From One Satay Skewer to the Work I Love Today

31 August 2026

Some dishes stay with us because they taste extraordinary.

Others stay because one bite can bring an entire chapter of life rushing back.

For me, that dish is chicken satay.

It was the first thing I properly learnt to make, and it belonged to my first-ever job: working as both a waitress and kitchen hand in a Malaysian restaurant in Melbourne.

I was 17 and had just been accepted into Monash University. When I saw how much the tuition would cost, I knew I did not want my parents to carry the whole burden. So I went looking for work.

At the time, it was simply a practical decision. I needed to earn money.

I could not have known that the little restaurant would give me far more than a wage. It would introduce me to food I still love, people whose kindness I still remember and the earliest signs of the life I would eventually build for myself.

It began with 1,000 flyers

My first task was delivering flyers to 1,000 homes in a rather wealthy neighbourhood.

The houses were about 10 or 15 metres apart.

Being painfully honest and far too inexperienced to ask the obvious questions, I walked the entire route. I had no lunch, kept going until every flyer had been delivered and eventually returned to the restaurant close to tears from exhaustion.

The owner looked at me and asked why I had not said I would be walking.

He had assumed I owned a bicycle.

Then he pointed to a large tub of marinated chicken breast and told me to start threading it onto skewers for the satay.

I said yes.

From then on, I was not only the girl dressed entirely in black, serving tables in a fine-dining setting. Whenever the restaurant was short-staffed, I worked in the kitchen too.

On some days, I prepared around ten kilograms of satay chicken. On others, I steamed roughly 50 trays of bean-curd-skin rolls for dim sum, measured individual 150-gram portions of rice noodles, carried boxes of supplies and made spring rolls in batches of 100.

Those numbers sound slightly absurd to me now.

At 17, though, they taught me that every polished result is supported by dozens of ordinary tasks that most people never see.

A dish may arrive at the table in minutes, but someone has spent hours preparing it.

A beautiful outcome nearly always has an untidy back room.

A little care came back to me

As a waitress, I learnt to pay attention.

I would often notice what customers needed before they had to ask. Perhaps that was why they tipped me so generously. After two months, the tips I had earned were almost equal to two months of wages.

The money was helpful, but the meals and memories stayed with me longer.

The restaurant owner had worked as a cook in the military. His Malaysian and Singaporean friends often came by, and they would prepare large meals together.

The first time I ate lobster was not at an expensive restaurant after becoming successful. It was in the place where I worked, when I was lucky enough to share whatever everyone had cooked.

Lobster noodles, chilli crab, pepper crab, rendang, char kway teow, nasi lemak and nasi goreng all became part of that period of my life.

The owner knew how much I loved the food. He also knew I would stay until the final customers had left, sometimes as late as 10 or 11 at night, when my brother would have to collect me.

Before I went home, he often packed me 12 satay skewers and two containers of nasi lemak or nasi goreng. Every so often, there would be rendang or char kway teow instead.

I also became surprisingly good at making teh tarik.

Part of the experience was pouring the frothy milk tea in front of customers, stretching it between two cups held almost a metre apart without spilling it everywhere. It felt a little like performing on stage.

Even now, the smell of satay and peanut sauce can take me straight back to that kitchen.

Food does more than preserve flavour. It preserves the people we used to be.

A computer upstairs

The owner knew I was studying, so he brought an old desktop computer from home and set it up upstairs at the restaurant.

During my lunch breaks, I could sit there and study.

To someone else, it may not have looked like a significant gesture. To the 17-year-old version of me, it meant a great deal. Those small pockets of study time helped me keep up with university, and I never failed a subject.

Sometimes, what helps a person continue is not an enormous opportunity.

It might be a quiet corner in which to study. A meal packed after a long shift. An adult noticing that a teenager is trying hard and deciding to make things slightly easier for her.

I still remember that kindness.

Small acts can carry someone through a much longer stretch of road than we realise.

My first business card

Not every part of the job was easy.

A distant relative of the owner began repeatedly bothering me and behaving inappropriately. It eventually became the reason I seriously considered leaving.

At the same time, I was becoming more committed to selling my handmade products.

When the owner learnt about my little business, he asked whether I knew how to design a business card. He told me to leave some cards at the counter so customers could find my shop and buy something if they liked it.

That Malaysian restaurant became the first physical place to display my handmade shop’s cards.

There was no launch party and no grand marketing campaign. Just a few small cards sitting on the counter at my casual job.

Important beginnings often look remarkably ordinary.

After about six months, my handmade shop continued to attract more customers. Eventually, my restaurant wage amounted to only a quarter of what I was earning from the things I made.

I knew it was time to leave, but I hesitated because I respected the owner and felt guilty about going.

In the end, he was the one who encouraged me. If I had the chance to build something bigger, he said, I should take it. I could always come back and visit.

At 19, I officially became a business owner.

Ten years later, at 29, I left office employment to take freelancing seriously. The reason felt strangely familiar: the thing I had been building on the side had grown too important to remain a side project.

Some decisions appear sudden from the outside. In reality, they are prepared by hundreds of small moments that came before them.

None of it was wasted

Looking back, I can see that the things I love never appeared by accident.

I understand Malaysian and Singaporean food because each dish is attached to a memory from my younger years in Melbourne.

I love travel for more than beautiful destinations. I once pushed myself to keep working on a cruise project because the first vessel I inspected carried a feeling that was unmistakably Melbourne. Sadly, that ship later caught fire.

I stayed in travel content because I loved arriving at the same place as everyone else, then experiencing it more slowly, noticing different details and finding my own way to tell its story.

These days, I am drawn to “rescue missions”.

When a project is struggling and someone asks for help, I tend to jump in and work until the problem is solved—or at least until things have genuinely improved. Perhaps that is why I rarely run out of ideas.

My passions have not disappeared. They have simply changed shape.

On paper, the roles might seem disconnected: kitchen hand, waitress, handmade seller, travel professional, content specialist and freelancer.

Look more closely, though, and they all begin with the same instinct. I like taking care of something, creating it and watching it become better.

A plate of food.

A handmade product.

A journey.

A piece of writing.

A brand that needs help finding its feet.

Perhaps our real work cannot always be captured by a job title. Sometimes, it can be found in the way we have always approached things, wherever we happened to be standing at the time.

What nobody saw

Recently, I have occasionally heard people say that I get what I want without doing much.

Some have suggested that earning money comes easily to me—that I can simply sit around and still be paid.

I would be lying if I said those comments never made me sad.

I know what existed behind the outcomes they could see.

I never considered myself naturally brilliant at school. I was simply persistent enough to earn a place at the university I wanted to attend.

A careers adviser once told me I was not pretty enough to work in travel. Years later, I may not be the person standing in front of the finished product, but I have helped create beautiful journeys, stories and campaigns from behind the scenes.

I am not naturally extroverted. After returning to Vietnam, I sent out 256 CVs. I needed work, but I was also forcing myself to practise speaking to people so I could become more confident and less vulnerable to being bullied.

I even signed up to become a streamer because I knew it would force me to talk, respond quickly and become more articulate.

I have lived with depression and anxiety, and I have been subjected to body shaming. At times, I knew that people saw my anxiety as a burden.

I did not want to remain frightened of everything. So, one fear at a time, I began stepping towards the things that scared me.

My English was once weak. I studied relentlessly for two months and raised my IELTS score from 6.5 to 8.0. What people did not know was that I pushed my listening practice so far that I injured my eardrum. A doctor told me to avoid loud noise, which is why I still struggle to stay in noisy environments.

For a long time, I also chose not to pursue a relationship. I had not yet understood my sexuality, and I did not know whether I would remain in Australia or return to Vietnam. I worried that my uncertainty would hurt someone else.

I gave up some happiness at the time so that, once my life had become more stable, I could meet and love the person who truly felt right for me.

I do not share these things to prove that my life has been harder than anyone else’s.

Everyone is carrying a history we cannot see.

I share them because today’s result did not arrive on its own. Money is rarely easy to earn. Confidence does not appear from nowhere. Success seldom arrives without a great many efforts made quietly, when nobody is watching.

People see the fruit

My father once taught me that people usually see only what is in front of them. Few will ask what process took place behind it.

That is simply reality.

People see you speaking confidently, but they do not see the occasions when your hands shook and you could not finish a sentence.

They see you working in a field you love, but not the nights spent studying and working, the failed attempts or the months when you had no idea whether you were heading in the right direction.

They see you earning money from an interest and assume it must be easy. They do not see the years when that interest earned nothing and you continued because you could not stop thinking about it.

Perhaps when you have worked long enough for the result to look effortless, that is its own kind of reward.

You do not owe every observer a detailed explanation of your journey.

You know what it took.

Sometimes, that has to be enough.

Begin with something small

I will not tell you that following your passion guarantees success.

Passion still needs skill, discipline, time, clear judgement and the ability to pay some very real bills.

But if something keeps drawing you back, perhaps it deserves a serious chance.

You do not have to resign tomorrow.

You might begin with one handmade product after class. A blog post nobody reads. A business card placed on the counter of a small restaurant. A skill learnt during lunch breaks. One difficult project you agree to help repair. Or a first job that does not look impressive at all.

We often wait for a dramatic sign before giving ourselves permission to begin.

My life, however, changed through very small things: 1,000 flyers, a tub of marinated chicken, a computer upstairs, a few containers of nasi lemak and my first business card.

None of them looked like a turning point when they happened.

Only years later could I see the path they had quietly created.

You will chase your own deadlines

One day, nobody will need to tell you to work.

Not because life has become effortless, but because you will be completely absorbed in something you care about—a craft, a passion or a project that feels so much like your own creation that you cannot leave it alone.

You will become the person chasing your own deadlines.

It is not always romantic. There are exhausting days, bills to pay, difficult clients and moments when you want to shut the computer and disappear.

Still, somewhere inside the chaos, you know you are building something that belongs to you.

This is what I most hope to inspire in others: find a way to create value from something you genuinely care about, then give it enough persistence and time to grow.

You do not need to be the most talented person in the room.

You do not need to meet somebody else’s standard of beauty.

You do not need to be born confident or extroverted, or to know exactly where your life is heading.

You can begin with diligence. Curiosity. A willingness to learn what you do not yet understand. The courage to try something frightening and accept that your first attempt may be awkward.

Some days, I want to go back

Perhaps today I am simply missing Melbourne.

I miss that Malaysian kitchen. I miss the smell of satay and the glasses of teh tarik I once poured from a metre above the counter. I miss the 17-year-old girl who nearly cried after walking to deliver 1,000 flyers, yet still returned for her next shift.

Living in Hanoi, I have not found many places that recreate the Malaysian flavours I remember. The closest restaurant I came across turned out to be Indonesian.

Perhaps that longing is beautiful in its own way.

It reminds me that I once lived somewhere else, did jobs I never expected to do, met people who helped me and tasted dishes that would eventually become part of who I am.

I feel extraordinarily lucky to have experienced those things, even though I have never considered myself more gifted than everyone around me.

I simply kept working with what I had.

Now, I am trying to earn enough money to travel back to Australia one day. This time, I want to bring my wife, so she can see how I used to live, where I worked and why one plate of chicken satay can leave me with so many stories to tell.

Perhaps happiness does not always mean travelling as far as possible from where we began.

Sometimes, it is returning with someone we love, looking back at an earlier version of ourselves and smiling.

That younger version had no idea where the road would lead.

She simply kept moving, beginning with the smallest things she could find.

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Written by Phanh for Notes by Phanh.

If this note reminds you of one of your own small beginnings or of someone who is still working quietly without seeing the result, please share it with them. Perhaps these words will reach them just when they need to remember that no sincere step is ever entirely wasted.