#49

In my interviews with family members on our family history, I recently found out my paternal great grandmother was, to quote one of my relatives, a plant medicine healer in her village — both at Adam Road kampung (Malay word for Village) in Singapore and in Dengkil, Johor Baru, Malaysia. Mothers would come to her because their babies wouldn’t breastfeed. Using a powder she had concocted —pearl powder was one of the ingredients— she would apply some in babies’ little mouths with her thumb. A relative demonstrated how she would spread it around the gums. I badly want her to visit my dreams and teach me her ways.

Through my research on dream visitations, I met Pochih Huang, an artist who, a few years ago, collaborated with Dawan Katjadrepan, an indigenous chief from Taitung, east Taiwan. Chief Dawan regularly receives dream visitations from her ancestors, instructing her on how to make wines from native plants. One of these wines became part of Pochih and Chief Dawan’s project, Dream Inspired Millet Wine. Visitors could sample this wine while sharing their dreams at Mei Mei Health Salon, a space where she also offers wellness services. Pochih generously gifted me one of the bottles he had left. He said it could aid in ancestral connection.

This fermented dream wine is yellow with the subtlest tinge of snake green. I decided I would drink a little every night, and prayed for dream visitations from my great grandma. On the first night, I tossed and turned, finding it hard to sleep. In a half awake, half asleep vision, I see Pochih and I dressed in white, in a white room, chatting. In the next dream, my great grandma stands over a table in an environment that feels like a tropical jungle. There is a big banana leaf on the table; on it, ingredients for making something — sugared peanuts, ginger, garlic, chives. I knew the dream was not about the breastfeeding powder, so I made dream visitation candy. 

In one later meditation, she let me know that the candy, with its spicy kick, would help with creativity. In another, after I had been experimenting with many ways to make the candy without success, she showed me how it looked and tasted. I saw and felt her tongue licking and clicking a thin rectangular block of sugared ingredients which rested sweetly in her smiling mouth, the brown(?) sugar slowly melting.

There isn’t one way the candy should be. And there have already been 11 versions. Perhaps the seeking of the perfect recipe is like grasping a night dream as one wakes in the morning, like holding water between one’s palms. And maybe all the candy versions put together is the coalescing of puddles into one watery, whole dream that means I am meeting my lineage through a woman I never saw in the flesh.

Salty Xi Jie Ng, Singapore

[loved one]