SINGAPORE - When Madam Esther Lee Peh Ing was alive, she lived in a silent world, unable to speak or hear. But her love for her children, though unspoken, was loud and clear.
Born with hearing loss, Madam Lee would spend hours chopping and dicing away in the kitchen to fill her children’s tummies with her delicious Hakka and Nonya dishes.
Chicken curry made using her homemade spicy rempah (spice paste), pork belly and bean curd sticks braised in a savoury brown sauce – this is among dozens of her recipes that her children would preserve in a cookbook after her death in 2022.
The youngest of the brood, Ms Cheung Siew Li, recalled how she would playfully tease her sister and two brothers over the affection of their mother. One way to do that was with food.
“I used to be very mischievous. On some days, I would tell my mother to cook braised pork; and during dinner time, when the dishes are revealed to be my favourites, I would tell my three siblings that I’m her favourite child,” said Ms Cheung, 51, group chief patient officer at National University Health System.
In 2017, the Cheung family was crushed when Madam Lee, then aged 83, was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Ms Cheung and her siblings – Rachel, a teacher, as well as brothers Rick, a retiree, and Kwong Wai, a pilot, whose ages range from the 50s to 60s – felt an urge to preserve her legacy and their memories of her.
“This prompted us to ask her about her recipes, especially our personal favourites,” Ms Cheung wrote in the foreword of the cookbook that was simply titled Aunty Peh Ing’s Recipe Book.
The book features 33 dishes ranging from soups to seafood dishes, and two recipes for rempah and rice wine made the Madam Lee way. The book, with a print run of 300 copies, was published in February at a cost of about $13,000.
Madam Lee was born in Bahau, a small town in Negeri Sembilan state on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia.
She first met her husband Aaron Cheung Chun San, a Shanghai-born man who was teaching at a school for the hearing-impaired in Singapore in the 1950s. Like Madam Lee, he was deaf, having lost his hearing due to a bout of meningitis when he was a child. The couple were also speech-impaired.
They were matchmade by her cousin, and Mr Cheung travelled from Singapore to Bahau to see Madam Lee for the first time. They married a year later.
Mr Cheung died in 2009 from pneumonia.
Asked how it was like growing up in a family with parents who have speech and hearing disabilities, Ms Cheung told The Straits Times she and her siblings had to learn to be the voice for their parents with whom they communicated via sign language.
“For example, if we wanted to eat fish, we would use our hand to signal a fish swimming through the water; or if we wanted to eat chicken, we would signal an open beak,” said Ms Cheung.
“Growing up, we also had to be the ones to pick up the telephone and help our parents to communicate with our relatives from Malaysia by translating what both parties were trying to tell each other.”
Ms Cheung said she was grateful for the support provided by relatives and cousins who were staying with them back then.
“If we didn’t understand what our parents were trying to say, my relatives were always there to help translate for us,” she said, adding that she also learnt English, Chinese and Hakka from them.
Even so, moments of self-consciousness still seeped in during her teenage years as she grappled with her parents’ disabilities.
Ms Cheung said she felt embarrassed that her parents were different from others and tried to hide that fact from her classmates by not allowing them to go to her house.
“It was only later on in life that I started to realise that my parents are actually quite an amazing bunch. They did not choose to be disabled but they chose to make the best out of it,” she said.
Describing her mother as a “gentle and industrious” figure, Ms Cheung said she was always looking out for others.
Even when she visited people at their homes, said Ms Cheung, her mother would help them with household chores or entertain their young children, making herself useful wherever she went.
Despite not having gone to school all her life, Madam Lee was also a resourceful and creative person.
“She learnt different skills with her hands and could do electrical repairs, woodwork, plumbing and so on. Once, we had an umbrella and one of the spokes broke. She unpicked the cloth and made two pouches out of it,” said Ms Cheung.
Before Madam Lee died in 2022, Ms Cheung took three months off work when she was working at St Luke’s Hospital to spend time with her mother.
Ms Cheung said she missed her mother’s presence as she was someone with whom she could joke and admire hot Korean idols together while watching K-dramas.
The former director of care and integration at St Luke’s Hospital said she has given away 180 copies of her mother’s recipe book to friends and relatives, while the rest have been donated to the hospital for its fundraising drive.
The book is not for sale but members of the public can get their hands on one if they donate $250 or more to the hospital via https://www.giving.sg/donate/campaign/legacy-of-love to raise funds for the less-privileged families and patients who are in need.
Ms Cheung said she decided to donate the recipe books to St Luke’s, where she worked for 16½ years, because of the exceptional care her mother received at the hospital.
Since Madam Lee’s death, the Cheung siblings do not meet for meals as regularly as before. But when they do, they would prepare dishes that remind them of their mother.
One such dinner happened last week, just a week before Mother’s Day.
Ms Cheung and her eldest brother Rick filled the table with dishes such as assam pedas, braised pork with sea cucumber and sayur lodeh (vegetables cooked in coconut milk).
Her favourite? Braised pork with sea cucumber.
“This is one dish that would remind me of the time I spent together with my mother in the kitchen preparing the dishes,” said Ms Cheung.
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Homemade with love: Siblings publish Hakka and Nonya cookbook with late mum's recipes - The Straits Times
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