I have a love-hate relationship with cooking and eating food from home. It’s not even the actual food themselves, but merely attempted renditions of them. I love it because it reminds me of home, and no food beats Singaporean food. Hate because it spirals me down into a pit of missing and longing for home that I don’t have the time or capacity for.

There are nights when I crave a hot plate of hokkien mee, or a bowl of chicken rice with chilli, or laksa, or prawn mee. I then contemplate if the craving is strong enough, or worth it for me to ‘use’ one of the few packets of food paste Ma sent along with me when I came to the US. I like to keep them for the days I really need a taste of home – as a reminder to myself that it’s okay to feel out of place, or not feel like I fit in at times because, right now at least, this isn’t home.

Tonight was one of those nights. I got home from a long day of class (Tuesdays are the worst, I have a studio class from 9am-4pm then art history from 6-9pm), and there had been this nagging emptiness within me for a while. Final critiques are coming up soon, but I just knew I was not going to get any work done tonight even if I tried. I took a shower and laid in bed. I let myself be sad for a while – I phrase it that way because even though I do recognize the importance and significance of emotions, there are times when they just get in the way and if I can help it, putting them away helps functionality. But then again, there are those days that emotions just eat you up, and you have no choice but to just be engulfed and hope and pray you wake up feeling better the next day.

The idea of not going home for winter has been on my mind a lot lately. With Thanksgiving just over, and it being a huge deal in America – classmates and roommates going home and seeing their families/dogs/cats and eating food and hanging out at their favorite coffee shops (American coffee shops though, not our kopitiams – That, I miss), it just makes home seem all the more far away. I thought about how nice it would be to fly home for a week and come back. Where would I go, what would I do? I made a list:

1. Eat

• Ma’s (and lately Pa’s, he just picked up cooking) homecooked 咸菜鸭汤 kiam chye ah tng (salted vegetables duck soup), ba zhang (glutinous rice dumplings), homemade porridge, and all her desserts
• Hawker centres for hokkien mee, laksa (with lots of hum), nasi lemak, bak chor mee, ice kachang, cheng tng, tau huay, prawn mee, satay, chai tau kuay. So. Many. More. Washed down with Teh Peng!
• Penang Kitchen for duck mee sua
• Sushi Tei for green tea soba
• Din Tai Fung for xiao long bao, hot and sour soup, chicken broth la mian
• Beer Thai for dou miao, yum woonsen, tom yum soup
• Island Creamery for burnt caramel, ping pong milo and pulau hitam ice-cream
• The Roti Prata House at upper Thomson. For prata.
• Zion Road Food Center for seafood soup
• Daily Scoop at Holland Village for avocado ice-cream
• Dessert Bowl at Serangoon Gardens for mango dessert
• Jooseng Teochew Porridge at Cheong Chin Nam Road for porridge

2. Do

• Sleep in my bed
• Meals with my family
• Play with my dog, Buddy
• Walks with Mum and Dad – MacRitchie Tree Top, Upper Peirce, Henderson Wave, Durian Trail, Punggol Water Way
• Hang out with the sister
• Go see my grandparents
• Cell and service at church
• Cycle at east coast park for a couple hours
• Catch up and hang out with friends whom I really really really miss and in some alternate universe we would all be teleported home at the same time
• Bask in glorious heat and light either tanning, or just in general

But since I can’t teleport, and flying is too expensive and too long, I decided it was time to use that last pack of prawn mee paste.