The Journey, is Food.

My earliest memories are of food.

A meal is prose as much as poetry, we eat to fulfil a base need but we also feed ourselves and others parts of our history. Parts of who we are, what made us and what brought us to this place. As the saying goes, a meal tells you as much about a person’s needs as it does about themselves.

I grew up in the tiger economy of Kuala Lumpur in the early 90s, a city in constant motion, a barely organised swell of sound and raw energy. Our glittering new apartment block attached to a mega mall stood in sharp contrast to the market a few blocks away where we did our shopping. Every morning after taking my brother to the school bus we’d enter the raucous mass of crammed together tents and stalls heaving with racks of knock-off clothes and tables loaded with produce. At either end were clumps of food vendors, the only ones whose stalls never moved. When we’d visit at night the area would be glowing with the heat and aroma of woks over gigantic flames, filled with ingredients being tossed and caught with an almost bored practice or with vast pools of oil bubbling with dough and meat. For breakfast we’d head to one vendor above all, the congee man, where Mum would buy us combination bowls brimming with char siu, fish balls and chicken. After which I’d get left at the stall of an old Hokkien fabric seller so Mum could freely buy groceries without losing me. We would sit there, him speaking Cantonese and Min Nan and me speaking a child’s broken combination of English and Kelabit. Neither of us understanding the other, but not really needing to. When Mum came to collect me the he’d give me a fresh fried dough ball covered in sesame seeds and filled with red bean, a simple statement of love from Market Uncle. Years later Mum would tell me he cried when she told him it was our last time before we’d move to Melbourne. I would do the same after waking up in my new home and being told that we weren’t going to the market, and I wouldn’t see him again. If I close my eyes I can see that market and almost feel the heat from the wok burners, the scent of fragrant ginger, garlic and chilli frying off while the taste of rich sesame and sweet red bean whips me back to a language I don’t understand and a person that I will never forget. Age and time have softened the memories of things from back then, the sharp contrasts of what remains is almost exclusively a record of food. Blazing coal barbeques of wild boar in the village, devouring piles of mata kucing and langsat at my auntie’s house surrounded by cousins and raucous conversation, bags of spicy bakkwa on Lunar New Year, soft dough filled with pandan caramel, newspaper wrapped bundles of kolo mee, glasses of Milo peng bigger than my head and plastic bags of tart and refreshing kumquat juice. When we left, those memories would keep me and Mum sane. So often we’d start conversations by jokingly asking for noodles in newspaper or laksa while my brother and Dad would roll their eyes and try to talk about anything else. We were in a new place now, and that was that. I should be happy now, he said. I have a backyard. I would have traded it in a heartbeat to be back in the night markets, for one more bowl of congee and a red bean ball.

First impressions of Melbourne weren’t happy ones. Gone was the constant noise and energy of KL, the heat and the fury replaced with blistering cold wind and the stark silence of the suburbs. The move had brought me a lot of feelings that I didn’t understand at the time, separated and adrift. Reaching out for comforts that weren’t there. This wasn’t the diverse food mecca that the city enjoys now, sure there were restaurants in the city serving up generational cuisine but they weren’t part of this new life in the suburbs. They were the purview of people with means, unlike back in KL where it felt harder to find a bad meal than a good one. Our only Chinese restaurant served muted versions of meals we knew, adjusted down for a palette that stopped at salt and pepper.

For the first time I remember food being a source of hostility and fear. When we did manage to make do or if Mum got a care package from back home the attitude to foreign foods were less than welcoming. We were deep in the tabloid news fuelled fear of MSG, making the already dull food even more desaturated. I remember coming home in tears as kids from school had thrown my lunch in the bin again for being weird, our neighbour encouraged Mum to make ham and cheese sandwiches so the other kids would leave me alone. Like many kids raised in multi-lingual environments, I’d code switch a lot, frequently dropping into and out of Malay and Kelabit when my brain couldn’t find the English words fast enough. The first parent-teacher night, my parents were told that if I didn’t commit to English, I’d have no future in this country. So it went, basic salad sandwiches and extra English lessons. Mum stopped speaking to me in Kelabit. The only respite was the annual trip back to Malaysia, Dad was still working in KL and we could head back in summer. Like a pilgrim walking to the promised lands we would hold on to that excitement to fuel us through the white bread and iceberg lettuce. Until we could be home and be with people who truly understood us, who understood what we needed and could feed us. Then that was taken too, the economy slowed down and Dad didn’t need to go there anymore. We were back to the start. Making do became the new normal, and the smells and tastes started to fade into the quiet.

Over the years I bonded with others that understood. Second and third generation Greeks and Italians got it — they’d seen their parents and grandparents go through the same thing. The same care we’d show new migrants from Eastern Europe and later Africa. Sharing each other’s food and keeping our spirits alive. To his credit, Dad showed me that Aussie tucker had some upsides. Introducing me to the food of his childhood, I started to gain an understanding of the British influences on early Australian cuisine. Crowded into the living room one afternoon around a table covered in white paper and a mountain that was my first taste of fish and chips, soon after came Sunday roasts and beginning to accept that maybe it wasn’t all bad. Eventually we found more spaces to fill in the things we missed. With the Vietnamese community in Springvale or the Chinese in Box Hill, we could get ingredients or close proximities to what we wanted. And while it wasn’t perfect — It took 15 years to find a kolo mee place — the embers stayed lit. With the right ingredients Mum could do her best to keep our kitchen feeling like the kampung. She’d been raised as an excellent cook in the village and those talents became her calling card. Amazing folks with fried rice and fiery chicken wings that were raved about as better than the restaurant. And when we moved to new homes she’d always start introductions to the neighbours with a plate of food.

Eventually attitudes in Melbourne began to shift, ingredients from overseas was easier to get and supermarkets began stocking more variety. People were able to open restaurants and serve unfiltered versions of their own cultures and seemingly overnight the people around me started chasing the trends. At first I found it tiring, watching this epicurean whiplash as the food scene seemed to rocket from one place to the next (but always back to burgers). Then I found it insulting, the same people that were disgusted at my childhood lunches were now paying top dollar for those same meals. Constant questioning about the authenticity of a new restaurant, and judging it based on a merit of being a perfect facsimile of a dish rather than the dish itself. Watching in disappointment as programmes on TV that treated the food I grew up on as a sideshow curio to be gawked at by white hosts. As the years passed I mellowed. Reasoning that I couldn’t be annoyed at people finally doing what I’d hoped anyone would do when we first arrived. People were trying new food and, in the process, starting to understand the journey of the people making it. Sure some of the attitudes weren’t perfect, it took and still does take a lot of effort to dispel old myths steeped in racism. No-one uses a rice cooker. Yet it felt like people were more receptive to learning. They understood a lack of understanding and were finally, finally trying to rectify it. I grabbed whatever positivity I could, making my friends watch Bourdain and telling them he got it. Letting the food just exist, showing it as the culture. Not making it a spectacle or turning it into his discoveries. He was my hero for that.

Doing my part I began to host dinners using the lessons Mum had taught me and in doing so I began scratching an itch that had been creeping around the back of my mind. Eating amongst my family in Malaysia was seldom solitary, nor did it require a special circumstance. We came together to eat and be in the presence of one another. As much as I wanted my food, I wanted to share it with friends as well. My backyard became reminiscent of the night market vendors with a roaring wok burner and heaving piles of food, so much that friends went from the old mentality of eating before you went to someone’s house to making sure they arrived at mine hungry. As I cooked more I sought out new cuisines and flavours. Not content to be a tourist in the palates of other cultures, I was a vagabond taking pieces to add to my own. Seeking to replace what I felt I had lost and hoping in the mishmash of dishes and techniques and ingredients to create my own new language. Barbeque and pastas, pico de gallo and mirepoix, masaman curry and curry goat, omurice and paella. Everything so similar and yet completely of the place it was born. Travelling the world in my kitchen, hunting down recipes and taking frequent trips to as many diverse restaurants as I could. Melbourne was opening up and I had access now to more and more food, making up for lost time became the mission and with it came purpose. Saving all my coins for the next cuisine and eventually the next trip. No longer content with seeing the world from my kitchen, I wanted to see the kitchens of the world. My first night in Hong Kong the energy and fire came rushing back. I was in paradise, moving from storied restaurants to street stall vendors and slowly learning the habits that guided me through so many countries and flavours. Landing in a new city and speaking to people, attempting to channel my best Bourdain. I wanted to see who they were so I asked what they ate, and found that my experience wasn’t as solitary as that little boy in the Melbourne suburbs thought. Food became connected to hearts again, to stories, to people, to a way of living and not just as a means of existing. The more I travelled the more I began to link experiences and places with the food I ate, the stories I was told over meals showed me the true depth of human experience. Exalting highs and terrifying lows all punctuated with flavours and textures until they became the stories of the meals themselves. Each plate taking my mind back to a place and person.

Steam on a bowl of pho swirls across my face before being carried away by the quickening breeze as Monsoon rains are slowly dragged ashore by the tides in Nha Trang. The scent of the tangy broth carries a deep sense of ease as the near midnight flurries of fresh snow in Oslo quicken. A long journey for noodles. Those connections stretching across continents, crammed in a tiny basement somewhere in north London and I’m back in the market next to the KL apartments. Noise and the bump-hustle of too many people, the smell of buttery roti canai wafting through the air punctuated with the spiced fragrance of rendang. Ordering without looking, knowing that this place speaks my language. Blink and it’s New York looking up at the photo of my hero on the wall, eating the dish he spoke so highly of and talking to the people who made it. Reflecting on what must have brought him to be memorialised, and what brought me here. Food again dictating my path, through my memories and through the world. My second last night, being shown around the lower east side, sneaking a babka into a far too expensive hotel lobby to people watch in the shadow of a Basquiat. Not knowing that the world was about to get crazier, sharing war stories about mental health and culture clashes with a new friend. She asked what kept me in touch with my culture, what kept me afloat. I paraphrased Baldwin, and how you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you eat. Finding people that walked the same path, adjusting to a new home, a new way of living. Missing what they had, trying to make the most of what they have until it all started to click. When you eat, the memories flow and the history that brought you here stays alive. No matter the destination, the journey always was and always will be food.