fried fish soup, delayed yum

Tonight's dinner at HV, a milk soup with rice noodle-- succulent fried, firm, white fish and "local spinach", Thai chili in fish sauce on the side to add-in, delish! Musical ambiance this evening = Miami Vice, an emo 80s mix tape.

This hawker center is not THE hawker center in HV, btw, but the one on the corner, across from the windmill. And ...whoever puts together the music for this center, is, like... A SISTER TO ME. Two weeks ago, the succulent carby-goodness of prata and dippage from the PrataMan combined with the Michael Jackson mix was, seriously, JUST what I needed to prevent slitting my wrists from homesickness. YOU SAVED MY LIFE, MIXTAPE LADY. I LOVE YOU, MAHN.

So here I am, tonight, contemplating my soup, which is far too hot to eat right away, sitting back in my chair, the big fans in the open air dining area oscillating gently, a cold mug of Tiger beer in my hand and the hubbub of contented voices all around me and I think to myself, 'This is me, Dee, watching an episode of Miami Vice in 1982 in metro Rocksonville, Floriduh. I am sitting in my mother's living room, and what's his face with the white linen suit is driving in his car, a warm night, just like here, with an 80s song blaring and the wind whipping thru his brush-back bangs. And in a moment of perfect clarity I look up, and see before me the timeline of my life laid out like a highway, punctuated with bright lights, a sensation of speed and the wind in my hair, just like the image on tv. I hurl down the road in the old Delta 88 I used to have, through this and thru that till I am looking down at a bowl of soup, cooling by degrees before me at an open cafe in Singapore. Slave to Love is playing. I watch a bead of condensation roll down my beer mug and pool on the table before I come back and start thinking mundane thoughts again, over in an instant, the spell created by the mixtape lady.

Here's the thing about this fish soup. 'Poo poo', said I, dipping a spoon in right when the gentlemn brought it out. It tastes raw and unsophisticated-- of milk and nothing else, where's its depth? But as I ate-- slowly, because of the heat, and waiting for the soup to cool-- the fried onions, the fried fish, the fish sauce and chilies (which I dumped in, of course!) slowly suffused throughout the soup, with the green vegetables. And slowly, as I chopsticked in the rice noodles, and ate the big chunks of fish, the soup transformed. From something hasty and simple, to somethign complex. Till after all the fish was gone, and the noodles eaten, it had become something sublime and savvory, something complex and wonderful. The soup at the end of the meal was entirely different from the soup at the beginning.

There's, like, some soup-y zen koan there or something, probably. YO I AM CLAPPING WITH ONE HAND CAUSE I'M EATING MY FISH SOUP WITH THE OTHER ONE WHAT SOUND AM I MAKING, GRASSHOPPER??!@!!