Scripts & Serendipity

🎉 Celebrating CNY: Chaos, Culture & Cat Hair Chinese New Year in a multicultural neighbourhood is a genuinely wonderful kind of chaos — visits back to back, food appearing faster than it can be eaten, and this year, my cat deciding the reunion dinner table was prime real estate for a nap, right in the middle of the mandarin oranges. 🧧 The Visiting Marathon Growing up in Malaysia means CNY isn't just for one household — it's an open-door season. Neighbours visit neighbours, regardless of background, and everyone ends up with more cookies, more oranges, and more red packets (or giving out more, depending which side of adulthood you've landed on) than they know what to do with. 🐱 Enter: The Cat My cat has exactly one opinion about CNY, and it's that the shiny red decorations are clearly toys, the gift-wrapped mandarin oranges are clearly also toys, and the brand new tablecloth is clearly the best napping surface in the house. I spent more time this year chas...

🍤 Prawn Masala & Memory Bites – Cooking from the Heart There are recipes you cook because they're quick, and there are recipes you cook because they bring someone back into the room with you, even if just for the time it takes the onions to soften. Prawn Masala is the second kind for me. 🧡 Where This Recipe Actually Comes From This wasn't a dish I learned from a cookbook or a video — it came from standing next to my mother in a small kitchen, being handed tasks too simple to mess up (peel this, stir that) while she did the parts that actually required judgment: how much chilli is "enough," when the masala has cooked down just right, when to add the prawns so they don't turn rubbery. Some of that judgment, I still haven't fully learned. I've made this dish dozens of times and I still find myself second-guessing the chilli amount every single time — which, if I'm honest, might be exactly the point. Some things in cooking (and maybe in genera...

🧨 Lion Dance in My Neighbourhood: How Tradition Lives On Every year, right around the same week, I hear it before I see it — the drums. Not the polished, rehearsed kind you catch on TV during CNY specials, but the slightly uneven, very enthusiastic kind played by a troupe making their way street by street through the neighbourhood. 🥁 The Sound Before the Sight There's a specific kind of anticipation that builds when you hear the drums getting closer. Doors open. Neighbours who otherwise only wave from their cars step out onto the street. Someone's kid is always the first to spot the lion's head bobbing above the fence line. 🦁 More Than a Performance What gets me every year isn't really the acrobatics — though watching the lion climb and balance on those poles never stops being impressive. It's watching how seriously the younger members of the troupe take it. Some of them can't be older than 16, and they're carrying something that's been passed...