Eating rice..
As we are a big family, we eat lots of rice. Father normally buy rice in big gunny bags or sacks. I assume these are about 100kgs bag. Today, we buy 5-10kgs bags for small families. The moving of the rice bag from the main door entrance to the rice storage container is a mobilization exercise where you have at least 2 or more members doing it. First over the five foot way, then across the door entrenchment, One of us will drag the bag with a hook and the rest will push it a distance of about 20m from entrance to the storage container. That's fun exercise and good teamwork. The rice container is a huge steel drum some 4 ft high by 2 ft wide located right under the inclining wooden stairway in the dining area. With the dragging of the bag and the hooking, there will be traces of loose grains all over the floor. These will be sweep up and collected as food. Every single grain is precious food to us. Imagine we have 10 mouths to feed and in those days when everybody is so young, the family finances must be real tight.
We eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In my primary and early secondary school days, I have porridge or rice for breakfast. So imagine, mother will have to wake up much earlier to prepare and cook. There wasn't a fridge earlier, so there's no possibility of precooking in advance overnight and reheating. As I understand, the idea of eating rice for breakfast came from father to ensure we won't go hungry during the day and we have the energy to study and play. Somehow, the idea of eating rice for breakfast wasn't exciting at all and was later dropped and we change to having bread and jam.
Not joking, at times we also ate rice at 3am, that's when father finished work and take home char siew rice. But that's different! These rice are very nice especially when you have the thinly sliced bakhwa. That's heavenly delicious. So silly, we were all awoke at the heavenly hours of 3am to eat rice for supper or breakfast? No one complained. Maybe the char siew rice was just fantastic. As for me, I don't mind. That's food for the undernourished. They said I used to be a fat chubby boy when younger but then I became thin. There were also many a times where we slept empty without food for supper. Sometimes, we have durians at 3am. So when father woke you up at those wee hours, you jolly well wake up. There must be something nice waiting for you to eat. It is good training too because you never know whether that's also a emergency drill or a fire drill. Fire was one big risk factor in our days in these old shophouses. And I have actually witnessed some small fire in our neighborhood. It's scary!
After eating, we go straight back to bed and I can fall asleep fast for the next few hours before daybreak. We sleep happily and snugly like piglets after a good five star meal.
Every night when father is home from work, he will do his supervisory rounds of inspection and head count of us to check that we are sleeping, who's not sleeping, and who's dreaming and who is not at home? He will go round the house and check everybody by feel, touching your legs and hands. Maybe he also counted 1,2,3..,2,3. You can feel the warmth of the human touch. From a pair of powerful hands that wields a giant cleaver for the last 12-13 hours. On wintry cold nights, he tucked in your blankets. On hot nights, he loosen your buttons. Otherwise, you will sweat like sardines as we slept pretty close like sardines. Lucky ones on beds, others on floorboards.
When you are sick and having a fever, he will wake you up for a chat. Just like NDP where the President will perk you up with a talk during his inspection rounds. Feeling the heat of your forehead, he will normally gets you a cold towel, prepared you a cup of hot milk and cracker biscuits. Probably, you take your dose of medicine at the same time.
As can be seen, father is a caring person. He really miss out family time because of his irregular and long work hours. So he either catches up with us during supper or when he woke in the morning at 11am or during the 2-4/5pm afternoon slot which is his break time from work. These are his face time with us. No Apple phones in those days! To communicate, check us out, to talk, and to mark our report books. That's also critical time where you need to do some explanation before he signed, Kong Yam on your report card.
