Pork Floss Christianity

Memories of primary school seem to me a blur – playing football in the garden behind our classrooms; running in the library, giggling nervously behind stacks of bookshelves with that thrilling fear of getting caught; and many dull hours passed in a string of lessons. Wild as these memories are, one of the clearest things that stand out to me now is much less extraordinary, just the staple lunch my mother cooked for me after school – a bowl of hearty, warm, and rejuvenating porridge, topped with savory and crispy pork floss. Even now, my mother’s pork floss porridge is one of my favorite dishes and it always brings back good memories of my childhood. It is also one of those things that I most quickly identify with my mother, like her Singaporean brand of Christianity – one that consumes the holy message and regurgitates it with a Singaporean packaging of obedience and propriety, replete with her nagging and rigid insistence.

I can still remember the smell of salty pork floss wafting through the metal gates as I walked up to my door, and the heat of the thick porridge spreading through my body as eleven-year-old me eagerly wolfed down my lunch. In those days, I ate this for days on end, my mother’s supply of pork floss and day-old rice seemingly bottomless. Naturally, I came to find it nauseating. Despite my complaints and requests for a change in menu, all she would say was, “Just eat whatever I cook, whatever I put on the table you’d better finish”, in her broken English and motherly authority. Her voice would ring with the fervor of urgent insistence, one that demanded my compliance and was also present when she said things like, Mark you have to read your Bible everyday okay, and make sure you pray before your exam, and did you go to church last week, assured in its own self-righteousness and morality. But there were days I didn’t listen and ate whatever I wanted. Maybe, by some subtle orchestration, these lunches were a mirror; a transitory space of eating, sharing, and communing with my mother, that would reflect the transformation of my faith, that would help me behold the spirituality she so easily made a routine of enforcing; temporarily glazed over with the immaturity of my youth.

First off, there is no right (or wrong) way to tell you that I’m a Christian. There’s just the truth. Sometimes we think the truth is simple, that there’s only one way to become Christian and oh, if you’ve not been to church your whole life and baptized at the age of seven and going on missions or evangelizing, then your story is hardly true. That’s not true at all. At least that’s not what happened to me, a boy who grew up eating pork floss porridge and getting used to being scolded for not attending church, caned with those old, colorful, rattan canes that hardly anyone remembers now. So, I think there is no one Christian story. This is mine.

I, at the age of twelve, sit in a crowded room, warm yellow light streaming from the ceiling, an incandescent glow setting upon the silhouettes of those around me. I’m stuck in between two strangers, people I’ve only just met during this church camp and with whom I’m supposed to act all chummy, but who I don’t actually know, and my eyes are closed. I suddenly realize I’m kneeling on the hard wooden floor, but I don’t really know why, and my poor knees are hurting really badly but I don’t feel like it’s very proper to be standing up now. In a few moments, the light appears to brighten very quickly and I’m sort of blinded, except I don’t really know because my eyes are closed and I’m afraid to open them. Instead, I listen. They – I don’t know who – say, “If you feel ready to accept the Lord into your heart, please rise to your feet and raise your right hand.” Though I’m not sure what being ready means, I stand anyway, because I remember my mother. I realize I have to open my eyes to stand, but I’m worried that opening my eyes will somehow expose me, make me larger, easier to notice, and I quickly close them again. The act, however, is done. I’ve said a prayer and the light dims, just a gradual softening of the wisps behind my eyelids, like some momentous weight dropping on my head which I don’t yet feel.

That was the day I became a Christian. After, I didn’t feel like much had changed and thought I was very much the same person, but now I realize – this perhaps could have been pivotal in why my childhood memories of sitting at the dining table eating pork floss porridge beside my mother are so striking and indelible. They are the epitome of what my mother was to me: protection. She protected me from everything, from cuts and bruises, from meeting the wrong crowds, from talking to strangers, from eating anything but pork floss porridge, and finally, from the depravity of hell. Things like just listen to me, I’m your mother; who else is going to care for you but me; I know things about you that you don’t even know because you’re my son, so just do what I say, made sense to me. Unexpectedly, my mother and my faith were two threads borne from the same cloth, their lines inter-weaving and crossing through the canvas of my life, sometimes stretching here, sometimes tightening there. Yet, even in this Christian story, truth is hardly ever simple. The truth warps, flexes, stretches and tightens, adapting itself to how life moves, like a horse beneath its rider, bursting into a full gallop, as it does now, at the crack of the whip.

The truth of the matter is: my mother had a bout of depression when I was fifteen. My father only confirmed the truth after she had been struggling with it for a while, despite my siblings’ and my own suspicions. Many times, I saw her stone-faced and impassive, staring quite blankly into absolutely nothing. Other times, I saw her become deeply emotional, burst into tears, cry and whimper at our slightest infraction. She was a shadow of her former self, no longer the protector I had always known. Her voice no longer rang with the brightness of authority nor did her eyes glow with the purpose of maternity, and I felt as though I was living with a stranger. Being the awkward fifteen-year-old that I was, I didn’t know what to do and spent many days wandering in my own home, lost without the centrifugal force of my mother’s authority. When someone you know becomes depressed, their presence is suddenly all around you, a specter looming over your shoulder, faint whispers ringing in your ear, but only whispers and caresses that tell you they’re not really there, though you begin to see them in everything, every movement, every sight and smell, every sensation. So, lost as I was, newly-Christian me did the one thing I never thought I’d do – I prayed. I prayed every day for my mother, in the morning, at night, loudly, silently; I prayed on the bus, in school, in the quiet of my room; I prayed alone, in church, just a boy and his God watching over a woman who had forgotten herself. And you could tell she knew. After the most intense supplications to my God, I’d leave my room, flushed and teary, and she would stand there, rooted to the spot, like she had walked in on an intimate moment between lovers, or on someone cooking a pot of pork floss porridge, and the two threads always intertwined in my life finally knotted over themselves. I wanted so hard to revive her, to bring her dry bones back to life, to protect her from life’s despair as she had done for me. That was what I was doing – cooking pork floss porridge for her soul. I prayed earnestly, wanting each and every prayer to reach her somehow, even though she couldn’t hear them, and to touch her heart, so that their warmth and richness could wash over that unknown hurt still tearing her apart. Whether it was because of my prayers, I am unaware – but she gradually recovered and the specter over my home receded, my mother’s newfound light and clarity drowning it out.

         So, no, I don’t always read my Bible or pray constantly, as pastors tell me that I should. But the truth is hardly ever simple, as I’ve come to learn. My truth is wayward, lost, and wandering, but it is true nonetheless. My truth strides forward, wildly racing against the current of life; a boxer in the ring, the underdog that fights and presses, not knowing its own strength. My truth is a bowl of pork floss porridge, greedily gobbled up right after school.