I am Chinese. I put Sichuan peppercorn and anise in almost every braise, and I finish my stir fries with Shaoxing cooking wine. I must have black vinegar with my dumplings. There isn’t a part of the animal I won’t eat, and I am almost certain I am part swine with how much pork I consume. But still I am inauthentic.
My mom died when I was nine, so I didn’t get to learn how to cook with her. My dad was rarely home, and I didn’t have a Pixar movie-worthy relationship with my grandmother. There were no traditions and family recipes - verbal or otherwise - passed down in my immigrant family. In some ways, I felt almost fraudulent - as if I couldn’t effectively communicate my love for a dish without a tangible story of my mother’s love for me. I wouldn’t be able to have authority over my food memories without an accompanying story about the traditions my family built for me. I convinced myself I didn’t want to eat Chinese food anyways.
When I was about nine or ten, I learned how to cook after my neighbor friend told me her mom made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and my jaw dropped open. I thought you could only get that stuff at Olive Garden. I loved my family’s special occasion outings to Red Lobster and then later Olive Garden. Spaghetti in marinara sandwiched between a cheddar bay biscuit. Pasta drowning in creamy white alfredo sauce with a pile of side salad with extra pepperoncinis. I craved that shit constantly.
Dinners at my house were always rice or noodles with an assortment of dishes eaten family style. There was always a meat, maybe a fish, a couple vegetable options, sometimes soup. I didn’t know there was any other way of eating at home unless we ordered in Pizza Hut or Dad decided to bring home a bucket of KFC after work.
So I always remember that fleeting conversation about dinner as the spark that ignited my desire to learn how to cook. I don’t know how or when I learned how to turn on the oven or manage a gas stove, but I know it was because I needed to make spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce. I could then strive to be more like my White neighbors. I could eat “normal” without needing to turn to microwave Kid Cuisine and Lunchables. It eventually led to daily binges of Food Network shows when we finally got satellite, and I collected Eurocentric cookbooks whenever I could convince my dad to buy one at Costco.
But in the same way I used food as a tool to separate Chinese from American, I used food again to reclaim the part of me that makes me susceptible to casual racism. When I finally moved away from home, I realized my grasp of Chinese cooking was weak. I had taken for granted the access to all my childhood favorites while I searched outside my culture for ingredients and techniques I didn’t see at home. In Wisconsin, I started to crave tomato and egg, green beans in oyster sauce, gelatinous red-braised pork, simple garlicky Chinese water spinach, beer braised duck, saucy spicy mapo tofu, and whole steamed fish piled high with ginger and scallion slices and singed with ripping hot oil - my favorites and staples at home. And then I started picking up a bag of greens I only recognize by sight and not name here, a package of pork hocks there, the occasional palette of eggs so I could make a big jar of tea eggs. I accumulated all the familiar aromatic spices I could find until my designated shelves in those shared apartments overflowed. Sometimes I’d text my stepmom for tips, but most of the time I referred to blogs for guidance where my instincts failed me.
At the same time, I started gathering my friends around Lunar New Year to make dumplings. I would make a big bowl of ground pork filling, following no recipe - a couple slices of ginger minced to a paste, a comically large bundle of chives, a sprinkle of white pepper, and an egg to bind it together. I would double check the proportions of hot water to flour, but I don’t know who taught me how to roll out fresh dumpling wrappers. A gentle voice echoes in the back of my head, “leave a bump in the center so it won’t rip.”
I taught my friends how I fold dumplings though I’m still unsure who officially taught me. I have photo albums of my mom hovering over me as I hovered over a wooden board of plump dumplings waiting to be dropped into the pot of boiling water on the stove, and I remember making misshapen purses and suns with my da’yi (big aunt) and laolao (maternal grandma) after Mom died.
I showed my graduate school friends how I add a generous dollop of filling to the center of a wheat disc and bring the ends together to pinch closed in the center. I held each pocket carefully in an outstretched hand, as I used the other to slowly push and pinch closed each side to make a row of pleats that curve inwards so that my little dumpling could sit upright on the cutting board. And then we do it again together until the entire board is nestled with dumplings waiting to drop into the pot of boiling water on the stove.
I loved sharing these dumplings with my friends because they were so quintessentially Chinese, a staple of my childhood. And I loved them because year after year, the same discussion would come up. The beginning might start differently - What if you made a filling with beef and kimchi? In my culture we call these raviolis. So are empanadas dumplings? - but it would always end in the same place: every culture has a dumpling.
I thought about this at length when one afternoon during the pandemic, I made my usual bowl of pork and chive dumpling filling, but I added a blend of jerk seasoning on a whim. And then I subbed a can of coconut milk into the wrapper dough. And then when all the dumplings were folded and cooked, I ate them with rice vinegar pickled carrots instead of my usual bowl of black vinegar and sesame oil. And I ate them all while pondering what it means to be traditional or authentic, how fusion and influence are different or the same, when is a cuisine claimed versus appropriated.
My ruminations all culminated in what I ultimately named Heritage Dumpling. In an effort to put onto plate my jumbled thoughts about what it means to be… whatever we are, I began asking friends for their lists and stories about the foods they were raised on. Then, I would fashion a cohesive dumpling out of it.
Heritage is essentially a love letter to my community - the home that I built starting at 25 outside of the one that raised me. What started as an attempt to simultaneously summarize and diversify the third culture kid experience, became a realization that in the absence of a mother to teach me what it means to love through food, I sought it through my friends. I identify as Chinese American, but really I am rootless. My food education is an amalgamation of all the regions in the US I’ve lived, the memorable tastes I’ve sampled abroad, and largely the friends who inspire me - a record that is constantly being molded and updated in my adulthood.
No comments:
Post a Comment