I got the fully-equipped bistro on the cheap on the condition that as well as whatever kind of menu I wanted to put up (pseudo-Chinese/Malaysian – I was still experimenting), I had to sell steaks + chips to cater to the pub regulars. It worked for me since, if nothing else, I could use their kitchen facilities to prep for the two monthly markets I had started trading at.

This was before the gentrification of Erskineville had kicked in, and the pub’s patrons were that rough that one time just before I started there, one of them got punched in the head out on the street, came in for a beer anyway, then walked out and promptly dropped dead from the injuries sustained.

The decor was dated, the carpet loud and obnoxious and the toilets must surely violate all known health codes based on their condition. But with a newly fitted-out kitchen I figured the $100 per week asking price was a good enough deal for me to work with.

There was some limited pub accommodation upstairs, and the rooms were taken up by a handful of older, displaced misfits and hobos who I never paid any attention to. Except for one.

My first day of trading, this old, grizzled, scrawny and bearded Aussie guy came down and sat at one of the tables. Loud and friendly with a tinge of the larrikin in him, he introduced himself – Peter Kenny. He almost immediately gave me a $50 note which he said to put towards his tab. Considering the price range for the menu was around the $5 mark, along with the fact that he’d never met me before that day nor tried any of my food, I was suitably stunned and impressed with his show of faith.

And that was the beginning of my association with the man who’s had the biggest impact on my life since coming to Australia.

Peter came down every day for his meals and stayed around a good amount of time to chat. I guessed at the time that living like the hermit he was, he didn’t get to meet a lot of people – and he was such a fascinating person that sitting down to listen to his stories became a daily ritual.

As I got to know him, I learned about his life – and a picture emerged of an incredibly complex character with stories that belonged more in a best-selling biography than in the dining room of, well, a shitty inner-city pub.

Apparently, Peter started his career as an academic – he was a psychology lecturer at Sydney University (my alma mater) before he met the as-yet-unknown John Singleton. They went on to start up an ad agency which made Singleton what he is today – the biggest name in advertising in Australia, and one of its richest people. Thanks to their business venture, Peter was the first person under 30 to become a millionaire in this country – back in the day when a million dollars actually meant something.

He and John revolutionised advertising in Australia – they were the first to come up with ad spots for music album releases – up until then it had always been considered too expensive a medium for it; they made TV advertising accessible to smaller businesses by using cheap production values and employing shock tactics in their ads.

Those late night TV ads starring the business owner yelling at the screen were introduced in this country by Peter and John. He described how this guy who had a golfing supplies store wanted to do an ad to salvage his ailing business. When Peter told him his idea, he said the guy turned sheet white. He went along with it anyhow – so, on camera, in front of his shop, he wielded a golf club, talked about his knockdown prices, and started smashing his glass storefront with it until it broke into smithereens. The ad was a roaring success.

And for a no-frills barber shop, he created the tagline – You Grow It, We’ll Mow It.

Being a psychology lecturer/professor, he was an expert with human behaviour. He described the time he was stopped for speeding on the way back from Canberra. Instead of displaying any contrition, he flew into a rage towards the cops. They let him off the hook.

He talked about the time he and Singleton went to this high-end seafood restaurant, and when told they could pick their own lobsters, they rolled up their trouser legs and climbed into the lobster tank to do so. They were banned for life.

And the time they said something derogatory about billionaire businessman Kerry Packer, who sent some big guys to their office the next day to politely elicit, and obtain, a public apology.

Obviously, despite his illustrious career, he had hit upon hard times. He was now old, lonely, had no assets, and lived above a pub. He’d lived a decadent life, been married 5 times, the last time to a high-class prostitute in her 40s. He said he even wrote her classifieds for her – the hook – I could be the most beautiful woman you’ve ever met. He said she was never short on clients, even though by his account she wasn’t that beautiful. The combined psychology of the ad and the way she carried herself meant her clients were never disappointed.

I remember him telling me about the meaning of the Swahili words ‘njaro’ and ‘ki’ and ‘lima’ and how they combined to form ‘Kilimanjaro’ meaning ‘small, snow-covered hill’ as we discussed etymology and word construction. Long before the food thing and the IT thing, I held a keen interest in languages – and still in my 20s and with 8 languages behind me and my degree in languages not the distant memory it is today – I was completely intellectually seduced by the 80-year old man.

He talked about worldly possessions, about how it was when he finally owned nothing, that it was then he realised he owned everything – he slept on park benches in beautiful Hyde Park in the knowledge that as public property, he ‘owned’ it. He owned the entire country, as far as he was concerned. He wasn’t anti-capitalistic or anything like that, but saw the folly of spending your money protecting what you already had and being a slave to your possessions. He was anti-establishment and was living largely off the grid.

He stayed in the good books with the lady owner of the pub by also paying her big advances towards his rent, and helping clean the communal toilets etc. I couldn’t understand where he got his money from, but he hinted that he was still writing ads for businesses on a cash basis. And I wasn’t sure what to make of all his stories – how much of it was true, how much was embellished and how much was just the creation of a crazy, deluded mind.

Back then, I was just starting out and traded under a different, innocuous business name. Keeping in mind this was light years before the cult of the celebrity chef took the world by storm, Peter kept trying to convince me – YOU are the biggest selling point of your business. You need to sell yourself more than anything else. It seemed incredibly narcissistic to me, and in response, he guessed correctly that I was a middle child in a big family, hence my discomfort with the whole notion of self-promotion.

Then, one day, Peter said – hey, you want to see what I do to make money? I’m holding this meeting in the city.

I had no idea what was in store when I went along that evening. I walked into a packed room of suits in this hotel in Sydney’s CBD. Then, as proceedings got started, John Singleton himself walked up to introduce Peter. All this time I had thought that maybe the relationship had been exaggerated but no, John, the godfather of Australian advertising, owner of radio stations and one of the most recognizable figures in the country, talked warmly and at great length about his old friend and confirmed everything Peter had been telling me.

Then Peter himself took to the podium. Not the grizzled, old geezer in singlet and shorts and sandals I was used to seeing at my joint, dribbling as he chewed my food and talked at the same time, but this incredibly sharp-looking man in a Christian Dior suit and polished shoes, crisp shirt and expensive-looking tie and cufflinks.

When he started talking, he oozed charisma and the roomful of important-looking corporate types were transfixed. At the end of it, people were willingly handing over their business cards so Peter’s associates could get in touch afterwards to discuss ways to market their products and services.

I found out after that night that Peter would hold these meetings every now and then, when his funds were depleted; in between, he basically wrote and designed marketing campaigns for the leads gained through these meetings. He made, he said, about $100K cash a year doing that; not too shabby for a hobo in the early 1990s.

I left the Erskineville pub after a few months. Towards the end, Peter would come down later and later each day, complaining about how he was having trouble getting up in the morning. I figured it was just part and parcel of old age and tried not to think too much of it.

Shortly after I left, I heard he’d died in his sleep.

It turned out the cause of death was a brain tumour.

I never made a cent in all that time working at the pub. It was a rough and exhausting time of my life, running that as well as another cafe in Balmain on top of my 9-to-5 corporate job without any days off. I’d passed off my then-2yr old daughter to my parents to look after full-time and only saw her occasionally. I missed my younger sister’s wedding because of having to work. I was assaulted by an aboriginal guy who thought mine was the place that sold his son bad pizza (I’ve never sold pizza). Looking back, I don’t know why I took on so much with no financial gratification. But the one thing that made it all worthwhile was to have met Peter Kenny.

I did take his advice many years later, by naming my business after myself. It’s a fine line to tread for someone like me who’s not short on cynicism about the culture of celebrity, but I think it’s the right call.

I still think about Peter after all these years. Memories of our conversations keep me awake at night. I miss him.

The post My Mentor – Peter Kenny first appeared on Jackie M..

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I’ve never been hugged by my dad.  Growing up, I was under no illusion that I was anywhere near the favourite of his 9 kids.

I thought he was harsh, dictatorial, mean-spirited; I couldn’t stand watching him pander to those with social standing.  I was appalled when he once grabbed a little Indian kid out of the Odeon by the ear and told him never to come back.  The kid had been hawking curry puffs from a basket and the way my dad saw it, was threatening our own livelihood.

He was never quite sure how old I was, let alone remember my birthdays.  He once threatened to break my legs for wearing shorts.  It was a rough relationship and I used it to milk for sympathy from anyone who would listen.

Ironically it took a privileged Scandinavian to help me see things from a different perspective.  I had relayed these stories to Steffen (my boyfriend at the time) in anticipation that it would win me some brownie points; his response took me aback and somewhat annoyed me.

Yes, but did he remember ANY of his kids’ birthdays?  Did he hug ANY of his kids?  Never having met my dad, Steffen, at all of 21, was nevertheless wise enough to the fact that my dad probably had a tough upbringing and A LOT of responsibilities AND was of a different era and culture where affection was not freely displayed etc. etc. etc.  But, but, but – what about his tolerance towards some of my other siblings’ perceived misbehaviour and hardline towards mine?  By that stage, even I knew I was splitting hairs.

My dad, Wa Koy Tang, was born in 1927 in Malaysia from immigrant Chinese parents.  His dad was an alcoholic who died when my dad was some 13 years of age.   Dad had to leave school to take up the breadwinner mantle for the family, having only completed primary school education.

There are gaps in my knowledge of his early years; I know he was sent to labour camp during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, where he worked for a not-completely-evil Japanese industrialist.

He was fed a diet solely comprised of yam which made his face swell up – it gave his mom some relief when she finally got to see him after a long absence, thinking he must have been well-fed by his oppressors, when in fact he was severely malnourished and at the brink of death.  It was also during this stint in the labour camp that he developed an injury to his knee that was to haunt him late in life.

His marriage to my mom was pre-arranged; he met her when she first got off the boat from China – they were both kids back then.  He laughed when he relayed in his twilight years that he thought at the time she was really ugly, with buck teeth.

My parents went on to have 10 kids, 9 of whom made it to adulthood.  My dad worked 20-hour days 7 days a week – that’s 20 hours of hard, physical labour.  He started out selling street food; was enterprising enough to diversify, eventually taking up a canteen at the Odeon Cinema.

He borrowed money from friends to buy a bus and start a school bus run.  He then started a factory bus run.  He ran most of these ventures at the same time.  On top of that, he somehow managed to find time to learn, and excel in, martial arts.  And lead a martial arts school in Seremban, earning him the title of “Tang Sifu” (Master Tang) among his followers.

He even travelled to Port Dickson some twenty miles away once a week to teach additional night classes there.  And he’d hire his bus to daytrippers on weekends driving them to the beachside resort of Port Dickson or to KL.

As a kid, I once found a very nice sketch of a girl back when we were living in Templer Flats.  I tried to cut her out with a pair of scissors so I could play dress-ups with her, but with my poor scissor skills, I accidentally chopped her head off.  Growing up in relative poverty does not preclude one from throwing a tantrum, and I did – I wanted whoever drew that picture to do another one.

Nobody owned up to it, so my stepmom helpfully tried to replicate the drawing to appease me.  Her sketch was awful and I bawled my eyes out.  It wasn’t until many years later that I found out the mystery artist was in fact my dad.

I’ll never fully learn the scope of my dad’s talents.  I know that despite having very little education, he could speak every Chinese dialect, some of which are so obscure I’ve (still) never heard of them.  He could communicate in Malay and seemed to have a better and quicker grasp of English on arrival in Australia than his much younger wife, despite never having learned them formally.

Back in Malaysia he would watch English movies and TV shows without subtitles and understand the entire plot and get the gist of the dialogue without knowing the language.  My dad never had the privilege of education, never had the luxury of indulging in his creativity and exploring his potential; he worked himself nearly to death, driving his buses till, on many occasions, he could no longer keep his eyes open.

And when it came to the dinner table, he always let his family eat first, claiming he was full until there were only scraps left for him.  Only when my stepmom threatened to throw out the leftovers, would he reluctantly eat up.  This pattern of behaviour continued his entire life, even when his kids were all grown up and we were no longer impoverished or in danger of ever going hungry again.

In “throwing away” all my higher education and promising career to pursue my passion for Malaysian food, my dad was the ONLY person in my family who seemed to get it.  My family doesn’t get it; my stepmom with her occasional nagging about my waste of a good education, and the deafening silence and lack of moral support from most other quarters are the kind of stuff I’ve resigned myself to.

And yet, the gleam in my dad’s eyes when he occasionally inquired about how things were going made it all worthwhile – he’d ask with a smile about adding this dish or that dish to my repertoire, reminisce about his own experience in selling the same dishes back in his younger days.

The first time I was featured in a half-page spread in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Living section, he laminated a copy of it and kept it as a souvenir.

My dad is dying.  He’s suffering from dementia and doesn’t have much time left.  He sleeps most of the day and my stepmom looks after him.  He shows signs of lucidity once in awhile, eg. when interacting with baby Noah, even if I doubt he really knows who he is.

Recently at family dinner, my brother-in-law who’s been in Australia probably about half a century, tried to crack a joke by speaking very broken Malay to my dad.

He gave up when he couldn’t remember the Malay word for “fishing”.  My dad, seeming to be in his own little world up to that point, piped up – “pancing ikan!”  Happy Father’s day, Dad.  I love you.

The post Tang Sifu first appeared on Jackie M..

They don’t call me The Curry Nazi for no reason.

My dad told me when he first started out, his family was so incredibly poor that he had to borrow money to buy a pack of cigarettes, break it open, then sell each stick individually on the streets.

His younger sister would be right beside him, and once he made a sale, she would beg the buyer to also consider buying a box of matches.  Some customers would buy them out of pity.

Packs of matches were like 5 cents when I used to work at the Odeon 30-plus years ago;  I imagine they were even cheaper in his day.  It breaks my heart to think of how desperate they must have been.

My legendary lack of patience dealing with customers stems in large part from the stories of my parents’ tough beginnings, and also from observing my dad in particular kowtow to people who held his financial destiny in his hands.

One prime example was my dad’s deference to the Odeon cinema’s general manager. Despite constantly humiliating my dad by scolding him in public over God-knows-what petty little thing and threatening to raise his rent (which he did on a regular basis), my dad always apologized.  The GM was given free run of our canteen so it became his personal candy bar.

This general manager converted to Christianity after we left for Australia, and even came to visit us once, a much humbler and gentler person in his old age.  Back in the day, though, I hated his guts, and that of everyone else who abused their position of power and made life tough for my parents.

To this day I tend to instinctively be very borderline disrespectful of people in positions of authority and in turn I get along great with kitchen staff anywhere around the world where I’m invited to guest-chef.

The post The Hard Sell first appeared on Jackie M..

I remember a boy, Bernard Wong, taking  a liking to me and bringing me candy every day.  We hung out.  Then one day, he started getting obnoxious.  I think he’d even been giving me money, and suddenly he wanted it all back.

I tried to brush him off but he kept tailing me and getting in my face all day.  Every time I tried to walk away, he would follow me.

I started walking around the classroom in circles, but he kept tailing me, and when I walked faster, he did too.  I finally complained to the teacher and he was told to back off.  I still don’t know what his deal was.

Then in first grade (Standard 1) I started ‘proper’ school at Convent Primary on Birch Road.  We were randomly put into classes, and I was assigned to 1B.

Between the time my older sister started school five years prior and when I began, the government had changed the medium of instruction from English to Malay.  Not that it mattered to me as I knew neither language going in.

Some of my older siblings had attended Chinese-medium schools, but at some point, mom had had the foresight to put the rest of us through English/Malay-medium schools.

My textbooks were hand-me-downs from my older sister.  There were pages that were ripped out of it, and others that were torn and missing part of the page.  Min Foong painstakingly filled out the missing pages of text and pictures with her hand-drawn efforts and taped them into my books.

I remember we were given a list of things we needed to bring every day.  One of them was colouring pencils.  I didn’t have a set; I don’t know if we couldn’t afford it, or if I just never dared ask my dad for it.  Every time we had to pull them out to use in class, I had to ask to borrow them from the girl across from me.

Unfortunately, not being able to speak English, I struggled for the right words.  I remember being confused even as I said, ‘Can you let me your colour pencils?’ – simultaneously thinking there was something wrong with the sentence, and being inclined to say ‘lend’ instead of ‘let’, but not knowing why.

Not having consciously come across the word ‘lend’, I didn’t think it existed.   There’s a lot to be said for subliminally learning stuff from our new TV, I guess.

Then came the tests.  I nailed every single one of them.  I was scoring 99-100% pretty much across the board.  I realised, at 7, after a childhood of living in the shadow of my sisters, that I had a gift.

Some kids in my class got 0%.  That was very perplexing to me.  I was taking a shower when I got home, when I yelled out to Yin-chee (‘sister’ Yin, our servant-girl who was to marry my dad) and Min Foong, ‘Can you believe some kids got 0%?  They’re so dumb!’

It seemed to me that the wrath of the heavens immediately descended upon me.  ‘How dare you call anyone dumb?!

You’re going to be the dumb one and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!’  The verbal tirade went on, it seemed, forever.

I couldn’t understand why they were so mad, but it shut me up for good.  As I got a little older I realised my older sister pretty much sucked at school, so I took solace in the fact that she’d been mad probably because the truth had hit a bit too close to home.

The post Starting School – Seremban first appeared on Jackie M..

There was one toilet, which doubled as a dark room – my brother Choong Fee had taken up photography and had converted it into his personal photo-processing lab.

I remember the thick black curtain which we had to draw aside to get into the toilet, the funny lights, the chemicals, the trays and all the negatives hanging from the toilet ceiling.

I remember the narrow balcony where the neighbourhood kids and I would hang out on, with our legs dangling through the rather wide rails , looking down at the activity 11 floors below.

Sometimes the kids would stick their heads through the rails for a laugh.  I tried but couldn’t because of my over-sized head.  I think I did manage to get it through once but got stuck and needed help to pull out again.  My big head was a running joke in those days.

There were eight apartments on each floor, all lined up in a straight row, and 2 elevators to service the building.  Except for a couple of pot plants, there was almost no greenery.  I never saw a caterpillar until I was probably about 8 or 10, and I remember the first time I did, I thought about it for a second before deciding I was terrified of them.  They freak me out to this day.

We played with the kids on our floor, in a pseudo-communal environment.  One day, my sister Min Foong, five years older than me, came home crying.  My mom asked what was wrong and she said one of the kids wouldn’t let her watch TV at their place.  That upset my mom.

We didn’t have a TV and had been freeloading off them for our TV fix each night.

My mom was our strongest advocate and most tenacious defender.  I remember she saw me crying once and asked what was wrong.  I said one of the other kids had been mean.

He was the resident bully on our floor, and had picked on me lots of times before.  But not that time.  To this day I don’t know why I said what I did.  Anyway, my mom stormed up to his and got into a fight with her because of me and my lie.

Back to the TV thing; that’s the story of how we ended up buying our very first, black and white TV.   My mom was a proud woman and protective of her children.

There were 9 of us, and yet I never felt from her that there was not enough love to go around.  She loved us equally and in great abundance, something I would miss for the rest of my childhood.

Disney’s Jungle Book was playing at the The Odeon, our local cinema, at the time.  On top of his photography, Choong Fee was a gifted artist.  My dad sewed a cover for our new TV and Choong Fee painted it with characters from that movie and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .  It was exquisite.  This is a pic of me posing next to our new TV.  Below it is a pic of playtime in the narrow corridor of my apartment floor, with my sister Chooi in the foreground.

The post The TV first appeared on Jackie M..

At 15, I’d had a personality transplant; from a mild, soft-spoken and obedient kid, I’d turned into a  take-no-prisoners Hakka warrior overnight.

I was ready to pick a fight with anyone, anywhere, and thanks to spending most of my time working at the Odeon, it generally meant the hodge-podge group of cinema ushers recruited, I was sure, based on their talent to piss me off.

I’d had an uneasy relationship with the cinema staff almost from Day One.  I remember early on at the ripe old age of eight, taking an instant dislike to one of the guys there – he seemed a bit too friendly and it gave me bad vibes.

One day I spotted some graffiti on one of the posters on the outside wall next to our canteen – it looked like something one of the other ushers had scribbled for a laugh. It mentioned a name, which I forget, but let’s say – Bob – and the message said –

‘Bob is sexy’.

I was disgusted and horrified at the same time – at that young age, having only started to learn English at school, I was convinced it wasn’t a good thing.  After all, ‘sexy’ came from the word ‘sex’ – and ‘sex’ was ‘bad’ – therefore, whoever ‘Bob’ was, must be some sort of sexual deviant.

So I asked one of the ushers – ‘Who’s this Bob? Is it him?’, pointing at bad-vibes boy.  He laughed and said yes.

That did it for me.  It confirmed all my suspicions about ‘Bob’.  I made it a point to be blunt and rude to him, and made sure he couldn’t get anywhere near me.

I even took pains to explain it to my younger sister and warn her about him.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out he wasn’t ‘Bob’ at all – it was actually the guy I’d asked the question to – so, not only had I maligned someone due to my lack of English comprehension, I’d done it to the wrong person.

I wonder if he ever puzzled over why I was so hostile towards him all those years.

One of the veteran staff there was nicknamed ‘Bengali’ by everyone – I never knew why – he was Chinese and bald and didn’t have any Indian blood in him as far as I could tell.  He even lived onsite, in a little storeroom upstairs plastered with old movie posters.

He was fond of me to the point of obsession, for some inexplicable reason.  Every time he saw me, he would sing out my name loudly – ‘Nyok! Nyoooook! Ah Nyooook’ – and just keep doing so all hours of the day.  I was pretty sure he was a bit crazy.

He would sit on the 6-inch ledge in front of our canteen during his breaks, enjoying his cigarettes . Every now and then, he would sneak me a movie poster pulled down from the billboards.

This was highly illegal, since they were meant to be shipped back to the film distributors at the end of the movie run.  I’ve often wondered what happened to him after we moved to Australia.

Back to Mr. forgot-to-say-please for his change, he was at the top of my list of ushers I despised.  I’d had a few verbal altercations with him in the past.  This time though, I felt he’d gone too far.

Thanks, I guess, to my family’s survival instinct to avoid having our canteen lease terminated (a constant implied threat by what I saw as the tyrannical management) I never witnessed anyone else confront him about his behaviour.  I had no such compunction about doing so.

‘Mahu tukar (Want change)?’  Here’s your bloody change, I thought – and I flung the coins hard on the stainless steel counter.  As predicted, they went flying everywhere – some hitting him on the face and others bouncing on to the floor.  He totally lost it.

He tried to grab me over the counter, and failing that, dashed around it to enter our canteen, procuring a sharp knife on his way (on top of candy and drinks, we used to sell cut fruit, hence the presence of knives).  He pinned me against the wall and held the knife to my neck, completely out of control.

I groped around for something to fight back with, but the only thing within reach was a sad little bottle opener suspended on a string.  I clutched it and held it against his neck in return – resulting in a knife vs bottle opener standoff, if you can picture it.

Everyone was freaking out (except me – I was all in despite my obviously inferior weapon).

It ended when he got dragged away by some of the bystanders.

Invariably, the General Manager heard about the commotion and summoned my poor stepmom into his office for what I presumed would be a dressing down plus more threats about kicking us out.

Apparently all he told her was to let us know not to fight with his staff.

Or maybe that’s just what my stepmom told me in case I decided to go all Hakka warrior on the GM as well.

This particular usher never bothered me again after that incident.

The post Bob is Sexy first appeared on Jackie M..

This is our ‘san goong yan’ (new maid) – I whispered to the neighbourhood kids – as we sneaked our heads over the doorway to our flat.  We wanted to stealthily check out the lady who was washing our clothes in the bathroom but she spotted us immediately.

Yin ‘Chee’ (‘sister’ Yin) was only about 17 when she started working for us; she still remembers the scene and thought the sight of a bunch of heads popping up to take a peek at her to be  really cute.

I was about 5 years old and we’d already been through a number of low-skilled nannies/housekeepers since my mom used to help with the family business.

I remember the horror stories about the one who used to sit precariously on our 11^th floor balcony ledge, an eye-blink away from certain death, and even worse, place one of us kids up there with her.

Or the one who burnt the rice and to cover her tracks, stored it under one of the beds until she got found out when it started to stink up the house.

Yin Chee, somehow, was different.  She came to work for us when my mom was hospitalised with cancer.  She was intelligent, hardworking and seemed to care for us.   I was concerned that her cooking might not be as good as mom’s, but she turned out to be a great cook.

Somehow, she took an immediate liking to me; at that age, I was extremely docile, quiet and as she saw it, prone to being bullied by the two sisters either side of me.

Yin Chee came from an impoverished family; she grew up in a remote area due to her parents’ work on rubber plantations, and their RM$4 per day wage meant they couldn’t afford to pay for her to attend school.

She used to catch the bus to her nearest school anyway, and would sit outside the classroom trying to absorb what the teacher was teaching.  The teacher finally took pity on her and let her join the class without letting the principal know.

Then the bus stopped showing up and she had to walk an hour and a half to school each morning, so she gave up after awhile, having attended only 2 years of schooling.

When, at 19, she decided to marry my dad, 28 years her senior, there was some opposition to it from my older siblings.

I remember being coached by Min Foong to ask them not to marry each other, and getting my speech mangled in the process and having to run back to my sister to double-check what I was supposed to say, which only served to make the situation comical.

At the wedding, we were instructed to no longer call her ‘Yin Chee’, but ‘Ah Yee’ – which means ‘young aunt’ –we were to view her as a younger sister to my mom, here to fulfill her role in her absence, but never to replace her completely.

Which is a shame, because I think it did affect the way she has been treated over the years.

She was married to my dad for some 40 years until his passing two years ago, so whatever doubts there may have been about her motivations, her loyalty to our family has stood the test of time.

I don’t know if she still feels the need to prove herself all the time, or if it’s just her no-frills personality, but she prefers to avoid the limelight and usually stays in the background cooking away at family get-togethers.

She is always the last to sit down to eat, often after everyone else has already had their share, which makes me uncomfortable as it is reminiscent of her days as our maid.

It also means we never celebrate her birthday or Mother’s Day etc., unlike with my Dad, for whom we always had a big celebration accompanied by ang pows.

Frankly, I think she deserves better;  in a family of Type A personalities, left rudderless by the untimely passing of my mom, Yin Chee turned out to be the right person, at the right place, at the right time, for us all.

The post Yin Chee first appeared on Jackie M..

Before the Odeon, my dad used to be a street vendor – I’ve heard the story about my eldest sister working as a young kid, squatting over a tub of dirty dishes and accidentally dipping her hair into the dishwater as she kept nodding off whilst washing them.  My older siblings had it much tougher back in those days.

Every once in a blue moon at the Odeon, they would play a movie with an extended running time – eg. blockbusters like Ben Hur, Oliver! and The Longest Day.  This was especially exciting because they would have an intermission during which time the audience would come out to stretch their legs in the lobby.

And my dad would put out some trestle tables and arrange to have hot coffee and tea as well as yummy curry puffs to sell.

At one of those screenings, my dad finally decided he could use my help, so I was allowed to come along.  My parents  asked if I had any homework to complete for school the following day – I was in Std 2 (ie. second grade) – ‘Nope’ – I replied truthfully.

I didn’t tell them that I did, however, have exams starting the next day in case they changed their mind.  There was a ton of coffee cups and saucers to wash up afterwards, but it was fun.

After that, I started working there every day, and was put in charge of the ice cream stand.  My younger sister decided, at 5, that she’d rather tag along than stay at home, so that’s how the two of us got started with full-time employment.

We learned to scoop ice cream into wafer cones, and to order stock etc.  It didn’t take me long to encounter rude customers.  I learned to shortchange them with scoops of ice cream that looked round and full but actually consisted of a great big air pocket in the middle.

Then I discovered my dad was a tyrant to work for.  Nothing was ever good enough for him. Because of his various other business ventures, he wasn’t around fulltime, but he would drop in every day.

We were always tense when he arrived – there was always some stock we forgot to refill, a soft drink bottle on display that didn’t have the label facing squarely to the front, or a spot we missed in our cleaning efforts.   And he was brutal in his admonitions.

As my older brothers and sisters left to continue their studies overseas, the ones left running the canteen were my stepmom, my older sister, my younger sister and myself.  Jessica was always his favourite – she was a natural sweet-talker; my younger sister was the baby of the family and super-cute, and caught some breaks on that basis.

I, on the other hand, felt that I bore the brunt of the verbal abuse meted out by my dad.  One time, as a young teenager, I showed up for work in a pair of shorts, which he thought was inappropriate.

He told me if he caught me in them again, he would break my legs, and happily spend a few years in jail in the knowledge that I would spend the rest of my life a cripple – that’s how dysfunctional we were.  There was a lot of pent-up rage in me.

One of the things we had to do before they banned glass bottles inside the movie theatre, was to go around collecting empty soft drink bottles in-between sessions, and carry them out in wooden crates.

One time, I grabbed a bottle in the dark without realising it was broken, and managed to gash my hand pretty badly.  As I walked out to get my hand fixed up, a cinema patron said to his companion disapprovingly – ‘Kids these days will do anything for money!’  I wanted to yell at him that I wasn’t in fact getting paid – we never even officially got pocket money.

I noticed early on that instead, my older siblings would help themselves to the money at the canteen for their spending needs.  I started doing the same, and took it to a whole new level, to, as I saw it, make up for the treatment I was getting from my dad.  I finally got caught out by my stepmom, who took all the money away, but banked it all in an account in my name even though I didn’t deserve to keep it.

As I got further along at school, I realised most of my circle of friends were from better backgrounds economically, and I became ashamed about having to work.

When I spotted someone from school catching a movie at the Odeon, I would crouch down underneath the candy counter until they were out of sight.

Then, as I grew older, I began to appreciate some of the benefits of working there.  First off, we got to see all the movies we wanted, for free.  Back in those days, The Odeon was the most popular cinema in town, and all the best movies were screened there.  The cinema across the road primarily showed Chinese movies; I was grateful that wasn’t the case with The Odeon.

When big movies like Alien and Star Wars premiered in Seremban, people would wait outside the cinema before it opened so they could get in line before the sessions sold out – the fact that I could procure hard-to-get tickets enhanced my standing among my friends.

Also, I guess in hindsight, in an era before mass TV channels and the internet, the opportunity to view English-language movies over and over again probably helped prepare me for aural comprehension of the language in a variety of accents when I was to relocate overseas years later.

The post The Odeon first appeared on Jackie M..

It would seem in hindsight that he never stood a chance, even from the moment he was named as a baby.  All the girls in our family have the middle name ‘Min’ and all the boys, ‘Choong’.  His name was Choong Fee.

Shortly thereafter, my mom saw a fortune teller.  He told her it was a bad choice for a name.   The Chinese are superstitious about homophonic words, ie. words that sound the same but with different meanings.  Which is why you’d never see a Chinese number plate with the number ‘4’, which sounds like the word ‘to die’.  And if you see a flashy car with lots of eights in the number plate, you can be sure it’s Chinese-owned, as ‘8’ rhymes with the word for ‘prosperity’.

See, in Hakka, ‘Fee’ sounds like the word ‘to fly’.  The fortune teller warned my mom that it meant this new son would ‘fly away’ some day, in other words, depart from this world.  So, it was decided that we would never call him by his real name.  He was always called ‘Poh’, which means ‘to cradle/hug/embrace’ – to protect his spirit from flying off.

He grew up to be a very handsome young man, a huge Bruce Lee fan and a hardcore practitioner of the martial arts taught by my dad.  And he had an artistic streak, which I think he got from my dad.   Most of our old black and white photos were taken and developed by him.  He used to buy me toys, and he got me the only Barbie I ever had, before anyone in my realm of existence knew what a Barbie was (myself included) – it was my favourite toy and I played with her all through my childhood.

When my mom died, he seemed to take it especially bad.  I remember he would go out after working at the canteen at the Odeon (our core family business) and stay out all night.  I think my dad assumed he was just hanging out with friends, and didn’t appreciate that it was affecting his performance at work.

He wasn’t happy when my dad remarried, and the wedding photos reflected that.  That cheeky smile he used to have was gone.  I didn’t find out until very recently, that Yin ‘chee’, our servant girl whom my dad married, was actually a friend of Choong Fee and he was the one who had in fact asked her to come work for us when my mom got sick.  I can appreciate how that must have affected him.

I remember the evening he died, a week before his 21st birthday; we were at the Odeon.  I’m told he’d forgotten some keys for my dad, who had a legendary temper, and he was anxious to ride his bike home to grab them before he got into trouble.

He came to an intersection just near the Odeon.  There was a female learner driver on the other side.  He had right of way but she turned and crashed into him.

I remember my eldest brother Choong Khee was first to report the news to us.  We were told he was unconscious but there were no obvious injuries, so it seemed like maybe he would be okay.  Choong Khee went back to the accident scene to tend to him; he came back shortly after with a haunted look, to say – ‘he’s gone’.  Apparently he’d suffered severe internal injuries.

I learned lots of previously unknown facts about my brother after his death.  There was one time his good friend and martial arts partner came to visit us with his arm in a cast.  We were told he’d hurt himself at work or something.  No one thought anything of it.  After Choong Fee’s passing, we found out he’d actually been hurt by my brother, who was very powerful, during a sparring session.  He didn’t want him to get into trouble, so he kept it a secret.

Another thing I found out was that all those late nights were because Choong Fee had been visiting my mom’s grave after work.  This next bit sounds like something straight out of A Chinese Ghost Story but I’m told that’s what happened.

Choong Fee went to see a medium one time, terrified.  Supposedly, he had seen a ghost at the cemetery while at my mom’s grave at night.

The fortune teller told him it was a female ghost, and she’d fallen in love with him.  His life was in jeopardy because she was going to kill him so they could be together in the afterlife.

To protect him, he was given a talisman and was told he had to wear it everywhere he went.

The night he died, he had left the talisman at home.

The post Choong Fee first appeared on Jackie M..

Anyway, one day, my mom rode the scooter to the butcher’s to buy some meat for dinner. She saw his prices and asked why his goods cost more than the neighbouring butcher’s.  His reply – Well, who says we have to copy everything other people do?  These other customers drive cars, and I don’t see you driving a car.

According to my dad, my mom went home and cried her eyes out.  And asked him to buy her a car.  So he did – a Hillman.  For years, I thought it was called a Hay-Lay-Man, because that’s how he pronounced it.

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