SA Weekend: How Poh Ling Yeong rose from humble beginnings to the top of the food chain
She rocketed into the public focus a decade ago and is now back in the MasterChef spotlight, but the woman known universally as Poh has risen from humble beginnings.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Read more great features from SA Weekend
- Latest Advertiser +Rewards: Enter our subscriber-only competitions
A young girl sits at the back of her maths class, lost in an imaginary world that offers an escape from the worries of school.
She cuts up a piece of graph paper, following the lines to trim the sheet into precise strips. These are her noodles.
The shavings from her pencil sharpener become fried shallots and they are combined to create a meal to be bought with pretend coins.
It is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in the early 1980s and Sharon Poh Ling Yeow can’t escape the feeling that she doesn’t quite belong. At school. In that city. Perhaps anywhere. But she knows she has some sort of connection with food.
“It’s funny looking back now,” says the SA cook, artist and television star now known across the country simply as Poh.
“It’s like your destiny is already marked out. I have always been fascinated by restaurants and cooking … I was transfixed by people serving me food. And I didn’t grow out of playing with tea sets until I was really old.”
What follows is one of those inspiring migrant tales that Australians rightly cherish and an empowering lesson in turning around issues with anxiety and self-image to follow a dream.
It also is a ripping yarn that touches on a school-yard guardian angel, an ex-Mormon bikie, unconventional relationships and “a crap-ton of butter”.
More than a decade after her appearance on the inaugural, mega-rating series of MasterChef changed the trajectory of her life forever, Poh has returned to the show as a contestant this year.
Like then, this season is a fresh start for the show, with a trio of new judges (including fellow Adelaidean Jock Zonfrillo) and a line-up of high-achievers and fan favourites who are “Back to Win”.
From the early episodes, Poh has been tipped to be a front-runner and has featured heavily in the edited excerpts screened each night.
Her duck rendang for pop goddess Katy Perry and a monumental beef and blue cheese pie confirmed her standing but there have also been plenty of frantic moments when the timing of the cake or whatever else is in the oven has comedown to the wire.
“The level of cooking is so high but I knew what I was walking into,” she says. “It is not a collective performance. You are only as good as the last dish you cooked. I am finding that hard as I am an erratic performer and I am very greedy trying to squash in as much as I can in each cook.
“I am interested in showing ways of eating rather than just isolated dishes which means I am always trying for multiple things. That’s how I want to do it so I kind of reap my own rewards …”
New judge Melissa Leong has watched Poh up close and admires how she stays committed to an idea.
“She is an artist in her heart and her soul and the chaos is part of her process,” she says. “Whether it is painting or cooking it is how she gets to where she is going.”
Watching Poh now – luminous, eloquent, focused, occasionally manic – it is hard to picture her as the solitary, uncertain girl and young woman she describes.
Poh was nine when her family decided to leave Kuala Lumpur, partly, she says, because she struggled at school and they wanted her to have a better education.
“When I was a kid in Malaysia I always felt this strange sense that life wasn’t quite right,” she says. “Then my parents told me we were moving and I immediately had this vivid thought … that life was going to make sense.
“When we arrived I loved everything about Australia. But life was hard for them. We didn’t suffer but it was hard to assimilate into anew culture.”
Poh’s parents took over a newsagent/post office and worked long hours to make it a success. She grew up helping in the shop or staying at home.
“We didn’t have much social interaction with other kids because my parents were too busy,” she says. “Most of my childhood was spent quite alone. I became more of an observer of things around me and I had to occupy myself with solitary pursuits like drawing, sewing and lots of reading … using my imagination.”
Poh began to blossom at school and says that she was always treated well, largely due to the friendship of a girl named Phillipa Harris, whom she hopes will get back in touch one day.
“She gave me such a beautiful welcome to Australia,” Poh says.
“She took me under her wing and protected me.”
The little girl from Malaysia, however, was still desperate to fit in. On coming to Australia, she had adopted her Anglicised name and became plain Sharon Yeow, which stuck until her mid-20s, as unlikely as it sounds now.
At home, she pleaded to be given a lunch like the other kids. “For pete’s sake, could someone make me something that I don’t need to eat with a spoon,” she laughs. “It was always fried rice and, on my first day at school, my Auntie Kim (who helped raise her) gave me chicken giblets cooked with star anise and soy.
“I just wanted a refrigerated lunch box like the cool kids with a bunch of grapes, dried apricots, Barbecue Shapes and a Vegemite sandwich. That was my fantasy lunch I never got. Even the best attempts to give me what I wanted ended up a bit weird, like Spam omelette in a sandwich.”
More troubling was the shame she felt about looking different. As she explained in a recent post on social media after making a MasterChef cook-off with four other contestants of Asian descent: “Growing up as a migrant kid I had so few role models. I dreamt of being blonde and blue eyed, fantasised about having long legs and was ashamed of the shape of my nose and my face. But today we get to be this for anyone who’s ever felt on the outer.”
The memories are still vivid. “I remember one time queuing up at the tuck shop and seeing a girl walking off with a Sunnyboy (iceblock),” she says.
“The glint of the sun was hitting the blonde hairs on her arm and I looked at her and thought ‘I will never be that cool’.”
It was only in her early 30s that Poh began to be comfortable with how she looked and realise that “anything that made me feel different was not the doing of other people – it was myself”.
It says much about her character that she has now analysed and embraced those feelings and turned them to her advantage.
“I always felt I stood out for all the wrong reasons but now I can reclaim that and it gives me a point of difference in life,” she says.
The round-faced, doll-like Asian girl that is a constant theme in Poh’s sought-after paintings, while not exactly a self-portrait, is an expression of this transition.
So is the rosy-cheeked cartoon that appears on labels and branding for her food business Jamface, which has a stall each Sunday morning at the Adelaide Farmers’ Market (“my church”, she says).
It was in the midst of these teenage insecurities and a rough time for her family that the Mormons came knocking on the door.
“We were a bit vulnerable and needed some support,” she explains. “They were very kind and gave us that. The church helped us through this dark period.”
Poh travelled to Utah, the centre of the Mormon universe, and then on to Canada, but began to discover the world was “grey and not black and white”.
She had a fling with an ex-Mormon bikie – “the antithesis of everything my parents had hoped for me” – and befriended a transsexual she met working in a restaurant.
“It was the first time in my life I felt free to have friends and socialise,” she says. “I couldn’t turn back after that. It was like biting the apple in the Garden of Eden.”
During her time as a Mormon, Poh met future husband and manager Matt Phipps and the pair left the church together. Poh’s parents and brother remain members which was hard at the time.
While Poh’s seven-year marriage to Matt was “tumultuous”, she believes he “pushed me to think beyond what I thought I was capable of”.
It was Matt who convinced her to reclaim her Chinese name, initially for a film appearance. He remains her manager and a close confidante. In another twist, Matt became partners with Poh’s best friend, Sarah Rich, and all three, along with Poh’s partner Jono Bennett, are in business together.
The unlikely relationships have been the source of several breathless headlines around love triangles but Poh says they are all “just one big, strange, happy family”.
Poh’s first encounter with MasterChef came as her career as an artist was starting to take off. It took some convincing from best mate Sarah to make her send in an entry and more from one of the producers to attend the second audition and cook for the judges.
She finished runner-up (to Julie Goodwin) in the record-breaking opening season but her charismatic smile and comfort in front of the camera ensured she was soon hosting her own cooking show. Then came the invitations to star at food festivals and rub shoulders with the megastar chefs who had been her heroes. “MasterChef changed my life,” she says. “I feel like my feet haven’t touched the ground for the past 10 years. I was literally heli-dropped into the middle of all that.”
The show was also how she met Jono, who was working as a runner for the production, though due to strict rules against fraternising they could only exchange “cute looks across the schoolyard” at the time.
Poh says they are “a bit of an odd couple”. “He is very calm. I am neurotic. He looks at things simply, where I complicate things. He is emotionally more even-keeled than me.”
After finishing the first series, Poh says she couldn’t watch the subsequent seasons for some time. “You do come out of it with a little bit of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder),” she says.
“It is a strange response where you still want to be there. There are so many things that are unique and magical to MasterChef … you can’t replicate that in real life. It’s that exhilaration and adrenaline rush.
“Thinking you can’t do something and exceeding your own expectations. The amount of courage you have to exercise on that show on a daily basis is remarkable. It is something you get addicted to and love, but still find hard to watch.”
Now she is back racing the clock in the MasterChef kitchen, part of the final seven of the all-stars line-up, with another elimination scheduled for tomorrow night.
Poh’s first experience as a contestant coincided with a quest to reconnect with her culture and the ingredients and techniques of South-East Asia were prominent throughout. This time they share equal billing with her first love of the kitchen, baking, a skill she began learning as a small girl and the subject of her most recent book.
“Baking was all I would do in the school holidays,” she says. “Mum would buy me a crap-ton of butter and I’d be set. It’s really therapeutic. I love the repetition of it. When you get a recipe you need to cook it four or five times to perfect it and I love that.”
Art and cooking joust for Poh’s attention and her commitment to them both leads to many late nights.
“They are my two loves,” she says. “It is me telling my story. I think it is a story people can relate to … feeling on the outer. That is what I like to express and share. “Food is the great equaliser. When you break bread with people, it is a wall coming down. There are so many aspects about food that I think connect us to a better place.”
Melissa Leong is one who identifies with Poh’s migrant experience and the power of its message. “Coming to this country and not feeling she fitted in … it’s a story we can all identify with,” she says. “For her to defy expectations and be brilliant, that is a beautiful story of the underdog.”
MasterChef Australia: Back to Win, 7.30pm Sunday to Tuesday on Network 10.
This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.