I feared this morning’s rain would mean I’d be sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow for a couple of extra hours, but the sun’s out, now, just in time for flying east.

I was talking to Mowmy on the phone this morning while we figured out how we were going to get from Kuala Lumpur to Port Dickson after feasting it up at my grandmother’s for Chinese New Year. “The Internet says we have to take a bus from KL to Seremban, and then from Seremban to PD,” I said. “Come, let me see where Seremban is.”

I Googled-mapped Malaysia, then – distracted by adventure – navigated north for Taiping, the town where my mother was born. “Hey, Mowmy,” I said, noting its proximity to the peninsula’s west coast, “did you go to the beach all the time?” “Hah?” she said, “Beach? No lah!” “Kuala Sepetang?” I said, reading off the Google map and picking out a nearby village on the waterway. “The beach at Kuala Sepetang?” I imagined my mother and her brothers and sisters on a beach vacation in this Kuala Sepetang, tanned, gangly children in funny, too-big swimsuits and bowl-cut hairstyles. I imagined my grandmother in a light sarong kebaya and sunglasses under a stripey umbrella, and my grandfather grinning widely in thick, black-rimmed spectacles.

“I was born in Kuala Sepetang,” Mowmy said. “There was no beach. There was a mangrove swamp.”

Shits and giggles, kids, shits and giggles.

And awaayy we go!

At four in the morning I was awake. I blinked into the darkness, I turned my body left and right, I buried my head in my pillow. I yawned till the tears came, but still my mind was off like a foxhound through the trees, mad and panting after a streak of red fox.

I got up and heated a small saucepan of milk to go with my book. This did not make me fall asleep.

At four in the morning you hear every tick, every bump and rustle, and the night is thick with hopes and regrets.

So lazy I have been! So slow in the mornings, so crawly-out-of-bed! What little discipline structures my day-to-day was carried away on the winter wind while CC and I traipsed around Paris and London in search of hot chocolates and sticky cinnamon rolls. “Back to work!” I said to myself and the mice when she left a couple of weeks ago. I called around for freelance bits while I searched the job ads again. I answered mail, I vacuumed, I grocery-shopped. I did a lot of laundry. I baked brownies. This was the first day. Later came the maple syrup cake showered with shattered pecans. Later, still, the shortcakes.

(The mice, meanwhile, licked all the peanut butter off the mousetrap.)

These past two weeks have found me in a curious no-zone between one big vacation and another. It was not so long ago that we held high glasses of champagne while the Eiffel Tower fizzed in the night. This weekend in Singapore, we will be planning another New Year’s Eve dinner, visions of niangaos dancing in our heads.

I have decided, incidentally, that this is the year I learn to cook Chinese properly. I’d always assumed that being Chinese meant Chinese cookery would come naturally. It turns out that having a bottle of oyster sauce in the fridge does not a Chinese chef make.

I started small last night with a steamed sea bass and bai cai in a garlic sauce – nothing fancy, but these are the foods that taste of a home. Prepped, the minced garlic, sliced ginger and chopped spring onions on the cutting board made, already, for a fragrant apartment. Afterwards, the steam puffed out from under the aluminium cover on the wok and then we ate the fish off the bone. We spooned the fried garlic-soy sauce-shaoxing rice wine gravy onto tender meat. It tasted like accomplishment and celebration.

“You should call your mother,” Olive said. You know, I almost did.

Thirty pounds bought us a cheap ticket on the first train to Paris. At 5:27 in the morning, some four weeks ago, Olive and I were in our seats; by 10:30 we were walking out of the boulangerie on avenue Parmentier, breaking a warm croissant in two. Like the ill-fated Hansel making his way through the fairytale forest, we left a trail of croissant flakes in our wake. “Do you see how my fingers are glistening with butter?” Olive said. He was pleased. Lucky for him the witch in her gingerbread house was not waiting for him.

We wove through the crowd at the Friday market on the boulevard Richard Lenoir. We ducked left and right through the thick of people with their market baskets and their little dogs, and the stalls were piled high with fish and cheeses and many-coloured fruit on display. Wild we were with the promise of Paris, and the city was tinted the colour of holidays.



There were a goodly number of strong espressos that day – taking the first train of the day will do that to you – and still we fell into bed for a two-hour nap late in the afternoon, waking to the light dusky through curtains the shade of dandelion clocks.

This was the calm.

Near midnight the next day, CC arrived from Sydney, pulling her red patent crocodile-leather stewardess bag behind her into the Gare du Nord as if she were a xinyao star. “Ouais!” we said, me and CC, at the train station, and “Ouais!” we said again when we woke the next morning. We had luxurious, decadently scented massages to get to, and beyond that a city of patisseries was calling.



Days we walked in the sun or rode the handsome Vélibs, balancing gingerly and screaming with glee down the boulevards. Well. One of us was screaming with glee and I think I need not tell you which one it was. We cycled single file, Olive in the front, CC in the middle and me bringing up the rear, and when I yelled “Vélib!” it echoed off the buildings and their black balustrades. “Vélib!” I yelled down the streets, or “Ouais!” or “This is great!” and, late one night, after dinner with Marc and Em and Oli and Kris in the Marais, as our bikes skipped down the cobblestones and we cruised through a moonlit Place de la Bastille, as we crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz and Paris was left and right and straight ahead, it really was great. Our cheeks were pink from exertion and the night breeze. “This,” I said to CC as we parked our bikes, “is what it is to be alive!” “My knees are still wobbly,” she said.



Days we walked in the sun, I say, with a hot and giant crêpe in our hands, or a small paper bag of sugar-studded chouquettes; even, once, a tray of delicate mini tartines we eventually sat on the pavement to eat, our sneakers resting on a speed bump. One Saturday we carried two kilogrammes of cheese for dinner that night. Mid-afternoons we collapsed, more often than not, at any one in a line of welcoming tables in any one in a line of welcoming teahouses. On days grey and damp we fell into the teahouses, too, for we are not, CC and me, two to discriminate. At Mariage Frères the lime cake was light like lime clouds.



Such hijinks and japes, such jolly adventures! One cold morning we woke and CC said, “There is a lot to pompi-see and Pompidou.” We queued for an hour at Beaubourg and, once in, needed fortification at the museum café before we could go on. At the Musée des Arts décoratifs, we read the menu at their chi-chi museum café – “Il sont quatre, ils sont fumés... La mer était leur berceau,” read one of the items – before we snorted and delved into the lunchtime clamour at the sandwich shop across the street.

At the Luxembourg gardens we leaned back in reclining chairs; in Montmartre Olive took us up and around the winding streets; through Saint-Germain and the Marais and on the boulevard des Capucines and down by rue Montorgeuil, we looked at the window displays like pigtailed children in front of so many sparkling candy shops. We touched and admired, we ooh’d and we aah’d.

“We cannot go in here,” I said, as we paused in front of a thing shop on rue Jacob. “It will be the ruin of us.” Things are the ruin of us, and we were already holding one little tome on cooking with orange blossom water, one slim monograph on cooking with honey, a couple of Arcimboldo postcards – though none of the man who is made up of fish, from whose nobly sloping pate fine corals reach out, from the back of whose head a tiny shrimp is balanced – and a sizeable Ladurée bag containing a fine selection of viennoiseries. There was a brioche in there. There was a chocolate-pistachio croissant in there. There would have been a blackcurrant-violet macaron in there as well, but we had already eaten it in the street. “It will be the ruin of us,” I said as we pushed the door open, and when we left the store I was holding a cotton tablecloth edged in blue and dotted with wild strawberries.



We criss-crossed the city and skipped up the steps in the métro. (We took the bus to the Bon Marché.) We pretended we lived in the Musée Picasso, and we made to shout up the wide staircase for the maidservant. One evening, as the wind chilled us to the bone, we stood in line, my CC and me, shuffling forwards with numb feet, to make it up the Eiffel Tower sparkling in the night.

It was as cold as stars up on that viewing platform, and the city and her lights twinkled below us. There was a year coming to an end and a year beginning but from up there you couldn’t see where they came together. The wind was teasing my scarf, and my hair whipped ’round my face. Down on the ground, we knew, the vendors under their neon signs had fairground crêpes for sale, and paper cones of hot fries.