Enduring Memories

This was the home that mum grew up in. This was the place I spent months of school holidays, where from a child's warped perspective, we peered through the hole in the wooden floorboards on the second level, down at the people walking on the five-foot-way below.

This was where we called out to the tock-tock noodle man as he cycled by with his stick hitting the wooden piece making the familiar tock-tock sound announcing his presence. This was where we bought colourful, home-made nonya kueh peddled by the Indian man wearing only a white dhoti, balancing a tiered, rattan basket on his head housing a myriad of delicious wares. This was where I waited for the soya bean milk hawker pushing his cart up the street, to buy a cup of black soya bean milk or a bowl of smooth soya bean curd, only realising after years had passed, that the blackness came from brown sugar and not coffee. This was where I experienced buying a ball of packed shaven ice, like a snowball, doused with colourful sugar syrups, holding the almost painful coldness in the palm of my hands and trying to eat it before it melted away. This was where every evening, I listened out for the toot of the hand horn of the bread man and handed out my coins in return for a sweet bun filled with butter cream.

This was the place for the memories of my childhood culinary pleasures, simple as they were. Perhaps it was because they were simple, that's why they were such enduring memories...