The Great Sardine Debacle

Prologue

The essence of youth - everything that comes from mum's kitchen is a smelly sardine, rotting vegetable, or a catastrophic carrot. From the mind of a Singaporean teen.

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I cracked the code. My mum, Mrs. Mabel Lim, was on a covert mission to “sabo”(ruin) my life. I knew this sounds insane, but just listen. I swear I’m not making this up—she had this evil gleam in her eye whenever she was about to embarrass me. I was a social outcast at school, and it was all her fault.

Let me tell you about what happened last Tuesday. I had a biology test, and I needed to impress this girl, you know? Not just because I hadn’t studied for it (okay, maybe that was my fault), but because Bethany Tan was sitting two rows in front of me. And let’s be real. Here in Singapore you must ace tests if you want to make moves on girls. Everyone knows that. My mum? Not really.

That morning, I shuffled downstairs, eyes blurred, and there she was. In full “Mission Sabo(sabotage, embarrass) Kok Leong” mode, concocting an evil brew in the kitchen. “Morning, Ah Boy! I made your favorite breakfast!”

Oh goodness.

Now, just so you get where I’m coming from, mum has never known what my favourite breakfast is. She believed she knew me, but she was sadly off track. My favourite breakfast—a smoothie she calls the “Brain Boost Blast.” She claimed that it was good for me because it was full of Superfoods, but in reality was a concoction of last week’s veggies that she didn’t want to waste. That Tuesday, she was tossed in slimy carrots that she would have thrown away otherwise.

“Uh, thanks, Mum,” I said, eyeing the smoothie with extreme caution. I thought I could sprint for the door, but got caught.

“Drink up! You’ll need this to ace that test.” She glowed, beaming as though she was my saviour. I looked into the cup that held the smoothie. Green and lumpy, it had the consistency of pond slime.

I sipped it unwillingly and gagged at once. I am speaking of a full-body purge. But she was watching me, proud, expectant, and I honestly didn’t want to let her down.

“I feel the boost,” I lied, hoping she’d be content and release me. She wasn’t.

“Good, your lunch will give you more brain power!” she tooted enthusiastically. She tossed me a lunchbox with a faint... fishy odour. I took a careful peek. Sardines. Last week’s refrigerated sardines, with coconut rice leftover from two nights prior. Her dubious version of Nasi Lemak (coconut rice with a variety of ingredients eg. Fried Chicken, Fish, and yes, sardines).

She had to be joking. And no, I wasn’t laughing.

At this point, I was certain that she had hatched a devious plot. No one with half a brain eats sardines in a canteen with hordes of teens unless the person’s aim is for everyone to name him “Smelly Fish Boy.” Yet, there I was, on the brink of the greatest social catastrophe of the century.

By lunch, my hunger pangs were so bad that I didn’t care if the sandwich was fishy. And the lines in the cafeteria stretched for miles. So…..sitting as far from Bethany Tan as I could, I opened the lunch box.

And the food bomb exploded. With a vengeance.

“Wee Keong, what is that?” John Lee asked, holding his nose with a dramatic flourish.

“Uh... it’s today’s kitchen special,” I stammer, trying to play it cool, though the sardines were pretty much the opposite. They were already a week old, and at room temperature, they were ‘odorific’, oily, and slimy. The only thing needed to raise the fiasco to its highest level was mum cackling in one of Macbeth’s witches’ hats.

I skulked out of the cafeteria, face beet red.

But the worst was yet to come. I heard Bethany Tan discuss the biology test with a friend later that day, and found out that I wasn’t the only one who flunked it. Perhaps this wasn’t a monumental disaster after all.

Then I heard ‘smelly sardines’

Wait. What?

“That guy—Wee Keong? The one with the sardines? He’s kind of... catches attention,” Bethany confided in her girlfriend, grinning.

Catches attention, eh? Now that was interesting.

I didn’t know what to do with this new information. The sardine incident, which should have sent me to the social tundra, could have worked in my favour. My brain spun. Might mum’s evil plot to embarrass me have worked in my favour?

I rushed home,expecting her to greet me from the throne room of destruction that was the kitchen. But when I walked through the door, she was just sitting in the living room scrolling through HGTV videos, looking perfectly normal.

“Oh, hey, Ah Boy,” she greeted me without an iota of malice. “How was school?”

I narrowed my eyes. She couldn’t have planned the Attack of the Sardines. She wasn’t an Axis General. Or was she?

Perhaps she was a gifted Victor Frankenstein. Perhaps I didn't 'kena sabo (Malay for get sabotaged). Perhaps.