When my son was younger, he used to call bak chor mee “the noodle with the noisy spoon.” He said it because I would always tap my spoon lightly against the bowl while mixing the vinegar and chilli through the noodles, a habit I never realised I carried with me from Singapore until I heard the sound echo inside our apartment kitchen overseas.
At first, I cooked Singaporean food because I missed it. The winters here felt too quiet without the clatter of hawker centres, without the smell of sambal drifting through humid air. I spent weekends searching for substitutes in unfamiliar supermarkets — using flat parsley when I could not find Chinese celery, or making laksa with curry paste that never tasted entirely right.
But somewhere between rushed weeknight dinners and Sunday mornings making kaya toast at home, the meals stopped being only about me.
They became a way for my children to understand a country they barely remember.
My daughter knows Singapore through fragments: the sweetness of Milo stirred into hot milk, rice cooker steam clouding the kitchen windows, the smell of garlic and shallots frying before dinner. Sometimes she asks why our food smells different from her classmates’ lunches. I never know how to answer without turning it into a lesson, so I usually just tell her that every home carries its own smell.
Food became our quiet language for belonging.
Living abroad has also changed the way I think about food itself. I used to see certain dishes simply as everyday comfort meals, but distance has a way of sharpening your attention to small rituals and familiar tastes. Over time, I found myself reading more stories from other expatriates navigating the same quiet homesickness through cooking, looking for reminders that these experiences of identity, migration, and food are rarely ours alone.
You can explore more reflections like these at expateat.com, where food becomes part of the larger conversation about belonging overseas.
There are things I cannot fully give them from abroad. They will probably never know what it feels like to queue downstairs for supper in slippers during a thunderstorm, or how comforting fluorescent hawker centre lights can feel after a long day. But perhaps memory does not always begin with place. Sometimes it begins with repetition.
A bowl of chicken rice on a rainy evening. Sambal carefully packed into freezer containers. Pandan tied into knots before slipping into coconut rice.
Small things, repeated often enough, until they become home for someone else too.
