When I was in my teens, some distant relative’s wife died of cancer, leaving him with two young children: a girl of about eight, and a boy of about six.
He was away a lot, working on construction projects in Malaysia, so he couldn’t look after them. They decided to split up the siblings, maybe so as not to burden kind relatives with two children at once. The boy was sent off to some relative on the mother’s side. My grandma took the girl in on her coconut plantation.
One of the things I noticed about the girl right from the start was that she’d refuse to eat green vegetables.
A bit of cultural background here. In all my years of growing up in Singapore, I’d never heard of children having trouble eating their greens, not in the way I’ve heard about British children doing it.
British children, from what I’d read, never liked eating their vegetables because the traditional British way of cooking them was to “boil them to death” (according to an expression that cropped up regularly in the literature I’d come across on the subject), so we hear of British children typically hating Brussels sprouts and cabbage, for example.
The Chinese way of cooking vegetables is most commonly stir-frying them, so they’re not overcooked, they stay fresh and crunchy (not boiled to almost a mush), with the flavour retained. If children out East don’t like their veg, it generally would be them being fussy (like the younger me about coriander and spring onion, which I’d call “smelly veg”).
With this in mind, this orphaned girl refusing to eat ALL greens was a bit puzzling.
I tried to get to the bottom of it, as I didn’t think she should exclude greens from her diet altogether. I went through the list of possibilities: was it the way it was cooked, or the sauce used (soya sauce, bean paste, chilli sauce, etc.)? She couldn’t give a satisfactory answer.
In the end, she said, “My mother told us not to eat anything that’s green.”
That was even more puzzling: how could a woman tell her children not to eat green vegetables? I couldn’t check with the mother in this case, of course.
After a while, the penny dropped: in my dialect (Teochew / 潮州 Cháozhōu, a S.E.Chinese dialect), the word for “green” (the colour) sounds exactly the same as the word for “raw” (uncooked).
The Chinese are not big on raw vegetables (e.g., salads that feature much more prominently in the Western diet). I grew up hearing grown-ups saying, "I'm not a horse or a cow!"
It could be partly due to health concerns, rather like the Chinese not drinking water straight out of the tap, they need to boil it first to make sure it’s safe. (Just my own theory.)
So, I put it to the girl: “I think your mother meant raw rather than green colour veg.”
Once this interpretation was introduced into her head, the barriers came down, and she ate all her greens after that.
(Singapore, 1960s)
