What Lies Beneath Sanrios & Fried Rice

It all started with my parents' overseas visit to see my sister.

Conveniently my sister lives right across a huge Asian food market. This was a huge plus for my elderly parents who don't always feel like going far for food.

On one surprisingly cool afternoon, my outgoing dad, who always prefers eat-in to takeaway, discovered a Chinese food stall at the food market that he hadn't noticed before.

Nothing Like It

Egg fried rice on the menu immediately caught his eye. And my…was he PLEASED with his order!

After an appetizingly rapid finish, he declared that it had the exact smell and taste of the street fried rice his mother used to buy him as a child in Shanghai.

Food stall where Dad rediscovered his egg-fried rice

Truth be told, Mom who accompanied Dad to the food market, did not quite share the same sentiment. She described it as plainly as I imagined it tasted to her, as ‘just rice with egg and nothing else’.

On the contrary, during Dad's entire one month stay there, he had happily returned to the same stall for egg-fried rice multiple times. Without Mom.

While my sister was narrating this whole intriguing incident, we started recounting our childhood stories.

My World of Pink

Source: Sanrio Official Instagram

One such memory was my love for all things Sanrio. My Melody and Little Twin Stars to be exact.

My Melody was a bunny with a soft pink hood over her ears while Little Twin Stars, originally created by the designer Yasuko Matsumoto, was a pair of twins - a boy with blue hair named Kiki and a girl with pink hair named Lala. They were often in soft pinkish, fluffy blue sky tones, making the whole setting irrresistibly 'kawaii', as the Japanese would say.

I remember, as a child, there was this nearby mall with the only Sanrio store in town back then.

We were a simple middle-class family so these Japanese imported goods in those days were considerably pricey.

Every time we went to that mall, I would feast my eyes on the pinkish My Melody and Little Twin Stars and be magically transported, totally immersed into their fairyland of the most awesome pretty soft plush goodness you could imagine.

On my birthdays mom would occasionally buy me one, and sometimes she would say if I did well in school that term, we could go to the store and she would let me choose another. My heart turned pink. It was inexplicable utter happiness.

Suddenly I felt a mad gush of desire to seek out my long forgotten Sanrio friends again.

I opened up my go-to Marketplace apps and started scrolling with energy higher than that of the undisputed Energizer bunny.

It was such elation to find my Sanrio characters were still very much alive. Even greater excitement to now be able to order them! And make them MINE.

And just like that my e-shopping cart fills up with mobile covers, cable holders, pens, pencils, notebooks and you-really-don’t-want-to-knows of Kiki, Lala and My Melody, each making their way home to mine.

The Unforgotten

My dad’s palish-yellow egg fried rice was no extraordinary cuisine by anyone’s standards.

On the contrary, it was a very humble Chinese dish - the kind of meal selected by those who needed a full stomach and enough in their pockets to make it till the end of the month.

Yet the true value of Dad’s fried rice to him was the reminisced childhood memories it evoked.

It wasn’t about the perfect balance of the egg and rice, the smell of the fried oil or the tranquil colour of the dish, but what lies beneath - the priceless joy of a child, the much savored moments with his mom on the way to market, at an irreversibly different time and different place brought back to reality through Chef Wang’s fried rice some seven decades later.

Likewise my favourite Sanrio characters were not powerful or adventurous anime characters nor mystical Totoro lovables nor brave Elsa personalities. They weren't sophisticated. They weren't animated. They didn't appear on TV. They didn't say anything smart or quotable.

Although I still see the Sanrio characters as cute, it was really about experiencing fulfilment of the once treasured and hard-to-attain scarcity that now I could choose to own. But most of all it is about re-living that irreplicable sense of glee that a child uniquely owns.

What We Hold

Indeed the pure joy (or pain) that a child experiences can often be deep and lifelong.

And in the end, what we hold dearest to our hearts are not so much the material value of the most exquisite goods we buy, the most delectable foods we devour, the flashiest cars we drive, the most scenic travel views we see even, but the precious emotions and memories that life elicits.

Klepon (sweet rice balls filled with molten palm sugar coated with shredded coconut) to me is Shanghainese egg fried rice to Dad.

As is Portuguese egg tarts and yuen yeung to my sister. And Yoshinoya rice bowls to my nephew.

Each one of us will undoubtedly have our own versions of Dad's egg fried rice.

Indeed wouldn't it be nice if each one of us used each of these personal favourites as mascots to remind us that

while our childhoods will never return, we do have the opportunity and the choice to make different wonderful memories every new day.

Let’s not waste our time getting upset over things that wouldn’t even matter in a few weeks or a few months or a few years time. #MyNewMantra

For what is life made of but collections of unforgettable moments?