Linda Marigliano looked forward to spending the school holidays in Malaysia with her Po Po and Gong Gong. She knew she was in for two months of wild freedom on the unpaved streets near the family hut.
As soon as the air conditioned airport doors would open and you'd step out into the streets of KL, I just remember the heat and the smell hitting me and being like - Wow, we are not in Australia anymore.Linda Marigliano
It was a big shift from her regular home life in Sydney, where she spent most Friday nights at her Nonna and Nonno’s house devouring four-course meals.
Oh my God, it was such a routine. It was like it was like a play that you just step into and you are a certain actor that goes on the stage, and you go and do it three times a week.Linda Marigliano
Linda and her Nonna Carmelinda
The differences were almost just surface level... a different framework, different coloured hair, different coloured eyes, different coloured skin... But all the values are the same. That foundation of family, respect, loyalty, duty.Linda Marigliano
Host Lizzy Hoo and Linda chat about the exuberant meals Linda shared with her Nonna Carmelinda (her namesake) throughout her childhood. Linda speaks about the dishes that remind her most of her Nonna and Nonno, and digs deep into the detailed hierarchy of roles and responsibilities that made the enormous family dinners run smoothly.
Linda having lunch with her Nonna
LISTEN TO
Service and sass: What Linda Marigliano’s Nonna taught her about love
SBS Audio
08/08/202428:40
Thanks to Amelia Chappelow, Linda Marigliano and the team at Tough Love for sharing the audio of Linda’s Nonna, Carmelinda, for use in this episode. It originally appears in the episodes ’ and ‘’. You can hear more of Linda’s podcast .
Executive Producer: Kellie Riordan
Supervising Producer: Grace Pashley
Producer: Liam Riordan.
Audio editor and sound designer: Jeremy Wilmot.
Production Manager: Ann Chesterman
A huge thanks to the SBS team: Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford.
We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the land on which this show was made.
Trancript
Note: This transcript has been automatically generated
I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I'm recording from.
I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and their elders past and present.
I also acknowledge the traditional owners from all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands you're listening from.
That foundation of family, respect, loyalty, duty, to the point of feeling guilty if you're not doing something right by your family.
All of those things within that family framework, I think exist within my Chinese Malaysian side, identically with my Italian side.
Linda Marigliano is a familiar name to most Aussies of my generation.
She made her mark as a mainstay on Australia's youth radio station, Triple J, interviewing music icons like The Strokes, Cyndi Lauper, Ice Cube and Metallica.
As a fan of her radio work, I only knew Linda by that very Italian surname and her bright Aussie accent.
So I was surprised to discover that her mum's family is Chinese Malaysian, like mine.
I'm Lizzy Hoo, and this is Grand Gestures, where I find out how much of who we are comes from our grandparents.
Linda, I know you've spent a lot of time in Sydney with your dad's parents, but I'd like to start outside of Australia.
Tell me a little bit about your trips to visit your mum's parents in Malaysia.
I have such fond memories of Malaysia.
I just remember landing in Kuala Lumpur at the airport, and we had uncles and cousins that would all pick us up.
As soon as the air conditioned airport doors would open and you'd step out into the street of KL, I just remember the heat and the smell hitting me and being like, wow, we are not in Australia anymore.
Every year we would go there and we would spend some of the time in Kuala Lumpur, some of it in Ipoh, which is a couple of hours drive away.
And then actually the majority of it, we would go and live at my grandparents' house, which is in a tiny, tiny town, a little village called Barnier, which is where my mum grew up.
Isn't that cool?
Because my dad is Malaysian Chinese as well.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And I didn't get to go back every year.
I only went back one time when, unfortunately, my grandmother was quite ill.
But I have those memories of going to this faraway place that I'd heard so much about in little drips and drabs.
And then rocking up, the humidity, the smells, all my favorite foods were suddenly just available.
And one memory that stuck out for me, I don't know if your grandparents' place was like this, but the cold feeling of the floors.
That's it, those concrete floors.
Yes.
Those concrete floors and that faint smell of sweat mixed with incense that would be burning in the corner.
And then there would often be, in the little Buddhist shrine in the corner of the little shack essentially that they lived in, there'd be incense burning, but they'd also have these really particular Chinese Malaysian buns.
And they'd also have like mandarins or something.
So there'd be that kind of like mix of like citrus smell, but then the cold floors and then the really hot heat and the mosquitoes and everything.
But you'd lay on those cold floors with like bare feet and they were just so cool and so smooth.
It was like they were constantly having a broom and just like sweeping the floors all the time.
The broom.
So many brooms.
The broom.
So many brooms.
I feel like the brooms always had that kind of like colourful neon like tape, taped around.
They did.
My parents still use a broom like that in their house.
Yeah.
My mum's got one.
She probably took it.
She probably bought it in Malaysia and like stowed it in a massive luggage or something.
What was their impression of you?
Were you the Aussie kid or were you this half Italian kid?
Like what did they think?
My mum's family was so warm.
I just remember them and they were on paper compared to what we had in Australia.
They were poor family, but I just remember they're so warm, bringing us in, feeding us, giving us everything.
I remember they squeeze our cheeks until they hurt.
I remember them being so excited to see us.
Because obviously my mum lived overseas and she'd moved overseas for a better life for herself.
So she could work and earn money and send it back to them, as is the story with so many immigrant kids that move overseas to help their family back home.
So she was one of those.
So when she came back and she proudly had this kind of esteemed European husband that lived in Australia and this new family and children, it was seen as this, I think, just really exciting thing.
And I don't know, I think because we ate everything, they loved us and they loved feeding us.
Could your grandparents speak English at all?
How did you communicate with them?
Barely.
Barely, like I remember them giving me food.
I remember them calling my name.
We'd know all the easy words so we could communicate with the grandparents.
So we would know what it is to, you know, go and have a shower.
It's bedtime, go get water.
It's time for dinner.
Like Sikfan, like it's time for dinner.
It's time to eat.
Let's clean up those little things.
We knew anything else beyond that, nothing.
So you're communicating through food a lot.
Yep.
As is Chinese culture.
What kinds of foods can you remember them cooking?
I remember my grandmother coming in and like choosing a chicken to kill from the farm, like from the backyard.
And she would run around after the chicken and then like slaughter it on the concrete floor in the kitchen.
And you just kind of look away.
But then later that night, you know, you're having chicken soup and you're having chicken feet and you're having the broth from the chicken.
I remember if we were feeling fancy, we would either have it there or we would go to a like a little local kind of cafe restaurant and we'd get like a whole steamed fish.
Beautiful.
So a lot of that, you know, like big steamed fish with your ginger and your scallions and all of that and your soy.
So your Po Po and Gong Gong, what do you remember of them on those trips?
What was their life like?
They worked their whole lives.
And when I mean whole, I mean, I remember my mum talks about going and working in those farms when she was a kid.
And it was one of the reasons that she thought I've got to try and do something else.
She wanted the city, she craved the city.
But for them, they lived that really humble, beautiful farm life of going, working out in the field, coming home and just cooking for the whole family.
And my mum's one of six kids, three boys, three girls.
And I know that they all lived in that sort of concrete, floored, almost shack-like house in the Barney village.
I remember they were both smokers because everybody was a smoker.
And they both died in their early 60s.
And that's quite young.
But for them, they'd lived this long, sort of hard life.
And my grandfather died really quite suddenly.
And my grandmother died after getting lung cancer.
So I remember my grandmother was a widow for a good few years.
And she was this tiny boned woman.
So I just remember her being so tiny, but she would carry us around.
And there's photos of me being this fat toddler.
And she's holding me with her tiny little fragile brown wrists, holding me up, feeding me, wearing a little cheongsam shirt.
And it's just, it's like quite heartbreaking.
Like I wish that I could have, like you just think about that stuff and I go, I just wish I could have just picked you up and plucked you and given you a really easy last few years of your life.
And do you think that's why they had this really, you know, tough existence.
They were so encouraging of your mum to go and move to Australia at such a young age.
It was always so sad watching them reunite and then watching them say goodbye at the end of the trips.
Really sad.
And I remember when my grandmother passed away, so when my mum's mum passed away, you know, my mum found out over the phone and hadn't seen her mum for months and months.
But I just know how encouraging they had been when my mum was an 18 year old that said, I want to go and live somewhere else and I'm just going to go and do it.
And I think about that and I go, my God, that was so brave.
18 in a different place where you can't FaceTime your parents, where there's no easy way of learning a language that you haven't grown up hearing, and you just decide to just take the risk and have the courage to do it.
And the more I think about that as I get older, I go, my God, 18 year olds are babies.
How did you do that, mum?
So food is important in both of your cultural backgrounds, Italian and Chinese, Malaysian.
What were the similarities and differences between those cultures?
I reckon the similarities are so much more than the differences.
The differences were almost just surface level, like all the values were the same, but they just had a different framework.
Different colored hair, different colored eyes, different colored skin, a different sort of sources that they would use.
But all the values were the same, that foundation of family, respect, loyalty, duty to the point of feeling guilty if you're not doing something right by your family.
All of those things within that family framework, I think exist within my Chinese Malaysian side, but identically with my Italian side.
I really think that's why when my mum met my dad, even though she spoke broken English, and my dad's mum, so my Italian grandmother and that whole side of the family, they often spoke broken English as well, they could see still eye to eye because the values, those core values that made them who they were and the way that they operated in a home, in a household, in a family were identical.
Sharing food was central to your Italian side of the family too.
I know growing up in Sydney, every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night looked pretty much the same for you.
Can you walk us through that routine?
Oh my God, it was such a routine.
It was like a play that you just step into and you are a certain actor that goes onto the stage and you go and do it.
Three times a week, we would go to Nonna Nonna's house.
We'd get there at about six and Nonna would be finishing things.
The table would already have been set from midday earlier that day, and all the antipasti is sitting on the table.
That's like all of the cheeses, the soft cheeses, the hard cheeses, the olives, the breads, the cured meats.
And you just got to stop yourself from eating too much bread because you know that there's so much more to come.
Because then the actual dinner would begin, and that would be everybody sitting around this massive table.
And then we would have the first proper course, which is your pasta course.
Always start with pasta.
So after all that, then you get your main course, which is like the Italian meat and three veg vibe.
And then once that was done, and then everything gets cleared.
All the women are always clearing, by the way.
All the women are like getting up, refilling the wine glasses, checking that everyone's okay.
Everyone's nibbling on like carrots and cucumbers that are laid out on plates in between people's settings.
And then once we finished the main course, I remember it was my job, because I was one of the kind of younger cousins that I would help clear the plates.
You're then having cracking walnuts for everyone, eating figs, eating some of the cheese that you hadn't eaten from the antipasti, you're doing all of that.
Then eventually once that's finished, that's generally when the kids like get up and run into the lounge room and start to like play around off all the crazy energy that they've built up.
And that's when the washing up begins and then everyone starts to make the coffee.
So once the washing up is done, then the women sit back down, everyone has coffee and that's when biscotti happens.
So that's when there's all the different biscotti that comes out, or there'll be some dark chocolate that will be brought to the table, or there'll be gelato taken out of the freezer.
And so then we have the gelato and then eventually, like this is an hours have gone by at this point.
Yeah.
Like hours have gone by.
And then once that's all cleared, then the cards come out and it's time to play poker.
Oh, I remember being so excited because we would go to bed late on nights that we would go to Nonnon Nonno's house.
And sometimes if we were to go out to 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, we'd be allowed to stay up watching, you know, TV that late.
Exciting.
That was it in a nutshell, literally in a nutshell, in a little nutshell.
Were there any dishes that you remember that your Nonna would cook that stay with you?
Oh, totally.
There's every Easter we would hang out, you know, every day.
And I just remember on Easter Sunday, it was tradition for whatever reason that she would make a pasta forno, which is essentially like a lasagna.
So it's a baked pasta dish.
It's like a lasagna, but instead of using lasagna sheets, you use pasta.
So you can use rigatoni or you can use fusilli.
So either one of those, quite often she would use fusilli.
So it would be very similar to a lasagna where you've got this like meaty sauce, a really rich tomato sauce, baked big rigatoni.
And in amongst that, she's got meatballs in there.
And it would just be this big, warm, cozy tray with so much cheese, so much mozzarella, so much parmesan.
Yum.
That would be pulled out of the oven.
And I think that that would have to be like one of my dying dishes that I would have.
You're named after your nonna.
Yeah.
I was just about to say, I have to get this dish right, because I'm named after her.
I miss everybody, darlin.
I know.
We miss you too.
My granddaughter, my granddaughter.
I know.
Did you have a special relationship with your nonna?
Yeah.
I did.
I don't know.
I just loved her so much.
She's passed away now.
And it's, sometimes it's still so crazy to think that she's not with me anymore, because, you know, you just, I grew up with this person, as we were saying, you know, you see them so often when we were growing up, multiple times a week.
And then even after that, because, you know, as soon as it got to us all growing up and going to university and working full time, plus nonna getting older, we weren't putting that burden on her to cook for everybody three times a week.
So the way that I would see her besides doing the, you know, big whenever it was Mother's Day or Easter or Christmas, when all the family would come together, I would have to, you know, make my own time to see her.
And that meant that I was seeing her one-on-one.
So when I was, you know, working in radio, I would drive to her house sort of on my way to going to the Triple J studios.
So I would spend time to, you know, have lunch with her that day.
And that I think really cemented in not just a kind of grandmother-granddaughter relationship, but more of a friendship.
It was almost like there wasn't the pressure of having to everyone play their roles, everybody quickly, you know, clear the plates, clean those pasta plates, get the entrees out, get the mains out.
It was really relaxed.
And I would just meet her in the morning.
I'd take her shopping to the grocery store.
She would choose whatever she wanted to eat for the week.
We would get back to her house and make lunch together.
And then there would be like an Italian cooking show on TV or something.
We would sit and watch the TV show together.
And I think that's what made us have a really close bond when I became an adult.
And I think similarly, that's what made it really sad as well to see her when she then was in a nursing home in the very last years of her life, because I knew how much she valued, like we all do, that autonomy and that independence that you get from just going to the grocery store and choosing what you want to eat and being able to provide for someone and cook for someone that you love, which she took so much pride in.
Yeah.
You know, when you're a teenager and you go into your grandparents' house three times a week, you're probably thinking, Oh, I've got to go to my grandparents' house again.
But then when you're older and you form a relationship with that person, you see them in a completely different light.
Yeah, exactly.
Like when we were just getting to that age where I was sort of becoming a young adult when I was turning 18, 19, I remember going to their house still for dinner on a Friday and a Saturday night, and kind of counting down the minutes until dinner would end, I would do the dishes, and then I'd go out to a club because I was finally of age to go out partying.
And so for me, it was like, Oh my God, just got to get through Nona's dinner, help clean up, and then guiltily say, Okay, everybody, I've got to go.
And they'd go, Where are you going?
And I'd go, Samantha's already outside picking me up.
Got to go, bye.
And just run outside the door, just leave and be thinking about it all through dinner.
How am I going to get out of this?
What am I going to say?
What's the easiest way that I can say this, that I'm just leaving to make a swift exit?
And we just don't have that tradition anymore.
We've all kind of branched out and started our own lives and had our own families.
And, you know, I'm living overseas now.
So that big kind of family unit doesn't exist anymore.
I love you.
I love you too.
I see you soon.
I was going to say, you've recently moved to Los Angeles.
That's where you're calling from now.
Away from Sydney and away from your family.
How did your nonna feel about you moving so far away?
You know, I only just thought of it when I told you that anecdote about thinking about being a bit stressed of thinking, how am I going to tell nonna that I've got to leave after dinner?
That same feeling, but times a thousand, was how I felt going, how am I going to tell her that I'm going to move overseas?
How can I possibly explain to this woman that I've grown up with that sees all the amazing things that living in Australia offers, how am I possibly going to explain to her, oh, I'm in love with someone that's over there, and we really want to live overseas together, so I'm going to leave, you know?
It's really hard to justify that decision to be somewhere else.
And I think that would be difficult in any context, but particularly saying goodbye to someone that's elderly and of a completely different generation that doesn't quite understand, you know, if you move overseas to them, you move for a better life because the country you come from is in turmoil.
That's why you move.
You move because there's, you know, a war or you can't provide for your family, but they did that.
They did that in their generation.
That's why we're there and that's why we're in Sydney and that's why we had better life than what they had.
So to turn around and go, you know, that country that has all the guns, I'm gonna go there.
You know, I just, and anytime I would sort of say it to her, I'd kind of gently say, oh, you know, Nonna, you know, Magnus, my boyfriend, because he had come to Australia so many times before and he'd met her and come to visit her in the nursing home with me.
I'd say, oh, you know, we're both gonna live in Los Angeles together.
When it was leading up to it happening, you know, a couple of years ago, leading up to this, like, finally being able to move.
I remember her accepting it, but accepting it, but not quite understanding it.
It would be hard to understand, but they also want you to be happy.
Yeah, I think she gave me a lot of shit for it for a while, where she'd be like, she'd be like, what are you doing with this boy?
You can just put him away.
Just put him away.
Put him away.
I'm like, okay, what do you mean?
She's like, no, just, you're not married.
You don't have to do anything for him.
Like, she just would, she was like, and she was really crass as well.
So she'd kind of swear and say, you know, rude things.
So she did give me a lot of shit for it, but she did support me in the end.
And I was able to say a really nice goodbye to her before I left.
And then you make it over to LA and you get some bad news.
I found out one night when my dad texted me at like midnight, and I happened to be awake and I happened to look at my phone.
And I saw my dad's number come up and I was like, dad normally knows that I'm asleep at this time, wonder why he's texting me.
And he was just like, darling Linda, I want you to know that your nonna passed away this morning, give me a call when you can.
And I was just in shock, in shock.
And I remember being out with Magnus and I just like didn't even tell him what the text said.
I just like held my phone up to his face.
I was just mid conversation with like, I remember there were three different people in front of me.
And I just like rudely held my phone up to Magnus' face.
And he like leaned and looked at it.
And I just turned around and like walked straight out.
I just couldn't comprehend it.
And I called dad.
I remember pissing down with rain and I was just sobbing.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's sad.
It's sad.
It is.
It's sad.
But you know, she was, she was 97.
She was about to turn 98 in a few weeks time.
And so good.
She, she had lived a really good life with a loving family around her.
And grief, you know, it brings up these big moments of reflection.
Do you think about her a lot still?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
I think it's sad to think that I think about her less often now, but I do think about her a lot still also because a lot of what I crave cooking wise is her things, like just really simple things.
She made, she used to make this really simple, it's like a very humble Italian recipe where you basically make an egg roll omelette and then you soak it in pasta sauce.
You soak it kind of all day in tomato sauce.
And then once you take the omelette out, it's got like when you cut into it, there's like this tomato sauce that's all through the omelette.
And it was this kind of really comfort food that I used to crave from her.
So I crave that now.
So I always think of her when I have that.
So your grandparents were obviously very influential in your life.
They were around.
Do you see any of them in you?
There's a real pride in serving that I always saw through my mum, my mum's mum, my nonna or like my whole family, that pride in giving people food, doing things for them, those real acts of service style love language things.
I know that I have inherited all of that.
I know as well that there's a part of me that goes, okay Linda, but you're also going to have to draw a line to not become a completely self-sacrificing people pleaser.
So just keep that in mind so that you can retain your own sense of self and not just be a loyal, beautiful person of servitude in your family.
But let's keep it all together.
And I do think I've also inherited my Nonna's spiciness in that, like I was saying, she was really witty and quick and funny and sort of rude and could be crude.
And, you know, even though she was a real, like traditional Nonna, she also had a sense of like modernity about her that was, yeah, just super sassy.
Like I hope to hold a seed of that throughout my whole life.
And I mean, if I am that sassy, even when I'm in my 90s, it's like what a dream.
Yeah, I want to be a little bit sassy like nonna too.
Yeah, I feel like we need to grow old with sassiness.
Servitude, but sassiness.
Thanks to Linda Marigliano, broadcaster, author and podcast host for joining me on Grand Gestures.
Grand Gestures is a Deadset Studios production for SBS Audio.
It's hosted by me, Lizzy Hoo.
The executive producer is Kelly Riordon, supervising producer is Grace Pashley, and producer is Liam Riordon.
Sound designed by Jeremy Wilmot.
Big shout out to the SBS team for their help, Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford.
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