I have been forced to move too many times. But the process of settling in is always the same. The first priority is to search nearby for a good, affordable Thai restaurant. It is a temporary emergency exit. I have been conditioned by my mother to eat out my sadness; a meal with rich, complicated flavor can envelop my tongue in its mystery, forcing me to, for a moment, forget everything that troubles me. Instead, I revel in its puzzle: what ingredients can harmonize like this? Palm sugar. Holy basil. Oyster sauce. Lime juice squeezed from its fruit like wringing dish soap out of a sponge. If I ever want to forget myself, I order something extra complicated. Som Tum, usually. Papaya salad. Or the intricately blended Larb. And I tell the chef: “Phi, give me Thai levels of spicy. I want to feel alive.”

🌶️

While Pad Thai, the dish of stir-fried rice noodles, has gained global notoriety as a stamp of Thai food (it does, after all, have its birth country in its name), I roll my eyes every time someone says Pad Thai is their favorite Thai dish. “He’s such a basic bitch,” I think to myself. Pad Thai is a light savory dish, usually sweet and salty, and flavored gently with chili powder and crushed peanuts. In the mouth, it can feel like eating a miniature ocean — the noodles are slippery like fish, and the garnishes are disturbed sediments; if it’s a seafood Pad Thai, you’d also taste the prawns. Everything goes down easy. Nothing leaves a sting in the mouth. One does not change oneself after eating Pad Thai. When one eats just the ocean, one fails to eat the world. Now, if he had said his favorite dish is something with chili as a core ingredient, then we’d be talking.

🌶️

It has been more than a decade since I last saw my mother. Every trace of her has vanquished out of my life. What she has left, instead, is what remains inside me. When I was 8, way too young for modern children to learn the discomforts spice could unleash onto the body, my mother would insist we sit down to eat spicy food together. First, it was black pepper sauce glazed upon grilled meats. Child’s play. Then, things got real. Mango salad. Green curry. Tom Yum. As she fed me these dishes, she learned to cook them, every intricate blend of spice pushed into her child, the test subject. A month or two later, they would appear on her hawker stall’s constantly expanding menu, mouth-watering pictures of dishes hanging from the ceiling like drapes, the plastic lamination enhancing the glaze of oil bestowed upon them. By 10, I could eat everything on the menu without fear. I would enjoy the sweat that pooled near my fringe, a sign that the spice was kicking me down from the inside. But also one that I would get up after. My mother brought me up a kind of monster.

🌶️

But I learned, of course, to pick my battles carefully. The scariest thing about chili is that their looks are incredibly deceiving. It is nothing to bite into a chili the size of a long finger — its spice is diluted throughout its body, leaving it almost hollow, like a middle-aged salaryman wrung dry by his obsession with work. No. The one thing in my food I won’t fuck around with is the youngest and smallest of chilis. The brightest, the feistiest. The ones shorter than my medium-length hair. When sliced diametrically, they become smaller than a 5-cent coin. If they are stir-fried into my food, I pick up a pair of chopsticks and surgically remove each piece, only choosing to eat them if I am feeling extra courageous for the day. Sometimes, I bite into a bit unknowingly, and fail the game of minesweeper, immediately facing the consequences. In Singapore, they call this little menace the chili padi. In Thai, we call it พริกขี้หนู (prik kee noo), which translates to “rat’s shit chili”.

🌶️

I was small and cute when I learned the Thai language. In our mouths, gendered pronouns are not used for the people we gossip about, the ones we exclude from our conversations. Instead, we label the ‘I’ pronouns with our gender — a greeting, but also a permanent façade. Boys should use “pom”, the Thai word synonymous with hair. But instead, my mother taught me to use “noo”. With an overbite, I was the household’s pet rat. “Noo klub baan laaw krub,” I’d announce when I enter the front door, mimicking Nobita from my favorite Doraemon cartoon. I am home.

As a teenager, after my mother passed, my cousins would remind me, with haughty guffaws, that I was a boy, and “noo” should only be used by girls. I wasn’t supposed to be the rodent I introduced myself as. I was supposed to be stoic, fearless, untouchable, like the thick hair that rested upon my head.

But I can’t ever quit it, this pronoun embalmed upon me. Instead, I learn to crush my tongue when the instincts kick in. “Noo yuu nii na,” I’d mutter under my breath. I am here. This identifier became a secret only my mother and I shared. I refuse to give it up.

🌶️

I never really wanted to work at my mother’s hawker stall, but soon it became a routine. Every weeknight, I’d reach there in time for the dinner crowd, watching the sweat pool on my mother’s face as she wrangled two heavy woks to fulfill order tickets clipped to a line like fresh laundry. My tasks were more assistive — I’d dig deep into the rice cooker twice my size to scoop out hot plates of white rice, pour homemade chili paste into little saucers, and wipe down the tables when diners were done. I think my mother put me up front to disarm the diners; no one would chide a young child doing his best for his mother.

When the orders waned, my mother would ask me what I wanted to eat that night. Anything on the menu. My most common answer was Pad Krapow. Till today, it is the Thai dish that appetizes me most, with its combination of dark meat, light aromatic basil leaves, glistening white rice and a runny egg yolk. Each Thai restaurant has a different ingredient list for Pad Krapow. Some includes bamboo shoots or long beans, but, for me specifically, my mother never fails to put in bits of พริกขี้หนู, just enough to give the sauce a kick. After plating, she would remove the remnants of the chili, knowing my aversion to it. Then, I would sit at the table outside the hawker stall, mixing the ingredients together with a spoon into perfect little bites of mixed textures and flavors. I was told by my family that I give very visible reactions when I eat, that I should be in a food commercial with how much I beam with every bite.

On those nights when I was enjoying the food alone, I could feel my mother watching me from inside the kitchen, washing the pots and the dishes, proud to have the power to feed her child.

🌶️

Whenever we ate out, my mother always complained about the plainness of Singaporean food. She was constantly unimpressed by the extensive menu of stir-fried dishes at Chinese restaurants, all offering the same meats tossed in an insubstantial helping of whichever sauce we picked. And she especially hated the lightness of clear soups, flavored with fish stock and sprinkles of pepper. “I might as well be drinking plain water.” I read those words in every indignant spoonful she took. The next scoop would wobble towards her mouth in hesitation. The food was never actually bad. But in eating it, she shut down, became the plain Thai-Chinese wife to a Singaporean-Chinese husband. My stepfather would encourage her to eat more, saying she was turning skinny, and giving me, the fat tag-along to their marriage, a side eye. My mother would take a few spoonfuls to appease him, and, later in the night, sneak us both something delicious to eat.

🌶️

Despite my desire to eat it every day, พริกขี้หนู is not native to Singapore, nor Thailand, nor Southeast Asia. It was brought here from Mexico by Spanish and Portugese colonists and traders in the 16th and 17th centuries. Because it is a tropical plant, it thrived near the equator, basking in the sun and monsoon rain to remain tantalizingly hot. Perhaps its exponential spiciness warns us against its displacement, a punishment to the humans who ripped it from its homeland and planted it here.

But it’s been many generations since, and us humans have not yet learned our lesson. Instead, we eat it like a party trick, a masochistic dare, a remnant of our addiction to violence. What was once alien has now stuck its roots, become inseparable from this land. And yet, we parade it in our cuisine, accept it with open arms. The chili is one of us.

When my mother brought all our belongings on that plane ride from Bangkok to Singapore, her hand bore the ring granted to her by a Singaporean man. I saw her tighten it with her fingers, as if by doing so she could be more assured she made the right decision to leave everything she knew behind. The night before, as I surrendered my thin Powerpuff Girls blanket to her enormous suitcase, she crouched down, ruffled my hair, and whispered, “Max, we are going to Singapore to get a better life.”

And yet, as with so many immigrant stories, all Singapore brought her was death.

We wanted to live like chilis. But all we could do was live like humans.

🌶️

My preferred way of enjoying พริกขี้หนู is when it is sliced thinly and then dropped, all at once, a sudden pouring of rain, into a pool of fish sauce. When the bits first make contact with the liquid, the seeds inside the chili are dislocated from its parent, finding their way to float around on their own, resembling the freedom lotus petals find in water. I stir the mixture. Some seeds wade down like sediments, some remain on top, clustered with the shell from which they emerged, unwilling to dive away. When I am ready to eat, I will grab a teaspoon and scoop the flavor bomb onto my food, a mixture of briny fermented fish and a heated, tropical, root-grown plant. Ocean and earth in one bite. Even as I savour each drop, I will remember that the seeds are hotter than the fruit, the child feistier than the mother. I knew to leave the many cream-colored seeds alone, lest I face the wrath of a fruit I chopped apart on the cutting board to tame.

🌶️

I was obsessed with my first mobile phone — a Nokia with a stylus-enabled touchscreen — when my mother bought me one as a teenager. It seemed so magical, to be able to plug in earphones, have music play through the wires and have no one else in the vicinity hear it. A freedom I found, discovered and owned, even in public. What I played was my little secret. Because I didn’t know that one could download songs off YouTube through a converter, I recorded my playlist manually through the phone’s microphone. So I heard strange windy breaths as I alternated between being Aladdin and Jasmine in “A Whole New World”. But I didn’t mind. I was thrilled to be able to live my Walkman fantasy. I would spend my evenings serving customers, but this time with a new groove running through my veins. From the kitchen, my mother said I looked like a crazy person as I silently mouthed the song’s words and my hips bopped to the music only I could hear. It was the 2000s, after all. I would come of age with the internet’s allure dragging me by my small hands.

One night, I was so spellbound by the music that when I turned the sharp corner to exit the kitchen and deliver a plate of sambal kangkong, everything slipped out of my limp-wristed hand. I watched it all happen, as if in slow motion: the white plate flying in front of me like a frisbee, the steaming stir-fried vegetables tumbling mid-air landing in a wet splat on the floor, and my mother, her mouth gaping as she watched me ruin the plate she fried by enduring flames the size of her body. In my ears, Hercules’ muses cheered on with their upbeat rendition of “Zero to Hero” but, in front of me, the mess looked like it came straight from the final scene of a Greek tragedy.

I took out the earphones and was shocked by the sudden quiet. Reality sounded like it always did: the dinner conversations of tired diners blending into each other; the drinks stall auntie soliciting beer orders then shouting them to the uncle in brash Hokkien; and the sizzle of oyster sauce and vegetables my mother had dropped into her wok.

I walked back into the kitchen, told her we needed another plate. “I know,” she said. She would not look at me, even as I picked up the wasted food off the ground and mopped up the mess, even as I said sorry many times in all three languages we communicated with. Not even when it was usually time for me to eat. We seldom fought, the two of us who decided we’d be by each other’s side as we settled here, no matter what. I knew I was wrong for not paying attention to the future my mother was building for us, for temporarily escaping into a reality where I could press pause and play at my own discretion, for leaving her behind. But I didn’t know how to say all that as a kid, and instead sat awkwardly in the new rift we had just landed on.

That night, my mother didn’t ask if I wanted dinner. Instead, I made my own, with whatever limited capabilities I had. I fried a simple sunny-side-up egg, layered it atop a scoop of white rice, and drizzled it with พริกขี้หนู-infused fish sauce. I forgot to remove the chili seeds, and accidentally bit into one. The sudden spiciness hurt so much I jumped out of my seat and rushed into the kitchen to douse it with a glass of water. In there, my mother just sat, head down, counting her earnings for the day, and watched little tears spill out my eyes through her periphery.

I went back and continued eating, having learned my lesson about the chili, with a renewed vigilance about what I placed on my spoon.

When I was almost done, my mother walked out and gave me a freshly cooked serving of chili-less Pad Krapow. “Eat slowly,” she said, and returned to the kitchen.

I did, and somehow every morsel of minced pork tasted so much better than anything she had ever made. Perhaps the chili seeds had ruined my taste buds, and I was just imagining how good my mother’s cooking was. Or, maybe, she somehow made it extra special because she wanted to accept my apology.

I would, of course, never know for sure. All that’s left of my mother’s cooking is buried in my hazy teenage memory.

🌶️

Before I was born, Thai pop icon Bird Thongchai McIntyre (best known for “Sabai Sabai”), released a song titled พริกขี้หนู, in which the little chili is heralded as the miracle cure to a Thailand that’s lost all color to overwork. With one bite, P’Bird glows intensely amidst the music video’s black-and-white background until he blows up in pink smoke, a failed science experiment. But, in classic ‘90s CGI fashion, P’Bird did not die from the chili. A few shots later, he is sprinting across town, a trail of color spilling behind him, a new kind of superhero with พริกขี้หนู sprinkling out of his pocket like he himself was the chili tree, reproducing the culture needed for life to continue. When his chili is sold in buckets at the nearby market, he enters a dance break full of Dua Lipa-style hip-twisting in the song’s final chorus.

Everything is colorful and oversaturated by the song’s end. P’Bird references again his muse, the chili: “It’s so delicious, I must eat, until I’ve learned my lesson.”

Till today, I am surprised how the song’s ironic last words ring true. My body craves the punishment of the chili because it has yet to learn what the chili will teach me. And so, I eat and I eat.

🌶️

In 2011, on an agony aunt board in a Singaporean forum, someone asks: “My boyfriend called me a chili padi. I asked him what does he mean, but he refuses to tell me. What does it mean??”

The chili is a fully grown woman, a response says. But she is small. Despite the smallness, she packs a punch, is fierce, will kick you down, a David against the world’s Goliath.

Most nights, as we travelled home, I sat at the back of my stepfather’s white car, watching the regularly placed streetlights pass me by on Singaporean roads. Most nights, my mother would be tired from standing all day and cooking for everyone but herself. Most nights, she could not sit up straight, so she would tilt her neck downwards, like a flower drooping from its stem, exhaustion magnetizing her to the ground. Most nights, my stepfather would encounter a red light, stop, and lean down to smooch her on her full head of bob-length brown-dyed hair, as if he loved her.

I don’t remember how tall my mother was, but she was definitely smaller than him. And so he took care of her like his prize, the immigrant import, the wife he’d chosen to marry because he was so taken by her zeal to live with him in Singapore, by her entrepreneurial spirit to hawk Thai food in a Singapore that was just opening its palate. He wasn’t rich by any means, but he got her what she wanted: a peaceful house where my stepsisters could not haunt her; the food business she was intent on starting, following the footsteps of her Bangkokian family before her; and, eventually, just a few months before she passed, her favorite Louis Vuitton bag. The reward for it all was having her by his side, an energetic woman who wanted nothing more than to start a new family in this foreign land even as she rambles regularly about missing home.

From the rearview mirror, I would catch glimpses of moments like this, my mother spent and my stepfather caressing her. I convinced myself that my mother deserved the love of this man. She had been through too much.

That night, as we alighted from the car, my mother slightly rejuvenated from her quick rest, I saw a small black cat running across the street. I pointed it out to them and said what every other kid from school had said earlier that week when we faced a similar creature: “Daddy! Mommy! Don’t look at the black cat! It’s bad luck!”

My mother placed her hand over my mouth. “Don’t say that,” she hissed, like the mere mention of ill omen was inviting it unto our family. My stepfather walked ahead, ignoring me, until we closed the door to our home and I went into my room. Only then, did he turn to my mother, raise his voice and share his true feelings about me. With my limited knowledge of Hokkien, I was only able to make out parts.

“This boy just cursed me!”

My mother defended me. I was just a child. I didn’t know any better.

“Why does he need to be here? He doesn’t even make himself useful in this house! All he does is eat and sleep. Like a pig!”

He was referencing last Sunday, when I did indeed spend all day eating, watching the Cartoon Network and sleeping. But what else was a 9-year-old boy supposed to do after finishing his homework?

My mother raised her voice back, louder and shriller than him. Suddenly everything became a volley of Hokkien words that blended into each other, like the game of badminton my stepfather loved to play on his off days.

Cowering under my Powerpuff Girls blanket, I knew what it all meant. Our house was so fragile a child’s misstep could crumble it. In this house, my mother was my stepfather’s, and I was only my mother’s. I was just a rogue seed, dangling precariously from my mother, always meant to be discarded to create the perfect image of a widowed Singaporean man and his spicy chili padi wife.

🌶️

Every time I try to write the romanization of พริกขี้หนู, autocorrect nudges me. “Prick,” says my iPhone 11. “Not Prik.” It highlights the word in red squiggly lines, like it is a teacher and I am a student, submitting a high school-level composition to be corrected only by smarter hands.

I don’t take offense. Instead, I see its point: the chili is a little prick, a red-hot phallus consumed for both pleasure and punishment. The chili was the kind of bad boy I could fall in love with because its danger can both protect and ruin me. As a child, before I knew that love and hurt went hand-in-hand, I would frequently eat spicy food, bear the brunt of their pain, my mouth all tingled and swollen, and look in the mirror. There, I’d see them — spots of blood beneath the skin, speckled across my inner lips — emerging before my eyes. I’d pull down my lip to inspect them closer, and imagine them like the acne on my face, something about to pop, ooze and be gone. But these little dots just remained there, silent and watching me back. The chili had shown me the inner workings of my body, made me look at myself with morbid fascination.

But no skin broke. I was not bleeding. Everything was fine. So I felt invited to enjoy it, again and again, bite after quelled bite, the chili aggressively pricking me from the inside. And there was my body, always hanging on for dear life, valiantly resisting its efforts to tear me down.

🌶️

When my mother was pregnant with my baby sister, just a few years before she passed, the doctor diagnosed her with diabetes. To ensure my sister would come out healthy, she would have to test her blood sugar every day by pricking herself with a lancet, pressing down on her fingertips until the tiniest ooze of blood emerged, then smeared it on a device that would measure how sweet her blood was. The doctor said it would feel like an ant bite, that it wouldn’t be a big deal. But every time she did, I could see the emotions rushing through her eyes: the anticipation of pain, and then the resolution to do it for her yet unborn child. The thought that she would get it over and done with, only to return to the same routine the next day. By the time my sister appeared on the ultrasound, her fingertips were a field of little dotted scars, as if she had purposefully used it to count down the days in which her pregnancy would be over.

When my little sister was born, her blood sugar went back to normal. The pricking stopped. But the scars on her fingertips remained, only slightly hidden by the age showing on her bony, washed-out hands. The spots, once flowing with rich red blood, had tried to heal. But when a body approaches its expiration, every mark becomes more and more permanent, until everything is eventually broken. Then, my mother would become nothing more than the fire she was growing inside her.

🌶️

At the crematorium, we could only watch from above, where the fire cannot touch us. Behind me, the chanting of words I did not understand, from a religion my mother was coerced to believe in. Before me, a giant glass pane I rested my palms upon. Beside me, my stepfather, now spent from managing the funeral proceedings, watching the culmination of a seven-day ritual.

Below me, large wooden doors opened. Then, the screeching of metal. The chanting intensified at the sight of the casket entering the room, like the corpse of my mother elicited in them some kind of agitation. As if these strangers understood that death stood before them. As if, by raising their voice, they could repel the monster. And then, everything was set in place: my mother inside the box that held her for a week, now rolling forward. When her head reached the end, the door swung open to reveal the giant flame that would soon consume her, so big it was like she was being swallowed.

I realized the moment the flame licked the tip of the casket that this was the last time I could ever see her whole, before she was scheduled to disintegrate into bones, the body I had known all my life melting into nothing, like she was to become every dish she had cooked before. As the chanting intensified, I dislodged the emotions that gagged my voice, and shouted, asking for her for the final time.

“Mae!”

My mother could not have heard me. The chanting, in a language I did not understand, overwhelmed my voice.

The door closed. The chanting petered out, and the voices began to leave.

Behind the glass pane were my stepfather and I, alone, our throats hoarse, our faces scrunched into tears. It was the only moment in my life where I felt like we were somehow a kind of kin, the despair of losing the one person we separately loved turning into a tenuous bond. A few months later, he would refuse to feed me with his money. But, for those short moments, we were still tethered by her, by the loss of the one person who brought us together.

Soon, I would return to this columbarium, use chopsticks to pick up my mother’s bones into an urn, as if she had turned into nothing more than food to be consumed.

🌶️

A week before she passed, when we knew she was due to leave us, when the cancer had gleefully taken over her body, I spent the afternoon with my mother on her bed. By then, she had given up her dreams: no more Thai restaurant empire, no more happy Singaporean family she would be a part of, no more seeing Nong Max graduate at the top of his class. The television in her room blared a mandarin drama she could not understand, but she watched it anyway, her eyes transfixed on the lead actress and the classy jewelry she had on.

I didn’t care though. I was focused on her — on pressing my little fingers into her arms and legs in an attempt to soothe whatever pain she had remaining. Years ago, whenever we had a family day at home, my mother would sometimes summon me to massage her tired limbs, and when I was done pressing into them for half an hour she would be elated the pain was gone.

I wished then that I still had the magic fingers.

When I got to her right hand, I saw them again. The wedding ring she still wore to demonstrate she belonged here. The little scars on her fingers from the diabetes tests during her pregnancy. The things that tied her to this place. And I knew then that I was not meant to be part of this picture. I knew that if she wasn’t ill, I might have still been cast aside for the family she wanted to mold with her own two hands. She almost achieved it all: a Singaporean husband, a Singaporean child. I was just an accessory to her perfect Singaporean family.

But still, I kissed it, the hand once coated with little specks of red, like it was a nursery that grew fresh chilis straight out of her body, each offspring equally bursting with unrelenting zeal for life.

I came out of that.