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Chicken
Appears in
By Sharon Wee
Published 2012
My mother once regaled that as a young wife shopping for freshly slaughtered chicken, she did not know how to describe a male chicken in Hokkien to the Chinese vendor, calling it a tapor kuey (boy chicken). Like many Nonyas, myself include, we call chicken by its Malay equivalent—ayam.
An old-fashioned wedding custom dictated that both a hen and a rooster were to be placed under the marital bed on a couple’s wedding day. Guests would then coax the fowls to come out. The fowl that emerged first would indicate the gender of the wedded couple’s firstborn. Interestingly, it took a long time for the rooster to come out from under my sister’s marital bed, foretelling the 12 years it took her to conceive her son.