JANUARY 23 — Poverty is often misunderstood because people think it looks like a UN donations poster — skeletal children lying in a wasteland.

In reality we are surrounded by an invisible kind of poverty, one that the monied are blind to, unwitting or not.

When I look back on parts of my childhood, I recall the days we were poorest not by toys or where we lived; but what my mother cooked.

I did not eat a packet of instant noodles all to myself until I was in secondary school, and never a whole chocolate bar.

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Because, before then, those foods were always shared.

Perhaps I was not a greedy child, or maybe it was just because I was often sickly with little appetite it never seemed unusual to me that instant noodles were always cooked to be shared.

Should chocolate appear, it would be cut up and divided between us children. I always thought it was because we were family.

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The sad truth was, it was done because we were poor. But because we were used to sharing it did not seem burdensome, just a part of daily life.

To eat, or not eat, together

As a child, I was only bought one pair of shoes a year, outside of the one pair for school.

There was little money for much else but somehow, there always seemed to be enough food.

Maybe it was because both my parents had grown up poor, they knew how to make do. At the same time, they made sure that whatever money we had went to food. Decent food.

I remember two or three packets of instant noodles cooked together with eggs and bak choy. With the seasoning served on the side, to be added to taste.

It was because to add the instant noodle flavouring during the cooking would dilute it and the noodles would be tasteless — instead my mother added baby shrimp, onions and a little salt or soy sauce.

Besides the noodles, there would be rice. Just in case the noodles themselves were not filling. I remember casually adding a little rice to my noodles, not ever thinking it was unusual.

A can of corn soup and an egg made a nourishing egg drop soup on rainy days, also with a side of rice.

It was all simple. It was all cheap. It never occurred to me, then, that was probably all my parents could afford.

Making cheap abundance

It is only now, when I peruse the meat aisles that I realise just how expensive animal protein was.

Yet we got a decent amount of it growing up. When times were finally easier, it was chicken most days and fish once a week.

In the leaner, earlier times, it was cheap burger meat, cut up and fried with onions and soy sauce to make a cheap substitute for actual minced beef.

There were days where my mother would cut up nuggets into small cubes and fry them with eggs — cheap, quick protein. Also a way to get finicky little mouths to eat.

While I ate whatever my mother cooked, onions aside, my siblings were harder to please so my mother did her best.

Whatever we ate, we ate together.

Even when my mother would feed my younger siblings when they were barely toddlers, scooping the rice and meat in her hand to pop into a little mouth, she would still think to feed me.

Not that I asked but if I happened to pass by while the little ones were being fed, she would call me aside and feed me a mouthful too.

The way she once fed me when I was perhaps a babe.

Food, above all

There was no soda in our house. Junk food was a rare treat. Instead, there were apples and whatever fruit was in season.

My grandparents would often send us jambu air and star fruit from their orchard.

It is funny, how, whenever I look back I think of food.

I never knew what it was like to have an empty belly, until I moved across the ocean.

Waiting for a delayed bursary, walking kilometres to the nearest payphone with my last 50 sen. Because I hadn't eaten for days and I couldn't not ask for money from home anymore.

I was not my mother — not as clever at figuring out how to stay full with very little.

Instead I spent my first semester break eating a spoonful of peanut butter, in half a cup of dried cereal. Because a jar of peanut butter and a tin of cereal was all I had for that week.

When I switched jobs and my previous employer was late with my pay. My new colleagues thought I was standoffish for refusing to eat lunch with them.

They had no idea that all I would eat, every day, that first month was a bun I bought from the bakery I walked past. I walked, all the way to the train station so I could go to work; it took me half an hour and back.

It was either that, or not be able to afford that damned bun.

Having lived that, and worse, I appreciate how creative my mother was. She raised seven children, all of us healthy and fairly tall (we dwarfed our much poorer cousins), because she was determined that we would always, always have enough to eat. Somehow.

How much harder is it now, for the modern mother, in an age where salaries have remained stagnant for decades while prices have not?

When I think of my mother, I will remember, always, her hand holding a mouthful of rice. Her deftly popping it into my mouth.

Now I am older, I appreciate every memory of her food and her care. And know that I was so, so lucky.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.