Yee Sang – From the Time the World and Malaya Were Young

By A. Najib Ariffin - Nadge

“Do you know yee sang, the veggie dish with raw fish?” I asked breathlessly as I went around China in my research visit years ago. When the person I asked didn’t speak English, I switch to Chinese, which makes it worse. Although I’m part Chinese, my Mandarin is almost non-existent, as my street dialect is Cantonese and even then my tones are tortured.

“So, do you know yee sang?” The best answer I get is a puzzled, “You mean like sushi?”

Well, that trip established it: the dish of raw fish and mixed chopped veggies and sauces that we Malaysians and Singaporeans take for granted during Chinese New Year was NOT common in China. Not even on the 7^th day of CNY as it traditionally was served in Malaysia.

So where does the yee sang we know today come from? No doubt a million people in at least two countries. Malaysia and Singapore, have been asking that. I just had to satisfy our need for an answer. After all, my father is Malaysian while my mother is Singaporean, and of Chinese descent to boot.

So I began asking… My Chinese grandmother in Singapore had dismissed it, as she is one of the few northerners among Sino-descendants in Southeast Asia; (“We northerners are nobles, different from southerners”). Okay but that in fact said something; at least I knew yee sang was definitely NOT of northern Chinese origin. So I headed south.

Southern China’s Guangdong province was the one place where a few people knew of yee sang (and where I could speak the Cantonese dialect!). Good, especially in Hong Kong with its more worldly restaurants. But surprise, surprise; many of those who knew it said it’s a modern import from Malaysia-Singapore! Back to square one.

Sure, maybe the modern version of yee sang as we know it really IS from Southeast Asia. But maybe there were roots, some earlier version of it hidden in a corner of China somewhere? I made some last tries and trials in the name of food. Finally a Mr. Cheng said that some communities of coastal southern China do have a raw fish type of dish. Where exactly?

The southeastern Chinese cities of Chaozhou and Shantou are located in the northeastern part of the province of Guangdong (Canton in English). Yet the people in this locality are NOT ethno-linguistically Cantonese. A localised pronunciation of Chaozhou is in fact Teochew, and that’s where some clues start to appear on where a raw fish dish originated.

Before that, let’s go further back in Chinese history and mythology. It is said that the goddess Nuwa (or Nuwo) created man from clay and mud on the 7^th day in the first month of the year.

Thus on the 7^th day of Chinese New Year people would celebrate Renri or the People’s birthday with a dish of raw meat called kuài (膾). I suppose raw meat was symbolic of the early naked humankind. Eventually raw fish became preferred, possibly because fish is an abundant creature of the waters from where mythology equates with life, as well as practically for the coastal Chinese such as in Chanzhou area and Guangdong as a whole the region was rich in seafood. What better way for them to celebrate than with their abundant raw fish symbolizing this birth of life.

Queries seem to show that the dish was more popular in the Teochew people’s Chaoshan region that must have also been spread to or shared with the coastal Cantonese in Guangdong province as a whole, especially in the port city of Jiangmen further south.

Shantou is the bigger sister port downriver from Chaozhou city; combined they make the Chaoshan region. Shantou city is also prominent in 19^th century Chinese history. It was then called Swatow, one of the ‘treaty ports’ that the colonial West used to exploit China, and was ceded to British concession in 1858. That was an Age of Turmoil in Chinese history. Meanwhile just a year earlier Kuala Lumpur had been opened by Raja Abdullah; and with its rich tin mines it began an immigration pull factor in which one of the results later became… yee sang in Malaysia. How?

Throughout the early mid-19^th to the early 20^th centuries China was facing its Age of Turmoil, especially in coastal China with the meddling of Western powers, the Opium Wars, rebellions and conflicts. Certainly turmoil did not escape Guangdong, including Chanzhou prefecture and to the Teochew and Cantonese in that era.

And so, like many other southern Chinese regional and dialect groups such as the Hokkiens, Hakkas and Hainanese, the Teochews and Cantonese migrated in significant numbers to the relatively peaceful and abundant lands of the Nanyang or the Southern Ocean, where Southeast Asia was located. One of the main ports of transshipment and departure to the Nanyang was Guangdong province’s port of Jiangmen, which gives another clue to Malaysia-Singapore’s yee sang origins.

The Teochews spread to Siam, the Malay Peninsula’s Penang and Johor states and Singapore next door as well as parts of Indonesia such as in Pontianak and Ketapang. Johor Bahru was even nicknamed “Little Swatow” because so many Teochews congregated there.The other group with raw fish dish cultural memories, the Cantonese, settled largely in the Malay Peninsula’s west coast and a few in Singapore. With that we begin to see a commonality and pattern of why yee sang came up in Malaysia-Singapore and not, say, in Thailand or Indonesia as well.

The Chinese as a whole brought with them their ancestral culture including beliefs, dialects, lifestyle and of course, cuisine. In the earlier years their aim was to make money and bring it back to China; culture was not a main concern. But as Chinese numbers increased and life in Southeast Asia was good; people began to stay permanently and raise families; and so culture began to be more and more practiced.

By after World War II, some Teochew and Cantonese families in Malaya (especially on the west coast down to some Johor Teochews; Singapore geographically included) began reviving the ancestral cultural memories of a raw fish dish that was eaten together at the meal table over Chinese New Year, especially on the 7^th day in honour of the goddess Nuwa and the human birthday Renri. [For this part onward of my research I thank the kind older Chinese residents in Subang Jaya where my parents live for sharing their yee sang reminiscences.]

Let’s take a look at the yee sang name, which helps give further clues as to how it came about. The dish was mainly raw fish. Vegetables were somewhat limited then using only carrot and turnip mixed with some oil, vinegar and a sweetener such as even sugar.

That was how the name yee sang or the official version yú shēng (鱼生) meaning “fish basic-life” or figuratively “raw fish” came into being in the first place. The word “fish” (鱼) is commonly associated with its homonym "abundance" (余). Thus yú shēng (鱼生) is correlated as a homophone sound for yu sheng (余升) meaning “abundance increasing".

By comparison it could not be, say, from the Hakka because in their dialect it would be “ng sang” (ng for fish) and what’s more “ng” is considered a bad omen. Definitely not an auspicious dish to start the Chinese New Year! So we must go back to the Teochews and Cantonese.

To a certain extent the raw fish and raw vegetables as ingredients were also dictated by practical considerations in the early days. By the end of the first week of Chinese New Year, the huge amount of food prepared before the celebrations would be only leftovers. Yet households were too tired to cook more sophisticated dishes.

Meanwhile leftover fish and vegetables that had been kept, needed to be consumed soon. The fish, while still fresh, would have softened by then and would be tasty just raw. That’s what happened with the Melanau fishermen’s umai dish, which is fish stripped up and eaten raw cured just with lime juice after a few days still at sea.

Whatever vegetables that were available in the kitchen would start to look less fresh too. So, in the same vein as the Malay kerabu dishes, just cut and chop up all your vegetables in strips so it would look fresh and fine, while any of the veggie parts turning bad can be cut away and discarded.

There are also personal anecdotes of stalls in Malaya selling yee sang-type raw fish mixes as side dishes meant to be shared with “Teochew moi” (Teochew-style porridge), and that the stall-holders had come via the Cantonese port of Jiangmen.

This mix of strips of raw fish and whatever shredded vegetables plus really anything else you like from noodles to crackers to sauces gave rise to another opportunity for auspiciousness. It’s something that is quite uniquely Cantonese; “lo hei” (撈起 or 捞起 in Cantonese). The “lo hei” activity mixes the words and homophone meanings for mix, toss and rise or high as everyone around the table merrily joins in. What a perfect combo of action and expression for a mix of “raising prosperity, abundance and happiness” for everyone present as they’re mixing and tossing the ingredients together.

Older people remember that this yee sang dish and the accompanying “lo hei” custom began spreading through Cantonese and Teochew households up and down Peninsular Malaya’s west coast for Chinese New Year.

Ever enterprising, the Cantonese began offering yee sang in restaurants for Chinese New Year menus from the 1950s. It was not as common or as elaborate as it is now. But it was found in places where there were concentrations of Cantonese, Teochews or any Chinese business activities, including in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and southwards but not so much north and none on the east coast.

Yee sang was available in food outlets only after the Chinese New Year holidays, usually the 7^th day, when restaurants reopened and the dish became a starter at business meals for “patrons to raise good luck for the forthcoming year”. In the 1950s branding was still not a huge thing for restaurants and dishes, so no-one bothered to brand or even record these for posterity. Besides, it was still very much a family and business partners’ specialty dish kind of item.

But something happened in 1952 that began to bring yee sang into the culinary awareness in Malaya. In that year, UMNO and MCA formed the Alliance to contest the Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council elections in February, which they won. Note that it was just around the corner of the Chinese New Year season.

What better way for Alliance partners to celebrate over an auspicious shared meal!

For Malays, yee sang was fine as it’s perfectly halal, being fish and vegetables, while Malay and Melanau fishermen for example were no strangers to lime-cured raw fish (dipped in sambal of course). And any possible misgivings about it being a “Chinese” food never arose, as the Malays simply saw it as a form of their own traditional kerabu salad dish that was just mixed with any keropok or whatever you wanted, and tossed up together in the spirit of muhibbah in the new year. Yee sang was thus also “kerabu tahun baru”, if you please.

After all, the symbolisms of mixing and raising the ingredients for prosperity and sharing the food for harmony are happily universal. (A similar concept applied with the Malay “nasi talam” where wedding guests share four to a large plate or tray called talam.)

From then on, yee sang became a popular Malayan / Malaysian staple each Chinese New Year with more ingredients added or variegated according to the restaurant or chef, or even the matriarch at family gatherings as well as politicians at coalition meal meetings.

Meanwhile Singapore puts its earliest commercially available yee sang in 1964, while it was still part of Malaysia, with the collaboration of four restaurant cooks. That’s perfectly fine, true and correct for Singapore.

For Malaysia, the Malaysians tossed yee sang up earlier. LO HEI!!

[This article was researched for and first appeared in Friedchillies.com under Gastropology 101 on food history in 2010]  
http://www.friedchillies.com/articles/category/gastropology-101 

TV shoot for my interview on #CapitalTV 2015 Chinese New Year special show on the #YeeSang research I did for #Friedchillies.com — at China Treasures, Sime Darby Convention Centre, Kuala Lumpur