A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Tan

we spread both kayas on bread, ours had an alarming grainy texture while Ah-Ma’s was perfectly smooth. Just as it should have been.
    Ah-Ma didn’t say anything. Auntie Alice and I winced. The students had been arrogant enough to second-guess the teacher—someone who had brought decades of experience to the kitchen counter only to be given the fish eye and sidelined. And we had learned a lesson, indeed. Silently, I vowed to listen to my grandmother more.
    Quietly, we packed up our kaya and hugged Ah-Ma good-bye. Just before letting me go, however, my grandmother gave me one final instruction: “Next time, bring a baby for Ah-Ma.”

CHAPTER FIVE

    My father was skeptical.
    And this was fairly new to me. Now, this was a man who had never been stingy with praise for my grades or Chinese brush paintings, which he’d proudly framed and hung in his office when I was a child. And yet, whenever I produced something I’d slaved over for hours in the kitchen during his visits to the United States, he’d chew quietly and say almost nothing. Knowing that he adored chocolate mousse, I once searched online for days for a recipe that had the largest number of positive comments and spent the better part of an afternoon making the mousse just before he arrived in New York. The mousse was met with silence. When I tried out my tau yew bak on him during another dinner in New York, there it was again: silence. (Prompted by Mike’s mmmms and other effusive and overcompensating grunts of enjoyment, however, my father finally said, “The meat was a little tough.”)
    It wasn’t that my father thought cooking was a waste of time; he’d given me a lecture in my mid-twenties about my inability to make much besides ramen for dinner, after all. It was just that his mother’s food was seared on his heart; nothing else could possibly come close. (My mother never even tried to impress him in the kitchen, leaving everything up to her maids.) And I knew that, of all the people who would be sampling my attempts at re-creating her dishes over the following year, he would be my toughest critic. I began bracing myself for the silence.
    It was May in Singapore—the days were getting more and more fiery as the hot month of June approached. And I was about to learn a rather difficult dish— bak-zhang, the pyramid-shaped dumplings filled with pork and mushrooms and wrapped in bamboo leaves that had been one of Tanglin Ah-Ma’s signature dishes. The dumplings were an annual treat for my family, although they can now be found year-round in Singapore. They’re traditionally eaten in June around the time of the Dumpling Festival, or Duan Wu Jie , which commemorates the death of the Chinese poet and patriot Qu Yuan, who became distraught over the state of his country and committed suicide by throwing himself into a river. When his supporters learned of his death, they threw rice dumplings into the river both as a sacrifice to his spirit and to feed the fish so they wouldn’t nibble on Qu Yuan’s body. Now, every year, Chinese all over the world celebrate the day by eating bak-zhang —which is more commonly known by its Mandarin name, zongzi —and having Dragon Boat races. (Those also stem from Chinese lore. As one story goes, Qu Yuan’s admirers, after learning of his suicide, immediately hopped into boats and paddled out into the river, hoping to rescue him or find his body.)
    In my family, store-bought versions of bak-zhang were taboo, of course. The only dumplings that mattered were my Tanglin ah-ma’s. As the years passed and her reputation grew among neighbors, friends, and friends of friends, she began taking orders and selling them. I’d disliked sticky rice as a child and had not really looked forward to eating bak-zhang every year. My father, however, had always adored the dumplings, having grown up eating only the best, of course. “Daddo,” I said to him one day in May. “Auntie Khar Imm is going to teach me how to make Tanglin