Tribute to the Cosmopolitan

Masters of the modern universe search for authenticity

By Judith Huang

image from Ethos Books

The Proper Care of Foxes
Wena Poon
Ethos Books (2009) / 200 pages / SGD20

In an age in where “I friend you” has morphed from Singlish schoolgirl olive branch to globally recognized verb phrase, where young executives are whipped from one metropolis to another in the space of a week, and where the geeks inherit the earth, Wena Poon’s luminous prose provides a voice that helps us make sense of it all.

Her concerns are timeless – love, death, kindness, cruelty, friendship, family and loss. But her voice is distinctive: defiant, confident, quirky and devastatingly, relentlessly hip. In her latest collection of short stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, she seems to be self-consciously transnational – an intention immediately obvious from the shopping list of the world’s major cities on the contents page. If her debut collection, the well-received Lions in Winter, was a tribute to the Singapore “heartlander”, then Foxes is its natural companion: a tribute to the “cosmopolitan”.

Here is a writer who is fluent in the feel and thought of an impressively broad range of worldviews – the dim cynicism of the expatriate photojournalist, the despairing decadence of the scion of New England Brahmins, the frenetic workaholism of the high-flying Hong Kong accountant, the cosy antiquarianism of the middle-class English retiree. Despite their closeness to stereotype, her characters defy easy classification. They have the weight of authenticity – instantly recognizable from cursory experience, and yet infused with depth and compassion.

Poon’s narrators are most often on the winning side of history – they are the savvy survivors in a world where the illiterate, the old, the unconnected, the unmoneyed, are left in the dust, as it were, of a frenetic, furious new world order. Hers is unmistakably a voice of the new: a Mrs Dalloway on speed, Ecstasy and a host of as-yet-unmixed drug cocktails, fingers flying on three keypads to contact 20 social networks to all corners of the pulsing ecosystem of humanity. But her allegiances are far more complicated. Her title, after all, invokes care – and “proper care” – a kind of embrace offered gingerly to something swift, dark and subtle. Her cosmopolitan empathy is also catholic: although her project in this volume is not to narrate for the dispossessed, her self-assured characters identify with them, however briefly.

In “Vanilla Five”, a bored, privileged housewife with literary ambitions and a larger-than-life philandering novelist husband momentarily superimposes on her Japanese shopkeeper neighbour the Japanese soldiers who “killed women by jamming Chinese fireworks up their cunts and lighting them”. She does this not because she has anything against her mild-mannered neighbour, who has an unexplained white son, but because “she knew so little about Japanese people and Asia” that it was the first thing that flitted into her mind when she saw him.

And she is unflinching when she writes about evil.

Prostitutes have more freedom. At least you’re not bonded to the client for years. You don’t live in his house. He hits you, you leave. But the Filipina maid. She can’t leave. Some of them are practically under house arrest, and nobody checks on them. Nobody. Think about the possibilities. I’d like to have power over someone like that. In my house. What’d I do to them. I wouldn’t trust myself.

rants MacGregor, the jaded British photojournalist, on the Filipina maids in Hong Kong and Singapore, comparing maid abuse in the comfortable apartments of middle-class Asians to the Senegalese supermodel he photographed at a Hermes show, who spoke of her experience with female circumcision. Where the outrage of war had ceased to move him, the “horror lurking in boring places” is what draws his lens, and the author’s pen.

Poon seems determined to write a different kind of story – fully confident in itself, but poised defiantly against the kinds of writing the mainstream offers about Asia. Worshipful Orientalism, embodied in the prancing tranny New Hampshire billionaire Siegfried, is continually brought down to earth by his no-nonsense nose-to-the-grind Hong Kong university roommate Regina: the classic odd-couple story updated into a 21st-century strange dorm room encounter with the third kind. MacGregor, who laconically describes his job as “photographing scenic poverty”, and who, tellingly, flees the banality of developed Asia, still finds himself galvanized in defense of abused Filipina maids when he finds cruelty lurking unexpectedly in the pristine lives of upper- middle class Singaporeans.

And yet, Poon’s stories never tip over into the territory of the angry young Asian woman of the “empire writes back” variety. Her frustrated divorcee, Alison, says of her successful novelist husband, “I’m sick of Langley and I’m going to write a story that Langley and other stupid male authors like him, who have first names which were really last names, can never write. I am going to write Langley and his Men’s Club out of my life”. But the revenge that Poon has planned for her is far more subtle, and far more exquisite – Alison gets to run away with a sweet, confused white Japanese punk-rocker neighbour who could pass for a 22-year-old, in defiance of her social pack of “upstate Radcliffe-educated women who no longer worked”.

And, where there has been misunderstanding, she is careful to unwrap, quite deliciously, the appreciative core at the heart of the misunderstanding – for example, watch what she does with Orientalism in this particularly sublime moment in “Siegfried & Regina”. Siegfried, naked, long-haired and illegal, stands rapturous in the middle of an empty French theatre in Hanoi:

Despite the architecture there was no way she would have believed she was anywhere but in Southeast Asia. Every molecule of air was bursting with the scent of the jungle…

He turned to [Regina]. ‘The flowers in the air smell like Chanel No. 5. You think this is a replica of the Opera Garnier and of Paris, but perhaps the Opera Garnier and Paris are but a replica of this. The flowers for their perfumes came from here. This is the real thing, Reg. Not France.

And so, Siegfried and Regina, archetypes of the Decadent West and the Industrious East, somehow ventriloquise something essential about authenticity – that it is found where beauty is, that there is, really, nothing new under the sun, and to have seen it once is to have seen it all, but that it does not preclude the need to keep on seeing.

To keep on seeing seems to be Poon’s ultimate project: though unflinchingly honest, she is, at heart, optimistic that through the thicket of BlackBerry chatter, real connection – real love, real friendship, can and does come through. Poon herself elucidates this phenomenon best – in the title story, a lonely English executive wonders at the bittersweet one-night-stand he had with his Malaysian Cambridge tutorial mate:

Edward marveled again at the random connectivity of life, the enormous consequences of tiny blips of electronic mail pulsing, faster than the speed of light, through the wide world. For the past few weeks he had felt intermittently, the terror of the void. And yet the void had sent him back something: her smell, her flesh. Out of eternity he had redeemed an hour; out of the unknown he had experienced a sudden consummation in which for a few seconds the universe contracted into the smallest possible ball of anguished joy.

And so once again, the oldest questions still have the oldest answers.

published at  QLRS Vol. 9 No. 3 Jul 2010

Atlantis Syndrome

My mudderland! Under water! How??

photos from jaschocolate

Listen to the Singapore Flood Song by Mr Brown!

The Great Pleasure

“Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.”

- Mary Catherine Bateson, quoted in Courage and Calling by Gordon T. Smith.

image from Wikipedia

I love learning, was filled with an insatiable curiosity from the moment (according to my mum) I opened my eyes. In my home country, people would never ask me a question like, “Why did you choose to go to Harvard?” – our attitude in Singapore is that you don’t choose Harvard – Harvard chooses you. If you get into Harvard, you’d better jolly well go. Not that I didn’t fret over it though – I was a little insecure and intimidated, wasn’t sure whether I’d thrive in a cutthroat environment, etc, etc, but really those were fears that were quickly overruled, and very soon the little envelope was mailed back and I started to prepare myself for the adventure that would be attending the Big H. Sure, I do still kind of suffer from the occasional useless counterfactual, but five years later, I have a fistful of regrets but a large sloshing bucket of gratitude.

I guess I’m revisiting my decision because the question resurfaced again this past month, when I was traveling in the Midwest, while staying with some family friends in Indiana.

When I first got to Harvard, I realized immediately it wasn’t the place I had thought it would be – in both good and bad ways. But because it was freshman year, I guess, and because I was suffering from a good dose of culture shock, at first it seemed primarily bad. To me the name of Harvard always called to mind the Ideal University – that is, the best university in this world and age, and therefore desirable in and of itself. It didn’t matter what its underlying principles were; or even who its faculty were. The very fact that it was the best meant it was some kind of platonic University, where all truth and knowledge of the ancients and the accumulated wisdom of the world today resided.

So, I used to be the girl with the 10 year plan. I was insatiably ambitious. When I was 7 or 8, I asked my elders and teachers what the best university in the world was (at the time, they answered “Oxford or Cambridge”), and decided then and there that I would work my ass off to get there. I don’t think I was primarily motivated by arrogance; when I was 7 I had barely any notion of ranking. In fact I was bizarrely innocent of the fact that my good grades meant that I was ranked highly against my peers – I had not made the connection between doing well and “winning” in some sort of race against everyone else. I guess my parents had taught me well not to compare myself with others. Of course, the moment the school rankings were published at the bottom of our report cards my innocence was completely and ruthlessly shredded to bits.  But my point is, I didn’t aspire to go to the best university because I thought I was the best – I aspired to go to the best university because it was the best.

Of course, I was disappointed. You see, I had always imagined universities to be beautiful floating islands with ivory towers and turrets in the clouds, where knowledge was pure abstraction, freed from the dross of the quotidian. I thought of professors as rootless sages, repositories of knowledge, without interfering backgrounds or personal tics that may bias them towards one field or opinion rather than the other. I don’t know where I got that idea – perhaps I thought my small country was provincial, and that in the big countries history was taught differently, or that with a full breadth of literature (or at least the Western canon) at my feet, I would have a better grasp of human nature than from 6 literature texts for the ‘A’ levels. I was actually stunned when I realized that in the department I was interested in, the best professors were Americanists, that they all approached their fields from personal interests (I was bewildered why black professors were teaching African American studies rather than being part of the history or literature departments) rather than from some Archimedean fulcrum from which they could leverage the world. I didn’t understand why Asian American writing had to be taught by Asians, why the Shakespeare professors were white, or why I had an American Literature requirement to fulfill. I was pretty devastated, actually.

Until I realized that there was no such university as the one I had been pursuing – that there is no objective standpoint to all knowledge, at least not one which any one human being can teach. And that there IS no objective standpoint that one can arrive at, either, no matter how good a student. And that the question, “Why did you choose Harvard?” is a totally valid one. I chose Harvard because I wanted to learn, and to learn from the best. I chose English because it was my comparative advantage, and also my passion. I chose to stick it out because too many people had invested in me, from the scholarship boards to my parents to my schools to my peers to my country, for me to just quit when the going got tough. I wasn’t just representing myself here – there was all this honor at stake.

There were people in my church who warned me against going to university to study literature because I would “lose my faith”. I was so annoyed I didn’t even answer them, I just smiled and nodded. But in my heart the remark stung, and I vowed to myself, if literature makes me lose my faith, then it wasn’t a faith worth having. Because, ironically, literature has, on more than one occasion, saved my faith. And because being put through the gigantic ego-wringer that is Harvard has been more purging, more cleansing of my soul than any other institution could possibly have been. The most important thing I learned in Harvard, in fact, was that I could hold a deep-seated, decades-old belief with all the intense fury I could muster, and still be wrong. I still remember, when I was faced with fulfilling my Science B (biology/chemistry) requirement, tiptoeing rather shamefacedly into the “Human Evolution” class for the introductory lecture, wondering if my church auntie was right. She wasn’t. I didn’t end up taking that class because I was too chicken, but I ended up taking Steven Pinker’s Human Mind class, which had a lecture on evolution. It was one of the most enlightening moments of my young life. I felt like the scales were falling off my eyes.

All my life when I picked up the children’s encyclopedias that lie around the house, and stared at the ethereal pictures of the planets in them, I was struck by their beauty and wonder. And then I would look at the dates scientists had labeled on them – however many billions of years, and I would be repulsed by what I thought was a lie, constructed by (what must have been) the infernal conspiracy of world scientists which I had learned about in church, to deny God’s creation. (Yes, I was surrounded by young earth creationist propaganda in my childhood). It bewildered me how the noble white-coated scientists of my imagination, whose science and technology had put a man on the moon, could simultaneously concoct such lies to fool small children, when they daily gazed through telescopes to see such heavenly beauty. It did not make sense to me, and now I see why.

I used to camp with my friends on the offshore island of Pulau Ubin, and, away from the light pollution of the mainland, we would gaze at the stars. What we saw was probably a pale imitation of the skyscape that our earliest ancestors gazed at – the skyscape that inspired myth, mathematics, astronomy, exploration, philosophy -  but still, no matter how diminished, there is still something awe-inspiring about seeing light that has traveled so far, light that is so old. Those massive balls of fire are lightyears away – I’d think to myself – billions of billions of lightyears away….They are signals sent from the dark of the deep past, beyond history, beyond mythology, into the retina of the now, from stars that may have long burned out, but which retain, for this split second, in my perception, their luminescent fury. And it just would not latch into place with my idea of a God who is just and constant and beautiful and, above all, True, to mislead his people each and every night with paper-thin lies, lies that those stars were not in fact more ancient than the earth, more ancient than human memory. It was hypocrisy to call God true and then accuse him of purposely setting the earth up to look old when it was in fact new. It seemed like a nonsensical concept to me, and for the longest time it gnawed in the corner of my brain, a thing I refused to think about, as I repeatedly pushed it out of my mind.

But now that I’ve looked it full in the face, I see that it is not so terrible – that in fact a God who used evolution to make us is an even more logical, beautiful, consistent and terrifying God than the one the pages of creationist magazines contained. I guess the moment of truth came to me when I had finished Jerry A Coyne’s amazingly respectful, mild-mannered “Why Evolution is True”, and I walked into the Northwest Labs building for the first time and saw, hanging above me, a gigantic, mysterious skeleton. It could have been a dinosaur, or some sea-monster of Nessie proportions. But then I saw below its ribcage two tiny, unconnected bones, precariously held in place by wire, that (I imagined) must have floated in the midst of fatty flesh and blubber when this creature still roamed the seas and I thought to myself, it must be a whale. Because Coyne had explained in his book the mysterious case of the whale – descendants of land mammals who returned to the water, thus leaving vestigial, unconnected pelvis and hindlimb bones beneath its spine. “Those bones serve no function at all, ” I thought. “It must be the skeleton of a whale.”

Two weeks later, the curators of that space finally put up a plague for the skeleton, and sure enough, it was.

And in that moment, my heart leaped and something latched into place.

For the Splendor of Creation – Gustav Holst’s The Planets

adapted for Harvard Commencement

For the splendor of creation that draws us to inquire,

For the mysteries of knowledge to which our hearts aspire,

For the deep and subtle beauties which delight the eye and ear,

For the discipline of logic, the struggle to be clear,

For the unexplained remainder, the puzzling and the odd:

For the joy and pain of learning, we give you thanks, O God.

For the scholars past and present whose bounty we digest,

For the teachers who inspire us to summon forth our best,

For our rivals and companions, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise,

For the human web upholding this noble enterprise,

For the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod:

For this place and for these people, we give you thanks, O God.

—

The Church of England’s posthumous apology to Darwin:

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well

source

Abe

Abe
by Judith Huang

After a year, Abe got sick of the place.
I don’t know about you, he’d say,
But the people around here talk funny.
And sure it’s unclaimed land, but
I can see why it’s unclaimed – it’s
Deserted desert, that’s what it is.
It’s a caravan park, a shanty-town…
I’m more of city person, as you know.
Buildings, proper sewage systems.
I guess it’s a country thing.
And it’s so inconvenient, everything.
Water is a long walk away,
And people get testy when
Water is a long walk away.
The weather decides to suck,
And boom, there goes your harvest.
It’s ridiculous. Sure, you get some
Great views, but when you’re staring
At mountains, and more mountains
There’s, you know, diminishing returns.

They say things will get better
Sort of get used to the pace of life
Sort things out with the neighbours, you know,
This bit is my land and that bit
To the left is yours, draw boundaries,
Mend fences, that sort of thing.
It just takes a while to adjust, right?

There he is again, using my well.
God, why did I move here?
What the hell?

-

photo by Scott Thistle Thwait Photography

A family moved out of the city to Perth, Australia, and their pastor said to them as he blessed them at the airport, saying: You are like Abraham, called out to the promised land, and we send you out with our blessing.

For those of you who remember, the promised land at the time was a bloody desert, and Abraham was impotent or Sarah was barren, or both, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t even like living in a cultural desert, not to mention an actual desert desert.

But they went. And Oh, it was hard! But we must never turn to Egypt, mistaking it again for Eden. We must never pimp out our wives, must never worship their idols, must never despair, must never idolize our son, must never give up on our daughters, must never look back at the cities now going up in flame, lest we melt into a flood of tears or turn into a pillar of salt.

Oh God you blessed Abraham – bless also this family.

-

The Promised Land no longer exists, not in the Singapore Dream, not in the American Dream. We have wrecked it, wrecked it all. There is no Garden of Eden on Earth, at least not right now. But I have slowly come to love tiny facets of the Australian desert – and I wrote this once to a friend

You know, there is nothing quite as moving as the different faces of our world. Can we help communing with places? I am so glad to think that the earth will not simply crumple up like a burnt crisp when God puts the world right, but rather that we will then witness the marriage of heaven and earth. Because this much beauty – the pointing, pointed beauty of your glaciers and my peculiar Western Australian light – this beauty could not bear being destroyed by its Creator. I love the world, G -  . It is a magnificent place to live. I love my body, especially when running and I can feel it humming along at what It ought to do. I love my mind, the way it reaches into my thoughtcloud and links two things together, the whirring beauty of it when stimulated to its peak, the wild surmise when it encounters God in the beautiful idea. Can you believe, G – , that on top of these wonderful things we have been equipped, blessed with, that there is more? That we are, apparently, weirdly enough, perfectible? I shudder to think what a perfect world will look like. Perhaps only then will great art not mean heartbreak.

Psychic Octopus Retires

Yeahh.

photo from Daily Mail

More about the Psychic Octopus, who predicted the Spanish win against the Dutch, at the BBC. Plus, a cool video of the triumphant retiree!

His name is Paul!

And he beat my countryman, Mani the psychic Parakeet of Singapore!

photo also from Daily Mail

also from the Daily Mail.

Wrong! Eat the Dust of Paul, Germany!

The Octopus was always right. And is smart, for he quit while at the top.

Small Domestic Success!

Small improvements over the Minnesotan Incarnation:

1) I didn’t mess up the rice/water proportion! We used Basmati rice, and it was just the right dryness today!

2) I cut up the chook anatomically correctly – half of it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was definitely bite-sized.

Always place the garnish in such a way as to hide one’s flaws.

That’s the money shot!

Perfect Soup! All it’s missing is Chicken feet, aka Phoenix Claws

Happy eaters. I warned them they wouldn’t need dinner. On the left is Holly, a family friend and surrogate Aunt to the Hopes, and on the right is Aunty Irene!

Look Ma! I cooked!

Conversation Starters, Conversation Killers

So, my “pick-up lines” have been a little more successful in the Midwest than in the Northeast, to put it mildly. But then again, it may also be a difference between 2008 and 2010.

Northeast, Harvard Coop, Cute Bookseller, Summer 2008.

me: Hi…. um, what time do you knock off?*
cute bookseller: Excuse me?
me: Er… do you want to get maybe coffee or dinner with me?
cb: No.

Midwest, Red House, River experience Cafe, Sound man who looks like John Lennon. Yesterday.

I’m at the counter buying a drink.

me: Hi! You look like John Lennon.
John Lennon-lookalike: Um, thanks! I’ll take that as a compliment!
me: It was!
JLl: I like to play his music…
10 minutes later, I am halfway through a strawberry lemonade frappe (excellent), he walks over.
JLl: Hey.
me: Hey. Do you work here?
JLl: Yeah, I’m working at Rock Camp, which is for teens who want to be in rock bands.
me: Cool! When I was 13, I wanted to be in a rock band. But I didn’t grow up around here, and we didn’t have something like that.
JLl: So are you visiting?
me: Yes, I’m from Singapore.
JLl: Cool! Which part of Singapore?
me: Singapore. It’s not a very big island.

We talk a bit about exactly where Singapore is located, geographically. He’s been to Thailand.

me: I’m “sailing” down the Mississippi, except not really, because I don’t have a boat. And I’m making a film while I go.
JLl: Cool, where are you headed next?
me: Wisconsin, probably. I have a long-lost cousin there I’ve just met.
JLl: You should take the Great River Road. I’ve been that way myself, it’s very beautiful. It looks like Japan.
me: I’ve never been to Japan.
JLl: Me neither, but I’ve seen pictures, and it looks like that. I was going to this Zen retreat centre run by a guy from Kyoto.
me: Oh! I hear that Kyoto is the most beautiful bit of Japan. They have a lot of sheep, or so I hear.
JLl: So you just came over from the museum?
me: Yeah! It was great!
JLl: I never get to go there, even though it’s so close by. I just don’t have the time.
me: Well, you want to see some sketches I made of the art there? I saw some really cool Haitian art, and the John Deere collection was fantastic!
JLl: Sure!

I proceed to show him my sketches of the Figge, two posts below/under the “Art” category.

JLl: There’s a lot of Jesus.
me: Yup.
JLl: Well, that’s the Midwest for you. Lots of Jesus.
me: Yup. Not necessarily a bad thing.
JLl: Oh no, Jesus is cool! I like Jesus. It’s some of his followers I can’t stand. I’m a fan.
me: Me too!
JLl: By the way, you are missing one H in “Rhythm”
me: Oh. Yeah. I can’t spell.
JLl: Sorry, I was an English major.
me: I was an English major, too, and I still can’t spell.
JLl: Listen, you have a good day now. I have to work!
me: Bye!

I finish off my strawberry lemonade frappe.

*”When do you knock off” is Singaporean Parlance for “What time do you get off of work?”. Apparently it doesn’t mean the same thing in America. You learn something new every day.

**John Lennon Lookalike’s real name is Lars.

***Also, I wouldn’t entirely blame the Northeast, because I think I was very awkward in 2008. But then, I still kind of am.

My Mother’s Chicken Rice Recipe

An Iowan Incarnation

ingredients

1 plump chook, about 1.2-1.5 kg (cooking time will have to increase if any bigger) -washed and cleaned with tail removed.

2-3 slices ginger,\

1 garlic (the entire thing) finely minced

spring onion – 1-2 pieces for the chicken, and the rest finely sliced for the ginger & spring onion sauce

steps:

1) Place ginger spring onion and garlic pieces together with the neck of the chicken at the bottom of a large pot, and the chicken on top of them, with the breast facing up.

2) Pour in a kettle of boiling water, with enough water to cover at least 2/3 of the chicken. Add 1 teaspoon of salt.

3) Boil on high heat and cover ( leave a small gap so it will not boil over)

4) When it is boiling nicely, lower heat to medium high(not too low) and boil for 25-30 mins. Longer if chicken is larger.

5) Prepare a basin of cold water in the sink.

6) When time is up, check chicken is cooked properly by turning it upside down (with breast facing down) and leave it in the water for 2=3 mins.) I think this is important if you are cooking for westerners as they do not like bloody chicken.

7) Lift the chicken out of the pot and dunk it in the cold water, fully immersed. Leave it there for 5 mins then lift it up onto a plate.

8) Drizzle the chicken with Shaoxing wine ( or cooking sherry or white wine) and sesame oil.

Rice:

1) While chicken is cooking, wash Jasmine long grain rice. Estimate 1.2 cup for every person, Plus 2 cups extra (people tend to eat more of the rice).

2) Drain the rice.

3) Dice i whole garlic into a fine mince.

4) Heat about 2-3 tablespoons of oil in a wok and add the minced garlic. Fry till fragrant then add the rice.

5) Stir fry tossing conitnually till rice is partially cooked. You can tell when the rice grains start to “stand up”.

6) Set aside in the rice cooker.

7) Add in some pandan leaves tied in a knot if available.

8) When chicken stock is ready, add to rice (amount is roughly 2 ladles to 1 cup rice, or if using rice cooker just follow the guide according to the number of cups of rice used)

9) cook rice.

Condiments:

1) Chilli: pound fresh chilli (remove seeds if cannot take hot), or put in a blender.

2) Add Apple cider vinegar (or white vinegar), pinch of salt.

3) Ginger & Spring onion sauce:

4) 1 knob ginger grated finely

5) 1 bunch spring onion sliced very thinly

6) Mix together and add olive oil and sesame oil and 1 teasp salt.

7) Dark thick black soya sauce. add 1-2 pieces finely julienned spring onion (the white part) and sesame oil.

8) Chop up ckicken into bite sized pieces and drizzle with more sesame oil and bit of wine. garnish with spring onion &/or fresh coriander.

9) Serve with slices of cucumber and tomato and celery or lettuce.

Bon appetit!

Note: you cannot cook this dish without sesame oil and spring onion cos these cannot be subsituted.