Guard Your National Dishes
I almost choked on my chilli crab.
“We cannot continue to let other countries hijack our food. Chilli crab is Malaysian. Hainanese chicken rice is Malaysian. We have to lay claim to our food.” says Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen.
Alamak! Does it mean that I can’t go to a zer char stall and order chilli crab anymore? Sorry, Malaysian food. Cannot sell in Singapore. Want to eat must go to Malaysia. But the cook is Malaysian, isn’t he? Well, maybe he can cook chilli crab in Singapore as long as he is licenced by the Malaysian government. Or do we have to pay chilli crab royalty to the new Ministry of Malaysian Food every time we serve chilli crab? What’s going to happen to our laksa and nasi lemak. Royalty to the Malaysian government as well? Let’s not even think about what the Indians would say about our roti prata. But knowing Singaporeans, they’ll probably just pay up and eat up.
What the heck. Let’s just eat up and pay up as long as the royalty doesn’t cost as much as GST. But those who have a bit of time on their hands towards the long weekend may want to think about it a little. We can’t argue when it comes to which airline belongs to who. But a problem may arise if somebody claims that SIA’s uniform is not really “Singaporean”. The Indonesians may come to claim it. The Malaysians may come to claim it and eventually, SIA may need to pay royalty for their kebayas too.
You see, if you keep going in that direction, more and more issues are going to crop up. One of the most curious claims in Thailand is that curry noodles or khao soi, is actually a Burmese dish. Just take a look at the kiam chye (preserved vegetables) and the mee pok. The coconut milk based curry is decidedly Malay if you ask me.
So what is all this cultural theft and and gourmet hijacking all about? There are Burmese and Khmer temples in Thailand. Can the Burmese or Cambodians accuse the Thais of hijacking their culture if Thailand calls these Thai temples? Should all these “foreign” artifacts be destroyed like the Buddhas at Bamiyan so that we can all start off on a “clean” slate?
And what about food that have exotic names which are actually misnomers invented by creative chefs to fool their customers. Hongkong (Singaporean by birth) film-maker Cai Lan once wrote that Yangzhou fried rice was a dish created by a desperate Cantonese chef who wanted to treat his bored customers to something exotic. Apparently, not many people in Hongkong had been to Yangzhou back then, so nobody knew that the chef’s Yangzhou fried rice was really created without any inspiration from Yangzhou whatsoever. The chef’s trick was discovered when people went to Yangzhou and got strange stares when they ordered Yangzhou fried rice. If Dr Ng Yen Yen were running Yangzhou, I’m not sure how she would handle the matter. Would this be a case of Yangzhou hijacking Yangzhou fried rice from the Cantonese?
One thing’s for sure, she can no longer say: “We do not want the problem of these ‘little dragon ladies’ to escalate. These women are enticing local married men into having affairs with them and are causing family disharmony.” 
Singapore is a land of immigrants. If every “parent” culture claims ownership of any part of what we regard as uniquely Singapore (a stupid slogan if you ask me), there is very little we can do to defend our “uniqueness”. Even our mee siam is Siamese noodles, but our PM has tried very hard to build our Singaporean identity around it.
