My Father and His Charcoal Hotpot

My father must have missed his Beijing days when he returned to Sibu in 1938/9. He was to start an English Newspaper called the Sarawak Times in 1940 in Kuching.

The business was bombed literally as the Japanese arrived just a few months after he started with a Kuching partner. My grandfather immediately called him back to Sibu.

Three years after the war he married my mother and had us. We had lived on an island away from the main town of Sibu where he worked quietly as an ice factory manager.

In 1956 we moved to Sibu as I had to start my primary school education at the English Mission school. But in those days we were too young to figure out his sentiments. We saw him as an old kind of father as he was more than 50 years old when we were kids. He had us after he was 40, having married my mother late in life. Most of my school mates had parents in their 20's.

My father had quite a tumultous life before the age of 40, born at the end of the Qing dynasty in Sibu, struggled through the early poverty stricken and hungry days with my grandparents who had 9 children by 1925, the early death of his Java born mother,  lived during the Sun Yat Sen period in Shanghai and Beijing as an overseas student, suffered the brutalities of the Japanese who suspected him of being a spy for the British (he had good vinyl records and books on classical music and a good radio in the factory) and post war Colonial days. He passed away 2 years after Malaysia was formed, knowing fully well that Sarawak was not ready for self government and that Sarawak would become a colony in a new fashion only. 

One of my best memories of him was how he brought back a new charcoal hotpot, placed it on the table and prepared the charcoal in the family Foochow stove. He had slowly started the charcoal fire, while my mother prepared the thin slices of pork, and deboned the fish upon his instruction. In those days there was no cold storage in Sibu. I vaguely remember that scenario.

(Since young I had always known that my parents loved to cook together at times when he had a bright new idea or a new recipe to introduce to my mother.)

He put the chicken bones into a pot to make the stock on the wood stove. Only now I realise that for a good hot pot, one must have good stock.

We had a simple hot pot but I remember how careful my parents were not to drop the live charcoals on the wooden table.

We were just curious diners, having the soup, the meat, the fish , vegetables and the rice. However even in those days, we kids felt that it was rather special. I felt that it was like cooking a lot of soup in a funny shaped pot. It was a mini stove, with the charcoal burning well.

To this day, I really appreciate the hot pot (or steam boat). Indeed has a very good way of getting enough air into the base to give the charcoal enough draught to burn up and sending enough heat to the boiling soup. It is an engineering masterpiece albeit its antiquity. The westerners never have its equivalent.

That was my first introduction to a hot pot. Later on in life, I kind of think that having hot pot dinners was rather romantic.

I believe that my mother was very grateful that my father bought a charcoal hot pot for the family and for years after he passed away, that beautiful hot pot was wrapped up in plastic and put on top of the food cabinet in the kitchen. 

We never had any hot pot meal after my father passed away. It was too much work my mother would say. But probably my mother was deeply and quietly mourning for the love of her life.

Our initial hot pot dinner with our young mother could be called a Father's Beijing Night in Sibu.

Notes on Hot Pots

In retrospect I would have loved to rewrite a part of my youth. I would have loved to enjoy probably an experience i which I enjoyed a hot pot dinner or two with a boyfriend who would pick some choice morsels for my rice bowl. That would be my kind of imagined drama script for a Chinese TV tragi-romantic story.

In real life as I grew into an old woman it was not all that romantic because  I felt that hot pot meals would be rather messy, loud and everyone for himself!! And imagine the large number of plates  you have to wash!!

And during a longish stay in Yunnan I had experiences of eating hot pot meals with really hot and spicy stocks!! I was quite unwell for a few days after those hot pot meals (every night).