On this blog post… we talk about cooking inconveniences in Singapore and BL/yaoi stuff.
I have tried in the past few months to “cook” for myself in Singapore, both as to control my caloric intake and exercise a bit, but I soon found it situationally cumbersome, inconvenient at times and… generally expensive.
See, I like cooking. When I was still in Quezon City and my parents emigrated to Hawaii in 2013, I found myself with a whole kitchen to play around in. My sisters barely use the kitchen. If I spotted any of them, I assume they were cooking instant noodles or hotdogs. So I spent years playing with and making various international dishes I’ve seen on TV and YouTube, like fish en papillote and Chilean charquicán. I bought random spice boxes from the easiest Indian grocer I could find in Makati and experimented on which spices went well with chicken. I had fun going to random food festivals and trying to recreate them from memory on weekends. That never left me even when I started to rent a unit in Mandaluyong.
When I moved to Singapore in 2018, I was more into tasting as much as I could from any hawker I could. Every new hawker centre and food house were wonderlands to me then. I came here as a weekend tourist in 2017, and I barely scratched the surface of this country’s diverse food scene. I ate out for lunch and dinner then. I made it a point to try a new hawker every now and then. I went to random hawker centre every weekend (up until the pandemic came), no matter how far… well, at least where the trains could go. Even if I favored some hawker stalls and patronized them, I rotated through their menu first before I repeated anything. Some aunties noticed it and started “selling” me on some of their menu items.
But when the pandemic came, it forced me to stay home for months, sometimes by mandate and sometimes by precaution. So that made me pick up the cooking habit again. I started with the simple dishes I could eat, and at least the ones I craved. I cooked mostly Filipino food that had ingredients I could get in any Singaporean grocery – adobo, caldereta, tinola, nilaga. However, once the pandemic restrictions eased and my employer finished renovating the office to enable a social-distance safety protocol, I had to go back to the office to work. And that put a pause on home cooking.
In addition to that situation, I found that cooking at home in Singapore was expensive. Even when I avoided grocery stores and went directly to wet markets to buy ingredients, it was still expensive. Not only ingredients, but the cooking was also not optimal to my situation. I was sharing the unit with two other friends (one is a coworker) and one of them was also a home cook, so I had to cede access when she was busy in the kitchen. The pots and pans in the unit was also big, so no single-serving cooking was possible. I cooked 4-serving dishes then put the rest in the fridge after I eat one serving. The other roommate rarely ate at the unit, so I initially left some in the fridge and sent messages in our WhatsApp group chat telling them to feel free in taking food I cooked. When weeks passed and no one touched any of my cooked food, I eventually gave up. I then went full tilt towards my own preferences, by that I meant more spicy food.
I often ended up tiring my tongue after eating the same dish for days. I also lost some ingredients to spoilage when I changed dishes and I couldn’t use some of them. Poor planning on me. So when the social rules relaxed enough to allow us to move more free around and more hawkers reopened, I gladly paused cooking.
I computed my expenses later, and it was clear that cooking at home was less effective than eating out. I could spend a whole day and stay under 15 SGD with three meals. No need to wash dishes, no need to turn on the cooking gas. Eat and throw away the takeaway after. If I cooked at home, not only do I need to buy ingredients in fixed group quantities, I have to turn on the kitchen lights, use gas to cook and wash dishes after, so that is a burden on utility expenses as well as dishwashing soaps and washing sponges/scrubs. When I saw the difference in utility bills from one month of cooking at home compared to not cooking at home, I knew it was not optimal.
Fast forward years later, March 2024.
I had to lose weight as recommended by the podiatrist, so one of the things I looked into was cooking for myself again. But I was not keen to 1) kill my tongue again nor 2) raise the unit’s utility expenses again, so I researched ways that I can resolve some of the issues before I cooked again.
For breakfast, I immediately narrowed it down to one dish I can either cook on stovetop or just steep in hot liquid/water and leave alone, but allows me flexibility to change flavors should I start to get weary of repetition – the humble oatmeal. I settled on switching between chocolate and vanilla flavors. I bought mixed nuts in the grocery to mix in a tablespoon of them in my morning oats. I bought two protein jars – one chocolate and one vanilla, and I switch every now and then. On weekdays I prep it as overnight oats, on weekends I cook them stovetop. For liquids, I just do 4/5 milk to 1/5 water, around 250ml, boil it with a spoonful of trail mix, and pour it on the oats to steep.
Lunch was a no-go. As I still work in an office on weekdays, I quickly knew that I didn’t have the time nor the happy morning demeanour to cook my lunch and put it in a lunchbox. I am grumpy AF in the mornings, so much so that the only dishes I can cook in the morning that won’t trigger my impatience was instant noodles (pancit canton) and oatmeal. I briefly thought about pre-prepping the night before, but I also realized that I will never have decently-cooked vegetables in it. To ensure that the veggies be cooked well is such a hassle. So, nope.
Dinner was the only free choice. However, dinnertime also presented its own incoveniences. First, my work schedule on nights are wacked. Often I am able to leave for home by 7pm, but sometimes there’s a patch deployment or a piece of work I just have to cross off my list for the day, so I eat out at dinner and go home late on those rare occasions. Second, my new roommate also has an unpredictable schedule. His work hours are always changing, and he is also an avid home cook. So sometimes I got home by 8pm and he’s prepping his meals in the kitchen, and he takes an hour or more to finish. So I can’t cook until then.
So the way I went at it first was to “prep”something I can whip up in minutes. Meaning, I precook something for 4 servings, eat one serving and eat the other 3 servings whenever I get home and get 10 minutes of kitchen access. However, prepped meals can only stretch so far for someone like me that easily tires of food. 4 times is my limit. And my repertoire of dishes to cook isn’t that good anymore. At first I went for the simplest ones – veggie fried rice, chicken porridge, sandwich fillings, hummus. However, I am at fault at this, my tongue tired out way faster than I wanted to. Fried rice got mushy by the time I get to the third serving. Porridge got thinner and I couldn’t salvage it with lao gan ma. Sandwich filling (mine was tuna) had its taste diminish every day in the fridge. Hummus was a bread thief (I used whole wheat wraps and toasted them like tortillas). Not to mention expenses. Even as I bought everything as cheaply as I could, I noticed my budget did not look good.
I eventually gave up on dinner one week in August after everything didn’t go my way for dinner. Deployments, unfortunate schedule timing, upset stomach. The fried rice I kept in the fridge somehow gained mold and I ran out of chili. Shit hit the fan and I just went fuck it and trooped to the nearest cai png stall for rice, steamed fish and a vegetable side for less than 6 SGD. After that, I just stopped in general to cook at home. I had a budget of 6-7 SGD for dinner, I ate at cai png or nasi padang stalls, half-rice and two sides, changed everyday.
I still do cook at home, but usually on “Flex Fridays” (my employer schedules certain Fridays to be work from home) and weekends. Free time and all that. I tend to be a bit more mood-based with those. For example, three weeks ago I watched a Paik Jong-won food episode on Netflix that made me try to cook jjajangmyeon sauce from scratch (although I bought sweet and sour fried pork at a cai png stall to stand in for tangsuyuk). I cooked Filipino corner beef with fried rice the week after that. Less stressful, way less expensive, and I can manage my time better.
However, recently I decided to semi-regularly make a dish that only takes me less than twenty minutes to prepare and do: ma jiang mian, or cold peanut and sesame noodles. It is a dish that doesn’t take too much effort and not that expensive to buy ingredients for.
I usually buy these noodles for less than 5 SGD at Scarlett, and they tasted amazing. So I figured, why not make my own? Fortunately, the Scarlett grocery has a lot of the ingredients. I found a pre-prepared sesame sauce bottle mixed with some rice wine, a cheap bottle of black vinegar, and a bottle of Sichuan-style chili oil with the crispy bits still inside. Then I grabbed two of the long noodle packs (6 in each) that I previously bought there, and the noodle has these wavy ends that should soak up the sauce pretty well. I remember they were very similar to dao xiao mian. Then before I got to my home, I bought a jar of store-brand peanut butter and two cucumbers.
Got home, popped two noodle bunches in boiling water. Then while those boiled, I mixed in a bowl one and a half tablespoons of peanut butter, three tablespoons of the sesame sauce, three tablespoons of the noodle water, a splash of the vinegar, three shakes of the Maggi seasoning liquid (I guess they could substitute for dark soy sauce), some sesame oil, and a heaping tablespoon of the chili oil with half of it the chili crisps. I also added in some Thai chili flakes for extra heat. Mixed them in a bowl and tasted it – and it tasted great! Not exactly the same as Scarlett’s, but still pretty damn close. And not soupy too, it’s like a proper semi-thick sauce. Mixed the noodles in and topped it with chopped cucumbers (sliced like tiny long sticks) and crunchy sesame peanut bits from a snack I haven’t finished up yet.
Tasted awesome.
This is only for my very specific personal tastes: I can admit I don’t find seme–seme or uke–uke pairings that attractive from the Japanese/Korean BL/yaoi that I read, and likely won’t find much footing in my long-term reading preferences, but I’ll only cede if the story greatly makes up for it. And to preempt gross misconceptions, this is largely a personal nitpick on the JP/KR works’ illustrations, art and story, not the genre as a whole. And not a fetishization as well.
My preferred pairing for boys’ love (shortened to BL) and yaoi is that there’s a top (seme) and a bottom (uke). Someone’s aggressive, and the other submits. I know that in real life, our gay friends are much more flexible. They (rightfully) should love whoever they love. And for the record, I don’t read bara or furry yaoi either, I read some with an open mind but it didn’t capture my fascination as well as BL did. More power to those who do, bless them and their exotic and unique ways. But for my BL/yaoi fiction, I have already developed strong and clear preferences over the years, and I mostly stuck to it.
I know I am used to the seme being a little more manly and the uke being more feminine and shy. The illustrations by (usually) Asian artists does help a lot (at least for me) to feed the imagination. I mean, these works were created with a female audience in mind in Asia anyway, so that naturally influenced the illustrations and art. Some artists do stick to the “tried-and-tested” art styles, and some try to go full tilt towards styles I find to be of acquired tastes. It’s always going to be dependent on who sees the artwork anyway, but “tried-and-tested” usually gets second volumes because of decent sales. Exotic and experimental usually ended as one-shots.
Seme are usually depicted as sexy in a masculine sort of way. Piercing eyes and suave tones. I usually avoid the ones with exaggerated male things like Schwarzenegger muscles or long sausages. Maybe a nice ass, as some artists clearly could not resist. Generally, most of them are just well-toned and/or handsome. More like suave young Benedict Cumberbatch than swole Chris Hemsworth, if that would help as a rough comparison.
The uke are more in line with bishōnen art tropes, very androgynous and effeminate. Often shy and has moments of being demure. Sometimes moody, or more in touch with their feelings and aren’t afraid to show it. Most artists end up making variations of otokonoko but slightly tuned for BL. But unlike the seme, the uke often blurs the line between being a male and being a “trap”. Most BL/yaoi artists end up with an uke character that has some man and some woman in terms of features, but the balance is tricky. Putting too much “man” and the character ends up with other traits compensating for the lack of visual femininity, but also putting too much “woman” and the character ends up being perceived as a flat-chested woman or a tomboy. A deft artistic touch is always appreciated for uke characters.
So in the past when I looked in a bookstore/manga app and saw a BL/yaoi cover art, often I didn’t need to inspect much because if I could spot the seme and uke right away, and I liked the art style, I assumed it’ll be decent, it’ll have at least a second volume, and I pick it up and try to see if the story is as good. Then after a cursory check, I could start thinking about the pairing dynamic and how they went with each other. The characteristics might be cookie-cutter but the end results often ended up as fascinating. Talented artists and/or writers must’ve worked hard there. But for a few years now, not so much with some works and dōjins. I do acknowledge it’s a diversification of tastes, good to have overall, but for me who likes some things to be more defined, it adds a little more legwork to screen the works that I might want a few chapters more of.
For example, now if I see some BL/yaoi book covers, I have to apply a thorough checklist in my mind. First, do I like the art style? Again, it’s just for me – and it is a first as a must, non-negotiable and uncompromising. I don’t like to read things and get distracted by artists that look like they were influenced by Jackson Pollock or ukiyo-e. Second, do I like the depiction of the main characters and are they (at least) able to depict who’s who in the order? Circling back to my preferences, I do prefer depictions with less guessing of “who’s on top here?”, it’s a big factor but has some leeway for compromise, if for example the backstory and the main story are a high 9/10, I can agree to set aside my qualms about the depictions.
But the depictions of the main characters in the work can sometimes be puzzling and often leaves me to think a lot of things going forward. For example, if I decide to read something then I get a little bit deeper into the story and then realize, oh no, these are two seme, so then my thinking is a bit derailed. It’s an added complexity, then. I start guessing about how many chapters do I get before someone decides to be the top here. Or two uke guys in the story. Heck, these two are going to be too shy to make the first move, am I gonna sit through chapters of one dude trying to find the courage to light the fire? Story might be decent but I don’t know how long my interest might hold up before the story gets to the good stuff.
I do admit I highly prefer seme–uke, as I don’t have to bother with extra chapters of finding-out stuff, I already know who’s gonna be what here. More space for relationship development and more leeway for the complexities of love. I go read them with way less apprehension. Comfort in familiarity, in a general sense. But I like sometimes that the authors mix it up and make the uke be the aggressive initiator (but the seme ends up the one on top anyway) or the seme having some shy-ish tendencies and have the uke be the one who gets him out of his shell. Same hierarchy but different interpersonal dynamics. That’s also fascinating to read for me.
Then sometimes I go read a few new BL works or some of the “Omegaverse” works and while I am drawn to the genre in general so I read a lot of new stuff, and this is coming from a dude who loves this genre, I find less comfort in having been saddled with a lack of assumption or having been forced (uncreatively) to do away with my expectations. Who’s gonna go first, methinks. I had read one Omegaverse story where it was drawn-out in 4 chapters to who will initiate the relationship. Both dudes looked like cookie-cutter Japanese bishōnen with slightly different balances, but one of them was a pretentious rebel that looked and behaved like a top but also the story depicted him as slightly weaker than what he lets on, and probably will easily fold to a more aggressive guy that takes an interest and willing to be the top, and the other was a rich dude that deluded himself to think he was a top (or the “alpha”) but he was really (and hilariously openly) the one who’s stubborn and very hungry for acceptance and comfort, and would likely also fold easily to an aggressive man if not for the target love interest being potentially more willing to fold than he would. One dude kept raising flags that the other dude picks up on but man, the story dragged on. I sometimes like the chase or the courage development. Some stories benefit from the struggle, with competent storytelling a must. But it just doesn’t make me invest long term into reading further if I feel it’s getting tedious or eating up chapters and tempting me to skip. Especially if the first volume of the series is just a prolonged game of a two-man circle chase, I end up dropping out.
I think it’s part of my impatience with most literary works in general. If the first volume never fully grabs my interest or makes me want more volumes, I just drop it and go read other stuff. There’s lots to read out there and so little time nowadays. Work and adult life and all that. I do miss the time back in the 90’s when I can read at leisure and the school library was always a buffet of books. First chapters/volumes usually decides the long-term reading decisions for me, unless I knew from research that the story picks up steam in later volumes. Sometimes I get those kinds, but admittedly they are also very few.
Back to topic. That issue of unsatisfied expectations has extended to dōjin as well, and to results I sometimes like and sometimes don’t. Sometimes I come across a dōjin that pairs two known dominant characters as a yaoi pairing, and I read a few pages, and I’m like, this doesn’t really work, someone has to be the first one to land the plane on the tarmac. I know this character in the anime, no way this dude will allow that dude to be the initiator. A conflict of character expectations, if you will.
Sometimes it works, which I find highly entertaining. Like one can go, “hmmm, that’s interesting”, because it’s like seeing characters in a different light. A good exercise of thought. It’s sometimes a great thing to try and subvert a reader’s preconceived notions of an established IP character, it can give a new shade of color. But sometimes I find it lacking as well, because some creatives write themselves into a hole and end up either saddling one or both of them with incongruent traits or writing character/s further away from their source material that it ends up as a “foreign” thing to people who like the character/s. But in the end, I just let go. I mean, it’s work done by a creative that is based on a work done by another creative. Of course there’ll be clashes. Original writer writes this dude as a top, dōjin writer wants same dude as a bottom. Original writer writes love this way, the dōjin writer envisions love another way. Same with shipping characters sometimes, between original writer and the fandom. Creatives clashing can be both beautiful and maddening.
So, while I always vouch for my main preferences in BL/yaoi – good artwork and a defined seme–uke pairing, I am willing to bend and give things a further read if other aspects of the work greatly make up for what I deem not interesting. But those, again, rarely end up working.
I find that these BL/yaoi preferences do not extend to my GL/yuri preferences, which I find slightly strange. I have yet to find a largely disagreeable pairing there. In light novels, not yet. In manga, some but not too many, like more of a bad writing than character depiction choice. I don’t know why but in yuri, the writing largely carries the story. The more complex the better. That’s where my main preference is with yuri – story complexity. Often there’s one with some degree of assertiveness, but some stories have two protagonists with equal measures of apprehension about starting a same-sex relationship, and that’s OK.
I always pegged the yuri quality to authors that tried hard not to phone it in. The artwork always end up as my secondary factor here. I’m not a fan of yuri that uses old-school 80’s manga styles or Jojo-style artwork, but other than that I kind of liked almost all of the ones I have ever come across. And to be fair, the genre gets to be a tad more acceptable, so it gets some mainstream airtime, like Maria-sama ga Miteiru. That one I get some friendly discussions on forums whether it’s really yuri or more of a Esu (Class S) work. I personally think it’s still yuri but in a safe way that enabled it to make its way to AT-X, basically a good and safe starting point. I don’t want people to start hard right away with “Citrus” (a favorite of mine) or “Bloom Into You”. Lob them starters first, easy watches like “Stardust Telepath” before going to Adachi to Shimamura.
But I also have to admit as well that my love for shoujo manga/anime and light novels kind of influenced my preferences for BL/yaoi and GL/yuri. The oldest books in my manga/novel shelves were either shoujo manga or adventure light novels, long before I tried out any BL works. I do find that most of my preferences in these genres shaped what I liked in other genres as well.
But there’s one character trope I find cute in BL/yaoi but never liked in GL/yuri, and it’s the bitch trope. In most BL/yaoi works, the man acting like a bitch, whether the seme or uke, it’s treated as a character flaw that might be hiding something behind it, whether insecurities or some domestic issues that can be patched later on. But on GL/yuri works, it’s definitely a piss if it involved a protagonist. Might be because I also never liked the bitchy characters in shōjo manga, but fortunately, it rarely got to the protagonist level, just support characters or antagonists. There were very few yuri works that I rejected, and of them, a lot had to do with an unpleasant protagonist trait.
So in short, I like traditional in my BL/yaoi, and I am more liberal in my GL/yuri (provided they don’t feature one of the protagonists as a bitch).
Briathrail // Albert 2MNG 
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