I must confess my surprise at the amount of mail my recent pieces about the arrival of my daughter have garnered. Are my accounts of grappling with a baby touching some kind of chord? Or do people just like knowing that I'm suffering?

Either way, I'm grateful for the advice many of you seem to want to share with me. Certain recommendations, however, instead of providing solutions, have raised even more questions - mainly about the confinement period.

'Don't allow the Wife to drink any water during her confinement,' a few of you wrote. 'She should only drink red date tea.'

'And make sure she doesn't wash her hair either,' others added. (To which the Wife responded, 'Ee-yur.')

I'm always tickled that Chinese Singaporeans refer to the month immediately following childbirth as 'confinement'. The actual Mandarin term for this period is zhuo yue, which literally means 'sit for a month' - essentially all the new mother is encouraged to do. As I soon learnt, it's an interval marked by many arcane rules.

'Don't walk about so much,' ordered the Mother-in-Law, when she arrived in New York to administer the Wife's confinement. 'People say your womb will drop out.'

Unbelievably, there were even more peculiar injunctions to come.

'Don't eat durian while breastfeeding,' she continued. 'People say the child will have a smelly head.' Oh-kay, I could vaguely understand that one. But the next was, 'Don't eat hae koh (the shrimp paste used in rojak), people say the baby will have a scaly head'.

'Scaly head?!' I spluttered. 'And who are all these people saying this?'

'People, lah,' she replied, albeit now with the tiniest quaver of hesitation in her voice, which she quickly paved over with another prohibition. 'And don't eat yam. People say the baby's 'down there' will be itchy.'

As Wikipedia was glaringly silent on the effects of foodstuffs on heads and more subjacent parts of the infant anatomy, I decided to consult the Wife's obstetrician/gynaecologist.

'Just do what she says,' replied the OB-GYN (as they're referred to in the United States), who is Taiwanese. 'My mother told me not to cry so much after I gave birth because it would ruin my eyesight, and good Western-trained doctor that I am, I didn't believe her. I went from 20/20 vision to these super-thick glasses.'

But scaly head?

'Just because she can't produce a Lancet article and the results of triple-blind clinical trials doesn't mean her statements are false - only that empirical studies haven't been conducted yet,' she said, adding, 'Want to see scaly heads?' before whipping out photos of babies with seborrhoeic dermatitis. My turn to go 'Ee-yur'.

'Don't sweat the details and just appreciate the good intentions,' she continued. 'It's a good thing for mothers to rest as much as possible after childbirth and to watch their diet since it does affect the breastmilk,' she said.

'I guess these beliefs stem from some experience, even if they're not scientifically evaluated,' I said to the Wife (who insisted on washing her hair right after labour, and wild horses couldn't stop her from doing it, and she's doing just fine thankyouverymuch).

'Maybe some women in rural China went back to toil in the fields immediately after giving birth and injured their uteruses. Or maybe Chinese babies are sensitive to shellfish, even when cooked and mashed. I just wonder if other cultures have similarly weird beliefs.'

I learnt the answer two weeks later, when a nurse dropped by to check on Yakuza Baby. New York State monitors premature babies till the age of three, to catch any developmental problems early.

'Chile doin' jes' fahn,' said the nurse in her Caribbean accent, after running Yakuza Baby through some exercises. But the routines clearly got the child excited because she began hiccupping.

'Lick your finger and draw a cross on the baby's forehead,' commanded the nurse.

'What?' I looked at her incredulously.

'Do it, mahn!' she said, and I obeyed. And to my utter surprise, it worked.

'Won't find dat in no medical textbook,' she giggled. 'But my mother in Trinidad always swore by it. First time I seen it in action, though.'

It was also the last time it worked. Maybe Yakuza Baby was just so stunned by my bizarre action that she stopped. Still, it reminded me to be less dismissive of these ancient prescriptions - you just never know.

Besides, I'm still Singaporean and kiasuism is in my DNA. After all, I wouldn't want anyone's womb to fall out.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.