Goh Ling Yong : The Grammar of a Shared Kitchen - Goh Ling Yong
Goh Ling Yong : The Grammar of a Shared Kitchen
Learning my grandmother’s dialect not through words, but through the silent rules of salt, fat, and heat.
My grandmother’s cleaver spoke the first words I ever understood from her. It was a heavy, rectangular blade, worn smooth and thin in the middle from decades of meeting the same wooden block. The sound it made was not a delicate tap-tap-tap but a percussive, rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack that echoed from the kitchen through the thin walls of our flat. It was the sound of garlic being flattened into a fragrant paste, of ginger being sliced into translucent coins, of pork belly being diced with an authority I could only ever marvel at.
In that kitchen, my Ah Ma was a sovereign in her throne room. And I, her English-educated grandson who stumbled through a handful of garbled Mandarin phrases, was a visiting diplomat from a very strange land. The gulf between us wasn’t one of age or affection, but of language. Her native tongue was Hokkien, a dialect that flowed with the cadence of crashing waves and whispered secrets, a language I did not possess. Our conversations were a clumsy pantomime of pointing, nodding, and smiling. “Eat,” she would say, in one of her few Mandarin words, pushing a bowl of steaming rice towards me. I would nod, say “Xie xie,” and that would be the end of it. The silence that followed felt vast and heavy, filled with all the stories I couldn't ask for and all the wisdom she couldn't impart.
I wanted to bridge that silence. I decided I would learn her language not through textbooks or classes, but through apprenticeship. I would learn the grammar of her world by standing at her shoulder in the cramped, perpetually humid kitchen, a space no bigger than a walk-in closet, where the air was thick with the ghosts of a thousand meals. I thought I was there to learn recipes. I was wrong. I was there to learn a syntax of survival, of love, of memory.
Rule #1: Verbs Are Felt, Not Measured
The first and most bewildering rule in Ah Ma’s kitchen was the absolute absence of measurement. There were no cups, no spoons, no scales. Her tools were the curve of her palm, the length of her finger, the weight of her gaze.
“Ah Ma, how much soy sauce?” I’d ask in my clumsy Mandarin, holding up a bottle.
She would wave a dismissive hand, take the bottle from me, and pour. The dark liquid would cascade into the sizzling wok not in a neat, quantifiable tablespoon, but in a waterfall that she’d cut off with a flick of the wrist at a moment known only to her and God. A pinch of salt was not a quarter-teaspoon; it was the precise amount that clung to her wrinkled fingertips. A dash of pepper was a vigorous shake of the tin until her ancestors whispered, “enough.”
My modern, recipe-trained mind rebelled. I tried to follow her by sight, to quantify her intuition. I’d buy a set of measuring spoons and try to replicate her movements, catching the soy sauce in a tablespoon to see if it was one, or one-and-a-half. My dishes always came out tasting hollow, like a bad translation. They had the right ingredients, but the wrong soul.
It took me months to understand. She wasn't cooking with quantities; she was cooking with relationships. She knew the personality of her salt, the temperament of her wok, the exact thirst of the rice vermicelli. Her verb was not "to measure," but "to feel." It was a conversation. My attempts to impose sterile, external logic onto this living dialogue was an insult to the process. The day I finally put the measuring spoons away and just poured the soy sauce until my own instincts hummed in agreement was the day my braised pork belly started tasting less like an imitation and more like a tribute.
Rule #2: Adjectives Live in the Fat
In the Western culinary world I was more familiar with, fat was often the enemy. It was something to be trimmed, drained, and avoided. In Ah Ma’s kitchen, fat was the most important adjective. It was the difference between sustenance and joy.
Her primary cooking medium was a large enamel pot of rendered pork lard, milky white and solid at room temperature. A generous scoop would be the first thing to hit the searing wok, melting into a clear, shimmering pool that carried the flavor of everything that followed. Crispy, golden cubes of it were sprinkled over noodle dishes, each bite a tiny, savoury explosion.
![A well-seasoned, dark carbon steel wok with shimmering oil at the bottom, sitting on a gas stove. Wisps of smoke are just beginning to rise. Caption: The foundation of every dish: a searing hot wok and a generous spoonful of fat. This is where the flavor, or 'wok hei', begins.]
When I first started cooking alongside her, I’d instinctively try to be “healthier.” I’d use a meager teaspoon of peanut oil, carefully trimming every speck of fat from the pork. Ah Ma would watch me, silent, her brow furrowed in a look of deep concern, as if I were deliberately trying to make the food sad. One time, after watching my pale, anemic-looking stir-fry, she wordlessly took a spoonful of lard, dropped it into my pan where it sizzled angrily, and stirred. The aroma instantly transformed. The vegetables glistened. The dish came alive.
I learned that fat wasn’t about indulgence; it was about generosity. It was the carrier of "wok hei" — the prized, smoky ‘breath of the wok’ that is the hallmark of great stir-frying. It was the texture in the soup, the crisp on the egg, the richness that coated the tongue and comforted the soul. To be stingy with fat was to be stingy with love. It was the adjective that turned a simple noun like “cabbage” into “glorious, glistening, soul-affirming cabbage.”
Rule #3: Tense Is a Matter of Heat and Time
Ah Ma’s stove had two settings: off and inferno. She cooked with a ferocity that bordered on alarming. The gas flame would roar to life, licking up the sides of her carbon-steel wok until it was nearly glowing. Cooking was not a gentle simmer; it was a violent, split-second negotiation with fire.
This was the grammar of tense. The past was the prep: the patient slicing, dicing, and marinating. The future was the meal we would soon share. But the present—the moment of cooking—was a fleeting, high-stakes sprint.
My biggest fear was the heat. I would hesitate, lowering the flame, afraid of burning the garlic. My vegetables would emerge from the wok not crisp and vibrant, but limp, water-logged, and defeated. They were a grammatical error.
Ah Ma’s corrections were never verbal. They were a sharp tap of her ladle on the side of my wok—a non-verbal “faster!”—or a quick gesture with her hand urging me to toss the ingredients with more confidence. She was teaching me that in the language of the wok, hesitation is the enemy. You must be present. You must be decisive. The difference between a perfect stir-fry and a soggy mess was about five seconds.
Learning to master the heat was learning to trust myself. It was about understanding that control doesn’t come from timidity, but from bold, committed action. When I finally learned to let the oil smoke, to throw the garlic in for just three seconds before adding the greens, to hear the explosive sizzle and know it was a sound of success, not failure—that was when I began to understand the rhythm of her world. It was a world that rewarded courage.
Rule #4: The Unspoken Conjunction of Shared Space
For a long time, my presence in the kitchen was that of a student—clumsy, slow, and often in the way. But slowly, imperceptibly, a shift occurred. The grammar we were building began to connect us.
It started with small things. I would see her reach for the bowl of chopped spring onions and I’d have it in her hand before she could fully turn. She would be at the sink, washing vegetables, and I would be at the block, silently taking over the chopping, my cleaver’s rhythm slowly starting to echo hers. We developed a choreography, a silent dance in a space where a misstep meant a collision. I would wash the rice while she prepared the fish. I would set the table while she plated the final dish.
There were no “please” or “thank yous.” The language was in the action itself. The empty bowl I placed by her elbow was a question. The chopped ginger she slid onto my cutting board was a command. We were a team, joined by the conjunction of shared labor. The silence between us was no longer a void, but a comfortable, productive quiet. It was the silence of two people who understood each other on a level deeper than words.
One evening, Ah Ma was feeling tired. She sat on a small stool by the kitchen door, watching me. I decided to make one of the simplest dishes in her repertoire: a perfectly fried egg with dark soy sauce and a dash of pepper, served over steaming rice. I heated the wok until it smoked. I cracked the egg into the shimmering lard, tilting the pan so the hot fat pooled and crisped the edges into a delicate, brown lace while the yolk remained a perfect, molten sunset.
I slid it onto a bowl of rice, drizzled it with her favorite soy sauce, and presented it to her. She looked at the egg, then at me. She picked up her chopsticks, broke the yolk, and mixed it into the rice. She took a bite. She chewed slowly, her eyes closed for a moment. Then she opened them, looked at me, and gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
In the grand lexicon of our relationship, that nod was a symphony. It was “This is correct.” It was “You were listening.” It was “I understand you.”
I never did learn to speak fluent Hokkien. I can still only manage a few pleasantries, enough to get by at a family gathering. In that sense, I failed my original mission. But standing in that kitchen, I had learned a far more essential language.
I learned that love can be communicated in the perfect crisp of a fried shallot. I learned that heritage can be passed down through the muscle memory of a well-handled cleaver. And I learned that you can know the deepest truths of a person without ever sharing a single word of spoken dialect, but by understanding their grammar—the silent, profound rules by which they navigate the world.
The kitchen is quieter now. Ah Ma moves more slowly. But we still cook together sometimes, in our shared silence. It is no longer an empty space between us. It is a language. And it is a language I am finally, thankfully, fluent in.
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