By Tessa Wong
Political Correspondent
twong@sph.com.sg

 

On Sunday as my Facebook and Twitter feeds lit up with friends tweeting about their curry lunches and dinners, I was slaving away in my kitchen making beef stew.

I had heard about Curry Day about two weeks ago, when several friends on Facebook sent me invites to the Cook A Pot of Curry event. In those two weeks, I had thought about what tolerance, and being Singaporean, means to me, and decided: I wasn't going to cook curry.

I wasn't trying to be contrarian for the sake of it. Nor was I trying to make an anti-Curry Day statement. I just had three simple reasons.

The first is that I was uncomfortable with the origins of the event, which started as a response to an incident where a PRC family complained about the smell of curry every time their Singaporean Indian neighbour cooked curry. It eventually emerged that the incident happened seven years ago, but by then the curry controversy was already on the boil.

Like many Singaporeans, I was unhappy about the PRC family's alleged requests that the Indian family stopped cooking curry (that's like telling Chinese people not to eat rice). I was also unsure about the agreement that the two families voluntarily settled upon, which was that the Indian family only cooked curry when the PRC family was not at home, and the PRC family had to try curry at least once. In my opinion, that left the Indian family shortchanged, even though they had willingly agreed to it.

But, I was equally unhappy about the Cook a Pot of Curry event as a response. To me, its original event description carried more than a hint of xenophobic undertones, dressed up in nationalistic fervour.

One paragraph read thus: ""I hope that every Singapore Citizen/ or true blooded natives can COOK a pot of curry all over the island on this date (21st Aug 2011- Sunday) and let the aroma-therapy of CURRIES permeate the whole nation!! SHOW them we will not be coerced and DUN COME and bully our Indian Malay, Eurasian or Peranakan friends ! Roar!"

"True-blooded"? "Coerce"? "Bully"? Why the defensive language, and why draw a line between us and them?, I thought at that time. By then, more than 5,000 people had signed up for the event.

Then, last week, the event suddenly shifted in its tone. Suddenly, it became "Cook and Share a Pot of Curry" Day. The defensive rhetoric was scrubbed from the event description, and replaced with soothing pleas to include foreigners in the event. Anti-foreigner posts on the event page were also deleted.

I was glad to see that, but still had my misgivings given the original intent of the event.

Nominated Member of Parliament Mr Viswa Sadasivan wrote to The Straits Times Forum page recently, pointing out that the event was not about xenophobia, but rather was directed at intolerance. The organisers have also been quoted in news reports that the event was not meant to drum up anti-foreigner sentiment.

If that was so, then why did it take an intolerant stand at first by wanting to annoy foreigners with curry smells? Whether that stand was intentional or not, I found it pretty ironic that in trying to get foreigners to fit in, the event wanted to literally rub their noses into it.

The second reason why I wanted to cook beef stew was simpler. I'm proud to be a Singaporean, and I have many foreign friends who care as much about Singapore as I do. I'm for encouraging tolerance too, done in a gracious way.

But why do I need to take part in an event to prove it? In fact, why do I need to prove it at all, when I know these things in my heart?

The third reason was the simplest.

I just felt like having beef stew on Sunday. So I cooked it. And I found it just as delicious as curry.