When I was eight years old, I stood up in front of my parents and grandparents in the breakfast area of a Best Western during a family trip to San Diego and proclaimed that I hated Chinese food. My mother immediately admonished me, loud enough that a hotel worker overheard and also scolded me.
“You should respect your culture,” the employee chimed in.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
I didn’t care. I was just happy that for once, I could indulge in an “American” breakfast. The Best Western’s complimentary continental buffet bar was far from a five-star restaurant, but my eyes lit up when I saw exquisite items such as bacon, sausages, and muffins. I was tired of the Asian breakfasts I was forced to eat at home. Every weekday, my mom would microwave a bo lo bau (pineapple bun) for me before my dad drove me to school. On weekends, my dad would wake up early to steam mantou (steamed bun) for breakfast. Then we would go as a family to the local 99 Ranch Market, a popular Chinese marketplace, and replenish our supplies of Asian foods for the next week.
I grew up in a Cantonese household in Santa Clara, California, a city located in the hotbed of Silicon Valley with a population of more than 100,000. It’s a diverse region, where white people are the minority and immigrants the majority. My parents, who grew up in the Guangdong province of China, settled in the Bay Area in the early 1990s and, like many other Asian immigrants, staked out successful careers as engineers for local tech companies that helped contribute to the rise of the Valley.
My childhood was filled by interactions with fellow immigrants. My next-door neighbors were Portuguese and Vietnamese. I took piano lessons for 13 years from a stern Russian woman and cello lessons for three years from an even sterner old man from the country of Georgia. I played in a youth basketball league, and two of my most influential coaches were Indian immigrants with thick English accents. I went to a private K-8 school in the neighboring city of Sunnyvale; in eight years, I probably had class with only 10 kids who did not come from immigrant families.
At home, we ate three Asian meals a day. For breakfast, it was bo lo bau or mantou. For lunch, we would go out after shopping at 99 Ranch for dim sum in Cupertino. If Santa Clara is diverse, Cupertino is like a Chinatown in itself. Cupertino is two-thirds Asian. In 2009, it became the third city in the country to elect an Asian American majority for city council. Block after block, plaza after plaza are filled with Asian stores and boba shops.
The main dim sum place that we went to was called Dynasty Seafood Restaurant, an expansive, popular eatery with two large dining areas connected by a long hallway with private rooms for banquets. My parents always had change in hand whenever we went — they developed cordial relationships with waiters and bribed them to skip the line, which could be up to an hour-long wait on the weekends.
My mom was particularly adept at small talk, especially if the result was finagling a table for five at the hottest lunch spot in town during peak hours. My parents even included the waiters when giving away red envelopes for Chinese New Year, which took strategic bribery to a whole new level. One of the servers, David, took a liking to me and would give me a mango pudding on the house for dessert every time.
My family always ordered the same items at Dynasty, waiting and beckoning for the right cart to roll up to our table, impatiently sipping the guk fa cha (flower tea). There was siu mai, a dumpling with pork and shrimp wrapped inside a thin sheet of wonton wrapper, topped with a garnishing of crab roe. There was ha gao, steamed shrimp dumplings coated with a translucent, sticky layer of skin that made it difficult to remove from the paper at the bottom of the bamboo steamer it was served in. And there was cheung fun, steamed rice noodles that came wrapped with either ha (shrimp) or ngauyuk (beef) and drenched with a special kind of soy sauce that was richer in taste than the store-bought brands.
But dinner at home was the biggest meal, especially on Saturday nights. My grandma, after taking an afternoon nap, would start preparing the evening feast. She would wash and chop up the yu choy sum (Chinese greens) and start steaming the fish, usually a sea bass we had bought live at the market earlier in the day.
I never understood why Chinese people loved fish so much; it required so much work to separate the razor-thin bones just for a little bit of meat in the end. My mom would always separate the meat from the bones for me and then complain about how my generation of ABCs (American-born Chinese) were lazy. There was also some kind of poultry — wohng mouh gai (yellow-haired chicken) and see yao gai (soy sauce chicken) were the typical dishes.
My dad would sometimes have a bottle of Tsingtao beer, the mainstream brand of beer in China, to top it off. And then the rice. We had rice with every dinner. Every month or so, we would carry home a 25-pound bag of Golden Phoenix brand jasmine rice from 99 Ranch and stuff it into a kitchen cupboard within arm’s reach and slowly work through it. The rice had to be carefully steamed in the rice cooker — too much water before boiling would make it too mushy; too little water and it would stick to the bottom of the pot, not fully cooked. I was trained from an early age to know the exact level the water should rise to or risk a reprimand from my mom for messing up the rice for the entire family.
As a family, that was what we ate — or some variation of it — every single day. During my early childhood, I did not protest, because these were the only foods I knew. But when I reached grade school, I started thinking for myself and noticing other options existed. Every lunchtime in the school cafeteria was a revelation to me. My friends who purchased food were eating delicacies like hamburgers, burritos, and chicken nuggets, while I was stuck with whatever Chinese meal my mom had packed for me in a warm container — typically noodles and wontons with broccoli. I was even jealous of kids who brought Lunchables, because cold ham stuffed between Ritz crackers seemed different and more appealing.
I started to ask questions when I got home. I noticed commercials on television for fast food restaurants and wondered why I couldn’t have a Big Mac for dinner instead of chicken, rice, and vegetables.
My ever-loving family acquiesced, perhaps too easily, to their only child and grandchild. And my demands were taxing and hurtful. I told my mom that I didn’t want to eat her home-cooked meals for lunch anymore. She had to sign me up for the school lunch program, or else I threatened her that I wouldn’t eat at all. For my birthday meal every year during grade school, I dragged my family to the local Black Angus Steakhouse, where I enjoyed a big, fat piece of filet mignon for dinner. No way would I want to celebrate my special occasion at Dynasty Seafood Restaurant.
Saturday dim sum family trips were replaced by quick stops at KFC. I went through a phase when I was obsessed with KFC. There was just something about it — the crunchy fried chicken, the mashed potatoes, the coleslaw — that seemed so American. I knew that I lived in America, but I didn’t feel like I was an American when I was eating siu mai or yu choy sum every day instead of hamburgers and fries like every other kid.
The Hometown Buffet a few blocks away from our house became a Sunday regimen. This was my heaven. Awaiting me at every station were mounds and mounds of American classics: potato salad, steak, turkey, ham, fish and chips, apple pie. At home, my grandma — bless her soul — tried in vain to fry chicken nuggets to my liking. But no attempt was good enough for me; it never tasted like McNuggets.
Family vacations were my favorite time of the year, not because of the new places we were exploring, but for the sole reason that we were forced to eat out for every meal. When I learned how to use a computer, I spent hours in the weeks ahead of our vacation looking up restaurants on the internet — American places, of course — that we absolutely had to dine at. I loved vacations so much because we were finally in America, living like Americans, eating like Americans. Bacon for breakfast? Burgers for lunch? Steak for dinner?
I would have done that every day if I could.
I moved 300 miles south to Los Angeles after high school to attend the University of Southern California, but it might as well have been a world away. I was living on my own, in the middle of a large metropolitan area — a stark contrast from the quiet suburbia of Santa Clara — with seven suitemates. No longer was I coddled as the only child. Most importantly, though, I was no longer restricted to eating my family’s cooking. By my freshman year of college, I had somewhat softened on my strong anti-Asian food stance. Until that point, I still had rice with every dinner and went to dim sum on the weekends, at least.
Now, armed with a meal plan my parents paid for, I was free beyond imagination. I walked into the nearby cafeteria three times a day to devour an unlimited amount of American food.
A few weeks into freshman year, the dining hall had a special: an Asian food bar. I was actually pretty excited. I hadn’t had any Chinese food since moving, I’d been consuming a steady diet of salads, sandwiches, and burgers. They were serving siu mai, gyoza (Chinese dumplings), and cha siu bau (steamed barbecue buns)— or least they tried to. The siu mai was way too salty. The gyoza was overcooked. The cha siu bau tasted dry and bland. I was disappointed. Dynasty Seafood Restaurant would never cook such subpar Chinese food. Neither would my grandmother or mother, who would pick out small pieces of bone from the fish so I could have the best meat without having to do the work myself.
For the first time, I missed having a simple, home-cooked meal. I stopped being excited to visit the dining hall. My stomach started craving bo lo bau and ha cheung fun and yu choy sum. Instead, I was restricted to items like scrambled eggs for breakfast, romaine lettuce and croutons for lunch, and pot roast for dinner. All I wanted was a hot bowl of steamed white rice.
I remember calling home once a week, and food was a constant topic that my family would bring up.
“Ah, Eric, how is the dining hall? Do you have enough to eat?”
“They don’t have steamed vegetables?”
“Is it boring, eating this ‘white people food’ every day?”
“If they don’t have Chinese food, maybe you can buy a Cup-o-Noodle and eat by yourself. It’s so easy—just boil it a few minutes and then eat! You bought some chopsticks, right?”
“Maybe you and your friends can go to Chinatown and eat some real food.”
I would always laugh and tell them that the food was fine; everything was fine. For the first time in my life, I had this incredible amount of freedom. I wasn’t going to let on to my family that any part of it was questionable.
But things were changing in my life, rapidly. The social obligations of being in college were a lot for an introverted kid from the suburbs. I needed something to remind me of home, to put me at ease from time to time — like a hot bowl of soup my grandma boiled, a few dishes of dim sum, or a warm plate of chow fun. I missed the friendly, familiar confines of Santa Clara and its neighboring Asian-populated cities.
Most of all, I realized why food was so important to my family. There was a reason that, even after living in America for decades and exchanging their Chinese passports for American ones, my parents still ate traditional Chinese food every single day. They had given up a lot to move to a new country, to assimilate into a new society. My parents hated being treated like the stereotype of the model minority. Still, they understood that no matter how much pride they were sacrificing, it was for the betterment of their careers, their family, and, ultimately, a quality American education for their only child.
But the one thing they would never give up was their culture, and they expressed that largely through food. The weekly trips to 99 Ranch Market, the hours spent in the kitchen steaming the perfect fish when they could’ve just microwaved mac and cheese — it was because they, too, were homesick all these years. Biting into a juicy see yao gai or a ngauyuk cheung with just the right amount of soy sauce reminded them of home.
It took literal separation from my family for me to make that realization. When I visited home for the first time in college, I happily devoured plate after plate of my family’s favorite Asian delicacies. Every time I go back to the Bay Area, I drag my parents out — not to American steakhouses, but to all the Chinese spots I hated going to as a child.
During my junior year, I spent four months living by myself in Stamford, Connecticut, while doing an internship at NBC Sports. Quickly tiring of ordering takeout and Dunkin’ Donuts, I would make the 30-minute drive across the New York border to White Plains to the nearest H-Mart, an Asian supermarket, where I would load up my trunk with the same foods my family purchased at 99 Ranch Market every week. Then I would drive back to my studio apartment and get to work, cutting up batches of yu choy sum and making sure there was the exact amount of water needed in the rice cooker. During the many cold winter nights I spent cooking and making dinner alone, I found comfort in knowing that 3,000 miles away, my family was also eating Chinese food to remind them of home.
