1.
          Here, food is equated with love. It was like this when I was young as well, early weekend morning breakfasts. My father or mother returning from the market laden with plastic bags full of sticky rice dumplings filled with meat and mushrooms, steaming soups separated from noodles to ensure firmness, fresh soy milk from the tired looking corner shop, fried Indian bread with a thin layer of sugar or potato curry, and beignets stuffed with sweet peanut paste. Later in the day there would be patient broths simmering away on the stove, their ingredients added one by one in order of cooking time, suspect looking salted vegetables and meticulously cleaned pork loins. There would be hot rice in the rice-cooker, waiting for the click of cooked and for the plug to be pulled out. Even now, conversations long-distance end with a declaration of love and inquiries after the health of the kitchen, "do you need me to send you a package? What would you like?"

          Here, there is fresh bread in the morning, pots of jam to be taken out of the fridge every day, five different kinds of yoghurt and as much of the warm comfort of coffee as is needed. Love here is a furtive indulgence before a meal, a tease for the main course: half a sausage or a mouthful of fried potatoes. Love becomes pasta al dente, the smell of garlic and parsley in the pan, the rising of a cake in the oven, the blood red of a Sicilian orange in full season. Love is also laboring in the sunlit pantry, hands with papery skin kneading dough for bread, knowing which glasses are for wine and which are for water, blue bowls in the morning for tea and the green wood and glass pepper grinder present at the table at all times.

2.
          Like love, food in denial is also remembering the thin dark girls with their containers of bread and water. A time for abstinence. From honey and milk. Like the grey hearse with its back door and the man nodding off in the passenger seat. The vertiginous feeling of riding against the picture windows of a bus. The trees that are so close, so close. Their branch tips turning pink and red with exertion. Colour that seeps from the crown to the root. The exits grow smaller and smaller, and my life is asleep beside me.

3.
          I am sitting at the dining table across from my grandmother. Our meal has finished and I am tearing the inner seam of a star fruit, its flesh sweet and yellowed. Coming here has changed my appetite. I am unused to all this meat, to the pieces of fat flavouring soups and sauces. My tongue has betrayed me and become as foreign as my wild hair and imperfect skin.

4.
          The salesgirl had asked me,
          "Are you from here?"
          My mind raced, what did she mean by that? Was I from the streets surrounding the city centre, was I from the peninsula insinuating itself onto this island?
          "I mean are you visiting?" she clarifies.
          "No, I'm from here. Do I look like a tourist?"
          "You don't look like you're from here."
          I glance up to her green-lidded eyes and her carefully dyed hair. I want to tell her that I don't taste the same, that my tongue, my ears, my eyes betray my foreignness constantly.

5.
          Things to note: the pale thin girls from the suburbs in their uniforms of skinny pants and black tops, with their long thin hair. That salesgirl whose care in putting on my belt and turning up the hems of my pants made me want to ask her whether she had someone. The thick acrid smell of red earth just before the rain, the large brown ant tapping its way across my wrist. The tanned carelessly beautiful chinese woman on the subway with her mixed children.

6.
          Can a person change this way? Or perhaps not change, but hide this stranger under her skin all her life? Having it drawn out, like blood, when the right food touches the tongue? Even now I am craving a ripe tomato, a sweet wild blueberry, the texture of an oriechette between my teeth, the blue decay of a ripe cheese, the sharp afterbite of a kir, the grainy familiarity of couscous. All my senses seem to alienate me. How had I been brought up? Am I so devoid of cultural memory that these tastes and smells were able to imprint themselves without difficulty?

          I drink a cup of water to calm myself. The taste and smells of the old fridge seep their way into my cup.

          Perhaps what I fear is knowing too well.

Joanne Leow