Of Roti, Leong Fun and Yong Tau Fu

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‘Just half today. Setengah saja…’ The Roti Man had come by our house, blowing his air horn and I’d gone out to get our order of bread. The rotund Indian man swung his leg over his motorbike, and lifted the lid of the large metal box bolted onto a frame that sat atop the rear half of his seat. He pulled out a loaf of Sunshine bread, wrapped in pristine waxed paper adorned with that bright yellow sunburst logo, placed it on a wooden chopping board at the back of the box, then with a swift draw of a long knife, sliced through the waxed paper, cleaving the loaf into two symmetrical halves. 

Handing it to me, he took the coins I was holding out in exchange, pocketed them then asked me ‘Mana abang kamu? Where’s your brother?’

‘Abang yang mana? Which brother?’ I asked.

‘Yang gemuk tu… The fat one…’

‘Dia sudah pergi England. He’s gone to England.’, I replied.

‘Oh…’

‘Belajar. Universiti. Study. University.’

‘Ah… baik… Ah… Good…’

‘OK Thank you’ I said then went back up the driveway and into the house. He hitched up the left leg of his pants, swung his leg over the frame of the bike, kick-started it back into life with his right and in a a few moments was tooting his airhorn a hundred metres down the road.

Some months later, a younger, leaner man on a second motorcycle sans metal box, tailed our usual Roti Man on his rounds for a couple of days. The chubbier gentleman disappeared after a couple of days of this, and the younger man now had the metal box on his bike, and tooted his own airhorn.

‘Mana yang dulu tu? Where is the other guy?’ I asked him one day.

‘Siapa? Who?’

‘Yang gemuk tu… The fat one…’

‘Oh. Dia balik India. 6 bulan. Oh he’s gone back to India for 6 months.’

‘Ah… Baik…’ and I went back up the driveway and into the house.

Six months later, almost to the day, the round figure was back, smiling at us as he familiarised himself with the rounds, tailing the younger, leaner guy.

-

La Salle School. Where I spent 13 years from the age of 7 right through to 19. I was a thoroughbred Lasallian, a term reserved for those who went through every grade at this fiercely proud institution.

It was a hot afternoon as we trundled out of school one day. I was with my cousin and for some reason that day we were headed out the front gate rather than the back gate which was a shorter walk home.

The familiar toot of an airhorn signalled that the Soya Bean and Leong Fun man was eagerly waiting for customers just outside the gate. Hot Bean Curd, cold Soya Bean Drink and cold Grass Jelly or Leong Fun Drink was always very welcome at a little past 1 in the afternoon. This time, as I sometimes did, I chose to delay my gratification and told the hawker through the throng of thirsty schoolmates ‘Later come to my house OK?.

OK, he nodded, and my cousin and I wandered off.

An hour later, I heard the familiar tooting of his airhorn outside our gate and rushed to the kitchen to grab a few enamelware jugs. I proffered them to him and instructed in my very poor Cantonese ‘This one Tau Fu Fa, this one Tau Cheong Soi and this one Leong Fun’, indicating I wanted all three of his offerings in 3 separate containers.

My parents were not the traditional ones who insisted it was harmful to our health to consume cold drinks or food so I happily stuffed the Hot Bean Curd into the fridge alongside the cold drinks. Cold Bean Curd (as it became), blended with an adequate quantity of syrup is delicious consumed later that day when the fridge had had time to do its work.

I loved Leong Fun then and still do to this day. Some even have a mix of Soya Bean and Leong Fun but I much preferred it as it was, slightly sweetened and properly iced.

The Leong Fun man would ride around our neighbourhood on his rounds and so if we wanted some on a weekend or much later in the day after returning from school, we’d lay out the enamelware jugs in anticipation and listen out for the tooting of his airhorn. He’d hear our shout from inside our house as he went past, swing into our lane and stop outside our gate to wait for us to rush down the driveway.

-

There was a line of single-story shops near our school, comprising two blocks of linked units. In between the two blocks was a little lane and in that lane, in the afternoons would be a man by his sidecar-equipped motorbike. The sidecar was his mobile stall form which he sold a dish that KL people loved - our version of Yong Tau Fu.

His was a simple stall offering simple fare - the usual rolls of rice noodle ’Chee Cheong Fun’ (loosely translated as Pig Intestine Noodles not because of their ingredients but of their resemblance to that part of the pig’s anatomy) accompanied by meat balls, pig skin, bean curd sheets and more. We almost always had it with a mix of sweet bean sauce and chilli sauce and we would pick what we wanted from the steel bins where they sat in boiling soup, then pass him the plate with our choice for him to fill with our order of Chee Cheong Fun and whatever sauce we wanted. A sprinkle of sesame seeds on top and he would pass the plate back to us and we would wolf the dish down, standing right there by his bike.

That bike would appear between the morning and afternoon sessions at our school and early arrivals for the afternoon session would enjoy it as much as the much larger and older lunch crowd from the morning session.

His was a captive crowd and he didn’t have to ride far and wide looking for customers. In fact, I don’t even recall him blowing his airhorn.

We all knew where he would be and he knew when we would turn up. 

-

I sometimes wonder about these hawkers of old. Did the Roti Man return to India for good? Did he have a family and did he tell them stories of the family with the larger son who’d gone off to England to study? And did the Leong Fun man bemoan the poor standard of Cantonese of the younger generation when he sat and chatted with his friends about that boy whose house he would go to to fill 3 enamelware jugs with his dessert and drink offerings? And Yong Tau Fu… although I was not a frequent customer of his, I loved it whenever I had it and the very thought of this dish brings me right back to that lane between the two blocks of shops along Jalan Chantek, and of us standing in a group beside the dhoby shop, eating from plastic plates next to a motorbike.

Image produced by Sunshine Breads Malaysia and taken from the webpage https://cilisos.my/sunshine-bread-why-this-iconic-malaysian-bread-suddenly-disappeared-in-the-90s/?fbclid=IwAR22zPABRuljuAinJUhAX_xXT5VKhIcDziunDYUy7vwmUg6aYa_YiCKA7J4

Project 366 2024 

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One of the nice things about living in the hills and near a small pond full of catfish is that we have quite a few White Bellied Sea Eagles in the neighbourhood. They’ve even nested in a tree about 200 metres away, in clear sight through my apartment windows and we used to hear their distinctive call quite often.

I did once see an Eagle take a large catfish. He had been circling overhead for some time, and had made a few attempts, each time coming close to and almost rippling the surface before pulling up and away again. Finally though, he swooped down, slashed his talons through the surface, grabbed his prey then effortlessly pulled up, a large fish gripped tightly beneath him.

The Eagle may well have been satisfied with his catch of the day but the pictures I caught did less for me and I’ve been meaning to address that.

My schedule at the workshop has meant I have not often been around during the day which is when the Eagles come out to fish. The year-end holidays changed my schedule, however, and as we were on the way out to lunch together today, Mei and I spotted one fella circling low above the pond. Our hungry stomachs had priority though so we just drove out. Returning, we spotted the Eagle still circling so I rushed upstairs, grabbed a couple of cameras and scurried down to the pond.

Only to see an ever-diminishing speck in the sky. I sat under a tree for half an hour, my cameras in my lap, hoping he would come back. But he didn’t.

So no pictures of Eagles today.

But sitting there, in the shade of a palm tree and watching the few human anglers scattered along the circumference of the pond, I spied another set of predators. A species that has the highest success rate among all predators. These chaps chomp over 90% of the prey they seek. Nothing in the animal kingdom comes close… So I sat there and took a few pictures of a smaller fella: dragonflies. 

As with the Eagles I could not get too close but I did have an enjoyable time watching them flit from twig to leaf doing the things dragonflies do. 

In the last few weeks since Suet Fun’s latest book came out, complete with an essay by me, the idea of writing more has burbled away in my mind. Writing is one of those things I’ve done with varying frequency over the last 15 - 20 years. It has filled me with pleasure and satisfaction and on a few occasions people who’ve read my words have told me how it had impacted them.

Suet Fun’s endorsement and her encouragement have also  lit the fire beneath the pot and taking pictures of these dragonflies today served up an idea. In 2020, desiring to be more disciplined in my approach to My Photography, I embarked upon my second attempt at a picture-a-day routine. My first one in 2015 sank without being completed. Five years later though, I managed to post 366 pictures, and I felt pretty good about it.

So, just as I had come for Eagles and walked away with Dragonflies, maybe I should adapt my Project 366 and make words instead of making images. Short paragraphs, long rants, incoherent mumblings… it doesn’t matter.

So let’s do this.

This is number 1/366.

Wish me luck.

LWE 18: Sibling Birthdays: October

LWE 18: Sibling Birthdays - October 

In 2019 I did a series of blog posts on my siblings, coinciding with their birthdays. I wrote about each in turn from March through September. I did miss one out though, my eldest sibling, my sister Margaret whose birthday it is today as I write this. 

To be honest, I got a little stuck with getting some words down and eventually I gave up altogether, leaving in the draft of this post a few scribbled lines and nothing very much else. Many months later, Margaret and I were chatting and the series was mentioned and it was Margaret who made the comment that when she left for England I was only 4 and thus we didn’t have so many years of shared memories together on which to write.

Or do we?

In a way, Margaret was the sibling I perhaps knew the least about, and yet felt the most connected to in many ways. We’re the farthest apart in age, and yet in many ways we’re the most similar.

Margaret left to do nursing in London when I wasn’t even yet 5. I have a smattering of memories from that time - of her long hair, a laughing voice, some singing. You know how it is when you are just a little more than a toddler and there is a seemingly larger-than-life character in the house, someone whose energy you somehow feel even if you don’t understand it?

Margaret was that. It was the 60s after all, bell bottoms and miniskirts, floral prints, music… and though I didn’t know anything about it all, even then there was something about my eldest sister that I found enthralling. 

International travel in those days was expensive and my parents sent their kids off to study, paid their fees and some of their living expenses and didn’t have any left over for their holidays home, so it was unusual that I got to see Margaret again about 3 years later when she returned for a holiday. My poor sister was terribly homesick and Dad and Mum scraped together the money for a ticket back and this turned out to be a good thing too for Margaret could see our grandmother one last time before Ma-ma passed away a few months later.

This was 1972 and I had just started schooling and although I have a few pictures of us from that time, the memories I carry in my head remain vague. 

Margaret before she left for London in 1969.

Margaret and I in 1972.

A couple of years later, and our world had changed dramatically. Margaret was now married to Ruedi Grünenfelder and living in Switzerland. The first of our siblings to be married, and to a charming chap who melted all our hearts. Not long after, I had my first niece, Meilian who is only 9 years younger than me.

As I grew older, my connection to Margaret grew closer. She wrote copiously and I know I replied though probably at a lesser rate. Being a pack rat, I have kept many of the letters, cards and postcards she sent and in this picture you can see that wherever I was - Drummoyne or Coogee in Sydney, Clementi, Geylang, Siglap or Bedok in Singapore or at home in PJ, and more recently here in Penang - my big sister kept in touch.

The more eagle-eyed among you will spot the myriad of addresses I have had in 3 countries.

I have kept many letters from family and friends and most share some space in little folders in a shelf. Margaret’s, though, share with no one - they fill a whole folder on her own and sometimes I dig up one or two and remind myself of the person I was then.

Letters are that, aren’t they? Little compact time capsules from the past which you can open and relive any time you want. And they don’t just remind you of the correspondent who wrote to you, but also of the person you were that was worthy of a missive, handwritten, sealed in an envelope and posted from miles away. 

Beyond letters though, Margaret also sent things. One of the earliest things she sent me was a colourful paper advent calendar whose windows I opened without really understanding what they were, knowing only that this multicolour, patterned and illustrated piece was fascinating.

We also used to get parcels shipped from Switzerland, loaded with goodies among which were Swiss Torte which we all loved. She also sent books. At one point she asked me what I was reading and though I was only 12 or 13, I remember replying that I was reading Solzhenitsyn - I had just read and enjoyed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. So in the next parcel I received copies of Cancer Ward, Stories and Prose Poems and The Gulag Archipelago all of which I devoured. Indeed these parcels were magical brown cardboard packages containing valuable gifts, sealed with tape and bearing the notices, stamps and marks of a foreign land. 

Margaret was always a very creative person. She’d studied the piano when young and over the years turned to art and craft. She painted, sewed and quilted. And as I moved into the commercial arts, our paths grew even closer and we had more to share.

The most beautiful and amazing gift I have ever received. This quilt was made by Margaret and our Aunt Marianne and it is made from clothes and other material worn by people in our lives including my father.

It has a nice personal touch too.

And when she and Ruedi went their separate ways some years ago, our life journeys converged even more.  And this is when I began to realise that we were after all, very similar people. Strongly motivated to help others, a little set in our ways, very supportive of friends and family, and also led by our emotions. Both of us have kept to the Cheong tradition of not being able to keep quiet when we see that things are not right. Age may have taken the edge off that last attribute though I think… thankfully.

Divorce is not an easy process. One can divorce oneself of the encumbrance of an energy-sapping relationship but it is not so easy to divest of the emotional investment we have put in and it was because of this that Margaret and I had many conversations and exchanges. We almost always climb out of the holes we find ourselves in and often this process is helped by caring friends and family so as I had done, so too did Margaret.

Not long after I got married again, Margaret, Mei and I went on holiday to Hanoi where my good friend Ray lives. It was the first time in a long time that my eldest sister and I had been on a holiday at the same time and place and the first time we had actually gone together. It was a completely enjoyable holiday, one where we both discovered that despite our apparent intractable personalities, we were both rather easy going in many ways. 

Margaret and Mei shopping in Hanoi.

Braving the chaotic traffic to cross the street in Hanoi.

Sitting down to dinner.

Walking down past one of the many lakes in Hanoi.

More shopping in Hanoi.

Mei and I visited Margaret in Switzerland a few years after that and we did a whirlwind few days where we did or saw all the stereotypes. On one particular day, we took a bus, a train and a ferry, walked up a mountain, heard and saw alphorns and cows with bells and generally just had a lovely time with family we loved and felt completely and utterly comfortable spending time with. 

With my nieces Melanie and Meilian.

On our hike up a mountain, with Maurus (Melanie's then boyfriend) and Meilian.

Don't ask me why we were all pulling faces - it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In 2015, Margaret did the reverse and visited me in my new home here in Penang. I was going through a bit of a funk and though we had a lovely time, she also was a listening ear just as she had been 15 years earlier, though under different circumstances.

In between those trips, we did see each other very often, even in Singapore. Our mother’s health was deteriorating, her body and mind ravaged by Parkinson’s and Dementia, even as her spirit remained strong. Margaret made frequent trips to KL where she brought her nursing and geriatric care experience to bear, helping take some of the pressure off our sister Rosemary and her family who were Mum’s primary healthcare providers.

With Rosemary and Mum in PJ.

Visiting us in Singapore. This is in the Bussorah Street area.

Tucking into a hearty Big Breakfast at my Pedal Cafe in Penang.

Chinese New Year in PJ.

With Tessie and our sister in law, Hilda. Again, I have no idea why Margaret was pulling a funny face. Her Cheong blood I guess...

My eldest sister recently became a grandmother and we get videos and pictures of her and little Ines. And this is probably where she and I differ the most - I must admit I am hopeless with babies and toddlers. Yes I know I have 3 kids… Margaret, on the other hand is the doting grandmother through and through, with oodles of patience and love. 

Thinking about it, this is Margaret. Though often sociable and loud in that very Cheong way, she can also be quiet and pensive. She is caring for others yet also protective of her own wellbeing. Creative yet also happy to indulge in the creativity of others. Through it all though, Margaret has always been there for all of us. All of us in the family have a story of how Margaret has reached out to us and smoothened our rough waters, none more so than me.

And it is on this note that I wish my sister a truly Happy Birthday. If each day of her coming year were filled with even a tiny bit of the love and care she has heaped on us through the years, it will be a very happy year indeed.