Hainanese Chicken Rice: A Meal as Intricate as Its History

As China became a more and more fearful place to live due to the lashings placed upon it by European invaders, residents from the coastal island of Hainan began seeking greener pastures in the southeast around 1840. The Hainanese settled all around the Malay peninsula and Thailand. They were not the first to have done this process; many other Chinese minority groups made this trek as far back as the 1600’s. Unfortunately for the Hainanese migrants, they were one of the last to make the journey and disrupted the existing ethnic hierarchy in the region. It is now where a metaphor is apt that ties the famous dish to the people who created it. See, the Hainanese of the mid-nineteenth century are like the chicken that begins the dish’s preparation, both thrown into a pot of boiling water that extracted much more from them than vice versa. While the chicken endows important flavors into the water while being poached, which becomes pivotal to the later stock, the Hainanese instead provided an exploitable workforce deemed “necessary” by the English ruling class while they poached the Hainanese people.

            Going over the intricacies of English colonial rule during the era is certainly outside the scope of our article; however, some details are crucial to Hainanese Chicken Rice’s evolution. No facet is more important than the ethnic division of labor incentivized by imperial rule. As Han Ming Guang puts it in his Master’s Thesis, an ethnic division of labor formed along ethnolinguistic lines between the various Chinese minorities. These ethnic groups, over time, started to divvy up sectors of the economy for simplicity and, often, bigotry. Around the time Hainanese migrants started to reach the areas we know today as Malaysia and Singapore, English occupiers began to settle in for their colonial rule. A new labor niche opened up.

The English “needed” servants when a new group of desperate foreigners could find no better employment. As a result, the Hainanese became synonymous with the service industry. Not just being servants to the white colonizers but as servers in the food and coffee industries as well. Guang states that the Hainanese domination of the service industry was so great that it became commonplace to derogatorily call them “Hai Nan Ting (海南丁).” The “Ting” in reference to the characteristic sound of the coffee maker’s spoon hitting the completed orders of coffee—done to get the attention of their disproportionately Hainanese servers.

            The Hainanese were not going to go away though; they made the region their home. Returning to our metaphor, you cannot have Malaysia, and especially Singapore, without the flavor the Hainanese brought to the stock of Malay and Singaporean culture. Without the Hainanese, you would never get the foundation of the nations, much in the same way you would not get the all-important foundational fried rice without the flavors extracted from the Hainanese Chicken. Yes, the famously multifaceted, fragrant, and all-important rice, much like Singapore, is not the same without the Hainanese. It appears our cooking has gotten ahead of our history, as it took a lot of struggles before the stock and rice became one, so to speak.

            The Hainanese were the perfect target for periodic oppression because their lack of numbers made them vulnerable. Even by the 1950s, the Hainanese never made up more than 6% of the Chinese-immigrant Singaporean population, yet their few numbers belie their impact. Change began roughly around the 1920s as politics back home in China started to spill out into the larger region. As simply as I can put it, the nationalist versus communist conflict occurring in China up until 1949 started to create largely unfounded fears that Hainanese migrants were harboring extremism—of most fear to the English, communist extremism—with intentions of stirring up conflict in the colony.

English return in 45’ did not shake the newfound independence of the Hainanese descendant people, correlating with the rise of the Hainanese Chicken Rice industry all around the peninsula. When the English left—for good this time—in 1959, reform flourished. The road was bumpy, and an article of this tone and size is not able to do the topic justice, but healing began. After the failure of an experimental Singaporean—Malaysian unitary state ending in 1965, the Hainanese flavor that was the cornerstone of the Singaporean cultural stock finally resulted in a quintessential foundation.

For our dish, this foundation is the rice mentioned earlier. The fried rice, famous for its aroma and complex flavor, is coated in the famous Chicken stock and made irresistible with the addition of chilis, ginger, garlic, and (depending on the recipe) lemongrass. Do keep in mind that these aromatics that make the dish famous are additions to the pot that require the fusion of stock and rice first. This process mirrors the story of modern Singapore. The peace and melding of the Hainanese and other ethnic groups created the foundation of the republic, which was then made famous by the success that followed. Economic prosperity and architectural beauty are to Singapore what ginger and chili are to the Chicken Rice: beautiful signifiers that necessitated a harmonious base.

Now that our rice is plated, the poached chicken can be cut appropriately and placed atop the flavorful mix. Interestingly, the chicken is not the star of the show. The rice is the real heart of the fare. But when you take a bite, you are supposed to appreciate the texture of the chicken and the rice’s flavor at once, for the arrangement is incomplete without the combination. This is symbolically poignant. The chicken that spawned the core of the dish is returned to the concoction to share in its notoriety. So too, for the Hainanese of Singapore. Once extracted for their labor, they are now a core part of the Singaporean identity. Hainanese Chicken Rice is the national dish of Singapore, and you would be pressed to pass a street without a vendor selling their spin on the classic. The most famous Chicken Rice shop, Tian Tian, has worldwide fame owing to the sauce added when platting. There is even a Y2K—Romeo and Juliet-inspired—Romcom called“Chicken Rice War,” featuring the two ill-fated lovers as the children of rival Chicken Rice Shop owners.