She saw you five days a week for 4 years and you never learned her name.
Think about that….
4 years.
Maybe 6 if you were in the same school from Primary 1 to Primary 6.
Five days a week.
Forty weeks a year.
That’s over a thousand recess bells.
A thousand times you walked up to the same stall, said the same thing, and she handed you the same plate. And in all those thousand times, you called her “aunty” or “aunty, the usual” or just pointed at the thing you wanted, and she nodded and started making it before you finished the sentence.
She knew your order.
Not because she had a system or a database or a CRM.
Because she saw your face at 10:15 every morning and after three weeks your face became your order.
You were “the fishball noodle boy.” Or “the chicken rice girl.” Or “the one who always wants extra chilli but never says please.”
You were a plate of food before you were a name.
And somehow, that was enough for both of you.
The school canteen was the first restaurant you ever knew.
It didn’t look like a restaurant.
It looked like a covered area with plastic tables in four colours, a row of stalls behind metal shutters, and a floor that was permanently sticky from a decade of spilled drinks that no amount of mopping could fully remove.
The fans overhead pushed the hot air around without actually cooling anything. The queue was a suggestion, not a structure. And the bell, the recess bell, set off a stampede that would have impressed a wildlife documentary.
You had twenty minutes.
Maybe thirty if your teacher was generous.
And in that window, you had to queue, order, eat, return the plate to the collection point, buy a drink, find your friends, and still have time to run to the bookshop or the field or the toilets before the next bell.
Twenty minutes.
The most optimised meal of your life, executed daily, without anyone teaching you how.
The aunty made it work.
She was fast.
Faster than you’d expect for someone standing over a wok in a school canteen with no air conditioning and a queue of forty kids who all wanted their food at the same time.
Her hands moved in a rhythm that didn’t pause: noodles into the strainer, strainer into the boiling water, scoop out, drain, into the bowl, fishballs in, soup in, chilli on the side because you’d asked for that once three months ago and she still remembered.
Three months ago.
She remembered a chilli preference from three months ago. You can’t get that from a GrabFood algorithm with five stars and a comment box.
She wore the same thing every day.
An apron over a t-shirt.
Sleeve rolled up above the elbow on the arm that did the frying. Hair tied back or tucked under a cap.
Glasses sometimes, perched low on the nose, fogging up from the steam. Rubber gloves that she snapped on and off forty times a morning. You could identify your canteen aunty from thirty metres away, from behind, just by the posture.
And she was kind in ways you didn’t notice until you were old enough to recognise kindness.
The extra scoop of rice for the kid who looked thin.
The “pay tomorrow, lah” for the one who’d forgotten to bring money.
The portion that was somehow always a little bigger for you on the day after your results came back and she could tell from your face that it hadn’t gone well.
She didn’t say anything. She just gave you more food. Because in the language of canteen aunties, food is how you say: I see you. You’ll be okay. Eat first.
She watched you grow.
That’s the part that stops me.
She was there in Primary 1 when you couldn’t see over the counter and had to point at the menu board above her head.
By Primary 4 you were tall enough to put the tray on the counter yourself. By Primary 6 you were nearly her height and your order had changed three times and she’d adjusted without being told because she paid attention to you in a way that nobody asked her to and nobody paid her for.
You didn’t know her name.
She didn’t know yours.
But she knew you. Knew your face, your order, your chilli preference, your mood, your friends.
She knew which group you sat with and she probably noticed before you did when one of them stopped showing up.
She noticed everything, from behind a metal counter, through steam, over a queue of forty kids who were all just trying to get their noodles before the bell.
She made between five and eight dollars an hour.
Maybe less in the early years.
She started at 5am to prep the ingredients. Chopping, boiling, frying, portioning.
By the time you arrived at 10:15 for recess, she’d already been working for five hours. She’d work through the second recess, the lunch break, and then clean up, wash down the stall, lock the shutters, and go home.
Six days a week during school term. And during school holidays, nothing. No income. Because school canteen aunties don’t get paid when the school is closed.
Nobody tells you this when you’re ten.
Your mother paid the school two dollars for your recess money.
You handed that money to the aunty for a plate of noodles.
And you thought the transaction was: money for food.
It wasn’t. T
he transaction was: money for food plus patience plus memory plus kindness plus watching you grow plus never once making you feel rushed even though there were thirty nine kids behind you who also needed to eat.
Two dollars.
For all of that.
Some of those aunties are still there.
Older now. Slower with the ladle.
The queue is shorter because the newer canteens have more stalls and the newer kids buy from the vending machine or bring food from home. But some aunties are still behind the counter, still wearing the apron, still remembering which kid wants extra chilli and which one needs the “pay tomorrow” grace.
Some of them have been at the same stall for twenty years.
They’ve watched two, three, four cohorts pass through.
They remember kids who are now adults, who are now parents, whose children now attend the same school and walk up to the same counter and the aunty looks at the child and sees the parent’s face from 2003 and thinks: this one will want fishball noodle.
Extra chilli. Just like the father.
She’s right. She’s always right.
If you’re reading this, you had a canteen aunty.
Everybody did.
You might not remember her face.
You definitely don’t remember her name.
But if you close your eyes and think about recess at your primary school, you’ll see the stall. The metal counter. The steam. The menu board with the prices that seem impossible now. Fishball noodle, $1.50. Chicken rice, $1.80. Fried rice, $2.00.
And behind the counter, a woman in an apron, already reaching for the noodles before you’ve opened your mouth. Because she knows. She’s always known.
You just never asked her name.
And she never held it against you.
That might be the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you without you realising it.
She fed you a thousand times, watched you grow for four years, remembered your chilli, spotted your bad days, gave you extra rice when the results went wrong, let you pay tomorrow when you forgot your money…
And she never once expected you to know who she was.
If your school canteen aunty is still there, go back once.
Buy a plate. Eat it standing at the counter. And this time, ask her name.
You owe her that much.
3am stories. Pass it on
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