- Watch Poh’s story tonight on SBS World News at 6.30pm on SBS One.
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- Tell us your story: What was your first impression of Australia?
Poh Ling Yeow has just received the best birthday present ever: a one-way ticket to Australia. She would spend her ninth birthday on a plane.
In Malaysia, she’d always felt a stranger in her own land. Failing exams and struggling with separation anxiety at school, she was considered “a complete dunce”. From the moment her parents told her the family was migrating, Poh knew things were about to change for the better. She was right.
“It was a complete light bulb moment and clear as day in my head, it was just these words: everything is going to make sense,” says Poh, now sitting in the bright kitchen of her Adelaide home.
“When we arrived in Australia, I loved everything. I was just immediately besotted with this country.
“From waking up to the warbling of magpies, the smell of eucalyptus… I thought even the street signs looked beautiful!
“I just immediately felt at home here and never looked back.”
Now she’s made her home in suburban Adelaide. The house is a testament to Poh’s creative lifestyle: a wicker basket brimming with vegetables perched on the table, bowls bursting with fresh produce and walls tiled with artwork. It’s a creativity that Poh says was nurtured in what she calls “the lucky country”.
“Everything I have now in my life, I know I owe completely to Australia,” she says.
Television chef Poh Ling Yeow. (AAP)
“Having had such a chaotic kind of creative life, I know that it's not something that would've been easy to cultivate back in Malaysia.
“I think it's a very different Malaysia now... but back then I think it was still quite conservative values based on academia and expectations to sort of go into... a more conventional profession.”
But there were challenges adapting to Aussie life – particularly for Poh’s parents.
“I think my parents are quite modern in many ways, but even still they cling onto those traditional values, and I just wanted to move on and assimilate.
“When we arrived in Australia, I loved everything. I was just immediately besotted with this country."
“And I think that's ultimately the thing that made me shed my culture so aggressively as a kid.” Poh didn’t want to be seen as different, and although she was widely accepted by her schoolmates, there were times when she felt ostracised.
“Of course there's all those things that make you feel really different at school which I hated, like opening my lunchbox and finding like fried rice,” she says.
“It was always something you had to eat with a spoon, which I hated.
“All I wanted was a vegemite sandwich and a little bunch of sultanas.”
Little did she know, these were the differences that would kick-start her culinary career. The “holy cow” moment came in her early 30s, when she realised she wanted something from her culture to pass on to her future children. Poh turned to the traditional Asian flavours that had been burnt into her palette.
“I realised it was kind of the last vestige of my culture that I could really make a go of,” she says.
“I want to build my past and my heritage around my love of food and that’s where I’m going to have that thing from my past that I can hand on to my future.”
Her affinity with food took Poh further than she could have imagined. Her culinary career was kick-started in 2009 when she came runner-up in the first season of MasterChef Australia. Formerly a full-time artist, she went on to become a successful cooking show presenter and cookbook author. Her latest project is a new TV series, Po & Co, debuting on SBS this year.
The winner of Network Ten's reality show MasterChef Julie Goodwin (left) and runner-up Poh Ling Yeow. (AAP)
Poh lives in a multicultural suburb where neighbours often swap recipes for Italian home-made salami or French Duck Rillette. This merging of cultures is something she sees as uniquely Australian.
“I don't think people realise what tenacious eaters and cooks we are, and it's because we're built from a nation of migrants,” she says.
“We just cross-pollinate all the time and I love it.
“I love the dagginess of suburbia and all it has to offer - that's what Australia's about.
“We're just a real mixed bunch and I think that's what's so beautiful about Australia.”
Were you born overseas? We’d like to hear about your first impression of Australia as a new migrant.
Whatever your background, tell us your story in words, pictures or tweets.
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