All for Dad, None for Kids

 What is it like being Foochow today?

 And the same question in the PAST Tense. What was it like being Foochow?

There were many stories about being Foochow when I was growing up.

One of the most significant FoochowNESS I learned from my elders was "the husband must be given the highest respect with food".

We had lots of stories about wives serving their husbands to show respect. Some were hilarious, others, sad, some fairly normal while many were out of the ordinary.

My Ngie Mah of course was a woman with a great sense of humour. We were often in stitches, laughing and we could not push the stone grinder. But mind you, she wasn't very Foochow though. May be she had a very strong sense of justice and had some making of a feminist, way ahead of her time.

The Foochows call this, "laugh until the stomach cramps...."

Some how the stone grinder inspired people to tell stories.

Here is one related to making of kuih from a relative who came to visit us when we were small kids. She told us the story as we hovered around the stone mill, helping my maternal grandma to mill the soaked glutinous rice. Those were the days when we had to mill our own rice flour at home.

And lots of stories were exchanged in that particular corner of our house in Sibu.

Here is the story from our relative told around the stone mill......

This towkay was a man of means and he had quite a big family. His wife worked hard. Originally she had come from Fujian to marry someone in Singapore but instead according to some stories, she wanted to be more adventurous, so she accompanied a friend who was Sarawak bound , thus arriving in the thriving town of Sibu. Fate had its way and soon she became the wife of the towkay who found her very fair and pretty, and having great skills in cooking. The towkay was a gourmet!

Soon she was making all sorts of kuih and selling them, and much to the delight of the towkay as he became the "taster" of her food. She was probably a celebrity chef in her day.

She was allowed to keep almost all her earnings, which she happily saved for her old age and also to buy materials which were imported. According to the stories in the village, she wore some of the best clothes people had ever seen! May be it was also because she was earning money for herself with a husband who loved her cooking.

She made a lot of kuih, especially Mee Yang. Her children who helped her grind the rice batter seldom had the opportunity to eat the mee yang. A few pieces would first go their father and the rest would be sold.

This kuih maker saved enough money to buy lots of gold ornaments for herself according to this relative who told the stories.

We felt very sorry for the children, who did all the work and never got to eat the Mee Yang.

However though we commiserated with those little ones in the story which happened before the war we were so glad that our Ngie mah made sure that we had lots to eat. How we loved her. Whenever she came to our house, we had the best food on the table for her...and of course for my DAD. For us, it was different. Food was for every one 

Definitely, time had changed by then.