Every weekend, your father would labor away, alone, in your family’s kitchen, accompanied only by the solitary hiss of the simmering pot and gentle swirl of steam rising from the rice cooker. Now, so many years later, you finally understand why.

Salt grains tumble and dance as you work a whole chicken vigorously with fine sea salt in your new kitchen. You submerge it in boiling water with beautifully golden ginger and mellow green onion, and carefully watch the submerged bird poach for exactly eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds. Just as your father taught you.

Once your egg-shaped timer dings, you turn off the heat and submerge the chicken immediately in an ice bath. You do this with care, knowing you’re preparing one of the most famed dishes of Singapore, perhaps the world. Perhaps you do this with some nostalgia from childhood days long gone, but that’s okay, lah. They say that nostalgia nourishes the soul, anyways.

Your mind drifts back to your childhood. Afternoons lazily spent outdoors in the Clementi Mall Hawker Centre, as its faded sign weakly proclaims. The orange sign has Chinese text in ugly green blocks underneath its English name, but you struggle reading it because you’ve been refusing to learn Chinese since you were three years old. Not that you care, of course. A glorious collection of smells from the hawkers’ stalls blend together, lifted wetly by the hot humid heat of the afternoon Singaporean sun. You notice the gossiping aunties nearby smile widely at you. Wah, your cheeks so rosy ah, they exclaim, Singaporean tang thick on their tongue. It’s a compliment; you offer a polite smile back. Your Ba (father) has told you to wait while he went to buy food from your favorite hawker stall: browned duck rice with tea-smoked egg. You peer around anxiously, though knowing you shouldn’t worry.

He should be back any moment now…

You barely notice yourself moving to prepare the fragrant rice. Almost automatically, you wash the grains until the water runs clear. You’ve taken care to save the flavorful fat from your tender poached chicken cooling on the dirty marble countertop. You sauté the fat with oil and garlic before using it to drench the rice inside your rice cooker. Toss thick slices of ginger and whole garlic cloves into the rice cooker before pushing “start.” You give in to the tiredness from standing for so long. I’ll rest, you tell yourself, just for a while.

You see a green bridge. It’s heavy with rust and stories decades long gone. The brief caws of magpies echo from the surrounding trees. They’ve been there for as long as you can remember. Grasped in your small hand is a bag of day-old-bread for the fish below in the river as you and your father slowly walk towards the bridge’s railing.

Time lies still. It has no meaning—not here.

He tells you to pinch small pieces of bread and toss them into the water below. You glance at Ba as you see small ripples emerge near the surface of the river. The river fish have come. Hm? He smiles at you. His wrinkles accentuate his eyes, pools of kindness forged by years of hardship and suffering and loss you know you can never imagine. Wow, you breathe, your voice filled with wonder. The river turtles, so rarely seen, have come to eat, too.

You’re jolted awake by the unnecessarily hurried beeping of your rice cooker. Each grain seems spun from the very same sunbeams that now make their way through your blinds and onto your countertop, golden with the flavors of ginger and garlic and chicken. Slowly but steadily, your knife allows beautifully unsymmetrical pieces of succulent chicken onto your plate with a quiet certainty. You scoop a mound of steaming golden rice too, garnish proudly with specks of green that whisper of open hawker markets, warm Clementi breeze.

You stare at the meal before you thoughtfully. Thick curls of vapor rise from the chicken and stretch towards the ceiling as if reaching for the very heavens themselves.

But, just as you lift your fork to eat, you notice a soft beeping in the background. Muffled at first, then intensifying sharply as it grows faster and louder until you can’t help but wonder—

A wave of dizziness washes over you. Your kitchen begins to spin violently, a sharp clatter crescendoing as your bowls and plates and utensils collide.

Flashes of a green bridge.

BEEP

Your father’s smile.

Beep.

The hawker centre, brimming with life.

beep.

It’s as if every memory is desperately trying to anchor you, to help you stay.

But it’s to no avail. The ground seems to slip away, and soon you’re falling. Falling through time and space, falling through layers of memories and moments and people that define who you are.

And darkness engulfs you.

* * *

You open your eyes to a bright white light shining upon your face and are surprised to see that its source is a single lamp, swaying gently above. You’re no longer in your kitchen but splayed in a small bed flush against the mildewed wall of a room that vaguely echoes fear and sadness and pain and loss. A man by your bed sighs deeply as he disconnects a thin wire from his head that seems to tether you both to this moment and to the now faintly beeping machine at your side.

Sensing your gaze, he immediately pulls himself towards you. Ba, he sobs. It’s a term so familiar yet so distant. Ba, you’re awake!

You weakly push him away. Why does he call you father?

He staggers back, shock tinged with weary resignation. Stares at you with drowning eyes. Soon a small plate of meat and grain is brought in, placed gently before you, hands trembling.

Ba, he pleads, voice cracking. Please tell me you remember.

The smell reminds you of something familiar, something from many many weekends long ago.

You can’t quite place it, though.