Fantabulous Nonya cookbook author Sharon Wee dishes on the new edition of Growing Up In A Nonya Kitchen

Courtesy of Author

About the Author:

Sharon Wee was born and raised in Singapore, graduating from the National University of Singapore. She worked for Mars Confectionery in Hong Kong and China in the 1990s. She has an MBA from New York University and resides in Manhattan where she trained at the French Culinary Institute. Her recipes have been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post and she has given interviews about her Peranakan heritage. She chronicles her food experiences on Instagram @nonya.global. Sharon frequently returns to Singapore. 

Courtesy of Author

Synopsis:

This is a cookbook, and an intimate memoir, giving readers a sense of what it felt like to grow up in a Peranakan Chinese family ― descendants of local womenfolk and the earliest Chinese settlers to Southeast Asia.

As a fifth-generation Nonya (honorific for female Peranakans) from both sides of her family, Sharon Wee recollects her life in Singapore. She interviewed older relatives and recreated her mother’s personalized recipes, many orally passed down for generations.

Growing Up in a Nonya Kitchen was originally published in 2012. This updated edition includes revised recipes and cooking methods, with more detailed explanations and guidance for the young or unfamiliar cook to Peranakan food, spiced with a dose of humour. It also includes new contributions by subject experts on the heritage and beautiful cultural legacy of the Peranakans.

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EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Sharon. What an honour to have you. Thank you for sending me your wonderful cookbook, Growing Up In A Nonya Kitchen; it’s refreshingly novel that you’ve embedded a memoir plus cultural commentary on the world of the Peranakans that expand beyond cuisine. Why did you choose this blended approach?  

SW: When I considered publishing my book in the early 2000s, I was cognisant of the fact that there had already been a few established Peranakan cookbooks. Yet, very little was told about the significance of the food and how we ate – the moments we shared, the celebrations, the customs. 

I wove the memoir in to give readers a sense of our culture, and I revolved it around my mother’s life because she was from a vanishing generation of women whose lives focused on raising a family, keeping a home, all while being compromised in their education. Cooking was their currency. I’d like to think that this format of a cookbook memoir with headers elaborating on the dish, was not as common as what you see these days. 

Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi - a Gothic Horror Sci-fi Fantasy

 

In the distant future, humanity clusters in small villages, reduced to a medieval style of living, while monsters, demons, and vampires roam the outskirts of civilization. It’s a hard life, full of danger, witchcraft, and death – this is the world of Vampire Hunter D.

No Funeral for Nazia, interview with Taha Kehar

 No Funeral for Nazia is Pakistani journalist and writer Taha Kehar’s third and latest work of fiction. The story highlights some of the complexity in his hometown Karachi.

He speaks to Devika Misra.

TK: There are two different Pakistans, You have the Pakistan of the elite and then you have the Pakistan that is fairly steeped in middle class values.”

The Plot Twists In Singapore

Southeast Asia’s largest literary extravaganza, The Singapore Writers Festival, will be held next month. Now in its 26th edition, this year’s theme is “Plot Twist”. 

Devika Misra spoke to Festival Director Pooja Nansi about what audiences can expect at the upcoming event.

Pulitzer finalist Vauhini Vara launches her short story collection This is Salvaged.

Courtesy of W.W. Norton and Author

Synopsis

This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023).

 

A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And , in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another. 

 

Author bio.

 

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

Courtesy of Author

Award-winning writer Saras Manickam dishes about authorial ego, complicated women and race discrimination in Malaysia in My Mother Pattu

 

Courtesy of Author

About the Book

My Mother Pattu (Penguin SEA, 2023).

 

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community, and race relations.

Saras Manickam, courtesy of Sharon Bakar

About the Author

Saras Manickam won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, her story was included in the Bloomsbury anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories. 

 

Having worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, and writer, Saras Manickam’s various work experiences enabled insights into characters, and life experiences, shaping the authenticity which mark her stories. 

 

My Mother Pattu is her debut collection of stories. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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EC: Congratulations on your brilliant short story collection, My Mother Pattu. I’m delighted to see the love it’s been getting. I’ve not enjoyed a short story collection this much in a while. I’m curious: many of the stories are set in Mambang (which also means haunting/spirit). Is your Mambang a fictional town or based on a real town (e.g. Mambang di Awan, Perak)? 

 

SM:  Thank you, Elaine, for your very kind words. It’s rather affirming that My Mother Pattu resonates with readers.

 

Mambang is not a real town. It’s fictional, and therefore gives me the freedom to craft the streets, houses, places in it. It frees you up, you know what I mean?

 

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Devika Misra reports on a conversation between Rachel Heng, and some of her readers. 

Rachel Heng was born and raised in Singapore. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and her debut novel, Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018), was much praised. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA. The Great Reclamation, her acclaimed new novel, explores Singapore’s rapid transformation from third to first world in just two generations. At its heart the story is one of unrequited love - a doomed childhood romance and a lost way of life, as both the novel’s protagonist Ah Boon, and his nation, come of age.