FATIMA LEE PLACES a bowl of steaming chicken and coconut soup before me, commands me to eat then races back through the transparent plastic curtain that separates the six stools at the back of her food store to her front-of-house 'kitchen'. From this long display cabinet on wheels, equipped with a two-ring gas cooker and laden with aromatic herbs, spices and bubbling broth, she works a certain pure, wholesome, culinary magic that ensures her central Macau 'store' is always buzzing with customers, many of whom queue patiently down the street at lunchtime to order one of the only five dishes on offer.
'What do you think? Do you like it?' she asks me, as she does each customer when they tuck into one of her popular traditional Myanmese meals, each costing only $10 or $12.
The response is always the same, the sort of soulful groan of satisfaction only a hearty meal can invoke, which in turn sparks a warm beam of pride from the rosy-cheeked, grey-haired Lee, known to locals as 'Granny'.
While in recent times six of the neighbouring shops have closed, Lee's Ngau Ngau restaurant (49 Rue de Bispo Medeiros, tel: [853] 530 023) is flourishing, perhaps because of her much-loved garlic and chilli shrimp paste, which she sells by the jar in four strengths of spiciness. But things haven't always been so good for the 62-year-old.
While Macau is known for its long co-existing Portuguese and Chinese heritages, Lee is a part of a less promoted community which has added to its cultural diversity for decades.
The political turmoil that spread across Southeast Asia like a bushfire in the 1960s and 70s became a blessing for the tiny island colony, bringing to its shores thousands of migrants, a much-needed population of workers in a time of the Asian textile boom.
These new arrivals, mostly Chinese in ethnicity, fled persecution in countries such as the former Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam and made their way to Macau where residency, as opposed to refugee status, was easy to obtain and jobs plentiful. Some came directly from their countries of birth, while many came via China where they joined relatives, only to be met by the Cultural Revolution.