Beth Yahp | Eat First, Talk Later: A Memoir of Food, Family and Home | 2015 | Sydney: Vintage Books

This is the third in my little series on Malaysian women writers, and I absolutely loved it.

It's true that the narrative leaps around vertiginously. The reader is required to keep abreast of three complex arcs (the story of Yahp's parents and grandparents; the story of her own life; and the story of Malaysia), which play out in various geographical locations (Southeast Asia, Paris, Honolulu, and Sydney). None of the threads is expounded chronologically, and they interleave in a way that can be confusing. I often found myself flicking backwards and forwards to get my bearings.

But this complexity is there for a reason. Not only are all three stories inescapably part of a larger context, but they are also linked by the themes of ethnicity, people movement, and memory. They are simply inseparable.

I once did a weekend story-writing class, after which we were invited to submit a piece of work for evaluation. My story was based loosely on my mother and our relationship. The feedback was that I was actually writing two stories, and the piece would be improved by physically chopping it up to reflect that: one story about her, and one story about me. I profoundly disagreed. Her story was my story, and vice versa.



Luckily, if Yahp was given any such advice, she ignored it. What the book loses in simplicity, it gains massively in depth and perspective. As she says: "Malaysia is a country of competing narratives and memories -- is it any different for the Malaysian family?"

There were many reasons I liked this work. Generally, I'm a sucker for family histories. And Yahp has a wonderful ear for dialogue, especially the exchanges of "this [older] generation that doesn't 'converse', except in pronouncements, instructions, platitudes, jokes". There has been such a generational shift, it seems, from the cohorts that hardly even acknowledged having "feelings" to those that talk about little else...

But Yahp really puts her finger on everything that is both wonderful and heart-breaking about families. I was born a world away, but I empathize with so many of the circumstances she recounts: The older generation that can't/won't communicate; the infirm parents whose aging you resent on their behalf, and therefore can't help but be impatient with; the sacrifices you are always conscious of, but can never repay; the stories you have failed to pay attention to until it is too late....

Her goal is to take her parents, who have lived in Honolulu for the past five years, back to Malaysia, in order to retrace their early travel experiences, and in doing so capture and "fix" their stories. Her longing is that "I'll be able to speak to them, and they will finally speak to me". I can so understand that desire. As I read, I could hold out so little hope for its successful fulfilment...

"Why am I still so hung up on my parents?" she wonders. "I've lived 22 years away from them... I've made my own choices... But when I'm with them ... I'm transported back to being 16." I find that completely comprehensible. That was my experience precisely...

And she chides her mother in the way I used to chide mine: "She won't strive for any time for herself -- neither for reading, nor thinking, nor daydreaming, nor going for the jugular of what she really wants or needs." But they couldn't, the women of that generation. It was just not what they were brought up to do.

I empathize too with her attempts to make a home in different parts of the world -- and never quite succeeding. As Barnes wonders: "Need we choose the place we call home? What might a peripatetic life in which home is not a city, a house or an apartment, look like? Yahp is formed by each of the places in which she has made at least a temporary home, as she is formed by her parents' stories, and by the myriad cultures, languages, cuisines, traditions and identities of the country into which she was born."



I obviously don't share her ethnic experience, but it resonates with many similar stories I have heard from friends and acquaintances over the years.

All we know of her maternal grandparents is that her mother's father was Eurasian (maybe Portuguese). Her mother was born in Chiang Mai, Thailand; and she was adopted by a Thai woman whose own children were sent to Malaysia to be educated when their English father died. Yahp's father's parents were Hakka Chinese. Hakka have long experience of migration. The word, Yahp tells us, means "guest people".



This rich ethnic complexity might illuminate her life, but it doesn't exactly ease it. She is discriminated against in Australia, and always liable to be regarded as a "pendatang" (immigrant) in Malaysia. "My experience of my own country is so deeply racialised, perhaps I haven't been able to see it another way. Perhaps I can't see anything in ways uncoloured by race -- whether I'm in Kuala Lumpur, or Paris, or Sydney."



Finally, I love the way she deals with the topic of memory and memories. I warm, for example, to her evocation of food memories, which are so central to the story of her family and of Malaysia -- a place where at "[a]ny time, day or night, somebody somewhere will be cooking and eating something." As she explains, "Our food map lies across the map of the actual landscape, a sensual overlay that's tenuous yet resilient." I know exactly what she means. My food map is extensive, deeply etched, and majorly important to the fabric of my life experience...



But she is also brutally frank about the challenges of memory: "How skilful and patient do I need to be to distinguish this instant I remember from those remembered by others, this bit of fact from that bit of imagination, pinpricks in a constellation engulfed in blackness, and how do I separate everything out?"

Barnes again: "How blurred is the line between fiction and memoir, given the pliability of memory, its lacunae and its distorted focus? If we decide to illuminate particular moments in our past, do we thereby create a fiction of their prominence?" Yahp explores what it means to seek the stories of our ancestors. "Is the act of retelling them also an act of obscuring, an act of fictionalising?... Where do these reminiscences sit between truth and fiction?"

For McPhee, "[t]his is very much a book about writing a book". About a third of the way through, Yahp confesses: "I've caved under the weight of this story I'm trying to tell -- there are too many memories, too many smaller stories, too much history, too much life to be captured, and never enough to be true. I haven't yet found my voice."

But she does find it. By the end of the book, the family still hasn't made it to Pulau Pangkor, where Yahp's parents honeymooned. It seems unlikely they ever will. But the little vignette at the end captures all the love and loss that families represent:

"Smile," I instruct Peter and Mara, stepping away from them, squinting at my camera. I almost slip off the kerb, onto the dusty snout of Mr Lim's LandCruiser.
"Alamak," Mara exclaims. "So clumsy... OK, ah?"
"OK," I mutter. "Wait, wait."
Behind them Pangkor Island is a vague, incomplete blur, barely discernible from cloud cover and horizon. The sea is pearly grey and so is the sky. I'm not even sure Pangkor is there, where I'm pointing my camera.
"OK, now," I say. "Smile."
Peter adjusts his glasses, flips their clip-on shades up -- Mickey Mouse-style -- then back down. He puts his arm around Mara. "Like mother, like daughter," he remarks.
Mara pokes him in his ample ribs.
They smile.
I click.