Stories I Wrote While Waiting for You To Tell Them To Me

On healing a daughter's hungry heart, and how artists become themselves

Afternoon Tea with Wildflowers © 2022 Suyin Tan

Exploring the connections between food, art, and self-becoming, through a tale of two kitchens, and a collection of poetry and postcards born out of the kitchens in my life.

Who I am when I am writing about food

As far back as I can remember, I have loved everything to do with food — eating it, cooking it, and being around it, in kitchens and markets. I love reading, writing, film, and art about food and kitchens.

Food motifs, symbols, and metaphors pop up everywhere in my creative writing.

For some time, I imagined myself one day writing a food themed book or memoir that would be beloved by others for its lush earthy vibes, overflowing with the warmth of mulled wine, flowers and garden herbs.

Because this is what I find myself craving, and I felt drawn to the idea of becoming what I crave, of being to myself and to others what I crave.

This summer, over ten weeks, I found myself in two incredible writing workshops on the theme of food, run by my writing mentors, Laurie Bolger and Trivarna Hariharan.

Before the workshops, I imagined the warm, cozy, soft-edged vibes of the writing I would do, as the warm, cozy, soft-edged type of person I could be.

The writing I ended up producing was a revelation to myself. I share some of my food poetry from this summer at the end of this essay.

Slowly, I am discovering, that who I am is not defined solely by what I crave, or what I need, or even what I love.

What I crave, need, or love, is what I seek out in order to find my sense of calm, peace, nourishment, and safety, so that (the rest of) who I am feels safe to emerge.

And this is the me who is emerging, at this time —

I don’t run warm, I don’t run soft, and I don’t run melty with muted earth tones.

Instead, I run freezing hot, with ruffled waves and geometric edges, in the voluminous colour of fire and jewels.

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But first, why do I crave what I crave?

That’s what I was curious to know.

Now and again, I do a meditation practice from the Kundalini tradition that helps with surfacing our hidden or subconscious cravings. This meditation is particularly helpful, I’ve learnt, when we find ourselves seeking too much comfort outside ourselves.

The first two times I did this practice, two images of, you guessed it — food, appeared in my mind.

The first image that came up was of bao, a lotus leaf shaped bun made from white flour, originating from the Chinese province of Fujian, where I have my matrilineal roots. Also popularly known as gua bao 割包, which literally translates to “sliced bun”, it is a soft, neutral tasting bun with faintly sweet undertones, created precisely that way to be a perfect complement to the very flavourful meat fillings it carries in its middle. Its role in Chinese dishes is to be like the pleasingly soft white toast bread to a sandwich.

I have loved eating bao since I was a child, and I have always favoured eating bao over the fillings it holds. My grandmother shared the same preference. Whenever we shared a meat bao, we both wanted to eat just the bao and give the filling to each other. “You’re strange, like me,” my grandma laughed. “Who wouldn’t prefer to eat the filling?”

I hadn’t really eaten much bao since moving abroad 20 years ago. So why was it coming up for me in my cravings meditation?

Maybe because I wasn’t eating bao, but I had become bao. In the way I grew up with a seemingly elastic capacity to hold and accommodate any and all of the expectations, demands, needs, and worries of others, that I found myself being heaped and filled up with, starting from a childhood that was “child” mostly in name only.

I picked up from others, their unfulfilled dreams and desires, which spilled over into their fears and pain, claiming all those fillings, and feelings, as mine.

The second image that came up was of sugar. Plain white sugar. Sweet and nice. Conveniently invisible once dissolved, and absorbed completely into whatever it is used to sweeten.

Admittedly, I can’t and won’t live without sugar. I need all my drinks to be sweet. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t eat rice, pasta, or some sort of carb staple. I have a vision of the hangry person I would be without my sugar.

I recall how all my school reports seemed to be filled with words like “hardworking”, “quiet”, “never causes trouble”, “sweet”, “cheerful”, “well-liked”, and how that was held up as model behaviour in a Singaporean school. Now I cringe writing this.

It must have come as a shock when I returned home to visit after moving abroad, and started spilling messily outside the lines of the box — making mistakes, changing my mind, expressing contrary opinions in my choices and lifestyles, asserting my preferences, setting up boundaries, trying my hand at saying no instead of nodding yes.

Charred bitterness — seemed to be others’ taste of the disappearance of the neatly wrapped square box, tied up with a shiny bow.

Bittersweetness — was my own taste of that.

Why do I write what I write?

You’ve probably heard this before, that there are two categories of people when it comes to eating food.

There are the people who “eat to live” and the people who “live to eat”.

As I recently learnt from the food memoirist and recipe book author, Sumayya Usmani, there are also two categories of people, who find themselves drawn to writing food memoirs.

There are the people for whom food is a sentimental, significant, and actual part of childhood, going into adulthood, because of their lived experience of being strongly connected to the warmth of family, roots, and belonging through food and family home kitchens. Of course. See, for example, Sumayya’s delicious food memoir, Andaza.

There are also the people, paradoxically, who grow up in almost exactly the opposite way. Food is sentimental and significant for them too, but it lives in the imaginal, rather than actual, realm of childhood. Where the connection between family, belonging, and food cooked in the home kitchen runs cold and absent, existing only in the imagination opened up by the heart’s longing. See Nigel Slater’s powerful food memoir, Toast, described so poignantly by the Los Angeles Times as, a “lesson in how to let your stomach heal your hungry heart”.

Discovering this turned on a light inside me.

From that seed of imagination and longing, springs a need and craving for an alternate sense of belonging associated with food. A craving that runs into invisible depths, like the bottom of a well.

It springs from the sense of a lost belonging and nurturing in childhood that can only, maybe, partly, be recovered through learning to grow roots of belonging for the self, in a different kitchen, birthed out of another place and time.

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My own relationship with food, belonging, and kitchens has been coloured by duality.

Much of my earliest years of childhood were spent in my grandmother’s kitchen, where the stories and food ran warm, with love and comfort.

A little later, in a different home kitchen, the landscape ran more like a ragged theatrical battleground, where food boiled over from pots of blame and acrimony, often with a coldness that couldn’t be measured by a thermometer.

I remember learning at the dinner table about the children who went hungry in other parts of the world, and to be thankful that I wasn’t one of them.

I remember learning to believe that, with all the food I had on the table, I was not a hungry child.

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Over the years, my mother likes to remind me that she is firmly in the camp of “eat to live”. This declaration is dished out like a badge of honour, to explain an intense and enforced dislike of cooking, and an insistent indifference to the food being eaten.

Over the same number of years, I find myself wandering around the world, immersed in the joy of being invited into other people’s kitchens, the joy of receiving food that is home-cooked by strangers-turned-friends-who-become-like-family, food that warms me as satisfyingly as a log fire on a winter’s day.

I learn that people, and their hearts, can starve from emotional hunger, too.

I learn that there’s always a silent starburst of pain that lies hidden beneath someone’s overly loud insistence that they don’t care for food, that food doesn’t matter to them.

I teach myself how to cook — deliciously, generously, adventurously, humorously, and reverently.

One of the first dishes I found myself drawn to eating and learning to cook while living abroad was oyakodon (親子丼), a Japanese household comfort dish made of chicken, egg, onions, and scallions simmered together in a sweet and savoury stock, and served topped over a large bowl of rice (here’s a recipe).

I later found out that oyakodon literally translates to parent-and-child (oyako) rice bowl (don, short for donburi), in what has been described as a poetic reflection of both chicken and egg being used in this dish.

In the process of teaching myself to cook and cooking for myself (and others), I realize that I have the ability to build a home for myself, with a kitchen that is happy to cook and feed my stomach even at midnight, or past midnight, or way past midnight, if that is what my heart desires.

I realize that I can build a home that unconditionally embraces the past, present and future versions of me, where my kitchen becomes my teacher for how to receive and to give love, to myself and to others.

I realize that I am the apple that has fallen and rolled itself far, far away from the tree.

And that, something about rolling away like this, is what has made food taste of ever more vivid colours to me.

I will always, always, live to eat. And with the greatest joy imaginable.

Food and Art as Mirrors

A Family of Four, in the style of Vietnamese Summer Rolls © 2022 Suyin Tan

Over this summer, I find myself devouring stories and poetry, both old and new to me, about food, and serving up kitchen stories and poetry of my own.

Writing about food has helped me realize that a large part of the way I feel and understand the world, myself, and myself in relation to others, is through food.

There is a food I associate with every person and memory of significance in my life.

That food becomes a mirror, reflecting to me my inner world of my past, present and future selves, co-existing all at once in this body. That food reflects the way all those selves that are me, relate to a specific person and memory.

After sharing some of my food writing this summer, I receive a moving response from another writer, telling me that “Sad Beauty is pretty much my favourite genre in the world, and this is so beautifully sad”.

Sad Beauty is my favourite genre in the world too, I realise. All my favourite books, the ones that have saved my life, are the epitome of Sad Beauty (I’ve shared a book list below).

My kindred spirit in loving the Sad Beauty genre then shared with me the poem, Nothing but Color, by Ai, because “something about (your writing) reminded me of it”.

Ai's poem blew my mind and my heart wide open, in a way that has been both expansive and shattering. I had never before experienced beauty expressed in these shades of colour.

It helped me remember that, as someone with synaesthesia, I also perceive the world through colour.

The colours of words, numbers, emotions, people, memories, senses — each one I encounter has their own colour.

In the food writing I have been inspired to do, I feel myself beginning to understand and touch the edges of a different colour and tone of beauty, as it emerges through my words — it’s something that asks to be described as Fierce Beauty.

Fierce Beauty is like the ferocious beauty of an ocean storm with impossibly large waves, crashing the stories of their hearts out onto the rocks, and discovering the rhythm of their own dance in the process.

Fierce Beauty is the colour palette for the anger that overlays, and is overlain by, grief. The healthy and necessary anger we learn to feel, that enables us to find the courage, and take the steps we need to take, to protect ourselves from what hurts us, even when — especially when — those we relied on to protect us could not. Anger that teaches us to defend our right and ability to feel alive, in every sense of the word.

Write hard and clear about what hurts, said Ernest Hemingway. Don’t avoid it. It has all the energy. Don’t worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.

On a piece of paper, I draw a wooden signboard standing in sand by the ocean, and fill these words in — Write hard and clear about what hurts.

It’s become one of my foremost mantras for how I paint with words.

People don’t become artists.

Artists become themselves

A Mid-Autumn Evening’s Dream — Maple-Baked Brie with Walnuts, Rosemary & Jewel Berries © 2022 Suyin Tan

We are not our wounds, and we are not our pain, but the way we move through this world, and the light we radiate out into it, will always hold the distinct colours and flavours of the individual path we walk to navigate and heal from our wounds and our pain, which flow in a colour palette unique to each of us.

Not everyone’s landing place for healing needs to be soft white clouds, at all times.

I am discovering that, even as the edible flavours of my kitchen can run warm, fluffy, and soft, like a freshly baked French butter croissant, the poetic flavours of my food and kitchen writing can run freezing hot, in the way that ice and frost can burn the skin.

So far, not many of my food writing pieces lean particularly warm, fuzzy, or soft around the edges — quite the contrary, in fact — but in writing all the words I do, I am feeling absolutely alive.

Sometimes our place of healing needs to be the ocean in a storm, so that it can mirror our inner world back to us and let us see that where we are now, equally, holds beauty. It’s the beauty of being, and feeling, fiercely alive.

I am discovering the flavours of my growth, my healing, and my self-becoming, and I love each and every flavour.

Our art is our becoming. Our art shows us who we are, and how and where we are alive at this moment in time.

At each stage of our becoming and our art, we offer the world something that someone needs, in order to have the chance to have their inner world reflected back at them, in order for them to see that there is beauty there, too.

That’s what I think beauty is. It is something that necessarily goes beyond the aesthetic, it’s about the emotional truth and connection that is carried within, by both the source of beauty and by the witness to that beauty.

Our encounters with the emotional truth of the self, reflected back to us by another, is the doorway through which we touch beauty and come alive, each and every single time.

Stories I Wrote While Waiting For You To Tell Them To Me

(a triptych of poetry from and about the kitchens of my life)

Today, I am sharing a few of the stories I waited to be told to me, all these years, before I realised that I had to write them first. And now I have.

May they, in their different ways, also bring you all that your own heart is looking for today.

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                  𑁍

      Eye of the Storm


Chillis		
                        of bird’s eye
smashed        	pounded
into a     	        crimson paste
                  	of
soundless
storm	     	brewing with

my grandmother’s
implacable 	shallot tears

                layers 
   of soft brown unfurling
            a revelation

my mother 	carried off by
uncertain waves 	     of
delicate 	        purple 
                  bursting
through 	        the frenzy
of     pestle     and     mortar

        stone   \    grey

  like the dish I am given 
            to serve up
     dead-end memories

in the kitchen
inside 
the eye of the storm

I sit		twisting 
a tuning fork –
salting the memories
spicy and sour, sharp

like juice of

                        dark moss calamansi

I let it drizzle 
straight
                              down 
               slicing 
     	                      into the

               heart of stone

      shaking what was 
              forgotten
                                         awake

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                   𑁍

pink flowers green grapes
haiku / senryu

Green leaves can birth pink
flowers, each birth a burial –
roots cut, stillborn ties

Water leaks from your
dry hands, even it runs a
way from my parched lips

Green grapes, loudly crushed,
sparkle into wine – finding 
me thirsty, setting me 	               free

---

              𑁍

A Season for Tea

Whenever I start crashing
into the wall inside my chest,
I make tea, and wait 
for the kettle to sing 
together with me

Water bubbles rising up
into little Os of surprise,
echoes to the shape 
of my mouth, reawakened 
by a winter perfume 
of Keemun tea leaves

In a spring leaf bath of tea,
sits a black forest in a stone 
well, where red dates soak 
in blissful company, 
staying afloat with me, as I

inhale and expand into
a horizon of warm promise,
the cold wall dissolving
into a distant dream

In the heart’s teacup –
watered by sunlit autumn 
honey, and milky dew
drops of early morning mist

a summer’s wildflower 
meadow blooms, with 
the fragrance of liquid hugs

for who I was, for who I will be
for who I already am, right now



                                                                         𓍯𓂃

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𓇢𓆸 If you appreciated this piece, you might also like to read my other poetry and essays exploring similar themes — Wednesday’s Child, Recipe for a Birthday Far Away from Home, If Loneliness Was A Flower: On Self-Integrity and the Art of Personal Tradition, and Through the Other Looking-Glass, and What I Found There

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☾₊ ⊹ Invitation to a Midnight Kitchen Club ☾₊ ⊹

Who were we, before we lost ourselves in being who the world told us to be?

And how can our art show us the way home?

I’m brewing a secret pop-up midnight kitchen club, as a gathering for the existentially curious, who are on the journey of becoming ourselves.

We’ll explore the art and journey of defining the self, through cultivating the creative practice of owning our story and writing our truth.

𖤣 On the Menu ~ a delicious brew of poetic storytelling, art, alchemy, and cosmic magic

𖤣 The Scene ~ an immersive heart space for community conversations and learning

𖤣 Dress Code ~ you’re invited to come in all your colours and all your flavours

𖤣 Venue ~ our midnight kitchen will be virtually housed, so we can welcome you from anywhere in the world

(p.s. by midnight, I mean the time when all the magic happens, rather than chronological time per se — iykyk)

This lyrical space is beautifully taking shape, and as the best kitchens are co-creative spaces, I am opening up the invitation to you at this time to be a part of the conversation for creating our kitchen 💛

If this theme sparks your curiosity to hear more, or to visit our midnight kitchen, please send me a message on Substack using the button below, or reply directly to your email of this post, and I will get back to you! :)

p.p.s. I may write all about sad beauty and fierce beauty, but I’m really just a cinnamon sprinkled pastel de nata (Portuguese egg tart) 🥧 at heart, so please do reach out if you are curious about this topic or gathering, or if it speaks to your heart in any way! 💌

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A little more from the heart’s kitchen

🍊 Stories written by dear friends / writers I adore, that I have been holding close to my heart recently, and that are profoundly beautiful to me, for the reasons I’ve shared earlier in this piece —

〰️ A Lifetime in a Tomato, a heartwarming Greek food story for the heart and soul, by my dear friend,

nadia g

, whose writing and way of seeing the world through food and kitchens, has always nourished my artist’s heart

〰️ Family can be difficult, they say by my dear friend,

Ana Von

, whose courage, strength and vulnerability in writing this deeply moving piece, profoundly expanded me, and gave me courage to write my story

〰️ I couldn’t share this piece, by my dear friend

aaliyah madadi

, who always inspires me to share my voice with the world, and whose love and support I am always grateful for

〰️ i will swim in the pools at the bottom of your eyes, by my dear friend with the biggest heart,

Jennae Smith

, whose poem will hold you with love and tenderness while you cry

〰️ It’s Summer, and I’m Still Grieving, by

Trivarna Hariharan

, one of my favourite writers, whose amazing food writing workshop, Dreaming of Honeyed Apples, midwifed my triptych of poems above

🍊 Stories with a connection to food that, for me, epitomise the genre of Sad Beauty —

〰️ Kitchen and Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

〰️ The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

〰️ Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

〰️ Kikimora by Sofija Ana Zovko, from the Night-Time Stories anthology, ed. Yen-Yen Lu

〰️ Midnight Diner and Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories on Netflix

🍊 A balm for your heart and body

The Daily Rest Studio, founded by my amazing mentor and teacher,

Emmie Rae

, features yoga, restorative, movement, and meditation practices, including the most sublime practices named after and inspired by café drinks and food. You had me at Bubble Tea 🧋, Emmie ♡ TDR Studio supported me through processing all the colours and shades of emotions that came up before, during, and after writing this piece, the way it always has supported me in living life led by the heart and the body

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💌

I’m very grateful to have had this piece featured in —

〰️ the September 2024 monthly curation for

Unlocked: BIPOC Reads

by

Ricky Denham

— you can read the full piece below:

Issue #04: Unlocked

〰️ the September 2024 monthly Asian Writers Collective curation by

christa lei (they/them)

— you can read the full piece below:

Asian Reads | Issue 03

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