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Munchies

Learning to Cook Like My Chinese Grandparents, One Dumpling at a Time

Recently, I’ve found myself craving the egg jiaozi and sweet pancakes made for me as a child by my grandparents, who left Taipei for Canada in 1974. With Puo and Gong no longer around, could I learn to cook these things myself?

My memories of my grandparents, Puo and Gong, centre around a teak and smoked glass dining table in the early 90s. It sat in the middle of their house, a shag-carpeted bungalow in Niagara Falls, Ontario where they'd moved after leaving Taipei in 1974.

That table held everything: stacks of McDonald's napkins, musty Chinese newspapers, Puo's wealth of oversized sunglasses, and, if my sister Nika and I were there, an array of home-cooked food. Jiaozi filled with pork and shrimp. Sugary Chinese pancakes. Aromatic tea eggs. Pink pickled radishes.

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Their house was my island of Chineseness in an otherwise Anglicised childhood. It was the only place where I heard Mandarin shouted at full-volume and the only time I ever saw a treasured pet turtle fed from a plastic spoon (bizarre, sure, but he's still alive today). In the Canadian suburbs with a British father and a Chinese mother, I spoke English at home.

But at Puo and Gong's, I broke out what rusty Mandarin I'd learned from two years of dreaded Saturday Chinese school. I watched Gong quietly cook dishes from his native Beijing and discovered that Puo, who'd grown up wealthy in Nanjing, had never actually learned to cook. She added sugar to everything.

The author (centre) with her sister Nika and grandad as a child in Canada. All photos by the author.

Now, decades later, both Puo and Gong have died. I live in Berlin, tripping over Deutsch conjugations, often the only person of colour in a room. Since moving here, I've realised how much I miss the feeling of Mandarin in my mouth and the sound of Chinese music, with Puo half-shouting at me to sing along. I long for Gong's cooking and the sugary radishes they always kept in the fridge.

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