‘Knowing I couldn’t return was painful’: How food connects me to my home more than 6,500 miles away

I have been on English soil for 476 days straight, and counting. It feels strange to be writing that because I shouldn’t complain – I’ve been very fortunate throughout this pandemic: I’ve been able to keep my job, pay my rent, and haven’t fallen ill with coronavirus.

But at the same time, I didn’t imagine I would have gone this long without being able to, at the very least, go home once during the past year.

I moved to the UK from Malaysia in mid-June 2019. I had plans under my belt to go on a final holiday in Greece with my best friends after my wedding in September, to go to Latvia for a mini winter break with my new husband, to go to Bermuda for our honeymoon in May this year, and to go home to Malaysia in August to see my family again. 

But one by one, all my plans fell apart – either by will of the Home Office or the worsening pandemic. Soon, I found myself in the early days of lockdown with a fistful of cancelled plans and nothing but time on my hands. 

Knowing I would not be able to return to my home country was particularly painful, and worst still is not knowing when I can return without having to quarantine for two weeks there and here in the UK. Who can afford to go halfway across the world just to spend two weeks in quarantine? Not I.

Home seemed – and still seems – so far away. So I started looking for ways to bring home to me, into my new home in London, and the easiest way to do that is through food. 

I asked my parents for recipes of dishes I missed from their kitchen, asked friends for their favourite local recipes, and for a time, shopped exclusively at online Asian supermarkets to get ingredients that weren’t available at my local corner shop or farmer’s market.

In my quest to bring home to me, I amassed a number of cooking tools, including a bamboo steamer, a short rolling pin especially for rolling out dumpling wrappers, a specific type of domed wok lid I searched high and low for.

 I remember being very excited about the bamboo steamer, immediately experimenting with char siu bao (a fluffy steamed bun filled with barbecue pork that is a staple in dim sum meals), Chinese flower buns (delicately stretched and folded steamed buns laced with spring onion and white pepper), and steamed tofu with fried shallots and oyster sauce.

Lockdown gifted me the time to think about cooking projects that took more than 20, 30 minutes to throw together. I made curry puffs, starting in the morning wrapping, rolling and resting little dough balls before filling them with mouth-watering curried potatoes and boiled eggs; salting pork belly skin overnight and roasting it the next day to achieve a beautifully crispy siew yoke; even brining duck eggs for six weeks as an experiment to see if I really could make my own salted egg yolks, which were then used to make a salted egg yolk sauce, flavoured with plenty of garlic and curry leaves and coating crispy-shelled prawns.

Taking on unfamiliar and complicated cooking projects gave me a sense of purpose during lockdown. I was still working from home, but I work on an erratic schedule, with irregular working times, so there was no way to keep to an organised work week. 

What do you do when you suddenly have two days off in the middle of the week and you want to stay out of your partner’s space? When time stretches out in front of you and no amount of Netflix and YouTube can fill it?

It was just a bonus that the food I chose to cook filled our tiny flat with the smells of my home. They weren’t all successful – far from it – but with each failed dish, I knew I was a step closer to making something better and more familiar. My husband would hover by the kitchen door to watch me flit between chopping and peeling and stewing, asking questions or helping with a task. 

For the most part, he benefited from the fruits of my labour and was appreciative that I took into account his pescetarianism when I planned to cook. 

But still, I take pleasure in cooking a meat-based dish every now and then, especially for me. It feels like a treat.

As we face another form of lockdown and the return to the office has been further postponed, I plan to continue cooking and experimenting with new ingredients, recipes and cuisines. 

It heartens me to think that maybe, when I can eventually go home to Malaysia, I can make these things for my friends and family – and that’s a thought that will have to sustain me for the time being.