On death

It's just a part of life.

I killed my first chicken when I was seven. It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t gory. I wasn’t squeamish. It wasn’t a gateway to me becoming a serial killer. It’s just a part of life.

When I was a kid, we had chickens in the backyard. It was probably illegal, but my dad grew up on a farm in Hong Kong and being self-sufficient was normal for him. We lived in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere when they immigrated to Australia, so to do a quick run for an ingredient would take over an hour. We originally got a dozen chickens and a rooster for the eggs, but as the chickens aged and stopped producing, my dad said they were only good for eating.

I was kind of scared of the chickens because I was a very short kid and they would actually chase me around the backyard rather than the other way round while aggressively pecking, scratching and shitting all over the place. It didn’t help that I woke up one morning and found that we had killer chickens who cornered one asshole bird in the cage at night and pecked its guts out. (We did not eat that bird.)

The first time I ate one of them, I didn’t love it. They weren’t as plump or tender as the hormone-jacked birds I thought were normal, but the flavour was intense and could not be beaten.

After school, one afternoon, I watched my dad chase a chicken around the backyard for what felt like an hour. When he finally caught it, he held its neck down on a brick next to a set up of a bucket of boiling water and a bowl, then he looked at me and said, “You do it.” My dad then told me that if I wanted to eat dinner, I had to kill the chicken. Plus, if I want to eat meat, I should learn where it comes from.

You’re probably wondering at this stage what kind of father gets their seven-year-old kid to kill birds, but my parents already produced their wonder child with my sister, so it was fine if they ruined me.

He handed me his cleaver, pointed at the neck, told me to chop there and not miss. (Yes, yes, Father of the Year.)

That bird did not have a swift death. It took several chops, its feet went berserk and my dad was laughing at me the entire time. (FATHER OF THE YEAR.)

He held its decapitated body over the bowl collecting the blood while I stared at its head with eyes wide open on the concrete. He then dunked its body in and out of the boiling water to loosen the feathers. I ‘helped’ by pulling off a few, but I was a scrawny kid who basically got in the way. My dad threw away its seed-filled stomach and kept the heart and liver for a stir fry.

We ended up having white-cut chicken for dinner and my dad taught me that day that you can only really make it with a fresh-killed bird because the texture changes once the carcass is refrigerated. We steamed the blood and added it to congee, which was always my favourite part outside of fighting for the heart. How I’m not a serial killer today, I will never work out.

After that, my dad would regularly take me to markets where we could choose the fish we wanted to eat and they’d kill, gut and scale it for us on the spot. After I got a little stronger, he would pick up live crabs, wash them in the sink, teach me how to rip the shell off, pull out its dead man’s fingers before cracking it with the back of a cleaver and cooking the celebratory dish properly.

Every culture faces its food and I believe that if you want to eat meat, you have to be prepared to kill it. You can’t sanitise death, but the modern world has done a very good job of removing it from the cooking process.

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of many pig parties where you kill and process the whole hog over the weekend and feel your cholesterol levels slowly rise. I don’t know if this is true, but a friend’s parents were reluctant to process their cows because they believe that the cows know when one of the herd is missing and they all get depressed. Let’s just say they either never ate beef, or were eating it and giving it away for weeks.

The only time I questioned my dad on the eating of animals was when I watched a documentary on how intelligent octopuses are and suggested that maybe we should stop eating them. His response was the most stoic and Cantonese response ever, and for effect, he said it in English.

“If they so smart, why can we eat?”

What I’m reading:
Intimations, Six Essays by Zadie Smith. It’s probably going to be the only lockdown-themed writing I will read because I am powerless to her prose.

What I’m watching:
Donald Sutherland really steals the show in The Undoing. Hugh Grant plays a fantastic, charismatic idiot who is irresponsible with his penis and Nicole Kidman acts her arse off as the anxious and steely therapist-slash-wife-slash-victim-slash-mother with a heart of gold. There’s been done a killing and chaos ensues.

What I’m eating:
Lee Ho Fook 2.0 is a go and is as excellent as ever. The Chinizza is reworked as jian bing with charred spring onion and soft curds, which is also Vic’s reference to the potato focaccia and stracciatella at Carlton Wine Room (JP worked at LHF for a while, so it is a good inside joke for everyone). The big revelation here is that Victor is trying to teach everyone how to make Chineses sauces and basing them off vegetable water that comes from stir-frying greens with oyster sauce (which was always my favourite part of the vegetable dish to spoon over rice). I particularly loved the white fungus and peach dessert because it is not too sweet (the ultimate Asian compliment) and teaches people that you can eat mushrooms for dessert. Check it out and get your mind blown.

What I’ve donated to:
The team from O.My fell victim to a kitchen fire after the first night of service. In the words of Chayse Bertoncello, “Around 1pm, an ember kicked up from the charcoal grill in the kitchen. That seems to have caught and travelled through the evaporative cooling and it spread like crazy through the kitchen and dining room. Sixty-seconds and the flames were coming out the top of the building. It took the fire brigade three and a half hours to contain. Thankfully, everyone is safe, but the kitchen is non-existent and the dining room took severe damage.” Here is the link to the fundraiser.

Wanna kill some food with your friends?

Are you already a killer?