When I think about rice, I think of how soothing it is to wash it. The crunch of it against the palms of your hands, sifting it through your fingers, trying to lose as few grains as possible to the sink. I think of Lak Chim’s exasperation at her mother’s insistence that rice should be kept with black tea leaves mixed through; it meant my aunt had to wash out the leaves each time she cooked. “I’ll never do this again, even if she says something,” she confided. Our family pantry was besieged by moths and weevils, and my parents washed kilograms of rice and laid it all on tablecloths in the sun, flat pools of white on the pavement drying slowly. Because, they reasoned, who could waste that much rice?

This too is soothing: Making a perfect bowl-shaped mound of plain rice tumble with a fork; a large spoonful of rice mixed into soup; the swirl of coconut milk through pulot hitam, black-purple glutinous rice punctuated with pandan; heaping rice into each of my family members’ bowls in turn; Sa Chim’s Hainanese chicken rice on church camps, so famous and fragrant and ritual that we could expect chicken porridge for breakfast the next day; soft egg yolk seeping into rice; scraping the last of the rice from the bowl – because if you don’t clean up completely, you or your partner will have pimples equal to the number of leftover grains! – and smiling at the memory of 奶奶’s serious face.