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Nicole Tarulevicz, Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, University of Illinois Press, 2014. 224 pgs.

Anyone who has been to Singapore or Malaysia, or at least frequented a Singaporean or Malaysian restaurant, is familiar with the word makan. This Malay verb, meaning “to eat” also refers to the social activity of dining together. In the Singaporean context, makan is usually done outside, either in a hawker centre or an air-conditioned restaurant or café. Unless you’re close to some Singaporean hosts, it will be harder to have a home dining experience compared to in other societies, and this book partly explains why.

Like many other humanities academics, Nicole Tarulevicz, an associate professor in History and Classics at the University of Tasmania, Australia, sees food in relations to society, power, and identity. Her book looks at how food in Singapore is connected to heritage, family, and body.

Singapore is one of several islands in the Straits of Malacca. Derided as a “little red dot” by former Indonesian president B.J. Habibie, the republic wears the title with pride as it is the most advanced nation in Southeast Asia, if not the richest. Following the decline of Hong Kong as an international city in this century, Singapore has become virtually the only place in Asia that supports Western business with well-built infrastructure, an English-speaking population, and robust security to support the business climate.

Like Hong Kong, Singapore was once a British port. The island had been an international port for more than a thousand years, starting with the Buddhist empire of Srivijaya centred in the island of Sumatera in modern Indonesia. Then it became a transit island for royal refugees, from the last Srivijayans to Malacca, and then the Malaccans to Johor, both in modern Malaysia.

When Stamford Raffles, who administered Java and Bengkulu in southwestern Sumatra (memorialised as Bencoolen in Singapore), dived into Johor’s succession dispute to grab the island, only about 1000 people lived there, both Malays and Chinese. Raffles died in England two years after Britain formally colonised Singapore.

Almost a century later, Singapore became an integral part of the British Empire thanks to a piece of cooling technology, the refrigerator. It enabled the import of Australian meat and dairy, and the Singapore Cold Storage Company was founded in 1903. In 1937 the company founded the first dairy farm in the tropics and sold packaged milk and even ice cream, branded Magnolia. To this day both Magnolia (as milk, no longer ice cream) and Cold Storage supermarket remain household names in Singapore.

By this pre-war period, Singapore had become the midpoint link between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, specifically between Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Hong Kong to the northeast and Sydney to the southeast. The Japanese occupation was the only time the port experienced famine in recorded history.

Limited self-governance began in 1959 under the People’s Action Party (PAP), the same year the Cold Storage Company introduced the supermarket concept of self-serve shopping. Street food was institutionalised as hawker centres in the 1970s, beginning with the opening of Newton Food Centre in 1971. Air conditioning—another cooling technology credited by independence figure Lee Kuan Yew as the greatest invention—was installed in the food courts by 1985, and the centres would become the place of many meanings for Singaporeans. It is a symbol of meritocracy, where the children of hawkers could become doctors and ministers. It is a community space missed by overseas Singaporeans. It is the pride of Singapore that welcomes international celebrities and chefs to sample the hometown favourites.

Eating, Not Cooking
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The melting pot stopped being an acceptable political idea by the late 20^th century, as it implied assimilation (unacceptable for the Left) and even intermarriage (undesirable for the Right). Western governments advocated multiculturalism instead, and in 1992 the Singaporean government stated that multiculturalism was more suitable for an Asian society. As the author has it, multiculturalism embraces past differences while denying present differences.

A Singaporean, therefore, has two kinds of classification. The first is race or ethnicity—a Chinese, and Indian, or a Malay. Then informally, a cosmopolitan or a heartlander. The cosmopolitan speaks academic English and probably learns another international language, is interested in befriending foreigners, and makes good use of their Singapore passport, reputedly the strongest in the world. A heartlander lives away from the downtown (but remains connected by the excellent public transit system), speaks Singaporean English mixed with their mother tongue, and is mostly interested on local issues.

Both cosmopolitan and heartlander Singaporeans describe their society as rojak, a fruit salad of separate ingredients in a same bowl. This multiculturalism, however, hardly extends to the new migrants, the South Asian labourers who build the constantly expanding subway stations and malls, as well as Southeast Asian domestic helpers who take care of Singaporean children and seniors. There are no places for them in the hawker centres and the multiculturalism politics.

Singaporeans dine out, almost to the point that they might explain to foreign acquaintances that cooking dinner is unnecessary. Family meals are affordable, especially at hawker centres, the streets are well lit and safe at nights, and it’s more efficient to order and sit down than cook from scratch.

The kitchen itself has been overlooked throughout the history of modern Singapore, and a couple of picture books examined by Tarulevicz from the late 2000s omitted the kitchen as a part of home living. This is because the kitchen is always the place of Others in Singapore, from the Indian cook boy in colonial times to the Southeast Asian maid of today. Unlike in say, Australia, it’s not the place for the family to cook, bake, or prepare drinks while chatting. In Southeast Asia, not just Singapore, the kitchen is a place for working instead of recreation. Some houses in Malaysia and Indonesia maintain two kitchens—a dry one with refrigerator and oven, and a wet one where the assistant prepares daily meals and drinks.

It’s more the case in Singapore, where the majority live in shared buildings—whether it be a Housing and Development Board (HDB) public housing flat or a private apartment, often called a condo. Some designers even say that their clients need no more than a microwave oven and a rice cooker for their kitchen space. The rest, from dinner to dessert, can be obtained in restaurants or hawker centres.

Makan with the World
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One recurring problem with this book is its preoccupation with textbooks and cookbooks from the 1950s to the 1980s. Obviously it is illuminating to chart the changing official views of Singaporean authorities, from the post-war government attempting to instruct European and Asian women in cooking and housekeeping, to the PAP government attempting to mould Singaporeans into tidy, handy, and responsible citizens. But unfortunately, the author prefers to dwell on these books to argue how conservative and colonised Singapore always been.

Singapore is always conservative, but the views of mid-century books, amusing they are, do not represent modern values, and it’s unlikely that they influence the worldview of 21^st century Singapore in any way.

An Anglophile Singaporean might look for the English dishes of jam tarts, spotted dick, and curry (the title of the fifth chapter) not from reading old cookbooks, but from TikTok videos, or going back ten years, from TV programmes or blogs. Conversely, a Singaporean may have coffee with condensed milk in the morning and oat milk in the evening, as well as runny half-boiled egg in the morning and onsen egg in the evening and think it’s all about preferences. What began as colonial dishes have ended up as Singapore’s own specialities.

The book is redeemed at the end with the provocatively titled chapter “Food Sluts and the Marketing of Singaporean Cuisine”. Singapore has established itself as a tourism spot since the 1980s, not as a tropical paradise but a modern Asian city rivalling Hong Kong. Hawker centres are not a hindrance but rather an asset, a clean but still adventurous place for tourists to sample Singaporean food. The cringy “food slut” phrase comes from Jonathan Gold’s Saveur article in 2007, about how savouring the hawker centre’s food would turn one into a sweaty, breathy, and messy person. A different kind of journalism from a different time.

The point is, by the late 2000s and the early 2010s Singapore had become a hot destination for gastronomy tourism. Tarulevicz helpfully tells us that gastronomy is about eating, while the culinary is about cooking, and we’ve seen that Singapore cares only about the former. At the time of publication, the tourists had taxi drivers and books as guides. These days we have fast mobile internet, bridging the gap of knowledge between the locals and the tourists.

The book was released at the end of two crises: the end of the Great Recession and public displeasure at PAP’s leadership, fuelled by professional migration especially from the People’s Republic of China. Along with job competition and personal disputes there were also cultural clashes, as the migrants refused to tolerate the smells of curries prepared by their Indian and Malay neighbours. Dissident blogger mrbrown (Lee Kin Mun) became the voice of displeased Singaporeans who represented both the cosmopolitans and the heartlanders.

And yet, the government prevailed. Lee entered mainstream entertainment as an actor, and blogging had lost its bite by the mid-2010s. Singaporean new generation of dissenters disassociated themselves from the older Chinese men, and amid censorship and internal frictions that affected the activists, Singapore’s profile as a tourist destination and even a new home for migrants has only increased over the last decade.

Despite the interesting title, this is an academic book and Tarulevicz does not include her personal experiences of eating her curry and kway (rice cake) in Singapore, which would have been interesting, as her Singaporean friends never understood why she couldn’t eat seafood. This is a theory-heavy book on the critical observations of food and power in Singapore and is designed specifically for academic purposes. The author’s next work will be on the cultural history of food safety in Singapore.

How to cite: Rustan, Mario. “The Makan Republic—Nicole Tarulevicz’s Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/28/curries-and-kway/.

Mario Rustan is a writer and reviewer living in Bandung, Indonesia. [All contributions by Mario Rustan.]

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