my elderly parents once casually let slip that they don't like Peranakans. I was surprised cuz they're not normally so strident. Apparently they grew up being lorded over by rich Peranakans. Both are 1st gen sg Hainanese and grew up very poor (thread)

I don't personally have a problem with Peranakans. but something about this nugget of my parents's childhood, this forgotten tension, has always stuck with me. I guess in our country's eagerness to paper over our diverse migrant Chinese pathways, these nuances have been lost.

This memory flared up again with Nyonya Karen's recent meltdown. Her erasure of Malay culinary identity is one thing. Her snarling distaste for working class migrant Chinese food is the other. In the 7th month, she channels ghosts of long dead Straits Chinese snobs.

Her screaming "Ew I can't believe you eat like that" chimes with the same nativist disgust people have for FOTB migrants. She wields 500 years of Straits Chinese history to say, basically, I will always be better than you, sinkie. Tbf we are not immune from this.

I just find it interesting how haunted we are by these ghosts. They never really go away. They stay with us. Old money, old superiorities. Privilege can ebb away, often it doesn't. I think we don't remind ourselves enough how truly fresh off the boat we all are.

There's also something to be said in all of this about the aesthetics of Peranakan dining today. The expensive, gentrifying restaurant variety. Lavish lounges of the richest colonial nostalgia. Afternoon tea. The "Hainan cookie boy" pounding spices in the kitchen.

To be fair a lot of food businesses borrow this old world aesthetic, but the intent is always to present the experience as somehow premium. Singapore Slings. The cricket field. Long hours on the balcony. Again, haunted spaces, haunted brains.

So then it's also interesting to me that at the same time #thesingaporegrip is courting its own controversy for resurrecting colonial era Singapore with a white leading cast. For many in the former imperial metropolis, this is still the only living memory of our country.

But clearly for many here as well! The city is soaked with these ghosts. We are still in the grip of it, pun intended. They've never really been properly exorcised. We struggle to free ourselves from their stories, their way of seeing us.

Every once in a while, like a shrieking ghost they rematerialise and scare the living shit out of us. "I can't believe you eat like that, I simply cannot believe it."