I don’t think food is mystical, but it’s very hard not to write about hawker food in those terms. On my last trip home, I went to Hill Street Fried Kway Teow. There was a line—there’s always a line—for I can pay for this food only with my time. The thimbleful of coins that I hand to the ah ma seems a disrespect, when there is only one place on Earth to eat this dish, and one man alive who knows its rhythms. This hawker has been frying his kway teow for fifty years, and when he retires it will be gone. The names we have for this scale of practice lure us beyond the grasp of reason: mysticism, monasticism, obsession, passion.
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