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Discussed: racism
what to bring to the Portuguese potluck
when they ask for a dish
from my hometown?
an El Jannah Family Feast
a halal snack pack
Tim Tams from the Arnott’s factory
near Prospect Reservoir or
sweet and sour (bolota) pork?
chao chao rice apparently
is a clandestino staple
it would be instantly recognisable
provocative, somewhat embarrassing
like an culinary 69
alternatively: Singapore noodles
if the Intermarché has curry powder
bitoque with black bean sauce
if I feel like taking the piss
recently I learnt that dim sims and
dim sum* are not the same thing
food is emotional;
it goes inside you
that’s how I’ll know
what to bring
*whatever I want;
a choice that touches the heart
Parmesan is the fish sauce of white people
Congee is the Dickensian gruel of Asian cuisine. Century eggs are the blue cheese of the Chinese, spectral as the veins of a Victorian child’s inner arm, milky and stinking of the fungal earth: night-green segments splayed into dark mandalas, glowering, flowering, sulphuric. Both umamis can be true though I have always favoured the funkier, the fermented, the floppy mouthfeel of tossed jellyfish over surf club scollops, the slip, slop, snap of tripe and tendons over steak and boiled veg or whatever it is you people eat. I choose Chinese succulence: the spartan protein of boiled squid, the vermillion glow of mapo tofu whose clever peppers drug the tongue. I choose the monsoon communion of durian, uncle-shucked and split among family, the custard and the saline; I choose wok-fried Spam with sambal snake beans and an 8-cup rice cooker set to WARM in perpetuity, incorporeal surplus for hungry ghosts and other kin who dive for the eyeballs of gently steamed snapper like sun-browned swimmers for pearls. We are the fruits of our ancestors’ labour; we become what we eat. Fried ice cream was a psyop. The White Australia policy had exemptions for chefs.
Troy Wong is an Australian poet born to Singaporean parents. His work, written on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land, has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Island, The Marrow, Palette Poetry, The Suburban Review, and the anthology Solid Air. He is the winner of The Nomad Review “Fragility” Poetry Prize, an Australian Poetry Slam National Finalist, and the founder and creative director of Bread & Butter Poetry Slam. He can be found on Instagram and TikTok at @troyghw
Locative Magazine 