Growing up in Lashio, Shan State, northern Burma

We moved around a lot.  I was born in one house in Block 2, then raised in another.  My father’s business went bankrupt, my mother took over being in charge of the money, he tried to persuade her to buy a house in Block 1 or 2 but she was both choosy and cautious and we ended up renting in Block 8.  After that we moved back to live with my Aunty in Block 2 for a year, in the house I’d been born in, until we found another house a few streets away.  The government declared that all the large denomination banknotes which carried General Aung San’s portrait were henceforth worthless.  It devalued a lot of people’s savings, including ours.  Then we moved to a nice part of Block 5, surrounded by quite a posh area, then finally to another house in Block 5, which is still our family home.

I was a kind of wild child, my brothers and sister were all older than me and had left home, I was left at home with my father while my mother was out running her business.  At one of the Block 2 houses, my father had a little bit of ground, and grew vegetables, coriander, chillis, vietnamese mint.  He had green fingers.  He liked chillis, and spicey food - not like my mum.  When she visited our relatives in Hsipaw they used to joke that even as she was opening the food cupboards she would be asking, “Do you have any eggs?” because she knew she wouldn’t like any of the food she would find there.  She liked five spice, turmeric, paprika, garlic, ginger, but not fish paste or chillies.  She liked plain, bland food.

Some of the earliest dishes I grew to love were yellow bean with flat soft Vietnamese noodles; rice mixed with condensed milk; savoury rice porridge with pork; preserved dried bean curd fried with garlic.