Jun 14, 2021 | Blog
Place setting at The Peranakan Museum My pet peeve with my Americanized family is when my kids pull out forks to eat their white rice. I get so annoyed. Rice might fall through between the fork tines. A Chinese family typically eats rice out of a bowl with chopsticks....
Jun 7, 2021 | Blog
The wedding of my grandaunt in the 1930s. She was first cousins with my paternal grandfather. My Koh Poh Beng Neo (Koh Poh is the term for grandaunt, Beng Neo her very Nonya name) was one of the old relatives I had interviewed for my cookbook project. I posted the...
Jun 4, 2021 | Blog
Cheang Hong Lim wearing his Qing Dynasty honorific robe. I once had grandiose visions of me posing for a photo standing in the middle of Cheang Jim Chuan Street located in Singapore’s Central Business District. The namesake is my mother’s paternal...
Jun 4, 2021 | Blog
(Thanks to my old neighbor and her family who let us use her kitchen to illustrate how the Nonyas set theirs up. Ours had been demolished a few years earlier.) All bets are off when my dinner guests waltz in. I cannot concentrate. Being polite, they will meander to...
Jun 3, 2021 | Blog
Photo of my nieces and daughter taken with President Tony Tan and First Lady Mary Tan at the Peranakan Ball in 2015. When I wrote my cookbook, what reassured me that “Growing Up in a Nonya Kitchen” rang true about being a Nonya was the spread of photos of...