Stir-fried and not shaken

It took me over a year to finish this book, so I can't say it's a gripping account, but like the title says, it's a nostalgic trip and an educational description of the times and fascinatingly mixed culture of those days in Singapore (and before it became Singapore). It's light on the politics so you're left wondering what happened when the author mentions wars and ethnic strife almost as abstract occurrences, but possibly some of that is due to the vantage point of childhood, and it gets more detailed (and more interesting to me) in the later chapters when he's an adult, married with kids, etc. Despite the nostalgia, and some snootiness making fun of poor English and uneducated young women, he frankly exposes some backwards cultural among the older generations especially the treatment of women (preference for male children, not "wasting" education on young women...), but his greatest enthusiasm not surprisingly given his career is for food, and I could have used more of that (now I miss my favorite Malaysian restaurant in Vegas).