Most of my Chinese friends in Malaysia would be basking still in the festive afterglow of the Chinese New Year celebration. Some may perhaps be struggling to recover from the aftermath of too much feasting.

The usually frugal Chinese people would spare no expense when they celebrate the Lunar New Year. Starting from the New Year Eve reunion dinner, right through the entire period until Chap Goh Meh when they end the festivities, they eat like there is no tomorrow.

Besides the usual lavish meat and fish dishes, well-heeled Chinese indulge in very expensive items, like the abalone, the sea cucumber, and the shark's fin, cooked with traditional vegetables imported from China, and washed down with expensive brew, all costing a small fortune.

The Chinese obsessive love affair with their Chinese food is the source of endless wonder among my non-Chinese friends. To them, that fixation with food borders on sinful gluttony.

Indeed, a true blue Chinese person would proclaim proudly to you that he can eat anything that has its back to the sky. That excludes only his fellow human beings as food ingredients among all living things on earth!

Once, a newly rich Chinese friend in Kuching declared to a group of friends that he was flying over to Johore Baru to partake in an expensive feast where the main course was tiger meat. Some poachers had shot the poor beast in an oil palm plantation. I was appalled at his naked lust for the rare treat, because I would like to see tigers roaming in the wild, rather than ending up on a dinner table.

Hunger a large feature

In mainland China, the ignorant peasants in the countryside are eating rare animals and rare birds to their extinction. I even read a press report of how the international research community at the North Pole were scandalised when the Chinese delegation caught and cooked the penguins there!

All these horror stories of culinary indulgence are a tell-tale sign of the rising prosperity among the Chinese, either in Malaysia or abroad. When anybody gets richer, his first instinct is to eat well. The Americans has done it, and now it is the turn of the Chinese.

What is less obvious is that in the long collective memory of the Chinese, hunger has always featured largely in their history. From the earliest of times, the agrarian societies in Northern China had always been made to starve by the Yellow River spilling over its banks,

Rice had been cultivated from as long ago as 7,000 years ago. The discovery of agriculture and the reserve of food-supplies allowed the Chinese to build up a formidable and complex civilisation on the lower plains of the Yellow River around the third millennium BC.

Many of their cultural practices in celebrating the CNY today are still rooted in those ancient traditions. The use of the lunar calendar is one example; the lunar calendar allowed them to regulate their agricultural activities.

But they had to face many famines caused by floods, drought, and war all through those millennia. Masses of people would wander the countryside in search for food. In their desperation, they would even eat grass and tree bark. Many starved to death.

Inevitably, there would be those peasant leaders who led rebellions against the ruling power of the time. Sometimes, they would succeed in overthrowing the reigning monarch and start a new dynasty. One such rebel leader was the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who started his career as a beggar monk!

Towards the end of the last Ching Dynasty in China, the land was again laid to waste by war, drought, flood, and famine. That was what drove the waves of migrants towards all corners of the Earth in search of survival and perhaps prosperity. They originated mostly from the southern coastal provinces, and many of them ended up on our Malaysian shores.

The Teochew porridge

We can only imagine how hard life must have been for these early migrant workers in Malaysia. Arriving with merely the shirt on their backs, they were mostly illiterate, and were employed to do mostly menial work requiring hard labour only.

Strangers in a strange land, they had to survive great hardship with the help of their old-world institutions. They formed kongsi, guilds, associations, which ran their temples and their schools. Without easy access to local land, their last resort was to enter trade, though traders were at the lowest rung on the social hierarchy according to Confucius teaching in their old world. Some of them became very rich towkays.

Thrifty to a fault, these migrant workers would economise on food in ways unimaginable today. When I was still a young child, my mother used to take me shopping at the Padungan wet market near where the fire station stands in Kuching today. There were many food-stalls there. I used to see this man squatting on a small round stool, ploughing rice into his mouth at breakneck speed, with nothing to dull the monotony of the rice except a small dish of chilli!

When I started my Chinese primary school education, we students were asked to memorise a poem, which extolled all boys and girls to lap up the last grain of rice from our bowl, because every grain of rice carried the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor farmers. Wasting food or being choosy was the paragon of ingratitude, and could elicit corporal punishment from our parents!

In my childhood days, the most memorable food item was the humble Teochew porridge.

I was born to my Teochew parents, who had inherited their long traditions of making the now world-famous Teochew porridge. It was the salvation of poor families, because for a small supply of rice grains, you can stretch it into many meals.

To go with this staple diet, we had a wide selection of very cheap salty side dishes, fermented taufu, salted carrots and root vegetables of various description, salted fish, salted eggs, salted fried peanuts, salted olives, small anchovies, and tiny salted crabs, all purchased for a song at the local wet market. The saltiness meant that you can wash down a lot of loose porridge with very little amount of these side dishes.

It was poor man's way of eating, though obviously it was not all that nourishing. But then, when you are hungry, you could not afford the luxury of thinking about a balanced diet and food value.

The humble porridge has had a long history in China. Whenever a famine broke out, the local tycoon would do the right thing by opening a porridge kitchen to feed the hungry masses. It was their equivalent of the soup kitchen that fed many hungry Americans in the US after the crash of Wall Street in 1929.

A perfectly satisfactory meal

It is for this reason of a long collective memory of acute hunger in the Chinese cultural gene that food has become the most important need in their life!

Since then, my taste buds have been enriched by many tasty experiences from Asia, Europe, and North America. I have even partaken of that legendary Buddha-Jump-Over-the-Wall once. I have made the mistake that many people make in Malaysia: I over ate. In my early 40s, I was overweight, and was found to have diabetes type II. Now I am a literal shadow of my former physical self.

In my ageing years, I have come to rely more and more on my porridge meal. I cook it every day. I cook it the Teochew style. Unlike the Cantonese porridge, which is cooked for a long time until the whole thing is a sticky glue-like gruel, the Teochew style demands that I just boil the rice until the grains are broken.

Into this watery fare, you can add anything you like, like shredded chicken meat, fish slices, prawns, fried onion bits, a twist of coriander, salt and pepper, to be slurped loudly down the throat inside an outstretched neck. It is a perfectly satisfactory meal on a cold day.

Alternatively, I can eat my plain porridge with a steamed fish and some vegetable soup, with the ubiquitous salted fish and the salted egg, plus a bit of sambal belacan for that Malaysian touch.

Lately, I have sought innovation to my recipes inherited from my late mother. I started to mix the rice. The best combination so far is to mix up the Thai fragrant rice, the red rice produced by the Iban farmers, and the Bario rice farmed by the Kelabit highlanders in northern Sarawak. When this mixture is boiled, it smells like coconut, and the taste is out of this world. (Bario rice is available in some Giant stores in KL.)

I still seek sustenance from the porridge not only because it is the best diet for my diabetic condition. It is the reminder of my simple but happy childhood, my lingering ethnic heritage, my celebration of being alive, and above all my memory of my mother.

How about you? What is your favourite food?

We are what we eat. Eat wisely, before it is too late.

SIM KWANG YANG was MP for Bandar Kuching from 1982 to 1995. He can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com