Musing on being Chinese American, experiencing trauma, abuse, food insecurity, and wondering what the heck the point of mantou was.
If you’ve followed my cooking & baking journey, there’s a chance you might have noticed this about me. As a “proud” Chinese American, I don’t really make or eat a lot of Chinese food.
Most of the food I’ve made on this blog is comprised of traditional American baking and vegetarian Indian food. Outside of blogging, I’m also proud to have made various Mexican dishes, including poblano and cheese tamales, and my own corn tortillas by hand.
I put “proud” in quotation marks earlier, because the sad thing is that I wasn’t always proud to be Chinese. In fact, for most of my life, I was ashamed of it. I grew up in a family that was emotionally and psychologically abusive. This extended to ignoring my needs. Even though they insisted that they “always fed” me, I remember being really hungry for a lot of my childhood. They seemed to really underestimate how much a growing child was supposed to eat, which I’ll explain below. I had depression at a young age and that plus my hunger made it really hard to focus in school. Despite this, they demanded perfect grades. I spent a lot of my preteen nights crying and wishing I had been born into a different family.
My grandmother was a great cook, but I didn’t really appreciate it when I was younger. Part of that was because of my undeveloped child tastebuds, but the other part is that food tastes better when you have good company. As a hyper-vigilant child, I was often too anxious to enjoy what was on my plate. Unfortunately, this experience isn’t too unusual for many other Chinese Americans who experienced trauma and abuse, even if it wasn’t intersected with food insecurity.
When my parents divorced, my mother became the sole caretaker as opposed to my grandmother who then moved to a senior living facility. My mother was not a good cook, and was quite in denial about it. Her best dish was probably instant ramen, which is saying something. To this day, she’ll talk your ear off about her coworkers who enjoyed her cooking, despite my grandmother’s gossip about her giving them food poisoning. By the time I was able to fully appreciate my grandmother’s food, I was a vegetarian and unable to taste some of her best dishes.
For years, I never prepared Chinese food at home — not even rice — and even rarely ate at mainland Chinese restaurants. I felt like my trauma and history of abuse had poisoned my taste in Chinese food.
Do you remember growing up and eating something your parents made for you and having a sudden revelation where you think… “Wait a minute. Why am I eating this?”
It might be because the food isn’t very appetizing, nutritious, or fresh. For me, one of those things was mantou, this Northern Chinese bread.
Mantou is a plain Chinese bread or bun. It is less savory than a dinner roll, or a tortilla or naan, and it is simply made with just bread flour and water.
As an adult, I realize that mantou is meant to be dipped in sauce and eaten with savory food, such as pork floss, or pickled salty vegetables. Often times, the mantou I ate as a kid would have been sitting on the kitchen table for awhile, waiting for me. By then it would get kind of hard, or sometimes it was soggy and was completely tasteless. I’d eat two of these for breakfast, which was supposed to keep me going until noon when they would give us our lunch, which would consist of a drumstick, chocolate milk, and peas. Then I would get home at 3PM and maybe have an apple before dinner.
So I don’t have very positive memories of mantou at all, because I remember being bitterly hungry and unsatisfied when I ate it, and shut down as soon as I asked to eat something more.
But part of the Asian American experience is deciding what parts of your culture you’d like to keep and what you’d like to conveniently shelf in the recesses of your repressed memory.
Recently, I just bought a book called East Meets Vegan, a book on vegan Asian food. It’s written by a South Asian woman who grew up in Singapore. Some of the recipes in the book remind me fondly of fuzzy memories like eating Beijing duck with tortilla-like bread, or going to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere for the best savory pork buns.
Recently, I’ve been ordering from Chinese restaurants again. Another reason why I had avoided Chinese restaurants was because they would often overprice traditional dishes my grandma made, and not even make them as well. Nothing says the Asian American experience like going to a Chinese restaurant your friend recommends and thinking, “wait, what the heck is this?”
But after three years living in Oakland, I started to find Chinese restaurants I liked, and some of them were vegetarian-friendly. The mean suburban Chinese waitresses who would judge me for speaking broken Mandarin were replaced with kinder people who would pause and smile when they found out I could speak a little of the same language.
I started to remember the savory food that I did like, like cong you bing, or scallion pancakes. One of the dishes my mother did actually make well was Chinese stir-fried tomato and eggs, and a staple dish I order at many Chinese restaurants because it’s actually vegetarian.
Like my mom tries to stubbornly remind me whenever we talk, yes there were some good memories. I’m not just remembering the bad things. But those good memories, like scarfing down cong you bing were in spite of the trauma – and those are the sparse little jewels I’ll keep with me.
I’ll pass on the mantou, but for now, it’s time for me to reclaim my food. And this time, with as big as a serving I’d like, and good company too.
Plus, check out my blog article on making scallion pancakes here!
Note, this blog post contains an affiliate link. I do get a small commission if items are purchased through the link at no cost to the buyer or viewer.
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