Written by Jia Xuan Chok
I was interested in French food, but now, as a father, I want to learn more about my own Hakka culture, so that I can pass down my heritage, so that they (my children) can be familiar (with) not just French food but the food that made me.
Pang Kok Keong
It was a busy lunch hour, and the air in Sprout Hub was abuzz with the chattering of hungry customers, accompanied by the clattering of various metalwares in the kitchen. Separated by my computer screen from the scene, I imagine the hawker center smells differently in patches, with overlapping combinations at certain spots where stalls are placed tightly beside one another. I imagine if I were there, my smell receptors would already be eating before my mouth. The camera pans to Pang Kok Keong, who’s wielding a butter knife in his left hand as he stuffed the fried tofu with pounded pork and fermented fish paste. His natural, swift sway of the arm indicates years of practice in making Yong Tau Foo – a cuisine with tofu and other vegetables stuffed with fish paste. As the tofu was being deep fried, he tended to the noodles boiling beside it. That’s the main dish most customers came for – the Hakka noodles.
Pang’s Hakka Noodles popped up in a new hawker center located at the city-fringe of Singapore in 2020 as a replacement of Pang’s ex-business – a fancy French patisserie he had been running for a solid 9 years. The French patisserie and food parlor closed earlier in the same year due to political changes during the COVID pandemic that incurred a levy on his shop which amounted to a number higher than the rent. The switch from operating a high-class bakery/restaurant to a humble-looking noodle stall, though seems like a scale-down for many, had rather been a wish for him.
Both Pang’s parents are of Hakka descent, an ethnic group literally called the ‘guest people’ (客家 kè jiā). Unlike other Chinese ethnic groups such as the Hokkien or Cantonese, the name ‘Hakka’ bears no sign of a place name as the Hakka people have been constantly moving and settling in new places from Northern China all the way to the South due to social uprisings and unrest since the 4th century. They were farmers who, while escaping social unrest, cultivated their own crops on hilly terrains. The labor-intensive work demanded high-energy food, so when they moved to the rice-growing region of Southern China, Yong Tau Foo, stuffed tofu with minced pork, became a common side dish to be enjoyed with rice. Money Cai (sweet leaf, or literally, money vegetable) is another food that has come to be integrated into the Hakka’s survival strategy. The leaf is easy to cultivate, tastes good with rice, and is nutritious. Its stem can be replanted into the soil for a new one to grow. Money Cai constitutes one of the key ingredients of the Hakka Lei Cha, grounded herbal tea commonly paired with a bowl of rice topped with at least 5 types of vegetables that are easy to cultivate. Struggling with poverty and moving everywhere, the Hakka had to be creative cooks to adapt to whatever environment they could settle in. Pang was probably referring to the tough but bittersweet past of the Hakka people when he described the flavor of a mugwort kueh (glutinous mugwort rice dessert), “It has a unique taste – sweet, salty, umami and bitter that only a Hakka can relate to.” Such a habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), or the embodied physical and aesthetic disposition such as muscle tuning and taste preference, shows how taste is never innocent and always in conversation with one’s past, whether partial or whole. The lightness of the Hakka’s mobility allowed them to experience both freedom from coercion and self-fulfillment (Berlin, 1958) through survival with varying terrains, which prepared them for easier placemaking wherever they arrived. The normalization of perseverance, creativity and flexibility in the Hakka culture has been testified by Pang’s processual transition from making refined French pastries to traditional Hakka dishes despite barriers or opportunities erected by the pandemic.
Taste is never innocent and always in conversation with one’s past, whether partial or whole.
Growing up, Pang was an ardent helper at his mother’s noodle store. In search of that nostalgia, he found himself at the decision of starting Pang’s Hakka Noodles, his own “authentic” Hakka noodle stall. “My mom was a noodle vendor. It was the biggest part of my life, but she never made traditional Hakka noodles because she didn’t know how.” I was surprised to learn that his current Hakka noodles recipe was not passed down from the older generation of his family. Rather, noodles became a node that enabled Pang to borrow from the noodle-making memory with his Hakka mother to rejuvenate the “underrepresented” and sometimes “misrepresented” Hakka food heritage in today’s Singapore. “Some Hakka people haven’t even tried Hakka food, and the market representation is also very poor. There is a need to think about what real Hakka food is,” Pang emphasized with a hint of bitterness in his voice that denoted a sense of responsibility as a heritage defender coming from a place of self-consciousness that is valorized by others in the face of a declining Hakka culture.
Though Pang didn’t disclose exactly why, he confessed that French cuisine appeared more attractive to him when he was in his 20s. He won multiple awards in French food expertise throughout his culinary career. However, he revealed that capturing the nostalgic flavor of his childhood was a key motivator for him to start a side business. “Why have I devoted all my life to somebody else’s food, somebody else’s culture instead of my own?” So, in the same kitchen he made fresh French pastry and delicacies every day before Pang’s Hakka Noodles came to be; he started Pang’s Hakka Delicacies in 2015, an online takeaway business selling exactly what its name suggests. Hakka food became a space for him to understand the struggles of past Hakka lives, relive the nostalgic togetherness with a family member, and materialize a dream to resuscitate a flavor that is wandering off the vicinity of Singaporeans. He arrived at noodle-making with sentiment, and apart from making noodles, he was producing himself as a source of Hakka flavor, a heritage defender. Running the store physically with limited assistance, Pang loved the adrenaline rush during lunch hour when he had to dish out 80-100 bowls of noodles in an hour. The sense of accomplishment he felt is part and parcel of a labor that is far-reaching. This art of creating oneself as an embodiment of Hakka authenticity by making just enough money to preserve a fading culture through placemaking in the market economy lends itself to testify for a kind of labor that is an extension of one’s lifeworld embedded in cultural production (Paxson, 2012).
Of course, revitalizing traditional Hakka food culture was a significant part of Pang’s business, but he also recounted efforts to “keep it alive and interesting”. Traditional Hakka noodles usually use lard, garlic oil, fish sauce, and some light seasoning to make the sauce, which is later garnished with spring onion. Lard is the primary and most essential ingredient in the noodle seasoning. However, stating that the traditional serving is not as robust, Pang decided to use minced pork sauce instead of lard to make the whole eating experience “much more complete.” While Pang didn’t elaborate further, I suspected that because lard is essentially pork fat and seen as more “unhealthy,” minced pork was used to replace it, given that it is also better at absorbing the flavor of the sauce. Pang also introduced a “very special and unique” traditional Hakka soup that is commonly consumed with the Hakka noodles. The Hakka scholar soup got its name from its historical symbolism. The soup is served with 3 parts of the pig – pork slices, pork liver and intestine and was made by Hakka mothers for children who were going to take the imperial exam, hoping that the best parts of the pig can also enhance the vital parts of their children and wish for them to be ranked in top three for the exam. This hope came from wishes to break out of poverty, which the Hakka people struggled with, largely due to their mobility. Options were made available for customers who dislike innards to replace them with other more “acceptable” options such as fish balls, prawn sticks, and fish sticks. This abomination of animal innards may trace its origins to the decreasing commonality of domestic animal husbandry, a time when people were involved in the slaughter of their food. However, the advent of industrialization ushered in the era of processed food, concealing the bloody meat production process that is all-too-unfamiliar to us today. This transformation consequently led to a change in the classification system of disgust (Douglas, 2013).
To Pang, serving Hakka noodles is a form of self-fashioning that draws from sentimental, cultural and somatic memories of taste, place, and time. As he crafts a sense of himself by deepening his connection with his ancestral past, him making a space for Hakka food to be shared and discussed at the hawker center is also criticism toward a changing society that has grown distant from their “roots”. Hakka food is a system of communication infused with values and history of not just one’s immediate self but also one’s connection within a web of history. Pang’s taste and entrepreneurial endeavor combined is a condensation of what it means to be a Hakka in a rapidly changing world, where the fire in his Hakka kitchen continues to light up a culture that he hopes will eventually be seen and appreciated by more people in Singapore and beyond.
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The Polyphony 