Sins of the Father

Aren't relationships a mystery?  A total pain in the arse?

I try to avoid them but it is rather difficult as long as you have a pulse.  Short of going neo-survivalist and barricading myself in an abandoned nuclear shelter, there is really not much I can do to avoid human interaction.  I am getting ever more fastidiousness as I creep into decrepitude, disdaining personal interactions, preferring a much more remote and therefore, less irritating option ... the web.

Have I always been so anti-social?  Yes.  In fact, as a child I was notorious for being difficult, surly, rude and un-responsive to friendly overtures. Back in those days, autism would have been dismissed in lieu of poor manners.  I have always rather suspected that I had a smattering of autism thrown into the mix of a lot of complicated familial issues.  Suffice to say I refused to speak till I was the age of two and when I did, it was in complete sentences in 5 different languages, all telling everyone to piss off and leave me alone.

So, being the ray of sunshine that I was, I was punished severely.  My grandmother, being an enterprising sort, decided that facing the corner was highly unproductive.  Instead, she relegated me to the kitchen and made me help out in the restaurant.  I was four.  My first job was washing the rice and plates.  Oh, and poundng the rempah, chilli pastes et al.

The chores evolved, increased and rose in complexity.  But they all spun willy nilly around me in the whirlwind of the kitchen.  I was resentful but strangely, I felt a peace in the kitchen.  The monotony, the focus and the tactile appeal to the senses were oddly comforting and the kitchen became a sanctuary from the madding crowd beyond it.

I will not suggest that my grandmother had the sagacity or tender mercies to push me into the haven of the kitchen to save my sanity.  The only tender mercies that woman knew was papaya juice to terrorise slabs of meat into mouth-melting surrender.  Neither was she so deep that she recognised how the mind, soul and spirit of a young child were macerating into potential manic depression with the battles she witnessed daily among her family members.

My grandmother was a phenomenal cook.  To this day, I do not think I have met anyone as brilliant as she was.  I am sure many attest to the same sentiment about their grandmothers but since I am not obsessively fond of mine, my declaration is actually quite an objective one.

The woman was unlikeable.  She was hard-edged, hard-headed, hard-hearted and hard of fist.  There was nothing soft or warm about her.  She made Snape look like a Care Bear and could seek and destruct any fond illusions of happiness you might harbour at ten paces without even caring enough to make an effort.  No, I did not like her.  I feared and respected her but like is too pale a sentiment for the complicated emotions I hold towards her.

In her own way, I think she loved me.  She certainly treated me better than most.  Which is not saying much.  But I am almost certain that is due more in part to my heritage than any true worth of my own.   Hey, this is no self-pity here. I know my own worth.  Most of the times.  And many times, over-estimate it too.  But with my grandmother I know the score. 

I was there on sufferance.  Because of my father.

The adored progeny.  The proverbial prodigal son.  Much idolised and canonised by my grandmother. 

So of course, everyone else in the family hated his guts.  He, too, was unlikeable.  Unless you were female, easy and dumb enough to fall for his lies.  Again, I harbour no false illusions.  The man was a louse and a danger to any female with a heartbeat.

Worse still, he was a chef.  

Now, I hold little stock in the snobbery widely held in the industry about the distinction between cooks and chefs.  Terms were invented to weld pigeon-holes for the less privileged so others can feel superior.  I have met many chefs I thought should have have fingers minced before they poisoned their customers.  I have encountered a good many "cooks" who have more artistry, skill and passion for food in their little fingers than Gordon Ramsey.

In the world of culinary snobbery, he who shouts loudest... well, makes himself heard.  And like the Emperor with his new clothes, there is always hordes of willing sheep ready to don the same mantle of culinary superiority.

My father was one such asinine, ladle weaving charlatan.  He lorded it over all and sundry (sans my grandmother, of course) because he was formally trained and critically accepted.  In those days, fusion was an exciting concept and Asian fusion was a mysterious bastion of snooty, culinary misconceptions.  It was the Wild West of culinary experimentation mostly based on unsound, unfounded, untasty and unsavoury food mutilations.  Americans then thought Velveeta was Miracle Whip and Miracle Whip was manna from heaven.  My father's Asian fusion was lauded as revolutionary, miraculous and culinary genius.

I mean no offense when I say Americans then would not know shite from shiitake.

My father's creations might look pretty since he favoured the nouvelle cuisine style of presentation, but once translated from plate to mouth, the reaction was novel indeed.  I think I actually threw up a little in my mouth when I tasted one of his award-winning dishes.  And as mentioned in a previous post, my grandmother declared his food "not fit for human consumption".

I still remember that night. 

For years I had harboured a deep, bitter resentment towards my father.  My grandmother held him up as a paragon of ultimate culinary supremacy.  She harped at me, pushing me to even attempt a third of his achievements.  From the age of five, she egged me on my ignorance, my lack as compared to my father.  I knew that was her way of pushing me to excel beyond him.  In fact, I later discovered that she had always thought I had more natural talent than my father but she was incapable of an affirmative measures of nurturing anyone.

Her way was to blackmail, threaten, terrorise, harangue and humiliate.  She was the penultimate bully and tyrant and no one was spared.  Except my father.  Or so I thought.  

In all the years growing up, I had never heard her criticise my father.  He was everything wonderful and the way she went on, I would have expected bloody roses to bloom right out of his arse.  I cut my teeth on gritting them everytime she threw him in my face.  It is a miracle I have any teeth left.

She always held out hope he would return home to take over the restaurant.  In the interim, I was expected to hold the fort and make something of it so it would not disgrace his eventual take-over.  I was designated the ever-loving bridesmaid with not a hope of being the bride.

Now, even at such a young age, I was no fool.  Well, no less foolish than any grey-matter holding, cognizant child of ten.  At that age I decided I was having none of it.  I settled on subterfuge.  There was no way I was going to slave away in the bowels of the kitchen for the rest of my life so my father could waltz back in and have a ball dedicated to him. 

So while I enjoyed cooking and baking, I also resented my supposed destiny.  I rebelled quietly, never letting on that I was going to consign my grandmother's grand plans to hell before I became my father's Renfield.  I determined never to become a chef or cook. 

In those years, I always thought my father's cuisine must be of the highest level.  After all, he was formally trained all over the world.  Critics had given him awards.  He bloody sent the clippings home to boast of them every chance he could!

My grandmother would not shut up about his achievements. I was right sick of hearing them.

Not that I would have any clue what his food tasted like.  I have vague memories of some egg-based dish he made me when I was a toddler but because I had not lived with or even seen my father since I was five, I had no idea what his culinary sensibilities were.  But since he was formally trained, and more importantly, he was my grandmother's son, I had always assumed he must be a culinary genius to whom I could never hold a candle to.

So it was my sixteenth year that saw almost the entire family carted off to America to visit my father's restaurant for the first time.  I shall not go into details about the strange, volatile cocktail of emotions I carried into this visit.  Fear, dread, anticipation, hesitation, yearning, insecurity, resentment, bitterness, envy, jealousy, vulnerability, disquiet ... I was a mess.  So I did what any teenager would do.  I gave attitude to everyone and everywhere I could.

I was cold towards my father and refused to touch him.  I pulled my best "Grandma Icy" act that I think even impressed my grandmother.  I was dismissive of everything.  I withdrew into my ear phones and books and ignored everyone and everything.

But still, I could not hold back my excitement the night we dined at my father's restaurant.

Of course he served his award-winning dish.  I can't remember what it was now but I believe it was a chicken dish.  One of his new-fangled Asian fusion creations that Americans appeared to adore.  The pride on my grandmother's face ... well, back then it infuriated me.  Now, it draws a smirk.

Yes, malicious glee and I are friends.  I am Christian by birth, not by natural inclination so piss off.  And I am a Catholic by up-bringing so pettiness is inherent. So deal with it.

The looks on our faces at the first bite was priceless.  Better than any pithy credit card ad.

My father - gloating, arrogant anticipation

The rest of us - astonishment, quickly followed by distaste

It was the worst shite I had ever tasted.  It defied description, partly because my poor beleaguered taste buds, stomach and mind have erased the foul memory as best as they could.

We were terribly silent, unsure of which foot to set out on the floor of egg shells we were perching on.  Despite my internal glee, I was afraid to look at my grandmother.  Afraid that her love might be so blind that her taste buds would follow, adding another death nail to my coffin of hopeless disgust.  Afraid that she might indeed recognise the pulchritude of my father's failed science experiment and see the howling disappointment in her eyes.  Despite everything, I am not the demon spawn she always claimed I was.  I did not want to see her hurt.

If she could be hurt, then somehow ... somehow it would be like someone telling me God did not exist.  That the sun is just a giant lightbulb some space invader forgot to turn off.  And we would all be doomed to nothingness as quickly as it remember to switch it off and save the environment.

Grandmother was infallible.  If she was ... then the foundations of my beliefs would falter.  Nothing could be certain again.  Fear was an icy pill in my mouth as I kept my eyes on my plate of fallen expectations.

And then I heard her.

"Everyone, up!  We're going back."

Eh?

"But, but ... Ma, we're just at the entree!  You have not even fin ...," my father sputtered in shock.

"You expect us to eat this?  This is not fit for humans to eat.  Everyone, home.  I'll cook some curry chicken noodles for supper.  Up!"

And just like that we quietly shuffled off behind her, thankful and bemused.

That was a life-changing moment for me.  From that moment on, I did not resent my father as much.  Well, not for the same reasons anyway.  At the moment, I even felt a certain sympathy for him.  And for once, I felt a spark of kinship that had nothing to do with the accident of blood that linked us.  

I, too, had been at the other end of my grandmother's acerbic, bitter tongue many, many times. Daily.  Sometimes hourly.  She could flay you faster and more to the quick than the albino chappy in that cheesy Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

I still did not want to become my grandmother's kitchen serf but right there and then, I stopped being afraid.  I was no longer fearful of being inferior to my father.  I stopped putting formally trained "chefs" on a pedestal.  If my father was a result of these training then God forbid I ever followed in his footsteps.

That my grandmother was also formally trained gave me some pause for thought.  I deduced that the difference between them was talent.  Grandmother had it so regardless of training, she would always be a culinary genius.  My father didn't.

I was not sure if I did but I was no longer afraid.  Nor did I care.  I simply like to cook. And eat. It did not matter how I achieved those two desires.  The journey was now cleared of self-imposed obstacles.

For once, the sins of my father had freed me.

For all the shite and misery he caused me, this was the one thing I was thankful towards him for.  

Thank you, Dad, for being a shitty cook.