Soya Sauce Heritage

Perhaps the pangs of nostalgia are hitting me quite hard these days. I was craving for Soya-sauce braised chicken, the kind that my mom made when we were growing up. Realizing that I had run out of soya sauce, I went to the biggest Chinese supermarket and was simply blown away by the huge selection of soya sauce there – from light to dark to low-sodium to flavored to soy-based marinades, choices galore.

My grandfather was a soy-sauce worker, a hard worker who worked into his seventies, before he saved enough money to retire back in mainland China and died a few years after returning to China. I don’t have many memories of him.  He spoke only Cantonese and we were brought up speaking Hokkien (my mom’s dialect), hence, we didn’t converse very much.  He fled to Singapore during the Japanese war when Japan invaded China (World War II), taking with him my grandmother and 4 children, leaving the eldest one behind in China (I don’t know why). In Singapore, he worked in a soya sauce factory, a huge open air place with rows and rows of clay urns, containing soya sauce that fermented away in the sun. He made all sorts of soy products, from light soya sauce, dark soya sauce to soy bean paste. For years, we had a continuous supply of soya sauce and I never knew what ‘commercial’ products tasted like, until he left for China and we had to buy soya sauce from the store. It was a world apart. The soya sauce that my grandpa made was flavorful, not overly salty and you got a great soy taste. The ones that you buy from the supermarket are just ‘dead’ salty, almost like sea water with a slight dash of soy flavor. I admire his hard work; he worked all his life and walked around with a hunch, carrying the toil and the result of years bending down to work the urns.

I have a soya sauce heritage, I have a Chinese heritage. Even though I’m not from mainland China, I will always carry with me a unique brand of Chinese tradition and culture.