Tea Rice : Nang Chong Version

 My maternal grandmother Tiong Lien Tie was not a picky eater. She was a careful eater, often just eating simple food and in small portions because she was such a small person too at less at 5 foot in stature. But to me she was a BIG person, with a strong personality and a tongue to match.

She never went to formal school but since she grew up next to a school house in Ming Ching, Fujian, she picked up a lot of Confucian sayings and committed them to memory. She had indeed a very good memory. She could quote an apt Confucian saying at any time to teach us a good moral lesson. She would "once Confucius has said it, it cannot be wrong".

We had seen her in various moods. Happy, sad, angry, reflective, warm and loving. She was never cruel or unkind, perhaps it was due to her difficult life when she was young as a child. She was sold to the Lau family at the age of 4 and then she had to do a lot of child labour work in the family to sustain the family. Then she was brought out to Sibu, Sarawak to marry my maternal grandfather. She was hardly 10 years old! My maternal grandfather was 16 years her senior. They were married when she was 15 or 16. There was no marriage certificate for them.

Growing up in Sibu at Ensurai, she was treated as a daughter of the family and was at the beck and call of her elder, "sister in law". She was a kitchen assistant mainly.

She made attap, by sewing together nipah leaves. She made rokok or local cigarettes by rolling nipah leaves and cut and tied them in bundles.

She dried longevity noodles in the sun. At times she made salted fish.

Those were chores she did with grace and joy, because at the end of the day she had a bowl of rice to eat.

When she was sad, she had a self remedy. Pour hot tea over the crusty cold rice topped with her own salted fish slices.

And she would sit by the back of the stove, near the fire, as she tended the fire, sang a few of her Foochow songs, in between mouthfuls of tea rice.

The moments of sadness would soon leave her mind and she carried on with life again.

Note : I saw her eating tea rice many times. Every one would empathise with her and understand the situation.

Relatives would knowingly tip toe around her. But soon her sadness would be gone, and she would be whole again.

How nice it is to be able to uplift emotional upheavals by just a bowl of tea rice......