During the last couple of months in Vancouver, as winter’s moved decisively, although not without some backtracking, into spring, I’ve been cooking oats most mornings. During my annual health check-up in Singapore my doctor announced that my cholesterol levels were on the border between healthy and unhealthy, and suggested that I start by modifying my diet. Oats are one easy change to make. There’s art to preparing them, I’ve learned, starting with shopping – quick, rolled, or steel-cut? And then there’s the process of soaking overnight, with just the right amount of water. Finally, early in the morning, as my partner wakes up, there’s a comforting ritual of cooking, stirring with a wooden spoon, adding milk or water, a little salt, and watching the mixture slowly thicken to that perfect glutinous texture. There’s something very satisfying about this ritual, almost like a meditation at the stove. Porridges of various kinds are comfort foods, repairing the world, gluing it back together. I’ve just finished Han Kang’s heartrendingly beautiful novel We Do Not Part, in which the horror of the massacres and executions in Jeju that its protagonist unearths is counterposed, albeit fleetingly, with the comfort of eating juk.

What does my life look like, remembered through the thickness or thinness of porridges? I have a couple of memories from childhood. My maternal grandfather would make porridge with butter and salt. I remember the boxes of the oats he used, featuring a muscled and presumably oat-satiated Scotsman with a short kilt, tossing a caber. Searching online, I realise the brand was Scott’s Porage Oats, although the caber tossing I remember was in fact shot putting. After my initial childhood disgust at any new food, I came to enjoy the taste. At my primary school in Newcastle – stretching the definition of porridge a little – we would often be served semolina for desert, and I remember how I and my classmates, trying to overcome the awfulness of school dinners, would mix a small dollop of strawberry jam we’d been given into it, and stir until it was a sickly, uniform pink. Until this day, no doubt marked by the trauma of those lunches, I never stir any kind of porridge up; if there’s added fruit, or, with rice porridge peanuts, or pickled vegetables, or fermented tofu, I’ll keep the toppings separate, taking a little of each of them with each scoop of porridge.

In my two years in Gainesville, Florida, doing my masters’, I became acquainted with grits.  This was a different kind of porridge, made from cornmeal, yellow or white, and still with a hint of the nutty texture I’ve rediscovered in the last months through steel-cut oats. I cooked quick grits bought from the Winn Dixie supermarket in the apartment I lived in, and later in the shared house I quickly moved to. If we went out for breakfast, especially on a road trip, grits would be served with savoury toppings, often cheese, or egg. I don’t have strong memories of cooking, but I do remember eating cheese grits at a long-vanished diner just off campus, waited on by polyester-clad serving staff, and then continuing, as I could do in my early twenties, on to a cooked breakfast.

After Florida I flew to China, in 1986, to teach at Hunan Normal University in Changsha, Hunan Province. In the winter, in contrast to Florida, there was much less food, and very few vegetables beyond cabbage and radishes. We were served what I then called 稀饭(xi fan), a rice gruel, thin but comforting in the morning when it emerged from a hatch in the staff canteen where we ate our breakfasts. In the break before New Year, I made a trip to Hong Kong, a land of plenty. I stayed in a hostel in Chungking Mansions, and, in the small breakfast stalls in the surrounding alleyways, ate 粥 — the thick, floury Cantonese-style congee with 油条, which Chinese restaurants in Canada translate as “Chinese donut.” Even after years in Singapore, I still use the Mandarin words for these foods: zhou for congee, you tiao for the fried dough sticks, rather than the Hokkien-derived yu char kway that’s more common among my generation in Singapore.

When I briefly returned to England in my late twenties, the Vietnamese refugees I worked with would cook congee overnight in huge pans for New Year. My grandfather still ate porridge, though he’d sometime burn it, forgetting that it was still on the stove. Struggling against a failing memory, he’d cut up the porridge boxes and write lists and instructions on the inside: the steps to take when washing clothes, or when starting up the hot water boiler. On my visits, I’d find these lists, written on cardboard, taped to the doors of his kitchen cabinets.

In my years in Canada and Taiwan, I don’t remember many encounters with porridge. In Taiwan I’d eat 蛋饼 (dan bing)for breakfast in one of the small shops outside the university gates. You could eat hotpot in airconditioned restaurants in Tainan to beat the heat outside, but 粥 was mostly sold at roadside stalls, where it really was too hot to enjoy, and I was diverted by the delights of 臭豆腐, so-called “stinky tofu,”  葱油饼,fried onion cakes close to roti prata in texture, and other snacks that had migrated across the Straits.

In Singapore, at lunch on my first day in the now long-demolished National Institute of Education canteen, I stared at food options I didn’t yet quite understand – nasi lemak, mee siam, mee rebus – and opted for congee, despite the heat. But my central Singapore porridge memory is going with my father- and mother-in-law to Smith Street market each Sunday in Chinatown, and eating rice porridge there. At times I’d go with my partner, too, but at others she’d sleep in, exhausted by a long week of work。 “她睡她的觉,” my father-in-law would say, “你吃你的粥.” In English I can’t find a suitable parallelism, and it’s somehow more prosaic: let her sleep, you eat your porridge. We’d drive down in the purple Proton Wira to Chinatown, negotiate the narrow, curved ramp up into the carpark. My father-in-law loved to buy coffee from a certain stall that, if requested, would give us it in recycled carnation milk tins, punctured in the lid and so that a handle made of twine could be attached. We’d eat porridge at Man Soh, 文嫂, if I remember rightly: the stall has long vanished. I’d always take fish head porridge, scraping the bones clean with my chopsticks.

Much later in life, my mother-in-law came to stay with us for a couple of months. I’d cook oats for her each morning in the style she was used to, very liquid, almost a drink, and very plain. When she left, I was tired of them, and wanted something more tasty. We didn’t eat oats for a while.

Now, in Vancouver, I’ve returned to porridge again. Each morning, I take the soaked oats out of the refrigerator, spoon them into the pan, heat slowly, add milk, stir. Eating porridge is comfort; cooking it is love. Sometimes I wish that the softness of the porridges I’ve eaten, and all those others I have not tasted, could spread everywhere, submerging hate, filling in all the cracks and fissures in our crazy world.