Wanton mee, no chilli, one bowl, and little bit love, please

Nine years ago, I was working as an intern at The Straits Times. At that time, halal food courts were beginning to take off, and it was all the rage to write about opportunities for different ethnicities to eat together at the same table. I went around balancing a spiral notebook and a pen, chatted to the vendors at Banquet and Kopitiam and their customers, bought and ate rounds of food. Then I wrote a story called "Mee pok, chilli, one bowl, halal please". That was about March in 2002. I remembered writing that story today. I felt hungry for a bowl of noodles when I left the office, and I stopped by the smaller food court at the side of Funan the IT Mall. There is a stall there which sells wanton mee, which always has a long, slow-moving queue at the lunch hour. Loyal customers return there whenever they can for a bowl of noodles. At the late hour close to half past eight, the crowd at the food court is thinning and bottles of beer appear at all the outdoor tables, together with smoking ashtrays. I ask for a bowl of wanton mee. The auntie deftly slips the glossy raw wantons into the boiling water, and asks me if chilli is okay. I say no, I don't want that. She nods and scoops tomato sauce and dark sauce into a bowl; skims off the meat froth that is creaming at the soup vat; and then, very gently, uses her huge ladle to add about two tablespoons of soup into the bowl, and adds a dollop of oil. As she drops the slightly floury mee kia into the boiling water, she asks the person queuing behind me for his order. He says he'll have the same as what I'm having, and a plate of fried wantons. She listens as she drains the steaming noodles, and then pours them into the bowl and tosses the noodles expertly. She looks at the customer behind me and says, "The wantons for your noodles, I'll give you the soft ones. Because you will already have the fried ones, which are harder. Balance it out." He nods silently, as if it is a matter of course that she would think about the experience of dining on crunchy fried wantons and boiledwantons in a soup. She smiles as she sets out the fried wantons and charsiew slices in my noodles, and ladles hot, clear soup in a separate bowl over the boiled wantons. She asks me if I will be going home after this. I say yes, but not before I've had her noodles. When I pay for the meal, she gives me back the change with a smile in her eyes. As I chomp away at the crunchy wantons in my bowl, I wondered why I felt a little like a cat with a full saucer of cream. It was a simple $3.50 bowl of noodles. Was it because the balance of flavours and textures was right? Certainly the charsiew was not the roasted, caramelized pork that Singaporean foodies rave over. It wasn't the ambience of rowdier smokers and drinkers, the friendly Filipinos who shared their table with me, or the load of office workers and retail salespersons milling about. I'm guessing that it was a thoughtfully prepared, tasty bowl of noodles, and it was about interacting with the cook: the auntie who put the bowl of noodles together, while showing that she thought of the people who will eat it. It was like eating at an open kitchen in your home with someone asking after you and thinking about you - not an overwhelming sort of attention, but just a touch of how-do-you-do, which adds a warm kind of flavour. And I thought back on my days of writing with ST, and how simple the treatment of eating was in that story. I'm not even going to go into the complex ethnic and religious lines that intersected with what I did. I guess that it took me awhile to finally understand better the emotive experience of where you choose to eat. Makan is everywhere, but given a choice, I know I would eat most often at a place where I feel at home. That feeling is knit together by a thousand exchanges at once, of visual and verbal cues. I wish time had slowed down so that I would see some of the details I am sure I missed. Perhaps more importantly, the production of what you consume is done with care and thought, and if the saying is right - that we are what we eat - then somehow the production, consumption, and reconstitution of the self is made right together. How do you ask for a little bit of the cook's love with your next main course? Postscript: This entry was first posted to Minyi's Facebook account on 2 Nov 2011. Photo Credits: Wanton noodles by Flickr user alexxis under the Creative Commons 2.0 License.