Stir-fried And Not Shaken
By Terry Tan

Monsoon Books/ Paperback/256 pages and eight pages of photos/$23.50 before GST/Major bookstores
This is a fun and funny look at life in Singapore from the 1940s to the 1970s. There is no narrative arc as such. Instead, it is a collection of episodic anecdotes, each affectionately recounted in an easily digestible couple of pages.
Food writer and television chef Terry Tan, who was born in Singapore in 1942 and later moved to London in 1983, makes clear early on that this is not a chronicle of 'the horrors of war or its aftermath' but an idiosyncratic and deeply personal jaunt down memory lane.
'I prefer to perpetuate happier memories instead.'
Even his accounts of the Japanese soldiers are not about their cruelty but include an almost comic look at their propensity for bathing in public in loincloths.
Not surprisingly, a lot of his memories have to do with food, from his grandmother's flying fox curries to vanishing hawker fare such as keropok ubi (tapioca crisps) and tang hu lu (rock sugar bottle gourd).
Tan peppers his memoirs with a large assortment of mischievous cousins, colourful aunts and one very feisty grandmother. In his vignettes, they get into trouble, go on dates, gamble and battle with thieving neighbours, all to amusing effect.
There are also nuggets of trivia scattered throughout the book. I had always thought that lau pok car meant crappy old car, but found out from this book that Piak and Pok were actually the corrupted forms of Fiat and Ford.
Tan also offers glimpses into his own Peranakan heritage, Malay culture, the hard lives of samsui women and what it meant to live in a British colony.
Reading the memoir, you get a sense of the massive transformations that have taken place in Singapore in the past few decades, leaving you both heartened and with an inexplicable sense of loss.


If you like this, read: Sweet Mandarin by Helen Tse (2008, $21.03 without GST, major bookstores). Tse recounts her family history from life in a poor Chinese village to bustling Hong Kong to Britain, and how it is deeply intertwined with food.
(ST)