KOTA KINABALU: Tham Yau Kong would have never imagined a year ago that he would one day be literally getting hot and bothered about chillies.
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Specifically, the birds’ eye variety, locally known as cili padi.
After all about this time in 2019, Tham, a travel guide with 30 years of experience, was focused on the operations of his travel company that among others specialised in bringing visitors to experience the infamous “Death March” that saw thousands of Australian and British soldiers killed between Sandakan and Ranau districts at the tail end of World War Two.
Then the Covid 19 pandemic struck and his business, like that of others in the tourism trade, collapsed with the imposition of travel restrictions.
These days, he’s kept busy washing and plucking the stems of up to 6kgs of the tiny but hot peppers almost every day. And if not that, he’s peeling almost the same amount of ginger or squeezing the juice from nearly 10kgs of calamansi lime.
All these to produce bottles of chilli sauce that he sells for RM2 each.
“My hands feel hot all the time from the daily handling of the chillies and the ginger,” said Tham, who prefers to do the work himself and who, on most days, stays up until midnight to get it done.
And while his income now is just a fraction of what he was earning in the travel and tour business, Tham is content.
“Though I’m earning RM30 now compared with RM300 previously, I’m satisfied as I have something that keeps me going and I know I’m helping some farmers as well,” he said.
Like other Malaysians, he found himself stuck at home in Kota Kinabalu with the imposition of the movement control order (MCO), unable to return to his family farm in the interior Tenom district.
It was only in June, during the recovery movement control order (RMCO) period, that he was able to return to his farm where a bumper harvest of the chillies and calamansi lime awaited him.
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Instead of allowing the excess chillies and lime to go to waste, Tham came up with the idea of blending them into chilli sauce – something he had never done before.
“I learned about making chilli sauce and experimented and eventually decided that it would contain cili padi, garlic, ginger, calamansi juice and apple cider vinegar as a preservative,” said Tham.
He started by making just a few bottles and advertising it on his Facebook page – and among his first customers was former deputy chief minister Christina Liew.
“That gave me the encouragement but I still made it in small batches. It was something to keep me occupied, apart from earning a little to buy groceries,” said Tham who does every aspect of the trade – cleaning and blending the chillies and then bottling, marketing and personally delivering his chilly sauce.
It was a small scale operation with a dozen or so bottles of chilli sauce produced and sold daily. And then, as Tham put it, an “angel” saw his Facebook postings about his chilly sauce and contacted him.
That angel was John Chong, the owner of the chain Pick and Pay supermarkets around Kota Kinabalu who offered to sell Tham’s chilli sauce at his outlets and even designed the label for the bottles.
Tham’s chilli sauce has been on the supermarket shelves since early November and he’s had to increase his chilli sauce output up to 40 bottles daily, apart from catering to friends’ request for hotter versions containing ghost peppers and milder ones containing normal red chillies.
For Tham the chilli sauce venture has been a learning experience. But it’s not just about the variety of peppers and the combinations of making them into sauce.
“I’ve learned that there are opportunities in moments of adversity, it’s up to you to seize them. Even if rice fell from the sky, you can’t eat unless you cook it.
“The other thing I’ve learned is that we should help the community in any way. Many people are facing tough times, some more than others. My venture into making chilli sauce means I’m buying more chillies, calamansi lime and ginger from local farmers and the mak cik and pak cik in the farmers’ market,” he added.
For Tham, venturing into chilli sauce has, therefore, been more than just staying financially afloat amid tough times brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. It has enabled him to see that opportunities abound for himself and to help others. – FMT