Peranakan culture was what I was born into and what I experienced growing up with my mother’s family in Singapore, without knowing its name or that I wasn’t typically Chinese. My mother’s family members wore sarong kebayas and ate rice with their hands, spoke Teochew and English with a lot of Malay thrown in (so much so I never knew some of those words are not Chinese), and ate meals that never went without sambal belacan. They were other markings, more to do with practices and food and names than material things, so I actually thought we were wholly Chinese, not the special brand of Straits Chinese who had some Malay blood up the line—the “Chinese Peranakan”, which in Malay means children of the soil—Chinese descendants on Malayan soil, in this case.
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…And it didn’t explode in the kiln! (That was the important bit.) Behold!
It is MY wavy stamped leaf plate with ladybug. Which I made. My signature’s on the bottom. (May photograph the signature and add it to this post later, or maybe not.)
I’ve long wanted to work with “proper” clay, the kind that needs to be fired in a kiln, that gets covered in luscious glazes and so forth, and had always been challenged finding a pottery or ceramics class close enough to me. Then a lunch at the Singapore Flyer led me to discover Aaron Tan’s ceramics workshop there (website seems down at the moment, alas), and a few days later, I was having my first, trial lesson.
The two hours had moments of me feeling absolutely daunted and out of depth sometimes, but they were not entirely unpleasant (except, not having the physical strength to physically knead the clay when it came right out of the package was, frankly, terrifying—like, I kept wondering if I needed weight training or if I needed to just give up on a lifelong fancy). Once the kneading was done, things got a whole lot more fun, as fun as my teenage days when I worked with paperclay. Not that my previous paperclay skills helped any—real clay is a real different beast, and markedly different from shaping dough as well (which I love doing too) because OMG AIR IS THE ENEMY AND IT IS EVERYWHERE.
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