The rain came down sideways in Piripiri that morning, fine and grey like flour sifted through gauze. In the old villa they were renting—drafty, high-ceilinged, cold even in November—Asha spooned watery porridge into her toddler’s mouth and tried not to think about how lonely the walls felt.
The baby grizzled. He never liked oats. She made a soft tsk with her tongue, switching tactics: “Here comes the plane—vroom!” He blinked at her, unimpressed. The porridge dribbled down his chin and into the folds of his bib.
It was the kind of day where everything felt slightly wrong. Her husband had left early for the dairy farm, and the heater in the living room refused to click on. Outside, the corrugated fence rattled in the wind, and one of the kitchen cupboards had started creaking again.
She stared at the rice cooker on the bench. It was a sturdy Korean brand—Cuckoo, second-hand off Facebook Marketplace, its buttons worn smooth. She used it daily, though never without a pang of guilt. Her grandmother had steamed rice in a battered tin pot balanced over a charcoal stove, singing under her breath in Bahasa Malaysia. Here, everything beeped. Everything was silent.
The porridge hardened in the bowl. The baby fussed. She lifted him from the high chair, nestling him against her chest, and padded into the kitchen.
That’s when she heard it.
A faint melody. Like a music box, slightly warped. Faintly electronic, distantly sad. Just one line, repeating itself. She paused, heart fluttering against her ribs. Was that—no, surely not. The rice cooker was off.
Still, the sound seemed to be coming from there.
Asha turned away, but the note followed. High, lilting, undeniably familiar. A tune she faintly couldn’t name, but one that stirred something in her blood. She pressed her palm flat to the rice cooker’s lid.
Silence.
She almost laughed. Maybe she was just tired. Jet-lagged by life. It had been six months since the move from Ipoh to New Zealand, but some days Asha still felt wobbly in her own skin. The baby cried again, and she moved on, not giving it more thought.
Later, as she rinsed the porridge bowl in hot water, steam fogged the windows. She watched the mist curl and settle, like fingers reaching for a shape. The rice cooker sat still, quiet and unremarkable. But something had changed. A note, barely heard, hovered in the air like a question not yet asked.
Asha didn’t mention it to her husband that night. He wouldn’t get it—he’d probably make a joke about ghosts in the kitchen or tell her to get more sleep. She didn’t want sleep. She wanted… something she couldn’t name.
That night, while her son slept curled like a comma in his cot, Asha stood barefoot in the kitchen again, watching the red standby light on the rice cooker. It blinked. She blinked back.
From deep inside, so soft it was almost imagined, came a sound.
A lullaby. In Korean.
And this time, it felt like it was meant for her.
She didn’t talk about the lullaby.
Not to her husband, not on the parenting forums, not even in the voice notes she sometimes recorded and deleted and then re-recorded before sending to her sister back in Ipoh. It sounded silly out loud, like the plot of a movie she’d roll her eyes at. Besides, she knew how people thought: when brown women talked about ghosts or talking appliances, it was superstition. When white women did it, it was magical realism.
So Asha kept it to herself.
She focused on surviving the day. Waking up before the baby, brushing her teeth in cold water, boiling sweet potatoes for his snack box, wiping down sticky surfaces with a sponge that never quite dried. She tried to appreciate the clean air, the quiet, the mountain view from their bedroom window. She reminded herself she was lucky. That she had chosen this life.
But in her chest, something stayed taut and twitching, like a string pulled too tight.
The lullaby didn’t play every day, only sometimes. Once, after a long walk where the wind had slapped her cheeks raw and the baby had screamed all the way home, she dropped the nappy bag and collapsed at the dining table, her head in her hands. No tears, just the dull ache of depletion. The rice cooker sang then—clearer, this time, and slightly longer.
Another time, after an argument with her husband—nothing major, just a tired snap over whether or not to rinse rice—she heard it while she was scrubbing the high chair tray.
Always soft. Always from just inside the machine.
Asha had begun noticing other changes, too. Cravings for recipes she hadn’t thought of in years: nasi ulam—herb rice salad; gulai pisang muda—a curry made with young bananas; and bubur kacang hijau—mung bean dessert simmered in coconut milk and palm sugar, the one her grandmother always made when someone was unwell.
But the recipes didn’t come with her. Just cravings, smells, flashes of sound.
She felt her hands returning to movements they hadn’t made in years—scraping coconut flesh with a spoon, pressing turmeric root into the ridges of a stone pestle, slicing shallots into paper-thin rings. It wasn’t conscious. The motion was already in her bones.
Her husband didn’t notice. Or if he did, he didn’t say anything. His days were long—up at five, boots on by five thirty, gone before the baby woke. He came home tired, smelling of silage and mud, with deep grooves under his eyes. They spoke mostly in practicalities now: baby nappies, meat prices, his mother’s health, the visa renewal timeline. The rest of the time they moved around each other like furniture. She didn’t know how to explain to him that she felt like a woman who’d been flattened and folded into a smaller version of herself. That sometimes she stood outside herself and watched, like she was just babysitting her own life.
The baby, at least, was her anchor.
He had her eyes and his father’s jaw. He smelled like buttered toast and breastmilk, and sometimes, when he babbled in that nonsensical way toddlers do, she imagined he was trying to translate the lullaby into something she could understand.
One afternoon while he napped, she searched for the melody online. She tried typing things into YouTube: ‘Korean lullaby rice’, ‘Cuckoo rice cooker tune’, ‘Hangul lullabies’. All she got were reviews and cooking hacks. She switched to Korean and tried again, clumsily spelling words she hadn’t used in years. Still nothing. The closest thing was an old folk song called ‘Arirang’—beautiful, yes, but different. ‘Arirang’ didn’t feel like this.
This was… warmer. More private. Less mournful, more like a mother humming while peeling onions, while rinsing rice, while waiting for soup to boil.
The next day, she took out a notebook and tried drawing the melody, like notes on a line. But she didn’t know music theory. She just drew little loops and waves. Then she started sketching recipes: sambal—chilli paste—in one column, kimchi in another. Different acids, different heat, the same desire. The same longing for something that bit your tongue before melting into memory.
That night, Asha brought out the ikan bilis—anchovies dried, crinkled, and bought on impulse from the Asian mart an hour away. She fried them in oil with garlic until the smell filled the house and clung to her hair. Her toddler woke up crying, and when she went to soothe him, she caught herself humming.
It was the lullaby.
Her body knew it before her mind did.
She sang as she rocked him, soft and low. His eyes closed slowly. His breathing matched hers. The rice cooker blinked silently from across the room, its light red and steady.
She didn’t know who the song belonged to—her grandmother, her mother-in-law, some long-dead ajumma in another life—but she knew it was hers now. It had come through the rice and the steam and the silence.
And it was finally speaking back.
The lullaby began to change.
At first, it was just the tempo—slightly faster one day, almost mournful the next. Then came the embellishments: a new note at the end, a rising lilt, a deeper tone that felt like a harmony trying to surface. Asha never saw the rice cooker change. It still sat in its usual spot beside the kettle, cord coiled neatly like a tail. But something inside it had begun to evolve.
She noticed it most on days when her mood changed too fast to track. If the baby knocked over a glass and she snapped without meaning to, the lullaby would flatten into a low, slow tune that hung around the house for hours. If she found a new herb at the market—say, Vietnamese mint, the kind her ammachi used to crush between her palms—the song would brighten, become almost playful.
One night, when her husband came home and handed her a bag of Korean groceries without saying much, she found herself weeping. Not from sadness, exactly, but from the gentleness of it. He had bought jangajji—soy-pickled garlic—and dasima—kelp strips for soup stock. He didn’t say anything, just set the bag on the bench and walked away. Later, as she unpacked it, the rice cooker began humming again. A new melody this time—familiar, but different.
Not her grandmother’s voice. Not her mother-in-law’s either. This one sounded younger. Braver.
She started writing down lyrics. Or fragments of them. They came to her in moments when her hands were busy: washing rice, tying back her son’s hair into a stubby little ponytail, folding laundry. She would hum something, realise it hadn’t existed before, then scribble it onto a scrap of paper. Her notebooks became peppered with lines like:
Sleep now, little seed / Steam will keep you soft / Dream the way your mother did—quiet and folded.
She didn’t know if they made sense but they helped. They gave shape to the days that otherwise slipped past, soft and formless as overcooked porridge.
One morning, after a sleepless night with a teething toddler, she bundled him into the stroller and walked into town. It was a Thursday, which meant the library was open, and the weather was only mildly grim. She stopped in front of the pinboard outside the dairy. Notices for firewood delivery, yoga in the hall, and a sign-up sheet for a shared garden.
She didn’t know what made her do it, but she wrote her name down.
A few weeks later, she found herself standing beside a row of raised beds in the community patch behind the school hall. A white-haired woman named Judith showed her how to mulch cabbage, and a teenager in gumboots helped her transplant basil. No one asked where she was from—not immediately. They just handed her gloves and pointed at weeds.
She started showing up every Saturday. She brought leftover curry puffs once—half were gone by morning tea. Another week, she brought her son in his little yellow gumboots, and one of the older men gave him a worm to hold. Asha watched as her son squealed, then laughed, the sun catching on his curls.
Something in her chest unclenched.
Later that afternoon, still smelling of compost and garlic chives, she stood in her kitchen and cooked rice with pandan leaves, letting the fragrance fill every corner of the house. She stir-fried kangkung—water spinach—with garlic, and added a spoonful of leftover kimchi on the side. It was a confused plate, maybe. Or a brave one.
Her husband blinked when he saw it. “You made this?”
She nodded. “Like this back home. A bit.”
He smiled gently. “Smells like Seoul. And Penang.”
That night she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of barley tea while the baby slept. Outside the wind rattled the hedges, and somewhere a possum screamed. But inside the silence felt softer than usual.
She stood and rinsed the rice cooker pot. The red standby light blinked steadily.
The lullaby started again, only this time it had lyrics. Not hers. Not fully. But fragments she recognised, sung in a voice that sounded like her own. A little older. A little steadier.
She dried her hands and stood very still.
The baby waddled into the kitchen and reached for her leg, one sticky hand tugging at her hem. He pointed at the rice cooker, then at his mouth.
“Want nasi?”
She blinked. He had never said that word before. Not in Malay. Not in any language.
She crouched down, cupping his face in her hands. “Say again?”
He grinned. “Nasi.”
The rice cooker blinked its little red eye. The song had stopped. Or maybe it had finished.
Asha lifted her son into her arms and kissed his forehead. “Alright then. We eat rice.”
She turned to the bench, set the water to boil, and for the first time in a long while, she felt something rise in her—not quite joy, not quite peace. But hunger. And readiness.
The kitchen had changed. Or maybe she had.
The next change came quietly.
It happened during an ordinary Thursday lunch—leftover rice, egg fried crisp at the edges, sambal from a jar. Her husband, late home from the farm, barely spoke. Their toddler babbled between mouthfuls, throwing a spoon on the floor for the second time that day.
Asha sighed. “Can you pick that up?”
He didn’t move.
“Please,” she said again, sharper this time.
Still, nothing.
“I’m tired too, you know.”
He looked up, eyes red-rimmed. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“No,” she said, rising now. “You don’t have to. You just act like I should be grateful for all of this. Like this…”—she gestured at the room, the house, the country—“is some great prize.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then stood, slow and tired. “We’ve both given things up.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her hand hovered above the sink, where the rice cooker waited—clean, silent, unblinking.
He left early the next morning, without saying goodbye.
She didn’t hear the lullaby for two days.
The silence made her stomach tighten. Asha moved through the motions—feeding, folding, wiping, dressing—but felt strangely untethered, like the house had turned its back. She tried boiling rice, twice, just to coax the song back. Nothing. The rice was overcooked both times.
On the third day, she sat on the floor with her son, watching him press puzzle pieces into the wrong spots. She wanted to cry. Not because he got them wrong, but because she couldn’t summon the energy to correct him.
That night she went into the kitchen and whispered to the machine.
“Talk to me.”
Nothing.
“Please.”
She rested her forehead against the lid. Cold metal. Stillness.
She stood there for a long time.
On Sunday, she decided to cook the way she used to. Not for nostalgia. Not to impress. Just to remember.
She soaked dried chillies, split them open, scraped out the seeds. She blended shallots, garlic, lemongrass and belacan—fermented shrimp paste—until the house filled with a pungent, familiar haze. She fried the paste slowly, watching it darken to a deep, angry red. It sputtered and hissed in the pan, scenting her hair, her skin, the curtains.
The baby wandered in, eyes wide. “Spicy?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very.”
She made sambal tumis—slow-fried chilli paste—the way her grandmother did, with a spoon of sugar and a squeeze of lime. She boiled eggs and peeled them with her thumbs, careful not to tear the whites.
She opened the fridge and saw the jangajji—pickled garlic—still untouched. She plated two eggs, a mound of rice, a spoonful of sambal, and a few slices of the pungent pickle. A borderless meal. A protest. A peace offering.
She ate slowly. Alone. The baby refused the sambal, as expected, and asked for toast instead.
That night, the rice cooker sang again.
The melody was different this time—slower, lower, a little cracked around the edges. It didn’t sound like comfort. It sounded like memory.
She followed it, eyes closed. She saw her ammachi in a faded housedress, squatting on a stool in the outdoor kitchen, pounding dried anchovies into sambal. She saw her mother pinching her brow in frustration while kneading chapati dough. Her mother-in-law chopping radish into perfect half-moons. None of them had been storytellers, not in words—but their hands had always spoken in oil and salt, steam and sting.
Her own voice joined them now.
She opened her eyes and reached for her notebook.
Some songs aren’t passed down. They’re remembered backward. By the body.
She wrote the line down, then circled it twice.
When her husband returned, it was raining again. His shoulders were soaked through. He brought no groceries this time, just himself and a towel over his head.
They stood in the kitchen, uncertain.
“I shouldn’t have left like that,” he said.
Asha shrugged. “I shouldn’t have snapped.”
“You’ve been… different.”
“So have you.”
He looked at the floor. “I didn’t think it would be this hard for you.”
Asha smiled, but she could feel that it didn’t reach her eyes. “Neither did I.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at the rice cooker. It blinked. The melody had stopped again, as if giving them space.
“Stay,” she said.
He nodded.
That night, they cooked together—ginger chicken, sautéed spinach, instant seaweed soup. Nothing special. But the rhythm of their movements softened. She passed him the knife without needing to ask. He rinsed the rice just the way she liked it.
Later, when the kitchen was quiet again, she heard something faint. Not the lullaby this time.
The baby. Humming in his cot.
She crept in and found him half asleep, thumb in mouth, murmuring a tune without words. Her heart cracked open.
She knelt by the cot and hummed with him. Not matching the tune. Just folding hers into his, like water finding water.
The rice cooker stayed silent that night.
It didn’t need to sing.
The invitation came in a roundabout way, as most small-town things did. A woman named Shelley—someone Asha had once passed garden shears to at the community plot—sent a message through Judith.
“We’re doing a shared lunch next month at the marae. Just locals. You should bring something.”
Asha hesitated. She’d never stepped into a marae before. The word itself carried weight. Her Korean husband wasn’t sure either. “Maybe just go first and see,” he said. “You’re good at that.”
She laughed. “At what?”
“Fitting in.”
She didn’t correct him.
She thought about what to bring for days. Not just what would taste good, but what would feel right. Malaysian food didn’t come in single dishes. It came in spreads—rice at the centre, surrounded by the evidence of effort. But she didn’t have the time or ingredients for a full hidang—family-style spread—and didn’t want to offer a diluted version either.
She decided on something she’d never made before. A hybrid. A rice salad layered with turmeric, coconut, blanched greens, and Korean perilla leaves. Fragrant, spicy, with a dash of vinegar in the sambal to sharpen the flavour. A little wild. A little wrong.
She practised it three times. Adjusted the salt. Toasted the grated coconut. Reheated leftovers to test texture. The rice cooker obliged without song, but she still touched the lid every time, a silent thank you.
On the morning of the lunch, she packed the salad in a wide glass bowl, laying banana leaves underneath. Her son helped by tearing them crookedly. Her husband stood at the door, adjusting the pram straps.
“You don’t need to stay if you don’t want to,” she told him.
He kissed her cheek. “I do.”
The marae sat at the edge of town, framed by tall trees and low clouds. Inside, the meeting house was warm with people and smells—roast lamb, fried bread, coleslaw, butter chicken, boiled potatoes. Women arranged dishes on long trestle tables. No one asked questions. They just smiled and made room.
Someone asked what she’d brought. She said, “It’s… hard to explain.”
Judith tried a bite and grinned. “Bloody good.”
Later, someone asked for the recipe. She laughed. “There isn’t one. Yet.”
Her son ran barefoot on the mat-covered floor, laughing with another child. Her husband chatted with an elder about irrigation. Asha sat down in a corner and let the moment wash over her like warm broth.
She thought of the house back in Ipoh. The green gate, the dying guava tree, the way her grandmother would wrap newspaper around jackfruit to keep the birds away. She thought of her mother’s silence during dinner, of the way her father tapped his spoon against his plate when angry. She thought of her in-laws in Busan—how her mother-in-law once left peeled fruit at her door after their first misunderstanding.
All those things—fragments, failures, gestures—had brought her here.
She got up and fixed a second plate, this one smaller. A slice of taro, a spoonful of boiled pumpkin, a bit of everything. She brought it outside and sat on the step, eating slowly while birds wheeled above the paddocks.
That night the kitchen was quiet.
The rice cooker was unplugged. They were having toast and eggs—too full from lunch to cook again. Her husband picked at a kiwifruit. The baby played with a spoon, smearing jam across his tray.
Asha cleared the plates and stood at the sink, staring out into the dark garden. The smell of garlic still lingered faintly in the air. On the bench beside her, her notebook lay open.
She picked it up and flipped to the back. A clean page.
At the top, she wrote:
A Recipe for Remembering
She paused, then wrote:
She hesitated, then added one last line.
In the weeks that followed, she began teaching her son how to name ingredients. They walked through the garden centre and said the names aloud like spells: daun kesum—Vietnamese mint, pandan, bawang merah—red onion. He pointed at the seedlings and made sounds of approval.
Sometimes she gave him a small bowl and let him “cook” beside her—rice grains, water, and a single shallot to stir with his fingers. He took it seriously. She didn’t laugh.
One afternoon, as he napped on the sofa, she made bubur kacang hijau—mung bean dessert—for herself. She didn’t follow a recipe. She just added what felt right. Palm sugar, coconut milk, a pinch of salt at the end. Her grandmother’s version, but gentler.
The rice cooker clicked off, and for a brief moment—barely there—she heard the old melody. Not sung. Not played. Just suggested.
It didn’t startle her. She didn’t cry. She smiled and served herself a bowl.
Outside the rain had returned, soft and silvery on the roof. She sat by the window and ate slowly, feeling the steam on her lips, the sweetness on her tongue.
She didn’t need to understand where the song came from.
She just needed to know it had been real.
And that it had fed her when she needed it most.