Posted by TW Lim

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-109-cousin

This is Cousin Henry. I met him for the first time yesterday, and neither of us is young. Cousin Henry is a professional poker player, and he was in Singapore scoping out the scene. He’d heard I was in town, so my sister brought us both to Springleaf Prata for lunch – the place that gave us the Original Murtaburger, Däs Pratwurst, and the Salted Egg Prawn prata.

Cousin Henry’s spent most of his life in Shanghai and Sydney, ten months in Hamburg, and a few days in Malaysia. But it still surprises me when he doesn’t know what roti prata is. My dad was one of 14, and most of his siblings were prolific themselves. Cousins rolled out of Muar like Katamari, picking up spouses and children on the way north to KL, or south to Singapore. There are enough of them for statistical soundness, and the sample is over 80% Malaysian. Maybe we don’t pass our food on in our genes.

We should order him anything, he says, “as long as there’s some meat.” Something about those syllables, or the subject, brought Henry’s accent out – gently sibilant, waves upon a pebbled beach. We get him masala chicken and coin prata. The prata are the size of small coasters, five to an order, crunchy on the outside, resistant within.

Henry’s mum was my dad’s older sister, one of two siblings who went to join the Cultural Revolution. I have just enough memories of her to mistrust them. The revolution needed her to be a nurse, and then a doctor, and eventually it wore thin. She finagled a visa to visit Australia and brought her son. There he stayed, while she returned to Shanghai.

It was 1987. Henry was 23. He had neither papers nor English, but he had the phone number of another aunt, who lived in Sydney. I have this photo of my dad as a young man – he and Henry share a jaw, a hairline, cheeks planed flat by a clean cut kind of hunger. I pictured that face at a bus stop in Sydney, looking for a payphone.

The prata come. He eats like a stranger to food. I’ve never before seen someone puzzled by a prata. They’re simple, but interactive. You tear them apart, the ragged edges embrace the gravy. Cutlery is an impediment, primarily there for serving.

We trade biographies. Henry’s is picaresque. Paperless in Sydney, he talked his way into a job with a clothier. The interview involved lying about his skills, being found out, and being given the job anyway. He got asylum after Tiananmen, but decided he didn’t like the offer. Too much uncertainty about the terms, five years residence and then what?

Henry decided to hedge. He’d met a German girl in Sydney, and she was going back to Hamburg. She said immigration would be a cinch. He went. Jobs in a mustard factory, in a 24-hour Burger King on the Reeperbahn. He found he didn’t like the Germans – “emotionally quite different from the Australians” – he said. Unrelatedly, his relationship was tanking. So Henry went back to Sydney and his shears. Later on, Henry tells me he’s never told anyone about his German fling. Our conversation makes me wonder how many people knew he was in Germany at all.

When I was in high school, my family went to London to see yet another aunt. On the same trip, we went to see a friend of my dad’s, in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable suburb. I remember wondering why we went, why my mum was so tense. Years later, I found out that we’d been visiting my dad’s first wife.

I watch Henry explore his plate. Like my dad, he seems not to pay much attention to food. The prata are a pile of piecework to get through. But my dad could be relied on to inhale whatever was on his plate, and I wonder if Henry’s uncomfortable or merely lost. I wonder what would make him feel at home – fish slices in wine sauce, or a meat pie and a beer, eaten outdoors. We’re sitting in a cut price wonderland of fairy lights, Deepavali tinsel, and unscrubbed floors. The cooks are scowling at the griddle. I’ve never seen a happy employee in a Springleaf, except the mascot on their logo.

Back in Sydney, Henry wound up running the cutting room first for one fashion brand, and then another. He traded shears for spreadsheets, then for a CAD program and cutting machines. Just once, 20 years ago, I used a pair of real tailor’s shears on a proper cutting table, and it was one of the most sensuous things I’d ever done.

And then somehow Henry decided to play poker professionally, trading silk and linen for baize. Officially, he became a custom fabricator of soft goods for film: backdrops and camera covers for filmmakers, so they could walk around filming in the rain, every piece of it custom work. But the fabrication business was, itself, a cover.

Eventually he comes to an accommodation with his prata: he piles pieces of chicken on the coins, and drowns them in sauce, then folds the prata over with his fork and spoon. A prata is not a taco, until it is. I don’t know if it’s his upbringing in China that prevents him from eating this with his fingers, but it’s all I can do not to interject to suggest that the utensils are optional. It takes a circus act with tableware to bring the prata-taco to his mouth.

There’s something intensely timely about Henry’s life. He couldn’t have lived it except in the few decades when he actually did, emerging from the ashes of Mao’s China into the toddler tantrums of the 21st century. I cannot shake the sense that I should know him. We are both fuckups, misfits, muddlers-along. Our fathers are not so distinguished that we can be failsons. A list of things I have been paid to do: theatre tech, advertising, cooking, pouring wine, interviewing dentists, babysitting video crews, all-purpose fixer, writing documentation.

The walls in Springleaf are covered with feats of concatenation: The Pratonomiyaki! Prata Al Fredo! The Prataco does not yet appear. The menu was written by teenagers with the munchies, but teenagers have always had the munchies, and only in the last few decades have they eaten teriyaki, prata, and spaghetti in the same day. Springleaf’s prata remain flaky, the ginger tea reliably strong. What else is a prata cook to do?

At Sin Ming prata, or to give it its full name, Sin Ming Roti Prata Faisal & Aziz Curry Muslim Food. “Plaster” prata in the bottom left, then clockwise, fish curry, coin prata, and chicken masala. The coins are maybe a little sturdier than at Springleaf, but the photo gives a sense of the challenge. They’re made by taking the stretched dough, rolling it into a rope, then coiling the rope – regular prata are just folded. If you ask for an egg prata you get the egg in an envelope, “plaster” gets you the egg on the outside. Prata places are generally judged on the prata, but here the curries are actually more intricate than at the average hawker stall, because they’re also a full-on biryani place.

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-109-cousin