During the Lunar New Year, dumplings – shaped like ancient gold ingots – transform into edible lucky charms, so the more you eat, the more good fortune you usher in. Which is why in the lead up to the Lunar New Year, my friends can be seen gathering around the dining table to fold dumplings with their families. But my family? We fetch ours from the frozen food section at the local Chinese shop.
While the dumpling-making scenes from movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Pixar’s Bao are familiar to my friends who grew up with the same ritual; painstakingly pleating the edges of meat-filled parcels is a foreign process to me. This surprises people because for some reason it’s assumed that anyone who comes from a Chinese family would have an inbuilt ability to make delicious dumplings from scratch.
The reality is that every Lunar New Year, we rip open a packet of frozen dumplings and toss them into a pot of boiling water. This isn’t out of sheer laziness or being strapped for time. The brutally honest reason? My family’s cooking sorta, really — sucks. And it doesn’t improve around the Lunar New Year — a time when most Asian families are enjoying sumptuous, homemade feasts.
While the dumpling-making scenes from movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Pixar’s Bao are familiar to my friends who grew up with the same ritual; painstakingly pleating the edges of meat-filled parcels is a foreign process to me.
Meal times have always felt like a chore to me. At home, most vegetables and meats were cooked unseasoned. (Drowning them in soy sauce afterwards didn’t help) One time, my mum made a bitter melon and boiled eggplant medley so spectacularly inedible that it gives me flashbacks to this day.
I only discovered how enjoyable food can be when I moved out of home and started eating out. For a while, I couldn’t believe the same eggplant that was braised at Chinese Noodle Restaurant, or served smoky and grilled in a burger was the same vegetable I once loathed at home.
There is, however, a good reason why we ate so humbly and simply at home. My mum grew up in a small Hakka village in the mountains of Guangzhou where there wasn’t much meat or fresh produce around. People ate for survival, not enjoyment. My mum didn’t deviate from the homely style of Hakka cooking when she arrived in Australia. Being illiterate in both her first language and English, she couldn’t read recipes to expand her meal repertoire, either.
My dad doesn’t have many family recipes to pass onto us. He grew up motherless, his mum passing away two years after his birth. His dad – my grandpa – started cooking after being widowed.
Following Chinese recipes has given me an unexpected way to reconnect to my cultural roots.
For previous Lunar New Years, I’d look enviously at people’s Instagram posts of their family’s delectable feasts. One caption said the food was all the more flavourful because they could taste all the love and care that their mum put into making the meal. When I visited my friend’s family for dinner, I understood what they meant: eating dumplings from the frozen food aisle just does not compare to eating them homemade from a family recipe.
But as much as I complain about eating gag-worthy food growing up, my mum’s cooking has diversified. With foodie culture exploding on TV, my mum is now able to pick up new things by watching. Being illiterate, she’s a visual learner. At the supermarket recently, I thought she’d grabbed the wrong shopping basket because there was a head of lettuce and haloumi in it — something that had never been in our fridge before.
“I’m making vegetarian san choy bau, saw it on TV,” she said when I accused her of taking someone else’s shopping basket.
Armed with a treasure trove of recipes online as well as step-by-step video tutorials, my kitchen has become a food laboratory of sorts.
My mum’s experimentation in the kitchen has emboldened me to do the same. Armed with a treasure trove of recipes online as well as step-by-step video tutorials, my kitchen has become a food laboratory of sorts.
More importantly, I feel reconnected to my Chinese heritage now. Because I live out of home and no longer need to attend Saturday Chinese School, I forget that I even speak Mandarin until the sporadic requests from Chinese tourists asking for directions. Following Chinese recipes has given me an unexpected way to reconnect to my cultural roots.
Sometimes I do feel upset that I don’t have any special family recipes to pass down to my future kids. The transmission of recipes is like a thread linking one generation to the next. But thanks to the internet, I’m lucky to take cues from other people’s Lunar New Year family recipes like chef Adam Liaw’s grandma’s.
This Lunar New Year, there will be no store bought dumplings. We’re going to recreate the dumpling making scenes that moved many in Crazy Rich Asians. Sure, it won’t be a family recipe passed down from generation, but with a little research, it might just be our best meal yet.
Yenée Saw is a writer and a winner of the 2017 Premier's Multicultural Media Awards.
This article was edited by Candice Chung, and is part of a series by SBS Voices supporting the work of emerging young Asian-Australian writers.
