If you grow up in Singapore, at some point during your childhood you find out about hawkers. This happened for me when I was four or five. At that age, my mum would bring me to her office now and again, and there was an old hawker nearby who sold fishball noodles, which my mum liked to have for lunch. The noodles came packed in a plastic sack with a plastic drawstring, and if they hadn’t been sufficiently jumbled in the packing, they were certainly a mess by the time we got back to her desk to eat.

Many hawker dishes are so humble they struggle to live up to the status of being a meal. You can call them snacks and no one will look at you funny. This is convenient, because it means you can eat five or more times a day while still only having three meals. Fishball noodles fall into this category. There are some noodles in dressing, a few fishballs and maybe some slices of fish cake, which is to say: noodles with fish paste and more fish paste. This particular hawker used ketchup in his dressing, which I have refused to allow anywhere near my noodles for thirty years. His dish is the first clear memory I have of food that was made by someone outside my family, because it did not taste like home cooking. It tasted slapdash and daring and cacophonous. It tasted of something that had been made at speed, by someone who knew with absolute certainty that his work—though hurried—would still be good. My mother and my grandmother were Teochew, and their cooking was both simple and fussed over.

• Tags: Issue 22, Singapore, Tse Wei Lim