorny pungent fruit found in the region) or of spicy curry might be enough to alienate people who are not used to distinctive aromas and tastes or the pungency of spice mixes.73 So, taste and smell (and sometimes hearing too) in these examples have shaped the analyses in less expected ways—shaped it in the spirit of Paul Stoller’s “sensuous scholarship”74 —and interrupted those more predictable accounts of relations of food, space, and identity. In chapter 2, for example, unraveling people’s “scent-memories” of kopi (coffee) and toast, we forgo the easy slippage into discourses of heritage commodification. Through exploring the nexus of taste, smell, and remembering in particular places at particular times, we find something more intriguing emerges. It is this sense of intrigue, of alternative stories and of “meaning embodied,” that we want to capture in this book. So, to rework our earlier statement, Eating Together (as “rojak” engagements with each other, as eating “together-in-difference”) is about understanding the complex forms of multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singa- pore not only intellectually but also viscerally and critically, understanding through the tongue and the nose, as well as more conventionally, through the eyes and ears.

TASTING THE COSMOPOLIS

“Eating together-in-difference,” however, is hardly a panacea for countering fears of national instability and for achieving interethnic sociabil- MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 21 ity. We are acutely conscious that the celebratory hype surrounding support of hybridity or plural identity is too easily co-opted and commodified by state policies of multiculturalism and tourism and by empty national unity slogans like “1Malaysia.” Nevertheless, we are curious to explore how banal cultural pluralism, hybridity, and transethnic solidarities play out their scripts in food interactions in public eating places, virtual spaces on the Internet, and in relation to popular cultural forms, like the Mandarin television series The Little Nyonya. Highlighting existing hybridities becomes our strategic gesture. This is a deliberate tactic that problematizes the ideology of purity and the maintenance of ethnic supremacy in one nation (Malaysia) while, at the same time, seeking interstitial spaces in another nation-state (Singapore) to subvert the carefully calibrated but restrictive ethnic balance of its social planning. So, although our analysis of “rojak culture” might not, of necessity, prompt unconditional celebration, the tactical use of its imagery, in a de Certeauean sense, certainly has some purchase.75 Through examination of the tensions and congruencies of the “together” and “difference” elements of Malaysia and Singapore’s mixed culinary landscapes, we want to explore the ways these tensions and continuities are embedded in the tastes of the global cities and the circuits of people, goods, and practices that frame these cities. The everyday dynamics of cosmopolitanism, played out, for example, in the halal cultures of Malaysia’s mamak stall (chapter 3), constitute starting points, at the very least, for understanding the uneasy, ambivalent politics of “together-in-difference.” By “cosmopolitan,” we should note, we are not embracing a Kantian view whereby the cosmopolitan subject regards himself or herself as a world citizen.76 In contrast, the cosmopolitan subject in our book is firmly rooted in local tensions and struggles. Rather than the liberal humanist individual with his or her “one-world” view, we deploy meanings of cosmopolitanism to signify openness to other people’s cultures, especially here at “home” in the “local.” In pluralist Malaysia, for example, this Other is constituted primarily by Malaysians of “other” ethnicities. In other words, the Other is likely to be one’s neighbor or occupy- ing a table nearby at a local kopitiam or hawker center than a distanced Other figure of imagination or media circulation. While, for Martha Nussbaum, cosmopolitanism inevitably entails theorizing an identification and solidarity beyond national boundaries, we are not (to repeat 22 INTRODUCTION the point) adopting her trope of liberal humanist universal subject here.77 Instead, we are seeking a more nuanced definition; for example, in chapter 6, we use the term “cosmopolitanism” in relation to the television series The Little Nyonya, with full awareness of Beck’s point about cosmopolitan identity as merely an identity based on consuming global cultures and “exotic” brands78; in the same chapter, we may refer to The Little Nyonya as cosmopolitan (or universal) in its ease in transcending numerous cultural and linguistic barriers for overseas audiences. Nevertheless, in multicultural nations like Malaysia and Singa- pore where racialization is deeply entrenched through policies, state institutions, and the government-controlled media, the search for interethnic cosmopolitan spaces can constitute a deeply political act.79 Here, for searches such as ours, Nava’s “visceral cosmopolitanism” or Werb- ner’s “rooted” or “vernacular” readings of cosmopolitan sensibilities appear to offer a politically congenial and richly nuanced analytical home.80 What does “being cosmopolitan” actually mean in Singapore, in particular? Selvaraj Velayutham in his book Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore concludes that the kind of cosmopolitanism for which the Singapore government is striving is one that is so global in form that it undermines “the unique place-orienta- tion of Singapore, and possibilities for an organic Singaporean national ‘we-ness’ to emerge.”81 This particular take on cosmopolitanism results in practices of branding Singapore as a global city to the world (in order to attract foreign workers and capital investors). Such forms of cosmopolitanism, positioned in the service of globalization and cultural convergence, also might be seen in the packaging and marketing of television soap operas such as The Little Nyonya for global audiences.82 Suffice to say, meanings of cosmopolitanism on which we draw are embedded firmly in the local (or rather, the glocal)83; not surprisingly, these meanings focus on culturally hybrid food and identities, emerging from the mundane spaces of encounter with others. At the same time, we acknowledge that globalization also presents new challenges and changes to these older forms of identities shaped by earlier patterns of migration and settlement (see, for example, our discussion of Singa- pore’s population and migration policies and the current backlash against mainland Chinese, in particular, in chapter 7). MAKING ROJAK . . . OR EATING “TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE”? 23

In the context of social change and globalization, when state actors are scrambling to find answers for preserving political hegemony and control through stabilizing the economy and creating a “national” culture/identity, what possible organic forms of interethnic “we-ness” can be found in everyday life in Malaysia and Singapore? Can they be found in the most ordinary places, such as the local mamak, kopitiam, or hawker center? These are exactly the questions we want to tease out— the directions our book intends to pursue. So, to begin this culinary journey, we will follow those enticing smells drifting through streets and neighborhoods to their source. Malaysia’s traditional kopitiam provides us with our first space to eat, drink, observe, and reflect—to taste the cosmopolis from the ground up.

KOPITIAM In Search of Cosmopolitan Spaces and Meanings in Malaysia

If it’s lunchtime you know the place [Yut Kee] will be packed, with a crowd outside the door waiting for an open seat. You know that Mervyn will take note of your presence, ask for the number of people in your party, and you will wait with a certain measure of patience because you know that Mervyn doesn’t tolerate queue jumpers. If you’re a party of just two or three, you know you’ll have to share a table. The ceiling fans will be swishing air about, the portrait of Jack’s father, who founded the place, will be staring down from the wall. The glass display case will be full of cakes, plastic cups of kaya will be stacked by the cash register, the smell of kopi will be everywhere. There will be couples and colleagues and whole multi-generational families, people from knee-high to months from the grave sitting at marble-topped tables, tucking in.1

Our first stop is the kopitiam (Hokkien for “coffee shop”), considered a cosmopolitan space welcoming diversity and critical democratic discourse across race, class, gender, and age. With the advent of the Inter- net, the name kopitiam is also invoked as the title of online discussion forums by local and overseas Malaysians and Singaporeans.2 In Malay- sia and Singapore, it is a symbol of civic national identity, although it has evolved somewhat differently since the separation of the two countries in 1965. This is evident from the subtle differences in the treatment of

25 26 CHAPTER 1 the kopitiam in chapters 1 and 2. This chapter, written by Gaik, focuses solely on the evolution and meanings of the old-style kopitiam in peninsular Malaysia, while in the next chapter Jean explores the modernized kopitiam as a “new” form of coffee shop in Singapore. The kopitiam is a modest and ubiquitous part of the daily national landscape found spread out in small towns, urban areas, and their surrounding suburbs; it represents the daily informal civic life of Malaysian citizens. Additionally, it predates by at least fifty years the monumental architectural wonders such as the Islamic-inspired Petronas Twin Tow- ers. While the kopitiam does not try to compete for world attention, interestingly, it is in itself a space where different worlds and cultures meet/collide in hybrid fusion, whether as patrons or in the menu and food served. Historically, “kopitiams have existed for as long as there have been Chinese in [Malaysia].”3 Mostly owned and run by Foochow and Haina- nese migrants who settled in towns and urban areas during the British colonial era, the kopitiam owner typically has a monopoly on beverage sales while renting out stall spaces to other hawkers selling noodles and assorted food. Unlike many European cafes, which focus on coffee and only offer cakes, sandwiches, and pastries, the Malaysian kopitiam sells not only snacks but also hot food and full meals like soupy noodles, rice dishes, and pork chops with French fries. But although the kopitiam may offer Malay and Indian cuisine, its non-halal character and Chinese operators signal the “Chineseness” of the space. This signifier holds particular relevance for Muslim Malays who are less inclined to frequent these places. As “[e]thnic ideology is . . . just as much a question of ‘who you are not’ as ‘who you are’”4 in Malaysia, Malay identity is most clearly defined against the second-largest ethnic group, the “pork- eating” Chinese.5 Nagata notes that historically the Malay-Chinese relationship “has been marked by a chronic ambivalence: on the one hand, a grudging respect for Chinese economic prowess; on the other, a rejection of perceived Chinese personal and cultural abrasiveness and all that this implies in moral and religious terms.”6 For this reason, we do not discuss in any detail the experience of Indians, as a separate group, who make up a small minority of the kopitiam’s customers. Neverthe- less, their recollections of the kopitiam and other informal food outlets inform our work (see this chapter regarding customers and chapter 4 on hawker centers, for example). KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 27

There are different types of kopitiams. The most common manifes- tation is a non-air-conditioned restaurant that houses individual stalls selling different types of hawker food (which can include Chinese, Ma- lay, and Indian dishes). These shops were traditionally operated by the Hokchiew and Hainanese in Penang.7 This kind of kopitiam is frequently invoked in overseas Malaysian restaurants with the same name as a generic signifier of Malaysian diversity, though at much higher prices. Most kopitiams of this type have fast turnover and little ambience. The second type of kopitiam is a cozier family-run business, where personal relations with the owner of the shop take precedence over business turnover, and where the menu may be limited to coffee, eggs, and kaya (egg jam) toast. This type is the one that provokes nostalgic renditions in two short animated films and a television series (Kopi- tiam, 1998–2004), which are briefly mentioned later in this chapter. It has also prompted gentrified mall versions such as Uncle Lim’s, Kluang Station (in One Utama Mall), Old Town White Coffee, and the Singa- pore-owned Killiney Kopitiam, which appeal to young executives looking for a cheaper alternative to Starbucks to reflect their social status.8 I focus on the discursive representations of the family-run kopitiam and two actual family-run kopitiams I visited in Malaysia.9 There is notably a disjuncture between public discourses of kopitiam as cosmopolitan transethnic spaces and the sociological reality of kopitiam as a more exclusively Chinese space due to its non-halal character. We argue that the cosmopolitan kopitiam is a discursive construct deployed to critique racialization in Malaysia. By racialization, we mean “ethnic segregation that is systematically regimented through state policies and institutions, all of which impede the citizen’s ability to think beyond ethnic self-preservation.”10 Although essentially nostalgic, the small-scale kopitiam is also a form of ethnic minority resistance against Malay and Islamic hegemony, against corporate globalization and, finally, an assertion of a unique hybrid Chinese Malaysian place and a belonging to the imagined community. This is not to deny the cosmopolitan (i.e., inclusive) nature of the air-conditioned modern kopitiam that are certified halal and have become ubiquitous in malls such as Pappa- rich, Old Town White Coffee, and Killiney, the kind that Jean discusses at length in the following chapter. The latter type conforms to “halal- ization” in order to broaden its clientele in places as far away as Austra- lia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. In this regard they illustrate a “banal 28 CHAPTER 1 cosmopolitanism”11 whose inclusivity and transnational characteristic hinges on consumption. Instead, in this chapter, I focus on two “exceptional” small kopitiams that are cosmopolitan, and I discuss what conditions foster and enable cosmopolitan crossings. Lastly, I discuss the nostalgic ideal of the cosmopolitan kopitiam as a projection of the alienated desires of the Chi- nese (and Indian) Malaysian middle classes, particularly those who were educated in English-medium national schools before the 1970s and a younger generation who grew up during the 1990s and was inspired by the inclusive state discourse of a Malaysian race/nation (Bangsa Malay- sia) in then–prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 speech. Rather than focusing on an ethnographic account of interethnic interactions in a kopitiam, we are more interested in the perception that the kopitiam offers possibilities for eating together around the same table. Such spatial possibilities for commensality have shrunk with growing racialization and Islamization, which rigidly divide Malaysians into Muslim and non-Muslim, and drive non-Muslim eating places to adapt to and conform to a halal economy.12 Accompanying the New Economic Policy (NEP), 1971–1990, in instituting Malay hegemony, the active dakwah phase—Islamic proselytization—followed by the mainstreaming of Islam and Islamic discourse in the 1980s, have all led to a stronger visibility of Islamic identity. This can be seen in the public sphere, in Islamic architecture, Islamic banking and insurance systems, and the widespread wearing of tudung (headscarves) for Muslim women, to mention a few examples. More pertinently, Islamization insti- tuted the halal-ization of the food industry and stricter observation of food restrictions. Laws about Muslims caught eating in public during the fasting (Puasa) month are visibly enforced, though some interethnic kopitiams still continue their discrete policy of having a room at the back for non-fasting Muslim customers. According to former journalist Pillai, before the 1960s, despite the existence of laws to fine Muslims caught eating in public during Puasa, “if food was consumed in closed places, even in special rooms in restaurants, they were not prosecuted. But in the 1960s, especially after PAS [the Pan Malaysian Islamic party] took control of Kelantan and Trengganu in 1959, [the idea of enforce- ment] spread gradually into mainstream Malaysia.”13 Today, Indian Muslim restaurants no longer serve beer, which they did up to the 1960s,14 and the majority of Malays themselves have KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 29 become self-conscious about their (prior) lack of public observance of Islamic rituals and norms due to the global rise of Wahhabism, a conservative brand of Islam that promotes a literal interpretation of the Quran. Minutely detailed translation produces rigid public prescriptions of daily rituals, based on fears of pollution rather than an invisible and personal spiritual commitment. In this way, hegemonic Islamiza- tion has served to alienate the non-Muslim and non-Malay populace.15

THEORETICAL STRATEGIES: VERNACULAR COSMOPOLITANISM, NOSTALGIC THIRD PLACE/SPACE?

Thinking of Malaysian spaces and identities as “cosmopolitan” is thus one way to escape the static racialized boundaries that characterize every aspect of Malaysian pluralism, a situation that is exacerbated by increasing Islamization and Islamic discourse.16 “Cosmopolitan spaces” refer to spaces where diverse cultures/groups converge and mingle— this includes the customers and the types of food and drinks served. Moreover, I use the term “cosmopolitan” to describe a commitment to commonly shared values and humanity, regardless of race, class, and gender. To be cosmopolitan is to be open to the culture of others, whether within or outside of one’s nation. Having a cosmopolitan sensibility does not necessarily entail traveling beyond national borders; rather, it could be having a “broad commitment to civic-democratic culture at the national level.”17 If, as David Hollinger explains, pluralism connotes different cultures existing side by side, cosmopolitanism, which assumes diversity as an “always already,” requires those boundaries to be crossed. Unlike pluralism, which “is more concerned to protect and perpetuate particular, existing cultures,” cosmopolitanism “is willing to put the future of every culture at risk through the sympathetic but critical scrutiny of other cultures.”18 My strategic use of cosmopolitanism connects with more local forms of theorizing Malaysian racial pluralism—namely, Malaysian writer K. S. Maniam’s idea of the “new diaspora” and historian Sumit Mandal’s “transethnic solidarities.” According to Maniam, the members of this new diaspora are “conditioned by” their various ethnicities but do not let their culture/ethnicity limit their ability to relate to or find common ground with those from other cultures or ethnicities. As “exiles-at- 30 CHAPTER 1 home,” able to see more objectively and comprehensively, they seek to inhabit different intellectual, cultural, and imaginative spaces simultaneously. Aware of their own culture, the new diaspora subjects are equally aware of the cultures around them.19 This is similar to Vertovec and Cohen’s idea that the cosmopolitan attitude or disposition is “an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences.”20 Although, as Maniam acknowledges, such a group is in the powerless minority in Malaysia, their interstitial presence, especially in choosing to negotiate “through the more persuasive imaging of a vision in the present, both through its lifestyles and literature,”21 is crucial. This position of the powerless Malaysian minority can be said to be a form of “vernacular cosmopolitanism”: what Bhabha calls “a cosmopolitan community envisaged in a marginality,” which he draws from Anthony Ap- piah’s notion of the “cosmopolitan patriot.”22 Maniam’s new diaspora suggests that Malaysians of various ethnic and religious backgrounds can still forge a shared vision through this minority cosmopolitan mental and imaginative space that potentially offers them a more liberated cultural community. Though Maniam focused mainly on writers, this clearly applies to other fields such as independent filmmaking and social activism. Further, he believes that identity is artificially categorized into a monocultural, ethnic, and political thing when multiplicity is our “true nature”: “It is this multiplicity that the new diasporic man is trying to regain.”23 We can contextualize this point to the brief period between the Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1971–1990), a period, according to Maniam himself, “characterised by the driving force to shape a multiracial country into a nation with a common sense of identity.”24 In a similar vein, Mandal proposes a strategy to undo the perception of “race” as a totalizing, divisive force in Malaysia. He points to the 1947 establishment of a united political front by anticolonial left movements representing different ethnic groups— the alliance between the All-Malaya Council of Joint Action (AMCJA) and the Pusat Tenaga Ra’ayat (PUTERA) or Centre for People’s Power, which later fell victim to the British antileftist emergency efforts from 1948 to 1960—as a historical moment of “transethnic solidarities” that has been erased by structural and social racialization.25 This whole period fostered a cosmopolitan attitude that enabled humanist writers and KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 31 those in the arts of all ethnicities and left-leaning politicians to think beyond bounded single identities, to form transethnic solidarities in the multiplicity of Malaysia perhaps over a shared meal or a drink at their local kopitiam, if we regard commensality as the very foundation of social bonds. A more recent example of cosmopolitan ethnic unity occurred among opposition parties in the formation of the Pakatan Rakyat (Citizens’ Alliance) and ordinary Malaysian citizens who no longer clung to ethnic political affiliations during the March 2008 elections. In The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg posits the importance and necessity of having a third place, one that is neither home (the first place) nor work (the second), which contributes to informal public life and gets “you through the day.”26 Informal gathering places, third places are physically accessible and inclusive of people of all classes, ethnicities, and genders. They are also spaces that welcome conversation and conviviality rather than isolation, providing a “home away from home” that allows one to relax and unwind with friends and strangers, fostering social ties and enriching civic life and democracy. Often taken for granted, most third places have a low profile.27 The kopitiam is a third place for these categorical reasons and more. Ng Ping Ho, the creator of the television series Kopitiam, said he was inspired by the American sitcom Cheers, a place “where everybody knows your name,” but he wanted to house it in a typically Malaysian setting, the kopitiam, rather than the neighborhood pub.28 The kopitiam conveys ideas about space for democracy, open discourse, and debate, a civil society, and a class and ethnic/race leveler. Like the cultural politics of language in Malaysia, it provides “space in which ethnicity and class intersect.”29 BrandMalaysia.com blogger Mack Zulkifli expresses the popular belief that the kopitiam “signif[ies] a touch point that transcends race, religion and creed,” for it is “a place where millionaires mingle with clerks and ‘kutu’ [lice], and [where] there is very little distinction on segregation by any means.”30 Thus, the kopitiam shares much with the early seventeenth-century English coffee house: Both are “a place of free association among all classes” where issues of public concern can be discussed.31 Moreover, the kopitiam is a relatively affordable and thus more accessible space to lepak (Malay slang for “hang out”). In terms of its “democratic atmosphere” and “equally democratic prices,” it fulfills some of the characteristics of the good third place.32 32 CHAPTER 1

But what about modern fast-food outlets and designer coffee shops like Starbucks that due to their halal or pork-free nature are therefore accessible to most Muslims?33 Starbucks in its literature even purports to be a “third place.”34 But its cosmopolitanism is of the more elite and worldly kind. Accessible only to yuppies who can afford to pay five to ten times the price of a coffee in a kopitiam, it is also limited to those who can understand the English-language menus.35 There is a distinction between the global cosmopolitanism represented by Starbucks and the vernacular cosmopolitanism represented by the family-run kopitiams that have undergone “a tryst with cultural translation as an act of survival,” particularly in their menus.36 Malaysian and Singaporean multiculturalism and hybridity are a legacy of British colonialism, and the drinks in a typical traditional coffee shop reflect the Chinese owners’ adaptation and integration to colonial Malayan influences: Ceylon tea and coffee served with sweetened condensed milk rather than Chinese tea; Milo or Ovaltine, malt drinks found throughout the British Empire; boiled barley, which the Chinese drink as an herbal cure; and beer (drunk with ice!). In addition, toast (charcoal-grilled bread) spread with butter/margarine and kaya or coconut egg jam and sometimes boiled eggs are served for breakfast. A similar story of hybridized tastes—of kaya toast and kopi (coffee)—and colonial influences is set in Singapore’s “new” coffee shops in chapter 2. If food is cooked and sold by the Hainanese owners themselves, this may be pork/chicken chop (a colonial inheritance but prepared Chinese style), or chicken rice and other Hainanese specialties. The presence of Western food existing alongside more Asian rice- and noodle-based dishes testifies to the Malaysian and Singaporean experience of British colonialism that has been adapted and hybridized to suit the local palate. Indeed, ethnic Chinese cooks employed by the British were mostly Hainanese. That said, the kopitiam is perceived to reflect a Malaysian cultural and historical identity that is unique to the region, unlike Star- bucks, which remains, for most Malaysians, a global corporate American entity. Kopitiam cosmopolitanism is older, culturally hybrid, and embedded in the idea of a localized public sphere or community. A stereotypical image of kopitiam as a third place is a place where retired and unem- ployed men sit, drink, read the papers, and while away the off-peak hours with gossip and political discussion.37 Kopitiams provide a barom- KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 33 eter for measuring public satisfaction or dissatisfaction about current issues by reflecting the vox populi. So popular is this idea that the phrase “coffee shop talk” appears on Wikipedia, the free Internet ency- clopedia, under “kopi tiam.”38 A cynical reference to the news of the day appears in the short animation Don’t Play Play39 when the coffee shop proprietor asks whether the hyperactive boy is on Ecstasy, which the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) had linked to the youth sub- culture. Those who opt for the kopitiam over the designer cafe do so as a form of resistance against brand consciousness and the potentially homogenizing forces of corporate globalization. Indeed, a short animation made by some Multimedia University students, Coffeeshop,40 expresses nostalgic regret for the loss of one’s cultural and communal identity vested in the kopitiam when the family coffee shop is sold and turned into a McDonald’s outlet. The Mandarin-language voiceover describes the traditional kopitiam as a place where the owner has a special relationship with the customers, knowing them by their names and habits. He compares it to the upscale expensive coffee bars today (like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) with their impersonal and alienating atmosphere of “foreign music” and having to “choose from a whole list of exotic names that you don’t understand.” Ultimate- ly, the film suggests that the latter is lacking when it comes to providing good, reasonably priced coffee and friendly service. The overt reference to McDonald’s is symptomatic of the film’s overall critique and resistance to “the homogenous narrative of globalization” to which its nostalgia for kopitiams constructs a localized alternative.41 Wang poses that nostalgia is “a defiant attempt to find the remainders of history beyond or within the world of commodity [coffee in this case].”42 “The remainders of history,” in the case of the kopitiam, include a space for nourishing relationships and a diversity of human contact, where a sense of place and community is invoked, and life is made more colorful. In- deed, a common thread in the interviews I conducted—that of intergenerational bonding—is humorously conveyed in the student animation Don’t Play Play. Here, the kopitiam becomes a site of bonding between a toothless old man and his cheeky grandson. Although invoking cultural hybridity in discussing the food and atmosphere of the kopitiam, I am reluctant to consider the kopitiam as a “third space” that “represents both the general conditions of language 34 CHAPTER 1 and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious.”43 Bhab- ha’s concept of third space is much too elusive and slippery as it is trapped in a post-structuralist paradigm that “ensure[s] that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity.”44 On the contrary, common ideas about the kopitiam (its significance, appearance, social habits, menu, and ambience) have become consolidated through the years and provide a detailed store for nostalgia and cultural preservation. In other words, while Bhabha’s idea of third space problematizes authenticity, the kopitiam is highly dependent on notions of authenticity insofar as the space is able to re-create or recapture an atmosphere from the early to mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, “authenticity” itself and associated nostalgic meanings are not without cultural construction and fluidity, and we would not want to argue for an essentialized view of “the past,” despite the performance of this within the walls of the kopitiam. But if we step outside into the heat and approach the kopitiam to explore it, immediately we get a sense of openness. Neither enclosed nor air-conditioned, it is usually sited in a colonial shophouse45 and may have electric fans over round marble-top tables and stools or wooden chairs.46 Its traditional decor, furniture, crockery, and atmosphere all contribute to a particular collective memory of the traditional kopitiam (for example, Uncle Lim’s Cafe). On its website, Uncle Lim’s claims that it is “extending history and preserving our unique culture.”47 The cups and saucers are white ceramic with green floral markings. The walls are usually covered with posters advertising beer and cigarettes, or in some prewar kopitiams, a large antique spotted mirror with engraved Chinese characters. Developmentalism (the mad rush to modernize, urbanization, the rise of materialist consumption, corporatization, and privatization) is the impetus behind the nostalgia for the kopitiam. Through the developmentalist 1990s, kopitiams have been converted into Western fast- food outlets, mobile phone shops, clothing retail shops, and upscale multinational coffee bars, or been destroyed to make way for ever- larger shopping malls. The eradication of rent control in downtown Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown too has contributed to the physical deterioration of current kopitiams in those areas as operators, fearful of KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 35

Figure 1.1. Menu at Yut Kee Restaurant, Jalan Dang Wangi, Kuala Lumpur (est. 1928). Photographed by Gaik Cheng Khoo. the threat of phenomenal rent increases and possible eviction, are reluctant to invest in renovation and maintenance. Chua Beng Huat notes that the Singaporean nostalgia for kopitiams and kampung (village) is motivated by the desire to recapture characteristics of the predevelopmentalist space and time of contemporary Singapore where, it is believed, individualist capitalism has fostered a sense of competition and urgency that inhibits community ties and human conviviality. In deconstructing nostalgia, Chua explains that the slower pace of life back then was based on high unemployment, and that the high level of trust and community among the kampung dwellers had to do with their shared poverty and the physical layout of the kampung, which allowed for a kind of informal surveillance by one’s neighbors. He cautions against romanticizing the past and claims that nostalgia for the kampung is counterproductive since there is insuffi- cient political will to realize the preference for a more contented, stress-free life. Moreover, unlike utopianism—which is oriented to a 36 CHAPTER 1 new future based on critiques of the past and present—nostalgia is grounded in the past and, as such, “blunts its powers and possibilities as a radical tool.”48 The prevailing discourse of the kopitiam and its image making by Malaysians, however, is not necessarily nostalgic to the point of counterproductivity. Instead, they have to be contextualized by the climate and space of their very enunciation. Based on my informal survey and interviews with informants, the idyllic image of the coffee shop is a pervasive one that is not only obviously imbued with nostalgia for “the good old times” but is also about the formation of a multicultural national identity. It signifies the desire on the part of ethnic minority Chinese for recognition of the nation’s multiethnic history and inclusion by a Malay state and Malay Muslim majority. Notably, the three film and television representations of the kopitiam I discuss came only in the wake of the Vision 2020 document and were conceived by middle-class Chinese Malaysians. In the Vision 2020 document, former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad spoke of a Malaysian race/nation (Bangsa Ma- laysia) that is inclusive of non-Malay citizens. The filmmakers believed that they were capturing some sort of local authenticity and national identity that speaks of diversity and civic nationalism in their chosen site of the kopitiam. These cinematic representations are thus ways of writing themselves into the national imagery/imaginary. They collectively stake a claim for recognition of the historical contribution and continuing presence of the Chinese in the Malaysian everyday landscape. Such discursive representations of the kopitiam, while ostensibly representing a cosmopolitan Malaysian space, came up against some sociological realities. Namely, even before the Islamization project took effect, the transethnic kopitiam was more an exception than the rule. For, although popular opinion assumes that kopitiams were more interethnic in the pre-dakwah (Islamic missionary) past, actually interethnic interaction was superficial and mostly occurred among the English- educated before the war.49 The theme of transethnic interaction through the world of English notably persists in the television series Kopitiam (1998–2004) in which a Eurasian woman in her late twenties inherits a kopitiam and manages it with the help of two elderly “uncles,” one Chinese and another Indian. Other friends and customers of diverse personalities, class, and ethnic backgrounds also appear, speaking in English or Manglish (Malaysian English). This English-language KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 37 television series survived for six seasons and increased its viewership threefold, which must mean that there is a sufficiently large minority of English-speaking middle-class viewers who cross ethnic boundaries and follow such programs.

COSMOPOLITAN ACCOMMODATIONS: YUT KEE (NOSTALGIA) AND HAI PENG (DEVELOPMENT)

But why the perception that kopitiams were transethnic? Perhaps it was because in the past the only hangout in the neighborhood was the Chinese kopitiam. But from the early 1970s, the presence of Malay food courts (through Taman Selera)50 meant there was little need for Malays to go beyond their ethnic boundaries to a kopitiam. Sadly, as Pillai noted in a 2004 e-mail, the food courts themselves attracted few Chinese and Indian customers, who preferred their own cuisine, thus further entrenching racialization. Today, other cosmopolitan hangouts like Western fast-food joints, bubble-tea outlets, and Western-style halal cafes have emerged to compete for the middle-class dollar. Never- theless, how do old, small, family-run kopitiams retain their cosmopolitan charm? We turn to two kopitiams that have adopted opposite strategies to maintain their cosmopolitanism: Yut Kee in downtown Kuala Lumpur (est. 1928) and Hai Peng Kopitiam in the small east coast town of Kemaman (est. 1940). The conditions that foster Yut Kee’s third-place cosmopolitanism lie in its accessible and welcoming atmosphere and congeniality. Here the food, layout, and decor have remained mostly unchanged since its founding, and except for the cashier’s counter, as De Silva observed, there is a sense of frozen time.51 The Western food on the menu evokes British pub food from the 1950s.52 And its present owner, Jack Lee, calls to mind his father, Lee Tai Yut, who had been a cook to the family of Chinese tycoon Choo Kia Peng before opening his own kopitiam. A seventy-one-year-old customer, Mr. S. T. Mok, remembers the older Lee: “He was just like Jack—friendly, helpful, very community-centric and a good cook.”53 More important than the generational continuity is the personality of the shop owner, whose friendliness and welcoming of diversity and difference can only be described as cosmopolitan. Sixty- 38 CHAPTER 1 one-year-old Jack Lee told my friends and me (after ordering us a round of drinks and refusing payment) that his father’s shop used to be a “landing spot” and source for new Hainanese immigrants who arrived in Malaya who needed jobs and help with settlement. Some ended up working as cooks in government rest houses. This is typical of migrant restaurants elsewhere in the world. For example, Hardyment noted that “restaurants were at the heart of the self-help movement” among Ben- gali migrants in England during the 1950s and 1960s.54 Today, Lee has taken his father’s place, dispensing help and advice, extending a listening ear, and providing companionship to lonely senior citizens and retired army officers who come by his kopitiam. Lee feels that “money isn’t everything” and values interaction with everyone. He enjoys the conviviality of working in a kopitiam and regards it as a space to meet people. Yut Kee’s cosmopolitanism derives from the vibrant personal networks and friendships the owner has forged since his boyhood. During our conversation, Lee, who was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur (KL), frequently mentioned those who had gone to the same leading boys’ school as himself, the Victoria (Boys’) Institution (VI) during the 1950s. This or that person or personality was “an old boy” from VI. And his VI friends, with whom he kept in close contact, would drop by the kopitiam for drinks (beer) every so often. Among these friends were Malays as well as Indians, not only Chinese (indeed, a couple of them showed up around closing time for precisely this ritual). One former school- mate, T. Jayanathan, even called it the “headquarters.”55 Another com- mentator named C. K. Cheong, who now lives in Vancouver, Canada, noted in the comments section of an article “Yut Kee: The End of an Era?” on March 11, 2011, that they were in a group of friends called “the gang” that consisted of Chinese, Malays, Indians, Sikhs, and Eur- asians who have been friends since the early sixties and were still in constant contact: “‘Yut Kee’ is our HQ.”56 Jack Lee has managed to keep these friendships through the old school network: friendships forged through the shared hardship and character-forming experience of colonial school discipline, working on school Shakespeare productions, and rugby. He lamented to me the lack of ethnic integration among the younger generation of Malaysians today, acknowledging that integration between Chinese and Malays in the past was “more natural.” In De Silva’s newspaper article dated June 2007, Lee reminisces KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 39 about the old days: “I miss those times. It was a nice mix. I would pick up Tamil words from my customers. It was once a meeting place for the Kampung Baru residents [mainly working-class Malays].”57 Due to Islamic food restrictions, Lee’s customers are now mostly Chinese. Conservative Malays will not come since he has pork items and beer on the menu. Islamic food restrictions, Robert McKinley explains, not only mark and bound Islamic identity but also create an asymmetrical power relationship between Malay hosts who are able to give (regarded as socially elevating) but unable to take as guests of non- Muslims.58 Thus, “the presence of halal observances in the national culture thereby has the ideological bonus of stressing that Malays are permanent hosts in relation to non-Muslim Malaysians.”59 This idea of Malays as permanent hosts resonates with the NEP politically imposed essentialist notion of Malays as bumiputera (“sons of the soil”), which dialectically casts the Chinese and Indians forever as pendatang (newcomers or immigrants)60 rather than longtime citizens deserving of equal rights. Nevertheless, Chinese Malaysians should not discount barriers to ethnic socializing as their food excludes Malay Muslims since it contains pork and various other non-halal ingredients.61 Jack Lee reveals that his longtime Chinese customers have requested that he should not remove his recipe roti babi (which contains pork) from the menu. I read this gesture not as about being exclusivist but conversely about retaining one’s right to one’s ethnic diet and cuisine in resistance to hegemonic halal-ization. In contrast, Hai Peng Kopitiam in Kemaman is a cosmopolitan kopitiam that serves only halal food. Well aware of the possibility of excluding the town’s majority Malay population, second-generation owner Elaine Wong tells me that the family, who lives above the coffee shop, does not cook pork, even for themselves. They have both Chinese and Malay workers and eat meals together with their staff. Their patrons are a mix of locals (majority Malays), urbane friends from KL who drive up on the expressway during weekends for breakfast, and tourists from Star Cruise staying at the nearby seaside resort. Aside from the traditional breakfast, her kopitiam does not serve the old-style Hainanese Western food but instead offers more contemporary Western fusion dishes, since Elaine lived in Canada for many years. She has introduced ice-blended drinks, spaghetti vongole (“Italian Pasta with Asian Touch”), and peanut butter and banana sandwiches on top of the usual coffee, kaya toast and 40 CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.2. Hai Peng Kopitiam in Muslim-majority Kemaman (est. 1940). Photo- graphed by Gaik Cheng Khoo eggs, and Malay fare. The Western meals cater to tourists and to those who want Starbucks-style ice-blended coffees but with a nostalgic atmosphere. The sealed iced coffee containers perhaps suggest not only convenience but also modern concerns about hygiene. Elaine has added a charming touch to the classic kopitiam decor by keeping her collection of antiques in the shop. Such touches lend this small-town place an air of nouveau nostalgia that is in keeping with gentrifying developments in the cities.62 Hai Peng’s decision to go halal and global makes business sense due to its location in a Malay-majority town that periodically benefits from cruise tours. On the other hand, Yut Kee, situated in KL, can afford to stay non-halal because of Lee’s extensive social network, its long-established reputation, and a relatively larger pool of urban Chinese and Indian customers. KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 41

CONCLUSION

So, to return to the question: Why is the kopitiam regarded as cosmopolitan? Perhaps this comes from the notion of coffee houses contributing to the public sphere, a possibility constricted by time, place, and ideology in Malaysia. Nostalgia for the kopitiam as the good third place on the part of the Chinese middle class has to be further deconstructed. More than its literal meaning, “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,” nostalgia is “a sentiment of loss and displacement” and also “a romance with one’s own fantasy.”63 For the television series creator Ng Ping Ho, Kopitiam the program precisely articulates that “sentiment of loss and displacement” for the boy who left KL at the tender age of eleven only to return to an unrecognizable KL landscape a decade later. Similarly, the two animations are self- conscious constructions based on unreliable memory and creativity rather than professed authenticity. Not only does this nostalgia for the small-town kopitiam reappear “as a defence mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals”64—that is, in response to the past few decades of developmentalism—it is also spurred by increasing Islamization of the public sphere and public discourse.65 Jack Lee’s case makes it clear that it is a longing for interethnic commu- nitas, not an ancestral homeland outside of Malaysia as some ethnonationalists would like to believe (like China), but more of a Malaysia that is either of the past or of an indefinite and utopian future that allows for mutual human flourishing. The nostalgia can be traced back to two moments: the late 1940s–1950s, and the more immediate past, the 1990s with then–prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 speech about the hoped-for emergence of a Bangsa Malaysia by the year 2020. The persistent longing and projection of the kopitiam as a cosmopolitan space allowing for civil discourse and political conversation is perhaps an attempt to recapture an exciting moment in Malaysian history, a time around independence and before the NEP when English-educated Malayans of all ethnicities felt and identified themselves first as Malayans, and only secondarily as Chinese, Malays, and others. Certainly Yut Kee embod- ies a cosmopolitan space that provides continuity with Victoria Institu- tion cosmopolitanism. More broadly, however, Jack Lee’s generation is not held together by the assertion of rigid linguistic boundaries. The 42 CHAPTER 1 cosmopolitanism of the Chinese diaspora and their adaptation to Malay- sia undermine the “naturalness” of ethnic absolutisms that are regulated through language.66 In a typical cosmopolitan gesture, the members of this generation also crossed linguistic lines to reach out to other ethnic communities. Jack Lee speaks several Chinese dialects as well as Malay, English, and a bit of Tamil. Among English-language theater “elite” directors after the 1969 race riots, Syed Alwi and Krishen Jit crossed over into Malay-language theater.67 Theater director Krishen Jit, who recounted to me his memory of his favorite kopitiam, also wrote reviews in both the English-language and Malay-language newspapers (New Straits Times from 1972 to 1994 and Berita Minggu from 1974 to 1976). This trend of transethnic interaction through the world of English notably persists in a much younger generation of people involved in the arts and social activism. Such an ethnically inclusive nationalist moment, whether imagined or really occurring within the kopitiam (then a popular urban meeting place), soon evaporated with the advent of race politics, the NEP, Is- lamization, and the various prohibitory laws that circumscribed freedom and imposed (self) censorship. A renewal of nationalist faith in light of Bangsa Malaysia, the 1990s ideology of developmentalism that contributed to the waning of the discourse of ethnicism (though not ethnic identity) in and among Malaysian political parties,68 the opening up of civic discourse, and the appearance of transethnic cooperation by the Reformasi movement in 1998 are some crucial points in recent history that signal some continuities and similarities with the past. This may explain the contemporary cinematic invocation of the cosmopolitan kopitiam. Such keen reminders of transethnic solidarities, past and present, provide a hint of “the coming community,” one that might seem an idealistic projection for the future or a nostalgic hearkening to a lost national past, yet it is also not beyond the realm of the possible present. The new minority, writes Maniam, “will not subscribe to the concept of pragmatic tolerance” bred by a pluralism that creates cultural enclaves; “nor will they rely on a vision projected from fruition some time in the future. For them the society of the future is already here.”69 Instead of longing for a reverse in racist policies and racialist thinking accumulated through colonial history and postcolonial continuance of racialized structures, we should be thinking ahead through and beyond race while KOPITIAM: IN SEARCH OF COSMOPOLITAN SPACES 43 expanding discursive and actual cosmopolitan spaces in Malaysia today, true “kopitiams” in that Habermasian sense. Such cultural hybridity exists in the quintessential kopitiam food and foodways of kaya toast and kopi, as the next chapter shows.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity in Malaysian Culture and Media,” in Everyday Multiculturalism, ed. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2009), 87–104. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY From Hainanese Kopitiams to Boutique Coffee Shops in Singapore

Chin Mee Chin has been in this spot for over 60 years, dishing out simple but soul-satisfying eats accompanied with strong coffee or tea—served in requisite porcelain cups. It’s a favourite with locals who love the fact that this stretch hasn’t been Starbucked, and the shop hasn’t given up its ceiling fans and old world mosaic tiles for more modern spoils. . . . Chin Mee Chin is famous for their homemade kaya (a custardy spread made from coconut milk, eggs and sugar) which is best enjoyed still-warm on their buttery toasted buns.1

This chapter is framed by the taste and smell of kaya toast and its distinctive accompaniment, Hainanese kopi or coffee. These, as we have seen in chapter 1, are staple menu items of the traditional Haina- nese kopitiam in Singapore and Malaysia. As such, kaya and kopi constitute a culinary culture of “entanglement”2 —complex connections of tastes, aromas, stories, histories, memories, objects, and spaces. Howev- er, the recent appearance of such slogans on websites as “The Toast that Binds,” “Welcome to the good old days,” and “Toast Box’s coffee rocks” signals a different kind of coffee-shop chain emerging in both Malaysia and Singapore.3 Recasting such slogans, with their obvious appeals to the heartstrings, as traces of “nouveau nostalgia,”4 this chapter builds on the previous one. It teases out the cultural and commercial

45 46 CHAPTER 2 possibilities of the “new” (as an intersection with the “old”) in this ascription. Curiously, “nouveau nostalgia,” while an oxymoron, seems a particularly fitting label for Singapore. After all, this is a nation-state caught in the vortex of developmentalism’s imperatives, on one hand, and competing with desperate attempts to preserve (and, indeed, rede- velop) a remembered heritage, on the other.5 Everything seems strangely new-old.

INGREDIENTS FOR THE MIXTURE: THE TASTE OF TOAST

To begin with those “object[s] invested with . . . sensory memory” that lie at the heart of my narrative,6 I (Jean) want briefly to examine the provenance of kaya toast and kopi, arguing their significance as “hybrid” tastes. As an iconic offering of street stalls and kopitiams, kaya toast is certainly no exception to the rule of “mixed” ethnic origins and “local” creativity with ingredients that shape much of Singapore’s cuisine.7 The rojak theme persists here. However, there is some variation in accounts of these mixed origins. Ya Kun, a coffee-shop chain that has emerged from a traditional kopitiam “of yesteryear” to its current status as “a legend in Singapore,” claims that “Kaya, derived from a word of Malay origin meaning ‘rich’ because of its golden colour, is jam made from coconut milk, eggs, flavoured with pandan leaf and sweetened with sugar. The spread originated in Southeast Asia, most likely Indonesia or Malaysia.”8 Other accounts, while not incompatible with William Koh’s (Ya Kun’s official historian) definition, however, insist on kaya’s colonial “past.” The following description, for example, positions kaya as an example of “localization,” the choice of its ingredients influenced by thrift and availability: “A uniquely Eurasian jam that has become ubiquitous in Singapore and Malaysia is kaya which began its existence as Portuguese egg jam. Coconut milk was substituted for milk, and panda- nus leaves replaced the vanilla pods, which were expensive in Southeast Asia. Thus kaya was born.”9 So in this increasingly mixed tale of origins, as well as intimations of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, we now sight the ghosts of the Portuguese and Eurasian communities as well. Furthermore, we should not underestimate the contribution of the Hainanese to the spread of SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 47 kaya throughout the region. This, however, should not be viewed predominantly as a story of their “borrowing” recipes and substituting ingredients, in a similar fashion to Eurasians’ reworking of Portuguese recipes, although this “borrowing” is certainly part of the overall “mix.”10 Instead, while Nyonya cooks prepared kaya primarily for family use as a filling for their homemade kueh (cakes, sweetmeats), the Hainanese were crucial in establishing kaya toast as a staple for kopitiam menus.11 In other words, Hainanese cooks were largely responsible for commercializing the taste of kaya.12

ENTER THE HAINANESE: THE SMELL OF KOPI

Lai Ah Eng documents the role of the Hainanese in the history of Singapore’s food and hospitality industries as “an interesting tale of the latecomer and minority immigrant group whose survival skills gave them an unexpected edge later.” Lai’s “interesting tale” proves to be one in which war, migration, and colonization all play their parts.13 Arriving in Singapore from Hainan Island well after other immigrant groups, the Hainanese were not only disadvantaged in employment terms but also by being fewer in numbers, lower in social status, and speaking a lesser-known dialect. In other words, they lacked the protection of established clan associations for securing employment in the more-favored trades and professions. As a result, many Hainanese immigrants were obliged to take on less-desired forms of manual labor (such as farming) or domestic work (such as cooking for Peranakan [Straits Chinese] and European families).14 However, all this was to change. Firstly, according to Lai, there was increasing competition for domestic employment from female immigrant groups in the 1920s and, secondly, fewer employment opportunities with the departure of the British from Singapore (from the years leading up to the Second World War onward). Thirdly, a strong desire among Chinese immigrants more generally to achieve more autonomy as workers resulted in increasing moves toward small business ownership, particularly of businesses that were food-related. This, says Lai, is “to do ‘ka-ki-kang,’ i.e., to work for oneself and, better still, to be a successful entrepreneur based on one’s own hard work.”15 48 CHAPTER 2

For the Hainanese, this entrepreneurial spirit, when fused with acquired skills of cooking and household management, encouraged a form of “ethnic” takeover of built landscapes of informal eating out in Singa- pore, especially during the years of the 1920s to the 1950s.16 After all, the establishment of such businesses initially required very little capital:

They were able to set up simple coffee stalls with just a few pieces of furniture by the roadside serving coffee to the masses. From such humble beginnings, Hainanese eventually progressed and moved their businesses to better locations in shophouses when the rentals for shophouses fell during the Depression years.17

Lai elaborates on the availability of affordable premises. She points out that shop vacancies occurred not only during the Depression of the 1930s but also during the years of the war and Japanese occupation (1941–1945). Entrepreneurial Hainanese took advantage of low, or even no, rents “for starting up their kopitiam ventures.”18 The desire to “do ‘ka-ki-kang’” persists. This belief in the value of working for oneself shapes the foundational narratives of such “yuppie” coffee-shop chains as Killiney Kopitiam, Ya Kun Kaya Toast, and Toast Box. We follow this persistent thread in Chinese business philosophy later, as well as meanings of “yuppieness” in situ. For the moment, however, we focus on the Hainanese community as pivotal in creating a modern kopitiam culture in Singapore and a culture that, like kaya itself, has very mixed roots. And here I want to return to the kopitiam’s iconic offerings, this time selecting kopi from the menu (a return to those nostalgic tastes of food “washed down pleasingly with a cup of . . . [fragrant] coffee”).19 Working in Peranakan and European households during the colonial period, Hainanese cooks had acquired critical skills that would shape the history of the Hainanese kopitiam and its boutique descendants. These skills and experiences included the making and drinking of coffee. Chan claims that the British certainly were responsible for ensuring their cooks mastered the art of coffee making, and this expertise, in turn, became integral to the culture of the Hainanese kopitiam.20 How- ever, Chan is swift to dispel assumptions that Singapore’s traditional kopitiams have become simply the local equivalent of “Western” cafes (presumably, of chains such as Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf):21 SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 49

[In the kopitiam t]he way in which the coffee is prepared, served and consumed is unique. Coffee beans here were fried with butter. This was different from the practice in Western Europe or the States, where beans are toasted. A piece of butter was usually served with the coffee. People either added the butter or ate it separately. It was believed that this method of drinking coffee would soothe the throat. The locals believed that coffee was a “heaty” drink and butter a cooling food; when taken together, they would maintain the balance in the body. The coffee served here was mixed with condensed milk and sugar.22

So it seems that rituals and practices that emerged under the influence of colonialism and multiple migrations brought kopi to the kopitiam. (Here, the critical ingredients are the establishment of the British and other Europeans as colonial masters, the mixed heritage of Perana- kans and their ties with the British, and the movement of Hainanese both throughout the region and from domestic service to self-employment.) Nevertheless, one cannot assume coffee equals kopi, and that the spaces of the kopitiam are those of the cafe. As well, kopi itself is not without its own embedded stories, some of which may be region or community specific.23 For example, while the practice of adding butter to one’s kopi may appear strange from a European perspective, it is totally consistent with Chinese culinary beliefs: “Most foods can be classified as having ying or yang properties, and the wise eater is one whose diet exhibits a proper balance. Harmony in food is the desidera- tum. . . . Extremes and excesses are to be avoided.”24 And, in fact, Chan, in her above description of coffee as “a ‘heaty’ drink” and butter as “a cooling food” refers explicitly to the “balance” principle. Once again, it seems we have a complicated mix of historical exigen- cy and local ingenuity. The introduction of European-style coffee cultures to Hainanese cooks, while a significant ingredient for this mix, is obviously not its only flavor, or indeed the dominant one. Instead, these borrowed cultures intersect with the uniquely local approach to preparing coffee beans, the scarcity of quality fresh milk in the tropics, the demand for tinned/dried milk for its keeping qualities, and the high sugar levels and concentration of condensed milk (with sugar acting as a preservative).25 The flavor that results is so distinctive that kopi, like kaya, despite its colonial roots, becomes firmly rooted in local gastronomy and myth making. So, the story of kopi in the hands of the Haina- 50 CHAPTER 2 nese in Singapore is not simply one of lack of availability of ingredients or of substitutions for a tropical climate. Instead, kopi acquires its own baggage of nostalgic references and its own fan base, as bloggers frequently attest.26 Of course, the Hainanese have not been the only contributors to kopitiam culture in Singapore, nor has the traditional kopitiam remained a fixity in Singapore’s cultural and urban fabric.27 The current mood of expansion, of modernization, of branding and franchising, however, seems very different from 1990s predictions of the death of the traditional kopitiam in Singapore, although this “death” was one intimately tied to “metamorphosis.”28 Mr. Lim, commenting in the Straits Times on behalf of the Chin Hin Group (a company focusing on developing neighborhood food courts in Singapore in the late 1990s), expresses the problem more bluntly:

The old coffeeshops can’t work anymore. They’re usually badly managed, dark, dirty and hot. Apart from good food, ambience is important so our customers will come back. That’s why our shops are brightly lit. The colour scheme is warm, mainly orange. We’ve par- tially air-conditioned the outlets so it’s cool.29

Nevertheless, changes to Singapore’s coffee shops are not achieved without arousing degrees of customer ambivalence. The problem, as Tan sees it, is that “underlying the survival of the coffee shop trade are the necessary changes which paradoxically remove the distinctiveness of the coffee shop that many are nostalgic about.”30 So, is the cost of modernization inevitably built landscapes of dreary predictability? Not necessarily, it seems. Boutique chains, such as Toast Box, Ya Kun, and Killiney Kopitiam, exploit the paradox itself in their fusion of “old” and “new.” These chains are intimately shaped by mythic meanings of modernization as progress, on one hand, held in tension with nostalgic yearnings for past times, tastes, and relationships on the other. The result is sold as a fashionable, classy product. So, here at the intersection of tradition and modernity, we have meanings of comfort in all their complexities. This is the comfort that emerges as an outcome of rational design and management (the reas- suring predictably of service rituals, the coolness of air-conditioning in the tropical heat, the pleasure in a coffee shop’s “modern” looks, for example); at the same time, this is the comfort that resonates from the SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 51 realization that material objects (a photograph, a traditional coffee cup, a cone of butter on the counter, for example) “provoke . . . the awakening of layered memories.”31 In fact, this particular quest to embody the contradiction of modern standardization and glossy interiors with quaint haphazardness and distinctiveness renders such chains as “boutique” and desirable. Together they claim a hybrid space—one of “in- betweenness”32 —that neither replicates exactly the traditional (or even the updated) kopitiam (“uncool,” yet beloved of the “aunties” and “uncles”)33 nor imitates Western chains where “cool” fashionability, it seems, attracts a predominantly youthful, internationally style-conscious following. Cool, in this analysis, now becomes something else: “nouveau nostalgia”—a deliberate trade in material comfort, hygiene, food security, up-to-the-minute casual styling, collective memory, and yearning for the past. And, with kaya toast’s embourgeoisement (“from food for coolies to food for cool”34), once again, the Hainanese have entered the story.

FOUNDATIONAL NARRATIVES: THE VILLAGE BOY MAKES GOOD

The year was 1926. Clutching a black wooden suitcase, 15-year-old Loi Ah Koon scrambled frantically on board an old Chinese junk poised to set sail from Hainan Island to Singapore. . . . [F]inally . . . on Singapore soil . . . [and k]nowing neither kith nor kin, he naturally gravitated towards the local Hainanese community. It was there he was introduced to work as an assistant in a Hainanese coffeestall. Quick and nimble of mind, Ah Koon picked up the tricks of the trade fast.35

The year is now 2010. I am at Tiong Bahru in Singapore in a rather glitzy local shopping mall. All the well-known food chains (international and local) are represented here, including Ya Kun Kaya Toast. Ya Kun (the name of Ah Koon’s stall after it was relocated and renamed in 1944) looks reassuringly familiar, complete with its ubiquitous wall poster in sepia tones recounting the history of the business, and its list of places where franchises have been established.36 The tables are modern, white, and Formica topped, reminiscent of those found in Western cafes, while the cups are in the style of the traditional kopitiam—made 52 CHAPTER 2 of thick, white china, and complete with the Ya Kun logo. Staff members are dressed in their uniforms of maroon with cream trim (echoing the colors of the decor, signage, and even small paper bags for take- away food), the Ya Kun insignia displayed on their shirts. The usual menu of kaya toast and hot tea and coffee prevails, as well as some variations—“butter sugar set,” “cheese toast set,” “French toast set,” “ice-cream toast,” barley tea, and iced lemon tea. Branded merchandise is also available—Ya Kun’s own “authentic” kaya, for example (“No preservatives added. No artificial flavouring. No artificial colouring.”). Presiding over the scene is the motto that proclaims: “Ya Kun . . . The Toast that Binds . . . Kinship, Friendship, Partnership.”37 How does Ya Kun Kaya Toast qualify as a boutique coffee shop in ways that distinguish it from a beloved neighborhood kopitiam or a Western-style, market-conscious Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf outlet? Ac- cording to Koh, the company’s historian, Ya Kun’s strength as a local

Figure 2.1. The tale of a village boy in Singapore—Ya Kun Kaya Toast Source: The Top Toast: Ya Kun and the Singapore Breakfast Tradition (Singapore: Cengage Learning Asia Pte. Ltd.) SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 53 and international business with a distinctive identity lies in its story. This story could be summed up as follows: Through hard work and canny business decisions, the poor but honest Hainanese boy makes good but is also good himself, possessing the virtues of human kindness, generosity, and empathy. This is ka-ki-kang encapsulated in mythic form—a fairy tale of the hero’s struggle to achieve success through the agency of his inherent personal qualities, rather than at the hand of chance, wealth, or privilege. Koh continues:

Ya Kun’s . . . uniqueness lies in the heritage behind the brand. Rela- tive to competitors such as Toastbox [sic] and Killiney Kopitiam, Ya Kun is the only brand tied to a personality and story, in this case Mr Loi Ah Koon’s generosity and family values and his rags-to-riches tale. Such a history has helped to create emotional bond between Ya Kun and its customers, and consequently leads to customer loyalty and sustained revenue in the long run.38

I must admit it is the discourse of “heritage” and “emotional bonds,” in concert with that of “loyalty” and “revenue,” that interests me here, as much as actual details of the Ya Kun story. After all, traditional kopitiams and other small food businesses have their stories of successful founders, together with the contribution of their families and neighborhood networks to these successes. For Ya Kun, however, it seems that the mantra of “The Toast that Binds” stands in for intangibles—“Kin- ship, Friendship, Partnership”—and that the story itself becomes the object of merchandise. This is the business of selling memories in ways that reference the emotional geographies of the “village,” of dreaming and imagining, as well as those of the modern nation in all its stream- lined efficiency and “coolness” (both literally and metaphorically).39 In other words, in such an organization, “traditional culture” meets the “corporate” in productive engagement.40 This is achieved in ways that mirror the nation’s desire to rescue history and reinvent mythical meanings of tradition while grasping the potential of entrepreneurial cultures and the spread of corporate capital. And, of course, memory is the critical product to be sold here (here we recall Wong’s study of themed restaurants, mentioned in the introduction, as well as Teo and Chang’s discussion of Singapore’s boutique hotels41). Indeed, the question of the construction and reconstruction of memory and history in Singa- pore returns in regard to the popular Peranakan television series, The 54 CHAPTER 2

Little Nyonya (chapter 6) and the documentary play Cook a Pot of Curry (chapter 7).

TOAST BOX ROCKS: “CONTEMPORARY FLAIR” MEETS THE “VIBRANT COLOURS” OF NOSTALGIA

This flagship outlet of Toast Box42 looks very, very retro: dark wooden floors and window frames, old-fashioned fans and ceiling lanterns. Wooden shelves hold a variety of artifacts: an old radio, an upright phone, hat boxes, a ceramic jug, old photos (mainly of “old town” landscapes). The crowd seems younger than that of either the Killiney Road or Ya Kun shops: a mix of students, businesspeople, and shoppers. The menu likewise looks a fusion of old and new. As well as kopi, I am having a slice of kaya cake—a bright-green layered sponge, flavored with pandan, with kaya between the layers. If I had been here at lunchtime, I might have been tempted by something savory, such as a hebi hiam bun or otah bread—local, spiced dried shrimp and fish flavorings used with Western-style bakery products. Bread is stacked on open shelves as a prominent item of decor here. In practical terms, though, the loaves are also positioned in readiness for slicing, toasting, and spreading with a variety of toppings—kaya, honey, sugar, peanut butter. The bread theme is hardly surprising as Toast Box is an offshoot of the BreadTalk Group of bakeries, first established by George Quek in Singapore but now, through franchises, spreading to Indonesia, Malay- sia, and Thailand. Has Toast Box indeed “appeared out of nowhere,” as my Singapor- ean friend Tan Aye See suggests as she compares various boutique chains?43 Even without the one-shop history and “village boy” narrative of Ya Kun (and the somewhat similar one of Killiney Kopitiam44), one might claim Toast Box is part of a resurgent interest in the flavors of traditional, local foods, particularly among middle-class Singaporeans:

The Kaya Kraze is on. These days, the kaya toast can be found not only in neighbourhood coffeeshops, but also in air-conditioned cosmopolitan food courts and funky cafes. Yuppies are smacking their lips even as they dust away the bread crumbs powdering their otherwise immaculate business attire. . . . At Gu Noodle + Bar, the restaurant at Takashimaya which opened four months ago offering Asian SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 55

gourmet food in a sleek, minimalist setting, the kaya toast, together with sugared toast, is a signature snack. Says its director, Mr Brian Ang, 44: “The kaya toast is something close to Singaporeans’ hearts. We grew up with it.”45

There is no doubt that the flavors of kaya toast have achieved a degree of fashionability beyond their traditional kopitiam contexts. Nevertheless, here we should note that the boutique landscapes in which consumption takes place are themselves integral to the “Kaya Kraze”: those “air-conditioned cosmopolitan food courts and funky cafes” where customers are dressed in “immaculate business attire,” those “sleek minimalist setting[s]” where customers might indulge in “designer kaya toast” and its variations, in preference even to “modern fast-food.”46 Through relocation from local kopitiam to smart coffee shop, nostalgic meanings of kaya are restyled to suit the middle-class tastes of the “new” cosmopolitan Singaporeans. Toast Box’s senior vice-president (Brand Development) Eileen Tan captures the business’s conscious attempt to create a certain style, an ambience, particularly in the face of an apparent lack of a specific foundational narrative:

When we entered the market, we were . . . not first in the market. Ya Kun has built up a very strong heritage—everyone recognises that brand. So when Toast Box came along, we had to also look at how to position ourselves, and for us, not just by enjoying the coffee and the toast, but it’s really about the whole experience of . . . good times [and chit-chat] . . . and therefore we look at interior style . . . a lot of people are very charmed . . . the whole package.47

The coziness of “enjoying the coffee and toast” and having “chit-chat” and “good times” might suggest echoes of the kampung of myth, memory, and memorialization (especially its mythic “idleness”), with the kopitiam at its heart.48 However, in the case of Toast Box, is this to stretch a point? Is there a sense in which this business still appears out of nowhere, while it cheerfully grasps meanings of “the good old days” as a class-directed marketing opportunity? Haunted by the phrase “appeared out of nowhere,” I suggest it is necessary to excavate Toast Box’s origins a little more thoroughly to ascertain whether, in this respect, a sharp contrast with Ya Kun (and 56 CHAPTER 2 perhaps Killiney Kopitiam, with its similar tale of Hainanese labor, ingenuity, and deference to tradition49) is justified. Interestingly, the story of George Quek, founder of BreadTalk Ltd. has a familiar ring:

A classic rags to riches tale, George Quek who came from a humble background ventured to Taiwan in his early twenties with only $5,000 in his pocket. Twenty years on, he started BreadTalk and totally transformed the bland and banal task of bread-buying into the most charming and delightful gourmet experience for consumers.50

Quek’s online biography embraces incomplete secondary school art studies, military service, a number of food businesses in Taiwan—some failures, some successes (of the latter, the most spectacular was Singa, a chain of twenty-one outlets that sold traditional Singaporean dishes such as satay, Hainan chicken rice, and prawn noodles). Homesick, the Queks eventually returned to Singapore where George developed a chain of food courts, with a reputation for selling cheap, hawker-style foods served in a “modern” restaurant setting. With a growing number of outlets and his burgeoning reputation, Quek was dubbed the “Food- court King” by the media while his bakery chain, BreadTalk, was promoted as “the first bread boutique [in Singapore] . . . which became the talk of the town.”51 His Food Republic chain, established by the Bread- Talk Group in 2005, was and still is a particularly interesting and innovative venture into nostalgia marketing.52 And here, I might recall Tan Aye See’s advice to go to Food Republic for “a sense of ‘old Singapore.’” Although this story of “making good” has different twists and turns to the foundational narratives of Ya Kun and Killiney Kopitiam, there are sufficient resonances from all three stories to suggest that these, together, are essentially Singaporean stories—of ka-ki-kang entrepreneurialism, of creativity, of food cultures that are open to innovation while celebrating their historical embeddedness. In other words, according to the “village boy” myth, if we are poor but honest, hardwork- ing, and resourceful, we can have our kaya toast (or kaya cake, or floss bun, or green tea-flavored moon cake) and eat it too.53 So, although Toast Box lays no claim to Hainanese family connections, this supposedly “out of nowhere” initiative is rooted in the history of Chinese business practices in Singapore and the hybridity of tastes that marks Singapore’s cuisine, as well as in particular international trends in modernist design. SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 57

THE COMFORTS OF NOSTALGIA . . . OR THE SELLING OF “BOUTIQUE HISTORY”?

For Singapore’s yuppies who eschew membership of Western-style cosmopolitan coffee cultures (or who simply want alternatives to these), Toast Box is a beguiling prospect. The business’s philosophical basis allows seemingly contradictory meanings to intersect, as its customers return to the “past” and to the comfort of childhood memories, while still remaining in the “present”—as up-to-the-minute and forward-looking citizens. This yearning for the old-in-the-new, according to Kwa Chong Guan, takes a particularly poignant form in Singapore, with its relatively recent history as a nation-state and its traumatic and conflict- ridden colonial past.54 The result, he says, is a collective forgetting of painful events and a reification of artifacts (that supposedly signal “better times”): “Our preoccupation with collecting Straits gold and silver and furnishing our homes with art deco furniture are symptoms of a mania for roots, and a pervasive nostalgia to counteract our amnesia.”55 While this mania may seem fortuitous, even therapeutic—one can have the best of both worlds, in fact—such selective remembering and fet- ishization of past objects/tastes/experiences raises significant political issues in terms of whose voices and whose stories are heard, and what times are invested with significance, and how. “Collecting” here becomes a form of renarrativization—deliberate acts of selecting, omit- ting, and retelling to produce a different, more comforting story. In the process (of prioritizing, of forgetting), the danger is that we might be drawn toward “boutique history . . . a version of the past that is tailor- made to sell its aura and charm of nostalgic comfort, without a commitment to the actual context and substance of the [time] period.”56 It would be easy to accuse Toast Box of boutiquery, not only in terms of its class aspirations and fashionable aesthetics but also in terms of its deployment of “charm” as a marketing tool. To be fair, the business does not claim to be a museum set in “old Singapore,” reproducing in exact detail the everyday struggles and achievements of early twentieth- century hawkers and street-stall vendors. The National Museum of Sin- gapore’s excellent food gallery comes much closer to achieving that goal. On the other hand, Toast Box is not entirely lacking in historical reference points. Curiously, this business not only has its origins in the myth of the (different) village boy (a tale of folkloric sensibility) but 58 CHAPTER 2 also, closer to home, in nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s urban Singa- pore—a period that many of Toast Box’s current customers would not necessarily remember, but recent enough for their parents to recognize and claim. As well, this was a period that itself has become history, not only celebrated for its iconic music and fashion on the global scene but also recognized as a significant period of urban development in Singa- pore—with the containment of hawkers in purpose-built centers, the shifting of populations to high-rise public housing, the erasure of kampungs, the transformation of built landscapes, and the early developments in transforming ethnic neighborhoods for tourism purposes.57 Toast Box itself had its genesis in the Food Republic food court chain, itself an exercise, as previously mentioned, in nostalgia marketing. Food Republic first opened in 2005 in an atrium in a major department store, Wisma Atria. Originally, Toast Box was simply a stall selling kopi and toast among Food Republic’s string of businesses, evocative of (though not a reproduction of) a Singapore street in the 1960s and 1970s. When Toast Box struck out as a separate subsidiary business of BreadTalk, it took the critical discourse of nostalgia with it. So it seems that Toast Box has a multilayered nostalgic heritage: tales of kaya and kopi, the history of the Hainanese kopitiam and its lookalikes; the village entrepreneur as folk hero; the 1960s and 1970s remembered (only a generation or so later); the conviviality of a “toast bookshop” (the literal translation of the Chinese characters that form its name); and a philosophy of celebration, with owner George Quek’s playful toasts to toast.58 This plethora of meaning is available for us to reference. Nevertheless, while such nostalgic feelings may engender memories (as well as being products of remembering), they do not, in themselves, replace social memory. Dawn Mok, reflecting on why she finds Food Republic congenial (despite her abhorrence of the unifor- mity of most food chains), comments on this memory–nostalgia distinction:

Food Republic . . . they’ve done . . . it up in such a way you know it’s not real but it feels quite nostalgic. . . . They . . . got like these old wood bicycles and doors and whatever from China. . . . It’s a modern food court, of course, but all the tables and chairs are like wooden— it’s not plastic . . . and the hawkers are dressed in a certain [old- fashioned] way with their handkerchiefs round . . . [their fore- SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 59

heads]. . . . And then they have a stall upfront like a cart and . . . and the minute you enter . . . [you think] “It’s authentic.”59

Earlier, Dawn and I had discussed the basis for selection of entries into an alternative tourist guide to Singapore that Dawn currently co-edits. She talks about “soul” as a criterion for choosing sites for inclusion. For Dawn, “soul” implies a point of connection that may be harnessed quite deliberately to draw on people’s memory resources:

Sometimes it’s a design, it’s a visual, it’s a color, it’s a smell, it’s a flavor, so it could be a restaurant, it could be a shop . . . specialising in vintage . . . you walk in and you just recognize the pattern, “My Mum had a dress like that” and immediately you like [think] “I love the shop,” you know, you just need that one [connecting] hook.60

On the other hand, Dawn is critical of contrived and blatantly money- saving efforts to make this point of connection—for example, using sepia tones and curly script in signage as clichéd ways of signifying “the good old days,” or purchasing job lots of “heritage” chairs to signal (cheaply) a certain chain’s trade in nostalgia. She tends to look for “authenticity” in her recommended businesses, even if this is reproduced, as in the case of kopitiam cups that are certainly not original but distinctly recognizable for their specific designs and trademarks.61 The object’s evocative power is central here, Dawn concludes, for, “even if the cup is not ‘real,’ the memory is.”62 What is “real,” then, about Toast Box? Or, rather, how does Toast Box tap into the remembered “real”? Is this simply a new form of colonization for Singapore where meanings of commodified conviviality, stylishness, and public nostalgia replace old histories of migration, colonialism, and the distinctive tastes of local foodways? Like the destruction of the kampungs and Singapore’s tabula rasa approach to the redevelopment of ethnic neighborhoods, we might speculate: Is this a postmodern “invasion” of the landscape of kopitiam cultures?63 In contrast to Ya Kun’s “Toast that Binds,” is Toast Box’s “celebrate with a toast”64 a gesture of erasure in which the ties to the “realness” of memory and history become rather tenuous? In response, I suggest there are several different threads of argument we could follow. Firstly, as Mok has implied above, I feel we should be less essentialist in our approaches to the “past”—less con- 60 CHAPTER 2 cerned with reproduction as a process of attempting to “fix” times and spaces and their material contents, and more concerned with their multiple and fluid resonances (remember “the artefact [that] can provoke the emergence, the awakening of layered memories” and “even if the cup is not ‘real,’ the memory is”65). Secondly, we might want to rethink the boutique coffee shop “invasion” and the extent of this. While one might criticize the employment of tabula rasa approaches in establishing Singapore’s new coffee cultures, clearly this is not actually the case. Boutique coffee shops in Singapore have not replaced neighborhood kopitiams or those in Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks or even those in modern shopping and food centers. (We remember, however, from earlier in this chapter, that these kopitiams, at the same time, are subject to renovation, as indeed are the HDB blocks themselves.) As Lai points out in her history of the kopitiam, its various forms tend to exist side by side, with each new form an addition to the landscape, rather than an erasure of older forms.66 Thirdly, despite the promotion of collective historical imaginaries by state and commercial institutions, people are positioned differently within these—as an Anglo-Australian traveler in Singapore, experiencing my own first taste of kopi and kaya, I claim no equivalent positioning to those for whom kopi and kaya represent “simple comfort foods that they grew up with.”67 Nevertheless, we all have the right to nostalgic connection, even though the nature of connection itself crucially is forged through the dictates of personal histories. Finally, the object of nostalgia has its own fluidities, as Lai’s account of the kopitiam shows. A site seen as erasing history in a particular temporal context (such as the modernist, purpose-built hawker centers that replaced mobile hawkers’ vans in Singapore from the 1950s onward) may, in time, become a nostalgic one for a generation remembering its hawker-centered youth or remembering this site from elsewhere, as we will see in chapter 4.68 It is possible that Toast Box will accrue its own generations of remem- berers—not necessarily Hainanese, not even necessarily Singaporean— who claim a particular time, place, and taste of kaya toast and kopi for gastronomic memory. While one might argue about the realness of Toast Box’s package, with its much-loved local foods, well-chosen artifacts, charm, and conviviality, one cannot deny the realness and the comforts of the memories sparked. At the same time, we should remember, the realness has its own exclusions: As well as traces of class SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 61 and cultural capital meanings in the ways this business imagines its customer base, Toast Box assumes the presence of a non-halal culinary community within its walls.

TOWARD NANYANG COSMOPOLITANISM VIA “A GLOP OF CONDENSED MILK”?

In December 2009, to celebrate its receipt of the Most Promising Brand Award (one of Singapore’s Prestige Brands Awards recognizing local business initiatives), Toast Box offered its tea and coffee (its “Nan- yang brews”) for the bargain price of a dollar a cup.69 The award, it was claimed:

recognises . . . [Toast Box’s] concept of serving home-roasted coffee and toast in a setting reminiscent of old-world Nanyang-style coffeeshops; with memorabilia painstakingly sourced to create the ambi-

Figure 2.2. Local foods, artifacts, charm, and conviviality at Toast Box, Singa- pore, 2014. Photographed by Sean Lowcay. 62 CHAPTER 2

ence and feel. Toast Box’s service is noted to be warm and person- able while its food menu is planned to ensure authenticity in the Nanyang coffee and toast fare.70

The repetition of “Nanyang” throughout this press article immediately begs the following questions: What is “Nanyang-style” that is being referenced here? How is Nanyang linked with meanings of Old World and traditional? How do Nanyang “brews” and “fare” constitute markers of authenticity for Toast Box? After all, what is this elusive Nanyang that apparently confers the authority of history on a yuppie coffee-shop chain? While Ya Kun and Killiney Road draw on very specific narratives to justify their trade in Singapore’s past—the only stall that since 1944 has always sold just toast (Ya Kun), the oldest surviving kopitiam (Killi- ney Kopitiam), and so on71—does Toast Box provide an alternative historical landscape—its own mythical place, rooted in the past, while offering comfort and emotional sustenance in the present? To tease out Toast Box’s promotional reference to Nanyang-style, it is necessary to position Nanyang itself as a cultural landscape—as a territory of collective identity and imagined belonging. Hugh Lewis elaborates:

The Nanyang or the “Southern Ocean” used to be the Chinese equivalent of Southeast Asia as it was then known—Nanyang refers to those Southeastern territories that were reached by overseas Chi- nese people via the South China Sea [during the colonial period]. The overseas Chinese form a distinct nation within many different nations, within the Southeast Asian region and beyond, a nation whose only real territory was a sort of socio-cultural space within a larger regional framework and the freedom of the South China Sea itself. . . . The Nanyang Chinese have been more culturally influenced by the Nanyang itself than by their common Chinese homeland.72

Hence Nanyang is not an actual geographical territory but an example of an “imagined community” in the sense that Benedict Anderson describes.73 While Nanyang ethnicity seems more fluid and harder to define than, for example, meanings of ethnicity associated with particular Chinese-dialect groups in Singapore and Malaysia—Hokkiens, Teo- chews, Foochows, Cantonese, Hakkas, Hainanese74 —it does provide a virtual space of belonging for different groups, with a common bond in SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 63

Chineseness in this place and at this time, defining themselves in relation to each other rather than to an ancestry that is distant (in the several meanings of this word). Lewis continues: “They form a heterog- enous population—varied adaptations to a regional environmental mosaic that has led to a great range of cultural and social diversity—though all within a single Nanyang continuum.”75 The image of mosaic seems a useful one for developing cultural analyses focusing on multiethnic nations, despite criticism of its potentially racist meanings (as bits of ethnic “color” decorating the mainstream cultural outlines).76 The more hopeful nuances of such an image, however—distinctive contrasts, shades, and textures yet coherence (usually) through less-expected juxtaposition and connection—might allow more productive applications. Perhaps, in a cup of coffee, even a traveling blogger might sense this mosaic of region and its distinctive (hybrid) tastes. Backpack Foodie, inserting a familiar image of a modern reproduction of a traditional kopitiam cup into his or her Internet photostream, comments: “A coffee from Toast Box, in the Food Repub- lic food court on Orchard Road, Singapore. The coffee is made Turkish- style, poured from a long-spouted pot, and a very Southeast Asian glop of condensed milk is added.”77 “A very Southeast Asian glop of condensed milk” . . . this is a taste emerging from a particular outlet of a particular chain at a particular moment, but a taste that resonates of regional travels, memories, and understandings. The “glop” is a self-contained piece in the mosaic, yet, historically, it reaches backward, as we have seen in this chapter’s account of the effects of migration, colonization, war, and ethnic entrepreneurialism on Singapore’s street-food trade. As well, the same glop at the bottom of a kopitiam coffee cup accesses meanings of the present and future, through oblique reference to a nation’s trajectory toward postmodernity and postcolonialism, its nostalgia trading, and its increasing regional and global reach. In other words, there are ghostly hints of an imaginary beyond the photographic moment as captured. Tentative- ly, this sensibility might be reframed as Nanyang cosmopolitianism—as the flavor of “we-ness” that our book wants to trace in everyday acts of commensality. It might seem crass to suggest that drinking a cup of coffee at Toast Box is an act of vernacular cosmopolitanism. (Werbner defines vernacular cosmopolitanism as vested in “contradictory notions of local specific- 64 CHAPTER 2 ity and universal enlightenment.”78) More usually, this ritual would be labeled “cosmopolitan” in the sense of “classy,” drawing on its popular media meanings. In fact, much of the debate centering on the “new cosmopolitanism” raises questions about privilege, freedom of movement, and the resources to do so (even, presumably, as a backpacker).79 Putting it bluntly, Singapore’s yuppie coffee shops are indeed primarily for yuppies. It would be easy to condemn Toast Box’s customer base as simply involved in a self-conscious pursuit of style. Nevertheless, the appreciation of a local taste, together with that same taste attached to a wider cosmology of belonging and acceptance of difference within this imagined community, seems to me a small trace, at least, of a Nanyang cosmopolitan sensibility. This is cosmopolitanism in a regional sense— one that is neither entirely global nor grounded in the vernacular yet is very mixed. Like kaya toast and kopi, this is a form of belonging and identification that reflects the complex history of its diverse roots as well as the mediated meanings of past and present in recent promotional cultures, especially those implicated in the reshaping of Chinese gastronomy within the Chinese diaspora. So with the taste of kaya toast, kopi, and pandan-flavored sponge cake referencing a cosmopolitan, and perhaps a rojak, imaginary (with its intimations of movement across time, space, and borders of ethnicity; with its traces of narratives of collective memories and hybridized futures), we have walked through the spaces of the traditional kopitiam and its gentrified younger relative, the yuppie coffee shop. Both of these sites of public eating, as we have seen, have a certain appeal based on their everydayness, on one hand, and on their capacities to reference nostalgia, memory, and meanings of the local on the other. The smell of strong coffee, the sweet taste of tinned milk, and the crunch of griddled toast linger throughout. In this analysis too, both kopitiam and yuppie coffee shop allow new takes on cosmopolitanism and Asian modernity, scaring the ghosts of liberal humanism that tend to pervade Western intellectual traditions. Both sites potentially offer moments of commu- nitas—whether of the Habermasian variety or of the Nanyang as shared, regional identity. Neither provides ready solutions to complex issues of race relations, developmentalism, or heritage commodification, but both imply, in de Certeau’s sense of the interstitial, sites of “everyday creativity” and mobility of meaning in which the spirit of rojak prevails, however uneasily.80 SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY 65

Nevertheless, it is now time to move on. To add to the mix, we are about to approach Malaysia’s mamak stall. In chapter 3, we focus even more strongly on ways that race relations permeate the everyday. We also see how the mamak stall delineates a critical space for the reproduction of Tamil Muslim identity.

“MAMAK, ANYONE?” Tamil Muslim Eateries in Malaysia

In our search to discover whether the kopitiam is truly a cosmopolitan space, Malaysian friends and casual acquaintances would mention that “the mamak” was halal and therefore qualified as a cosmopolitan space that could accommodate Muslim and non-Muslim customers. If the kopitiam’s identity is undoubtedly Chinese, the mamak stall is firmly Tamil Muslim. What then is a mamak stall? In Malaysia, mamak stalls are eateries operated by Tamil Muslims (“mamaks”) selling drinks like teh tarik (pulled tea),1 food dishes like nasi kandar (rice and curries),2 mee goreng (fried noodles), and roti (Indian bread).3 Among these dishes, the nasi kandar stands out as an ethnically unique Indian Mus- lim cuisine. Blogger Burhanudeen writes that “the word ‘nasi kandar’ is seen on most Indian Muslim or ‘Malaysian Mamak’ restaurants and stalls offering rice meals” but this is usually followed up by its broad appeal to Malaysians of “different races.” Chin, writing on the history of nasi kandar in a newspaper on Malaysia’s fifty-first Independence Day, claims that it is a “national favourite,” “a 100% Malaysian dish with changes made to suit local tastebuds.”4 Let us return to the idea of mamak stalls as cosmopolitan spaces. I (Gaik) can certainly verify this from frequenting many mamak stalls in addition to the nine eateries I visited in Penang, Petaling Jaya, and Kuala Lumpur during the period of our study. But was I getting carried away with the whole idealistic notion of mamak eateries as a Haberma-

67 68 CHAPTER 3 sian public sphere or Oldenburg’s “good third place?”5 Were customers there to discuss the politics of the day or, as Yao Souchou describes of Singaporeans, to “talkcock,” meaning to vent as a way to manage their own anxieties in their ambivalent relationship to the state?6 Were the Chinese, Malays, and Indians even sitting around the same table and eating together as the ultimate form of interracial harmony (muhib- bah7)? And what were the roles of the Tamil Muslim proprietor and workers in this relationship and in this interethnic everyday space? How do the identities of its mixed clientele relate to the identity of the space, one (the clientele) being ethnically diverse, and the other (the space) Tamil Muslim? Does the relationship between proprietor and customer ever transcend marketplace interactions (where one does business with Tamil Muslims but does not socialize with them beyond monetary transactions)? In this chapter, I explore the processes by which the Tamil Muslim nasi kandar sold in the mamak stall is becoming accepted as a national food, and the mamak stall as a national space. This “national becoming” is interesting for its multiple traces of the “national” in everyday connections of food, space, and identity in Malaysia. I argue that mamak stalls provide an inadvertent space for cosmopolitan togetherness by facilitating our enactment of a seemingly banal collective national pleasure and pastime: our love of food and eating. The mamak stall can be regarded as a possible public sphere because of its easy accessibility for its customers. The food is cheap and attracts students and the working class. At the same time, these eateries also offer more expensive items like crab and tiger prawns for those who can afford it, so Malaysians of all classes and ethnicities frequent mamak stalls or “the mamak.” Being halal makes it possible for Muslim Malays to enter without feeling uneasy about not observing Muslim law. The diverse styles and spectrum of dishes on offer accommodate both young and old, ranging from classic old-style roti and nasi kandar to North Indian breads and curries, Western burgers and steaks, old and new fusion, and Thai-Malay cuisine. Lastly, the mamak stalls’ convenient locations and opening hours—in almost every suburb and urban neighborhood on the west coast of Malaysia, open twenty-four hours or till late, almost every day of the month, 365 days a year—make them democratic and popular places. To be sure, most owners are business minded and aware of the increased competition in the past ten to fifteen years. Decisions to “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 69 install cable television screens, air-conditioning, trendy cafe furniture, and misting fans are based on a desire to attract an increasingly sophisticated middle-class clientele for their spending money rather than on any sense of the mamak stall providing a public sphere for discussion of the latest news and politics. Certain conditions may be necessary in order to transform mamak stalls into good third places to lepak or sembang (hang out): late night outdoor or open-air dining and the special case of AdilSembang,8 where friends and others are informally invited to meet and transform a nasi kandar restaurant into a mamak stall, without the owners’ knowledge or approval (more later). There is also World Cup season, when football fans unite and crowd at mamak stalls to watch the game; special national occasions like the live telecast of the first Malaysian astronaut’s space flight,9 and perhaps election campaigns or times of national stress when the mamak stall, similar to the kopitiam, becomes a meeting place where one can discuss and express one’s sentiments about the current situation. Such mamak stalls can be actual physical places or alternatively, like the kopitiam, web forums going by that name. For example, “mamak stall” is the name of a web forum that can be found in WebmasterMa- laysia.com and is used by a group calling themselves “Malaysians in Sweden.” It also connotes a marketplace for the exchange of ideas and information about goods, or a social gathering place. For instance, the Mamak Stall from Malaysia Number 1 Board professes to be a “Place where you are free to talk about anything” and the topics range from cars, films, and hobbies to jobs and romantic possibilities. Some Malay- sian bloggers use the term to signify their identity as Malaysian mamak stall-goers—for example, the Mamak Stall Blog with its tag, “mamak stall is a place where you can hangout and have a fun time chit chat ☺ enjoy your stay.” The name is adopted by homesick Malaysian students blogging from overseas; for example, Mamak Stall Stories’ tag is “Budak Kampung Sabah gone to Christchurch” (Village Boy from Sabah in Christchurch), or to identify oneself as a savvy but laid-back Malaysian investor, one who has renounced aggressive investment for passive investment: “The Mamak Stall Investor: Build wealth, ignore Wall Street and get on with my life . . . and enjoy my cup of Teh Tarik!”10 I want to discuss the identity and perceptions of the mamak stall and nasi kandar restaurant (there are differences between the two) through 70 CHAPTER 3 several entrances: first, the identity of the space and what this signifies both to the owners and the customers (identity from the sites of production and consumption); second, the space of mamak stalls as a possible public sphere and what conditions allow this to occur; and third, mamak food as a sign of adaptation and hybridity (much like Hainanese kopi and kaya) or, ultimately, its processes of becoming Malaysian.

HISTORY AND IDENTITY

The word mamak originates from the Tamil word maama (mAma) for maternal uncle. There are several theories: Wikipedia makes an all-too- plausible claim that since the culture of deference for one’s elders among Malaysians encourages children to greet their elders (even strangers and shopkeepers) as “uncle” or “auntie,” this was a polite and respectable form of greeting to Tamil Muslim men. Another theory came from an English-educated Tamil Muslim whom I interviewed, a retired civil servant in his fifties. To him, the term mamak originated from Malay children greeting their Tamil Muslim uncle who had married into the Malay family. These two theories suggestively diverge— the former carries the strict notion of Tamil Muslim identity, and the latter implies intermarriage with Malay women. Both these points are tantalizing for they hint at the diverging paths some Tamil Muslims have chosen to take in residing in and adapting to Malaysia. There is a constant tension between preservation of Tamil Muslim identity (through language and cultural maintenance and in-group marriages) and assimilation into Malay culture. The mamak eateries I visited were mostly more conservative in terms of keeping closer to their Tamil Muslim roots, and intermarriage with Malay women was a rare phenomenon. But intermarriages and assimilation to Malay society and culture do occur, incurring ambivalence in some Tamil Muslims who feel that “Tamil Muslims have already lost their identity. They no longer have a Tamil Muslim identity. They tend to speak Malay rather than Tamil, even with Tamil friends.”11 As a familial term used by both Hindu and Muslim Tamils, the word mamak transmuted into a specific ethnic category when bodies moved across the Indian Ocean to generally indicate Indian Muslim. Some Tamil Muslims regard this transmog- rified meaning as a gross insult to their language and culture. A former “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 71 president of the Penang United Muslim Association whom I interviewed insists they are Muslims, not this special noun mamak. Others take no offense unless it is flung rudely in public to address them, such as, “Oi Mamak!” Expressed in this tone of voice, it becomes a derogatory label. There is a strong historical record of the contributions of Indian Muslims in Malaysia, especially in the early settlement of George Town, Penang. It is believed that Islam came to the Malay Peninsula via In- dian Muslim traders in the fourteenth century.12 When Sir Francis Light opened up Penang to trade in 1786, Tamil Muslims from Kedah and Melaka moved to the island to engage in trade. They built a third of the mosques in Penang, which was the first port of call for Indians coming to British Malaya. Tamil Muslims were known by different names that appeared and disappeared, or acquired different meanings in the records over time: Chulias, Keling, Jawi Peranakans, and Penang Malays. Knowing the subtle differences among these terms is crucial as the idea of the Tamil Muslim as inauthentic Muslim—not quite Malay and not quite Hindu Indian—is the reason they become scapegoats. By 1794, a thousand Chulia shopkeepers were reported to be living in the settlement.13 Prior to the use of the term Jawi Peranakan, some Indian Muslims who had married Malay women self-identified or registered as Keling, a general term for south Indian Malaysians (even though the ancient kingdom of Kalinga from which the term derives is located in north India). Nowadays Kling too is considered pejorative (though again the context defines the meaning14); Kelinga is still used by Hokkiens to refer to Indians, generally understood as non-Muslim Indians.15 In the nineteenth century, the children of Tamil Muslims who married Malay women became known as Jawi Peranakan, Jawi Pekan (urban Malays), or, more significantly, Jawi Bukan (not Malay).16 The category of Jawi Peranakan, like Chulia, was also only briefly recorded in the 1870s census but disappeared from the census in 1911 as they presumably gradually assimilated into Malay culture.17 A somewhat pejorative term, Jawi Peranakan is “often applied to self-proclaimed ‘Malays’ suspected of having some Indian ancestry, and as such may be used interchangeably with the appellation DKK, for Darah Keturunan Kling, or ‘having Indian (Kling) blood.’”18 Similarly, when used as an insult, Mamak carries the connotation of discrediting a Malay person’s authenticity and implicitly connotes that his Indian heritage 72 CHAPTER 3 makes him wily and cunning, unlike the straightforward naïve Malay. (Mamak is often gendered as male, as commonly seen today in shops dominated by male workers.) This ethnic stereotype most likely emerged in the early 1900s, when the urban-based sophisticated mer- cantile Jawi Peranakan received the benefits reserved for Malays under colonial rule such as positions in the civil service. Unlike hinterland Malays, who worried about the Christian influence in schools, urban Jawi Peranakan readily accepted the value of secular education.19 To- day, Jawi Peranakan who practice Malay culture, speak the language, and follow the customs consider themselves Malay, and some have at- tained ministerial positions within the United Malays National Organ- isation (UMNO). This history of Indian Muslims in Penang is integral to the narrative about the origins of mamak food: It was in the port of Penang during the 1930s that Tamil Muslim vendors hawked rice and curries to coolies and workers. However, before I move into a full discussion of what mamak food is and what people mean when they say “mamak stall,” it needs to be said that the category of “Indian Muslim” in Malaysia has been transformed through various periods of history into a catchall category for a diversity of Muslims coming from India who are divided by place of origin, language, occupation, and “vestigial caste distinc- tions.”20 Tamil Muslims make up a majority of Indian Muslims in Ma- laysia, but Indian Muslims also include Malabari Muslims (Mappilai) from Kerala, Bengali Muslims, Gujarati and Bombay Muslims, and later after Partition those who self-identify as “Pakistanis.”21 Tamil Muslims constitute a small minority of the total Indian population (of all relig- ions) in Malaysia, although that total population is shrinking.22 Unlike the Indian majority Hindu Tamils whose forefathers came as inden- tured laborers to work in the rubber plantations, Tamil Muslims were a commercial class of independent urban-based migrants, who dominated sectors such as the import-export business, becoming sole distrib- utors of foreign products, jewelers, money changers, textile merchants, books, and stationery, and petty traders. The village or district of origin may yet explain the occupation of Tamil Muslims in Malaysia today as villagers from the same area tend to end up in the same trade. Emi- grants from Panaikkulam and Alagankulam in the Ramnad district monopolized the jewelry and money-exchange businesses.23 Similarly, women from Tenkasi and Kadayanallur dominated the spice-grinding “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 73 trade in the market (and are known as rempah mami). Nasi kandar sellers are mainly (but not solely) Tamil Muslims from Ramnad district. Within Ramnad, Kirudu Muhamed Kuppaikanni or Haji KK, the founder of the Pelita Nasi Kandar Restaurant chain, explains that many early nasi kandar sellers in fact came from Athiyuthu village.24 In a society that tends to group identities according to the clumsy outmoded category of race (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other) rather than the more complex and specific one of ethnicity, it is easy to homogenize and stereotype all Indians as Hindu, or all Indian Muslims as coming from the same place. In this chapter, by zooming in on a favorite food of all Malaysians, I aim to unpack the specificities and complexities of the identity of the producers of that food and to indirectly make a case for their historical and culinary contributions that enrich Malaysia’s diversity. When it comes to the origins of nasi kandar and teh tarik, several narratives exist. Penang Malay Association president Datuk Mohd. Yussof Latif insists that, contrary to popular belief, “nasi kandar and teh tarik did not originate from the waterfront area of Penang.”25 Instead, before the Second World War, the rice dish was cooked in Jalan Hatin (Hutton Lane), packed into large brass pots placed in two baskets balanced at the ends of a shoulder yoke over one’s shoulder to be carried and sold on various streets in George Town near the Hutton Lane area. He explains: “In the early days, nasi kandar was only available in the morning. The vendors would operate by the roadside or under shady trees—never from a shop.” One newspaper account claims that these itinerant vendors began doing business in shops after 1925,26 but a Penangite in her late fifties whom I interviewed remembered seeing the nasi kandar man in her childhood. Moreover, some nasi kandar restaurants were already established before 1925: Hameediyah Restaurant in 1907 and Craven Café and Restaurant in 1920. Syed Ibrahim, third generation and one of the present four managers of Hameediyah, reputably the oldest surviving nasi kandar restaurant in Penang, claims that his grandfather (who came to Penang at the turn of the twentieth century) opened the shop with his three brothers. They would cook at the shop and then each would kandar (carry on a pole over the shoulder) the food to sell: one at one end of Penang Road and the other to Pitt Street (now Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling), where the Kapitan Keling Mosque is located. Contra- 74 CHAPTER 3 dictory accounts make me doubt whether nasi kandar vendors were part of the large community of Tamil Muslim settlers who came in the late eighteenth century, as claimed by Penang Malay Association president Yussof who grew up at Jalan Hatin.27 From talking to the restaurant proprietors, most of whom were second or third generation, I estimate that their ancestors must have only arrived in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. In fact, historian Khoo Salma Nasution explains that the earlier wave of Tamil Muslims who migrated to Penang came from Tanjore rather than Ramnad.28 The inland Kadayanallur and Tenkasi Muslims from Tirunelveli district, unlike the Coromandel Coast Indians, came with their families around the turn of the twentieth century, with the men arriving first in Penang in the 1880s and 1890s during times of severe famine in India.29 While the Kadayanallurs also hawked food, made teh tarik, and settled in the Hutton Lane–Transfer Road area, by the 1920s their womenfolk had gained popularity as suppliers of freshly ground spices (giling rempah), which they would carry in baskets on their heads and sell from door to door. Kadayanallur curry pastes were popularized through nasi kandar vendors, usually Tamil males from Ramnad.30 What is notable about this narrative of trade and interdependent or collaborative networks among Tamil Muslims from different districts is a kind of collective “rojak making”: The Kadayanallur curry paste made it into the Ramnad recipes, which ended up in the guts of the mamak’s ethnically varied customers; the teh tarik was made, again, with tinned sweetened condensed milk, which signifies traces of British colonial hybridity and adaptation. Hybridity and cultural adaptation, however, do not compromise one’s sense of identity. These diasporic nasi kandar mamaks are, for the most part, proud of their Tamil Muslim heritage. Cultural retention is observed through marrying other Tamil Muslims (either of Indian or Malaysian nationality) and hiring predominantly Tamil Muslim relatives or Tamil-speaking workers from India. Most second- or third-generation Tamil Muslim Malaysians still have family networks in India, so they may visit India once or twice a year. Larger chain restaurants would have transnational business links in the form of hiring workers from Madras or opening a branch there. But generally, mamak stall/ restaurant operators deal with local businesses in order to source imported spices, meat, and other ingredients (not unlike the relationship “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 75 with Kadayanallur spice traders from the 1920s). Indian permit workers on one-year contracts or Tamil Muslim permanent residents, by comparison, tend to have stronger ties with India than younger Tamil Mus- lims who identify first as Malaysians. Second-generation Tamil Muslims attended and send their children to national schools in Malaysia where the medium of instruction is Malay. Therefore, mamak food vendors are fluent not only in Tamil but also Malay (and English and sometimes Hokkien as well). Discourses about Indian Muslim identity in the second half of the twentieth century hearken back to discourses about the position of Jawi Peranakans in relation to Malay Muslims at an earlier period. While Malay nationalists on the mainland saw the Jawi Peranakans as usurping positions reserved for them under the colonial administration, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the category of bumiputera (reserved for indigenous and Malay Malaysians) in 1970 forced some Indian Muslims to choose between “joining the upwardly mobile fold of the entrepreneurial Bumiputeras to become part of the prefe- rential quota system or to retain Indian identity in a rather underprivileged minority position.”31 The formation of an alternative political party, the Congress of Malaysian Indian Muslims (KIMMA), in 1979 to represent Indian Muslims who felt neglected by the Malaysian Indian Congress (whom they saw as protecting Hindu interests) and who did not identify as Malay so would not join UMNO signaled the contradictions of political identity for Tamil Muslims in the rigidly constructed racialized landscape of being either Malay/Muslim or Indian/Hindu. While KIMMA is reported to have almost 80,000 members,32 they do not speak on behalf of all Indian Muslims, many of whom perceive their 2005 decision to seek bumiputera status as opportunistic and assimila- tionist. In short, it is evident that the border between Indian Muslim and Malay Muslim identities is porous and one may shift back and forth between the two when the need arises, such as when doing business in India or relying on a global Indian network.33 Stark claims that Islam has been unable to bridge class/caste and cultural differences between Malays and Indian Muslims, and among Indian Muslims themselves. Instead, religion has “accentuated the diverging ethnic and religious loyalties in the multicultural setting of Ma- laysia.”34 Likewise, Nagata states that the universal character of Islam “does not invariably succeed in eradicating other social cleavages” for 76 CHAPTER 3

Indian Muslims.35 And this discrimination is indeed an issue when we turn to an analysis of the identity of the space of the mamak eatery or nasi kandar.

THE IDENTITY OF THE SPACE/RESTORAN AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

Penang mamak or nasi kandar has become a ubiquitous part of the west coast urban landscape of Peninsular Malaysia since the 1990s. It is especially popular in Kuala Lumpur (fondly referred to as “KL”) and the greater regions around it known as Klang Valley, which includes middle-class neighborhoods and suburbs like SS2, Petaling Jaya (PJ), Bangsar, Cheras, Ampang, Subang, and Klang. The name “Penang” features as a brand, a mark of authenticity, for nasi kandar restaurants in KL and elsewhere. Nevertheless, most customers agree that these labels mean little and that the best (read: most authentic) nasi kandar still can only be found in Penang. Consequently, my fieldwork centered on both Penang and KL. There are at least three ways to understand the term “mamak stall”: a roadside stand or structure that is temporary or attains semiperma- nent status (such as Line Clear, described later); an individual stall located within a coffee shop or taking up a whole small restaurant/ shophouse; and the shiny modern nasi kandar chain restaurant. Each of these spaces carries different meanings for the proprietors and their customers: modern/traditional, Tamil, Indian, Muslim, and Malaysian being just a few that are attached to nasi kandar. As for the term “mamak stalls,” some customers do not even consider Tamil Muslim ethnicity to be an operating feature: to them it is more an alfresco, casual, cheap, dining and meeting place usually at night. Semiotically, most mamak eateries convey their Muslim identity in several ways: using yellow and green on their signboards or walls (or even furniture), the yellow crescent and star, or putting up framed pictures of Quranic verses and of the Kaabah on the walls. More interestingly, in addition to the Islamic colors, logo, and Muslim name pre- ceding “(Penang) Nasi Kandar Restaurant,” some mamak signboards may also contain “786,” which is a Sufi numerological reference to the total numeric value of the letters of the Bismillah, according to the “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 77

Figure 3.1. “786” over a yellow crescent and star against a blue background and “Penang” are important markers of Tamil Muslim identity and food. Photo- graphed by Gaik Cheng Khoo.

Abjad order.36 The practice of substituting “786” for Bismillah is popular in India and Pakistan and is used in Malaysia by Indian Muslim businesses for prosperity more than anything else (just like the waving cat doll at the entrance and cash counters of Chinese restaurants). But such signs of “Muslimness” may not be enough for religious Malays who police the ethnoreligious lines between Malay Muslim and Indian Hin- du identities. In June 2007, officials from the Department of Islamic Development Jakim (Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia) asked the In- dian Muslim eatery Restoran Aiswaria in Bangsar, KL, for the restaurant’s halal certification. When they realized that Aiswaria did not have one, they removed Quranic verses and a framed picture of the Kaabah from the restaurant’s walls, claiming that they were “misleading.” The implication is not just that if the restaurant was not certified halal that Islamic paraphernalia could not be placed on its walls, but that Indians 78 CHAPTER 3 were not Muslims and were tricking Malay Muslim customers into eating at their restaurant through their signage. Jakim officials seem to assume that Malays have a monopoly over Islam, as can be interpreted from the opening sentence of this Malay- siakini article: “‘I’m Muslim too, I’m Muslim too,’ says Mohammad Jehapar Ali Hussaien Kader.”37 Jehapar, the owner of Aiswaria, explains that, being a Muslim, he purchased food items from a halal vendor and therefore did not think a halal certificate was necessary.38 It should be noted that during the same raid Seetharam, an Indian restaurant further down the road, also had its Hindu deities removed by Jakim, suggesting intolerance for both ethnic and religious diversity by Jakim Is- lamic officials. Democratic Action Party (DAP) opposition leader Lim Kit Siang called the Jakim officials “Little Napoleons.”39 But not only are Indian Muslims not recognized as “real” Muslims because they are not Malay, the Sufi numerology of “786” makes them doubly Othered, for the Malaysian government recognizes Sunni Islam according to the School of Sha’fie and categorizes all other forms of Islam as deviant.40 According to one of many websites where the following report appears, the Malaysian Muslim Consumers Association and the Perak Religious Department held a seminar specially to expose haram (forbidden by Islam) products that were in circulation and to ask Malays/Muslims to stop using them. Among the products were four brands of Indian curry powder, with 40 percent of the profits from the sale of these supposedly directed toward renovating Hindu temples and supporting the killing of Gujarati Muslims in India.41 In addition, the blog pointed out the number 786, which the author acknowledged is

the code for Bismillah whose practices only they (Indian Muslims) know of. Unfortunately, this code is organized by ethnic Hindus when they post their signboards with this number in order to trick Muslims (mengaburi umat Islam). It’s not surprising then that lately, the calendars of Indian Muslims which use the picture of the Kaabah and Quranic verses are printed or sponsored by Palanniappa, Sakhty and Babas. It is also necessary to remind Muslims to be sensitive about several new nasi kandar restaurants which are active in any towns, particularly in Taiping and Ipoh. Make sure the business is run by Muslims and the chicken, halal. In Taiping there are restaurants selling nasi kandar, roti nan and toseh by H**** workers and their chicken is supplied by C***. “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 79

Clearly, this Malay blogger deeply distrusts the Indianness of the nasi kandar restaurant/space and food. The Tamil Muslim’s ambiguous hybrid position straddling ethnicity and religion proves problematic, and this anxiety is reflected in the wide circulation and reproduction of this report in various web forums and blogs, including HarakahDaily, the newspaper of PAS, the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party. Such racial anxiety on the part of Malays also suggests that the Indian Muslim shift to inhabit one identity and the next may not be as fluid or strategic as Nagata suggests. Although Tamil Muslims do not regard their ethnic- religious identity as discordant, it nevertheless troubles others who need to maintain strict boundaries between Muslim and non-Muslim (such as the Hindu workers and the Chinese chicken suppliers mentioned above), halal and haram, and along with it accompanying ethnic rights such as ketuanan Melayu/Malay dominance. The prohibition against 786 in the above report does not show knowledge of its Sufi roots—merely a suspicion that its Indian association might connote “Hinduness,” hence the mention of Tamil-sounding names like Palanni- appa, Sakhty, and Babas. Nevertheless, the Sufi roots of Indian Mus- lims, once a source of communal pride and difference—as can be seen in the construction of the Al-Qadriyah Sufi shrine dedicated to Syed Shahul Hamid of Nagore (built in the early 1880s) and several other shrines for the veneration of other Muslim saints in Penang—are now downplayed in the interests of homogenization to a standardized Malay Islam and preserving Islamic unity.42 In this context, “786” becomes a remnant signifier of a superstition whose origins are now a mystery, reduced to a mere decoration as part of the capitalist competition to be modern in presentation styles,43 and described in typical Malaysian multicultural fashion as a “feng shui” belief. There is no doubt upon entering a nasi kandar restaurant as to its Tamil Indian identity. The first thing that draws customers is the fragrant smells of south Indian spices and curry—rich, heavy, and aromatic—that waft out to greet them and then seem to hang in the air of the whole indoor restaurant space. Simultaneously, one immediately encounters a group of Indian male servers behind a glass enclosure where a diverse array of curry dishes, pots of curry, and a griddle for frying rotis are located. You can order directly from them and then find a place to sit. Tamilness marks the space through the presence of the Tamil workers and some Tamil customers but most significantly 80 CHAPTER 3 through the sound of the Tamil language: spoken among themselves or with Indian customers; or through the Tamil radio I heard playing at several places like Mohd Raffe in Pulau Tikus (a mainly Chinese neighborhood) and Line Clear on Penang Road (which is more mixed). Rare- ly do these mamak stalls play Malay pop music, although they might if they have television screens; at Yaseen Nasi Kandar in KL, some Malay music videos were playing in the afternoon when I visited, followed later by an American sitcom or soap opera. Some signboards include Tamil script but not the menus, which are usually in Malay and sometimes also English. Signs of Malayness are less immediately apparent, but they are aud- ible in the transactions taking place between the servers and the customers of any ethnic background (albeit inflected with different accents) and in the names of the food and drinks items on the menu such as teh tarik or teh halia, Malay for ginger tea. Even Indian permit workers pick up Malay very quickly in order to be able to take orders and serve customers. In Hokkien-majority Penang, mamak operators like second-generation Ali Iqbal at the Merlin Hotel Nasi Kandar are fluent in Hokkien. Others who are Malaysian nationals would have a basic vocabulary that includes the Hokkien names of drinks like teh O or sooi kam peng (hot black tea or cold kalamansi lime juice). Tamil Muslim proprietors may not immediately define their food and themselves as Malaysian within Malaysia to me, a fellow Malaysian who is of ethnic Chinese background; in fact, they are more likely to identify as “Indian Muslim,” “southern Indian,” or “Tamil Muslim”—all categories of difference permissible within the spectrum of official Ma- laysian pluralism—as a way to distinguish themselves and their cuisine from Chinese and Malay identities (I will return to food later). Howev- er, it is the customers who regard “the mamak” (meaning the location) or mamak food as the ultimate sign of Malaysian multiculturalism. For Malaysian Chinese customers in particular, “mamak-ing” involves simultaneously negotiating numerous cultural and linguistic registers and sensual experiences such as smelling, eating, and tasting spicy Indian food in an Indian eatery; hearing various languages being spoken; ordering in Malay, possibly speaking in Chinese or English (or Malay) with one’s friends; or maybe eating with one’s fingers instead of using a fork and spoon. Yet these are everyday intercultural negotiations that are habitual, normalized, and habituated as part of an urban cosmopoli- “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 81 tan and multicultural Malaysian identity. Put another way, these influences on the senses—Tamil radio or music, the aroma of Indian spices and fried roti canai, shouted orders in a mix of Malay and English, “Boss, kira!”44 —are integral to the formation of a national pluralist sound- and sense-scape of everyday life in Malaysia. It is the memory of this total sensual experience and a national consciousness about embracing the diversity of other Malaysian cultures that Chinese Malay- sians, for example, take with them overseas when they decide to cook mamak food (as in Mamak, an eatery in Sydney’s Chinatown) or call their restaurants “Mamak Corner” (in Canberra and Adelaide, Austra- lia). Such experiences speak to the space of the traditional small family business, operating out of one stall or shop (no additional branches), which survives on the integrity and reputation of its food—what one customer I interviewed called the “C and G” factor: cheap and good. The food and the casual unassuming atmosphere are what customers mean by “traditional” or “original.” An example would be Line Clear (est. 1947), which has been located in an alleyway off Penang Road and open twenty-four hours a day since the beginning; in 2008, the price of roti canai was raised by a mere ten cents (to seventy sen) when other places were charging ninety sen.45 They pay rent to the owner of the building for the right to use the fixtures (electrical wiring and sockets on that wall for the fan and lights), and pay electricity and water bills separately to the city council. Here the nonuniformed servers range in age from their forties to sixties and look more like relatives than hired young and new permit workers from India. Taste is foremost for a place like this: “The taste of their curries is so unlike the mass produced new outlets. Line Clear curries have that balance of spices in their curries and do not leave your tastebuds with too much flavour of only certain spices. It tastes justttttt riggghtttt.”46 “Tradition” adds high value to the reputation of nasi kandar restaurants like Hameediyah (est. 1907). A Malay customer I interviewed there comes by for lunch twice a week and has been a loyal customer since he began working in the vicinity fourteen years ago. It is his favorite nasi kandar place because of its original recipes and the fact that it is the oldest establishment around. Similarly, some customers rely on the cachet of the “Penang” brand in their preference for the small-scale family-run nasi kandar restaurants like Kudu, notable in my 82 CHAPTER 3 research for being the rare female-headed nasi kandar business in an industry historically dominated by men. The late 1990s saw the emergence of the modern twenty-four-hour nasi kandar chain restaurants such as Pelita (twenty-seven outlets), Subaidah (fifteen), Kayu (nine), and Kassim Mustafa (nine).47 The mushrooming of these chain stores may have peaked with market satu- ration although there were plans, for example by Kayu, to establish two branches in each state.48 The modern chain restaurants emphasize on their websites hygiene, customer comfort, high quality, innovative management techniques, and efficiency. Subaidah boasted on their website in 2008 that they are probably the “first Nasi Kandar outlet to provide good work study methods, innovative management techniques and mo- tivational approaches in the training of its staff wherein quick response, good mannerisms and service with a smile have been the service standards in Subaidah outlets.”49 These factors are meant to change the old image of mamak stalls: the mamak in his old off-white T-shirt and sarung, unhygienic practices such as servers using their bare hands to pick up food, the broken furniture and old kitchenware and utensils, and greasy dirty floors. To- day, the uniformed waiters wear plastic gloves or use kitchen tongs to serve, and the old furniture has been replaced by a very contemporary setting of stainless steel chairs and tables, brighter lighting, cable television screens, and air-conditioning inside or misting fans outside. Even smaller family restaurants like Hameediyah and Yaseen have followed suit with uniforms for their servers. Competition not only among nasi kandar restaurants but also with Western franchised fast-food restaurants and cafes lead some places to set up wi-fi access (such as Maju Curry House in Bangsar). Many of these chain restaurants refer to modern business ethics and efficiency in the process of professionaliz- ing the industry. Sirajuddin Mohammed Mydin, the managing director of one of the biggest and most popular chain restaurants, Kayu Nasi Kandar Sdn Bhd, talks about studying the market over thirty years and understanding how to reform or repackage the image of nasi kandar into a professional business. Similarly, another nasi kandar chain spokesperson50 explained that his company is creating an environment that is on par with Western fast-food restaurants: ensuring customer comfort, installing television screens to broadcast football games and breaking news, providing choices (rice, noodles, dosai) and a variety of “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 83 curries not available at other smaller nasi kandar restaurants, and ensuring consistent food quality and cleanliness. The rationalization of the industry and emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene has paid off. These nasi kandar chains are multimillion-dollar businesses today. Interestingly and problematically, though, a discourse of hygiene (poor hygiene, good hygiene) seems to surround the mamak eatery but less so the Malaysian kopitiam (unless the discussion is of kopitiams in Singapore or East Malaysia). The reasons given by customers include the idea that twenty-four-hour service makes cleaning difficult, or blame is attributed to foreign workers’ lack of hygiene in food handling, the implication being that imported laborers from the developing world (mostly India51) are unused to higher standards of hygiene and food safety. Yet Malaysian kopitiams today also hire foreign workers (from Burma, Nepal, and Indonesia, for example). While not explicit, I wonder if there is remnant racism (toward Indians) in the comparison between attitudes about hygiene in mamak eateries and Chinese kopitiams. Such a stereotype plays on the consciousness of the second- or third-generation Tamil Muslim food operators, who all seek to counter the negative image, perhaps out of a sense of internalized racism and the deep-seated desire to be regarded as modern. Crucially, the modern corporatist aspirations and the fast-food-ization of mamak cuisine are a microrealization of the 1990s state developmentalist discourse of economic liberalization and Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020, which seeks to achieve “fully-developed nation” status for Malaysia by the year 2020.52 More amazing is that Pelita’s success as a professional, modern, and now transnational corporate entity is achieved through private pooled capital, ingenuity, and resourceful entrepreneurship53 rather than a reliance on state patronage. This gives the lie to the derogatory accusations of mamak opportunism.54 From the nasi kandar franchise, we move next to a humbler form of mamak stall, the freestanding stall located outdoors (by the roadside) operated by Indian Muslims, which offers mamak staples like teh tarik, maggie mee goreng or mee goreng, traditional roti canai, and roti te- lur.55 Some mamak stalls even sell kopitiam fare such as roti bakar (grilled bread) and half-boiled eggs.56 My informant, a thirty-eight- year-old Hindu Tamil Sri Lankan professional woman from Penang, whom I met in KL, explained that she did not like the new mamak restaurants, which she found less personal and the food not as good. 84 CHAPTER 3

She felt that “all the nasi kandar tastes exactly the same.” Nesa recommended a mamak stall behind the TMC building in Bangsar, KL, an aluminum shed that serves the very basic core of nasi kandar for lunch and dinner: stir-fried bean sprouts, fried fish, fish curry, lady’s fingers (okra), and three types of gravy (kuah). As a Penangite with discriminating taste, she felt that people in KL pay a lot for not very good food. These spaces are all interracial: The TMC shed attracts office workers, families from the nearby mosque after prayers, and so on. There was a personal touch in that the proprietor knows his regulars and speaks Tamil to Nesa whenever he sees her. Nesa then took me to a Tamil Muslim–run eatery that sold only Malay nasi lemak: Seapark Nasi Lemak (est. c. 2001) located in the Paramount area of Petaling Jaya, open from 7 p.m. until 4 a.m. Foldable tables and cheap stackable plastic chairs are set up on the road and five- foot alleyway outside a closed corner Chinese kopitiam (open only during the day). There were no visible signboards to announce the name of the eatery although the business pays rent to the shop and pays for electricity and water. The operation seemed to function and thrive solely through word of mouth. What struck me about the identity of this place was its bustling character: There seemed to be a never-ending flow of customers—Chinese, Malay, and Indian, mostly in their twenties and thirties—who were out for supper. Some were college students studying at nearby private colleges, or young men who needed a break from the nearby cybercafes where they were playing video games. Some, like Nesa, were office workers who came after their evening shift. As for the five Tamil Muslim workers, they did not own the business but worked collectively in an egalitarian fashion without a supervis- or: Each had his task (deep-frying chicken, making drinks, serving, washing dishes, cooking rice) though everyone was trained in all duties in order to be able to substitute for each other if absent. Forty-six-year- old Rahim told us that he had come to Malaysia at the age of six.57 His Malaysian father had worked in Bismillah restaurant in Butterworth. Rahim had always been involved in the food industry and chose to sell nasi lemak because he thought it was more popular in KL than nasi kandar, which is popular in the northern states. When I asked whether the night schedule was difficult for the men or their families, Rahim replied that for him, for Tamil Muslims who were used to hard work, it was not considered hard work. Nesa translated that he implied to her “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 85

(in Tamil) that this was difficult work that Malays would not do. She felt they were obviously proud to be Tamil (they spoke to her in Tamil and spoke Malay with me). I too felt that they were probably proud in particular of their industriousness and independence. I visited this place twice, the second time to eat their famous delicious nasi lemak. Both times, we lingered over our drinks and food, chatting about films and other things for more than an hour. We were not obligated to order food (when only drinking), and although busy, no one asked us to vacate our table. Such a condition is conducive to a public sphere: offering cheap and good food, you can sit for as long as you want “without being given dirty looks” (interview with Yen Yen58), it stays open when other eating places are closed, and its open-air character allows one to freely speak one’s mind.

THE SPACE OF MAMAK STALLS AS A POSSIBLE SITE FOR PUBLIC SPHERE

This “open air” factor is crucial in contributing to mamak eateries as public spheres. Non-Muslim customers might not feel comfortable talking about politics or criticizing government policies inside a mamak restaurant compared to a Chinese kopitiam, even though mamaks are not Malays. When I asked the female proprietor at Kudu whether they had customers who came to hang out and talk about politics in the afternoons as you would have in the kopitiam, she said that this was common during her father’s time, when the coffee shop (and drinks) was still run by a Chinese proprietor and Kudu only sold food. Not only is the coffee shop signified as Chinese through its Chinese characters on the pillars outside, but its choice location in the corner makes the place more open—only two walls surround it. Today, Kudu’s daughters have taken over the management of the premises and are in charge of preparing drinks in addition to the food. Perhaps this change is reflected not only by change in the ethnic proprietorship of the shop but also by the climate of racialization that has grown since the 1970s, which makes the Chinese, for example, feel less comfortable discussing politics openly at the mamak restaurant. Moreover, the nasi kandar business is largely volume-driven since the profit margins are not high. So, although some outlets are more popular and crowded than others, 86 CHAPTER 3 and the quieter ones allow customers to sit for longer, nevertheless they are not meant to attract the poor college student crowd (who might sit longer and spend less) as much as to cater to middle-class families. Most nasi kandar restaurants are “eat and go” joints and some have expressly not installed television screens because they want to encourage customer turnover. Those that have large-screen televisions attract football fans (mostly men) and become homosocial opportunities for married men to hang out with their male friends over a game. Obviously the mamak eatery has the potential to become a good “third place” for such men (for whom the first place—home—is where they leave their wives and children on football nights). But the restaurant atmosphere is less conducive to fostering an ideal public sphere, compared to the alfresco mamak stall. Here, according to Andrew Sia in his Star news column “Teh Tarik,” “Unlike pretentious and expensive watering holes crammed full of yuppies and other assorted wannabes, the Teh Tarik Stall is a place where we can be our True-Slippers-and-T- shirt-Malaysian-selves.” This is because “it’s the great meeting pot, if not yet the melting pot, of Bangsa Malaysia; a halal yet neutral ground for peaceful inter-racial—to use that distasteful official term—‘tolerance.’ Run mostly by the affable mamaks or Indian Muslims, every ethnic group feels at home here without any nagging sense of having ‘invaded’ the territory of other races.”59 Further, he writes that

For a mere 90 sen, we can indulge in mental masturbation and ver- bal diarrhoea till the wee hours here—thanks to the open air, the noise and the dirt. Yes, it is these fertile elements of the stall that allow our humbler egalitarian instincts to germinate. After all, it is perhaps the only place in Malaysia where everybody calls everybody else “Boss.”

Crucially, this neutral open-air meeting ground for all races/classes then hinges on the specific ethnic-religious identity of the mamak who be- longs to an ethnic minority but embraces the religion of the majority. Some other Malaysians, particularly those in their twenties to early thirties based in the Klang Valley region, might not even consider the mamak stall to be Tamil Muslim in character. Yen Yen, a Chinese Malaysian woman in her early thirties, claims that the SS2 Mamak opposite the police station is “more muhibbah than the [nearby predominantly Chinese and non-halal food court] Wai Sek Kai” because “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 87

Figure 3.2. Mamak alfresco opposite SS2 police station, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia. Photographed by Gaik Cheng Khoo everyone—Chinese, Malay, Indians—frequents the place. Moreover, the food court includes Chinese stalls that either sell halal Chinese food or do not sell pork, Malay stalls, and four Tamil Muslim stalls that monopolize drink preparation and a few mamak food staples. For Yen Yen, “going mamak” is a nonracially specific description of eating out at a roadside or outdoor food center that must “open late, be cheap or cheapest, and they don’t give you dirty looks or chase you out if you just order drinks, and you can sit for three hours.” In that sense, even SS Murni, a popular halal eatery owned by Kelantanese Chinese Perana- kans in SS2, Petaling Jaya, also constitutes a mamak of sorts for its late night business and spill of crowded tables onto neighboring shop lots. Chinese Malaysian early thirty-something Daryll Mak, who is a self- confessed “mamak kaki” (mamak addict) for the past fifteen years in Petaling Jaya (PJ), insists that the criteria of a mamak stall are “98 percent outdoor, alfresco, night, cheap plastic tables and chairs, cheap rather than good quality food that is just enough to fill one’s stomach, 88 CHAPTER 3 questionable hygiene standards, a place to chill out with friends.” Cheap, he says, means that “you spend five ringgit and under for the whole night.”60 However, I want to return to the ethnic-specific mamak stall. I believe its open-air features (where no walls exist to create a sense of containment and confinement of bodies and spoken thoughts) and its temporary nature seen in the folding tables and stackable plastic chairs create moments that are as transitory and transient as the space itself. Its nighttime atmosphere and anonymity where utterances can disappear in the crowded din of darkness and dirt, and the near invisibility come morning of Seapark Nasi Lemak when the men have packed up and left without even a signboard to call attention to themselves, tell us something about the perimeters of democratic expression in the country. For example, AdilSembang was an informal monthly gathering held at Maju Curry House in PJ, initiated by Nathaniel Tan, blogger and Parti Keadilan Rakyat member (September 2007—January 2008): “Adil Society is a neutral meeting ground for all those interested in making Malaysia a better place, and a relaxed opportunity for the general public that might be vaguely interested in KeADILan to get to know the party and its members a little more.” Tan added: “Mamak chats are a humble but important starting point from which we hope to build relationships, expand (just :) networks, and organically grow into more ambitious undertakings.”61 Tan explained that he had chosen Maju Curry House because it was in his constituency, it had lots of parking space, and it was an “open” space, namely halal so everyone could eat. Although ambience was not one of his reasons, Maju Curry House’s layout was spatially quite open; it consisted of three sections: tables in front of the restaurant (no fans), tables within the walled interior (with electric fans and two television screens), and at the back, where it was darker, more private, and where the tables overlooked a swimming pool from the next-door club. I was curious as to which section the group would occupy. But when Tan and partner arrived shortly after I got there, they sat in the main or central section where there were nearby long tables in case we needed to expand our group. It was around 8.30 p.m. when I reached the premises but Maju Curry House was not crowded. In addition, the crowd was mostly men in their forties who had no idea that a “public” political discussion was underway in the establishment. There “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 89 was a smaller group of two or three men (Malay, Indian) who seemed to be having a business meeting in English, sitting closer to the parking lot, and a few other tables where people were having dinner. The Adil- Sembang session I attended62 was not very lively as Tan had not been actively promoting and publicizing the meeting. A few months earlier, Nat Tan had been remanded for four days under Section 8 of the Official Secrets Act by the Special Branch police for a comment published on his blog about a deputy internal security minister accepting bribes for the release of underworld figures. When I asked if AdilSem- bang was under surveillance from the Special Branch, he dismissed this by saying that they were “small fry.” The crowd at AdilSembang usually consisted mostly of Tan’s own circle of friends (aged in their twenties to early thirties) who were encouraged to bring their friends to a political discussion. They had managed to attract two regulars who were drop- ins who had read about the meeting on his blog. Attendance can range between four and seventeen people.63 Indeed, I found it interesting that the owners of the establishment were not informed about AdilSembang, perhaps because of its infor- mality. Moreover, it was after all a peaceful discussion about current politics; such discussions should be carried out in public more often to challenge the idea that public spaces in urban Malaysia are now largely regarded as spaces for consumption, shopping and eating being the most common form of consumption. In fact, to lepak or sembang (hang out) is regarded as a somewhat dubious occupation associated with unemployment and delinquency. AdilSembang thus challenges the banal consumption of that space and in that space.64 Moreover, in the Malaysian context, before 2013 any public gathering of more than three people required a police permit or constituted an illegal assembly.65 Yet within the confines of the mamak eatery, a privately owned space constructed for the seemingly harmless everyday public consumption of food and nonalcoholic drinks, the group’s presence and political activity—in raising consciousness and empowering citizens—is permissible (halal!). It may be worth asking whether there is an unconscious “social contract” between Tamil Muslim proprietors and their interracial customers that the mamak stall can be an inadvertent public sphere or an outlet for expressing discontent as well as muhibbah (friendship and affection). Note the intent of this blog entry from Steven Sim, a twenty- 90 CHAPTER 3 six-year-old Christian activist blogger turned elected DAP member. Sim blogged about attending a candlelight vigil in Penang in solidarity with peaceful demonstrators arrested at the Bersih, Hindraf, and human rights rallies in KL on December 15, 2007.66 They were only allowed to stand for twenty minutes. In his appeal to the prime minister, Abdullah Badawi (Pak Lah), he laments the violation of the right to peaceful assembly, saying that Malaysia is losing both peace and rights and freedom, for “[t]here will be no peace without the space to disagree with one another, even with the government.” Further, after the disper- sal:

a group of us gathered at a local Mamak (you may call it the Teh Tarik Revolution in good Penang-Malaysia spirit). There were people of all races, young and old. I made friends with and spoke to a Malay Muslim and a Hindu. We talked openly about our political aspiration for the Country. There may be points which we disagree with one another, but there was space to do that. We do not need to shut each other up just because there were different opinions. Peace, Pak Lah, does not come from mindless accusations on folks that disagree with you or from locking up your opponents. Peace may better come, you were a Penangite you should understand, in form of solid friendship—yeap [sic] even with those who are fundamentally different from you—over a cup of teh tarik at the mamak stall.67

Therefore, the mamak stall provides that crucial space that fosters transethnic solidarity or cosmopolitanism, meaning a simultaneous recognition of and an appreciation and respect rather than intolerance for difference. Sim’s blog entry presents the sentiments of Malaysians who were to turn against Abdullah Badawi and the racial politics of the ruling coalition (Barisan Nasional) two months later at the general elections. It also suggests an alternative form of working toward peace, one that includes sharing of food (commensality), mutual affection (muhibbah), and the exchange of varying ideas and opinions (rational dialogue). Such a gesture is underpinned by the assumption that open dialogue would not necessarily lead to emotional responses and vio- lence, as has been repeated in state narratives explaining why public expressions of dissent need to be repressed. “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 91

FOOD AS A SIGN OF ADAPTATION AND HYBRIDITY

Finally, after discussing Tamil Muslim identity and space, we come down to the specifics of food. Original nasi kandar, according to con- noisseurs, consists only of rice, a combination of fish curry and beef curry poured on the rice, and served with steamed lady’s fingers and boiled egg. It is the mixture of spices in both these varied-tasting curries that contribute to the dish’s unique flavor. Other curries might include beef liver. Fried chicken is a later addition, as are other types of curries: sotong (squid), prawn, crab, burung puyuh (a type of bird), and so on. Purists also insist that the cooked rempah (or masala) needs to be kept in the pot for a few days before serving (by adding fish). This improves the taste and is probably the root cause behind stories that the mamak does not wash his pot or throw out leftover curry but keeps cooking in the same pot and allowing the remnants to add extra flavor to the fresh ingredients. These curry recipes are considered south Indian but, as many people I interviewed observed, there is no nasi kandar in India since the concept of hawking cooked curries and rice emerged from colonial Penang. The proprietors I interviewed would claim that their dishes were of south Indian origin. When queried further, they then started to acknowledge the processes of change and adaptation. The difference was accentuated when I posed the question of com- paring the curries found in India and the south Indian dishes in Malay- sia. At Kudu, a second-generation woman proprietor who visits her in- laws in Ramnad once a year felt that the chilies in India are much hotter. Others have claimed that the Malaysian palate is unused to the spiciness of food in Chennai because Malaysian curries are generally milder. Thus, in order to cater to Indian nationals, the Chennai branch of Pelita, for example, spices up their cooking, making the curries stronger tasting. In addition, the presentation is a novelty in India: The open display of a variety of curries buffet-style ensures that the customers see and know what they are getting (they order upfront) as opposed to ordering from the menu. Also, Indian restaurants do not serve mixed curries on rice so nasi kandar is unique in that respect. The Pelita in Chennai asserts its Malaysian difference by selling dishes not usually available in its Malaysian branches: Malay dishes like satay (barbequed 92 CHAPTER 3 meat served with peanut sauce) and desserts like ais kacang (shaved ice with syrup, red beans, jelly, evaporated milk, and ice cream). The influences of other Malaysian ethnic cuisine is apparent in mamak food, as business-minded and customer-friendly proprietors try to cater to the taste of their customers, the majority of whom are likely to be Chinese.68 Chinese influences are evident in the choice of ingredients: Today, instead of hard-boiled eggs, there are salted eggs. Ma- mak eateries also serve vegetable stir fry such as bean sprouts or cabbage (though laced with turmeric), and black soya sauce is used in some dishes. Some restaurants cater to the Chinese palate and children unused to the hot spiciness of south Indian cooking by introducing milder dishes such as honey chicken and kurma. On the other hand, Malay influences on nasi kandar seem more superficial: the dishes might have Malay names, but the cooking styles remain quite separate. Malay recipes use coconut milk whereas Tamil Muslim recipes do not. Other typical mamak food such as roti canai, murtabak, and mee goreng are also uniquely Malaysian. When asked why the Indian parotha is called roti canai in Malaysia (it is called roti prata in Singapore), many people (including Tamil Muslims) I interviewed were mystified. Wikipedia explains that it is merely a reference to “bread from Madras or Chennai”—roti Chennai. Yet today, the word canai has passed into the Malay dictionary to mean to sharpen, flatten, smooth, or thin out pastry. As for murtabak, a kind of omelet with minced lamb or beef and onions served with pickled red onions and/or curry, the proprietor of Hameediyah explained that it does not exist in India. The closest recipe in India would be the egg onion parotha since beef is not widely consumed in predominantly Hindu India. Lastly, mee goreng (fried yellow noodles) perhaps is the quintessentially Malaysian hybrid mamak dish: its main ingredient is Chinese. Other ingredients may include bean sprouts, fried Indian fritters, fried tofu, and preserved squid in a tomato and sweet potato–based gravy. These local names and combinations of local ingredients from other ethnic cuisines reflect the hybridizing processes of producing and becoming the Malaysian mamak. The Malaysian mamak business is notable for its resilience and is ever adaptable to survive in the competitive food industry. Thus, it attempts to appeal to as many tastes as possible through “self-food- courtization” (a term I have coined to mean offering a diverse array of ethnic cuisines). In its capacity as a neighborhood mamak, it would “MAMAK, ANYONE?” 93 cater to the particular tastes of the community: In predominantly Chi- nese Puchong, the mamak also sells yong tau foo.69 In cosmopolitan Bangsar, one mamak restaurant in Lucky Garden offers a range of food that targets everyone: young and old, classic or hip fusion, Westernized or Asian, Malay, Chinese, and Indian palates. Beginning with the traditional south Indian curries, the menu stretches to include north Indian food, tomyam noodles, roti John (both catering to Malay customers), burgers and steaks, fish and chips—all “mamakfied” in style. Often the drinks menu also demonstrates the need to compete with popular designer coffee houses by offering tehccino, juices, and lassi. Menus are typically creative and hybrid: Mohd Raffe had nineteen types of tosai (pancake made from rice batter and black lentils) and forty-one kinds of roti (roti salad, roti Hong Kong, roti John, roti Mexico, roti Chicago, roti John cheese, etc.). But its base Tamil Muslim identity remains strong as most customers still prefer the mamak staples, some of which are closely guarded family recipes passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, nasi kandar purists eschew the chain restaurants in favor of small-scale family operations.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter I have focused on how Tamil Muslims produce and are produced as “the mamak” or produce mamak food in the form of nasi kandar, roti canai, mee goreng, and teh tarik. At the same time, for its customers, the pleasure of eating “mamak food” or hanging out at the local mamak produces and reproduces subjects constituted as distinctly Malaysian, reinforcing the idea that the urban Malaysian palate favors cosmopolitan diversity and democratic sociality. Nasi kandar’s historical origins in Malaysia and its evolution into a hybrid amalgam incorporating Malay names and catering to a Chinese palate with a strong Tamil Muslim base is something they can all claim as part of their normal national routine and cuisine. The transmutation of a familial term that originated from Tamil Nadu into a specific ethnic category in Malaysia is just the beginning of a complex subjectivity whose ambiguous position lends it an “affability” (to use that slightly egregious stereotype) with the majority Muslim Malays and other ethnic minorities like the Chinese and Indians. The 94 CHAPTER 3

Tamil Muslim eatery thus functions as the national glue as much as it can inadvertently provide space for the exercise and practice of a mature democracy. People have transformed mamak stalls from mere sites of consumption into transethnic public spheres in the new post–May 8, 2008, political landscape. When I was eating brunch in a Tamil Muslim restaurant somewhere in Ipoh in January 2012, I heard two men discussing politics at a nearby table quite openly. Some claim that it was not the opposition who won as much as it was the citizens (rakyat) who spoke through their rejection of race-based politics at the ballot box. While there have been no substantial institutional changes to promote democracy several years later—in fact, critics have pointed out that more repressive policies have been enacted—progressive civil society groups such as Bangsa Malaysia that promote the concept of a common citizenship in contrast to ethnonationalism may periodically have a meeting at a nasi kandar restaurant.70 Yet, even though the mamak may provide the national glue, his ambiguous position can just as easily make him a scapegoat. A pro-UMNO rally held after the election to petition DAP Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng not to abolish the NEP supposedly drew a significant number of Indian Muslims among the demonstrators. Although the numbers of actual protestors are disput- able (a hundred or a thousand?), the event spawned a racist backlash against the mamak, with some people calling for a boycott of Indian Muslim businesses, including nasi kandar eateries. This shows that, despite the claims of a new dawn of politics that is nonracialized, racialization cannot be so easily eradicated.71 In the next chapter, Jean takes us to an equally popular, accessible everyday public eating place: the Singapore hawker center. Here she draws on additional definitions of “third place,” based on interviews with Indian Singaporean men whose memories of “third tastes” and youthful commensality trace processes of “growing into” cosmopolitan masculinity.

This chapter was written by Gaik, who conducted fieldwork and interviews between Decem- ber 2007 and February 2008. 4

GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL Traveling through Singapore’s Hawker Centers

Based on the information from the National Environment Agency and press reports, we have compiled the latest upgrading news [of hawker centers] . . . for your reference. We ask that you please bear with the changes and enjoy the new environment when the renovations are completed. . . . [T]hree markets/food centres will be built into one centre, to be named “Taman Jurong Market & Food Cen- tre”—date of completion is May 2005.1 You invest your own private meanings into the places where you lived, studied, played and worked. They become repositories of memories in a way that photographs or diaries never do. Memories recorded self-consciously always miss the mundane. It is the things one takes for granted that disappear most irretrievably—like the feel of mosaic tiles between one’s small, bare feet.2

It is late 2004 in Singapore and this is Jean speaking. Madhur provides me with a guided tour of the hawker center close to Taman Jurong housing estate where he lives. The estate was constructed in the early 1970s for the workers of the Jurong industrial complex in Singapore’s west. Having grown up on the estate and completed his education in Singapore (including attending university there), Madhur has traveled and worked elsewhere (Berlin, Paris, Sydney, New York City). Howev- er, he is now once again under the family roof. So, in this chapter we will accompany him on a nostalgic return to this local hawker center to

95 96 CHAPTER 4 reflect on a different kind of “public” eating place in Singapore from the kopitiam, coffee shop, and mamak stall of previous chapters.3 At the same time, this supposedly different place connects with all the other sites we have chosen for this book. In other words, we are still looking for traces and spaces of commensality, intercultural exchange, identity hybridity, and belonging. Entering the hawker center, we find we are in a dilapidated shed with fixed tables, terrazzo flooring, and merciless fluorescent lighting. Cooked food stalls are clustered together according to their ethnic designation—Chinese, Malay, Indian. At some of these, food preparation is taking place, the sounds and smells of cooking hanging in the air in a desultory fashion. A dog wanders past. It is about nine o’clock in the evening. At this time (an hour between workers’ evening meals and young people’s late night snacking), the center is curiously quiet. We drink teh halia (milky ginger tea from a Malay Muslim drink stall) and try to ignore occasional sounds of small rodents’ feet scurrying across the floor of the adjacent wet market. From the perspectives of a touristic imaginary, this might not constitute a glamorous moment of cultural border crossing. However, it is most certainly an “authentic” or “local” one—a moment to savor someone else’s lived and remembered “mundane.” In this chapter, I focus on Singapore particularly, as “the Manhattan of the East”4 —a global, highly urbanized city-state, its recent history of nation building tied to support for multiculturalism and, with this, state- sanctioned acknowledgment of Singapore’s rich gastronomic heritage.5 “Singapore food,” says the Singapore Tourism Board, “is a tasty tale about a country’s unique cultural tapestry, and the way individual strands have woven into others, and changed hue in the process.”6 In other words, edible intersections in Singapore’s multiculinary cultures—histories of preservation, borrowing, and innovation in food preparation framed by exchanges across borders of ethnicity—produce distinctly “Singaporean” dishes and flavors: Hainanese chicken rice, roti prata, Indian rojak, fish head curry.7 Within such contexts of taste opportunities, I examine the hawker center as a site of multiethnic eating. In 1973, in a cookbook designed to promote tourism and travel, Singapore was declared “a gourmet’s paradise offering an endless variety of cuisines and eating styles.”8 Pro- motional literature since has hardly changed its tune.9 Nevertheless, GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 97 despite the sophistication of Singapore’s restaurant and international hotel scene, the iconic space for experiencing this paradise of variety lies “where the locals eat”:

[H]awker centers will always be the real heart of Singapore dining. . . . [B]ustling open-air food centers house vendors selling a whole range of dishes [which include] . . . Chinese, Indian and Malay food. These hawker centers are basic, often open-air establishments without air-conditioning and lit by glaring fluorescent lights at night. Still what they lack in charm they make up in quality and unbeatable prices. . . . Hawker cuisine is Singapore soul food: heart-warming, familiar, and a reflection of the country’s heritage.10

So it seems that inexpensive local food— either prepared at home or cooked at stalls clustered together, and then “hawked” to hungry customers in open shelters—should lie at the heart of any discussion of food in Singapore. The selling of cooked/prepared food in Singapore streets and informal eating establishments, nevertheless, has not always attracted official approval, a point to which we return later. While tourism discourse might revel in the frisson of the fine line between a hawker center’s “vibe that may be gritty” and “food [that is] generally authentic and tasty,”11 hawkers, hawking, hawkers’ centers, and street food have a history of contradictory positioning within Singapore’s culinary cultures.12 Even the popular discourse of cookbooks hints at the pleasur- able ambivalence of embarking on adventurous eating that, in its sensory overload, transgresses conventional boundaries of cleanliness, quiet- ness, and decorum:

Your ears are assailed by the shouts of the cooks, the clatter and bang of ladles on giant woks or kuali; your nose twitches with every waft of fragrant steam from bubbling pots and kualis sitting over roaring fires. . . . [At the Satay Club you could] go home with your hair smelling of grilled meat, but nothing beats this meal of sticks of barbecued meat dipped in a spicy peanut gravy eaten in the cool darkness of the night, lit softly by lamps and the glow of coal fires all round.13

The romance for the traveler of “getting down and dirty” among the smells of freshly grilled meat and the stickiness of peanut sauce licked 98 CHAPTER 4 from the fingers is a compelling one. Nevertheless, I want to leave aside collective imaginings of hawker centers as arenas of the sensual and mildly risky “exotic.” Instead, I am interested in a site more ordinary. Deliberately eschewing touristic reinventions and renovations, such as Smith Street with its fixed hawker “carts,” Lau Pa Sat with its gloriously renovated Victorian ironwork, or the guidebook-encouraged crowds joining “locals” at Newton Food Centre, we travel by train west toward the town center of Jurong. Here the intention is to unravel, through a less obvious (almost reverse) case in point, the ways that a hawker center, as a comparatively recent historical phenomenon, offers a resonant example of transnational space, constantly negotiated within local memories. In this chapter, the questions that niggle me are twofold. Firstly, how do processes of collective remembering confer nostalgic status and prestige to particular landscapes, particular objects, but not to others? In George’s quotation above, for example, how are we to reconcile forms of “self-conscious” memory making and preservation versus a disregard for “the things one takes for granted”? How does an ostensibly drab, utilitarian structure attached to a modernist high-rise housing estate mesh with Singapore’s romance of hawkers and hawking, and how is this landscape reworked to produce, in its turn, narratives of childhood and “lost” places? Secondly, is it possible to trace examples of everyday negotiations with transnationalism, ironically, in this most “local” of places? Through memories of the mundane, can we transform this site of Singapore’s “soul food” (remember, “heartwarming, familiar,” inscribed with “heritage”) for the biographical moment, to offer, instead, intimations of cosmopolitan identity making—cultural practices of growing up (simultaneously) local, Singaporean, and transnational? For the project of reflecting on questions like these, I want to draw on interview conversations with a small group of young Indian Singapo- reans (all previously having lived in countries other than Singapore, and now living either in Singapore or Australia). The intention is to “worry at” nuances in their stories of a specific hawker center in the Jurong district—the site of my own ethnographic grazing described at the beginning of this chapter. (Since that convivial evening with Madhur, however, the center has been demolished through the agency of the Singapore government’s Upgrading Program).14 Analysis of these GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 99 friends’ stories of eating under the center’s roof, together with specula- tions of these memories’ significance beyond this roof (temporally and spatially), offers some intriguing possibilities to disturb conventions of nostalgic remembering. As well, such analysis suggests the need for theories of cosmopolitanism to consider making conceptual returns to the “mundane” more frequently than they do—to practices of “borderwork” at “home.”15 Here, I am drawing on Hodge and O’Carroll’s positive connotations of borderwork—its potential “to relax boundaries, find connections and dream of a more humane society.”16 To set the scene for these conversational exchanges, however, it is necessary to sketch the hawker center’s own history of coming into being in Singa- pore—a narrative shaped by forces of regulation and glimpses of opportunity.

HAWKING IN SINGAPORE: AT THE INTERSECTION OF CHARM AND SAFETY

For Singapore and Malaysia, hawker food, traditionally, is street food. Its history is shaped by large numbers of Chinese laborers arriving in the Straits Settlements of Singapore and the Malay states, particularly during the nineteenth century, and by the limitations of housing and domestic facilities at that time: “For single men who made up the majority . . . [of immigrants] and for many families who lived in cramped, and overcrowded conditions in the towns, cooking at home was not a possibility. Chinese street food developed to cater for them.”17 Street food consisted of inexpensive dishes based in home-style cooking purchased from hawkers. With baskets containing food and equipment suspended from poles positioned across their shoulders, hawkers walked the city streets in search of customers or congregated at busy corners. Other hawkers used mobile carts (complete with cooking equipment) to move from place to place or to form clusters in streets where, ritually, custom was ensured.18 Other hawkers would position their carts close to food stalls and coffee shops for mutual benefit, so that food purchased from hawkers could be consumed (for a small surcharge) at the tables of the nearby kopitiam.19 Both the food itself and those who hawked it now have an assured place in Singapore’s culinary history. Memories of individual hawkers, their distinctive 100 CHAPTER 4 dishes, the smells of home cooking in the streets, the sounds used to attract customers, vendors’ inventive uses of public spaces—all of these contribute to hawkers’ iconic status in Malaysian and Singaporean collective remembering. Sylvia Tan, author of a study of Singapore’s “heritage food,” for example, maps aural landscapes produced by itinerant hawkers:

[R]oving hawkers worked out a system of food delivery whereby shop-house dwellers would lower baskets whenever they heard the food calls, and in this way, exchange cash for food. . . . The food calls were distinctive—you could not mistake the nasal cry of the loh kai yik man for the gutteral calls of the ap bak (braised duck) man; nor the clacking of bamboo clappers of the noodle man for the mee goreng man’s insistent clanging of frying implement against wok.20

Similarly, Tan describes the contribution of food stalls and coffee shops to nostalgic imaginaries of tastes, textures and aromas:

Figure 4.1. Hawker selling soy milk and soybean custard in the streets of George Town, Penang. Photographed by Jean Duruz. GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 101

My 85-year-old aunt remembers eating [char kway teow] . . . at Koek Road in her girlhood. . . . The name [Koek Road] reeks of nostalgia for it was the place to eat at for many years. . . . People would visit . . . a rather dark and grimy coffee shop. But no one noticed the dirt in those days. Instead they remembered the thick aromatic stock of the gu bak kway teow, beef noodle soup, the lushness of the oyster omelette and the simple tastes of cha siu fan [boiled pork on rice].21

Meanwhile, Cheong Liew, growing up above his family’s poultry business on a main street of Kuala Lumpur, recalls the food stalls of his childhood (the Indian Kachang man, Chinese barbecue stalls, a Teh Chew restaurant known for its congee, and a Hokkien one for its noodles), and a procession of hawkers throughout the day in the street below.22 There were hawkers selling, for example, nyonya kueh or laksa or yong tau fu, taking up their positions at certain hours throughout the morning and then the “rojak seller . . . and the soup man with red bean soup, peanut soup, black rice soup and black sesame soup, all eaten with coconut milk” appearing during the late afternoon.23 Liew’s descriptions resonate with affection for his own growing up with hawkers—these intimate, biographical fragments become olfactory and aural cartographies of a 1950s childhood of eating and remembering. Hawkers, however, have not always been the much-loved figures that this romance of hawking in Malaysia and Singapore would lead us to believe. In Singapore in 1950, a Hawkers’ Inquiry Commission was established to address, among other concerns, the implications of hawking for the community. Hawkers were seen as “primarily a public nuisance to be removed from the streets,” and such removal was justified in terms of “obstruction of traffic and noise.” Other aspects of this “problem” for the commission were: the contradictory economics of hawking (the low returns from hawking versus the need for employment of unskilled workers; the need for “whole families [lacking access to cooking facilities] to eat cheaply away from home”; and questions of hawking’s deleterious effects on the city’s health and hygiene). “We are satisfied” says the report, “that from the point of view of public health it would be ideal if virtually all hawkers were excluded from the streets.”24 Despite the recommendations of this commission, Thio, in an ethnographic study of twenty Singapore hawkers twelve years later, declares, “hawkers continue to be a menace to the general health of the population of Singapore. They continue to clutter up roads. They continue to 102 CHAPTER 4 be a serious threat to bona fide traders, shop-keepers, and even to market stall-holders.”25 However, rather than simply offsetting these public discourses of “nuisance” and “menace” against everyday memories of the sensory pleasures that hawkers and casual eating places offered (including their “dirt” and “grime”—perhaps as an added spice to remembering?), we turn to Lily Kong for a more subtle reading of the hawker “problem” from the perspective of urban professionals, responsible for the efficient management of the city:

activities of hawkers conflicted with the goals of development, for they were competing with land usage. Another reason was that Sin- gapore was striving to be a modern city, and the colonial administra- tors regarded such small-scale trading as traditional and not in keeping with this goal . . . Public health aside, street hawking detracted from the functionality and efficiency of the city. Their higgledy-piggledy appearance and streetside location lent a certain haphazard charm to the scene but also contributed to the disorderliness of the streets and impeded traffic and pedestrian flow.26

Interestingly, the commission was not unsupportive of hawkers, acknowledging public sympathy for hawkers’ attempts to make a living and the role of these street vendors in providing Singaporeans with low- cost meals. So, the solution to the “problem” of itinerant food sellers was sought through formal licensing, and through hawkers’ relocation from the streets to “back lanes, car parks and vacant land” and to purpose-built centers.27 As Kong notes in her history of the changing material structures and cultures of street-food eating, the popular expression “hawker center” had now become an irony in itself.28 Such structures represented the centering and fixing of a tradition that, contradictorily, had been vested in the mobile, haphazard, and at times chaotic (and the regulation of a tradition that still has its echoes in the subversive “street buzz” of postcolonial cities, with their “barter and neighbourhood markets, peddlars, artisans, shoeshine boys and windscreen washers”29). Furthermore, although hawker centers were designed not only to contain hawkers and maintain Singapore’s public order, they also represented other forms of regulation. These related to provision of essential facilities to ensure hygienic food preparation and consumption: “pot- GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 103 able water supply, electrical supply, sewerage and drainage systems, toilets, lighting and bin centres.”30 Achieving a balance of “traditional” eating, reminiscent of its former charming disorder within orderly environments, appears to lie at the heart of the hawker center’s origins—the search for gastronomic pleasure in company with control of risk. This tension, as we noted earlier, continues to haunt the tourist imaginary. An Australian travel writer comments: “in the face of the thriving diversity of hawker precincts [in Singapore] . . . it’s a rare traveller who doesn’t find some relief in the knowledge you can eat anything here, anywhere, without needing to keep a supply of Immodium [sic] on hand.”31 A second echoes similar sentiments: “This regulation [classification of stalls according to standards of hygiene] means a rare treat for tourists: the security of eating from cheap street stalls and neighbourhood cafes knowing that stomach wobbles are unlikely to result.”32 The “centering” of hawkers—this balancing of charm, adventure, sustenance, and safety—however, was not so easy to achieve. Illegal hawking persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s, despite the best efforts of the Hawkers Department’s Special Squad, established in 1974. Furthermore, the sheer numbers of hawkers to be relocated from the city to purpose-built centers presented a persistent challenge. The solution was declared to be found in a creative approach to high-density living, with centers sited within new housing estates where time, rather than lack of space and facilities, had become the issue for working families’ access to cooked food:

Once the estates were up and ready, the street hawkers would be located there as the residents moved into their new flats. . . . While HDB [Housing Development Board] was developing new estates, the Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) was also developing industrial estates. Some street hawkers were resited to hawker centres within industrial estates.33

This history certainly could take shape as a modernist narrative of progress: the state’s cleaning up of the city through movement of population and services from the overcrowded center “into new controlled environments of public housing and satellite towns.”34 In actual fact, negotiations are never as smooth as official accounts might suggest and, of course, not everyone was happy. A survey of street hawkers in China- 104 CHAPTER 4 town in the early 1980s prior to relocation concluded that their objections were both “sentimental and practical.” The category of “sentimental” included objections from older hawkers who feared a loss of place and community; the “practical” tended to be from younger hawkers concerned with questions of maintaining a customer base and storage facilities. All, however, conveyed a strong sense of “loss of the bazaar atmosphere of the market . . . as an important element in the success of their operations”35—an acknowledgment that nostalgia, memory, atmosphere, and commerce are not unrelated. In a similar fashion, a study of hawkers that included a focus on new towns, such as Clementi (one of the developments associated with the western area that incorporated the Jurong industrial estate), concludes: “From being aristocrats of an ‘informal sector’ economy outside the ambit of state-control . . . [hawkers] are having to adjust to all the constraints that institutionalisation involves.”36 In other words, relocation not only required hawkers to balance their commercial profits and losses, but also to renegotiate emotional economies of identity, agency, and autonomy. Likewise, for customers who fondly remembered “the clacking bamboo clappers of the noodle man,” the arrival of hawker centers posed interesting challenges for redrawing culinary landscapes and structures of belonging.

GROWING UP AND HANGING OUT IN HAWKER CENTERS

Leaving aside nostalgic references to the “bazaar atmosphere” of the marketplace and its presiding “aristocrats,” we now turn to lives in which hawker centers appear as a given—a continuing presence throughout childhood and beyond. This is to re-enter the “mundane” of deep HDB territory, though this time in the remembered 1980s. For Madhur, Rabi, and Jasdeep, these years represent their adolescence—a distinct life-cycle stage of growing up, its rhythms dominated by rituals associated with food, sleep, family, school, friends, leisure, hanging out, waiting, and initiations into adulthood. The local hawker center becomes critical for this remembered everyday. In a temporal sense, it is sited within the transition zone between childhood and adulthood, and spatially it is placed “somewhere else”—located, for the moment, outside immediate institutional frameworks of family, schooling, and paid GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 105 work. These echoes of a third place (in a positive sense, not merely as an absence or an interstitial positioning) remind us of the kopitiam and our discussion in chapter 1. To grasp this sense of the hawker center as a distinctive milestone, as an “other” space, in the landscape of growing up, we turn, first of all, to Rabi’s account. Interestingly, Rabi presented his culinary biography chiefly in terms of home cooking, though its political economy was traced across generations, and across nations:

My story begins in India where I was born, in Tamil Nadu, and lived there up to the age of seven, in a village environment. So basically it was South Indian Tamil food. Main staple was rice and lots of curry, and we had produce close to us. Some of the early . . . memories that I have is of the local house cow . . . milked at 5 am . . . [and] coffee . . . brewed using that milk, and we’d get served breakfast in the kitchen sitting around the stove which was a firewood oven. . . . And then . . . we moved to Singapore . . . [where] basically my mother did all the cooking, so obviously that has come down from her mother. . . . There was never any experiment. She cooked what she knew. . . . But also, equally, because my Dad had come as a young man to Singapore [for employment] and had lived in a sort [of] communal household . . . he had taught himself to cook. So [whenever my mother returns to India] he cooks with extremely potent curry . . . and as a result there’s more variety and robust- ness . . . in the dishes.37

Through international travel and relocation, Rabi, in his turn, was obliged to learn to cook. In the early 1990s, as a university student in Perth, Australia, he relied primarily on childhood memories for recipes:

I’d mentally construct things that I remember doing, helping my mother to cook, and I’d draw on those little memories and put it into a picture and tried cooking [it] . . . But over the years I’ve fine-tuned it and I think I make an excellent chicken curry . . . [So it was a case of a] kind of trickling [down] of experiences, as a boy growing up.

With Rabi, and his younger brother Madhur, coming from such a resolute background of (mainly) traditional south Indian home cooking, it is interesting to speculate on ways the hawker center is inserted into their remembered culinary landscapes. After all, the romance of the 106 CHAPTER 4 cooking mother, positioned at the center of the warm kitchen as she provides nourishing meals from local produce to her children gathered contentedly around the fire/stove, is a recurrent one in gastronomic remembrance.38 Likewise, accounts of growing up in a village environment resonate, with some predictability, with intimations of safety, nur- turance, and comfort. More curious, however, is the role of the hawker center when newly established in Singapore’s housing estates—its cultural intersections with meanings of “home” and “village”—especially for relocated families like Rabi’s, who “have never eaten out.” Other groups too needed to adapt to new exigencies. From the perspective of a specific village form, the kampung in Singapore, Chua traces public concern in the 1990s that the spirit of the kampung, with its kopitiam as a “place for collective idling, where boys and men spend their time over long drawn out cups of drink,” was being lost.39 This was thought to be inevitable as families moved to high-rise apartment buildings and turned to estates’ “eating houses,” focused on rapid service and high turnover, for their daily meals. Kuo Pao Kun’s play Kopi-tiam, says Chua, reflects these concerns, with life at the kopitiam serving as an allegory of Singapore’s transformation into modernity and, with this, a poignant statement of its losses:

the change from the camaraderie of friends who idled together to strictly self-service business transactions; the disappearance of dialects and the emergence of Mandarin and English; and the passing of the older generation who hold on to their reveries of the past and the rise of a new generation striking out to a new economic future.40

Obviously, in the development of the new towns, hawker centers— with their imagery of tasty, inexpensive food prepared in hygienic sur- roundings—provided interesting challenges to nostalgic discourse. This would surely be the case, whether such discourse is peopled with itinerant hawkers, home-cooking mothers, or idlers of the kampung, memorialized for its “‘relaxed’ pace of life, communitarian cooperation and happy days in spite of material privation.”41 Nevertheless, instead of looking at everyday tensions emanating from Singapore’s emergence as a modern, industrial state, I want to examine the hawker center, in its turn, as an urban “memorial,” as a repository of nostalgia, both in terms of its retrospective significance in the rites of growing up and its subse- quent disappearance and future reinvention. GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 107

Again we call on Rabi’s memories as starting points:

Rabi: If we do eat out [now, as a family], it’s often only in Little India, familiar Indian food. . . . [M]y Mum would never try anything at a hawker center. My Dad would have because of his work. And it was us going out to school and having that opportunity to explore. I used to love kway teow goreng [Indonesian dish that is without pork, unlike its Malay version], so [I’d] just go back to the same [stall]. There was another dish called mee hong kong which is actually a Chinese dish but has been tailored by the Malays. It was sort of noodles cooked in a sort of gravy . . . oyster sauce and seafood, so it was peppery. So that was one of the factors [in going to the hawker center]. The other thing was, yes, hanging out after school, not going home.

Jean: Would you go there every day . . .?

Rabi: Most of the time, every day after school. And then this particular one was close to where we lived. Probably at least it’d be three or four times a week with Jasdeep, and often past midnight . . . go for tea.

Later, Rabi commented that he still misses the tastes of that particular hawker center. Of course, it is not surprising he feels nostalgic. Memo- ries such as those above provide maps of “meaning embodied”42—sensory explorations of the tastes and smells of food; ingested understandings of its provenance and of its moments of cultural border crossing; performance of daily rituals attached to particular foods, friendship networks, and spaces for conviviality. The cartography of “[t]hat opportunity to explore,” however, has very specific coordinates, not only rooted in dictates of family, class, and ethnic/religious community but also, crucially, in masculinity’s rites of passage, together with Singapore’s housing policies and education system. Chua lists a number of state-engendered sociopolitical changes that have, perhaps indirectly, influenced patterns of “hanging out” among school students in Singapore.43 The first of these has been the alloca- tion of secondary school students to schools on the basis of merit rather than proximity to their homes. As a result, friendship networks tend to be based on geographies that incorporate the entire island, rather than those of particular neighborhoods.44 The need to find somewhere to “hang out” together during that transitional time between the finish of the school day and travel back to the family home elsewhere becomes 108 CHAPTER 4 imperative. At the same time, with the population’s move, substantially, to housing estates, establishing friendship networks locally is no easy task: “Living in relative isolation in the air and surrounded by too many strangers at ground level, people find a high-rise, high-density living environment rather inhospitable for establishing acquaintances.”45 Rabi was fortunate in living near the school he attended, whereas for Madhur, school was some distance from the estate. For both brothers, however, their home was not deemed an appropriate place for friends to “hang out.” Just as their mother would not enter the hawker center, her sons were careful not to transgress boundaries of home and the world outside by disrupting familial privacy with outsiders. (“We rarely took friends home,” recalls Rabi.) In any case, for socializing, the hawker center presented more attractive options. Open long hours and late into the night, relatively free from adult surveillance (from the watchful eyes of one’s own parents or teachers, at least), the hawker center offered permission to kill time—for young men, legitimately, to sit and chat over a glass of tea. Rabi’s friend Jasdeep, Singaporean born and from a Punjabi Sikh family, similarly described this particular hawker center, emphasizing its transitional, “elsewhere” status:

It used to be like the place where we would have our meals before we took the bus home. . . . [O]nce we have finished at school we would always be there because . . . you know your friends will be there . . . not just [for] food, lots of talking and chatting. Sit down there and talk about what happened . . . [during the day] and have a drink or whatever. . . . [But i]f you go there [and] nobody’s there, you go home.46

“Always being there” carries with it some heavy baggage of memories and rituals. In the process, the hawker center is transformed from a state-formalized collection of street-food stalls primarily engaged in commercial transactions to a space for practicing independence and masculinity in ways reminiscent of the kopitiam. As such, the local hawker center not only maps the illusive boundaries of a third space for identity making, as Bhabha conceptualizes this, but also a literal third space.47 This is a space between home and school (an intimate home- like domain to practice “being in the world,” that is neither wholly at “home” nor in the “world” but contains their heterotopic tensions).48 Historically speaking, the hawker center is also positioned here as a GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 109 third space between village environment and new town, between kopitiam and eating house. Once again, in the ambiance of a space for hanging out, a space of conviviality and affordability, we are reminded of Oldenburg’s third place, discussed in chapters 1 and 3. Of course, the local hawker center is not the only space appropriated by young people for their cultural and social rites of passage. While Elspeth Probyn constructs the relentless march of McDonald’s golden arches across the globe as, in part, a handover, by default, of some of the state’s traditional functions (such as the care of its citizens) to the private sector,49 Chua offers, for this corporate giant in the Singaporean imaginary, a compelling counternarrative. Here, McDonald’s becomes the comforts of just another place for friends to meet, given the limits of domestic space, especially for older students—for doing homework, studying, or meeting friends.50 McDonald’s, says Chua, is inserted/“ingested” into Singapore, by virtue of the ease with which its cultures of food and service layer on to familiar tastes, rituals, and practices. It simply represents an “other” cuisine, an “other” space in the culinary local, rather than an exotic takeover by the powerful Other.51 “[U]biquity,” continues Chua (in arguments similar to those I have suggested above in relation to hawker centers), “also lends to McDonald’s outlets a sense of convenience as meeting places: they are open for long hours, near mass rapid transit stations and in busy thoroughfares that offer visual pleasure for those waiting for friends.”52 Similar appropriation of modern commercial spaces is reflected in Madhur’s remembering (“We would go to shopping malls to hang out, and McDonald’s”). However, there is always the possibility of return to the traditional, as indeed Madhur does (“normally when . . . [Rabi] comes back home we’ll come here [to this hawker center] for midnight tea”). Hence, for some, the hawker center becomes a significant place for nostalgic attachment—a return to the territory of lost youth and to its rehearsal spaces for growing into adulthood. However, this is not to fetishize the center’s significance as the only space of creative appropriation. It is not, as the example of McDonald’s amply demonstrates. Obviously, the search for cultural meaning through spatial practice, together with the remembering of this, takes a variety of forms, and enshrines different spaces as “sacred.” However, for the hawker center, I would argue a particular density of material culture for remembering, poised as it is (somewhat uneasily) between myths of the village and 110 CHAPTER 4 those of nation, between gritty eating adventures at relocated food stalls (with mysterious rustlings underfoot) and modernity’s air-conditioned comfort in food courts and shopping malls.53 While Western-style fast- food outlets, like McDonald’s, might certainly reference Singapore’s nostalgic heritage (witness McDonald’s kampung burger and chili dip- ping sauces),54 the romance of the village, of the kampung, finds, in the hawker center, its rightful home, haunting its structures with “genius loci—the spirit of a place.”55 When this particular hawker center in Jurong was demolished in 2005 to make way for the multistoried glass and steel structure of the Taman Jurong Market and Food Centre (with a bridge connecting it to Taman Jurong Community Centre),56 one blogger wistfully noted: “But I like[d] the atmosphere . . . [of the old hawker center], cockroaches under the table, chio bus from the bowling alley, massage centre and karaoke pub everytime go there for makan. The unique smell of that place and a bit kampong-like environment.”57 In the process of mourning mundane losses (“unique smell,” “kampong-like environment”), this blogger reworks bittersweet moments of nostalgia in resistant celebration of faded and disappearing symbols of Singapore’s modernity.58

EATING TOGETHER TRANSNATIONALLY: THIRD PLACE AND THIRD TASTE

Lily Kong’s account of Singapore hawker centers—the most comprehensive study to date59 —begins on a note of celebration:

These everyday places have become Singapore icons etched into the cityscape. Hawker centres pulsate with a life and rhythm unique to the island. . . . Hawker centres are convenient places serving up affordable food for executives with demanding schedules and families with busy routines; community places where neighbours meet; and casual places where all social types gather—CEO and officer cleaner, grandpa and junior, Chinese, Malay, Indian and others. Hawker centres are a microcosm of Singapore society.60

Tourist literature tends to echo these images of Ang’s “togetherness- in-difference,”61 marking out the hawker center as a point of intersec- GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 111 tion for Singapore’s diverse social and cultural communities. Neverthe- less, in the examples of promotional discourse that I have collected, the emphasis is more on diversity of dishes than of customers. Certainly, we are invited to partake of “a feast of ethnic flavors” from “the city’s multiethnic cuisine”62 with reminders that “[h]awker food stalls reflect the mix of the Singaporean populace”63 and hawkers themselves are “living national treasures.”64 At the same time, beyond these celebrations of the nation’s multiculinary offerings, such literature expresses less concern about who actually uses the hawker center and how—the ways specific groups interact under its roof. My own focus, on the other hand, is driven by an abiding curiosity about who sits together, eats together (“grandpa and junior”? . . . Malay and Indian?) in this micro- cosmic space. What do observations that “all social types gather” in the hawker center actually mean here, in terms of commensality, and particularly across the borders of ethnicity? Unlike other forms of eating establishments, such as restaurants or some cafes, the hawker center is organized on assumptions that strangers will share space. Such assumptions probably have their origins in necessity (at any time of day, large numbers of people must be accommodated at fixed tables and seating—either by themselves or in groups of varying sizes—for the purpose of casual eating and drinking). Neces- sity, however, quickly becomes a virtue. In descriptions such as Kong’s above, the hawker center is figured as a significant communal meeting place—a vortex of intersecting identity positionings, of age, generation, gender, ethnicity, and class. Furthermore, in a setting that contains the familiar (Rabi and Jas would meet school friends in groups of up to ten in number), strangers can be more readily accommodated, tolerated and, indeed, welcomed.65 Lai, for example, researching social interactions between specific ethnic groups in a multiethnic housing estate in Marine Drive, Singapore, would set out to the local hawker center as a new resident and a stranger, and return with possibilities for friendship (and future research participants!):

At the hawker centre or coffeeshop where tables are shared, striking up a conversation requires little more than taking a chance and initiative, starting off with a smile and “do you live here? I have just moved here . . .” or making a comment about the food. Introductions were often made when others came to join the table. Through these numerous occasions over breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and supper, I 112 CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.2. The Chinatown Centre’s hawker center, Singapore (prior to its renovation). Photographed by Jean Duruz.

made many acquaintances and some friends. Sometimes long discussions were held; at other times, I just sat and listened, or eaves- dropped.66

Lai’s account, in fact, reflects the etiquette of table sharing, spelled out for travelers by a Lonely Planet guidebook. Here, diffident tourists are advised that “sharing a table with strangers [in hawker centers] is not a problem” and “a perfect way to strike up a conversation about food. Simply ask [for permission], before you sit down. . . . A friendly smile goes a long way, of course.”67 It is true. In Singapore, I have had similar experiences to Lai’s in Chinatown and Katong, noticing how readily the spaces of casual eating places and their economies of sharing allow a degree of ready-made, for-the-moment intimacy (particularly for an obvious stranger and a woman) not permissible in other contexts. However, while food provides perhaps an easy starting point for conversation, especially for a stranger eager for culinary “instruction,” GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 113 sharing of tables (and sharing food, if this occurs) should not be regarded simply as a form of fuzzy “multicultural free-for-all.” Propin- quity under the same roof does not necessarily ensure positive cross- cultural interactions, however compelling Goldberg’s arguments might be in regard to awareness of the materiality of different bodies in the one space. (“The experience of rubbing shoulders, the pressing of bodies, being thrown together in unexpected ways with the different, creates its own effect.”68 ) In fact, awareness of racial and ethnic differences might have the opposite effect.69 Nevertheless, the intimacy of table sharing while eating is, perhaps, a starting point. Sharing each other’s food, however, is a different dimension of intimacy entirely. Referring to the potential of the (south Indian Muslim) mamak stall to become a “truly cosmopolitan space” through the accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Khoo, writing elsewhere, says: “I am referring to a transethnic interaction of a deeper level—where people of diverse backgrounds are sitting around the same table talking and sharing in food rather than at different tables with their own families.”70 Selina Chan develops similar arguments in relation to the kopitiam. While she constructs Singapore’s history of hawking (prior to relocation of large numbers of hawkers to centers) as one directed toward serving different immigrant communities with each hawker and stall reflecting a “homogeneous pattern of consumption,” the coffee shop, on the other hand, is regarded as a multiethnic space: “A cultural tolerance among people of different social and ethnic groups is observed by the fact that individuals, undisturbed by differences in class and ethnicity, shared a table. But these strangers ate different foods, thus maintaining the social boundaries at some level.”71 Such sharing creates an illusion—an “imagined equality and social cohesion”72 —and one that, I suggest, for a later point on Singapore’s road to modernization, could equally apply to hawker centers. While people shared tables, perhaps, they selected and ate “their” food accordingly. However, here I want to follow Lai’s thread of argument in regard to “taking a chance” (together with our earlier discussion of hawker centers’ contradictory appeal of risk with safety). In the process, though, I want to move Lai’s arguments in regard to serendipity, and opportunity seized, from their focus on shared conversations to shared food. What does eating one’s “own” food entail? How might this “own” suggest both the adventure of “eating out” (outside familiar boundaries, 114 CHAPTER 4 across cultures) and the forces of regulation—suggest border crossing while staying at “home”? Let us return to our group of friends at Jurong. Other than Rabi’s favorite dishes of kway teow goreng and mee hong kong, what are they actually eating, and how and why? What culinary and religious rules are embodied in such eating? What scope is there to play with, venture beyond these, while seated at the same table? First impressions of Jas’s everyday eating at the school canteen prior to his college and hawker center days suggest a plethora of choices owing to Singapore’s multiculinary origins:

At school you had a choice. At . . . [the canteen we had] an Indian shop, a Malay shop, a Chinese shop and a drinks shop. At school you had a variety. Have Indian one day. And the Indian . . . [choices] are normally pancakes—for their breakfast—pancakes, and you dip into curry and you have it. The Malays are normally . . . nasi lemak [an addictive breakfast or snack dish of coconut rice with boiled egg, anchovies, cucumber slices, and sambal].

“Choice,” however, should not be overestimated for all stages of this culinary biography. Jas was swift to disabuse his listener of images of a childhood diet manifesting all the signs of cultural richness and diversity, insisting, instead, that he grew up in a conservative environment of Punjabi Sikh home cooking (“You eat Indian food because your Mum has told you to eat Indian food. . . . Primary school you go to school and go home . . . [but] at college practically every day you’d be going out. . . . [So the e]arly stage is home and Indian food . . . [but, later] college was fish and chips, chicken wings”). Nevertheless, despite Jas’s declarations that college and its attendant freedoms was an “eye-opener” and “you’d try everything,” his account of eating with friends from different ethnic backgrounds displayed recognition of the subtle ways this must be negotiated. Discussing the Malay Muslim prohibition on pork, Jas continued: ‘For the Indians we were not that . . . I will go to a Malay shop but I will try to order something [else]. But for the Malays, they can’t even go to [a particular] shop because it sells pork and the cooking way [is not halal] . . . [but] I can go to the shop. I just . . . order beef.” The asymmetry for Malay Muslims, in this example, as Khoo, citing McKinley, has argued in chapter 1, is that Malay Muslims are perpetually hosts (to all, presum- GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 115 ing for non-Muslims an absence of taboos against diets without pork and lard, and against ones embedded in halal practices). On the other hand, Malay Muslims can never be guests of other culinary traditions. Recognizing difference (what is possible and not possible) is, perhaps, the starting point for eating together across ethnic boundaries. Progress in “intercultural interactivity”73 at the table, however, might require additional “tactics”74 to balance risk and safety—to share unfamiliar tastes in contexts that allow, at the same time, observance of one’s own culinary cultural/religious regimes. Rabi, for example, from a south Indian Tamil Hindu background, will not eat beef or pork but is able to share a table with Jas, who is tucking into his beef. In Malaysian contexts, Tan Chee-Beng explains this, referring to the greater ease non-Muslim groups have at sitting at the same table: “It is not so much about eating the same kind of food as having no inhibitions about eating together. Thus, while Hindus do not take beef, they have no inhibition eating together with those who eat beef . . . only they [Hindus] avoid eating the beef.”75 For Malay Muslims, however, prohibitions are based not only on the eating of particular foods (and on the use of associated cooking and eating implements) but also on eating in the actual presence of pork and food that is non-halal in its preparation.76 On the other hand, awareness of being subject to similar prohibitions enables, at the very least, forms of partial culinary alliance between particular groups, and facilitates experiments in cross-border eating. Rabi described his grazing at the hawker center during his school days:

Rabi: I would try . . . different [stalls] from those series of stalls which were mainly Indian Muslim or Malays, but never venture out to try the other Chinese stalls that were there. Except . . . [for] something different, I may wander off to the Chinese chicken shop which I know is safe because the chicken rice . . .

Jean: Is it pork that was the main problem with Chinese food?

Rabi: That’s right, the pork. And I wouldn’t also order at the Malay stall certain dishes [containing beef]. . . . Most of the Indian stalls are owned by Indian Muslims and they only specialize in x number of dishes—usually fried noodles, rice, sometimes lamb. . . . Every Indian Muslim shop sells just that. So there’s no wide menu or whatever. 116 CHAPTER 4

Jean: But it’s totally safe. You know exactly—

Rabi: Because . . . to respect both cultures, they don’t cook pork or beef. But Malay stalls, most of them do have beef in their dishes, so I’ll only have dishes which are non-beef, like chicken.

An intricate pattern of acceptable tastes and avoidances was being traced here. While certain dishes of Singapore’s Indian, Chinese, and Malay communities are acceptable, others clearly are not. Indian Mus- lim dishes seem the safest with their guaranteed absence of pork and their limited but predictable range of offerings. Chinese dishes, on the other hand, drawn from a heavily pork-based cuisine, appear the most dangerous, although chicken here becomes the bridge to certain dishes’ acceptability, whether Chinese or Malay in origin. Sitting at the table, then, appears a matter of judicious consumer choice according to permissions and constraints. So, perhaps this is simply a muted version of tourism’s celebrations of Singapore’s multiethnic eating (sampling diversity at the Indian Muslim stall, the Malay stall, the Chinese chicken shop) with the added benefit of local knowledge of dishes and cultural rules of their production. There are hints in Rabi’s memories of more complex mappings than this, however.77 Rabi’s explanation of the In- dian Muslim’s stall’s own border crossing (“to respect both cultures, they don’t cook pork or beef”) identifies a suggestive trace: Culinary cultures themselves change, accommodating difference in the interests of a more broadly based commensality. According to Chua and Rajah:

Chinese, Malay and Indian cuisines appropriate in a promiscuous and voracious manner from each other, creating a far greater culinary variety through hybridisation than each possesses in its exclusive representation. . . . The central issue is not what permits appropriation or borrowing but, rather, what prohibits it.78

Promiscuity and prohibition may seem unlikely bedfellows. Never- theless, in the spaces of the hawker center there is opportunity for creative hybridization in the interests of rules of others—hybridization marked by absence and deletion rather than “the presence of alien or foreign elements.”79 The borderwork of table sharing then has some mundane nuances for theories of cosmopolitanism. Between identity’s project of maintain- GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 117 ing cultural boundaries, on one hand, and gastronomic forays across these boundaries, on the other, there are spaces for hungry customers’ hybrid place making—a search for the familiar self in the other’s food practices. In Rabi’s love of mee hong kong (“tailored by Malays”) or chicken rice (“safe” from pork), for example, we find the formation of strategic alliances with others, as commonalities are established and ingested. Instead of direct confrontation with/consumption of the “other,” a delicate dance is performed around the table, its choreography embedded in subtle points of connection across boundaries. For this reason, Chua and Rajah convincingly argue against essentializing national groupings and their cuisines in Singapore. These authors trace ways that cuisines bleed into each other, producing dishes like Haina- nese chicken rice, Indian rojak, and fish head curry. These are dishes that, in their hybrid form, have taken on lives of their own beyond the mythical origins they reference, and sometimes in response to the need for interethnic consumption and commensality.80 This distinctiveness and interstitial positioning of many of Singapore’s best-known dishes has been referred to locally by Seetoh (of Makansutra food guides, television programs, and food tours fame) as “third taste.”81 Third taste is a useful concept for my argument. Similar dietary taboos among ethnic groups can create a zone of connection, facilitating, at one level, the eating of each other’s food (however asymmetrical these relations might be), and at another, tasting hybridity as a dynamic tension of self and other, past and future—a neither-wholly-“self”-nor- “other” third taste that is distinctively “something else.” Furthermore, among groups in culinary alliance, even the mutually forbidden “other”—for example, “Chinese”—can be shared (that is, once it is “Islam- ized”/“tailored”/guaranteed to be without pork, as in the case of halal Hainanese chicken rice).82 So, here, in the hawker center, as once imagined for the kopitiam,83 an apprenticeship in the complexities of self–other recognition through interethnic eating is available for the taking. In Rabi’s case, this was an apprenticeship willingly entered into and sustained throughout his school years. Furthermore, it seems, when these young men travel beyond the hawker center, leaving Singapore for worlds of adulthood, higher education, and international student membership, they take their culinary skills and knowledge with them—familiarity with the third taste of Singapore’s hybridity, together with practice in negotiat- 118 CHAPTER 4 ing, within the third space of the hawker center, the everydayness of transnational belonging.

EATING INTO THE WORLD

To take this narrative beyond the confines of memories of an estate hawker center in Singapore in the 1980s, we now make a final move toward Rabi and Jas’s student days in Australia in the early 1990s, respectively in Perth, Western Australia, and Rockhampton, Queensland. Not surprisingly, for both Rabi and Jas, these were years of expanding culinary knowledge. At the same time, this rite of passage—this further “eating into the world”—was also inflected with yearning for a taste of home. In comparison with Singapore street food, Rabi remembered finding Asian food in Perth in the early 1990s “inauthentic” (the texture of noodles “floury,” the inclusion of different-from-usual vegetables, and “most of the stuff didn’t taste quite like how [we were used to]”). As a result, his group of friends preferred to avoid the university’s refecto- ry, where most of the international students ate, and instead had meals downstairs where “there used to be a social club . . . [with] café food and there’s a pub.” However, with a limited budget, Rabi found he “ended up eating out less, and cooking more.” Such cooking was to lay the basis for the later experiments in fusion cuisine that have become his trademark: “I’d use sambal to make pasta and Asian vegetables, and couscous, but with curry sauce.” Gradually, Rabi discovered intimations of home were to be found in Perth, after all. Here, thanks to his gastronomic apprenticeship, he located “places where we wouldn’t be disappointed”:

So we used to go to—I can’t remember [the name of] this place. It’s to the south of Murdoch [University], a sort of big hawker center, a food court place where there was a Malay shop, sold all the noodles. And I think it was a Malaysian Indian man and he used to make . . . [food that tasted] quite close to how it was back home.

It seems that food from the Malay shop, initially containing elements of the exotic in early days of eating out, is now thoroughly domesticated, taking on heightened significance when consumed “elsewhere” and “homely” tastes are less accessible.84 Furthermore, its consumption en- GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 119 ables the maintenance of cultural/religious rules, even in this very different urban context where plenitude implies different choices. So, as Rabi purchased noodles at the Malay shop in Perth, the ghosts of his past (his place nostalgia and practice in border crossing) hovered, providing a sense of comfort (“close to how it was back home”). Neverthe- less, the prickle of “quite” was still felt. In other words, the rehybridiza- tion of this dish, in this other transnational/translocal setting, this other village,85 reproduced a productive tension of familiarity–strangeness, the ambivalence of feeling at home, and yet not.86 Meanwhile, in Rockhampton on Queensland’s coast, Jas shared a house with other international students, one of whom was Egyptian, others Singaporean. Fortunately for Jas, all the others were competent cooks. He described the household’s diet as “the balance between fish and chips, occasionally, and [of] their style of eating and our style of eating. So sometimes we had a craving, it would be [for] our own. Our kind of food.” Anxious to pursue the emotional content of “our kind of food,” I enquired further, asking about missing “tastes” in Australia, particularly in relation to eating out. At the time, Jas and I were sitting in Adam Road Hawker Centre in Singapore, and he gestured toward our dishes as he replied: “[I was nostalgic for e]xactly this. Like . . . the chicken rice. You can get it there but . . . it’s not the same. I don’t know what it is.” That elusive taste of home in the form of Hainanese chicken rice then has traveled the world. With its origins in Hainan Island, this is a dish that, in its local interpretation, has become iconic throughout Malaysia and Singapore. (“It’s said to be our national dish,” claims Tan, instructing tourists in the pleasures of Singapore’s “soul food.”87 ) While Jas found the dish wanting in its translated form (relocated to Rock- hampton in the 1990s, and reinvented there by immigrants from Chi- na), some years later, once back in Singapore, he had the satisfaction of small daily acts of eating associated with his spiritual homecoming. With a palate further shaped by diversity (familiarity with, for example, Turk- ish, Italian, and Mexican food), Jas can make a pilgrimage to Adam Road, now a favorite hawker center close to where he works, and one that has been redeveloped in late modernity’s imagery of casual style, while referencing its former architecture in roof line and retaining its angsana trees.88 Here, Jas also makes a return to chicken rice, a distinctive route for youthful border crossing, a nostalgic absence for transna- 120 CHAPTER 4 tional living elsewhere, and a memorialized taste of nation, whether home or away.89 This chapter has set out on a journey to see an iconic Singaporean space differently—to displace its structures from landscapes of regret for the disappearance of Singapore’s itinerant hawkers, and from landscapes of bureaucratic regulation concerned with health, hygiene, and the order of the streets. As well, my intention has been to trouble the hawker center’s centrality in landscapes of touristic flirtation with the tasty, the gritty, the charming, and the risky. Instead, in this meditation on memories of a specific center, I have deliberately focused on the mundane, and on nuances in remembering less commonly examined. These are everyday reverberations of nostalgic myth making—of the village, community, ethnicity, masculinity, gastronomy, adventure— that invest a utilitarian structure, open to the public and complete with its share of dirt and grime, with significance. For three young men, while growing up and retrospectively, the hawker center becomes, perhaps, a space of “cosmopolitan conviviality”90 in which their transnational belongings are acknowledged—belongings vested in their own life histories and in those of others. I am anxious not to overstate the case, however. I want to avoid the appearance of supporting limited conceptions of cosmopolitanism that simply call for the need for tolerance across boundaries of ethnicity— the stranger who is tolerated as a gesture of magnanimity from the powerful mainstream. To me, the politics framing such conceptions appear questionable as an ethic of living together in global cities.91 So, instead, I am suggesting that unspectacular uses and spaces of hawker centers can be reworked as extremely resonant ones. Together, these define a predictive site—a locus of meditative reflection—for the challenges of cosmopolitan modernity. However, for the urgent project of “living together in worlds of difference,”92 there is also need to recognize that actors’ scripts and the urban spaces for performance of these are themselves subject to change, as people continually negotiate that critical dynamic of difference–sameness. The hawker center’s dishes, material structures, and cultural rules are reworked by its “users” for new places, new life stages, and new forms of identity making.93 This mobility is usefully captured in Keith’s discussion of “iteration, a notion that ethnic specificity and cultural difference are invariably on the move.”94 GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL 121

Nevertheless, from the perspective of “ordinary” memories (rather than from Keith’s ironic figuring of “street rebels,” heroes, and “vil- lains”), this movement seems partial, contradictory, and full of yearning. As well, in its pursuit of this very ordinariness, my political project is somewhat different from, but not incompatible with, Bhabha’s, when expressed as “vernacular cosmopolitanism.”95 This is cosmopolitanism conceptualized, on one hand (as we remember from the introduction), as a critique of Nussbaum’s universalizing liberal cosmopolitan “self” who embraces “humanity as a whole,”96 and, on the other, as a defense of the cosmopolitanism of specific communities “envisaged in marginality.”97 Certainly, the stories and images presented in this chapter are less dramatic than arguments with which Bhabha engages, as he teases out—for example, from Sennett’s work—a “darker cosmopolitanism”98 in which “fractures, self-destructiveness and irresolvable conflicts of desires within ourselves . . . will prompt us to cross boundaries.”99 There is a more obvious sense in which my “ordinary” takes a detour from Bhabha’s “vernacular.” Being less preoccupied with Bhabha’s margins (as domains of specific, localized identities-in-solidarity, their content not inconsistent with a cosmopolitan sensibility), I am far more interested in ways that culturally diverse communities negotiate their differences within the confines of a particular urban location (reminiscent of our discussion of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” in chapter 2). At the same time, for my argument, potential points of connection emerge in Bhabha’s “subaltern secularism.”100 This is secularism understood not as a space where religious observances are taboo but as an enabling space where differences (for example, in religion, cultures, cuisines, and rituals) can be negotiated. So, in the banal act of young Indian Singaporeans claiming Hainanese chicken rice as “our kind of food,” or in the nostalgic search for Malay shop noodles tasting “quite close to how it was back home,” there are hints of such negotiations: border crossings; sticking points; creative approaches; less usual alliances; ways to inhabit, and manage, diversity in everyday life. In the process, the hawker center itself is subject to transmutation: It becomes, simultaneously, sacred (in its preservation of difference) and secular (in its potential to engage with difference productively). This chapter’s stories of ritual movement both within and beyond the boundaries of an iconic Singaporean site of public eating suggest that the hawker center is a nostalgic and predictive space for the contra- 122 CHAPTER 4 dictions of transnational belonging. Here, in the hawker center’s modest communal spaces within Taman Jurong housing estate, three young men and their friends met and ate, and later remembered this. For them, the practice of eating “together-in-difference” denoted a critical life-cycle stage between home and the world. This “different” eating also served as an apprenticeship for both the pleasures of, and yearning for, cosmopolitan citizenship and mobility. So, we will leave these young men there, reflecting. The next chapter takes us from the hawker center, as a specific site of Singapore’s casual eating, to Katong, a neighborhood near the east coast, renowned for its mixed cuisines and culinary delights. (“All of Singapore is a food paradise, but the East is her kitchen,” says Dawn Mok in her tourist guide to the “real” Singapore.101 ) Specifically, the chapter traces the development of a Peranakan business, Kim Choo Kueh Chang, through its signature product—ba chang or Nyonya rice dumplings. In the process, a nostalgic narrative of memory, heritage, and creativity is unraveled. At the same time, this narrative becomes one of tradition under threat, of losses mourned. After all, the road to commensality, food exchange, and belonging is not entirely marked by sweetness and light. 5

DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI Singapore’s Urban Villages as Spaces of Exchange and Reinvention

Origins On the Betel Box Hostel food walk in Singapore’s Katong neighbourhood, our next stop is Kim Choo’s main shop/factory in Joo Chiat Place. We watch one of the workers make pork dumplings and then Tony buys a selection of kueh for us to try—shiny red ones with peanuts inside, others covered in yellow coconut, ones with alternat- ing layers of green and milky white jelly, and those round, bright green teatime treats, with coconut all over and palm sugar syrup inside.1 Futures Interviewer [addressing Desmond Wong of Kim Choo]: What made you decide of all the places in Singapore to set up shop here—at Changi Airport’s Terminal 3? Wong: Last year 36 million people passed through Changi Airport and to me that translates [as] terrific business. . . . We are the first and only Peranakan restaurant in the airport and we are planning to expand overseas, so that this is actually a great platform for us to expand awareness . . . over what Peranakan cuisine is all about.2

It seems a long way from that sultry Singapore night of Tony Tan’s food walk (the distinctive flavors from back-street businesses lingering in the crumbs we licked from our fingers) to the cool depths of Singapore’s

123 124 CHAPTER 5

Changi Airport’s Terminal 3. Here, among the fast-food giants such as Burger King, McDonald’s, Coffee Club, and Hard Rock Cafe, the “local” is reinvented as tourist novelty. And yet the distance is not so far, after all. Hungry for other cultures, we can visit the source of one of Singapore’s traditional foods, hear the story that is now the stuff of legend, and walk the streets that are, symbolically at least, associated with Singapore Peranakans. Then, only a short taxi trip away, as global travelers we purchase, “in elegant looking boxes,” morsels of Peranakan culinary “heritage” to take home; or, in nostalgic remembrance of times past (even if these memories are not our own), we eat dumplings at Kim Choo’s cafe on the concourse: “One can smell the faint, fragrant scent of pandan leaves before you can sink your teeth in. . . . The fillings . . . [are] made up of finely chopped lean meat that tastes like meat floss in your mouth. Sipping a cup of fragrant, hot tea would further bring out the exquisite taste of the dumplings.”3 The beguiling narrative of ba chang (rice dumplings) brings me (Jean) back to the neighborhood of Katong.4 I have been here before, following other food trails. Most recently, I have been teasing out some of the mixed origins of laksa, a Chinese-based dish localized in South- east Asia through the addition of distinctive Malay ingredients.5 In Sin- gapore, laksa is traditionally associated with the Peranakan community, and this dish is found, famously, in the cafes and hawker stalls of the Joo Chiat/Katong neighborhood on Singapore’s east coast. At the same time, the taste and aroma of laksa is pervasive in Singapore’s collective imaginary. Like those other culinary icons we mentioned in the previous chapter—Hainan chicken rice and fish head curry, for example— laksa has become a quintessential symbol of Singapore belonging and identity. It even has been borrowed as a national dish by “non-Asian” parts of the region, such as Australia.6 The search for laksa represents earlier travels and writing, nevertheless. This time I am setting out on the trail of ba chang, to construct a specific chronology of its many “lives”—as everyday hawker food for Singapore workers, as a cafe snack, as traditional tastes to be preserved, as commodified nostalgia for the tourist trade. Then I want to use the food product itself and its embedded history (of people, places, historical moments, rituals, exigencies, opportunities, risks, and serendipity) as a prism to reverse the gaze. Instead of serving primarily as an account of successful entrepreneurialism or of beckoning touristic potential, the DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 125 recent history of ba chang (particularly in its Peranakan manifestations in Kim Choo’s kitchen and factory) raises questions about meanings of heritage and the remaking of Singapore’s urban landscapes. So, ba chang, as material culture in a microcosm, will be put to work. I position these homely dumplings in a wider narrative of changing food- scapes in Katong—a narrative that includes struggles over dominant meanings of place and competing claims for ownership of these meanings. Perhaps, then, through the stories and imagery of ba chang, we might see ways to rethink the preservation of heritage, especially in regard to those traditions with mixed and fluid origins. Furthermore, from the streets of Katong, we might be tempted to redefine tradition itself, identifying challenges that such “spaces of indeterminacy”7 in increasingly globalized societies offer, to both the memorialization and erasure of collective remembering. In other words, how are traditions to be kept in this rapidly changing world, and, perhaps more critically, why should they be sustained? Before tracing the story hinted in this chapter’s title, however (along the lines of “from banyan tree to Terminal 3”), it is necessary to set the scene for the action. This scene setting has two dimensions: a brief history of Singapore’s Peranakan community and a walking tour through Katong for a contemporary geospatial/sensorial portrait of place that is popularly and publically known as home to this community. My walks through Katong initially took place at a time of discussions among local shopkeepers and members of heritage associations in regard to initiatives to develop a designated historical site—Peranakan Town—in the neighborhood.8 Since then, the area has indeed been declared Singapore’s first Heritage Town.9 So, given these recent developments, it seems pertinent to ask: Who are Peranakans, and why and how does Katong as a place resonate with significance for this community?

MAPPING PERANAKAN CULTURES IN KATONG

Singapore’s Peranakan Chinese community has a long and distinctive history. Compared to the Hainanese and Tamil Muslim Malaysians whose identity, cuisine, and food establishments reflect the processes of migrant adaptation, Peranakan Chinese identity in Malaysia and Singa- 126 CHAPTER 5 pore has undergone a more extensive and perhaps more complete process of integration and creolization, as the community in Melaka traces its ancestry back to the seventeenth century and to intermarriages/co- habitation between Baba Chinese men and local Melaka women back then.10 The Peranakan Chinese or Baba–Nyonya identity is “an indigenized Chinese identity” symbolized by adoption and adaptation of Ma- lay language, fashion, methods of food preparation (including the use of specific local ingredients), and betel nut chewing.11 Peranakan men were known as “Baba” and the women, “Nyonya.” Peranakan is a Malay word meaning “local-born” and is used to describe the Babas of Melaka and Singapore (more so than those in Penang). At the same time, these Peranakans practiced ancestor worship, observed Chinese festivals and Hokkien wedding and funeral rituals, and sent their children to English schools in the twentieth century.12 Often conflated with the name Straits Chinese, the Babas were local-born (as opposed to foreign-born) Chinese living in the British Straits Settlements of Penang, Melaka, and Singapore (1826–1946). Their English education earned them positions in the colonial civil service, and for their loyalty to the British they were also known as the King’s or Queen’s Chinese. This is not to say that other foreign-born Chinese domiciled in the Straits Settlements then could not be called Straits Chinese; likewise, it should be noted that the term Peranakan does not apply only to Chinese Peranakans but also to other groups (for example, Indian Peranakans and Portuguese Perana- kans) on the principle of their “mixed” marriages in which “foreign” males marry “local” females.13 However, the attribution of Peranakan identity to specific Southeast Asian communities has become controversial in a number of respects, and the debate continues.14 Tan Chee-Beng compellingly argues that intermarriage between Chinese men and local women in Melaka and Singapore (as strongholds of Peranakan Chinese culture) effectively ceased after the end of the nineteenth century, due to increasing immigration of Chinese women to Malaya and Singapore.15 Tan continues: “Today . . . the Babas generally marry among themselves and with other Chinese. Babas are localized Chinese who see themselves as different from the now mainstream Chinese-speaking Chinese.”16 From this argument then, it seems that, for recent times, one is Peranakan Chinese solely by descent and cultural heritage, rather than by forms of cross-cultural marriage observed and remembered in one’s DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 127 own lifetime or in the lifetimes of parents or grandparents. Neverthe- less, the term Peranakan continues to be problematic, often equated with “local-born Chinese,” despite, as Tan has indicated, Peranakans wanting to assert their difference. Interestingly though, according to Wang, there may be an argument for adopting this broader definition anyway (“Singapore could be a place where post-national kinds of Chi- neseness could be accepted by China”17). What exactly is the heritage, then, of these so-called postnational Peranakans in Singapore? Compared to the golden era of “the King’s Chinese”—the second half of the nineteenth century, when Peranakans held considerable economic, political, and social standing in colonial society—the twentieth century seems haunted by echoes of waning influence. According to Wong, “[T]he decline of British power after the Second World War led to a corresponding decline in the Peranakan community, that had lost much of its material culture during the 1940s and 1950s.”18 Likewise, Chew observes:

[M]any Peranakans . . . lost their wealth in the Great Depression of 1929, and the Chinese-educated community rose in power in the wake of the loss of colonial authority in 1942 . . . and the rise of Chinese nationalism and Communist China after 1949. By the culture wars of the 1960s, the visible and material aspects of the Baba/ Nyonya culture began to look like they should be preserved rather than developed.19

By the mid-1970s, the increasing urgency to preserve a seemingly dying culture caused Mrs. Lee, mother of the Singapore Republic’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, to produce Mrs Lee’s Cookbook: Nonya Recipes and Other Favourite Recipes. In it, Mama Lee comments re- gretfully on the disappearance of the traditional “secrets” of Nyonya cuisine from Peranakan households, along with the loss of the distinctiveness of Peranakan identity (“Our Nonya food . . . one day may be a thing of the past. . . . We Straits-born Chinese are no longer a separate group, but instead we are all Singaporeans”20). This sense of a visibly fading culture, particularly in the streets of Katong and Joo Chiat, was to persist. Although the neighborhood had long been distinguished by “a significant presence of Peranakans and Eurasians,”21 in more recent years this presence had become less obvious. With Singapore’s shifts in population (due to urban development 128 CHAPTER 5 since the 1970s and changing demographics) and with changing attitudes to traditional practices, the streets of Katong, visibly, became less “Peranakan” or “Eurasian.” Kong and Chang describe this process during the later years of the twentieth century:

With modernisation and its various effects (some moved out of Joo Chiat, others felt tradition to be a shackle rather than a heritage). . . . Peranakan culture faced a threat, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s. While the physical architectural forms remained in Koon Seng Road and . . . [elsewhere in the neighborhood], other traits and practices were in decline. Kebaya [traditional fitted jackets or blouses worn by women] were seldom worn, kasut manik [intricately beaded shoes] were discarded, and the younger generation rarely spoke the patois that their parents knew.22

On the other hand, continue Kong and Chang, the 1980s and 1990s saw a renewed interest in Peranakan culture, especially with the revival of the Peranakan Association and the extension of its membership and activities.23 Today the association offers membership to anyone with a “passion for the culture.”24 In other words, in the spirit of the Perana- kan musical Siapa Baba?, everyone can be a Peranakan in one’s heart (or so we are told in the performance’s closing moments).25 So, with this mythic tale of Peranakan decline and rebirth in my head, together with those exhortations to preserve or revive a “dying” culture—through themed restaurants and preparation of iconic dishes; television series such as The Little Nyonya,26 and theater performances; shops and galleries promoting traditional arts and artifacts27—I now want to walk once again through Katong’s familiar streets. My project is to examine the neighborhood’s built landscapes, not only as the symbolic home of the Peranakan community, with its cultures of architecture, art, design, fashion, and cuisine, but also as Singapore’s acknowledged culinary heart. The east coast, with Katong as its epicenter, as Mok reminds us, is celebrated as the nation’s kitchen (“a potluck of authentic dishes dotingly cooked up by the island’s diverse Peranakan, Eurasian, Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures”).28 Here, in “this former seaside village [that] still retains its rich heritage,”29 I hope to find, at a visceral level, traces of the ways memory, history, memorialization, and erasure operate, not only in intimate spaces of that village but also, via Changi, in the movement of people and goods to the world beyond. DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 129

SENSING KATONG IN STUCCO DRAGONS AND PINEAPPLE TARTS

Imagine a return to 2008. In Singapore I am staying in Geylang in Lorong 41 (Lane 41). This is fortunate, or so I am told by local residents. Apparently, even-numbered lorongs (particularly those between Lorong 16 and Lorong 24) form the heart of the city’s red-light district. At night, these traditional spaces of the sex industry are busy with legal trade at state-registered brothels and with illegal soliciting outside these—in the streets or in nearby bars, clubs, and massage parlors.30 Meanwhile, if we walk east in the opposite direction we will reach the heart of Geylang (officially, Geylang Serai). Here, among the suburb’s markets, hawker centers, shopping centers, and high-rise housing, is the Malay Village as a nostalgic representation of Malay-Indonesian kampung life (“an imagined Malay rural idyll”31). Nearby, after dark, the tourist-authority-sponsored annual night bazaar—in a large tent fes- tooned with colored lights—pumps out music since it is the month of Ramadan.32 Turn right now and begin to follow Joo Chiat Road in the direction of the east coast, and soon you will be walking toward the historic heart of the Peranakan community: the district of Katong. On the way, the Lonely Planet guide book tells us, there is much to beguile the senses:

Despite restoration the streetscape [of Joo Chiat Road] has largely escaped development. Several fine Peranakan terraces remain intact, providing some atmosphere of old Singapore . . . . On Koon Seng Rd, just off Joo Chiat Rd are some of the finest Peranakan terraces in Singapore. They exhibit the typical Peranakan love of ornate design; they are decorated with plaster stucco dragons, birds, crabs and bril- liantly glazed tiles.33

Such appeals to revel in the aesthetic lushness of the streetscape are not uncommon in tourist literature focusing on the neighborhoods of Joo Chiat and Katong; for example, “The multi-hued pastels colours of . . . [renovated shophouses’] facades can brighten a cloudy day,”34 or “Feast your eyes on exquisite architecture. . . . The colourful Peranakan culture and influence can be seen in two rows of pre-war shophouses along Koon Seng Road. . . . The designs are exceptionally ornate and the details exquisite, showcasing a fusion of East and West influences.”35 130 CHAPTER 5

Meanwhile Where Singapore, a periodical devoted to promoting the city as a destination of cultural tourism, omits direct reference to Peran- akans/Straits Chinese from its discussion of hawker food by ethnic group and from its description of Singapore’s ethnic neighborhoods but later lists examples of Straits Chinese restaurants in the category of “local” as well as identifying Katong as an “area of interest”:36 “East of Singapore[’s central business area], just 10 minutes from the beach, the former home of the Straits Chinese community remains one of the last neighbourhoods to feature the splendid architecture of old Singapore. Katong also has a reputation for being a local food haven.”37 “[A]tmosphere,” “ornate,” “brilliant,” “exquisite,” “colourful,” “splendid”—these and other rapturous descriptors command the walker to marvel at these micro-landscapes of Peranakan heritage. This architectural legacy becomes, in turn, a marker of Katong’s distinctiveness38 (along with those other objects of material culture on a more intimate scale, such as porcelain, kebayas, and beaded slippers, proudly displayed in specialty shops, such as the gallery above Kim Choo’s Kitch- en; Rumah Bebe, a business famous for its beadwork; and the Katong Antique House, presided over by Peter Wee, the community’s acknowledged keeper of Peranakan culture39). However, while treasured examples of Peranakan fine arts and the conserved fabric of Peranakans’ prewar-built environment in Katong are celebrated, perhaps wistfully, as quaint signs of disappearing cultures, the association of this district with the traditional tastes, textures, and aromas of Nyonya cooking is a narrative perpetually re-created in the present.40 Searching for the distinctive tastes of Peranakan cuisine in Katong/ Joo Chiat, I find there is any number of small businesses ready to oblige. I have visited these before, when temporarily living in Singa- pore, and later in writing about these.41 The well-trodden laksa trail has taken me into Chilli Padi and Guan Hoe Soon, for example, as I am lured by promises of such “authentic” Peranakan dishes as ayam bua kuluak, a chicken curry cooked with hard nuts that contain a delicious truffle-like filling; into Glory with its kaya (coconut jam) and sambals and “the most variety of Nonya kuehs you can find in Singapore,” and into the shop of Saint Francis Enterprises for Nyonya pineapple tarts, pickles, and rempah (spice paste).42 Further along East Coast Road, we will find a cluster of cafes selling Katong laksa, their competing claims to originality and authenticity—to being “true” and “the first,” histori- DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 131 cally speaking—reaching a climax in the “laksa wars” of the late 1990s. The advertising and street signage for my favorite stall declares “Marine Parade Laksa is the original Katong Laksa” and that this business offers the “true version of the authentic Peranakan dish” and has “more than 50 years’ experience in serving best nonya laksa.” However, it would be a mistake to conclude that Katong functions exclusively as a Peranakan stronghold, its food businesses operated only by “real” Peranakans. Firstly, the growth of designated Peranakan restaurants might be seen as inversely proportional to a Peranakan presence in the neighborhood. As Kong and Chang comment, “[Now] Per- anakan cuisine is served up in restaurants such as Guan Hoe Soon and Peranakan Inn, which never would have happened in the days when the Peranakan presence was strong. Going to a restaurant would have been an insult.”43 Secondly, assumptions of Peranakan ownership and staff in Perana- kan-themed businesses ignore the degree to which Peranakan food was

Figure 5.1. Dumplings, kueh, and other Peranakan snacks at Glory Food, East Coast Road, Katong. Photographed by Jean Duruz. 132 CHAPTER 5 prepared and sold by others—instances of marrying in to Peranakan families, of working for Peranakan households and acquiring knowledge of their typical dishes, and of interethnic neighborly exchanges of traditional food and recipes were not uncommon. As a result, “Katong itself comes to signify an ‘authentic’ place of ‘borrowings,’”44 an argument to which I shall return at a later point. Thirdly, of course, Peranakan food represents only one cuisine in the potluck of Katong’s traditional culinary offerings, with many of these being reworked for changing markets and, more recently, new cuisines being added to the mix:

[W]hile food traditions of the district’s various ethnic groups have been maintained, recently these traditions, according to Kong and Chang, have been interpreted “in different, more upmarket ways.” As well, many “new” cuisines have made their appearance . . . [including] Western/Chinois, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Thai and Japa- nese, “as well as ‘familiar favourites’ Häagen-Dazs, Pizza Hut, Ken- tucky Fried Chicken, Temptations Cake Shop, Begawan Solo [a chain of Peranakan cake shops], The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Coffee Club.” While such cuisines/businesses are certainly not exclusive to Katong, and, indeed, are emblematic of Singapore’s “new” cosmopolitanism. . . . Kong and Chang stress that “in Joo Chiat, it is the unique mix [of food outlets] and concentration in a geographical- ly small area and the long period of association [some have] . . . with the area that make it distinctive.”45

One of the Peranakan businesses with a “long period of association” with Joo Chiat/Katong is Kim Choo Kueh Chang. This business appears to fit Kong and Chang’s category of maintaining traditions in “different, more upmarket ways.” Pausing inside this business, I want to tease out questions of culture maintenance and cultural entrepreneurialism in a quintessentially mixed neighborhood: What does it mean to work in a family business located in a district of Singapore where Peranakan food is one taste among many, and where Katong itself has become a recognizable brand? How is culture reworked and repackaged, both in the spaces of the “village” of Katong itself, and for markets beyond its borders? Is tradition in fact “dying” after all, or subject instead to processes of revitalization? DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 133

UNDER THE BANYAN TREE

The business that I am now entering is one that combines a food outlet, selling typical Peranakan snacks such as ba chang (of these, the specialty is the Nyonya variety of rice dumplings, wrapped in pandan leaves), otah-otah (fish steamed in pandan leaves), pineapple tarts, and other kueh, with a restaurant next door. The restaurant is furnished with marble-topped tables and displays of Peranakan porcelain, and offers a menu of traditional dishes. Upstairs is a gallery of Peranakan crafts, together with a small demonstration cooking area—this is where visitors watch the making of ba chang. Although this particular branch of Kim Choo was only established in 2003, the business itself has a long lineage, dating back to 1945 and to its founder, the almost mythical Madam Lee Kim Choo who, at the age of twelve, “first learnt her grandmother’s secret recipe for making Nonya rice dumplings.”46 This story is displayed prominently on the walls of the restaurant, while upstairs in the gallery it is possible to watch a “live media show” that includes archival images of the business and its founder. Raymond Wong, one of Madam Kim Choo’s grandsons, is currently the director of the gallery, while Helen Lim, Raymond’s mother (of Chinese background who “married in” to this Peranakan family), is one of the company’s managing directors. Dressed in a kebaya, Helen Lim appears at public functions, such as Singapore Food Safari (a local food trade fair), as the contemporary face of the business, having inherited the mantle of Madam Lee Kim Choo. During an interview with Raymond, I learned details of this business’s history:47

Raymond: Just after the war, World War II, my grandmother [then aged twelve years] was selling Nonya kuehs [at a little stall, here in Katong] with her maternal grandmother. . . . [A]t different times of the year . . . [they] would actually . . . do different food. . . . So if, for example, Chinese New Year you will need kueh bakol which is those kind of sticky brown cakes, rice cakes. And huat kueh [steamed cake] for Goddess Guan Yin’s birthday. . . . However, after she [my grandmother] was married, she supported the family by selling Nyonya food under the banyan tree. . . . Back then, she was serving like Peranakan food, like curry vegetables (sayur lodeh) and sambal prawns. . . . [Her 134 CHAPTER 5

Figure 5.2. From banyan tree to Terminal 3, Kim Choo’s Kitchen, East Coast Road, Katong. Photographed by Jean Duruz.

decision to focus particularly on] Peranakan rice dumplings was around the 1960s. . . .

Jean: So was it mostly Peranakan people who were buying the food, do you think?

Raymond: Surprisingly, Peranakan food is quite popular, not just among the Peranakan community. It was also popular with the local Chinese and Eurasians that were staying all around Joo Chiat in Ka- tong area.

In the 1970s, however, with increasing government pressure on street hawkers to move to fixed premises (as we saw in chapter 4), Madam Kim Choo, says Raymond, “had no choice but to rent a stall in a coffee shop and . . . [to sell] her dumplings and some Nonya kuehs there.” Business continued to prosper, and during the 1990s, Madam Kim Choo was able to purchase the stall next door to the coffee shop. This DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 135 site (60 Joo Chiat Place) was the first of several outlets established in the district, and today remains the heart of this family business. From here, Kim Choo products emerge, not only to satisfy the yearnings of customers in Katong and in the rest of Singapore but those of global markets as well: “For our overseas visitors, Kim Choo is a perfect place for them to pick up well-known local goodies for their friends and relatives back home to get a taste of local culture and tastes.”48 To facilitate international tourists’ purchase of such goodies, in 2008 the company opened its first franchise at Changi’s Terminal 3. In so doing (if we recall Desmond Wong’s comment from the opening quotation), it also hoped to create “a great platform . . . to expand awareness . . . over what Peranakan cuisine is all about.”49 Certainly, this is a beguiling story of imagination and resourceful- ness—a story of local necessity, exchanges across cultures, and business expansion to acquire global reach (from the banyan tree to the world, in effect). It is also a story of cultural commodification, in the spirit of Peranakan traditions of entrepreneurialism,50 and perhaps, too, a story of reworking approaches to traditional cooking, along the lines of Kong and Chang’s “different, more upmarket ways.” Nevertheless, there are a couple of less predictable threads that I wish to draw from Raymond’s account that emerged during interview moments when conversation and reflections shifted from his more usual task of narrating the business’s history as a practiced performance for customer audiences. These threads identify some ambivalence surrounding “culture selling”—particularly in regard to attempts to shape urban neighborhoods to fit tourism’s dominant narratives. They also capture traces of nostalgia for the village—for ways of life that, contradictorily, provide both the foundational imagery for this family business’s narrative of progress and a sense of disruption, even threat, to this narrative through the presence of developments in Katong. Here, developments might include the introduction of those “new” cuisines in competition with the “old” ones, or that noticeable burgeoning of the sex industry—locally known as “sleaze”—in nearby Geylang, resulting in its expansion within, and beyond, its formerly accepted street boundaries.51 For Raymond, the critical issue for cultural entrepreneurs, particularly in small ethnic businesses like Kim Choo, is achieving the balance between culture maintenance and promotion, on one hand, and commercial viability, on the other. Although such enterprises must clearly 136 CHAPTER 5 provide a livelihood for those involved, together with an adequate economic base for expansion, there is still the possibility, in the course of everyday transactions, for value-added activities and moments: to view shopping and its related acts of production and consumption as a cultural experience that reaches beyond the material exchange of money and goods.52 Raymond explained, “Our main aim is still a business to earn money, but you want your customers to know that, actually, while . . . [they] are here dining, . . . [they] can do something interesting . . . [and it is possible for] your guests to see something cultural.” At this branch of Kim Choo, the “something interesting” and “something cultural” can take a variety of forms, from listening to informal talks on the history, design, and modern uses of kebayas (illustrated with examples from the gift shop’s stock) to watching a ba chang–making demonstration to en- quiring about classes in beading (conducted by Raymond and using his own designs) to a mini-tour of artifacts from the family’s archives, now prominently displayed on the gallery walls. The reach of these activities includes primary and secondary school children, trainee teachers, and teachers, with in-house tours organized to assist children’s project work; local residents who wish to purchase kebayas to wear on more formal or ceremonial occasions (particularly when traveling overseas) or informally in the modern fashion (the em- broidered jacket worn with jeans, for example); Peranakans (and others whose histories are shaped by familiarity with Nyonya cooking) who regularly visit the restaurant to taste the complex flavors of home when too time-poor to produce these themselves; expatriate wives (Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders) who work as volunteers for the Peranakan Museum and who attend briefing sessions at Kim Choo as part of their training; and, of course, tourists, either indepen- dently or as part of organized “Peranakan packages” wanting to learn more about the everyday lives of one of Singapore’s distinctive ethnic groups (“when they come to my place I won’t focus on what they have seen in the museum. I will focus on [current] lifestyle because our Peranakan people are not extinct,” said Raymond). Such activities promoted by this business imply an awareness of culture as a dynamic force that requires creative reinvention for its survival—materially, emotionally—within the spaces of the everyday. As well, survival depends on expansion of reach beyond local Perana- kans of the Katong/Joo Chiat district, not only in a commercial sense DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 137 through the establishment of new niche markets but also philosophical- ly through the building of support for ideologies of inclusivity and culture sharing. (Remember Siapa Baba?’s insistence that everyone can be a Peranakan in one’s heart?) Obviously, small-business proprietors in particular, with their limited profit margins, need to negotiate competing commercial and cultural imperatives. (Raymond at one point explained that the regular takings of the restaurant and food outlet are necessary to sustain many of the business’s more nebulous cultural activities where income is less assured, and certainly more sporadic.) However, there are other concerns for small-business managers, particularly those committed to “selling culture” in ways that define the transactions of the selling more broadly to incorporate their educative possibilities. One of these concerns is the positioning of the business in the political economy of the neighborhood and changes in the neighborhood itself as a place. Unlike Singapore as a whole, Raymond feels that Ka- tong as a neighborhood has managed to retain its reputation for leisure- ly ways of life and a strong sense of community.53 (“The feel of the Peranakan lifestyle, the tempo of the lifestyle is still much similar,” he reflected.) Nevertheless, continued Raymond, the introduction of a “lot of food stalls” that are “not really traditional businesses” has become a “drastic” change in the neighborhood (and that, we presume, intervenes in the district’s feel and tempo). At the same time, local residents are agitating for the containment of a very different traditional mode of work—prostitution—in the area (“cleaning out the sleaze is still a very big effort which is still currently in progress . . . [s]o a lot of people are actually trying to change that kind of situation there,” Raymond commented). These competing interests, of course, produce very different definitions of neighborhood and claims on its spaces. However, for Raymond himself, the greatest threat to his business appears to be overcommercialization of cultural products and excessive thematization of Katong as a place. Tourism, we find, is both a blessing and a curse:

Raymond: [W]e are hoping that now that tourism is slowly coming . . . [to] the Katong area, [to] showcase . . . [the] lifestyle for how we [were] in the past—a lot of the locals are strongly hoping . . . that though we want to see some business and activities around Katong, we don’t want it to become a commercialized area. 138 CHAPTER 5

Jean: Yes. It would be a pity because the mixture is quite interesting.

Raymond: Yes. We prefer it to keep it as organic as possible so that when people come they can actually see what kind of lifestyle we are having over here.

Here, Mrs. Lee’s anxiety about the cultural maintenance of Nyonya cooking and Peranakan traditions in the face of the state’s imperatives to embrace a totalizing national identity suddenly finds a new form. It seems that specific ethnic groups in Singapore do not need to mourn the disappearance of difference. Instead, difference is heightened through its spatialization and celebration in designated neighborhoods and urban villages. Nevertheless, this touristic reinvention of difference promises other kinds of losses. The nearby Malay Village (at that time targeted for demolition and redevelopment) issues a warning for small businesses like Kim Choo.

VILLAGE WAYS

Since the mid-1980s, the Singapore government has pursued policies of managing both multiethnicity and heritage through “extensive programs of demolition [of older, ethnic neighborhoods] for urban renewal.”54 Commentators have been extremely critical of such programs,55 claiming that through this tabula rasa approach to the city’s landscape and built forms, designated areas, such as Geylang Serai, have been “transformed as packaged, stereotypical ‘ethnic districts’ for cultural tourism.”56 From a number of perspectives, the specific project of erasing, and then re-creating, Malay culture in Geylang has been deemed a failure.57 Architecturally, the Malay Village (completed in 1989, though now demolished) represented a pastiche of housing styles pillaged from the Malay Peninsula, its structures performing as an idealized representation of life in the kampung. As such, this model was a poor substitute for vernacular forms familiar to Malay-Indonesian communities living in urban, portside areas of Singapore.58 From perspectives of culture and commerce, the Malay Village fared no better. It tended to be regarded as a sterile theme park and shopping center for busloads of overseas tourists, and had little to do with the nuanced remembrance of residents whose history it purported to conserve and display.59 In fact, DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 139 in the village, this history was sentimentalized to the point that it became not only irrelevant but also offensive. (Its touristic performances, says Imran, included, for example, top-spinning, with the significance accorded to this activity re-creating—in Kong’s words—“an unproble- matic golden past” of lazy days under colonialism.60) Meanwhile, in Tanjong Pagar, part of Singapore’s Chinatown district, it seems that similar erasures of the past—of buildings, people, trades, and activities—have occurred with reinventions in their stead. A “landscape of spectacle” replaces the messier landscapes of the everyday—replaces “the raw nature of community life as once lived in Tanjong Pagar.”61 Interestingly, if we return to Geylang Serai, the rawness of everyday life still surfaces, but in a different location than we would expect:

Ironically, the role of a typical Malay pekan, or market and bazaar district, does live on in Geylang Serai. But it does so, commercially, not as the Malay Village, but in typical modern non-Malay buildings erected by the state, where hawkers and shopkeepers have been relocated.62 Several websites carry unflattering reviews of the Village from back- packers and independent travellers. Published and web travel guides dedicated to independent travellers (as opposed to package-tour participants or “hyper-tourists”) instead celebrate the unpretentious everyday structures of Geylang Serai and recommend visits to its market halls and alleys, brimming with goods and crowded with small shops, itinerant peddlers, and small-scale food vendors.63

As a final nail in the coffin of the village’s reputation as a popular tourist destination, Imran turns to an online city guide. Its readers are advised to “[a]void the Malay Village . . . and head for Geyang Serai, with its brightly painted shophouses and lively fresh produce market.”64 It appears that alternative travelers’ indictment of the village, together with their corresponding endorsement of less contrived, less predictable spaces, could not be more unequivocal.65 Raymond, as a resident and small-business proprietor engaged in “culture selling,” agrees. Like those independent travelers described by Imran, Raymond expressed a preference for “ordinary” life in modernist structures rather than for nostalgic architecture and re-created idylls. During our conversation about the gentrification of selected ethnic 140 CHAPTER 5 neighborhoods in Singapore, he had cause to regret landscape losses engendered by an excess of touristic thematization:

They don’t look real and interesting to people, you know what I mean? So that’s why we hope that we wouldn’t turn into something like that. One fine example [of unsuccessful thematization] is the Malay Village which is [in the neighborhood of] . . . Geylang Serai. The Geylang Serai market is still much intact, the flavor is still there, but when they tried to open up the Malay Village tourism area, it looks like kampung but it’s actually a commercialized shopping area. But the thing is people do not want to come here to see a shopping center that looks like a kampung. They want to see what is people’s lifestyle. Just like when I go to Australia I want to see how is life in the farm-stay or go to the Aborigines’ villages [sic; communities] and see their artefacts that reflects the local lifestyle.

In these reflections, Raymond referenced (in its absence) the spirit of Peranakan culture—a culture, we recall, he had already described as “not extinct,” “organic,” as a living “lifestyle” in contrast to a memorialized past. Hence, it is not surprising that daily transactions in the market—everyday rituals of cultural belonging, relationships, and exchanges—produce, for him, an intensity of “flavor.” This, for him, is in direct contrast to the feel of transactions in the faux village—negotiations with a mythologized past in fancy dress so that this village, at the end of the day, performed purely as another site of globalized capital. On the other hand (and remembering Imran’s “ironically” in relation to a “typical Malay pekan”), we should note that what is unusual here, perhaps, are the ways in which certain relationships, certain ways of life, manage to retain their flavor in less-expected settings. Here, these “ways of operating”66 rooted in family and community histories survive the transfer to modernist structures and, in turn, become routinely embedded in these. And it is possible that over time these sites, now transformed from alien into settings of familiar rituals, practices, and exchanges, might themselves become the focus of nostalgia.67 Imran expresses this argument differently, but his position, I suspect, would not be incompatible with the resonances of Raymond’s wanting to share his own lifestyle and to discover “how life is” for other people. According to Imran: DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 141

[State] reinvention [of “ethnic districts”] results in a deemphasising of the significance of alternative, vernacular contexts of interethnic discourse; or better still, in a re-presentation of them as ethnically pure identities in the name of cultural tourism. Ethnic affiliation is thus restructured from being fundamentally behavioural (embedded in living culture) to being ideological (tied to a set of designated symbols).68

So, if we now retrace our steps to the “lively fresh produce market” of Geylang Serai, I suggest it is not only its hustle and bustle, its sensory geographies, the fascination of other people’s ordinariness, and their daily rituals that make this site so attractive, particularly for cultural tourists. Like the laksa stalls of Katong, the market of Geylang Serai performs as a place of “alternative, vernacular contexts of interethnic discourse.” This is a place, of course, with its own sense of order (with religion and ethnic affiliation, for example, defining the positioning of stalls and their goods, acceptances and taboos in regard to certain dishes and ingredients, cultural rules about cooking methods adopted, practices of eating/not eating together, and of utensil care and use).69 Nevertheless, in the market as a site where communities come together in shared spaces, there is potential for mixing across dimensions of age, generation, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, or at least acknowledging boundaries and negotiating any spaces of give in these.70 In this way, the market not only echoes the mixed character of the neighborhood but also (in this unlikely set of buildings) perhaps it nostalgically references relations of the kampung more assuredly than the state is able to do or imagine. Nevertheless, while the Malay Village might have provided an inadequate reference to a disappearing way of life in Singapore, the image of the kampung and its relations is a haunting presence in the neighborhood’s cultural remembrance. Rita Fernando, who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Kampong Hajijah in nearby Siglap, recalls:

When you had that kind of lifestyle, mixing with the villagers or your neighbours who were of different races, you also absorbed their food. . . . We were not particular. We ate Chinese food, Malay food, Indian food, Western food . . . we were not fussy. . . . [W]e just lived as kampong people and neighbours and we shared whatever we had. If somebody plucked coconuts from their tree and there were 100 142 CHAPTER 5

coconuts, each house would probably get five or six, and if someone cut down a bunch of bananas, again he would cut off the combs and share them with the people around. . . . And because the children intermingled so freely and the adults also did, the kampung spirit was so very much alive. As I said, we were one big happy family.71

While this might seem a utopian fantasy and romanticized place- defined identity (“we just lived as kampong people”), born of nostalgia for childhood and, in this case, a semirural past (one in which one grew one’s own coconuts and bananas, and shared not only produce but also time and companionship freely with neighbors, and across ethnic boundaries), the sense of loss is palpable among residents of Katong. Kong and Phua, interviewing both the neighborhood’s insiders (residents) and outsiders (nonresidents), conclude that a number of factors miti- gate against the continuance of the kampung relations of sharing and interethnic exchange: increased affluence, and with it long working hours and more concern with class, income, and purchase of consumer goods rather than neighborly relations; broadening social networks to include island-wide friendships and meanings of belonging; specific government policies directed toward bolstering all-Singaporean identities (rather than prioritizing ethnic or neighborhood identities), such as the promotion of national motifs and the “speak Mandarin” campaign.72 Raymond agreed that the neighborhood has suffered a loss, describing this in terms of a weakening of “the kampung effect”:

Raymond: Kampung is, first when you’re staying in a kampung area, like this area, everybody’s living side-by-side. Everybody’s so friendly and heart-warmingly welcoming. But what happened is this kampung effect really disappeared in Singapore when HDB starts coming up [Housing Development Board high-rise public housing]73 and people that you know all are broken up into areas [and move to] . . . different areas of Singapore, and there’s . . . certain people that you do not know [in the neighborhood with] . . . you—that’s where you really lose that kampung effect when you are always friendly with your neighbors, and when . . . you can enjoy everything [together]. DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 143

Jean: Do you think it’s coming back, that kampung effect? I just wondered now, you know, like it’s been thirty, forty years since the first HDB [blocks] were built.

Raymond: The kampung effect is still quite prominent in Perana- kans and Eurasians and some Peranakan Indians. But for the purist Chinese, I’d say it might not be so open. I can only say that. The thing is, there are now more Chinese than our group, so . . . you won’t be able to feel that kind of warmness easily.

In this remembering, the historical image of “one big happy family” suffers disruption. Government housing initiatives in Katong have resulted in different cultures (with their different, seemingly alien, ways of expressing “warmth”) becoming more prominent in the residential mix. In turn, these shifting neighborhood dynamics produce moments of tension. Kong and Chang, nevertheless, are cautiously optimistic about the survival of “old ways.” In relation to Joo Chiat, they conclude: “There is something of the old and the new in the place, but the old and new do meet, albeit sometimes in uneasy ways, at other times, in convivial ways. The Joo Chiat of today is a living legacy of the past—kept alive through the everyday experiences of ordinary people.”74 This implies, however, that Raymond’s “organic” cultures, although maintaining sufficient flex- ibility to survive in modern times, at the same time still need to be rooted in memories, rituals, and material practices for their sustenance. Hence, Raymond’s adapting the business of “selling culture” to meet the challenges of globalization contradictorily does so through referencing this culture’s origins in a family’s treasured historical narrative:

Jean: [It all] feels so homely. I mean, it’s partly because it’s a family business and everyone’s involved, but even the café, it feels like eating in your house. Do you know what I mean? Because it’s very small-scale and intimate, and you have your family artifacts on the walls and even the things for the gift shop are, again, very homely.

Raymond: We arranged it like what you do would in your house. We don’t always commercialize [the] package. . . . That’s what we are trying to give people, that kind of feel [of our home] so that they can feel cozy when they are here. 144 CHAPTER 5

Nevertheless, remembering takes different forms—and, perhaps, more nebulous ones than attempts to re-create specific material and emotional contexts. Drawing on the example of Geylang Serai’s market, we might speculate that, through the mobility of memory, the spirit of everyday exchanges, negotiated within certain built structures and landscapes, can survive transplantation to new sites. While Raymond assumes the removal of people to Housing Development Board high-rise public housing blocks fragments the “kampung effect,” it is possible that, in this new setting, creative tactics are employed to sustain old ways when the spaces from which these ways emerged are erased or are, at least, under threat:

Beneath the dwelling configurations in Singapore’s housing estates, however, residents routinely “borrow” or appropriate public property or space for their own private use. The détournement of prefabricat- ed architectural elements and spaces arises from creative adaptations made by the residents within the planning grid. The unprogrammed, “empty” spaces within the housing block are used daily as waiting and pickup points for school children, and the elderly bring lounge chairs and potted plants to create their own special enclaves. Chess, table tennis, badminton and break-dancing are not excluded. Funer- al wakes and wedding banquets are equally welcomed and tolerated. . . . In a reflexive way the HDB has even learnt from some of these practices and incorporated them into later planning strategies.75

Lai Ah Eng agrees, presenting a similar portrait of village ways trans- planted to the housing blocks of Marine Parade (a neighborhood adjacent to Joo Chiat and Katong). With her children growing up in a HDB flat facing the sea, and her own research focusing on interethnic exchanges between the residents of the estate, Lai offers an ethnographic and creative challenge to those who might want to mourn the supposedly disappearing “kampung effect”:

In the public–private housing divide that has come to characterise Singapore class society, public housing residents are commonly viewed as a homogeneous lot of “heartlanders” (as opposed to “cosmopolitans”) that lives in “pigeonholes” in uniform and unaesthetic high-rise blocks of flats in somewhat inauthentic communities. What I show and discuss is about how ordinary people go about their lives DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 145

meaningfully both because of and despite the planned housing environment, contrary to the common view that such an environment that has replaced the older village or urban street settlement is standard, sterile and starved of spontaneous, organic and interesting life. My focus on people as active agents in their ordinary lives also offers insights into living cultures . . . beyond those [insights of planners focused] on old buildings/sites, designs and built environments which currently tend to dominate in local heritage discourse.76

The study that follows contains a rich and thick description of exchanges between residents in the playground, in the games court, and at the local hawker center and kopitiam; descriptions of residents’ talking politics, storytelling, and joking; accounts of wedding and funeral celebrations in the shared spaces of housing blocks’ voids; documentation of delicate negotiations with difference, particularly in terms of ethnic and religious differences; and reflections on moments of empathy, on those of tension. It seems that here, in Marine Parade, relations of the kampung are alive and well, after all. Lai is adamant, however, that her study does not represent a return, via nostalgia, to old days and old ways. (After all, “if we could return to that past, would we like it?”77) Instead, it becomes a resettling of village relations within HDB settings, though, of necessity, accommodating new people and exigencies. Nevertheless, this transplantation is not achieved without loss or without a watchful critique of the new home:

I have never met residents who lament the demise of the village bucket latrine even if they are nostalgic about past kampung days, but I have many residents who lament top-down and distant decision-making by “them.” . . . Many a local anecdote from various heartland neighbourhoods jokingly or angrily tell of out of sync building designs, shady trees cut down, favourite meeting spots removed and citizens’ vegetable plots demolished without . . . consulta- tion.78

So, while relations of the kampung might be transferred, via the agency of ordinary people, to the seemingly austere spaces of the HDB block, it seems these relations are continually contested. Not surprisingly, there are tensions within but, perhaps, an even greater challenge from outside—from the “them” of officialdom—national and local government, planning professionals, consultative bodies. For this project of 146 CHAPTER 5

“tasting Katong,” the question that persists is whether Raymond’s neighborhood business, vested in the organic, embedded lifestyles, generational memory, and intercultural exchange, can survive the shifts in place making and remaking in Singapore. The ghost of a response, I suspect, haunts from the future—whether planned or spontaneous—of Katong itself.

DUMPLINGS OF INDETERMINACY?

Returning to Kim Choo’s kitchen and food outlet, and to the delectable dumplings for a final bite, we seem to have come full circle. The business, thorough its website, promotes continuity of tradition as a significant trope:

Kim Choo Nyonya Dumplings has been a mainstay in Singapore’s diverse epicurean tapestry for over 60 years. . . . But more important . . . [than rich taste and fragrance] is its ability to preserve the tradition, unyielding to the hands of time and untainted by the modern. A taste so rich with heritage, it unravels decades of hard work and perseverance.79

While the above is certainly integral to a narrative of reassurance, it also begs the question of tradition under threat. In the discourse of “to preserve,” “heritage,” “unyielding,” and “untainted” lurks the ghosts of its opposite: ghosts of a frightening world that is indeed rapidly changing, appearing to lose its sense of stable origins and traditional values, easily corrupted by the mad race of modernity. Ironically, the business itself, as Raymond’s account demonstrates, has been up to the task of addressing the challenges posed by global capital, especially in relation to “culture selling”; it has proved flexible, creative, and entrepreneurial as it meets the demands of changing markets. Nevertheless, at its heart is the narrative of core values that has survived the moves from Madam Lee’s childhood hawking to the company’s current global aspirations. This, in fact, is the commodity to be preserved, as much as the taste of the dumplings or the details of their “secret” recipe. This mixed dynamic of looking backwards to the comforts of tradition while looking forwards to meet global challenges might be said to characterize Katong itself. This is a neighborhood that prides itself in its DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 147 tangled roots and that has, to some extent, eluded the fixing of time and place in an essentialist narrative of Peranakan culture. At the same time, however, this is a neighborhood with a history of erasure of time and place through, for example, the construction of a fantasy village for tourist consumption. With their rapidly changing landscapes yet ones rich in nostalgic references (including those changes actually engendered by nostalgia marketing), Katong, and its neighboring Joo Chiat and Geylang, might be seen to occupy a unique position in Singapore’s urban redevelopment and heritage conservation. As William Lim, prominent Singapore architect and urban theorist, points out in re- ponse to Koolhaas’s trenchant criticisms of Singapore’s state policies of demolition and rebuilding:

Contrary to what Rem Koolhaas suggests, tabula rasa in Singapore is not complete. . . . [T]here are still numerous locations and sites of varied sizes with indefinable, evolving complexity, hybridity and ter- ritoriality, such as Geylang and Joo Chiat. I use the term “spaces of indeterminacy” to describe them. Geylang is a chaotic, rugged district, teaming with traditional eateries, fruit sellers and other small businesses. . . . On the surface, Joo Chiat appears quieter and more gentrified. Establishments such as a wine cellar, an upmarket furniture shop as well as a disco have made their way into the traditional residential enclave of the Straits Chinese. In actual fact, Joo Chiat, with its numerous shophouses, some beautifully conserved, others dilapidated, has withstood rapid usage changes, and is characterised by mixed usage and fragmented spatial arrangements. In both Joo Chiat and Geylang, local residents, newly immigrant communities as well as prostitutes and the customers are equally visible on the rugged urbanscape. Spaces of indeterminacy are anchored in the postmodern; pluralistic, fuzzy and complex.80

Of course, as my arguments here have indicated, Katong’s “indeterminacy” has strong historical roots in village ways and relationships. To date, these have been diverse and flexible enough to survive dramatic changes in the neighborhood’s built form. Lim is hopeful that the refu- sal of such spaces to be overly determined will continue:

In Singapore the creative activities of the non-complying minority and the energy generated in spaces of indeterminacy are essential catalytic substances towards the formation of a distinctive Singapor- 148 CHAPTER 5

ean culture and urban identity with its own peculiarities. They stand as firm attestations of the persistence of memories of spaces, of instances of people reclaiming the space they live in and of plural alternatives to Singapore’s story of nation building that have all but been eradicated by tabula rasa.81

It will be interesting to see how the recent designation of the neighborhood as a heritage precinct shapes the future of Katong/Joo Chiat.82 Will development of this neighborhood continue to reflect its mixed nature and mobility while retaining its flavor (and here, we are haunted by Raymond’s “not extinct,” “organic,” a living “lifestyle”)? Meanwhile, Kim Choo’s dumplings, whether purchased near the site of Madam Kim Choo’s mythical banyan tree or from the transit spaces of Terminal 3, taste delicious to the last bite. Their story, however, while offering the comforts of almost-myth, also contains ambivalent elements. An- swers to questions such as: Will the story survive? And in what form? would seem to depend not so much on the guarding of a pure tradition. Instead, I suggest, for those concerned with foodways and heritage, and, critically, the politics of these, there is a need to unravel tradition’s many-stranded origins, to value the “persistence of memories of spaces,” and to foster a commitment to plural possibilities that meanings of indeterminacy and mixed heritage might offer. So from this chapter, it seems that here in Katong village, ways and food are not necessarily lost or erased but reworked for new, global–local settings. The relationship, however, is always a fragile one, and constantly under negotiation. For the moment, competing discourses— for example, of urban renewal, conservation of tradition, the value of “new” enterprise cultures, and gentrification—prevail. “Eating together” in Katong then becomes an uneasy mix of local foodways and traditional businesses (for example, prostitution) layered with the traces of global economies of tourism, consumption, migration, and developmentalism. Nevertheless, in spite of the density of these inscriptions, the mamak, kopitiam, hawker center, and urban village are still real third places that inspire memories, songs, and films. In chapter 6, however, we move into the domain of the virtual. Here, our site for “eating together” is the Singaporean Mandarin television series The Little Nyonya—a series that led to a resurgent interest in Peranakan culture and heritage, previously marginalized in Singapore and considered not DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI 149

Chinese enough in an era of national sinicization. Complex processes, both of meaning appropriation and contradictorily meaning differentia- tion, are unraveled for the project of constructing Singaporean national identity. As well, in chapter 6 we explore ways that this rewriting of Peranakan difference–sameness manifests itself in cultural performances and touristic spectacles, appealing to the eye and gustatory senses. Throughout, certain questions persist: How does the notion of “making rojak” operate here? How is nostalgia channeled?

THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY Between Commodification and Cosmopolitanism

In this chapter, we continue the exploration of Singapore Peranakan identity that Jean began in her discussion of Kim Choo Kueh Chang in Katong. Rather than merely consider how people of different ethnicities can eat together, here we ask whether a television drama focusing on Peranakan Chinese culture can attract diverse audiences who might find in it fragmented possibilities for affinity and identification. As we saw earlier, Peranakan Chinese identity constitutes a body or archive of past cosmopolitan possibilities that are the result of historical, cultural, and ethnic mixing. Such an identity is embedded in its language (Baba patois, a sublanguage of Malay), the rich material culture of what is today considered “antique” (for example, furniture, porcelain, and embroidery), fashion, food, rituals, architecture, music, and dance. Its distinct cuisine is an early fusion of Malay, Chinese, and even Thai influences (if referring to Penang Peranakan food). Historically, Peranakan music, which incorporates Arabic, Malay, and Portuguese influences, “transcended the boundaries of race, language, religion and class and was an important site for the integration of multi-ethnic cultures.”1 Cultural historian Khoo Joo Ee notes that the synthesis between Chi- nese and Malay elements in Peranakan culture, “fragile though it was, went beyond the kind of political coalition which exists between different racial groups in present-day Malaysia.”2 Indeed, the figure of the

151 152 CHAPTER 6 female Peranakan, the Nyonya, is recognized as representative of diversity, and the Peranakan is said to embody an early example of Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak’s concept of “1Malaysia.”3 This chapter, written by Gaik, asks whether such a hybrid culture can continue to provide a contemporary cosmopolitan space of sharing for Malaysians and Singaporeans of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds today—one that is simultaneously a testament to migrant adaptation and adoption as well as an evolving culture keeping up with changing times. Honing in on the representation of Peranakan Chinese culture and identity in the Singaporean television series The Little Nyonya—in particular, the food, fashion, and language—we raise questions about historical and cultural authenticity while counterbalancing this against the production’s genre framework and melodramatic conventions. We argue that Peranakan culture and identity is also notably embodied in the femininity and feminine arts of the Nyonya, for she was largely the one who produced and was responsible for the “lavish Baba Nyonya material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.”4 One of the key signs that The Little Nyonya promotes Peranakan Chinese identity is that it highlights and celebrates Nyonya cooking. The television series showcased several Peranakan dishes such as babi pongteh (stewed pork with fermented soybean) and chap chai (vegetable stew), among others. But it is most famous for turning the simple rempah udang, a rice dumpling with spicy dried shrimp and coconut filling wrapped in banana leaf, into a Proustian petite madeleine moment. “Remember the scene in The Little Nyonya where the chor- chor’s eyes all lit up when she ate rempah udang?”5 asks Leslie Tay of IEatIShootIpost in his vlog (video blog) of a Peranakan cooking demonstration with Bibik (“Auntie”) Kathryn at PeraMakan restaurant in Sin- gapore. The food blogger was calling up the moment when Madam Chen (known to the family as chor chor) is reminded of the past upon tasting the rempah udang made by Juxiang, and of her dearly departed friend (Juxiang’s grandmother) whose rempah udang was always superi- or to hers. Leslie ends his tasting session by repeating the epiphanic line from Madam Chen: “这个味道，就是这个味道” (“This flavor! It is this quintessential flavor!”). In the television series, during the cooking contest, it is Juxiang’s daughter Yueniang’s rempah udang that fits Madam THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 153

Chen’s ideal of the perfect-tasting rempah udang, the kind that evocatively transports her back to happier times past. Today cooking and eating Peranakan cuisine may be the key to maintaining the group’s identity and sustaining a vibrant Peranakan culture that is visible and accessible. Especially with the proliferation of such restaurants and food blogs (with recipes available online), it is easily the most accessible way of identifying with and being Peranakan whether in the region or overseas. This is especially acute in light of language loss and other time-consuming and labor-intensive crafts (embroidery, beadwork) associated with the house-bound Nyonya of the prewar era and its distinct women’s fashions (dress, slippers, and jewelry).

THE LITTLE NYONYA AS SPACE FOR IDENTITY MAKING

Rather than providing an ethnography of Peranakan food production and consumption, I have chosen to analyze the television series The Little Nyonya, as it provides an imagined space for tasting the culture’s complex flavors that is perhaps more powerful, evocative, and intimate than being in a physical restaurant. As we have suggested in earlier chapters, media texts, blogs, and films recycle, perpetuate, and contribute to a variety of meanings about food, identity, and cosmopolitan spatiality. Thus we are not seeing the everyday as pure, unadulterated, and fixed but mediated by different regimes of meaning whether these are public, personal, real, or virtual. Moreover, what occurs in the media text can shape, transform, redirect, or channel public perception, attitudes, and interest toward a particular group in the real world. The idea is to explore the ability of a historical costume drama about adapted Chinese in Malaya to attract a diverse audience both locally and internationally. Moreover, multicultural and cross-religious eating at Peranakan restaurants is not part of broader discourse in the way that kopitiam culture and mamak culture have captured and dominated the popular imagination, although they and their food have become a site of boutique tourism, as the previous chapter’s walk through Katong has indicated. In fact, Peranakan Chinese cuisine hinges on pork eating as a way to distinguish the Babas from Malays and to assert the Chineseness of the former.6 Peranakan pork dishes like babi pongteh (popular in the 154 CHAPTER 6 television series) are mainstays on the menu of most Peranakan restaurants in Muslim-minority Singapore, with the exception of the upmarket True Blue Peranakan Restaurant, which serves halal meat and is pork- and lard-free. In order to appeal to the Muslim majority in Malay- sia and Indonesia, some Peranakan restaurants such as Ah Tuan Ee’s or Little Penang Cafe in Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya, and Jakarta have gone halal, making Peranakan restaurants possible cosmopolitan spaces where commensality between Muslims and non-Muslims can occur. But this is still rare. So, while the mamak and kopitiam are real third places that inspire songs (“I Got It from My Mamak” and “I’m a Freak [mamak video]”)7 and films, in this case The Little Nyonya (aired November 2008–Janu- ary 2009) led to a resurgent interest in the Singapore mainstream about Baba culture and heritage, previously marginalized and considered not Chinese enough in an era of national sinicization. The thirty-four-episode Mandarin-language serial was MediaCorp Channel 8’s highest rated series in fifteen years. Its two-hour finale on January 5, 2009, attracted a record 1,672,000 viewers, beating the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.8 Peranakan businesses and tourism to Peranakan- themed museums and locations in Singapore as well as Malaysia soared.9 The Little Nyonya triggered a revaluation of Peranakan culture as acceptable to Mandarin-speaking Singaporeans, one to be consumed, celebrated, and embraced for its simultaneous hybrid uniqueness and Chineseness. As a subgroup of the majority ethnic Chinese in Singa- pore, Peranakan Chinese culture becomes the perfect synecdoche for Singaporean national identity: not too foreign so as to constitute a threat to Confucian values yet with a modicum remnant of incorporated local culture to earn pride in indigeneity and entitlement in place. Sec- ondly, this popular Singapore television drama series attracted audiences and fans from across a wide spectrum of ethnicities and nationalities. Within Singapore, the Mandarin-language series (subtitled in English) counted among its fans Mandarin speakers, English-educated Chinese Singaporeans, non-Mandarin-speaking Malays, Indians, and others.10 Shortly after its Singapore run, the series aired overseas in Malaysia, Cambodia, France, the Philippines, Myanmar, US DirecTV, Vietnam, Thailand, Shanghai, China (on satellite television), and Hong Kong. Its Facebook page has Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian fans writ- THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 155 ing in to express their delight with the series. One Thai fan even shared pictures of Nyonya kueh (cakes) found in Phuket.11 Although its Facebook site allows these diverse fans to share a common cosmopolitan space, The Little Nyonya series itself can be said to offer “a distinctive cultural space” to generate Peranakan identity, along the same lines as the Straits Chinese Magazine had done in the earlier part of the twentieth century.12 For example, the series’ seventy-year saga of three wealthy Peranakan families, beginning in the 1930s, may also provide an opportunity for collective remembering, restoration of pride in its identity, and reclamation of Peranakan culture, thus making The Little Nyonya a “site of memory.” Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) emerges as a result of the deritualization of the modern world that tends to homogenize society and recognize individuals as “identical and equal.”13 For a Johore-born sixty-year-old Ma- lay Malaysian woman whom I interviewed, the television series recalled her childhood memory of visits to a “rumah Nyonya” (Nyonya house) in Melaka in the early 1960s. “Perhaps, I had that childhood association of beautiful house and things belonging to the Nonya and baba people,” she reminisced.14 Sites of memory appear as “museums, archives, ce- meteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuary”15 or even books and other devices that act as “catalysts for the collective act of remembrance.”16 Indeed, The Little Nyonya show- cases and rememorializes Peranakan rituals related to weddings, funer- als, and the tok panjang (long table) feast that are now rarely practiced by Peranakans in Singapore. More importantly, it gives recognition to the intensive female labor of Peranakan households by showcasing in some detail the fine handiwork and craft that go into Nyonya embroidery, beadwork, and food preparation. In its archiving of Peranakan culture, The Little Nyonya also educates its viewers as to the forgotten Chinese symbolic meanings embedded in the colors and language of its food and material objects.17 However, sites of memory are also different from historical objects because sites of memory are “pure, exclusively self-referential signs.”18 To paraphrase Nora, they have content and history, but what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. The site of memory is “double” because it is a “site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations.”19 Conceptualizing The 156 CHAPTER 6

Little Nyonya as a site of memory may explain the way the series strays from history in the fixed, conventional sense we think of history. How- ever, the series fulfills the requirement of Nora’s more complex, nuanced definition of a site of memory that intimates the embeddedness, connectedness, and cross-referencing of personal memories and public histories. As Khoo Salma, fifth-generation Penang Nyonya and longtime heritage activist, says, authenticity is not what the series strove for; it took advantage of the rich material culture of the Peranakans but with a good story, touched on class issues, and successfully popularized Nyon- ya culture to the extent that it appealed to non-Peranakan Chinese who would find its Mandarin dialogue more accessible if less authentic.20 With that in mind, it would be crucial to ask what kind of cosmopolitanism The Little Nyonya represents in terms of gender, class, and race. If we return to the notion of making rojak in the introduction and to the closing questions of the previous chapter, we continue to ask: How does hybridity operate here? And how is nostalgia channeled? In this chapter, I explore the representation of Peranakan Chinese identity in The Little Nyonya, an identity that seems to struggle with issues of commodification and cosmopolitanism. What is the quality or type of cosmopolitanism it encompasses? I discuss the series as a “distinctive cultural space” that generates Peranakan identity as well as being a possible cosmopolitan space. If it is indeed the latter, whom does it serve? Its international fans on Facebook? Whom is it interpellating as its cosmopolitan subjects/viewers? The choice of Mandarin as the language of the series really segmented audiences in Singapore and Malaysia. Some Peranakans interviewed told me that they did not watch it because it was in Mandarin. Some said they never watch soap operas (no matter what language) so they did not follow it much. One Singaporean Malay fan in her twenties followed it not because there were recognizable Malay elements like the fashion that she could identify with, but because she watches all kinds of Asian soap operas (Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Chinese). Another much older Malay Malaysian fan watched it for its cultural nostalgic value and aesthetics.21 I demonstrate that the tension between cosmopolitanism and national identity persists in the way that particular commodifiable aspects of Peranakan culture are appropriated and repackaged (in The Little Nyonya) to represent a uniquely Singaporean national identity, one that is Chinese albeit with very marked and marketable differences. This THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 157 uniquely indigenized Chinese identity distinguishes Singapore from its transnational Chinese viewers by presenting an assuring sameness, a “multiculturalism without multicultural subjects,” to slightly alter Hage’s description of Australia as a “multiculturalism without migrants.”22 In the absence of Malay bodies, indigenous (Malay) difference is absorbed and written onto the ethnic Chinese bodies and manifests as cultural performances and touristic spectacles that appeal to the eye and gustatory senses.

THE LITTLE NYONYA: PROBLEMS WITH REPRESENTATION

The “little Nyonya” in the title refers to a mother and daughter, both played by Jeanette Aw, who work in the Huang household: the mute Juxiang, product of the rape of the maid of the Huang household by Master Huang Yuan in the 1920s–1930s, and then Juxiang’s daughter conceived with Yamamoto, Yueniang, a feistier rebellious character who physically resembles her mother. Gentle, thoughtful, kind, and attractive, both women excel in the Nyonya arts of cooking and sewing. The four-generation saga revolves around three wealthy Peranakan families in Singapore and Melaka. Produced by Mandarin-language MediaCorp TV Channel 8 in celebration of its forty-fifth anniversary, the drama serial is Chinese drama with a difference. As such, it had to adhere closely to serial soap opera tropes and female-focused melodramatic conventions. Scriptwriter Ang Eng Tee explains that he focused on Peranakan culture because of its uniqueness to Singapore and Melaka and for its novelty to the Mandarin-language drama genre: “It is a fresh subject for a local Chinese drama.”23 This statement of origins is important to keep in mind, as many of the problems of representation stem from having to operate within this framework. We argue that these genre-based restrictions stretched viewer credibility and sacrificed historical and sociocultural authenticity for entertainment. Fulfilling the requirements of its genre, The Little Nyonya understandably had to deliver an interesting narrative with strongly drawn characters and sub- plots sustained over thirty episodes with enough plot twists and turns to keep its viewers riveted every weeknight. Indeed the average viewer was not critical of whether the series was authentic in its representation of history and Peranakan culture even if she was vocally critical of the 158 CHAPTER 6 casting, sometimes illogical storyline, characters, and the series’ unsatis- factory ending. At the same time, Ang’s statement is a practical remin- der to those who unrealistically expected the series to be performed in Baba patois (regardless of the amount of training it would require to get Mandarin-language actors prepared for their speaking roles in a language completely foreign to them and targeting a Mandarin-speaking audience).24 Moreover, the story about Peranakan characters and society was fictional and, as such, the producers could take creative liber- ties, such as when the lovers meet at the (in real life, nonexistent) train station in Melaka. That said, MediaCorp spent a lot on its publicity machinery and proudly boasted of its care and research taken on representation, especially hiring Peter Wee, first vice president of the Peranakan Associa- tion of Singapore, as a consultant.25 The series incurred the highest production costs for MediaCorp, and included location shoots outside of Singapore in order to be as authentic as possible. Nevertheless, discriminating viewers were more critical of the representation of the material objects and their uses on the show. Jackie Yoong, then assistant curator of the Peranakan Museum, informed me that older generation Peranakans discovered “several discrepancies in props and fashion.”26 Raymond Kwok, an antique collector I interviewed in Penang, thought he detected several inaccuracies. For example, he pointed out that it was wrong for the Huang family to use yellow Nyonya ware since yellow was reserved for the Imperial court. But perhaps this was no longer an issue after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. In addition, Kwok also said that the larger-sized pot that was shaped like a spittoon is actually a chamber pot and not to be used as a spittoon or placed on the table as he had noticed in the series.27 Other observant viewers also mentioned that the Peranakan characters are seldom shown using batik ware, the blue and white porcelain that is used on an everyday basis,28 rather than the expensive rose famille porcelain reserved for special occasions.29 Overall, while The Little Nyonya was not a documentary, viewers’ exposure to Peranakan cultural norms through the series raised consciousness about Peranakan culture and instilled curiosity and pride in those who claim Peranakan or partial Peranakan ancestry. For example, it sparked young people to ask their parents and grandparents about their history or to seek verification about details in the show: Is this true? Did these things happen? Were people so wicked back then? THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 159

FEMINIST MELODRAMA INTERTWINING SPACE, GENDER, AND CLASS

Wicked or not, The Little Nyonya conforms to a typical television melodrama shaped by ideologies of heterosexual romantic love, motherhood, monogamy, and intimacy in the domestic realm. And in that way, it portrays

conflicts between virtuous heroines and Machiavellian villainesses, adaptation of Cinderella myth in a modern setting, the female pro- tagonist’s sacrifice of her own dream for the sake of her family, women’s unfulfilled desires, fantasies and sufferings, their own awareness of women’s repressed agency.30

Notably, the historically fixed figure of Nyonya femininity haunts the series even as its feminist tensions generate the main appeal of the series: Yueniang’s performance and embodiment of Nyonya femininity remains constant. Unlike the other modernized Peranakan female characters, she is never shown wearing anything except the Nyonya kebaya throughout her life, although she learns to speak English and later marries a British lawyer. Not only the figure of the Nyonya but her milieu, the Baba house, proffers a “distinctive cultural space” and marks the series as an appropriate lieu de mémoire for Peranakan identity. In the Baba house, it was the strong-willed Nyonya matriarch who presided over the management of the household and its members, discharging duties to servants over child care, cooking, and laundry as well as observing ancestral worship and rites. Thus, the television series set most of the scenes in the house, in interior spaces dominated and controlled by the matriarch and other female characters. For example, the kitchen is clearly the Nyonya domain, where she is tested and proves her worth. The second living area is where young unmarried women are kept busy doing beadwork and sewing (whether they enjoy it or not)—both mandatory ac- complishments meant to prepare them for married life. Older female characters busy themselves with a card game called cherki while gossip- ing (seen in the early part of the series when the production team was trying to create the allure of authenticity). Lastly, the bedrooms upstairs are locations where marital tensions and sexual intrigue transpire. 160 CHAPTER 6

It is the female melodramatic narrative and the glossy production values that draw fans from various ethnicities and nationalities. The “almost exclusive use of interior sets, obsession with close-ups, glossy ‘look,’ cosmetic, costuming, and decorative excesses”31 reflected in the production of the series gives Peranakan culture and society portrayed within it a sense of timelessness, exaggerated by the use of soft-focus lens and golden lighting. Doubtless the mostly interior settings are partly dictated by plot because it was considered unseemly for unmarried Nyonyas to be seen in public.32 But what is interesting is that female soap opera conventions such as its occurrence “within closed communities” and emphasis on “the personal relationship among members of those communities rather than, for instance, their political or work lives, or the connection between a particular community and the larger world”33 work hand in hand to attract transnational and cosmopolitan audiences and commodify Peranakan culture. Indeed, the rich material culture of wealthy Peranakan families tends to be the focus of much literature on Peranakan identity.34 With the exception of Tan Chee-Beng’s work on the Peranakan-type Chinese in Kelantan and Terengganu, the general impression is that poor Babas were rare before the war in the Straits Settlements since so much attention is focused on the golden period of the Peranakans during the 1920s.35 There is even a dichotomy painted between the poorer hard- working China-born coolies and the wealthy local-born Babas who worked in the civil service or lived off the legacies of their industrious fathers and grandfathers.36 The Little Nyonya television series perpetu- ates this representation of Peranakans as wealthy elites who live in sumptuous luxury. Two characters are exceptions: Tian Lan, Juxiang’s mother, who is the maid and concubine of Huang Yuan (after he raped her) and the mother of Liu Yidao, the butcher. Textile historian Hwei- Fe’n Cheah, much to her credit, comments that, although the Perana- kans were regarded as elite, the community was not homogenously wealthy.37 An example Felix Chia provides is the less wealthy Baba clerks with small incomes who willingly paid one dollar (the price of a meal for five people) for three dances at the ronggeng (dance hall) at Happy World and other amusement parks.38 In my fieldwork conversations, Singaporeans and Malaysians who had direct experience as Per- anakans themselves or with Peranakan friends and neighbors contested THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 161 this prevailing stereotype of the wealthy Peranakans. Instead, they recounted tales of poorer Baba relatives and neighbors. The choice of locations was one of The Little Nyonya’s undisputable attributes, lending a touch of nostalgic authenticity to the setting. View- ers are treated to sumptuous interiors of the Baba home consisting of Chinese blackwood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, European chandeliers, collections of colorful ceramic ware commissioned from China by Peranakan families in the nineteenth to early twentieth century, English porcelain statues, and decorative items from Europe like Venetian glassware. If the unique aspects of Peranakan decor, furnish- ings, and architecture are desirable and fetishized today, it is because their elaborate, baroque details signify the high status, historical achievement, and past glory of the Straits Chinese, many having been self-made men who escaped drudgery and poverty in southern coastal China to amass fortunes in the Nanyang. The rise and fall of these families and the community as a whole who were so dependent on the price of commodities like rubber and tin in a way provides an allegory for the biography of Singapore, itself heavily reliant on the global economy and now determined to carve a pragmatic lasting future that is cosmopolitan yet rooted in the region—one that promises to evade the demise of the civilization of its Chinese ancestors. Here, in turn-of-the- century Southeast Asia, the acculturated Chinese built their eclectic Straits mansions and villas, such as the Pinang Peranakan Mansion in Penang (formerly owned by Kapitan Cina Chung Keng Kwee, now a museum), and other heritage buildings in Melaka showcased in the series. Architecturally, the house includes Victorian influences, Malay and Chinese wood carving motifs and symbolism, colorful tiles, and colored Venetian glass, and has a southern Chinese layout.

LANGUAGE DRAMA RESTRICTIONS

But more importantly, the series is no ordinary soap opera—it is specifically a Chinese-language drama. And the most notable genre constric- tion that The Little Nyonya as a Mandarin-language television drama poses to representing authentic Peranakan Chinese culture is language. How can it purport to represent a hybrid local Chinese community who neither spoke nor understood Mandarin? Who instead spoke Baba pa- 162 CHAPTER 6 tois, a variant of Malay historically used by the Melaka and Singapore Peranakans? In the series, Baba patois is limited to a few scenes of pantun (four-line rhymed poetry) recital and singing by the sensitive, unhappy second son of the Chen family, Chen Sheng (played by Pierre Png). Miraculously, it is the Malay pantun he wrote that Yueniang (Jeanette Aw) sings for three straight days, which succeeds in reviving Madam Chen. The sensuality of the pantun helps reconnect her to life: “I was going to leave then I heard someone singing pantun. I couldn’t bear to leave after that so I came back.” Perhaps the pantun recalls the prewar glorious past when Baba performing arts (like dondang sayang) were at their height and when the family had unity and economic stabil- ity. However, these pantun are articulated in a stiff manner (Aw mispro- nounces words like “berjumpa lagi” as “berchampa lagi”) and the same song is sung on different occasions in the series as if there is a limited repertoire.39 Perhaps due to the Speak Mandarin language policy, the producers may have decided for the sake of consistency to avoid the use of Baba words and expressions, limiting them only to the pantun sessions and names of dishes and food.40 A few Peranakans I interviewed expressed regret that Mandarin could not capture the full spectrum of “color,” “character,” and “flavor” of Baba patois, especially its curses used in scolding. They pointed out that Peranakans spoke either Baba patois or English or perhaps some Hokkien (especially in Penang) and would compare the series to other series featuring or centering on Peranakan characters.41 Several of these were produced by the English- language MediaCorp Channel 5 but observers also noted that these other Singaporean series suffer from poor scriptwriting and overacting too.42 Beginning on February 2, 2011, The Little Nyonya series, dubbed into Baba Malay, aired on the Singapore Malay-language channel, Su- ria. According to the television station’s assistant vice president of network programming and promotions, Ezra Farabi, it was dubbed into Baba Malay in order “to create a more realistic portrayal of the Perana- kan lifestyle.”43 One Penang Peranakan woman I interviewed, based in Singapore, hazarded that the Mandarin original was more popular with Malay audiences than this dubbed version. Language cannot be underestimated in representing a particular culture. A Malay saying (Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa), which translated means “language is the soul of the nation/race,” is made apparent for Perana- THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 163 kan viewers who notice how Mandarin-ness not only depletes the color of Baba dialogue, but also that its very delivery is compromised by the gestures, mannerisms, body language, and behavior of the characters in a Chinese serial. Chen Sheng, Juxiang, and Meiyu (Disk 1, Episodes 5–6) all seem too eager to please, too Confucian in their lip-pursed nodding acquiescence to obey their elders rather than reflecting the more cosmopolitan relaxed way of inhabiting their bodies like those schooled in English, who grew up in a creolized world and listened to American pop songs. One male Peranakan interviewed objected to the screaming and shouting older women characters, whom he likened to actors in Taiwanese dramas. Peranakan grandmothers, he said, tended to speak in undertones when chiding the young.44 As a Penang Perana- kan myself, it took me several episodes to warm up to the story and characters because of this sense of dis-identification and lack of recognition. Only when I told myself to think of the series as a Mandarin- language serial replete with over-the-top acting and didactic messages, only when I stopped looking for Peranakan authenticity, did I begin to enjoy the story. The casting did not reflect the pluralism of the multiethnic polyglot Straits Settlements of Melaka and Singapore between the 1930s and 1960s, or the Peranakan community’s daily interactions with Malays, Indians, Eurasians, and other locals. The Indian kebun (gardener) and watchman, the Malay driver, the syce or handyboy/runner, and Haina- nese cook, all common employees of wealthy Peranakan families, are absent.45 Street scenes too are depleted of non-ethnic Chinese. In fact, the series gave the impression of a world only peopled by Mandarin- speaking ethnic Chinese and a few foreigners. Even the Chinese thugs, servants, and working-class characters all speak Mandarin, although in reality they would be speaking in various dialects. The only scenes with dialect have the same Hokkien ditty sung by the village simpleton, which becomes his signature song (an unfortunate association that seems to derogatorily imply that dialect is for the mentally challenged?). As a world populated only by ethnic Chinese-speaking Mandarin and a few “Anglo” characters speaking English, the series reflects the contemporary developmentalist aspirations of the Singapore state, which regards both languages as necessary for its economic survival. Under such conditions, the Peranakan culture represented is less about the Chinese adaptability to a predominantly Malay region/archipelago, 164 CHAPTER 6 as it was historically, and more about the minority elements that perhaps make the Chinese Peranakans desirably cosmopolitan and unique to Singapore. In fact, as Cheah noted, the “Peranakan” label is used as a branding tool and drawing card for foreign visitors by the Singapore Tourism Board.46

FASHIONING THE NYONYA

Due to the linguistic sameness that erases diversity among the various types of Chinese in the series, fashion assumes a key role in distinguish- ing between Peranakan and non-Peranakan Chinese women. The more traditional Nyonyas don kebayas and the more modern younger ones prefer Western dress. However, according to many Peranakans I interviewed and the photographs taken during those times, it was more common in the 1930s–1950s for Peranakan girls and young women to wear the “Shanghai dress” or samfoo rather than the kebaya at home and as casual wear. In the series, it is only non-Peranakan Chinese who are dressed this way; the Peranakan women have to distinguish their culture and identity through traditional Nyonya kebaya. During the 2009 roadshows and public events, including at the Cannes Film Market, Jeanette Aw and the cast would appear in costume, with Aw and the other Peranakan female cast wearing sarung kebaya and with their hair in a chignon to represent typical Nyonya fashion, the exception being Cynthia Koh, who played the transgressive modern Xiujuan.47 The male actors were in period Western-styled suits from the 1950s as was typical then. This gender fashion contrast (or complementarity) is common to representations of nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Peranakan society.48 English-educated Babas found jobs and became mediators between the colonials and non-Per- anakan Chinese (compradors) in the public world while the Nyonyas (who might also have received formal English education) embodied and performed tradition in the domestic arena, mastering beadwork, sewing, cooking, and managing the household. In that way, it is the Nyonya body that signifies hybridity and tradition while the Baba body projects the society’s aspirations for modernity. A consequence of this gendered situation is that Nyonya women bear the burden of representing recognizable Peranakan identity. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 165

Figure 6.1. Penang Nyonyas, the author’s aunts, in Shanghai dress (circa 1950s). Permission granted by Tan Thean Peng contemporary Peranakan women to reflect their modern identity of continuous hybridity and adaptability visually since most do not wear Nyonya kebayas anymore (as they are regarded as old-fashioned, too ornate, and cumbersome to wear). Such Nyonya period wear was a big part of the show’s success in depicting “rich Peranakan culture” and thus, as visually stunning signifiers, had to be present as part of the media spectacle.49 But the inevitable effect of this, and one hardly unique to the series but that prevails in the broader preservation efforts and heritage movement itself, is to freeze Peranakan culture and identity to a specific past, notwithstanding that the kebaya variety and styles in the show suggest different periods—1930s to 1950s—and the age of its wearers. More significantly, the television series is selective in the fashion chosen to represent Nyonya culture. For example, what my Peranakan mother’s family calls bekeman (from the Malay word berkemban, wearing only a sarung tied around the midriff) is a common practice in Malay and Peranakan households among older women in the privacy of 166 CHAPTER 6 their own domestic space either when relaxing or working at home (when the menfolk are out and they have no guests). It is much cooler, more comfortable, and practical to wear this while cooking and doing chores around the house or to have a bath.50 Few women would wear their beautiful and tight-fitting sarung kebaya complete with kerosang (brooches to pin the front of the kebaya) and makeup to pound chilies or cook in the kitchen. But the one time bekeman is portrayed in the show is when we see the pregnant and insane Yuzhu (played by Joanne Peh) locked up in an abandoned storehouse, crawling on the ground, catching rats and insects for food. These observations support my central point that the series is mainly “Chinese drama with a difference,” with the less spectacular (with an emphasis on the specular) Malay practices written out or construed as unrefined and not worthy of representation.51 What viewers are left with is a narrow boutique representation of only the elite, refined aspects of Peranakan culture written on the performing female body, one that is just as easily caricatured precisely for its mix of ultra-feminine and strong matriarch roles.52

FETISHIZING THE NYONYA FOODIE

Finally, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, food is the best transmitter of Peranakan culture and is symbolized through the feminine body. After the series aired in various provinces in China beginning in January 2010, mainland Chinese developed curiosity and interest in Peranakan culture.53 This was reflected at the Singapore pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo where Peranakan dishes such as kueh pie tee (Top Hats), laksa, and curry chicken were best-sellers. Later that year in China, Kentucky Fried Chicken launched its curry-flavored Nyonya chicken wings, advertised along with a photo of a sarung kebaya–clad woman. A spokesman for the fast-food corporation told He- nan Business Daily that “Nonya” refers to a “food culture.”54 This sym- biotic connection between Nyonya women and Peranakan cuisine is again striking, and one that Singapore government agencies play up. According to journalist Peh, when International Enterprise Singapore launched the Singapore Food Promotion campaign in Beijing in August 2010, models dressed in sarung kebayas showcased Singapore culture. THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 167

Moreover, “Singapore’s women diplomats in China were often seen in sarung kebayas during official events in Beijing in the past year.”55 Thus the Nyonya becomes a cultural ambassador for Singapore Peranakan identity. More importantly, the Nyonya is considered to be a professional cook and natural “foodie.” Attention to food in the series The Little Nyonya focused on two key events: the tok panjang feast where Juxiang meets Yamamoto (Episodes 5–6 on Disk 1), and Madam Chen’s birthday party, where eligible Nyonyas were invited to display their cooking and sewing skills as a way of finding a perfect wife for Chen-Xi (Episodes 19–20 on Disk 2). These scenarios offer an opportunity for the Nyonya cook to display her culinary perfection and personality by showcasing her talents. Her skills are then judged by the matriarch Madam Chen, who is the ultimate Nyon- ya foodie. The cooking competition resembles contemporary competitive cooking programs like Masterchef, with the young women racing to get the best ingredients at the start and the bad-hearted Huang Zhen- zhu, who is prone to cheating, shoving the others out of the way. Like Masterchef, the series raised mainstream awareness about ingredients common to Peranakan cooking with which non-Peranakans were not familiar (belacan, fermented bean paste, galangal, turmeric). It drew attention to the finesse and thoughtfulness that accompanied each step in the creation of a dish. For example, Yueniang explains that she did not mix the vermicelli with the gravy as she did not know when they were going to eat it and did not want the noodles to get too soft (“How thoughtful!” is Madam Chen’s response). The old lady’s discriminating tastebuds enabled her to identify individual ingredients in Yueniang’s gravy and to acknowledge that “it’s not easy to make such delicious gravy using them” because finding the right delicate balance of ingredients makes the key difference to the taste. In the concluding episode, even the loyal servant Tao, familiar with the ways of Peranakan cooking, tells Anqi, “[Using the blender] won’t give you the authentic taste of Nyonya dishes.” Rather, one has to pound the ingredients with pestle and mortar as the strict Peranakan believes that there are no shortcuts when making Nyonya food. The show introduced viewers to some standard dishes and clearly evoked enough curiosity that the weekly dish seen on the program would be requested by customers at Peranakan restaurants.56 168 CHAPTER 6

Finally, Peranakan culture and legacy are very much preserved through the material culture (embroidery, beadwork, kebaya, cuisine) that is the sole preserve of the Nyonya. The series illustrates that to be a true Nyonya requires attaining these skills, if not actually holding on to the beliefs such as ancestor worship (the two characters Yueniang em- broiders on the handkerchief for Madam Chen, zhui yuan, mean “we must always remember where we hail from, the descendants are not to forget their ancestors”). Yueniang has earned the respect and perhaps envy of Xiujuan who, although sophisticated and worldly, expresses regret to Yueniang for being “a lousy Nyonya” who does not cook the dishes, make kueh, or sew beaded slippers. Juan reminisces: “As age catches up with me, what I miss most are all things Peranakan.” Juan cuts a tragic but sympathetic figure of female rebellion that ends up lonely and unhappy. Yueniang, however, has a personality and balanced approach to life that resembles the deft balance of ingredients in the gravy she cooked for Madam Chen. It is finding this right combination—of being realistic, not greedy, thoughtful and caring, astute and courageous, modest and filial, modern in thinking but traditional at heart—that brings her success. Her entrepreneurial narrative is a much more dramatic one than the ones told in the gentrified kopitiam narratives in chapter 2. But instead, this is a rags-to-riches story that does not end with Cinderella marrying her prince but one in which a kind of typical Nanyang “ka-ki-kang” entrepreneurialism prevails for the hero- ine. At the end of her life, Yueniang hands down the Nyonya legacy to her granddaughter Anqi. The latter decides to take a course on museum management so that she can help maintain her grandmother’s house (with its Peranakan artifacts collected over the years) and convert it into a museum, much to the delight of Yueniang, who says, “Good, I have a successor now.” As if reinforcing this idea of passing down the Nyonya legacy through the matrilineal line, Anqi insists that she will do the cooking despite looks of dismay from her male friends: “I am the de- scendent of the Peranakans. If I can’t even cook, I will be a disgrace to my ma ma.” At Yueniang’s funeral or perhaps death anniversary (in the next series of scenes as the writers hastily wrap up the final episode), Anqi puts on a kebaya and slips on beaded shoes, transforming into a demure Nyonya in front of the mirror. The film ends with Anqi leaving her grandmother’s house in Melaka in a bus for Singapore, with Yueni- THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 169 ang’s words ringing in her head, that if you do not know your past, you will be like a leaf that does not know it is part of a tree. Yueniang’s constant invocation of knowing one’s roots, her holding onto filial piety, and zhui yuan attempts to reinstate the idea of Peranakan culture as a hardy, strong tree. Thus the series consistently reiterates and fetishizes the narrative of the Nyonya’s role as a natural cook and food expert.

CONCLUSION

In the end, The Little Nyonya is a popular commercial product that reflects current Singaporean society, mainstream attitudes toward gender, and a pragmatic developmentalist imperative for survival. Despite nostalgia for gender-related skills like cuisine, beadwork, and sewing kebayas, pragmatic state ideology recognizes women’s rights beyond the domestic realm and their modern contributions to the economy and public sphere. Thus the television series functions as a much-needed lieu de mémoire: “the ultimate [embodiment] of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.”57 As Pierre Nora reminds us, such sites of memory emerge out of “the deritualization of our world—producing, manifesting, establishing, constructing, decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past.”58 But as Yueniang’s voiceover reminds Anqi in the closing scene, ne- glecting knowledge of one’s collective past, construed through oral storytelling and memory work, signifies a lonely existence and lack of belonging: “You’ll be like a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” The deritualization of Singaporean (and Malaysian) society because of modernity, Westernization, Christianity, and secular influences has also seen the Peranakan Chinese populace absorbed either into the majority Chinese community in Singapore due to the Speak Mandarin and mother tongue policies from 1980 onwards, or in Malaysia absorbed into the minority Chinese population through intermarriage and strengthening of racial alliances against pro-Malay policies. Many of the traditions and rituals have been abandoned by younger Peranakans, and old Peranakan-style buildings have been torn down to make way for 170 CHAPTER 6 development and high rises. It was only the promise of tourism revenue that convinced the state of the value of heritage preservation. The past decade has seen a cultural revival of Peranakan culture through, for example, the opening of four other lieux de mémoire: the Baba House and Peranakan Museum in Singapore (both in 2008); the establishment of Main Wayang, a Peranakan theater group, in 2004; and the online Peranakan Resource Library in 2003. Specifically targeting a non-Baba Chinese viewership, The Little Nyonya was initially a space not so much to foster transethnic solidarities among the various ethnic groups in Singapore but to grow a relationship between Peranakan Chinese and other Chinese, one based on liberal cosmopolitan values of openness and tolerance for difference. But at the same time, this cosmopolitanism verges on “cosmo-multiculturalism”—a cosmopolitan practice that only includes superficial forms of knowing and tolerating difference through consuming “ethnic food” and other products.59 However, eating and consuming the culture of the other by way of watching this series in turn creates desire, curiosity, and interest in learning more about Peranakan culture through books, museum visits, attending plays, musical events organized by the communities, and more. This might be a more positive way to think about the cosmopolitan effects of the series, effects that span well beyond Malaysia and Singapore. For example, the series has become a site of memory not only for Peranakans in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia (where it aired) but also for mainland Chinese. As the Peran- akans were “eighty per cent custodians of Chinese customs and traditions,”60 mainlanders now flock to their temples in Melaka, Penang, and Singapore to understand and learn about their own culture that has been decimated under communist rule. In this way, making rojak as a process might take more time in the case of The Little Nyonya as it gradually builds up a transnational fan base of individuals who speak to one another on Facebook. This gathering or assembling of diverse transnational audiences is like putting together different fruits coated with the same unitary shrimpy yet sweet and chili taste of rojak sauce; in this case, the sauce is a Peranakan feminist soap opera that appeals first to fans of soap opera conventions and, secondarily, snags those who are drawn to the series as a site of memory to build new memories and to avoid becoming “leaves without knowing the tree” they grow on. That rojak can include nontraditional THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY 171 fruits such as green apples suggests its portability across geographical borders or openness to new additions or adaptations. Two other publications on Peranakan Chinese61 have emerged out of recent active attempts fostered through Baba conventions to connect with newer Baba associations and communities in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Melbourne, Medan, and Phuket. In a way, the desire for global connections reflects continuous and newer migration flows and ever-shifting formations of identity as Peranakans strive to hold onto remnants of their past Straits Chinese identity while adapting to the new place of domicile in a globalized temporal and spatial context. My critique of The Little Nyonya is mainly with its representation of what it thinks constitutes Peranakan Chinese identity. Although the series has been criticized for representing negative stereotypes of weak male characters and wicked Peranakan mothers, the issue here goes beyond such broad caricatures. The series gives a superficial and static impression of what Peranakan culture and identity is all about by highlighting the aspects that are most commodifiable. Furthermore, some elements of minority Peranakan culture are swallowed up by the re- sinicization in The Little Nyonya so that rich Nyonya culture is subsequently appropriated to stand in and become a synecdoche of Singa- pore national culture—its adoption of local elements is the one thing that makes Singapore Chinese culture different from other Chinese national cultures. After all, there is nothing to understand or misunder- stand since most people (except Muslims) can eat their food, wear their clothes, and buy their antiques without having to speak Malay or Baba patois. By 2008, in the interest of being more inclusive, the Singapore Peranakan community no longer insisted its members show proof of bloodline and speak Malay-Hokkien or Baba Malay patois.62 Without the language, Peranakans are just like any other Chinese in Singapore; in fact, they may even turn out to be better Chinese for holding onto their religion and rites and preserving their customs, as The Little Nyonya suggests. Moreover, they have a rich culture that can be exoti- cized, packaged, and sold globally. This is evidenced by the aggressive marketing and promotion undertaken by Singapore state agencies via costuming Singaporean models and female diplomats in sarung kebayas, as mentioned earlier.63 After all, as we remember from Jean’s discussion of the Main Wayang musical, everyone can be a Peranakan in one’s heart.

CURRYING THE NATION A Song and Dance about Multiculturalism

On August 8, 2011, a Singaporean daily, Today, published a story about a People’s Republic of China (PRC) couple’s complaint about the smell of curry cooked by their Indian Singaporean neighbor. The case was brought to the Community Mediation Centre (CMC), and the local family agreed it would cook curry only when the Chinese neighbors were out, on the condition that the couple have a taste of their cooked curry. Although this case occurred six or seven years ago, it raised the ire of Singaporeans who interpreted this incident as high-handedness on the part of new migrants telling longtime Singaporeans what they can or cannot do in their own country (or cook in their own kitchen).1 It also showed a lack of tolerance for multicultural diversity. Others blamed the CMC for even accepting the case in the first place rather than telling the Chinese complainant that there is no case because “here in multiethnic Singapore we have always lived by the principles of mutual respect and tolerance.”2 Still others blamed the CMC for its accommodating position toward FTs (Foreign Talent), seeing it as a proxy for the government’s pro-immigration policy that privileged newcomers over longtime citizens. Some Singaporeans started a “Cook and Share a Pot of Curry” page on Facebook (from which Alfian Sa’at’s play derives its title) to encourage their fellow Singaporeans everywhere to cook curry as a show of solidarity with the Indian Singaporean family

173 174 CHAPTER 7 and an endorsement of multiculturalism against what they perceived as intolerance by new citizens or FTs. Meanwhile in Malaysia, racially insensitive statements and threats against ethnic and religious minorities underlined by Malay primacy and a visceral sense of ethnic entitlement in the context of heightened levels of political corruption and social injustice have resulted in anger toward the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) government. In response, the traditionally conservative Chinese, emboldened by their feelings of alienation and frustration, are beginning to exercise their right to free speech and creative expression, for example, by taking part in the second Coalition for Free and Fair Elections (Bersih 2.0) street demonstrations in 2009. These sentiments are reflected in the Malaysian mixed-genre film Nasi Lemak 2.0, named after a local dish that producer Fred Chong claims is the culmination of the nation’s moves toward national cohesiveness, with each ethnic community contributing an element to the national dish. The “2.0” in the film’s title evoked close association with the Bersih 2.0 street protests, and the jackets worn by the students at the culinary school are yellow, which is the color of the Bersih T-shirts that were banned before the rally. These subtle and not-so-subtle forms of social critique and resistance do not displace director Namewee’s main concern: simply, and to echo Ien Ang, an emphasis on hybridity rather than diasporic identity is the way to live together-in-difference. Recognizing too well the “double-edged- ness of diasporic identity” that Ang alludes to—that Chineseness “can be the site of both support and oppression, emancipation and confinement, solidarity and division”3—Namewee says the spirit of his first film is about discovering “how to be Malaysian first, Chinese/Indian/Malay second.”4 Although Peranakan Chinese culture and identity may seem to symbolize the practices of quintessential localization to Malaysia and Singa- pore, as previous chapters have shown, in this final chapter we suggest that other non-(strictly defined) Peranakan Malaysians and Singapo- reans also hold on to the rojak elements that define such adaptive identities. Unlike chapter 6’s focus on the cosmopolitan prospects of forming diasporic and transnational connections for Peranakan Chinese beyond Malaysia and Singapore to China, Thailand, and elsewhere, in this chapter we demonstrate that ethnic diasporic affiliations can be weaker than national identity when it comes to making claims over CURRYING THE NATION 175 space, asserting place identities, and forming such identities strategical- ly through food metaphors. As Jean evoked in chapter 2 with regard to Toast Box’s literature, the Nanyang is a “cultural imaginary—a territory of collective identity and imagined belonging.” In this cultural imaginary, (ethnic Chinese) Singaporeans and Malaysians envision living “together-in-difference” by embracing curry. Notably, Indians are the smallest minority among the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia and Singapore, making up only around 7 and 7.9 percent respectively. So this embrace of curry signifies an inclusionary or localizing act on the part of the Chinese within the shared nation. Curry, with its enhancing and transformative power,5 is an appropriate metaphor in this sense, for its deployment lends a hybridizing force to cultural pluralism, altering the mix and adding taste to the basic ingredients. Its adoption by others and adaptation implies a recognition of the creolizing role it plays and undeniably guarantees it and Indians a vital place in the national identity (like “cucumber in the rojak”6). The “curry controversy” was at the heart of the population and immigration debate in Singapore in 2011 and features as the opening scene in the 2013 play Cook a Pot of Curry; curry also stars as one of the accompanying dishes to the Malaysian dish nasi lemak and is integral to a scene in the 2011 Malaysian multicultural film Nasi Lemak 2.0. In the last leg of our critical cultural tour, I (Gaik) focus on such contemporary film and theatrical representations of food, space, and identity. If anything, the literal and metaphorical “song and dance” numbers in these cultural texts suggest a lively ongoing public discourse about the quality of everyday multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore. This forms the crux of the chapter, much more so than the notion of a loosening of diasporic Chinese ties to the cultural homeland. Just what exactly is the kind of multicultural nation Malaysians and Singaporeans envisage, in which—of course—food features as a binding ingredient? In both countries seemingly it is an everyday, spontaneous, and organic living-and-eating-together-in-difference, removed from prescriptive state multicultural policies. Singapore has policies in managing ethnic diversity that range from language (the mother tongue policy and Speak Mandarin campaign), ethnic self-help groups, and housing quotas to the electoral process and education.7 Malaysia, on the other hand, has dealt with its ethnic diversity inherited from colonial times by keeping affirmative action in place for majority Malays (or 176 CHAPTER 7 more accurately, UMNO supporters) and relying on race-based political parties to represent communal interests. They have failed to protect ethnic minority rights, a fact particularly made manifest when Indian Malaysians and indigenous Malaysians organized street protests for the first time (the Hindu Rights Action Force [or HINDRAF] rally held in Kuala Lumpur on November 25, 2007, and the Orang Asli protest march at Putrajaya on March 17, 2010). Racialization has made a hybrid identity impossible unless it can be commodified (for example, Perana- kan culture as discussed in earlier chapters). According to Norman Vasu, the “Singaporean model of multiculturalism—how Singapore understands communal differences and manages them—was founded on an immutable understanding of race where individuals are recognized to have only one unchanging racial identity.”8 Vasu is referring to the CMIO model (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other) that exemplifies “the necessary inter-communal divisions,” thereby justifying the Singapor- ean People’s Action Party’s (PAP) corporatist form of governance.9 This “immutable understanding of race” requires the boundaries that divide the “C-M-I-O” to be equally rigid. Thus, even though Singaporeans are critical about the effects of racialization, they are also subjects of such policies. To illustrate, a 2013 survey of 4,000 Singaporeans’ attitudes toward race and religion carried out by the Institute of Policy Studies shows that, although Singaporeans “are ideologically committed to diversity . . . they do not always live out that ideology in their everyday lives” as most respondents seldom have close friends from other ethnic groups.10 Five racist postings by Singaporeans on the Internet in 2012 (which were by no means a new phenomenon) demonstrated that tolerance for diversity among (ethnic majority Chinese) Singaporeans themselves has very shallow roots.11 Indeed, a character in the verbatim docuplay Cook a Pot of Curry characterizes the state of race relations in the country as “multiracist harmony,” achieved through tolerance of difference without real understanding of such differences. For example, he notes that non-Muslims do not know that “‘no pork no lard’ doesn’t mean halal” and non-Indians are ignorant of the fact that “not all In- dians speak Tamil.” Living together-in-difference also comes at a cost: Even as it celebrates existing local multiculturalisms where Chinese Malaysians and Singaporeans form “transethnic solidarities”12 with other Malaysians CURRYING THE NATION 177 and Singaporeans, it also exaggerates the differences between them and those of other nationalities. Close analysis of Nasi Lemak 2.0 and Cook a Pot of Curry reveals that Malaysians and Singaporeans are caught in the tension of working through and resisting racism among existing ethnic groups while, in the face of globalization and the increasing presence of new migrants, embracing their multicultural diversity against the foreign Other. Specifically, the figure of “the PRC Chinese” assumes this Otherness by which Chinese Malaysians and Chinese Sin- gaporeans assert their difference and eschew shared ancestry and diasporic affiliations in favor of hybrid “localization,”13 national unity, and an embrace of multicultural diversity. Here it is evident that “globally- derived cosmopolitan openness is counterbalanced by various alle- giances, anxieties and self-interests,” thereby limiting one’s cosmopolitan openness.14 For example, in the film Nasi Lemak 2.0, Chef Huang’s effort to find a decent salary in the restaurant business is constantly frustrated by the Chinese national who is happy to accept lower wages for the same job. In Singapore, while globalization in the form of cheap labor, imported products, and foreign consumables is welcomed, some forms of class migration are not, especially when perceived to be overwhelming in number by the local population. These differences come to the fore in daily interactions with migrant workers and Foreign Tal- ents in urban life: on the MRT (mass rapid transit), at hawker centers and coffee shops, and in brushes with neighbors in dense high-rise apartments where unspoken resentment can build up due to cultural dissonance that emerges ironically out of ethnic proximity. For example, it is mostly middle-class ethnic Chinese Singaporeans who target PRCs just as middle-class Indian Singaporeans focus their cultural dissonance on the nonresident Indians.15

COOK A POT OF CURRY

Sometimes I think we’re being naïve by assuming a nation state is an idea still worth pursuing. I feel as though we have a sort of postcolonial cultural void, where we’re lacking a sense of pride or identity.16

In Singapore, a food controversy sparked debates about the contest for space—overcrowding, immigration, the government Population White 178 CHAPTER 7

Paper—and forced Singaporeans to ask questions about what exactly constitutes Singaporean identity. Is Singaporean identity defined by Singlish, the love of traditional local food, a commitment to meritocra- cy, and a respect for multicultural diversity? Indeed, although the curry controversy took place two years before the 2013 White Paper on population, it aptly catalyzed the play’s amalgamated articulations on issues about space and place, national identity, race relations, and dissatisfaction with government policies. The White Paper projected that the population would grow to 6.9 million by the year 2030 from its current 5 million. The past two decades have seen Singapore’s population grow by over 2 million people; it is said that one out of four people in Singa- pore is a noncitizen. A song entitled “Is This Home, Really?” in the play goes, “Sardine trains and traffic jams, could this be my Singapore?” This analogy of Singaporeans as sardines packed in the MRT hurtling forward (into development) strikes a chord with “core” Singaporeans— those who were raised and grew up in the city-state on the notion that Singaporean diversity was based on the CMIO model. The sudden in- flux of foreigners has altered Singapore’s ethnoscape, and such changes are experienced visibly, audibly, and physically (being pushed in the MRT) in everyday interactions. Alfian’s play has returnees from overseas in the postmillennial years who note the different experiences they encountered in the soundscape (Mandarin announcements on the Northeast MRT line for Chinese immigrants going to Chinatown) or not being understood by the PRC food seller when ordering noodles at the local coffee shop. The population increase based on liberal immigration has led to pressures on the infrastructure,17 spiraling housing costs, and competition for jobs. At the heart of the curry controversy lay the question of Singaporean identity, a question increasingly difficult to answer as the state manufac- tures and keeps its population and city in such constant psychological and physical flux that this state of instability and change becomes an uncomfortable norm that shapes national identity. The disparity between ordinary Singaporeans and the political leadership as to what constitutes national identity is evident. The PAP assumes that national unity and happiness center on the efficient delivery of “hardware.”18 But Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s concept of Singaporean identity as “something that new tangible icons can provide” is vastly different “from the concerns of a people who feel that a more rooted concept of CURRYING THE NATION 179

Singaporeanness is being eroded away, along with their voices.”19 This erosion of national identity is perhaps tied to the erosion of spaces of memory where preservation is targeted at only selected national memories.20 Landmark buildings and historical sites, even hawker centers and kopitiams, are demolished to make way for ever newer and taller buildings that construct an image of Singapore as constantly looking to the future. The effects of this are registered by Syaiful, a twenty-two-year- old Malay character, in the play:

Each time you tear down a building and build a new one, there is one less thing that I have in common with my parents. It’s like my parents can’t show me that place where they used to go on their dates. That cinema with the kacang puteh [peanuts] man. That hawker centre where you could buy a meal just with coins.

A teacher named Joanne, also in the play, feels that “with all this immigration . . . this thing called the Singapore identity is a blank canvas” whereby “we’ll say, here, make your mark, just draw anything you want and don’t worry about leaving space for others to come and draw. Be- cause when that time comes we’ll just erase whatever you once drew.” Such cynicism arises out of a frustration with the inability to trace a genealogy and maintain continuity with their parents and grandparents as old buildings are torn down and language policies that privilege Man- darin eradicate Chinese dialects among the young, who subsequently find themselves unable to communicate with their dialect-speaking grandparents. Even Singlish as a unique hybrid localized language is not spared, as it is banned from radio and television, and blamed for Singaporeans’ poor English grammar rather than regarded (by the state) as a source of national pride and unity. Although Singlish syntax and structure best resembles Hokkien, with loanwords from Malay and Chinese, it is also regarded as interethnic lingua franca among all Sin- gaporeans.21 Cook a Pot of Curry suggests that an organic hybrid national culture like Singlish—what I would call “good fusion”—is suppressed in favor of an artificial state-ordained hybrid national identity (“bad fusion”)— for example, comically mixing all the racial elements into the Miss Uni- verse costume. In other words, the postcolonial cultural void or blank canvas that Alfian refers to is generated by the state’s numerous attempts throughout the decades to define national identity (the 1991 180 CHAPTER 7

“Shared Values” White Paper being one). But critical-thinking bloggers like “Singapore Armchair Critic” insist that rather than adopt the state’s definition of national identity, Singaporeans themselves should take ownership and define it for themselves.22 The blogger suggests going back to the National Pledge, written by S. Rajaratnam in 1966, which sought to unite Singaporeans across the ethnic, linguistic, and religious divides and to build a democratic nation based on justice and equality.23 However, arguably the play posits that, rather than looking toward ab- stract transcendental ideals that bind, “a sense of pride or identity” could better be fostered at the everyday level of organic hybridity, replete with its own playful earthy humor. For example, Syaiful misses hearing an old Chinese Singaporean auntie working at the McDonald’s asking comically, “You want up sai your fry and your cock?” Here, food and sex irreverently tumble together in Singlish. If the things that symbolize Singapore’s hybrid national identity— such as architectural lieux des mémoires like the old National Library, the old stadium, and the Van Kleef Aquarium—are not preserved, if both Singlish as a rojak language and dialects are perceived to threaten the status of English and Mandarin, both promoted to advance Singa- pore’s global standing and trade, and if the tension between multiculturalism and melting pot cannot be resolved by an easing up of government controls and the end of racialization strategies, little wonder that food then becomes the only thing left for Singaporeans to passionately protect. In Cook a Pot of Curry, Syaiful’s parents’ memories of leisure spots are inevitably charged with memories of food sellers like the peanut seller at the cinema and eating places (hawker centers) long gone. Space and place may be a concrete way of belonging, but when those disappear, traditional food becomes “the one constant that [Singapo- reans] can hold onto—something that seems to survive rapid, disorient- ing development.”24 On food and identity in Singapore, Joanne Leow writes:

It’s a taste of comfort and memory amid a country where few can revisit old haunts. Food traditions have become out-sized bearers of our cultures, our histories (personal and public) and our memories. They link generations, transmit knowledge and let us discover a Sin- gapore of the past that has been lost. This is not to say we should take for granted that our food culture is permanent, without any effort of CURRYING THE NATION 181

our own. Hawkers retire, grandparents pass on, recipes are forgotten, techniques disappear and wet markets are demolished.25

THE RECIPE: A TRIBUTE TO HAINANESE CURRY RICE

This story of loss or forgetting is recapped in a television drama about dementia directed by filmmaker Eric Khoo, The Recipe (aired Septem- ber 29, 2013), commissioned by the Singapore Health Promotion Board. Here, once more, it is traditional Singaporean food, this time the understated Hainanese curry rice that is the source of nostalgia. An estranged daughter Grace, who wants to open her own French restaurant (representing cosmopolitan Singapore), reconnects with her hawker mother (representing the heartland, or local Singapore communities), who begins to manifest symptoms of dementia.26 The Hainanese curry rice recalls other migrant and similarly localized or hybrid dishes like the Indian and Chinese rojak or mamak fare that are unique to the region, discussed in this book. It is served, like nasi kandar, with several types of sauces poured over the rice, except this time it contains other diverse non-halal foodways flowing into one stream: Peranakan chicken curry, Hainanese chap chai (stir-fried vegetables), Hainanese pork chop (associated with British colonialism), and kong bak (braised pork).27 Like the situation in Katong where Peranakan food is being made and sold by non-Peranakans, here “curry” is appropriated and acknowledged to become part of the Hainanese repertoire. Eventually the Western-trained daughter, Grace, reconceptualizes her dream restaurant by moving away from French haute cuisine to open a nostalgia-themed restaurant based on her grandfather and mother’s hawker recipes. This is Grace’s way to keep alive her mother’s culinary legacy as well as their joint memories. For the customers, Grace’s old-style Singaporean diner that plays Mandarin songs from the 1950s and the signature Hainanese curry rice dishes it serves are “memory practices” that function as temporal and spatial anchoring devices, countering the triumphalism of globalization with the latter’s ever dens- er networks of compressed time and space.28 The television drama ends with a close shot of a tray of curry chicken, as the first and last shot of the Hainanese curry rice dishes served, as the credits roll. The film attempts to mend not just the mother–daughter relationship but per- 182 CHAPTER 7 haps sets up the false cosmopolitan–heartland dichotomy, only to ultimately fold the cosmopolitan back into the heartland, eschewing globalization for localization. Yet what The Recipe seems to suggest is that, underneath the cosmopolitan veneer of aspirations to Western first- world greatness, lay a different route to modernity, a truly rooted Sin- gaporean national identity that is associated with maintaining culinary heritage and an organic multicultural foundation still based on a core CMIO identity. Like Cook a Pot of Curry, The Recipe’s conclusion demonstrates skepticism toward Singapore’s shift to being a global city (one that had its beginnings in a 1972 speech but was actualized during the 1990s),29 seeing it as moving toward homogeneity and “identity convergence”30 with other global cities rather than having a unique identity of its own. The desire for localization over Westernized globalization (French cuisine) echoes the sentiments expressed in Nasi Lemak 2.0. At another level, this folding back of the cosmopolitan into the heartland roots fulfills the state’s aim as manifested in its Singapore 21 (1999) and Remaking Singapore (2003) policy visions: “to develop a Singaporean populace that is global in outlook but rooted in the local.”31 But its naïve nostalgic sentiment, emerging in a year bookended by the controversial Population White Paper (in January 2013) and the Little India riot (December 8, 2013),32 seems almost out of step with the discourses of fear and loathing of foreigners (be they Chinese migrants or Banglade- shi and Indian contract workers) accompanying these two events. Like The Little Nyonya, The Recipe reflects a world dominated by ethnic Chinese and Mandarin (not dialect) where traces of hybridization and localization linger in easily consumable food rather than meaningful relationships with ethnic Others. The latter terrain is more complicated and difficult to negotiate. We move next to an independent Malaysian film that, although mostly in Mandarin, makes itself accessible to a multilingual audience using subtitles as well as featuring a multiethnic cast.

NASI LEMAK 2.0 AND EVERYDAY MULTICULTURALISM

Debut filmmaker and controversial rapper Wee Meng Chee (a.k.a. Namewee) in an interview stated that, while the system in Malaysia is CURRYING THE NATION 183 unequal, “when we live together, we eat together, there is no racism.”33 He set out to prove this in a road movie where an arrogant Chinese ethnic chauvinist chef, played by himself, becomes a reformed nationalist who embraces Malaysian diversity and hybridity.34 After his Chinese restaurant business in the city fails, he gains appreciation for the humble street-side Malay nasi lemak (coconut rice) and goes on a trip to learn the secret of making the best nasi lemak from various master chefs around the country: a Peranakan Chinese couple in Melaka; a Tamil man and his beautiful daughter in Bentong, Perak; and a polygamous Malay family in a kampung. Ostensibly, the idea is that all these ethnic communities contribute to make up the different aspects of this dish: the coconut rice, sambal ikan bilis (chili anchovies), and the curry. But in reality none of them actually focuses on teaching him these three aspects of making nasi lemak. Interestingly, he is welcomed into these households and taught the craft even though his daydreams about the Indian and Malay families are stereotypes and caricatures: the dream sequence of the Indian family is through a Bollywood musical routine (as if suggesting that Indians are only good for entertainment), while the Malay man in his dream is portrayed as a hostile ethnonationalist (not unlike Ibrahim Ali, founder of Perkasa35) who wants Chef Huang and his friend Xiao K (played by singer Karen Kong) to “go back to China!” Indeed, in his journey Chef Huang discovers that, at an everyday level, Malaysians are less segregated and isolated from each other and much more cosmopolitan or accommodating of difference than the impression given by screaming media headlines about growing racial and religious intolerance.36 Even in Kuala Lumpur before he begins his trip, he encounters the Malay nasi lemak seller whose tai chi proves more powerful than his own martial arts. And as he traverses the country looking for an authentic recipe for success, each ethnicized family he meets is in its own way already hybrid. In Melaka, the Peranakan Chinese had adapted so well to Malay customs that they spoke creole Malay and cooked Malay food; the Indian spice master in Bentong could actually speak Teochew and Hokkien; and there in the rural Ma- lay heartland could be found urban Malays who were educated in Chi- nese vernacular schools who could recite Chinese classical poetry. The only person who needed to transcend this pluralist need “to protect and perpetuate particular, existing cultures” was himself.37 184 CHAPTER 7

Therefore, Namewee’s message is that one has to first acknowledge and counter one’s internalized racism before fighting to dismantle the political structures of racism: “The system has many problems but we should fix our hearts first.”38 Presumably, once we open ourselves up to the culture of others and adopt a cosmopolitan sensibility, systemic issues can be overcome through dialogue and mutual cooperation. At the rice-cooking competition, Chef Huang explains that on his recent journey he encountered many extraordinary people, lifestyles, and cultures that inspired him to create his dish: “Wrapped in the layer of fried egg, I included dishes created by different cultures in Malaysia. It’s a concept similar to the teachings of tai chi. Yin and yang can be found in all beings. It cannot be separated, but must coexist together. And this is the true essence of my new creation.” This statement is a clear embrace of Malaysia’s ethnic and cultural diversity, one that acknowledges a mutual influence on each other as the two or more cultures cohabit. In fact, numerous scenes in the film address this notion of yin–yang multiculturalism. The curry-powder seller’s daughter explains, “A good mix of curry powder is like the relationship between people. You have to find the right balance to make it work.” This analogy between curry and what it takes to live together in difference (a whole lot of tolerance) is a thread throughout Chef Huang’s journey. Earlier in Melaka, he learned from the Nyonya that the recipe for a tasty Peranakan dish is not measured out in grams but based on an instinctive estimation or agak-agak (guesswork). But estimation is a delicate art honed over time in order to get the balance of flavors and tastes just right. Later, when he meets a happy Malay polygamous family of a man, his four wives, and their children, he learns that the polygamous arrangement can work only if a man treats his wives equally. All these examples (the curry-powder mix, the agak-agak that goes into creating a Peranakan dish, and a happy polygamous family) testify to the constant and diligent work that is required to attain social and gustatory harmony. The quality of Malaysian multiculturalism requires not only the right delicate balance, but it also irreversibly means the inability to maintain strict boundaries between cultures. That the three judges (who represent the three race-based parties in Malaysia) support Chef Huang’s PRC competitor who uses traditional ingredients and Chinese ways of cooking suggests that the Barisan Nasional is still unable to think beyond divisive communal lines. According to this pluralist (and purist) CURRYING THE NATION 185 view of multiculturalism, Chef Huang’s dish is regarded as derivative and inauthentic: It is nasi lemak and sambal (chili) wrapped up in a thin omelet in the style of nasi Pattaya (Thai fried rice from Pattaya). How- ever, the Nanyang Chinese as diasporic hybrids have undergone processes of acculturation, adaptation, and localization after centuries of global migration. Consequently, it is difficult to define “where the Chi- nese end and the non-Chinese begin.”39 Certainly the comparison with the “authentic” PRC Chinese accentuates this difference. At the same time, although the film shows Malaysians as open to the multiple influences of global media, transnational cultural, and labor flows from different parts of Asia, Africa, and the West, the film draws a distinction between good and bad fusion. This is reflected in the musical scenes where Chef Huang undergoes several (experimental) phases to find the perfect balance and adaptive fit, beginning with a Chinese gangster karaoke rap with racist lyrics (“I’m Hero Huang from the Huang ancestry. I’m here to uphold our food tradition”) and ending with a popular Malay folk song. These musical numbers reflect his evolving identity as a culturally hybrid national subject. The second song is sung on the outdoor ko tai stage (Chinese “song stage”) and is what I would characterize as an example of bad fusion. Undeniably, the label “bad fusion” connotes an aesthetic value judg- ment that is weighted to favor certain cultural mixtures over other combinations. Chef Huang, wearing top hat and coat tails, and Xiao K, in a platinum blonde wig and flapper dress, deliver a song with English lyrics to a Chinese melody over a 1970s rock band. The intonation of the mostly English words is inaccurate due to the Chinese melody as it creates accents on the wrong syllables. Moreover, the syntax is “Man- glish” (Malaysian English): “I live in big city yo, People mountain people sea. Working so hard no money yo, why you still loving me. Who care you no money yo, please don’t judge me wrongly. We no need eat bao yu yo, we can eat wan tan mee.”40 This whole scene is replete with bad fusion: Chef Huang’s childhood hero, a martial arts chef, has degenerated into a ko tai hula dancer in drag, the two leads are told in Cantonese that their singing “sucks,” and Chef Huang insults the kung-fu clan leader by calling him a “smelly banana.” Could this scene of bad fusion (or cultural confusion) be im- plying that rather than imitating the West badly, it would be better to do what one is already good at? To be one’s authentic cultural self? This 186 CHAPTER 7 applies to possessing culinary and martial arts skills as opposed to singing a Manglish song no one is interested in listening to or dancing a Hawaiian hula (read: American import) in drag in a ko tai setting. I read this whole scene as a statement against incorporating Western forms of culture, for perhaps bad fusion is actually about inappropriate appropriation. The result of this experimental hybridity is “bad” because the film’s ideological agenda is not about the fusion of East with West for the Chinese diasporic subject. Specifically, it is about the Chinese diasporic subject turning his transformative creative attentions to local geography and being open to the possibilities of fusion with Malaysian culture. It is about becoming local to the point where individual cultural elements synergize to fit a new hybrid identity that is at once multicultural but also national. This new hybrid identity appears in the musical scene “Curry Neh,” sung in Mandarin by Xiao K, accompanied by a troupe of Indian female dancers/singers to an Indian tune that borrows from Bollywood codes and conventions. Aside from ethnic Chinese leads and Mandarin lyrics, the setting in a landscaped park, the performers, the

Figure 7.1. Bollywood musical sequence “Curry Neh!” in Nasi Lemak 2.0. Permis- sion granted by Fred Chong CURRYING THE NATION 187 style of dance, and the costume changes that include modern Western and traditional Indian clothing all signify Indianness and Bollywood. This song comes halfway in the film and marks Chef Huang’s first successful attempt at hybridity, fusing Chinese with local Indian elements, creating a kind of “Chindian” result. The chorus uses curry as a metaphor for love: Let’s make curry together (Curry neh) Let’s eat curry together Shake your head Wave your hand Our love spices spreading joy and happiness. By the film’s conclusion, Chef Huang does indeed fall in love with Xiao K, so perhaps curry is an effective aphrodisiac. After all, as Ang reminds us, after centuries of global Chinese migrations, “it is no longer possible to say with any certainty where the Chinese end and the non-Chinese begin.”41 Hybridity confronts and problematizes boundaries, unsettling identities of what is “Chinese,” “Malay,” or “Indian.” Thus

[t]he diaspora experience . . . is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.42

Chef Huang’s personal journey of self-discovery in a localized hybrid and adaptive identity is complete in the final musical sequence that plays as the credits roll: a Mandarin rap version of the popular Malay folk song “Rasa Sayang” (Loving Feeling) wherein he professes: “I love my country . . . without a country there’s no home.”43 The song plays over a montage featuring Namewee, Karen Kong, and other characters from earlier scenes dancing and singing the chorus to the song. Resem- bling the ultimate 1Malaysian dream, it spans all the existing genres and chronotopes—the dream world and the real time, the historical and the present. It is an ethnoscape that includes diverse Malaysians and Others such as the Chinese chef, African student, and Nepali guard, as if to suggest Malaysia’s global connections to the world. Karen Kong invokes this in the lyrics, asking Malaysians to “stop wandering around” and to 188 CHAPTER 7 realize “one home, one dream and one voice.” If “Curry Neh” is a sign of good fusion due to the melding of proximate cultures, Indian and Chinese, “Rasa Sayang” is about the cultural embrace of the nusantara (the Malay Archipelago) by everyone in the music video, and an invitation to Malaysians overseas who are part of the brain drain to return home. As a returnee himself, Namewee reminds the viewers, “No matter what, always remember your way home. The tastiest meal is sharing it with your own family!” The concluding line about commensality with one’s family is a final appeal that relies on emotional familial ties, whereas other earlier lyrics satirize the political situation, acknowledging empty political slogans and “parties saying nonsense in the paper.” In that way, Namewee outlines the systemic problems of inequality resulting from the New Economic Policy (NEP) but then insists on a message of everyday cosmopolitanism where eating-and-living-together-in-difference becomes a norm. This overt message of national unity differs substantively from the top-down 1Malaysia policy espoused by Prime Minister Najib because it describes ordinary Malaysians doing it themselves for and with each other without directives or incentives from the state.44

RECIPE FOR A SUCCESSFUL MULTICULTURAL NATION

Returning to Cook a Pot of Curry, Gilbert, employment counselor and organizer of the protest at Hong Lim Park against the White Paper, insists: A lot of my committee, they said, don’t say “protest” lah, Just rally, picnic, you know, come together. Gathering, makan-makan. But I said no. I used the word “protest.” In the case above, sometimes the discourse of “protest”—speaking up, not sublimating Singaporeans’ desires for democracy through state- endorsed consumption practices like eating and shopping—is necessary in order to attract the attention of the authorities to effect policy changes. Here, highly public forms of commensality such as picnics and public gatherings for makan-makan (“meals” in Malay) are no longer enough. Instead, as Gilbert’s statement implies, the strategy of diluting CURRYING THE NATION 189

Figure 7.2. Actor playing Gilbert Goh in Cook a Pot of Curry. Courtesy of W!LD RICE ltd. radical rhetoric may consequently undermine politics and claims-making in a society where the younger generation is increasingly vocal in its demands to exercise free speech and to participate in building a democracy. Nevertheless, while acknowledging the importance of collective claims-making in the public sphere as a form of participatory citizenship, this book has suggested that hybridity and interethnic commensality exist and are experienced in mundane public eating places where we take in (incorporate) national foods that affirm and reify our unique rojak-ness on a daily basis, whether we are conscious of its operation or not. Uncovering these food histories and narratives illustrates the lived and living nature of creolization in Malaysia and Singapore. It is clear that migrants to this region have adapted and localized their food and foodways to suit the tastebuds of other people in these countries. Cur- rying the nation, just like making rojak, entails mixing spices into the meat or vegetables, adapting, with the eventual result of enhancing and improving the taste of the original ingredients. This combination requires a delicate or fine balance, as reflected in the scenes from Nasi 190 CHAPTER 7

Lemak 2.0 and The Recipe and as explained by Madam Chen in The Little Nyonya. But the problem seems to lie with state leaders, as so eloquently articulated by many characters in Cook a Pot of Curry on stage. It is also hinted at in episode 99 of the Malaysian online satirical news program, The Effing Show. This episode, entitled “Let Them Eat Kang- kung,” refers to Prime Minister Najib’s unfeeling response to the complaint about price hikes (fuel, sugar, electricity, the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax) wherein he claimed that the value of a local vegetable, the water spinach (kangkung), had in fact come down but no one mentions this. The skit uses vegetables to stand in for various ethnic parties such as Perkasa (a Malay rights nongovernmental organization in this skit defending the rights of kangkung), the MCA (usually the Malaysian Chinese Association, but here representing choi-sam, a leafy Chinese vegetable), and the MIC (Malaysian Indian Association, renamed as Machas Institute of Cucumber).45 The MCA representative blames the head chef for not knowing “how to mix us together . . . how to cook us together”:

Actually hoh, it’s like this. When we MCA first started, we were always at the table involved with all the other vegetables. We mix- mix with the bayam, the kangkung, the kobis, altogether like lo han choy like that.46 But now ha, all the vegetables don’t like to be with us. They like to be on their own you know. You know why-ah, I tell you why. Because-ah, now-ah, our restaurant-ah, is in a bad shape. The head chef don’t know how to mix us together, don’t know how to cook us together. That’s why all the vegetables now they all go to other restaurants. They go to Australia, UK, Singapore. They don’t feel like they belong, you know. Like that ah, I tell you-ah, it’s a “recipe” for disaster. Hahaha. It’s a, wordplay-ah, joke-ah, I joke.

The pithy speech encapsulates issues such as the brain drain and lack of interethnic socializing, due to a failure in political leadership to culti- vate national unity based on fair policies and equal opportunities for non-Malays. This failure on the part of the state to unite its diverse citizens is regarded as “a recipe for disaster.” For a final glance at recipes for a successful multicultural nation, we return to the film The Recipe. Certainly the title describes the traditional Hainanese curry recipe that Grace inherits from her family. But read CURRYING THE NATION 191 metaphorically, the title can also refer to the recipe (or formula) for Singapore’s national identity. The film seems to imply that a happy nation (represented by the mother character as well as the old customers facing dementia) is one that maintains a semblance of comfortable familiarity that its citizens have with the past; this includes a store of affects, such as the sound of one’s favorite songs, and the tastes and smells of one’s childhood dishes. In this instance, the food (Hailam or Hainanese curry rice) and space (home or the hawker center) is uniquely Singaporean in identity with its hint of adaptation and borrowing from other ethnic communities in the region, an affordable and down- to-earth homemade hawker dish rather than a sophisticated French cuisine. Such a metaphorical reading of an otherwise predictable sentimental story would suggest the possibility of resistance against the un- critical adoption of Westernized cosmopolitanism and upper-class aspirations. In that way, it is not unlike the “good fusion” proposed in Nasi Lemak 2.0, where cooperation, fusion, and borrowing take place among local cultures. Furthermore, the process of producing “good fusion” itself echoes the “making” dynamic that has been our motif throughout this book: a series of moves and countermoves—moments of tension and accommodation—for living and eating together. We have been anxious to stress the mobility of these relations of food, space, and identity, rather than their rigid prescription. Seen from the ground, then, “recipes” become a repertoire of tactical practices in a world that will never be entirely within our control, on one hand, or lacking possibilities of intervention, on the other. Framed in this way, “recipes” sketch ways of “working” memories of the past and imaginings for the future to build a sense of “we-ness”—to trace intimations of “the coming community”—in the palates and places of the everyday present. At the same time, this embodied practice is held in tension by darker tales of hegemony: tales of commodification, hyper-nationalism, racial discrimination, and boun- dary drawing, tales of erasure of “living” landscapes and cultures. 192 CHAPTER 7

CLEARING OUR PLATES

Bright moonlight still shines on Gurney Drive Hawker Centre, Penang. However, the night is deepening. The smell of grilled cuttlefish hangs in the air. The taste of rojak lingers on the lips. It is time to leave. Overall, we have shown that “making rojak,” together with its resonances of eating “together-in-difference,” allows us to explore historical and cultural processes whereby national cuisines defined in difference come to be forged. We also have shown that concepts of nation might be challenged, or at least complicated, by “other” understandings of people and place, together with the culinary exchanges embedded in these understandings. This is particularly the case for Malaysia and Singapore—nations with diverse migrant ancestries and where public eating places echo this diversity in the selling of distinctive local dishes, marked by their hybrid histories and by their differing, sometimes competing, meanings of belonging. From our culinary mapping of these eating places (mapping of built, sensorial, and virtual landscapes), we have seen the significance of entrepreneurialism, creative experimenta- tion, the passage of time, and the movement of different groups of people through space. All of these dimensions play their part, whether we are sitting in an “old” or “new” kopitiam, walking through a Perana- kan-themed neighborhood, or reflecting on a fierce debate about the smell of curry. This coming together—of people, of food, of time, and of space—allows the possibility of reconceptualizing public spheres and good third places. It also acknowledges a persistent viscerality in these relations. Here, it is not only the taste and smell of shared food or the ambience of eating together that lingers on the palate and in the memory but also the sensory politics of who is eating what and with whom, and ways that commensality is written, differentially, on the spaces of the city. Eating together, we have shown, is steeped in both pleasure and anxiety—the power of food to create, and to mirror, identities of belonging and togetherness, as surely as it can push identity meanings apart. We conclude by returning to Ang, but this time to her reflections on the productive possibilities of hybridity’s ambivalences—states of ambivalence that keep us on our toes, sensitive to our differences while aware of potential connections to each other.47 This, for us, is the analytical force of “making rojak”—of “everyday practices” embedded in CURRYING THE NATION 193 taste, smell, sight, and sensory remembering and framed by complex relations of power. This approach of “making” and “mixture”—both conceptually and methodologically—has helped us to tease out ways of understanding the contradictory imperatives of multiculturalism and globalization, whether in Singapore and Malaysia or beyond. In the unfinished business of searching for that good third place for eating, conviviality, community, political debate, and resistance, we will continue to taste the cosmopolis from the ground up.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Sylvia Tan, The Cold Storage Heritage Cookbook (Singapore: Land- mark, 2004), 86, 98. Tan identifies rojak as a heritage food in Singapore, tracing its history from Indonesian origins (as rudjak) to the differing versions sold by Chinese and Indian hawkers in Singapore. While Chinese rojak contains dough sticks, cuttlefish, and even century eggs in addition to the basic Javanese version of fruit and vegetables, the Indian version “is a mixture of deep fried battered items tossed together with shredded cucumber . . . yam bean . . . and green chilli in a cooked sweet potato sauce” (86). 2. C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Breast of Aphrodite,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 303. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1963), 89. While Elspeth Probyn, citing Barbara Santich, points out that Lévi-Strauss was referring to specific meaning structures associated with taboo foods rather than speaking of food in universal terms, Leo Coleman claims that from Lévi-Strauss’s perspective, “animals, plants and their parts provided metaphors through which social, or even cos- mological, contradictions were either consciously or unconsciously expressed and worked out.” Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (Lon- don: Routledge. 2000), 11; Leo Coleman, “Guide to Further Reading,” in Food: Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Leo Coleman (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 153. 4. Su-Lyn Tan and Mark Tay, World Food: Malaysia and Singapore (Foot- scray, Vic.: Lonely Planet, 2003), 9.

195 196 NOTES

5. One of the more recent books to chart Singapore’s culinary history is Nicki Tarulevicz, Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 6. Salleh Ben Joned, “Rojak Is Good for Our Nation-Building,” in As I Please: Selected Writings 1975–1994 (London: Skoob Books, 1994), 56. 7. Lisa Law says, “Sensory landscapes of cities suggest less conventional forms of ethnic politics, and reveal how diasporic populations find original ways of engaging with urban life.” Lisa Law, “Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong,” Ecumene 8 (2001): 278. 8. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 193–201. 9. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 201, original emphasis. 10. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 200–01. 11. “Mad about Food” was the title of the column Sylvia Tan wrote in the Sunday Times (the Sunday edition of Singapore’s The Straits Times). A series of books of personal stories and anecdotes that played with this title followed, culminating with Sylvia Tan, Mad about Food: The Cookbook (Singapore: Mar- shall Cavendish, 2005). 12. Here is a sample in no special order. From Singapore: http://ieatishootipost.sg/; http://www.noobcook.com/; http://www.misstamchiak.com/; http:// rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/; http://www.sgfoodonfoot.com/; http:// lovesingaporefood.blogspot.com/. From Malaysia: http:// www.hungrygowhere.my/; Motormouth from Ipoh—Malaysian Food and Travel, http://www.j2kfm.com/; http://www.vkeong.com/; http:// www.friedchillies.com/; http://www.awhiffoflemongrass.com/; http://masak- masak.blogspot.com/; http://kampungboycitygal.com/; http://rasamalaysia.com/ ; Cumi and Ciki Food Travel, http://ccfoodtravel.com/; http:// www.bangsarbabe.com/; http://food.malaysiamostwanted.com/bloggers; http:// www.penangfoods.com/; http://www.penangfaces.chanlilian.net/archive/ (all accessed January 10, 2014). 13. “Homemade Penang Rojak Recipe,” http://rasamalaysia.com/homemade-penang-rojak/ (accessed August 10, 2013). 14. Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Chee-Beng Tan (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 188–89. 15. Ghassan Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, ‘Ethnic Food’ and Migrant Home-Building,” in Home/World: Space, Commu- nity and Marginality in Sydney’s West, ed. Helen Grace et al. (Annandale, N.S.W.: Pluto, 1997), 100–18. 16. Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West,” 105. 17. Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West,” 102. NOTES 197

18. See Philip Crang, “Displacement, Consumption and Identity,” Environ- ment and Planning A 28 (1996): 47–67, in which Crang discusses food as an “entangled” object. See also Law, “Home Cooking,” 276. 19. Wong Hong Suen, “A Taste of the Past: Historically Themed Restau- rants and Social Memory in Singapore,” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Re- source, Tradition and Cooking, ed. Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (London: Routledge, 2007), 115–28. 20. Here we are specifically referring to Peranakan Chinese, whereas “Per- anakan” itself simply means the offspring of a male “stranger” and a “local” woman. See Leo Suryadinata, “Introduction,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Glo- balizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre and Baba House, 2009), 2. Note that for consistency we adopt throughout our book the Malay form of the port city’s name, rather than its English version, Malacca, except when quoting from sources that use the English spelling. 21. Rosemary Brissenden, South East Asian Food (Ringwood, Vic.: Pen- guin, 1996), 185–86: Wong, “Taste of the Past,” 117; Tan Chee-Beng, “Inter- marriage and the Chinese Peranakan in Southeast Asia,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Her- itage Centre and Baba House, 2009), 30–31. 22. Brissenden, South East Asian Food, 185; Suryadinata, “Introduction,” 2–4. 23. Wong, “Taste of the Past,” 124–25. 24. The first Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf outlet opened in Singapore in 1996. Singapore-based Sunvic today owns the business worldwide. See “Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards. Jury: Michelle Sassoon,” http:// www.cartierwomensinitiative.com/jury/michelle-sassoon (accessed December 14, 2013). Sunvic CEO Victor Sassoon had to convince the American Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf owner that Asians needed food to go with their coffee, and it was necessary to introduce hot food at local stores. See Mohd Rizal Kismath Batcha, “The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Swot Analysis,” 2007, http:// www.scribd.com/doc/3987705/The-Coffee-Bean-Tea-Leaf-Swot-Analysis (accessed August 10, 2013). Starbucks opened in Singapore in 1996 and in Malay- sia in December 1998. “Starbucks Singapore,” http://www.starbucks.com.sg/ company-information.html (accessed January 8, 2014); “Starbucks Malaysia,” http://www.starbucks.com.my/about-us/starbucks-malaysia (accessed January 8, 2014). 25. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 16. 198 NOTES

26. Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, and Khoo Gaik Cheng, eds., Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (London: Routledge, 2009). 27. Selvaraj Velayutham, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 27. 28. Goh and Holden, “Introduction: Postcoloniality, Race and Multicultu- ralism” in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, ed. Daniel P. S. Goh et al. (London: Routledge, 2009), 6. 29. Goh and Holden, “Introduction,” 7–9. 30. Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Keynote Address, presented at the fourth annual Malaysian Student Leaders’ Summit, Kuala Lumpur, July 31, 2010. 31. The constitutional definition yokes Malays to Islam as an integral part of their identity so, consequently, all Malays are born Muslims. There is a constant slippage between these two identities as ethnic Malays make up the majority of Malaysians. This conflation is frequently utilized for political mile- age. 32. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 180. 33. Michael G. Peletz, Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Poli- tics in Malaysia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Maznah Mohamad, “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization of the Sharia,” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 3 (2010): 499–518. 34. Tan Chee-Beng, “Food and Ethnicity with Reference to the Chinese in Malaysia,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 147. 35. “Mufti Asri Zainul Abidin Says, Ceramah at Mosques Should NOT Be Too Loud,” Malaysians Unplugged Blog, September 17, 2008, http://malaysia- nunplug.blogspot.com/2008/09/mufti-asri-zainul-abidin-saysceramah-at.html (accessed February 7, 2014). 36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiv, xxiv, original emphasis. 37. Velayutham, Responding to Globalization, 31; Chua and Rajah, “Hy- bridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 188. 38. Mussadique and Jordan Suleiman, “Rojak!,” 15 Malaysia, September 16, 2009, http://15malaysia.com/films/rojak/ (accessed January 7, 2014). 39. Mat rempit are reckless or daredevil street racers on motorbikes who, apart from being regarded as dangerous traffic pests, are associated with petty crime. 40. Ross King, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space in Malaysia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008). NOTES 199

41. C. J. W.-L. Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 116. 42. Ziauddin Sardar, The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (London: Reak- tion Books, 2000), 8.0. 43. Boh sia is a Hokkien name literally meaning “no sound” used to describe a young woman (usually in her teens) who has anonymous sex with male strangers. Boh jan (short for boh sia jantan) is the male equivalent. 44. “All about Mat Rempit,” The Best Ummah’s Weblog, March 7, 2010, http://thebestummah.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/all-about-mat-rempit/ (accessed January 7, 2014) 45. Note that the alternative spelling to “kampung” is “kampong.” For consistency we use “kampung” throughout, unless we are quoting sources that use its alternative spelling. 46. William Lim, in his turn, is critical of internationally renowned architect Koolhaas’s trenchant criticisms of the Singapore government’s urban development policies. After Koolhaas, this approach (almost total demolition and then rebuilding) is commonly referred to as “tabula rasa.” We explore Lim’s criticisms more fully in chapter 5. William S. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism: A Radical Postmodern Perspective (Singapore: World Scientific, 2005), 165–66. 47. Kim Cheng Boey, Between Stations (Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2009), 132–33. 48. Boey, Between Stations, 146. 49. Boey, Between Stations, 128. 50. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 8. 51. Massey, For Space, 8; see also 1–6. 52. Massey, For Space, 195. 53. Examples of published work arising from these intellectual journeys are: Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity,” in Everyday Multiculturalism, ed. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velay- utham (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–104; Jean Duruz, “From Malacca to Adelaide . . . : Fragments towards a Biography of Cooking, Yearning and Laksa,” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking, ed. Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (London: Routledge, 2007), 183–200; Jean Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging: Following the Lak- sa Trail in Katong, Singapore,” Continuum 25 (2011): 605–18. 54. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 33, 39. For a comparison of Benjamin, de Certeau, and Lefebvre and their “spatial stories,” see Fran Ton- kiss, Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 114–15. 200 NOTES

55. Joanne Leow, “On Food, on Identity: Insatiable Appetites,” Civic Life Blog, September 2, 2010, http://www.civiclife.sg/blog/?cat=11 (accessed Janu- ary 6, 2014). 56. Pnina Werbner, ed., Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives (New York: Berg, 2008). 57. Felix Driver quoted in Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong, “The Notion of Place in the Construction of History, Nostalgia and Heritage,” in Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, ed. Kwok Kian-Woon et al. (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999), 137. 58. Yeoh and Kong, “Notion of Place,” 136. 59. Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People Places Food (Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2007), 45–61. 60. Katong and Joo Chiat are neighboring local areas of the east coast of Singapore; locally, the names tend to be used interchangeably. In 1993 Joo Chiat was formally declared (by the Singapore government’s Urban Redevel- opment Authority) to be a conservation area. In February 2011, Joo Chiat was proclaimed by the National Heritage Board as Singapore’s “first Heritage Town.” “Joo Chiat,” http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_946__2008-11-13.html (accessed September 13, 2013). 61. See Majorie Chiew, “New Food Culture” and “Modern Teahouse,” Star Online, April 18, 2005, http://www.thestar.com.my/story.aspx/ ?file=%2f2005%2f4%2f18%2ffeatures%2f10692452&sec=features and http:// www.thestar.com.my/story.aspx/ ?file=%2f2005%2f4%2f18%2ffeatures%2f10694239&sec=features (accessed January 13, 2014). 62. Under Prime Minister Najib Razak, the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allowed for indefinite detention without trial, has been replaced by other laws such as the Peaceful Assembly Act and the Security Offences Act that restrict human rights. See Rita Jong, “Suaram Vows to Expose Malaysia’s Rights Record at UN Council,” Malaysian Insider, September 18, 2013, http:// www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/suaram-vows-to-expose-malaysias-rights-record-at-un-council (accessed January 6, 2014). See Ong Kian Meng, “Assessing the Impact of Bersih 2.0,” Malaysiakini.com, July 11, 2011, http://www.isarawak.com.my/v2010/index.php?option=com_content& view=article&id=914:assessing-the-impact-of-bersih-20&catid=34:news& Itemid=53 (accessed January 7, 2014); Kenny Gan, “Bersih Rally an Eye- Opener: BN Loses Big, GE-13 Now Seen in 2012,” Malaysia Chronicle, July 10, 2011, http://hornbillunleashed.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/20662/ (accessed January 7, 2014). 63. “A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore: Population White Paper,” January 2013, http://www.nptd.gov.sg/content/NPTD/news/ NOTES 201

_jcr_content/par_content/download_98/file.res/population-white-paper.pdf (accessed January 8, 2014); Leonard Lim and Andrea Ong, “Population White Paper Debate: Who’s Xenophobic?” Singapolitics, AsiaOne News, February 21, 2013, http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Singapore/Story/ A1Story20130221-403658.html (accessed January 8, 2014); Jeannette Tan, “Population White Paper Triggers Nation-Wide Debate,” Yahoo!news Singa- pore, November 27, 2013, http://sg.news.yahoo.com/-yir2013--population- white-paper-triggers-nationwide-debate-101840966.html (accessed January 8, 2014). 64. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 65. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. 66. Here we are adopting and reworking Ann Game’s expression “meaning embodied,” although Game uses it in contexts of bodily senses at the beach, in the sea: “The desire to put one’s feet or body in the sand, to be in the water, can be understood as meaning embodied—feel, touch, fluid—and possibly not speakable.” Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociolo- gy (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 177. 67. “Old Town Kopitiam,” Yummy Corner Blog, http:// www.yummycorner.com/2006/01/04/old-town-kopitiam/ (accessed September 11, 2013). Note that the business Old Town Kopitiam later was renamed Old Town White Coffee. 68. David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 12–14. Meghan Holohan, “Smells like Nostal- gia: Why Do Scents Bring Back Memories?” NBC News Health, July 19, 2012, http://www.nbcnews.com/health/smells-nostalgia-why-do-scents-bring-back- memories-895521 (accessed January 5, 2014). 69. For discussion of embodied learning and the sensorium, see Constance Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994); David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1989). 70. Nadia Seremetakis, quoted in Law, “Home Cooking,” 266. 71. Law, “Home Cooking,” 274–80. 72. Note that live-in domestic workers in Hong Kong are obliged to vacate their employers’ homes on Sundays. This supposedly provides “free” time for the maids and a measure of private recreation for employer families. Law, “Home Cooking,” 269–70. 73. Alan Han, “‘Can I Tell You What We Have to Put Up With?’: Stinky Fish and Offensive Durian,” Continuum 21 (2007): 361–77. 202 NOTES

74. Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 1997). 75. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix–xx. De Certeau defines tactics as “‘ways of operating’; victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ . . . clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things . . . joyful discoveries” (xix). 76. For critique of this position (and of Martha Nussbaum, in particular), see Pnina Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture and Soci- ety 23 (2006): 497; see also Homi Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, ed. Laura Gracia-Morena and Peter Pfeifer (London: Camden House, 1996), 193–94. 77. Nussbaum’s essay and the ensuing debates that it sparked can be found in this compilation: Martha C. Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1996). 78. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 41. 79. Heightened Malay ethnonationalist rhetoric during Prime Minister Ab- dullah Badawi’s leadership (2003–2009) has not eased under his successor, Najib Razak, who has also not taken any actions or issued any speeches against ethnic and religious intolerance on the part of right-wing Malay ethnonationalist groups and those in his party. See Eileen Ng, “Anwar Calls Jais Action ‘High Handed,’ Wants Najib to Make a Stand on Allah Issue,” Malaysian Insider, January 5, 2014, http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/anwar- calls-jais-action-high-handed-wants-najib-to-make-a-stand-on-allah-is (accessed January 6, 2014). 80. Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Nor- malisation of Difference (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Werbner, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. 81. Velayutham, Responding to Globalization, 120–21. 82. George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2 (London: Pine Forge Press/Sage, 2007). 83. Roland Robertson, “Globalisation or Glocalisation?,” Journal of Interna- tional Communication 1 (1994): 33–52.

1. KOPITIAM

1. Robyn Eckhardt, “Yut Kee: The End of an Era?” EatingAsia Blog, March 8, 2011, http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2011/03/yut-kee-kuala-lumpur-chinese-kopitiam.html (accessed January 23, 2014). Sadly, when I NOTES 203 returned to Yut Kee in February 2014, I discovered that the business was indeed vacating the shophouse in April after eighty-eight years because the building was going to be converted into a seven-story hostel. Mervyn informed me that they had secured a space in an adjacent building. 2. These include Malaysia’s largest online community (https://forum.lowyat.net/Kopitiam); the Malaysia forum mailing list based out of Stan- ford University ([email protected]); Sparrow’s Kopitiam (Sin- gaporean); ClubSNAP, a Singapore photography discussion forum (http:// www.clubsnap.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=10); Singapore online community (http://www.discuss.com.sg/forumdisplay.php/62-Kopitiam-Chat); Sin- gapore students at Cornell University ([email protected]). 3. M. G. G. Pillai, e-mail to Gaik Cheng Khoo, May 21, 2004. 4. Judith Nagata, ed., “Introduction,” in Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and Reality (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 3. 5. Malaysia’s ethnic population is estimated at 50.49 percent Malays, 22 percent Chinese, 6.6 percent Indians, 11.92 percent non-Malay bumiputeras, and the rest make up 0.008 percent (second quarter of 2013 figures based on the 2010 census, Monthly Statistical Bulletin Malaysia, July 2013). 6. Judith Nagata, “Religious Correctness and the Place of Islam in Malay- sia’s Economic Policies,” in Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia, ed. T. Brook and H. V. Luong (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 99–100. 7. See the inventory, “Traditional Trades and Occupations in Georgetown World Heritage Site (by Trades),” p. 12, http://www.gtwhi.com.my/images/ Traditional%20Trades%20and%20Occupations%20Directory_by%20trades. pdf (accessed February 5, 2014). 8. Syahredzan Johan, “The Rise and Rise of Commercial Kopitiams,” Re- fleksi Minda (the Old One!) Blog, February 10, 2008, http://refleksiminda.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the-rise-and-rise-of-commercial-kopitiams/ (accessed January 17, 2014). 9. In May 2004, I conducted fieldwork near Petaling Street, Petaling Jaya (a predominantly Chinese suburb) and Penang. My informants had formative experiences of kopitiams in smaller towns like Ipoh, Kemaman, Sibu, Temer- loh, and Johore Baru. They ranged in age from their early twenties to sixties and were from diverse ethnic and dialect groups. A year later, in May 2005, I returned to visit a popular kopitiam in Kuala Lumpur, Yut Kee Kopitiam, and on December 31, 2005, I went to Hai Peng Kopitiam Sdn. Bhd., in Kemaman. 10. Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Listen to the Sound of the Azan,” OffTheEdge 42 (2008): 22. 11. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 41. 204 NOTES

12. Such racialization and nonmingling between ethnic groups were manifest even in the cosmopolitan eating places I visited where different ethnic groups came with their families or with friends of the same ethnic background. Tables with ethnically mixed customers were a rare phenomenon. 13. Pillai, e-mail, 2004. 14. Thanks to Tim Bunnell who obtained this information from geographer Terry McGee, who conducted fieldwork in KL during the 1960s. 15. Andrew Ong, “Suaram: Islamisation Race Affecting Non-Muslims,” Ma- laysiakini.com, June 18, 2004, www.malaysiakini.com/print.php?id=20338 (accessed January 17, 2014). 16. Indeed, on July 17, 2007, then–deputy prime minister Najib Abdul Ra- zak announced that Malaysia was an Islamic state, ignoring the existence of the nation’s secular constitution. See also Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Just-Do-It-(Your- self): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 227–47; Khoo, “Listen to the Sound of the Azan.” 17. Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 279. 18. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 85–86. 19. K. S. Maniam, “The New Diaspora,” keynote address, Internationalising Communities Conference, Brisbane, Australia, November 27–30, 1996, 8, http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl392/492/maniam-dias.html (accessed January 22, 2014). 20. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, “Introduction: Conceiving Cosmo- politanism,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13. 21. Maniam, “The New Diaspora,” 7. 22. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” 195. 23. Maniam, “The New Diaspora,” 8. 24. Maniam, “The New Diaspora,” 2. 25. Sumit Mandal, “Transethnic Solidarities, Racialisation and Social Equal- ity,” in The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity and Reform, ed. Edmund Terence Gomez (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 53. 26. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Commu- nity Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). 27. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 42. 28. Ng Ping Ho, interview with Khoo at Popiah Pictures, Kuala Lumpur, May 28, 2005. NOTES 205

29. Mandal, “Transethnic Solidarities, Racialisation and Social Equality,” 51. 30. M. Zulkifli, e-mail to Gaik Cheng Khoo, May 12, 2005. 31. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger in association with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 34–35; Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 186. 32. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 185. 33. There is a spectrum of diverse and diverging interpretations and feelings among Muslims about whether to eat at pork-free or halal establishments. Social stigma also reinforces such religious and ethnic divisions for Malays who are reluctant to be seen in a kopitiam. 34. “Our Heritage,” Starbucks.com, http://www.starbucks.com/about-us/ our-heritage (accessed February 5, 2014). 35. An English-language tutor to Chinese-medium high school students told me that the reason her students do not frequent Starbucks is because they are intimidated by the menus and do not know how to order in English. 36. Homi Bhabha, “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Cross- ing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 139. 37. Unlike the male-dominated early European coffee house, the kopitiam is “unintentionally” gendered, according to one female informant. She ration- alizes that women have less leisure time as they are taken up with child care but that women whose children are older also frequent coffee shops if they are not busy playing mahjong. Gender in the kopitiam deserves more space and elaboration than is possible here. For example, women working in the kopitiam experience sexual harassment. Lai Ah Eng, “Work and Family—Insights from an Ordinary Woman’s Journey,” Awareness 10 (2003): 61–73. 38. This Wikipedia entry on “Kopi tiam” exists as of July 11, 2014, at 14:58. 39. Don’t Play Play, DVD, 6 mins., digital student animation, produced by Liew Seng Tat, Ng Jun Wei, Soon Ah Hui, and Terence Raj (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2002). 40. Coffeeshop, DVD, 6 mins, student digital film, directed by Teo Yong Jin (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2002). 41. Ban Wang, “Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi’s Song of Unending Sorrow,” Positions 10, no. 3 (2002): 671. 42. Wang, “Love at Last Sight,” 673. 43. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 36. Jean, however, in chapter 4’s discussion of hawker centers in Singapore, uses Bhabha simply as a starting point to develop a more grounded view of third space. At the end of the day, our views tend to converge. 206 NOTES

44. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 37. 45. A shophouse is a Singaporean and Malaysian English word meaning a two-story building with a shop on the ground floor and living quarters above. 46. Chua Beng Huat, “That Imagined Space: Nostalgia for the Kampung in Singapore,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singa- pore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 229. 47. “The [sic] Uncle Lim’s Philosophy,” http://www.unclelimscafe.com/ about.htm. 48. Chua, “That Imagined Space,” 239. 49. Collin Abraham, The Naked Social Order: The Roots of Racial Polarisa- tion in Malaysia (Subang Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk, 2004), 6. 50. Taman Selera was an NEP initiative to encourage Malays to do business since there were limited allocations to non-Malay food sellers in such food courts; from Pillai, e-mail. 51. R. De Silva, “50 Years of Eating Outlets: Those Were the Days, My Friend,” New Straits Times, June 18, 2007, http://www.nst.com.my/Cur- rent_News/NST/Monday/National/20070618122751/Article/ pppull_index_html (accessed January 20, 2009). 52. Robyn Eckhardt, “EatingAsia: How the West Was Eaten,” KLue, issue 102, April 2007, http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2007/05/ how_the_west_wa.html (accessed January 21, 2014). 53. De Silva, “50 Years of Eating Outlets.” 54. Christina Hardyment, Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating since 1945 (London: BBC Books, 1995), 133. 55. De Silva, “50 Years of Eating Outlets.” 56. Eckhardt, “Yut Kee: The End of an Era?” 57. De Silva, “50 Years of Eating Outlets.” 58. Robert H. McKinley, “DiTanggung Halal [Guaranteed Islamicly Prop- er]: The Importance of Serving Halal Food in Religiously Plural Malaysia; Who Is Host and Who Is Guest?,” paper presented at Eat, Drink, Halal, Haram: Food, Islam and Society in Asia Workshop, Singapore, December 3–5, 2003, 1–2. 59. McKinley, “DiTanggung Halal,” 33. 60. See short story by K. S. Maniam, “Arriving,” in Arriving . . . and Other Stories (Singapore: Times, 1995), 17–20. 61. Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Chee-Beng Tan (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 184. NOTES 207

62. In a phone conversation with Gaik on March 13, 2014, Elaine Wong said she hopes eventually to continue Hai Peng’s legacy in Sukiyang Coffee, a company she established with a partner. 63. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii. 64. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 65. Andrew Ong, “Suaram: Islamisation Race Affecting Non-Muslims.” 66. James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feel- ing beyond the Nation, eds. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 365. 67. Kathy Rowland, “Introduction,” in Krishen Jit: An Uncommon Position (Singapore: Contemporary Asian Arts Centre, 2003), 16. 68. Francis Loh Kok Wah, “Developmentalism and the Limits of Demo- cratic Discourse,” in Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices, ed. Francis Loh and Khoo Boo Teik (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002), 50. 69. Maniam, “The New Diaspora,” 7.

2. SPREADING THE TOAST OF MEMORY

1. Dawn Mok, Singapore CityScoops (Singapore: CityScoops Media, 2007), 78. 2. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Crang cited in Lisa Law, “Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong,” Ecumene 8 (2001): 276. 3. “The Toast That Binds . . . Kinship, Friendship, Partnership,” Ya Kun Kaya Toast, http://www.yakun.com (accessed October 11, 2009); “Welcome to the Good Old Days,” Killiney Kopitiam, http://www.killiney-kopitiam.com (accessed October 11, 2009); Veron Ang, “Toast Box—Out of the Box,” Sparklette Blog, http://sparklette.net/food/toast-box/ (accessed October 11, 2009). 4. Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and Na- tional Identity in Malaysian Culture and Media,” in Everyday Multicultural- ism, ed. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2009), 99. 5. Khoo, “Kopitiam,” 94; Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lau Wei Peng, “Historic District, Contemporary Meanings: Urban Conservation and the Creation and Consumption of Landscape Spectacle in Tanjong Pagar,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 55–57. 208 NOTES

6. C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Breast of Aphrodite,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 303. 7. Jean Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging: Following the Laksa Trail in Katong, Singapore,” Continuum 25 (2011): 609. 8. William Koh, The Top Toast: Ya Kun and the Singapore Breakfast Tra- dition (Singapore: Cengage Learning, 2010), 3; see also 1–2. 9. Asiapac Editorial, Gateway to Eurasian Culture (Singapore: Asiapac Books, 2003), 120; see also Francesca Eber-Lim, “The Secret Ingredient: Eur- asian Food,” in Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes, ed. Myrna Braga- Blake (Singapore: Times Editions, 1992), 163. 10. The Business Tree, “Singapore’s Kaya Kings,” episode 8, Channel News- Asia, MediaCorps News Pte. Ltd., produced by Lau Joon-Nie and Susanna Kulatissa, 2005 (originally aired 2003). In this episode, Wendy Chen, in her position as marketing executive for Glory Foods, Singapore, comments that Nyonya [Peranakan] kaya is characterized by less egg and pandan juice and more coconut, and usually is green-gold in color, in contrast to the Hainanese version. The latter tends to demand more eggs and less coconut, and is a rich brown in color, sometimes with the help of caramel or gula Melaka. 11. Chen, in The Business Tree, “Singapore’s Kaya Kings.” 12. Ong, in The Business Tree, “Singapore’s Kaya Kings.” Ong Ah Hai is an eighty-two-year-old coffee-shop assistant from Killiney Kopitiam. The history of the association of the Hainanese with milk bars, kopitiams, Western restaurants, street food, and small food businesses generally throughout Singapore is fascinating in its own right. See, for example, Sylvia Tan, Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cook (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2004), 31–33. In this chapter, however, the focus is on the Hainanese contribution to kopitiam culture. 13. Lai Ah Eng, “The Kopitiam in Singapore: An Evolving Story about Migration and Cultural Diversity,” in Migration and Diversity in Asian Con- texts, ed. Lai Ah Eng et al. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), 213; see also 213–14. 14. Teo explains the delay in Hainanese migration to Singapore compared to other dialect groups (such as Hokkiens and Teochews) in terms of the late establishment of Hainan’s port Hankou as a treaty port. Jaclyn Teo, “Chinese Dialect Groups and Their Occupations in 19th and Early 20th Century Singa- pore,” Biblioasia April (2010): 24; see also Lai, “The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 213, 214. 15. Lai, “The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 214, 223. Lai notes that Kopitiam has, in fact, become, in Singapore, a brand in itself established under the auspices of Lim Bee Huat, whose business success is legendary in Singapore—another NOTES 209 rags-to-riches tale. During fieldwork, I noticed that these coffee shops (as Kopitiam Pte. Ltd.) are ubiquitous, and typically found in Singapore’s food courts. 16. Lai, “The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 214; Teo (“Chinese Dialect Groups,” 24), however, claims that the influence of the Hainanese in Singapore’s coffeeshop trade gradually declined after the 1930s as other dialect groups, especially Foochows, with more financial resources, opened larger establishments. 17. Teo, “Chinese Dialect Groups,” 24. 18. Lai Ah Eng, “The Kopitiam in Singapore: An Evolving Story about Migration and Cultural Diversity,” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Se- ries No. 132 (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2010), 8. 19. Tan Ern Tzeh Favian, “Coffee Shops in Singapore: Organizational Death, Birth, and Survival,” honors thesis, National University of Singapore, 1997–1998, 7. Note that kopi is the Malay word for “coffee. For the contribution of the Hainanese to Singapore’s coffee/cafe culture, see also Lai, “The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 215. 20. Selina Ching Chan, “Consuming Food: Structuring Social Life and Creating Social Relationships,” in Past Times: A Social History of Singapore, ed. Chan Kwok Bun and Tong Chee Kiong (Singapore: Times Editions, 2003), 133. 21. While Starbucks is based in Seattle and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf originated in Los Angeles, both chains, through their franchises, predictably have a visible presence in Singapore. “Homepage,” Starbucks Singapore, http:/ /www.starbucks.com.sg / (accessed October 11, 2009); “Homepage,” Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, http://www.coffeebean.com.sg/ (accessed October 11, 2009). 22. Chan, “Consuming Food,” 133. 23. The inclusion of condensed milk in kopi and kopi’s resulting flavor has a complex history that includes early twentieth-century concerns in Singapore for food safety and quality, Depression and wartime shortages and rationing (especially during, and immediately after, the Japanese occupation), the diffi- culty of keeping milk in the tropics without adequate refrigeration, and the keeping qualities of tinned condensed milk. Wong Hong Suen, “A Taste of the Past: Historically Themed Restaurants and Social Memory in Singapore,” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking, ed. Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (London: Routledge, 2007), 76–78; Goh Chor Boon, Serving Singapore: A Hundred Years of Cold Storage, 1903–2003 (Sin- gapore: Cold Storage Singapore, 2003), 21, 46; Reay Tannahill, Food in Histo- ry (London: Review, 2002), 332. 210 NOTES

24. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Pleasures of the Proximate Senses: Eating, Taste, and Culture,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 231. 25. Goh, Serving Singapore, 21; Wong, “Taste of the Past,” 76–78; Tanna- hill, Food in History, 332. 26. See for example, Ang, “Toast Box—Out of the Box.” 27. In her chapter on the kopitiam phenomenon, Lai (“The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 209–32) outlines the evolution of the kopitiam in Singapore through a number of stages—monocultural (casual stalls serving their own ethnic communities, from which the Hainanese kopitiam emerged as a dominant form, becoming writ large for a multiethnic clientele), multicultural (reflecting the mid-twentieth-century move of populations to housing estates and their resultant ethnic mix), and global-local (the expansion of kopitiams as chains throughout Singapore, the region, and beyond, and the hybridization of the form itself). 28. Tan, “Coffee Shops in Singapore,” iii, 3. 29. Geraldine Yeo, “Number of Traditional Coffeeshops Fallen Sharply in 10 Years,” Straits Times, June 23, 1997. 30. Tan, “Coffee Shops in Singapore,” 88. 31. Seremetakis, “The Breast of Aphrodite,” 303. 32. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 215. 33. Jocelyn Lee, “On Stage—At Coffee Shops,” Straits Times, November 5, 2010. 34. Teo Pau Lin, “Kaya War Spreads,” Straits Times, August 17, 2003. 35. “The Ya Kun Story,” Ya Kun Kaya Toast, http://www.yakun.com/story.aspx (accessed October 11, 2009). 36. In 1998, Ah Koon’s children took over the running of the company and it now includes Ya Kun International Pte. Ltd. and Ya Kun Singapore. At the time of writing, Koh records that these two businesses, with Ya Kun franchi- sees, together own thirty-two outlets in Singapore. As well, there are franchises in Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Koh, The Top Toast, 3–5. 37. “The Toast That Binds,” Ya Kun Kaya Toast. 38. Koh, The Top Toast, 13–14. See also 1–3. 39. Cherian George, Singapore the Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000), 15. 40. Koh, The Top Toast, 60–61. 41. Wong, “Taste of the Past,” 115–28; Peggy Teo and T. C. Chang, “Singa- pore’s Postcolonial Landscape: Boutique Hotels as Agents,” in Asia on Tour: NOTES 211

Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism, ed. Tim Winter, Peggy Teo, and T. C. Chang (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009) 81–96. 42. BreadTalk Group, “BreadTalk’s First Food Republic Food Atrium Opens in Wisma Atria,” press release, October 29, 2005. 43. Aye See, informal conversations with Jean Duruz, Singapore, 2008–2010. 44. “Killiney Kopitiam,” http://www.killiney-kopitiam.com (accessed No- vember 10, 2009). 45. Lea Wee, “Spread Some Love Around,” Straits Times, December 5, 1999. 46. Wee, “Spread Some Love Around.” 47. Eileen Tan [pseud.], interview by Jean Duruz, Singapore, November 8, 2010. Note that in this chapter all quotations attributed to Eileen Tan are transcribed from the digital recording of the extended interview. 48. Chua Beng Huat, “That Imagined Space: Nostalgia for the Kampung in Singapore,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singa- pore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 223, 226. 49. “Killiney Kopitiam.” 50. Leo Kee Chye, “Singapore Success Stories: Dr. George Quek (1957–),” Stoneforest.org Blog, Chutzpah Series, March 16, 2005, http://www. stoneforest.org/chutzpah/george_quek.html (accessed October 22, 2010). 51. Chye, “Singapore Success Stories”; Singapore Infopedia, “George Quek,” National Library Board, Singapore, 2009, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/ SIP_640_2005-01-22.html (accessed October 22, 2010); Singapore Infopedia, “BreadTalk,” National Library Board, Singapore, 2009, http://infopedia.nl.sg/ articles/SIP_657_2005-01-25.html?s=BreadTalk (accessed October 22, 2010). 52. BreadTalk Group, “BreadTalk’s First Food Republic.” 53. Singapore Infopedia, “BreadTalk.” 54. Kwa Chong Guan, “Remembering Ourselves,” in Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, ed. Kwok Kian-Woon et al. (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999) 54–55. 55. Kwa, “Remembering Ourselves,” 55. 56. Lysa Hong, “Commentary,” in Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, ed. Kwok Kian-Woon et al. (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999) 61. 57. Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 612–14; Yeoh and Lau, “Historic District, Contemporary Meanings,” 51–55; Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Cen- tres: People Places Food (Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2007), 29–31. 212 NOTES

58. The emergence of “retro” coffee shops with their owners claiming Hai- nanese/Peranakan family connections is explored in the article “Who’s the Taste of the Town?,” Straits Times, May 22, 2005; Tan explains the derivation of the name Toast Box (see Tan, interview); and Quek’s tribute to toast is mentioned in Sylvia Paik, “Firms Should Draw on Trust in S’pore Brand,” Straits Times, December 11, 2009. 59. Dawn Mok, interview by Jean Duruz, Joo Chiat, Singapore, November 9, 2010. Note that in this chapter all quotations attributed to Dawn Mok are transcribed from the digital recording of the extended interview. 60. Mok, interview. 61. Traditional kopitiam porcelain cups are distinguished by their logos— recognizable floral designs or the trademarks of tea, coffee, or milk producers. Chung May Khuen et al., Vintage Singapore: Souvenirs from the Recent Past (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006), 64–67. 62. Mok, interview. 63. Rem Khoolhas’s concept of “generic cities”—global cities that result from tabula rasa approaches to urban development—is discussed in William S. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism: A Radical Postmodern Perspective (Singapore: World Scientific, 2005), 31–35. 64. George Quek, quoted in Paik, “Trust in S’pore Brand.” 65. Seremetakis, “The Breast of Aphrodite,” 303; Mok, interview. 66. Lai, “The Kopitiam in Singapore,” 223–25. 67. Tan, interview. 68. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 163. 69. Daniel Roy, “Cup of Coffee, Coffee with Condensed Milk, Toast Box, Singapore,” flickr, October 14, 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/backpack- foodie/4014124286/ (accessed November 11, 2009). 70. Chen Jingwen, “Toast Box’s Tea and Coffee at $1 Only,” Straits Times SoShiok: SG’s Yummiest Food News and Reviews, December 14–15, 2009, http://www.soshiok.com/article/6263 (accessed October 26, 2010). 71. Koh, The Top Toast, 13; “History & Today,” Killiney Kopitiam, http:// www.killiney-kopitiam.com/coprofile.html (accessed October 11, 2009). 72. Hugh Lewis, “Urban Dimensions of the Political Economy of Nanyang Ethnicity,” 1989, http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Anthro- pologicalEssays/UrbanDimensionsNanyangPoliticalEconomy.htm (accessed June 12, 2010); see also Hugh Lewis, “The Political-Economy of Nanyang Ethnicity,” 2000, http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/ NanyangEthnicity/ NanyangEthnicityFrames.htm (accessed June 12, 2010). 73. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 74. Teo, “Chinese Dialect Groups,” 19–25. 75. Lewis, “The Political-Economy of Nanyang Ethnicity.” NOTES 213

76. Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multicul- turalisms (London: Routledge, 2004), 26–27. 77. Roy, “Cup of Coffee.” 78. Pnina Werbner, “Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthro- pology,” in Anthroplogy and the New Cosmopolitanisms: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, ed. Pnina Werbner (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 14. 79. Werbner, “Introduction,” 18–21. 80. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiv.

3. “MAMAK, ANYONE?”

1. Teh tarik derives its name from the mamak’s act of pouring hot tea mixed with sweetened condensed milk from one container to the next in a large gesture that resembles stretching the tea. This innovation invented by the Malabari Indians was to cool down the hot tea before serving. See Khoo Salma Nasution, “The Tamil Muslims—Weaving a Tale of Success,” in Glimpses of Old Penang, comp. Neil Khor Jin Keong, ed. Malini Dias (Selangor, Malaysia: Star, 2002), 67. 2. In Malay, nasi means rice and kandar is to carry two baskets balanced on a pole over one’s shoulders. 3. In Singapore, where Tamil Muslims also settled, a mamak stall usually refers to oddukadai (literally Tamil for “stuck shops”), a small corner stand operated by Tamil Muslims selling snacks, newspapers, and other small items. Thus, blog names referring to “mamak stalls” are Malaysian rather than Sin- gaporean. Nevertheless, the type of Tamil Muslim eatery ubiquitous in Penin- sular Malaysia is becoming popular in Singapore too. 4. Christina Chin, “A Truly Malaysian Dish,” Star, August 31, 2006, http:// www.thestar.com.my/story.aspx?file= %2F2006%2F8%2F31%2Fmerdeka%2F15066691 (accessed December 22, 2013). 5. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Commu- nity Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). 6. Yao Souchou, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (New York: Routledge, 2007), 121–39. 7. Muhibbah (in Arabic and Malay meaning goodwill, love, affection, and friendship) is usually uttered with a sense of irony by Malaysians who understand too well the lack of social interaction among the various ethnicities in the past few years due to systemic racial policies and growing Islamization, which 214 NOTES favor ethnic Malays. In the Malaysian context of multiculturalism, it also connotes interracial harmony or extending goodwill to others. 8. AdilSembang was a discussion group. In Malay, sembang means “to hang out” while adil means “to be just or fair,” but it is also a short form for the Opposition Party Keadilan, which the founder Nat Tan was involved in. 9. Debbie Chan, “Mamak Stalls to Rise to the Occasion,” Star Online, Metro Central , October 10, 2007, http://thestar.com.my/metro/story.asp?file=/ 2007/10/10/central/19124134&sec=central (accessed February 3, 2014). 10. Suffice it to say that teh tarik (“TT” on the web) is a mamak staple and predictably also considered “a national institution that transcends religious, race and class barriers.” See Zainul Arifin, “Let the People Know What Goes into ‘Teh Tarik’ and the Cost,” New Straits Times, March 29, 2006, http:// pgoh13.com/tehtarik_price.php (accessed December 22, 2013). 11. Interview at Hameediyah Restaurant, January 17, 2008. See also Nasu- tion, “The Tamil Muslims,” 69. 12. Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), 18. 13. Judith Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Malaysia,” in Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, ed. K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani (Singapore: ISEAS & Times Academic P, 1993), 515. 14. Buruhanudeen, “Of Rawthers and Kelings,” Blogspot.com, August 6, 2007, http://bdeen.blogspot.com/2007/08/of-rawthers-and-keling.html (accessed December 22, 2013). 15. Dr. S. Jayabarathi, “Keling,” http://www.visvacomplex.com/Keling_ English_Version.html (accessed December 22, 2013). 16. See Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Ma- laysia,” 519. 17. Helen Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolu- tion of the Jawi Peranakan in Penang up to 1948 (Tokyo: ILCAA Tokyo Gaiko- kugo Daigaku, 1988), 47. 18. Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Malay- sia,” 520. 19. Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community, 108; Halimah Mohd. Said and Zainab Abdul Majid, Images of the Jawi Peranakan of Penang: Assimi- lation of the Jawi Peranakan Community into the Malay Society (Tanjong Malim, Perak, Malaysia: Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, 2004), 103. 20. Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Malay- sia,” 518. 21. Seeni Naina Mohamed, “Indian Muslims in Penang: Role and Contribu- tions,” Colloquiums, Penangstory.net, http://www.penangstory.net.my/indian- NOTES 215 content-paperseeni.html (accessed July 20, 2014); Nagata, “Religion and Eth- nicity among the Indian Muslims of Malaysia,” 518. 22. In 2007, the Indian population was only 6.9 percent of the total Malay- sian population. See Azrul Affandi Sobry, “Laporan Khas: Pekerja asing melebihi masyarakat India,” [Special Report: Foreign Workers Outnumber Indian Community], Berita Harian, August 13, 2007, http://poobalan.com/blog/borninmalaysia/2007/08/13/foreign-workers-outnumber-indian-community/comment-page-1/ (accessed December 24, 2013). 23. Ravi A. Shankar, Tamil Muslims in Tamil Nadu, Malaysia and Singa- pore: Historical Identity, Problems of Adjustment and Change in the Twentieth Century (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: A. Jayanath, 2001), 44. 24. Chin, “A Truly Malaysian Dish.” 25. “The Origins of Nasi Kandar & Teh Tarik,” New Straits Times, Septem- ber 21, 2004, 15. 26. “The Origins of Nasi Kandar & Teh Tarik.” 27. “The Origins of Nasi Kandar & Teh Tarik.” 28. Khoo Salma Nasution, The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place- Making around the Kapitan Kling Mosque, 1786–1957 (Penang: Areca Books, 2014), 11; also in personal conversation with Nasution, George Town, Decem- ber 25, 2013. 29. Nasution, “The Tamil Muslims,” 67. 30. Nasution, “The Tamil Muslims,” 69. 31. Jan Stark, “Indian Muslims in Malaysia: Images of Shifting Identities in the Multi-Ethnic State,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 26, no. 3 (2006): 387. 32. Bernama, “Kimma Chief: We Have Decided to Merge with PPP,” Feb- ruary 3, 2008, http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/printable.php?id=312050 (accessed February 3, 2014). 33. Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Malay- sia,” 536. 34. Stark, “Indian Muslims in Malaysia,” 396. 35. Nagata, “Religion and Ethnicity among the Indian Muslims of Malay- sia,” 537. 36. Thanks go to Hassan Muthalib for pointing this out to me. See also: “Numeral 786 as Basmala,” http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1& ID=688&CATE=115 (accessed January 23, 2014). 37. Joyce Tagal, “‘Shocking’ Jakim Raids on Restaurants,” Malaysiaki- ni.com, June 29, 2007. 38. David B. C. Tan, “Little Napoleons,” On the Shoulder of Giants, June 30, 2007, http://dbctan.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html. 216 NOTES

39. Lim Kit Siang, “JAWI Raid on Indian Restaurant for Public Display of Hindu Deities—PM Should Stop the ‘Little Napoleons,’” Lim Kit Siang for Malaysia, June 28, 2007, http://blog.limkitsiang.com/2007/06/28/jawi-raids-on- indian-restaurants-for-public-display-of-hindu-deities-pm-should-stop-the-little-napoleons/ (accessed April 2, 2014). 40. This includes Shiites and a small minority of Malay Sufis who follow the Naqsyabandiah and Qadiriyyah orders and exist underground today. See Ei- leen Ng, “Shiites Banned in ‘Tolerant’ Malaysia,” Jakarta Globe, January 16, 2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/shiites-banned-in-tolerant-malaysia/; Ahmad Fuad Rahmat, “Factors behind the Anti-Shia Attacks,” Opinion, Malaysian Insider, August 17, 2013, http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/ opinion/ahmad-fuad-rahmat/article/factors-behind-the-anti-shia-attacks (both accessed January 27, 2014). Syed Naguib Al-Attas’s 1963 book still remains the only comprehensive work up till today on Malay Sufis: Some Aspects of Sufism as Understood and Practised among the Malays (Singapore: Malaysian Soci- ological Research Institute Ltd, 1963). 41. My translation. See Mohd. Rasul Bin Amat, “Mencari yang halal fardhu Bagi umat Islam” [Looking for the Permissible for Muslims], Intifada Ilmuan Islam Blog, July 1, 2007, http://muthaqqafazhari.blogspot.com/ 2007_07_01_archive.html (accessed February 3, 2014). 42. The Malaysian government also aims to eradicate Shia Islam among Malay Muslims. See Liz Gooch, “In a Muslim State, Fear Sends Some Wor- ship Underground,” New York Times, January 27, 2011, http://www.nytimes. com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28iht-malay28.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; and Celine Fernandez, “Malaysian Shia Muslims Prepare for Trial,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2013, http://www.online.wsj.com/news/articles/ SB10001424052702304173704579259473076713800 (both accessed Decem- ber 24, 2013). 43. For example, Restoran Mahabu Nasi Kandar Istimewa in Farlim, mainland Penang, serves their crispy dosai over some chicken and salad with “786” written with chili sauce over the dosai. For a picture, see http://www.flickr. com/photos/9302739@N06/1202321077/, August 20, 2007 (accessed January 23, 2014). 44. “Boss, kira!” translates politely into “Waiter, may I please have the bill?” (though literally kira in Malay means to total up). Boss has replaced mamak at Tamil Muslim establishments as a more neutral term of address. 45. Line Clear daytime manager, interview by Gaik at Line Clear, Penang Road, January 16, 2008. 46. Chan Lilian, “Nasi Kandar Line Clear,” Best Recipes, Foods and Travel Blog, September 12, 2005, http://www.malaysiabest.net/2005/09/12/nasi-kandar-line-clear/ (accessed February 8, 2014). NOTES 217

47. Erma Idayu Mohd Yusof, “Rempah Giling Rahsia Keenakan Nasi Kan- dar Kassim Mustafa,” Bernama Regional News, Berita Utara, November 4, 2008, http://www.bernama.com/bernama/state_news/bm/ news.php?id=369141&cat=ut (accessed February 3, 2014). 48. “Kayu Nasi Kandar to Undergo Re-branding Exercise,” New Straits Times, Business Times, June 9, 2005, B24. 49. http://www.subaidah.com.my/aboutus.asp. Last accessed in 2008, this link no longer exists. Although Subaidah opened its fifteenth branch in Shah Alam, the company has undergone restructuring and diversified into other businesses such as travel and tours, real estate, hospitality, and even software application and service. 50. Anonymous, interview by Gaik, Penang, January 4, 2008. 51. Pelita hires permit workers from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Bur- ma. 52. See Francis Loh Kok Wah, “Developmentalism and the Limits of Dem- ocratic Discourse,” in Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices, ed. Francis Loh and Khoo Boo Teik (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002), 19–50. 53. For example, Pelita has its own cold storage facility and chicken slaugh- terhouse that supplies all its restaurants as well as other companies. It also opened a branch in Chennai. 54. This merits a comparison with Perth-based Puteri Nasi Kandar, which was partly owned by Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s brother Ibrahim and a Penang tycoon Lim Ewe Jin and officially launched by the prime minister during the floods in Johore (where his absence was heavily criticized). Puteri did not last for more than six months. Pelita Chennai, on the other hand, has stayed open since 2003. See M. Saraswathi, “Malaysian Nasi Kandar a Hit in Chennai,” Star Online, October 24, 2004, http://sherene.blogspot.com/2004/ 10/malaysian-nasi-kandar-hit-in-chennai.html (accessed February 3, 2014). Suspicion of mamak opportunism is reflected in insinuations of the company not being solely Tamil Muslim–owned. See Mazidul Akmal, “Restoran Nasi Kandar Pelita Berstatus Halal Dan Milik Bumiputera” [Pelita Nasi Kandar Restaurant has Halal Status and Is Bumiputera Owned”], September 23, 2013, http://www.mazidulakmal.com/2013/09/restoran-nasi-kandar-pelita-berstatus.html (accessed February 3, 2014). 55. Fried instant noodles (Maggi brand), fried Indian noodles, traditional Indian roti, and roti with egg. 56. Nesa Sivagnanam, interview by Gaik, Seapark Nasi Lemak, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia, January 22, 2008. 57. Pseudonym, Seapark Nasi Lemak, January 22, 2008. 58. Pseudonym, SS2 Mamak, January 20, 2008. 218 NOTES

59. Andrew Sia, “My Kinda Starbucks,” Star [Malaysia], July 2, 2005, 7 (opinion section, weekend edition), http://www.thestar.com.my/story.aspx/ ?file=%2f2005%2f7%2f2%2flifefocus%2f11349917&sec=lifefocus (accessed February 3, 2014). 60. Group interview with Daryll Mak and Yen Yen at SS2 Mamak, January 20, 2008. 61. See Nat Tan, “1st AdilSembang! This Weds Night, 9pm MAJU CURRY HOUSE, PJ State,” Jelas.info Blog, September 3, 2007, http://jelas.info/2007/ 09/03/1st-adilsembangthis-weds-night-9pm-zainol-nasi-kandar-pj-state/ (accessed February 4, 2014). 62. Gaik attended an AdilSembang session at Maju Curry House, Petaling Jaya, on February 4, 2008. 63. Christabel Shmishtabel, “Did You Know That Many Revolutions Began in Little Cafes?” For Whom the Bel [sic] Tolls Blog, January 7, 2008, http:// shmishtabel.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/did-you-know-that-many-revolutions- began-in-little-cafes/ (accessed April 2, 2014). 64. In fact, most of the group had already had dinner and only ordered drinks or light snacks like fried noodles rather than rice and curry. And the array of curries on display did not look very fresh or appetizing by then. 65. In 2013 the Peaceful Assembly Act was introduced after Sections 27(2) and 27(5) of the Police Act 1967 were repealed in 2012. The former was meant to replace the supposedly more draconian Police Act, but there are many loopholes that constrict the right to assemble. See Sara Lau, “On the Right to Assemble under the Peaceful Assembly Act 2012,” Loyarburok.com, May 23, 2013, http://www.loyarburok.com/2013/05/23/assemble-peaceful-assembly-act- 2012; and Bernama, “Police Act Constitutional, Says COA,” FreeMalaysiaTo- day.com, September 4, 2013, http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2013/09/04/police-act-constitutional-says-coa/ (both accessed January 29, 2014). 66. Bersih is a coalition demanding free and fair elections, and Hindraf is the Hindu Action Rights Force. 67. Emphasis added; see Jack, “Candle Light Vigil in Penang and the Teh Tarik Revolution,” December 15, 2007. Reposted by Srinivasan Kalyanaraman as “Don’t Ruin It, AAB: Candle Light Vigil in Penang by the Next Generation of Malaysia,” MalayIndians.blogspot.com, December 2007, http://malayindians.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-ruin-it-aab-candle-light-vigil-in.html (accessed February 2, 2014). 68. This has to do with the historical spread of ethnic populations in Malay- sia; most Tamil Muslims, like the Chinese, settled in urban areas whereas the Malays are newer to the cities. 69. Yen Yen, SS2 Mamak, January 20, 2008. NOTES 219

70. Bangsa Malaysia Penang had a meeting at Subaida Nasi Kandar, Tan- jung Tokong, on March 16, 2008, http://penangwatch.net/node/2100 (accessed April 3, 2008). 71. BrightEyes, “The Mamak Conspiracy,” Silflay.blogspot.com, March 18, 2008, http://silflay.blogspot.com/2008/03/mamak-conspiracy.html (accessed February 3, 2014).

4. GROWING UP TRANSNATIONAL

1. K. F. Seetoh, ed., Makansutra: 2005/2006 Singapore (Singapore: Ma- kansutra Pty. Ltd., 2005), 234–35. 2. Cherian George, Singapore the Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000), 194. 3. Madhur [pseud.], interview by Jean Duruz, Taman Jurong Hawker Cen- tre, Singapore, October 29, 2004. Note that in this chapter all quotations attributed to Madhur are from the transcript of the interview recording. 4. Wendy Hutton, The Food of Singapore: Authentic Recipes from the Manhattan of the East (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 1999). 5. Martin Perry, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 22. 6. Singapore Tourism Board, Makan Delights: An Insider’s Guide to Sin- gapore’s Unique Flavours (Singapore: Singapore Tourism Board, 2004), 3. 7. Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People Places Food (Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2007), 115; Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Ra- jah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” in Changing Chinese Food- ways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Chee-Beng Tan (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 185–86; Hutton, The Food of Singapore, 18–19. 8. Kenneth Mitchell, The Flavour of Singapore (Hong Kong: Four Cor- ners, 1973), 4. 9. Where Singapore, April, 2002, cover title; Singapore Food Festival: Offi- cial Guide (Singapore: TTG Asia Media, 2002); Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, Gourmet Delights: Singapore Changi Airport (Singapore: Civil Avi- ation Authority of Singapore, 2004); Singapore Tourism Board, Makan De- lights. 10. Tan Wyn-Lyn, “Hawking Our Wares,” Where Singapore (April 16–19, 2002): 16. 11. Tan, “Hawking Our Wares,” 16. 12. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 25. 13. Hutton, The Food of Singapore, 20–21. 14. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 45; see also 95–97. 220 NOTES

15. Bob Hodge and John O’Carroll, Borderwork in Multicultural Australia (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2006), 37–38. 16. Hodge and O’Carroll, Borderwork, 38. 17. Rosemary Brissenden, South East Asian Food (Ringwood, Vic.: Pen- guin, 1996), 221. 18. Tan, Singapore Heritage Food, 71. 19. Su-Lyn Tan and Mark Tay, World Food: Malaysia and Singapore (Foot- scray, Vic.: Lonely Planet, 2003), 177, 181. 20. Tan, Singapore Heritage Food, 71–73. 21. Tan, Singapore Heritage Food, 71 22. Cheong Liew, with Elizabeth Ho, My Food (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Al- len & Unwin, 1995), 1–2. 23. Liew, My Food, 2. 24. Thomas H. Silcock, Report of the Hawkers’ Inquiry Commission, 1950 (Singapore: Colony of Singapore, 1950), 12; see also 5, 6, 11. 25. Thio Kheng Lock, “A Study of ‘Twenty Singapore Hawkers’” (unpublished research paper, Singapore: National University of Singapore, 1962), 1–2. 26. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 25, 26. 27. Silcock, Report of the Hawkers’ Inquiry Commission, 9–10, 11, 25; see also Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 29. 28. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 31. 29. Alessandro Triulzi, quoted in Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Postcolonial Cities,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 3 (2001): 459–60. 30. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 31 31. Pat Nourse, “Singapore Swings,” Gourmet Traveller, 2005, 142. Note: Imodium is a medication for the treatment of diarrhea. 32. Susan Kurosawa, “Almost China,” Weekend Australian, June 16–17, 2007, travel section, 1. 33. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 31; see also 29. 34. Perry, Kong, and Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State, 208. 35. Thoo Mei Lan, “Hawkers in Old Chinatown” (unpublished research paper, Singapore: National University of Singapore, 1982–1983), 131. 36. Kevin Grice, “The Institutionalisation of Informal Sector Activities: A Case Study of Cooked Food Hawkers in Singapore,” PhD diss., University of Keele, 1988, 233. 37. Rabi [pseud.], interview by Jean Duruz, Perth, Australia, December 12, 2004. Note that in this chapter all quotations attributed to Rabi are from the transcript of the interview recording. 38. Luce Giard, “The Nourishing Arts,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 151–59; Jean Du- NOTES 221 ruz, “Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering,” Gastronomica 4, no. 1 (2004): 57–68. 39. Chua Beng Huat, “That Imagined Space: Nostalgia for the Kampung in Singapore,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singa- pore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 223. 40. Chua, “That Imagined Space,” 224. 41. Lily Kong, cited by Chua, “That Imagined Space,” 226. 42. Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 177 43. Chua Beng Huat, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 127–29. 44. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 128. 45. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 128. 46. Jasdeep [pseud.], interview by Jean Duruz, Adam Road Food Centre, Singapore, October 22, 2004. Note that in this chapter all quotations attributed to Jasdeep/Jas are from the transcript of the interview recording. 47. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37. 48. Tim Edensor, “The Culture of the Indian Street,” in Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space, ed. Nicholas R. Fyfe (London: Routledge, 1998), 218–19. 49. Elspeth Probyn, “McIdentities: Food and the Familial Citizen,” in Transformations in Australian Society, ed. Paul Patton and Diane Austin- Broos (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1997). 50. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 129. 51. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 132–33, 136–37. 52. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 129. 53. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 163 54. Chua, Life Is Not Complete without Shopping, 133. 55. Phua Roy Yue Keng and Lily Kong, “Exploring Local Cultures: The Construction and Evolution of Meaning and Identity in Katong,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 132, original emphasis. 56. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 96–97. 57. DiGUb’s Bro., comment on “Open of New Taman Jurong Hawker Cen- tre and Market,” VR-Zone Forums, May 17, 2005, http://forums.vr-zone.com/ showthread.php?t=24427 (accessed February 19, 2008). 58. Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Wom- en (London: Sage, 2001), 100–102. Recently, in film and print, there has been a revival of interest in hawker centers as integral to Singapore’s heritage. See, for example, Eric Khoo’s film, Recipe: A Film on Dementia (Singapore: Health 222 NOTES

Promotion Board, 2013) and Teo et al.’s collection of photographs and stories: Angelia Teo, Bernie Guan, Simma DaShow, Jernnine Pang, and Jim Orca, Not for Sale: Singapore’s Remaining Heritage Street Food Vendors (Singapore: Goodfellow Syndicate, 2013). As well, during 2013 an exhibition was staged (Nine Hundred Days: Heritage Hawker Auditory Art Exhibition) at the Arts House, Singapore, and a World Street Food Congress organized. This congress was instigated by K. F. Seetoh, the founder of Makansutra, a company responsible for the production of the television series of the same name, for food tours, and for food guides to the street food of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. 59. While Teo et al., Not for Sale represents a comprehensive attempt to document, through photographs and interviews, the individual life histories of a number of Singapore’s hawkers, Kong’s account is a historically based one, and captures the feel of specific centers, together with current trends in urban development that have an impact on hawkers, hawking, and the built environment. 60. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 19. 61. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 200–201. 62. Where Singapore, April 2002, cover; Tan, “Hawking Our Wares,” 16. 63. Leanne Kitchen, “Singapore,” Australian Gourmet Traveller (March 2002): 124. 64. Christopher Tan quoted in Singapore Tourism Board, Makan Delights, 13. 65. Jane Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks,” in Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times, ed. Philip Kasinitz (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 122. 66. Lai Ah Eng, “Some Experiences and Issues of Cross-Cultural Field- work,” in Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method, ed. P. Lim Pui Hen, James H. Morrison, and Chong Guan Kwa (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 1998), 105. 67. Tan and Tay, World Food, 216. 68. David T. Goldberg, “The Space of Multiculturalism,” openDemocracy, September 16, 2004, 3–4, http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-multiculturalism/article_2097.jsp. 69. John May, “Globalisation and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity in an Inner London Neighbourhood,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21 (1996): 200–202. 70. Khoo Gaik Cheng, “Of Kopitiams and Mamak Stalls: Cosmopolitan Representational Spaces in Malaysian Film and Television,” paper presented at Overcoming Passions: Race, Religion and the Coming Community Confer- ence, Singapore, October 11–12, 2004, 16. NOTES 223

71. Selina Ching Chan, “Consuming Food: Structuring Social Life and Creating Social Relationships,” in Past Times: A Social History of Singapore, ed. Chan Kwok Bun and Tong Chee Kiong (Singapore: Times Editions, 2003), 135. 72. Chan, Consuming Food, 132. 73. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multi- cultural Society (Annandale, N.S.W.: Pluto Press, 1998), 118. 74. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 36–39. 75. Tan Chee-Beng, “Food and Ethnicity with Reference to the Chinese in Malaysia,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 148. 76. Tan, Food and Ethnicity, 146–47; see also Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 180–81. 77. Lidia Marte, “Foodmaps: Tracing Boundaries of ‘Home’ through Food Relations,” Food and Foodways 15, no. 3 (2007): 261–89. 78. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 94–95. 79. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 109. 80. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 179–90. 81. Seetoh, quoted in Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 115. 82. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore,” 181. 83. Khoo, “Of Kopitiams and Mamak Stalls,” 15; see also chapter 1. 84. Tommy Koh, “What Connects Me to Singapore?” in Singaporeans Ex- posed: Navigating the Ins and Outs of Globalisation, ed. Lee Geok Boi (Singa- pore: Landmark Books, 2001), 94–95; Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 106. 85. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham, “Second-Generation Tamils and Cross-Cultural Marriage: Managing the Translocal Village in a Moment of Cultural Rupture,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 1 (2008): 113–31. 86. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 200. 87. Tan, “Hawking Our Wares,” 18, 16; see also Tan, Food and Ethnicity, 131. 88. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 48–49. 89. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 106. 90. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), 9. 91. Tariq Jazeel, “Spectres of Tolerance: Living Together beyond Cosmo- politanism,” Cultural Geographies 14 (2007): 622; Hage, White Nation, 97–104. 92. Jazeel, “Spectres of Tolerance,” 623. 93. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xi. 224 NOTES

94. Michael Keith, After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London: Routledge, 2005), 5. 95. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 195. 96. Martha Naussbaum, cited in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 193. 97. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 196, original emphasis. 98. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 195. 99. Richard Sennett quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 195. 100. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 205. 101. Dawn Mok, Singapore CityScoops (Singapore: CityScoops Media, 2007), 71.

5. DUMPLINGS AT CHANGI

1. Jean Duruz, Singapore Diary, November 21, 2008. 2. “Channel News Asia T3 Kim Choo,” interview with Desmond Wong, Youtube Video, February 29, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-- DBj1M54zs (accessed December 12, 2008). 3. Promotional materials for Kim Choo’s Nonya Kitchen, located at Changi Airport, Terminal 3, Singapore. Note that the restaurant is now closed. Never- theless, it is still possible for travelers to purchase Kim Choo dumplings from a Terminal 3 outlet. 4. Note that I am assuming Katong is inclusive of Joo Chiat, as Katong is used as a more general, and traditional, name for this east-coast area of Singa- pore. According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Rediscover the East: Katong Joo Chiat (Singapore: Government of Singapore, n.d.); and Lily Kong and Chang Tou Chuang, Joo Chiat: A Living Legacy (Singapore: Joo Chiat Citizens Consultative Committee, National Archives of Singapore, 2001), 26, “Katong” tends to be used generically to cover both Katong and Joo Chiat, although, technically speaking, these are adjacent areas of local government. Furthermore, Kong and Chang (Joo Chiat, 26), comment that “popular conceptions of Joo Chiat are almost always conflated with the East Coast or Ka- tong such that the terms have sometimes become interchangeable.” Note too that, while the name of the dumplings is traditionally spelled bak chang and pronounced with a silent “k,” in this chapter I am using its popularized spelling of ba chang, the form used by Kim Choo Kueh Chang in its promotional literature and the form typically employed by Singapore food guides. 5. Jean Duruz, “From Malacca to Adelaide . . . : Fragments towards a Biography of Cooking, Yearning and Laksa,” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking, ed. Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee- Beng (London: Routledge, 2007), 183; for information on laksa as localization NOTES 225 in Southeast Asia, see Tan Chee-Beng, “Food and Ethnicity with Reference to the Chinese in Malaysia,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 133; and Tan Chee-Beng, “Intermarriage and the Chinese Peranakan in South- east Asia,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre and Baba House, 2009), 30–35. 6. Duruz, “From Malacca to Adelaide,” 197; Jean Duruz, “Tastes of Hy- brid Belonging: Following the Laksa Trail in Katong, Singapore,” Continuum 25 (2011): 606–7. 7. William S. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism: A Radical Postmodern Per- spective (Singapore: World Scientific, 2005), 24–25. 8. Tony Tan, “Reviving Peranakan Heritage and Culture,” Peranakan, no. 3 (2010). 9. Arti Mulchand, “Taking Joo Chiat Back,” Going Places, April 4, 2012. 10. Jurgen Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities: A Social History of the Ba- bas in Singapore (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1998), 195; Rudolph also sur- mises that the “local women” with whom these Chinese consorted could have been Malay women prior to Islam’s dominance, nominal Muslims, Malay slaves, or women from different parts of present-day Indonesia (such as Batak, Balinese, Bugis women, etc.), 83. 11. Tan Chee-Beng, Chinese Peranakan Heritage in Malaysia and Singa- pore (Kuala Lumpur: Fajar Bakti, 1993), x. 12. Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 402. 13. Leo Suryadinata, “Introduction,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre and Baba House, 2009), 2. 14. Suryadinata, “Introduction,” 2–3. 15. Tan, “Intermarriage.” 16. Tan, “Intermarriage,” 30–31. Suryadinata, “Introduction,” 4, notes that “[T]he term Baba . . . is still commonly used today, especially in Malaysia and Singapore. . . . Baba is the term used to refer to the peranakan community in general, and is in this sense gender free. But it becomes gender bound when it is used to address a male peranakan Chinese, while a female peranakan Chi- nese is either nyonya or nonya.” 17. Wang Gungwu, “The Peranakan Phenomenon: Pre-nation, Marginal, and Transnational,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre and Baba House, 2010), 25; see also Suryadinata, “Introduction,” 4. 18. Wong Hong Suen, “A Taste of the Past: Historically Themed Restau- rants and Social Memory in Singapore,” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Re- 226 NOTES source, Tradition and Cooking, ed. Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (London: Routledge, 2007), 117. 19. Alistair Chew, “The Peranakan Role in Singapore Educational History,” in Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre and Baba House, 2010), 115. 20. Lee Chin Koon, Mrs Lee’s Cookbook: Nonya Recipes and Other Fa- vourite Recipes (Singapore: Eurasia, 1974), foreword; see also Duruz, “From Malacca to Adelaide,” 183, 197; and Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 607. Chew, “The Peranakan Role,” 113–15, notes that it is interesting that the primary architects of modern Singapore were, in fact, Peranakan (Prime Min- ister Lee Kuan Yew and three of his influential ministers). Even though this fact is not overtly acknowledged, the combination of a British-based education and Confucian values enabled these leaders to operate effectively in an intersection society (here, a society based on intersecting European and Asian values) and to build an education system and political system based on this cultural heritage. 21. Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 97. 22. Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 99; see also 23, 97. 23. Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 99. 24. “About the History of the Peranakan Association,” Peranakan, http:// peranakan.org.sg/. 25. Alvin Oon composed “Siapa Baba?” (Who Is Baba?), the musical’s title song. The complete soundtrack is reproduced on the CD It’s Time for Sayang Sayang, by the Main Wayan Company, Singapore, 2008. 26. The Little Nyonya, MediacorpTV Singapore Pte. Ltd., http://littlenyonya.mediacorptv.sg/. 27. Wong, “Taste of the Past”; Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 605–6. 28. Dawn Mok, Singapore CityScoops (Singapore: CityScoops Media, 2007), 71. 29. Mok, Singapore CityScoops, 71. 30. Amanda Yong, “Sentinels of the ‘Freeway of Love,’” New Paper, 2008, http://www.asiaone.com/News; Brian J. Shaw and Rahil Ismail, “Ethnoscapes, Entertainment and ’Eritage in the Global City: Segmented Spaces in Singa- pore’s Joo Chiat Road,” GeoJournal 66 (2005): 194–97. 31. Imran Bin Tajudeen, “State Constructs of Ethnicity in the Reinvention of Malay-Indonesian Heritage in Singapore,” Traditional Dwellings and Settle- ments Review 18, no. 2 (2007): 25. The Malay Village’s lease expired in 2011, and the Urban Redevelopment Authority is now proceeding with plans to replace the village with a civic center that will include a community club and a Malay Heritage Gallery, due for completion in 2016. Singapore Urban Rede- NOTES 227 velopment Authority, Master Plan 2008: Paya Lebar Central (Singapore: Sin- gapore Urban Redevelopment Authority, 2008). 32. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 16. 33. Christine Niven, Paul Hollander, and Peter Turner, Lonely Planet Sin- gapore (Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2000), 90. 34. Dominique Grêlé and Lydie Raimbault, Discover Singapore on Foot (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2004), 91. 35. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Rediscover the East. 36. Where Singapore, April 2002: for discussions on hawker food by ethnic groups, see pp. 16–19, for descriptions of ethnic neighborhoods, see pp. 22–23, and for examples of Straits Chinese restaurants, see p. 38. 37. Where Singapore, 54. 38. Phua Roy Yue Keng and Lily Kong, “Exploring Local Cultures: The Construction and Evolution of Meaning and Identity in Katong,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 129. 39. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Rediscover the East; “Keeping the Peranakan Spirit Alive—Tomb of Mr Tan Keong Saik Found in Bukit Brown,” Bukit Brown Cemetery: Our Roots Our Future, October 22, 2011, http://bukitbrown.org/post/44373439907/keeping-the-peranakan-spirit-alive-tomb-of-mr. 40. See Niven et al., Lonely Planet Singapore, 13–14, regarding the decline of Peranakan culture. 41. Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 608ff. 42. Undated promotion materials from Chilli Padi, Guan Hoe Soon, Glory Food Products, and Saint Francis Enterprises, Singapore. 43. Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 87. 44. Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 610. 45. Duruz, “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging,” 612 , quoting Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 87. 46. Grêlé and Raimbault, Discover Singapore on Foot, 99. 47. Raymond Wong of Kim Choo Kueh Chang, interview by Jean Duruz, Singapore, November 20, 2008. In this chapter, all quotations attributed to Raymond Wong are from the transcript of the extended interview. Prior to that interview and subsequently, the author made several fieldwork trips to the business (in 2008, 2009, and 2010). The trips were for observational purposes and to engage in further and less formal conversation with Raymond Wong concerning the progress of, and changes in, the business. 48. Kim Choo’s Nonya Kitchen, promotional materials. 49. Desmond Wong, interview by Channel News Asia. 50. Wang, “The Peranakan Phenomenon,” 30–31. 51. Shaw and Ismail, “Ethnoscapes, Entertainment and ’Eritage,” 194–97. 228 NOTES

52. Jean Duruz, “Adventuring and Belonging: An Appetite for Markets,” Space and Culture 7, no. 4 (2004): 430–31. 53. Phua and Kong, “Exploring Local Cultures,” 132–34. 54. Tajudeen, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 7. 55. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 9. 56. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 7. 57. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 14. 58. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 14. 59. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 22. 60. Kong cited in Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 17. 61. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lau Wei Peng, “Historic District, Contemporary Meanings: Urban Conservation and the Creation and Consumption of Land- scape Spectacle in Tanjong Pagar,” in Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995), 61. 62. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 16; Geylang Serai Market has been progressively upgraded since the mid-1960s, the most recent renovations envisaged in Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority, Master Plan 2008: Paya Lebar Central, and now completed. Renovations have occurred under the National Environment Agency’s Hawker Centres Upgrading Programme (HUP): for more information, see Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: Peo- ple Places Food (Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2007), 45–51. 63. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 22. 64. The Economist website, quoted in Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnic- ity,” 22. 65. Duruz, “Adventuring and Belonging,” 433, 436. 66. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xi. 67. Kong, “Singapore Hawker Centres,” 106. 68. Imran, “State Constructs of Ethnicity,” 25, emphasis added. 69. Note that while a high degree of mixing across ethnic boundaries might seem to take place in hawker centers and markets, this is not to argue this mixing is unrestrained. Instead, I would argue that there is acute awareness of particular religious/cultural food rules, and prohibitions associated with these, and concessions are made accordingly. See chapter 4 regarding the constraints on Malay Muslims’ “public” eating (and that of some other ethnic/religious groups). 70. Kong, “Singapore Hawker Centres,” 19. 71. Rita Fernando, quoted in Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 108. 72. Phua and Kong, “Exploring Local Cultures,” 136–37. NOTES 229

73. For an account of Singapore’s public housing, see Chua Beng Huat, “Not Depoliticised but Ideologically Successful: The Public Housing Program in Singapore,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 15, no. 1 (1991): 24-41. 74. Kong and Chang, Joo Chiat, 145. 75. Eunice Seng, “Utopia or Euphoria? Six Sites of Resistance in Disney- land and Singapore,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 16, no. 2 (2005): 47. 76. Lai Ah Eng, “A Neighbourhood in Singapore: Ordinary People’s Lives ‘Downstairs,’” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series No. 113 (Singa- pore: National University of Singapore, 2009), 3, original emphasis. 77. Elizabeth Wilson, “Looking Backward: Nostalgia and the City,” in Ima- gining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (London: Routledge, 1997), 137. 78. Lai, “A Neighbourhood in Singapore,” 22. 79. Kim Choo Kueh Chang Pte. Ltd. website, http://www.kimchoo.com/ (accessed January 27, 2014). 80. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism, 165. 81. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism, 166. 82. This move was initiated by the family of Kim Choo Kueh Chang, together with the owners of other local businesses and members of heritage groups.

6. THE LITTLE NYONYA AND PERANAKAN CHINESE IDENTITY

1. Tan Sooi Beng, “Peranakan Culture in Penang: Towards Revitalization,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 82 (part 2) (2009): 160. 2. Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996), 272. 3. This is the reason the makers of the online cooking program The Big Bibik and the Little Nyonyas used Kenny Chan, a television icon who played the Nyonya (in drag) in Malaysia’s longest running sitcom, Baba dan Nyonya, in 2000 (509 episodes), to promote diversity among Malaysians. See Dennis Chua, “Entertainment: Bibik Is Back,” Life & Times, New Straits Times, Sep- tember 29, 2009, http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/articles/ 20090929090946/Article/ (accessed February 17, 2011). Kenny Chan also played the same figure in Nasi Lemak 2.0, the film discussed in chapter 7. 4. Khoo, The Straits Chinese, 122. 230 NOTES

5. “Ieat Learns How to Make Rempah Udang,” video blog, May 13, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9uCxpkwbKE (accessed February 9, 2014). 6. David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng, “Introduction,” in Changing Chi- nese Foodways in Asia, edited by David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-Beng (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 7. 7. See the parody of the rap song “I Got It from My Mama” by HitzFM’s morning crew JJ and Rudy, “I Got It from My Mamak,” YouTube, uploaded January 17, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flBrVQe7iSU; and “I’m a Freak (mamak video),” YouTube, uploaded April 28, 2009, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=STlTwNi2hMA (both accessed February 10, 2014). 8. Shiliang Lim, “The Little Nyonya Viewership Records,” Shiliang.co.cc Blog, December 24, 2008, http://shilianglim.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/the-little-nyonya-viewership-records/ (accessed February 10, 2014). 9. See Lam Pin Foo, “A Popular Television Melodrama Boosts a Declining Culture,” Lam Pin Foo Blog, January 25, 2009, http://lampinfoo.com/2009/01/ 25/; Cheryl Tan, “Bibiks Are Hot Stuff,” Straits Times, January 12, 2009, http:// www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Asian%2BOpinions/Story/ A1Story20090112-114172.html (both accessed February 4, 2014); Tan, “Peran- akan Culture in Penang.” It may also have inspired a youth hostel in Melaka named Little Nyonya and eight webisodes of a Malaysian online cooking program directed by QuaChee. See The Big Bibik and the Little Nyonyas, Anony- mous Production, Dir. QuaChee, starring Michelle Ng, Vanessa Hee, Char- lene Meng, and Kenny Chan, web television drama, YouTube video, uploaded September 7, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkaNhLtRZk (accessed February 9, 2014). 10. Lam, “A Popular Television Melodrama Boosts a Declining Culture,” and Cheryl Frois, “Over 5,000 Sets of The Little Nyonya DVDs sold,” Channel NewsAsia, January 12, 2009, http://archive.is/kE09u (accessed February 9, 2014). 11. For viewer responses, see the Official Facebook Page for The Little Nyonya, http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Little-Nyonya/22268538302. 12. Philip Holden, “Colonial Fiction, Hybrid Lives: Early Singaporean Fic- tion in the Straits Chinese Magazine,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33 (1998): 86; Zu-hui Celina Hung, “‘There Are No Chinamen in Singapore’: Creolization and Self-Fashioning of the Straits Chinese in the Colonial Zone,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009): 269. 13. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 12. 14. E-mail to the author, October 15, 2010. NOTES 231

15. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 16. Maurizio Peleggi, The Politics of Ruins and the Business of Nostalgia (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2002), 4. 17. For example, Yueniang’s grandmother bequeaths to her Yueniang’s great-grandmother’s circular, tub-shaped porcelain covered vessel, a kamcheng, which she informs her means “relationship” in Hokkien. On the wedding day, the kamcheng will be filled with red (for fortune) and white (purity) glutinous rice balls in syrup (sweetness). 18. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 23. 19. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 24. 20. Khoo Salma Nasution, phone interview with Gaik, March 24, 2010. 21. These viewer responses come from online fora and twenty interviews I conducted (face to face as well as by e-mail) between March and October 2010 in Penang, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. Some of the interviews were more relevant than others, some shorter or longer, some more detailed than others. Understandably the people I interviewed may not have had a clear memory of the details of the serial as it was aired more than a year before and the hype had died down somewhat (even though there was a rerun on Singapore television in mid-2010). I have not used names where subjects preferred to remain anonymous. 22. Ghassan Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, ‘Ethnic Food’ and Migrant Home-Building,” in Home/World: Space, Commu- nity and Marginality in Sydney’s West, ed. Helen Grace et al. (Annandale, N.S.W.: Pluto, 1997), 99. 23. Jocelyn Lee, “Little Nyonya, Big Ratings,” Life! The Straits Times, De- cember 25, 2008. 24. One viewer in this forum, “Ah Bin,” writes: “I got all excited when I first heard about this . . . but then I started to watch it and they were all speaking Mandarin! About the most un-Nyonya-ish language in the world! It does look beautifully made, and I hope it can introduce the world of Babas and Nyonyas to people in China and Taiwan. . . . I just wish they spent a little money on making programmes in Baba Malay—the language spoken by Nyonyas at the time. . . . it really needs more young people to learn it.” See “小娘惹 “The Little Nyonya,” Chinese-Forums.com, October 1, 2009, http://www.chinese- forums.com/index.php?/topic/22679- %E5%B0%8F%E5%A8%98%E6%83%B9-the-little-Nyonya/ (accessed Feb- ruary 10, 2014). 25. One year of research was conducted, according to Jocelyn Lee and Jasmine Teo, “Where’s the Happy Ending?” Straits Times, January 7, 2009. 26. Jackie Yoong, e-mail to author, June 13, 2010. 27. Raymond Kwok, interview, Island Glades, Penang, March 21, 2010. 232 NOTES

28. “These blue-and-whites were not made specifically for the Peranakans; they were the lower-end Chinese export porcelain commonly used in South- east Asia as well as by early Chinese migrants in San Francisco.” See Lye Wai Choong, “Festivals: The Month of Hungry Ghosts,” Peranakan (July–September 2006): 8. 29. Khoo Joo Ee disputes the idea that batik crockery was used only in times of mourning because of its color, explaining that they were for daily use. See Khoo, The Straits Chinese, 239. 30. Lee Keehyeung, “Morae sigye: ‘Social Melodrama’ and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary South Korea,” in South Korean Golden Age Melo- drama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, ed. Kathleen McHugh and Nan- cy Abelmann (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 230. 31. Laura Stempel Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women, and Television Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42. 32. Khoo, The Straits Chinese, 122. 33. Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon, 40. 34. For a notable exception emphasizing the poverty of the Peranakan father and attempts to keep up appearances, see Shirley Lim, Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist (Singapore: Times Books International, 1996). 35. Tan Chee-Beng, “Peranakan Chinese in North-East Kelantan with Spe- cial Reference to Chinese Religion,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 55, part 1 (1982): 26–52; Tan Chee-Beng, Chinese Mi- nority in a Malay State: The Case of Terengganu in Malaysia (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002). 36. Yao Souchou, “‘Patience, Endurance and Fortitude’: Ambivalence, De- sire and the Construction of the Chinese in Colonial Singapore,” Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1996): 41–66. 37. Cheah Hwei-Fe’n. Phoenix Rising: Narratives in Nyonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlements (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), 56. 38. Felix Chia, The Babas Revisited, 3rd ed. (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1994). 39. Peranakan cab driver Kelvin Wan, aged forty-eight, interviewed for the New Paper, mentions a cringe-worthy scene: “Like the one where Pierre Png was singing the pantun (Malay poem). He was so stiff and sounded like he was reading some lines from a book!” See Maureen Koh, “A Little Bit of Every- thing,” New Paper, January 5, 2009. 40. A Singaporean fan (KT) whom I interviewed mentioned that under this policy only something like 20 percent of the dialogue can be in Chinese dialect for MediaCorp Channel 8. He said that Malay is fine but not Chinese dialect— NOTES 233 this begs the question, what about Baba patois? See also the reply from the Media Development Authority to a letter entitled “Provision of More Dialect Programmes,” REACH Singapore, March 26, 2009, https://www.reach.gov.sg/ TalkAbuzz/YourFeedbackOurResponse/tabid/108/mode/3/De- fault.aspx?ssFormAction=%5B%5BssBlogThread_VIEW%5D%5D& tid=%5B%5B122%5D%5D (accessed February 11, 2014). 41. Online criticism on forums was harsher. “Rock ^ Star” posted his frus- trations on December 5, 2008: “This bloody show is a farce la. Where got nonyas speak chinese?????!!!!!!!! Nyonyas speak malay and english!!!!!! Now ignorant young ones or even adult Sgporeans will think Nyonyas speak chinese.” See “Little Nyonya,” SGForums, http://sgforums.com/forums/1533/topics/338512?page=2 (accessed February 11, 2014). 42. Such local English-language Peranakan programs include Sayang-Say- ang (MediaCorp5, 2008–2009), which was playing a few months before The Little Nyonya came on but which got completely overshadowed by the latter; Ways of the Matriarch (played on Arts Central, 2002–2004); and Masters of the Sea (Television Corporation of Singapore, 1994–1995). In Malaysia there was Baba & Nyonya in the 1990s, with two Peranakan actors from Melaka, Kenny Chan and Chee Hood Siong, playing the roles of two Peranakan ladies and mostly speaking Baba Malay. The couple reprised their roles in Nasi Lemak 2.0, which is discussed in the final chapter. 43. “Little Nonya ‘Well-Received’ on Suria, More Ch8 Dramas May Be Dubbed into Malay,” Straits Times, February 15, 2011, http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=3107145 (accessed May 2, 2011). 44. Kwa Chong Guan, interview by Gaik, Singapore, May 26, 2010. 45. See Christopher Alan Bayly and Tim N. Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London: Penguin, 2004), 53. Though the Hainanese cook (cheong por) is referred to as a good cook, he is neither seen nor given a speaking part. Neither would viewers unfamiliar with local social history be aware of his specific dialect group or place of origin. 46. Cheah, Phoenix Rising, 325. 47. Pearl Forss, “The Little Nyonya Stars Charm International Photogra- phers,” Channel News Asia, March 31, 2009. 48. This can be seen in many family photos of married Peranakan couples. See photos in Khoo, The Straits Chinese, 94. 49. Jocelyn Lee, “Little Nyonya Big Ratings,” and also based on the feed- back here: “What do you like about ‘The Little Nyonya’?” Singapore Yahoo Answers, http://www.sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid= 20090105014328AAFiOJW (accessed February 11, 2014). 50. Khoo, The Straits Chinese, 122. 234 NOTES

51. To the show’s credit, the Peranakan families are shown eating with their fingers during meal times, and not using chopsticks so much. 52. The issue of the performing Nyonya body is a critical one, which is reflected in the arts; for example, the popular and frequent staging of the one- woman play Emily of Emerald Hill, and the often male-dragged Nyonya figure as played by Ivan Heng and Kenny Chan, which comes from a tradition of Baba female impersonators on stage since the 1950s. See Peter Lee, “Role Reversals,” Peranakan: Quarterly Newsletter of the Peranakan Association (July–September 2002): 3–9. 53. Peh Shing Huei, “Nonya Fever Sweeps China Thanks to S’pore TV Serial,” China Bureau, Straits Times, December 29, 2010. 54. Peh, “Nonya Fever.” 55. Peh, “Nonya Fever.” 56. Koh, “A Little Bit of Everything.” 57. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 58. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 59. Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West.” 60. Peter Wee in Chai Mei Ling, “Can Peranakan Culture Survive?” New Straits Times, November 15, 2009, http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/ NST/articles/20091115105325/Article/ (accessed February 17, 2011). 61. Suryadinata, Peranakan Chinese in Globalizing Southeast Asia; special issue on the Penang Peranakans in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 82 (part 2), no. 297 (2009). 62. Yap Koon Hong, “Here’s Re-looking at You, Bibik,” Straits Times, S2, February 2, 2010. 63. By comparison, the Malaysian government lacks interest in promoting Chinese Peranakan culture.

7. CURRYING THE NATION

1. Sharmini Adam, “Singapore Curry Protest Heats Up Vote with Face- book Campaign,” Bloomberg, August 19, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/2011-08-18/singapore-curry-protest-heats-up-vote.html (accessed Octo- ber 30, 2013). 2. See Singapore Armchair Critic, “What Defines a Singaporean?” Singa- pore Armchair Critic Blog, August 6, 2012, http://singaporearmchaircrit- ic.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/what-defines-a-singaporean/ (accessed October 30, 2013). 3. Ien Ang, “Together-in-Difference: Beyond Diaspora into Hybridity,” Asian Studies Review 27, no. 2 (2003): 142. NOTES 235

4. Namewee, Nasi Lemak 2.0 premiere, press conference, Kuala Lumpur, recorded by Malaysiakini on Rentakini, July 26, 2011, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=zo8vQqMRMRQ (accessed March 15, 2014). 5. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (London: Routledge, 2011), 46. 6. In an Internet spoof, two Indian characters insinuate how marginalized ethnic Indians are in Malaysia. As “cucumbers,” they are considered mostly to be a “garnish” or “side dish” in numerous dishes except in rojak and raita (cucumber yogurt). See “That Effing Show #99—Let Them Eat Kangkung,” YouTube video, January 15, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iEYZvwm0GHE (accessed February 23, 2014). 7. See Norman Vasu, “Governance through Difference in Singapore: Cor- poratism’s Composition, Characteristics, and Complications,” Asian Survey 52, no. 4 (2012): 743–46; on Special Assistance Plan schools that privilege Chinese Singaporeans well versed in Chinese language and culture, see Gerald Giam, “Singapore: Multiculturalism or the Melting Pot?” Online Citizen, July 20, 2009, http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2009/07/singapore-multiculturalism- or-the-melting-pot/ (accessed March 3, 2014). 8. Vasu, “Governance through Difference in Singapore,” 737. 9. Vasu, “Governance through Difference in Singapore,” 734. 10. Devan in Rachel Chang, “Racial and Religious Harmony a Hard-Fought State of Affairs,” Straits Times (Singapore), July 22, 2013. See also Kirpal Singh, “Keeping Vigil: Openness, Diversity, and Tolerance,” in Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, ed. Kenneth Paul Tan (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007), 123. 11. These include an assistant director working for the National Trade Un- ion Cooperative (NTUC), one Amy Cheong whose personal Facebook rant against “noisy” and lengthy Malay weddings held on the void deck (community space) of public housing flats invoked consternation from a friend who reposted it before it went viral on October 7, 2012. Ms. Cheong and the other four cases that year were dealt with quite harshly. Public opinion was divided. While Singaporeans did not support racism, the heavy-handed manner in which the state dealt with racist speech prompted criticism about the lack of space for dialogue and debate and missed opportunities to do antiracist education by exploring the deeper roots of racist speech. See Andrea Ong, “Different Shades of Grey,” Straits Times (Singapore), October 30, 2012, http:// www.singapolitics.sg/features/different-shades-grey (accessed October 22, 2013). Racist statements are most often made against ethnic minorities. For the use of the laws in the Sedition Act against racist speech, see Chang, “Racial and Religious Harmony a Hard-Fought State of Affairs.” 236 NOTES

12. Sumit Mandal, “Transethnic Solidarities, Racialisation and Social Equal- ity,” in The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity and Reform, ed. Edmund Terence Gomez (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). 13. Namewee, Nasi Lemak 2.0 premiere. 14. Zlatko Skrbis and Ian Woodward, “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cos- mopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness,” Sociologi- cal Review 55, no. 4 (2007): 736. 15. Seah Chiang Nee, “New Singapore Story,” Star, July 27, 2013, http:// www.thestar.com.my/Opinion/Columnists/Insight-Down-South/Profile/Arti- cles/2013/07/27/New-Singapore-story.aspx/ (accessed February 27, 2014). 16. Playwright Alfian Sa’at, quoted in Patrick Benjamin, “Writer of Cooling Off Day, Alfian Sa’at,” I-S Magazine, August 4, 2011, http://is.asia-city.com/ events/article/writer-cooling-day-alfian-saat (accessed March 15, 2014). 17. “Singapore MRT Breaks Down for Third Day in a Row,” Jakarta Globe, April 18, 2012, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/singapore-mrt-breaks- down-for-third-day-in-a-row/512271/ (accessed March 15, 2014). 18. Dan Lim, “The White Paper: Just a Walk in a Park (Connector),” Online Citizen, February 23, 2013, http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2013/02/white- paper-walk-park-connector/ (accessed December 15, 2013). 19. Lim, “The White Paper.” 20. The major metanarrative is the first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. See Lee K. Y., The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Prentice Hall, 1998). 21. Shinichi Harada, “The Roles of Singapore Standard English and Sin- glish,” 2009, http://www.bunkyo.ac.jp/faculty/lib/slib/kiyo/Inf/if40/if4006.pdf (accessed March 6, 2014). 22. Singapore Armchair Critic, “What Defines a Singaporean?” 23. Similarly, Vasu and Giam note the tensions between emphasizing national identity or ethnic pluralism. See Vasu, “Governance through Difference in Singapore,” 746; Giam, “Singapore: Multiculturalism or the Melting Pot?” 24. Joanne Leow, “On Food, on Identity: Insatiable Appetites,” Civic Life Blog, September 2, 2010, http://www.civiclife.sg/blog/?cat=11 (accessed Janu- ary 6, 2014). 25. Leow, “On Food, on Identity.” 26. First introduced in a speech by then–prime minister Goh Chok Tong in 1999, the “heartlander” is defined as someone living in a mature public housing estate who is communitarian, conservative, Mandarin/Malay and dialect- and Singlish-speaking, while the “cosmopolitan” lives in private housing, is English-educated, sophisticated, and has enough cultural capital and competitive edge to enable global mobility. K. P. Tan, Cinema and Television in Singa- pore: Resistance in One Dimension (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 66–67. NOTES 237

27. Leslie Tay, “Loo’s Hainanese Curry Rice: How Did Hainanese Curry Rice Come to Be?” IEatIShootIPost.sg, September 14, 2010, http://ieatishootipost.sg/2010/09/loos-hainanese-curry-rice-how-did.html (accessed December 15, 2013). 28. Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 36. 29. Selvaraj Velayutham, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 83–93. 30. This point was summed up by Sudhir, a senior editor in Cook a Pot of Curry. 31. Velayutham, Responding to Globalization, 83. 32. On December 8, a privately chartered bus ran over and killed a construction worker in Little India, Singapore. This sparked anger, and a riot broke out in which police cars were overturned and torched, and eighteen people were injured. Twenty-seven Indian nationals were charged. The riot, which was quickly quelled, generated racist comments on social media as well as counter-xenophobic and antiracist responses. See Eddy Blaxell, “Stop and Think: Lessons from Little India,” New Mandala, December 9, 2013, http:// asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2013/12/09/stop-and-think-lessons-from- little-india/ (accessed December 12, 2013). 33. “Nasi Lemak 2.0: Can We Learn to Laugh at Ourselves Too?” Move- ment for Change, Sarawak, September 17, 2011, http://mocsaraw- ak.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/nasi-lemak-2-0-can-we-learn-to-laugh-at-ourselves-too/ (accessed December 13, 2013). 34. Wee had been accused of insulting Malays and Islam with his rendition of the national anthem, “Negarakuku.” Real-life parallels can obviously be drawn between himself and the character he plays in his debut film. 35. Perkasa is a nongovernmental organization defending Malay rights. 36. Hui Yew-Foong, “Sinophobia Smolders in Malaysia,” Asia Times Online, October 2, 2008, http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JJ02Ae01.html; Ra- zak Ahmad, “Malaysian Muslims Charged for Cow-Head Protests against Hin- dus,” Reuters, September 10, 2009, http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/ 09/10/malaysian-muslims-charged-for-cow-head-protest-against-hindus/; and “Anti-Chinese Sentiment Gaining Ground in Malaysia,” China.org.cn, August 27, 2011, http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2011-08/27/content_23288480.htm (all accessed November 1, 2013). 37. “Pluralism is more concerned to protect and perpetuate particular, existing cultures” while cosmopolitanism “is willing to put the future of every culture at risk through the sympathetic but critical scrutiny of other cultures,” 238 NOTES

David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 85–86. 38. Namewee, Nasi Lemak 2.0 premiere. See 10.03 min. into the video. 39. Ang, “Together-in-Difference,” 148. 40. Baoyu is abalone, a high-status food, and wan tan mee is a cheap noodle dish with wontons. 41. Ang, “Together-in-Difference,” 147. 42. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 235. 43. This song is popular in the Malay Archipelago, in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, and has been the source of dispute in the Indonesia–Malaysia culture wars. 44. Indeed a real-life example occurred during the water crisis where residents in Taman Desa Karunmas grew closer through the kind act of one man and his employer, who distributed water to his neighbors every night, regardless of race or religion. Oh Ing Yeen, “One Man’s Kindness Draws Balakong Folk Closer,” Star, February 27, 2014, http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Com- munity/2014/02/27/One-mans-kindness-draws-Balakong-folk-closer/ (accessed March 2, 2014). 45. Machas means “brothers” in Tamil. The episode can be viewed here: “That Effing Show #99—Let Them Eat Kangkung,” YouTube video, January 15, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEYZvwm0GHE (accessed Feb- ruary 23, 2014). 46. Bayam is Malay for spinach, kobis (Malay) is cabbage, and lo han choy is Cantonese for mixed vegetable dish. 47. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 200. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Note: Observing preferred cultural norms, most Malay names are ordered by given name first followed by the father’s name. For easy reference, Malay names listed below will follow the first name given in the chapter references. Chinese names adopt the order of surname first, followed by given names. Hence, Chinese names are listed below with the surnames first.

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INDEX

Adam Road Hawker Centre, 119 Chew, Alistair, 127 air-conditioning, 27, 50, 55, 69, 82, 109 Chia, Felix, 160 Alfian Sa’at, 178, 179 Chin, Christina, 67 Anderson, Benedict, 62 Chinese culinary beliefs, 49 Ang Eng Tee, 157–158 Chinese people in Malaysia, 26–28, 32, Ang, Ien, 3–4, 110, 174, 187, 192 36, 39, 42, 62, 92, 174, 185–186 Appiah, Anthony, 30 Chinese people in Singapore, 56, 62, 99, assimilation, 70–71 143, 154, 156–157, 161, 171. See also Australia, Malaysian/Singapore food in, Peranakan 15, 81, 105, 118–119, 124 Chin Mee Chin, 45 Aw, Jeanette, 157, 164 Chong, Fred, 174 Chua Beng Huat, 5, 35, 106, 107, 109, Baba. See Peranakan 116 ba chang (rice dumplings), 124, 125, 133, coffee. See kopi 134, 136, 146 Coffeeshop (film), 33 Beck, Ulrich, 22 Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 7, 15 Bhabha, Homi, 30, 34, 108, 121 Cohen, Robin, 30 blogs, 31, 67, 69, 78–79, 89, 110, 180; commensality, 3, 9, 10, 16, 28, 31, 110, food blogs, 5, 152 176, 192. See also interethnic eating Boey, Kim Cheng, 12–13, 17 condensed milk, 49, 63, 74 borderwork, 99, 116 Cook a Pot of Curry (play), 175, 178, BreadTalk Group, 54, 56 179–180, 188 Burhanudeen, 67 cookbooks, 96, 97, 127 cosmopolitanism, 4, 21–22, 29–30, 63, 64, Certeau, Michel de, 10, 13–14, 19, 21, 64 192; vernacular cosmopolitanism, 22, Changi Airport, Singapore, 123–124, 135 30, 32, 63–64, 121 Chan, Selina Ching, 48–49, 113 cosmopolitan spaces, 29; hawker centers, Chang Tou Chuang, 53, 128, 131, 132, 110, 111, 114, 115–116, 120, 121; 135, 143 kopitiams, 31, 36, 38, 41, 113; mamak Cheah Hwei-Fe’n, 160, 164 stalls, 67–68, 80–81, 84, 86, 90, 94, Cheong, C. K., 38 112; markets, 141

255 256 INDEX

Datuk Mohd. Yussof Latif, 73 Hameediyah Restaurant, 73, 81, 82 De Silva, R., 37–38 Hardyment, Christina, 38 developmentalism, 8, 34, 59, 138, hawker centers, 13, 27, 59, 95–98, 146–148, 179 102–121 diaspora, 5, 6, 29–30, 105, 118–119, hawkers, 99–104, 113 186–188 history, reconstructing, 16, 53, 57, 59, domestic workers, 20, 47, 48 135, 139, 140 Don’t Play Play (film), 33 Hodge, Bob, 99 Driver, Felix, 16 Holden, Philip, 8 Hollinger, David, 29 eating across cultures. See commensality; hybrid cultures/identities, 3–4, 10, 33, 64, halal food; interethnic eating 79, 176, 179–180, 183–187, 189, 191. The Effing Show (online news program), See also Peranakan 190 hybrid foods, 1, 39, 56, 92–93, 96, 116, entrepreneurialism, 47–48, 53, 56, 181, 183–185, 192; from colonial 133–136 times, 32, 46, 74, 91 hybrid traditional and modern, 50–51, 53, fast food, 5, 32, 37, 82–83, 124, 166. See 58, 63, 146, 164 also McDonald’s hybrid spaces, 26, 32 Fernando, Rita, 141–142 hygiene standards, 82–83, 86, 102–103 films, 10–11, 33, 36, 174, 175, 177, 182–188, 190–191 Imran Bin Tajudeen, 139–141 food courts, 9, 56, 58, 118 India, Malaysian restaurants in, 91–92 Food Republic, 56, 58 Indians in Malaysia, 26, 72, 175, 187. See football, 69, 86 also Tamil Muslims in Malaysia foreign workers, 12, 18, 74–75, 83, 173, Indians in Singapore, 105, 114–115, 173, 177, 178, 182 175 interethnic eating, 9, 111, 112, 115–117, gender roles, 32, 72, 82, 86, 159, 164–165, 141–142, 175. See also commensality; 169 halal food George, Cherian, 98 interethnic socializing, 20, 32, 36, 38, Geylang Serai, Singapore, 129, 138–141, 41–42, 116, 141–143, 144–145, 163, 144, 147 176, 189–190. See also together-in- globalization, 22, 33, 140, 177, 181–182 difference Goh, Daniel P. S., 8 intergenerational bonding, 7, 33 Goldberg, David, 112 intermarriage, 6, 70, 71, 126 guidebooks. See tourist literature Internet forums, 25, 69 Gurney Drive Hawker Centre, 1, 192 Islamization. See Malaysia: Islamization

Habermas, Jürgen, 43, 64, 67 Jit, Krishen, 42 Hage, Gassan, 5–6, 7, 157 Joo Chiat, Singapore, 124, 127–128, 129, Hainanese chicken rice, 117, 119, 121 132, 134, 143, 147 Hainanese people in Singapore, 47–48, 51 Hai Peng Kopitiam, 39–40 kampung (village), 106, 110, 138, halal food, 76–79, 114–116, 176; 141–143, 144–145 halalization, 27; mamak stalls, 67, 68, Kant, Immanuel, 21 86; Muslims avoiding non-halal places, Katong, Singapore, 19, 123, 124, 127–137, 9, 26–27, 39; as a strategy of inclusion, 142–143, 146, 148 32, 40, 88, 154 INDEX 257 kaya (egg jam), 27, 32, 39, 45, 46–47, 52, Lim, Helen, 133 54–55 Lim Kit Siang, 78 kaya cake, 54 Lim, William, 146–147 Kayu Nasi Kandar Sdn Bhd, 82 Line Clear, 81 kebayas, 133, 136, 159, 164–167 The Little Nyonya (television series), 152, Keith, Michael, 120–121 154–171 Kemaman, Malaysia, 39–40 Loi Ah Koon, 51–53 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 166 Khoo, Eric, 181 Mahathir Mohamad, 28, 36, 41 Khoo Joo Ee, 151 Maju Curry House, 88 Killiney Kopitiam, 15, 27, 48, 50 Malaysia: AdilSembang, 69, 88–89; All- Kim Choo Kueh Chang, 123, 124, 125, Malaya Council of Joint Action, 30; 132–136, 146–148 Bangsa Malaysia, 94; Barisan Nasional, Kim Choo, Madame Lee, 133–134, 146 90; Coalition for Free and Fair Kirudu Muhamed Kuppaikanni, 73 Elections (Bersih), 18, 174; colonial Koh, William, 46, 52–53 era, 26, 30, 38, 71–74; Congress of Kong, Lily, 16, 102, 110, 111, 128, 131, Malaysian Indian Muslims (KIMMA), 132, 135, 139, 142, 143 75; Democratic Action Party, 78, 89; Koolhaus, Rem, 147 Department of Islamic Development kopi (coffee), 32, 45, 48–50, 63 (Jakim), 76–78; development and Kopitiam (television series), 31, 36, 41 modernization, 11–12, 34, 83; Kopi-tiam (play), 106 elections, 17, 30, 90, 94; Hindu Rights kopitiams (coffee shops), 15; in Malaysia, Action Force, 176; Islamization, 8–9, 7, 25–27, 31–43, 83; in Singapore, 11, 28–29, 36, 41; Malay hegemony, 3, 46–64, 106 11, 21, 27–28, 39, 75, 79, 174, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 37–39, 41, 76, 175–176; Malaysian Chinese 84 Association, 33, 190; Malaysian Indian Kudu, 81, 85, 91 Congress, 75, 190; marginalized youth, kueh (cakes), 123, 133, 134 12, 33; New Economic Policy, 8, 12, Kuo Pao Kun, 106 28, 30, 39, 41, 75, 94, 188; Official Kwa Chong Guan, 57 Secrets Act, 89; Pakatan Rakyat Kwok, Raymond, 158 (Citizens’ Alliance), 31; Pan Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), 28, 79; Parti Lai Ah Eng, 47–48, 59, 111–113, 144–145 Keadilan Rakyat, 88; Penang Malay laksa, 15, 124, 130–131 Association, 73, 74; Penang United language, 32, 41–42, 156, 157–158, Muslim Association, 71; Perkasa, 190; 161–163, 175, 179, 183 political protests/rallies, 17–18, 90, Law, Lisa, 20 174; political speech, 17–18, 69, 85, 89, Lee Hsien Loong, 178 90, 94, 174; Pusat Tenaga Ra’ayat, 30; Lee, Jack, 37–39, 41, 42 racial policies, 8, 22, 27–29, 30, 42, 85, Lee Kuan Yew, 127 94, 175–176, 190; Reformasi Lee, Mrs., 127, 138 movement, 42; United Malays Lefebvre, Henri, 15 National Organisation, 72, 94, 174, Leow, Joanne, 180 176; Vision 2020, 28, 36, 41, 83; See Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2 also Chinese people in Malaysia; Lewis, Hugh, 62–63 Indians in Malaysian; kopitiams; Liew, Cheong, 101 mamak stalls; nasi kandar restaurants Lim, Bliss Cua, 18 Malay Village, Singapore, 19, 129, Lim Guan Eng, 94 138–141 258 INDEX mamak identity, 70–71, 74, 76, 80, 82–83, O’Carroll, John, 99 85–86, 92–93 Oldenburg, Ray, 31, 68, 109 mamak stalls, 67–70, 76, 80, 82–90, 92–94 Old Town White Coffee, 7, 27 Mandal, Sumit, 29–30 Maniam, K. S., 29–30, 42 pasembur. See rojak Marine Parade, Singapore, 131, 144–145 Peh Shing Huei, 166 Massey, Doreen, 14, 16 Pelita, 83, 91 McDonald’s, 33, 109, 110, 180 Penang, Malaysia, 1, 71–74, 76, 81, 91 McKinley, Robert, 39 Peranakan: culture and identity, 6, 124, MediaCorp, 154, 157–158, 162 125–128, 130, 136–138, 140, 146, mee goreng (fried yellow noodles), 92 151–152, 154–161, 162–171; food, 47, memory, 19, 53, 59, 108, 120–121, 144, 130–131, 133–136, 146, 152–154, 148; lieux de mémoire (sites of 166–167; Peranakan Association, 128, memory), 155–156, 159, 169–170, 179, 158; Peranakan Museum, 158, 170 180; selective, 57, 98, 125. See also Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 86–88 nostalgia Phua Roy Yue Keng, 142 modernization, 7, 11, 16, 50, 103, 106, Pillai, M. G. G., 28, 37 128, 146, 169 pluralism, 29, 184 Mok, Dawn, 58–59, 122, 128 Probyn, Elspeth, 109 murtabak (omelette with minced meat), 92 Quek, George, 54, 56

Nagata, Judith, 26, 75, 79 racialized government policies. See Ma- Najib Razak, 152, 188, 190 laysia: racial policies; Singapore: racial Namewee (Wee Meng Chee), 174, policies 182–184, 188 racism, 17–18, 83, 173–174, 176–177, Nanyang, 62–63, 64, 175 182, 183–184 nasi kandar (rice and curries), 67, 68, 84, Rajah, Ananda, 5, 116 91, 92 Rajaratnam, S., 180 nasi kandar restaurants, 73, 76, 78–79, Razaleigh Hamzah, Tengku, 8 81–83, 85–86, 94 The Recipe (television film), 181–182, nasi lemak (coconut rice), 84–85, 183, 185 190–191 Nasi Lemak (film), 174, 175, 177, rempah udang (rice dumpling with 182–188 shrimp and coconut filling), 152 Nasution, Khoo Salma, 74, 156 rojak (mixed salad), 1–3, 5, 11 Nava, Mica, 22 Rojak! (film), 10–11 Ng Ping Ho, 31, 41 roti canai (flat bread), 92 Nonya. See Peranakan Nora, Pierre, 155–156, 169 Seapark Nasi Lemak, 84–85, 88 nostalgia, 6, 11, 41, 57, 98, 101, 120, 181; Seetoh, 116 for childhood, 5, 19, 107, 109, 119, Seremetakis, Nadia, 2, 19 142; for a homely, secure past, 6, 8, 13, sex industry, 129, 135, 137 16; for the kampung (village), 35, 55, Sia, Andrew, 86 106, 110, 141–143, 145; nostalgia Siapa Baba? (musical), 128, 137 marketing, 51, 56, 57–58, 59, 63, 124; Sim, Steven, 89–90 and “traditional” restaurants/coffee Singapore: as a global city, 22, 179–180, shops, 6–7, 27, 33–34, 36, 40, 50–51 182; colonial era, 47–48, 62, 99, 126, Nussbaum, Martha, 21, 121 127; Housing Development Board Nyonya. See Peranakan estates, 59, 95, 103, 104, 106, 108, 111, INDEX 259

143–145; People’s Action Party, 18, theater, 42, 106, 175, 178, 179–180, 188 176, 178; Population White Paper, 18, third spaces/third places, 31–32; hawker 177–178; racial policies, 8, 10, 22, 138, centers, 13, 108–109, 121; kopitiams, 173, 175, 180; Singapore National 31, 33–34, 41; mamak stalls, 68–69, 86, Environment Centre, 17; Singapore 154 Tourism Board, 7; Singlish, 178, third taste, 117–118 179–180; Speak Mandarin Campaign, toast, 32, 54 8; tabula rasa approach to Toast Box, 48, 50, 54–64 development, 12, 59, 138, 147, 179; together-in-difference, 3–4, 8, 15, 20–21, urban redevelopment, 7, 11–13, 17, 121, 174–177, 188, 192. See also 58, 103, 106, 128, 138. See also commensality; interethnic eating; Chinese people in Singapore; hawker interethnic socializing; cosmopolitan centers; hawkers; Indians in spaces Singapore; kopitiams; Peranakan tourism, 96–97, 124, 135, 137–138; Sirajuddin Mohammed Mydin, 82 cultural tourism, 19, 135–141, 143, smell, 13, 19–20, 79, 173, 192 146, 170 socializing across cultures. See tourist literature, 2, 59, 96, 110, 112, 122, cosmopolitan spaces; interethnic 129–130, 139 socializing; together-in-difference transethnic solidarities, 21, 29–30, 42, SS2 Mamak, 86 170, 176–177 SS Murni, 86 Starbucks, 7, 15, 27, 32 Uncle Lim’s, 27, 34 Stark, Jan, 75 Stoller, Paul, 20 Vasu, Norman, 176 Straits Chinese Magazine, 155 Velayutham, Selvaraj, 10, 22 Subaidah, 82 Vertovec, Steven, 30 Sutton, David, 19 Wang, Ban, 33 Tamil Muslims in Malaysia, 67–68, 70–80, Wee, Peter, 158 83–86, 89; divisions between Indian Werbner, Pnina, 22, 63 and Malay Muslims in Malaysia, Wong, Desmond, 135 75–79. See also mamak identity Wong, Elaine, 39–40 Tan Aye See, 54, 56 Wong Gungwu, 127 Tan Chee-Beng, 126–127, 160 Wong Hong Suen, 6–7, 11, 53, 127 Tan Ern Tzeh Favian, 50 Wong, Raymond, 133–140, 142–143, 146 Tan, Nathaniel, 88–89 Tan, Sylvia, 100–101 Ya Kun Kaya Toast, 15, 46, 48, 50, 51–53, Tan, Tony, 123 54, 55 Tan Wyn-Lyn, 119 Yao Souchou, 68 Tay, Leslie, 152 Yeoh, Brenda, 16 tea, 32, 74, 96 Yoong, Jackie, 158 television commercials, 7 yuppies, 32, 48, 57, 64, 86 television series, 31, 41. See also The Yut Kee, 25, 35, 37, 40, 41 Little Nyonya Teo, Peggy, 53 Zulkifli, Mack, 31

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jean Duruz has been teaching and researching in the fields of cultural studies, food studies, and ethnography at the University of South Aus- tralia since 1991. Currently, she is an adjunct senior research fellow in the Hawke Research Institute of that university. Her passion for understanding the significance of food in cultural relations, together with the pleasure of talking about this, has shaped Jean’s research in particular ways and places—around cultures of everyday life in postcolonial, global cities, such as London, Mexico City, Sydney, and Singapore. A major strand of her work uses food as a window for understanding issues of inclusion, integration, and citizenship in changing societies. Her research has been published in journals such as New Formations; Cultu- ral Studies Review; Emotion, Space and Society; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Space and Culture; and Gastronomica. She has also contributed to various anthologies, such as Sidney C. H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng’s Food and Foodways in Asia; Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayuthum’s Everyday Multiculturalism; and Tan Chee-Beng’s Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Be- yond. Recently, Jean co-edited and contributed to special issues of Con- tinuum and Cultural Studies Review, these themed issues focusing on food markets and food cultures, respectively. She is currently developing projects on the role of cookbooks and food guides as documentation of identity writing and intercultural exchange.

Gaik Cheng Khoo is currently an associate professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia and teaches cultural studies, film, and gender

261 262 ABOUT THE AUTHORS but her research focus is on film, food, identity, and cultural politics in Malaysia. She is interested in the role food and film play in multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship and has published in Inter- Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema, South East Asia Research, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Concentric, and various anthologies, including Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayuthum’s Everyday Multiculturalism. Her more recent publications on Malaysian civil society and cosmopolitan solidarity between citizens and noncitizens appear in Asian Studies Review, Citizenship Studies (in a special issue on Malaysia that she co- edited with Julian Lee, 2014), and anthologies such as Worlding Multi- culturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, Routledge, 2014) and K-Pop—The International Rise of the Kore- an Music Industry (edited by JungBong Choi and Roald Maliangkay, Routledge, 2014). A new project she is developing looks at the sustainability of hawker food in her hometown of Penang since George Town, Penang, was declared a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site in 2008.