We share the same father but our encounters with him are different. All four of us sisters remember papa for different reasons. My other sisters did not know that papa loved Sarsi.. “Sarsi ci kuan, seng kak noh aw”, was papa’s common phrase each time we visited the coffee shop when I was a kid. “Sarsi ci kuan, seng kak noh aw” means “one bottle of Sarsi and two glasses of ice” in Hokkein.
When I was a kid, I used to follow papa to town to pay the bills. I looked forward to those moments because a trip to town also meant that I would get to eat my favorite “Char Koay Teow” and “Sarsi”. “Char Koay Teow” was the only food and “Sarsi” was the only drink papa knew how to order or rather the only combination of meal which he enjoyed. We always shared the bottle of “Sarsi” because I could not finish the whole bottle by myself due to the soda in the drink. As I grew older, things changed, Papa had other interests and eventually those coffee shop outings with papa stopped.
Today was “Father’s Day”. We went out for lunch after mass just to celebrate “Father’s Day”. Suddenly, I had the urge to order “Sarsi” for papa. Interestingly, my sister poured half a bottle of “Sarsi” for papa and she conveniently gave me the other half telling me to finish it off because papa could not finish the whole bottle of “Sarsi” due to the soda. Yes, we had “sarsi ci kuan, seng kak noh aw” today, but the one who made the order was not papa, it was me. Times have changed.