For eleven years I have ordered the same bowl of mee pok every Tuesday morning at the same stall on the second floor of Tiong Bahru Market. Dry, chilli separate, no fishball. Extra crispy pork lard. It costs $4.50 now. It cost $3.20 when I began.
The woman who runs the stall is in her mid-sixties. Everyone calls her Auntie Peng. She is not, so far as I can tell, particularly friendly. She is not particularly unfriendly. She takes your order without looking up. She hands you your change without looking up. In eleven years I have received one direct compliment from her, and it concerned my haircut, which I had not asked her about.
Nevertheless: eleven years, fifty-two Tuesdays a year, minus the weeks she closes for Chinese New Year and one August she was on a cruise. That is roughly five hundred bowls of noodles. Here is what I have learned.
The queue is a barometer
If Auntie Peng's queue on a Tuesday morning is fewer than four people, the mee pok will be excellent. If it is more than eight, the mee pok will still be good but the fried shallots will have been made twenty minutes earlier and will have lost their edge. This is not a criticism. It is an observation about entropy and shallots. Every day of the week she is the same person doing the same thing to the same noodles, but on Tuesday mornings, when the market is quiet, the noodles are somehow more themselves.
Weather is content
Auntie Peng does not talk about the weather. But she runs her stall as if the weather were a conversation partner. On humid mornings she leaves the sauce a little wetter — more shallot oil, less chilli paste. On cool December mornings, when the North-East Monsoon has just arrived, she adds a small extra pinch of white pepper. She has never told anyone she does this. I only worked it out in year four, after I compared my Google Fit weather records with my own recollection of the bowls.
Regulars are not customers
A regular is somebody you have decided to be responsible for, in the smallest possible way. In year three I began arriving on Tuesday mornings a little earlier — 6:50 instead of 7:15 — so that Auntie Peng could set up her second wok before the queue started. I did not ask if I could help. I simply began sitting on the plastic stool nearest the counter and reading a book, so that the empty stool was occupied.
This is not a service. It is a form of company. She has never thanked me. She has also, on the four Tuesdays in eleven years that I have arrived late, saved me a stool.
"The regulars know I don't like conversation. They also know I don't like being alone."
This is a paraphrase. Auntie Peng said something very like it, once, to another regular whose name I never learned. I overheard it because the market was almost empty. It has stayed with me for six years.
Consistency is a form of care
People sometimes ask me why I have kept ordering from the same stall for eleven years. My honest answer is: I don't know. There are better bowls of mee pok within twenty minutes of my flat. There are certainly cheaper ones. There are stalls where the auntie will chat with you about your parents.
But there is a particular kind of care that operates entirely without warmth. It shows up in the small adjustments — the shallot oil on humid days, the extra sauce for the elderly man in Unit 04 who cannot chew properly, the way she starts the second wok five minutes early on Tuesdays. Nobody has told her to do these things. Nobody would notice if she stopped. She does them anyway. That, I think, is what she has been teaching me. Not with words. Not on purpose. Simply by opening her stall every morning at half past six.
Consistency, taken seriously, is a form of attention. Attention, taken seriously, is a form of love.
The chilli is, incidentally, still separate. I will still be ordering it that way in another eleven years, God willing, and so, I suspect, will she.
