Field Notes by Rene

The Lei Cha may be many Hakka people’s cup of tea, but we can always count on the Yam Abacus as my family’s favourite Hakka dish.

Growing up, I was never close to my grandmother. We didn’t hate each other but we barely interacted and she always seemed… angry, pissed, nasty?

But when she cooked, like every grandma, she was DAMN good at it. One of her best dishes was 算盘子 (suan pan zi), known in English as Yam Abacus.

Suan pan zi is a traditional Hakka dish from the Dabu county of the Guangdong region in China. It is made by mixing boiled yam with tapioca flour and shaping it to resemble an abacus.

Top it with some stir fried shiitake mushrooms, shallots, coriander, dried prawns, and minced meat, and you have a dish that’s filling enough to be a complete meal or can be served as a side dish.

Legend has it that the dish symbolizes unity and prosperity—so prosperous that you can’t stop counting your money—but it’s so tedious to prepare that Hakka people generally only have it during important festivals.

In the final years of my grandmother’s life, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moved in with us. Our relationship did not improve, but I could see why she was always angry.

I heard from my aunt (her daughter) that she was the only female child sent to Malaya from China (some patriarchal shit), and she resented her mother for sending her so far away.

I don’t have the “How I Met Your Grandfather” story, but they ended up opening a sundry shop named ‘Ban Hoe Leong’ in good old Tanjong Sepat.

My grandmother was one hell of an entrepreneur. Besides being extremely good at counting, she also self-learned Malay and Tamil to communicate with customers of other ethnicities.

On top of that, she was also the mother of nine children and outlived two of her eldest kids.

It was probably Alzheimer’s that kicked in, but it was hard to witness an iron-willed lady calling for her mother in her last few months of life. She passed away in March 2011.

Currently, only one person in the family knows how to make my grandmother’s style of Yam Abacus, and it’s that aunt you’d want to avoid at family dinners. Just recalling our encounters gives me PTSD.

My last two attempts to make Yam Abacus were in 2021, and both failed miserably. It was so bad that I decided to take a three-year hiatus to give my family some buffer time to recover from the yam overload.

Today, after three years of honing my culinary instincts and studying Yam Abacus recipes from a scientific approach… I hereby announce that I’ve nailed the taste! Honestly, I thought it tasted better than Ying Ker Lou. HOWEVER…

I couldn’t get the texture and presentation right. It was too soft, and the shape didn’t hold well, most likely due to a lack of tapioca flour.

I always say to my family, “Aiya, outside Yam Abacus has so much tapioca flour, and it’s so expensive. If I make it, sure full of yam one.” I guess there’s a reason why other people’s versions have better presentation.

My intention is not to replicate my grandmother’s dish—I honestly don’t even recall what it tasted like.

The end goal is to create a plate of yam abacus that my family enjoys, creating new memories around the dinner table and preserving a tiny piece of our heritage.

And I have a feeling that my next attempt will be the one where I get this dish just right… maybe in another three years haha!

Side note: I don’t know how to use a proper abacus.