let’s eat, 食饭, jom makan
shania k.
On August 28, 2020, I moved from my parents’ home in Cary to Durham. Because of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic that has made huge changes in our lifestyles and practices in order to keep people safe and healthy, my classes for Duke University moving entirely online and few students being allowed to live on campus. I chose to move to Durham because Duke requested that I live in Durham in order to receive monetary aid for housing (which only adds to the ways in which Duke University gentrifies Durham). Moving away from my parents (particularly my mother, who had cooked an overwhelming majority of my meals since I was born) during a global pandemic meant that I had to build a kitchen on my own alongside my four friends living with me. From basic pots and pans and utensils to an evergrowing spice, condiment, and sauce collection including oyster sauce, mirim, sesame oil, fish sauce, corn starch, and too many (yet not quite enough) assorted jars and bottles, we are doing our best to make mini-replicas of our mothers’ kitchens. The five of us rotate cooking dinners, meaning that we also rotate calling, texting, and consulting our mothers for recipes and guidance as we figure out how to use a gas stove for the first time. This zine highlights snippets (of our receipts, of my mother’s recipes, of our pantry, of what I am eating) that have sustained and nourished me (quite literally) during these past two months. Even though my childhood home is only twenty minutes away and my mom is always calling me to come home to pack food or dropping food off in Durham, I find comfort and home in how the kari ayam and 饺子 and chop suey always served with steamed rice on my dinner table parallels my family’s table in Cary and those of my extended family in Malaysia and Singapore. I want to recognize also that as much food is a comfort for me, food is also the source of anxieties around scarcity, around health, around safety for many. The COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted how food insecurity drastically impacts marginalized and BIPOC communities and how those that allow the rest of us to eat (restaurant workers, grocery store workers, migrant farmers, factory workers, etc.) are primarily from marginalized and BIPOC communities. As I explore what it means for me to eat in a pandemic, to eat at all, I must also consider how everything I consume is drastically created, shaped, and influenced by erased and invisibilized labor and larger structures and systems of oppression. So let’s eat, 食饭 (sik6 faan6) (chīfàn), jom makan.
Once a week, my mom asks me what I want to eat from Rasa Malaysia, the only Malaysian restaurant in the area. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve made a habit of ordering char kway teow, Hainanese chicken rice, roast duck, and other dishes with other Malaysian families to support Winnie and Simon Leong, the husband and wife who are the owners of Rasa Malaysia in Southern Village, Chapel Hill. Simon left Perak, their homestate in Malaysia for New York in the 1970s when many Malaysians were leaving to Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and the United States due to economic recession in Malaysia. Winnie joined him in the United States 1996. Together, they worked in numerous restaurants in New York until they moved to North Carolian in 1999, where they have stayed ever since because the weather is much nicer than it is in New York. In 2005, Simon becomes one of the owners of Merlion, a Singaporean restaurant, alongside four others. In reflecting on their time with Merlion, Simon and Winnie explained that Merlion’s recipes and dishes were largely catered to ang moh, or American/white, tastes, rather than trying to create authentic Singaporean and Malaysian foods.
Merlion closed in 2015, and that same year, Winnie and Simon opened Rasa Malaysia in the same space in Chapel Hill. The menu shifted away from centering Westernized Singaporean food to drawing inspiration from their hometown of Taiping in Perak. As a self-taught chef drawing from memories of Malaysia, Winnie makes Malaysian food that is at the heart of the small, but mighty, Malaysian community in the Triangle Area. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Rasa Malaysia was where my mom helped to organize celebrations from Lunar New Year. it’s where we order Malaysian staples for large gatherings. it’s where we find our home of Malaysia in North Carolina, even though we’re 9701 miles (15,560 km) away. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rasa Malaysia has only been doing take-out orders and has suffered from a drop in business, forcing Winnie and Simon to work longer hours. Fortunately, Winnie and Simon have built up a strong community of regular customers that continue to support them and their restaurant by ordering throughout the pandemic.
The following pages are recipes that I learned from my mother over time as I watched her cook and ate her food literally my entire life. My mom and I never cooked together until I graduated from high school, and then I finally had the time and energy to start spending more time in the kitchen. In living on my own for the first time during a global pandemic forcing me to cook a majority of my meals, I have finally started to learn to cook from my mom, who learned to cook from her mother. Our messages to each other are mostly directions from her on how to cook a dish or how to heat up food she packaged for me and brought over or pictures of food she’s making at home.