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steam rises from our cups of jasmine tea
​/ paints ghosts on the windows

"you will find your body": On making dumplings and returning home

1/11/2019

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On Christmas Day the rain doesn’t stop. There is a thick layer of cloud covering the harbour and the land that surrounds it. The house where we are staying for two weeks while we’re in Wellington is surrounded by hydrangeas in all different colours: magenta, peach pink, violet, creamy white like icing. Over the last week we’ve witnessed a succession of 9 p.m. sunsets all mirroring the colours of the hydrangeas, but today: all blue. Inside, the air is damp and the floors are sandy.

It feels strange to be here, just like it felt strange not to be here. My parents have temporarily moved away from Wellington, my hometown, but we’re still here for Christmas. Toby the labrador, my best friend, is with us for two weeks and his presence (his big, wide, brown eyes) calms us. I’m not convinced he remembered me at first but I think he realises now: it’s me, his Nina. He stays close to me, padding after me wherever I go, curling up and snoozing in a chocolate-coloured ball in the corner of the room. Every now and then, between loud snores, he opens one eye, checking I’m still nearby.

The day before, we shopped at Yan’s for our Christmas feast: dumplings for two. Yan’s is one of my favourite places in Wellington. It smells like dried fish and steamed bao and somehow a little bit like durian even though I’m sure there’s no fresh durian around. It’s in that part of the city that’s weirdly quiet, all concrete and cabbage trees and tūī swooping low over the urban motorway, not quite town but not quite anywhere else, either. Like in every Chinese supermarket, for me it’s easy to be hypnotised by all the noodles: Sichuan noodles, Beijing noodles, Shanghai noodles, Vietnamese rice noodles, bean noodles, egg noodles, shrimp-and-egg noodles, refrigerated hand-pulled noodles, fresh rice noodles, vacuum-packed udon, dried udon.

We come away with soft tofu (later I’ll stack tins of tomatoes on top of the tofu cube to drain its excess water away), mushrooms, ginger, spring onions and dumpling flour, which is just regular wheat flour with more gluten. I didn’t know about dumpling flour until I started my first job in London at a Chinese community charity, where we taught Chinese cooking workshops in schools around the UK. The elasticity of dough made with dumpling flour is extraordinary. In our teaching kitchen, my colleagues and I watched a local Chinese chef roll and stretch the dough for making Shanghainese 小笼包, which require the thinnest skin and the finest folds (eighteen, to be exact, according to Din Tai Fung’s standards). I saw how the dough stretched and warmed and tensed and relaxed in his hands. It’s a less delicate dough than bread or pastry; it can bear fluctuations in temperature and humidity. It’s the perfect dough for me, the kind of cook who lacks the precision for baking. But I love taking hours to knead and shape things with my hands, feeling them change against my skin.

There are two ingredients: flour and water. Dumpling flour is startlingly bright white and fine. If you dust a handful on your skin, you’ll barely feel it. At home in my own kitchen, these would be my tools: a mixing bowl, a thin rolling pin, and a short-handled white melamine rice scooping spoon that my mum gave me—one of those that you can always find in the far back corners of Chinese supermarkets and department stores.

Toby lies curled up at my feet as I make a well in the flour with a spoon and add lukewarm water. Different recipes call for different temperatures. Cold water makes for a stiff dough, making it better for fried dumplings. Hot or just-boiled water creates a softer, more malleable texture, better for sealing the 水饺 edges tightly before they are tipped into the boiling water. This recipe from The Woks of Life calls for less water in humid climates. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Every Grain of Rice, calls for cold water. I choose blood temperature. Rain streams down the kitchen skylight.

The dough is soft but not sticky, pliant but not limp. I pull the ball into two halves, and halve those smaller balls again. With both hands I roll them into cylinders and cut them into little gnocchi-like chunks. I shape the chunk into a ball by rubbing it between my palms, that same way you learn to do with Playdough when you’re a little kid. I press down with the heel of my palm to flatten it into a disc.

I realise what I don’t see when using shop-bought dumpling wrappers, jiǎozi pí, is that the dumpling holds the shape of my skin. When I flatten the balls into discs, the last step before rolling them into thin skins ready to be folded into jiǎozi 饺子, an imprint of my palm lines appears on each one. Jiǎozi pí: dumpling skin. Pí 皮 means "skin." 

Jiǎozi pí should not be perfectly flat. Unlike sheets of pasta rolled out to make ravioli or tortellini, the circle of dough should be thicker in the centre, thinning out towards the edge. This means the centre can hold the xiàn’er 馅儿 without breaking, while the edges can be tightly sealed with the your fingertips. I use the edge of the heavy rolling pin (which is built for rolling large pieces of pastry, not small 8cm-wide jiǎozi pí) to flatten the edge of the circle, rotating it with my other hand. It’s the kind of swift movement that I never thought I could be capable of when I first watched Chinese aunties and grannies do the work at breakneck speed. But now it comes to me easily, even though I’m hopelessly uncoordinated when it comes to most physical tasks involving speed and rhythm. When cooking, my body fall into a natural rhythm I didn’t know I had.

I take a small spoonful of the chopped filling (peas, tofu, mushrooms, spring onions, garlic, ginger, with a little seasoning of soy sauce and oyster sauce and sesame oil). I place it in the middle of the circle, the part that’s thickest. I seal the 饺子 with two or three folds on each side with my fingertips, so that the edge is moulded with the shape of my fingers. Every good homemade 饺子, in northern China or elsewhere, looks like this: formed inside a cupped hand, pressed shut by firm fingers. I can see the faint traces of my fingerprints on the curved outer edge of each dumpling.

~

When I’m feeling sick I can’t cook and I can’t eat. When we got back to dark, wintry London I got my period, which had somehow held off while I was travelling, then arrived with horrific vengeance the next day. After two days of aches and nausea, on Wednesday night I had a little strength. Able to stand now for longer than a few minutes at a time, I stood in the kitchen and thought of Rebecca May Johnson’s spell-poem-recipe for tomato sauce in the wonderful book SPELLS: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. In December I listened to her read from her poem (titled “to purge the desire to write like a man”) at Review Bookshop in London while we all tasted forkfuls of her homemade gnocchi in fresh tomato sauce. I cook tomato sauce every week, and now, when I do, lines from her poem chime in my head:

    enter the kitchen
    you will find
    your body

    add the cold green oil

    add a caution of salt

Squinting through the prickling in my eyes, I chopped two wonky shallots. I drowned them in an unmeasured amount of green olive oil, along with a peeled, crushed clove of garlic, which I couldn’t be bothered to slice properly. In went the tinned chopped tomatoes. I put the rigatoni on to boil and glanced at the time: 6.30 p.m. and already dark for hours. Steam filled my small blue kitchen. I opened the window to let in some winter air and saw my windowsill garden is beginning to come out in force: tall daffodil stems, budding irises, garlic and spring onions. I grated the last bits of the cheese left in the fridge: red leicester and mild cheddar. Sometimes you want the crispness of parmesan; sometimes you need the melted comfort of a softer cheese. I strained the pasta in the sink, shaking it just once so as to keep it wet and warm with a little cooking water, and tumbled it into the sauce.
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the noodle soup diaries #1: wonton noodle soup

1/23/2018

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I want to write about comfort food and childhood, but there are too many places to start. I want to read and write more about how “comfort food” is a phrase we tend to associate with guilt and shame. I want to write about how I try to make my relationship with food all about joy, nourishment and comfort, and how sometimes I fail, but that there are certain things that help: cooking food, and writing about food.

I want everything I eat to give me joy, nourishment and comfort. I want to banish the word “indulgent” from my vocabulary of eating. I want to bite into something and let electric currents of joy fizz along my nerves, all the way down. I want to be transported to a distant home. I want to cook comfort food as an act of love and I want people to do this for me. I want this every day, always, simply because it makes life better and because we deserve joy and nourishment all the time, always, not just when we’ve done something that makes us feel like we’ve earned it.

“What’s your favourite comfort food?” is one of the best questions you can ask someone. I have too many answers. There are those from childhood: instant noodles with the soup strained away, French toast made with sliced supermarket bread, crispy squares of fried turnip cake, silky rice rolls with char siu pork inside, soft-serve chocolate ice cream melting in the heat of a northern summer. And there are the new comfort foods that I discover in each new place I learn to call home: sticky rice wrapped in fragrant lotus leaves, hand-pulled noodles tossed in soy sauce and oil, soft stir-fried eggplant and bowls of tiny cloud-like wontons.

This is the first of a series of short essays/poems/pieces. I'm calling it the Noodle Soup Diaries because to me, soup noodles are undeniably the ultimate comfort food. First up on the menu of my dreams: wontons.

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​The wonton, the dreamiest of all Chinese dumplings, goes by different names depending on the language or dialect. Here are three different words that all mean “wonton”, and their literal translations:

馄饨        húntun        irregular-shaped dumpling
云吞        yúntun        cloud swallow
抄手        chāoshǒu    to fold one’s arms


I grew up with the delicate Cantonese kind, little round bundles of pork and shrimp (sometimes only shrimp) encased in a golden skin made of flour and egg so thin it’s semi-transparent. The joy is in the texture as much as the taste; soft and slippery like swallowing a cloud. They float on a bed of thin egg noodles in gingery soup. We eat them in Chinatown restaurants and crowded mall foodcourts and fish & chip shops with plastic chopsticks in one hand, spoon in the other. No sound but slurping and every now and then, a sigh.

I’ve learnt that the skins of dumplings get thicker the further north you travel in China. The wontons of Shanghai are less famous outside of China, but distinctive: heavier, heartier, filled with pork rather than shrimp. These 小馄饨 (xiao huntun, simply “small wontons”) are different from the ethereal Southern Chinese version. So small that you could eat several in one mouthful. Just a tiny dollop of pork and ginger enveloped in a thicker dough made from flour, egg, salt and water, similar to the consistency of handmade pasta. I always thought they looked like small princesses dressed in gowns far too big for them.

I lived off these xiao huntun when I lived in Shanghai as a student. For a quick and comforting breakfast, lunch, dinner (or a snack in between) I went to my favourite cheap diner on the corner of the street where I lived, paid around $1.50 for a bowl of twelve and slurped them down while reading my book. An instant cure for homesickness, heartache and weariness of all kinds. I’d leave feeling stronger, warmer and more myself than before.

I used to watch the mother and daughter making wontons in the back corner of the shop, while another woman (an aunt, maybe?) lowered the tiny dumplings into a giant pot of boiling water and doled even portions into green bowls. A square-shaped wrapper in the palm, a teaspoonful of pork in the centre, then squeezed shut in one swift motion. They worked at a rate of about one wonton each per second, all while taking customers’ orders and while watching reality TV on their iPad propped up on the table between them. The women’s hands moved so fast their fingers were a blur.

Since leaving Shanghai, I miss 小馄饨 most of all. I tried to make them myself using shop-bought wrappers and a filling made from pork, garlic and ginger, but couldn’t get the folding technique quite right. They weren’t so light and ethereal as I’d dreamed – more lumpy and wonky than floating clouds.

But still, if I measured against the memory, my recreation was almost right. I felt the familiar warmth and glow, breathing in the smell of ginger and spring onions and steam that wafts out onto the streets of Shanghai late into the night. Plastic chopsticks in one hand, spoon in the other.


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My family eats wontons wherever we go. 1 o’clock in the morning at a 24-hour dim sum restaurant somewhere in suburban Toronto, since we were hungry after just getting off the plane. On Christmas Day in a shopping mall food court in Shanghai. At crowded eateries in various Chinatowns in New York, London, Singapore, San Francisco. In Chinese takeaway shops in Wellington, the small city we call home. In busy airports, at street-side stalls in my mum’s hometown in Malaysia, at home in front of the telly.

In Hong Kong in October I meet up with someone I love. We wander beneath the purple sky and neon lights towards a noodle shop called Mak’s Noodle. Like everywhere good food is eaten in big cities, the place is small and crowded and everything happens fast. I notice there’s slightly more elbow room than in other noodle shops where only locals go, perhaps to make tourists and expats feel a little more at ease--but you’re still sharing a tables with an uncle and auntie and grandpa, just as it should be. I order wantan mee, just about the only thing I can say with confidence in Cantonese, with a side plate of steamed gai lan, Chinese broccoli. These are the only two items on the menu.

Mak’s Noodle is apparently the most famous wonton noodle shop in Hong Kong and I can see why. The wontons are cloudlike and slippery with pale golden tails floating in soup that is so delicious and fortifying it sends waves of warmth right to my bones. The egg noodles are thin and crinkly, just how I like them, hard to get a good grip on with chopsticks. We eat quickly and noisily, crunching on bright green stems of gai lan. We step out onto the busy street street and stand by the shop’s front window for a moment, watching two chefs (one for noodles, one for dumplings) deep in concentration, assembling bowls of soup and lifting ladlefuls of tiny wontons into each with practiced precision. The making of a bowl of wontons is an art, just like the eating of one. We wander on through the lovely humid air.


​

In summer in Wellington, my friend Rose and I swim in Oriental Bay in the evening after work. The sky is gigantic and blue. I count two faint wisps of cloud above the hills. The moon has already risen by late afternoon, a shy arc just visible against deepening blue. We wriggle into our swimsuits beneath both sun and moon.

Rose swims out to the swimming platform and back several times. I dip my body three-quarters into the water and paddle gently, wary of jellyfish and the stinging cold. We dry off clumsily, becoming slowly aware of the gnawing feeling in our stomachs and a weakening in the backs of our knees. I love swimming, partly because of that particular kind of post-swim hunger which can only compared to hunger after sex. The ache that tells you if you don’t go eat something soon your limbs might liquefy. It must have something to do with the weight of water on our muscles, the strain of using parts of our body we never use on land.

Still with sand between our toes and thighs, we sit by the window of a tiny Chinese takeaway in the city. We eat bowls of wontons and noodles and chat over steam clouds. A Taste of Home -- the best name for a noodle shop ever -- is the only place we’ve found in Wellington that has thick, chewy hand-pulled noodles (the ones that originate in central China) and handmade wontons. We sip sugary peach juice between mouthfuls of soup and chilli oil, cheeks red and eyes watering. I balance a fat wonton between my chopsticks while wind beats against the windows. The sound and taste of home.

​

This piece was originally published on Food Memory Bank, a blog that collects people's food memories, created by Rebecca May Johnson. 


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34 days of summer

3/2/2017

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(four windy, sunburnt weeks spent back home)

1.

​The last few days in Shanghai were strange and happened fast. Exams come and go and suddenly I’m packing my suitcase full of summer clothes. My last meal in the city is ramen and green tea in an underground mall. At midnight the sky is dark pink.
 
There’s something calming about plane travel when the place you’re headed for is exactly where you need to be. The strangeness of the past 72 hours feels remote and cannot touch me here, like they happened to someone else very far away. I can only sit and wait and eat my airport-bought chocolate bar and try to imagine what it’ll be like going home again. I’ve imagined it so many times it’s starting to feel like where I’m going isn’t real.
 
On my flight from Auckland to Wellington the captain announces which volcanoes to look out for today. I see craters in the distance surrounded by cloud oceans and cloud mountains. When the clouds start thinning I can just make out islands underneath. I get breathless and there’s a fizzing sensation in my stomach, like popping candy.
 
It’s both comforting and unsettling to be back. It makes me uneasy that everything looks just the same as before I left, like I never left at all, like the past year never even happened. It’s as if I’ve travelled back in time and no one else knows I’m from the future but me. What did I expect? Why did I think it would look any different? 

On the fourth day, walking home from the bus stop just after 3am, I look up. The whole sky is full of faint stardust clouds, entire galaxies inside. Some stars are dark red, some orange, some are hot and blue. Out of these hundreds, some must be planets. I stand there on the street for a long time, just looking. I’ve been hungry for stars. 

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2.

The dog is half napping, half watching me from his blanket in the corner of the kitchen. Every now and then I go and kiss his ears. He doesn't look up but wiggles his tail in reply. I eat a handful of raspberries while waiting for the water to boil. I cut my toast into soldiers and I slice off the top of the egg with a butter knife. I dip my toast into the yolk while a scientist on RadioNZ talks about detecting ‘volcanic utterances’ under the sea. I spend the rest of the day thinking about the words volcanic utterances.
 
Whenever the uneasy feeling comes back, cooking calms me down. Breakfast is a ritual. A soft-boiled egg, poached eggs on toast, French toast with fried bananas or just dark raisin bread with butter. Throughout the day, when all my friends are at work, I make toasted muesli and focaccia. I wash strawberries and peel sour little apples picked from our tree.
 
It’s a shame summer hasn’t come this year, people keep saying. But I can forgive the weather so long as there’s apricots, nectarines, peaches, plums, cherries. I make a pie out of apples and raspberries eat it for breakfast several days in a row, with ice cream. The whole house smells like cinnamon and peaches.
 
Some days it’s hot enough to pretend that summer really has come. January is the month of peach pits in the grass, hands smelling like sunscreen, fingers stained by plum juice. Dad listening to the cricket on the radio, the low crackly voices just audible through the thick ringing of cicadas. We go for drives like we did when I was little, stopping by the beach to get ice creams (one hokey pokey, one boysenberry ripple, one chocolate). I swear ice cream tastes better by the sea, Mum says. 
 
I haven’t had a bite of Chinese food in two weeks. It doesn’t feel right. The confusion of never being fully at home in one cuisine over another, a feeling those who also grew up between two cultures will understand. In China I miss home comforts like crumpets, cheese, apple crumble. In New Zealand I crave Chinese food—especially street food—silken tofu, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves.

New Zealand writer Robin Hyde visited China in 1938 and recorded the experience in her travel memoir Dragon Rampant. She spent a short time in Shanghai, where had dreams of back home: “Almost every night, lying in the padded quilt, I dreamed about New Zealand, dreams so sharp and vivid that when I woke up, it seemed the black-tiled houses were a fairy-tale.” Those first few nights back in my old bed, in my old room, I dream of plane trees and rain-soaked streets and a night sky that is never dark.   
 
One rainy morning I pick spring onions from the garden and recreate from memory my friend’s recipe for egg & spring onion pancakes. Shanghai street food in my kitchen by the sea. The closest thing to being in two places at the same time. 

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3.

I spend most evenings rubbing aloe vera gel on my sunburnt skin and watching David Attenborough documentaries. Not everything is the same as it was before; you just have to look closer. A door in our house that always used to swing shut now swings open. Dad thinks the earthquake in November might have slightly altered the levels of the house, or shifted the ground beneath.

​On days when the temperature climbs above 19 degrees, I’m in the water. Ocean swims are what I looked forward to most. M and I have a picnic on the hottest day, when the wind has momentarily disappeared. We eat stone fruit on the beach, dripping nectarine juice on our thighs, then we swim out to the platform in the middle of the bay. It takes me less and less time now to go fully under, even though the water is cold as knives at first. It’s unbearable until it isn’t anymore.
 
I go swimming with K in Oriental Bay. We dive under the waves and resurface to examine the rising moon. Do you know about the craters on the moon? They have such beautiful names he says in between waves and I think of the volcanoes again as I float on my back, arms outstretched, pretending my fingers are jellyfish tendrils. I glance at the tattoo on my arm, warped and rippling underwater. It’s still there, which means this past year was not a dream.
 
I’m reading a book of essays called Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young. After finishing it I carry it around with me wherever I go. I keep coming back to this bit: “When I take my breath and jump into the space between the rock and the coldest water, I become light as air. I am air, and I try to stay like this, suspended, made whole in air, in stillness.”
 
We lay our towels down on the sand to dry off, quietly aware we’re slowly burning. 
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4.

​I wake to the news that 416 pilot whales have stranded at Farewell Spit in the South Island. There are scenes on the news of people standing neck-deep in the ocean forming a human chain to stop the whales re-stranding. I tell K about my recurring dream, the one that came back a few nights ago, in which all the water drains away and blue whales strand themselves in the harbour. He says I must have moon whale sense. I can’t watch the news anymore.
 
During my last weekend in Wellington I go see Moonlight by myself at my favourite movie theatre. Afterwards I check my phone and there’s a message from my friend D, who lives in Shanghai: Your home is so beautiful – you must really like China to want to move away from it and live here.
 
A warm bluish glow follows me out of the cinema and settles somewhere inside my ribcage. A guy who works there who's having his smoke break asks me if I liked the movie. The answer is yes, but it will be a while before I understand why. The entire film, almost every still and every colour, reminded me too strongly of that feeling of being in a crowded room but only being aware of the presence of one other person, knowing if they come any closer you might burn up, but neither of you can do or say anything. I think of the other day when K and I went to the museum. In the bug exhibit there was an interactive display about a bug scientist who stung himself with all kinds of stinging insects and created a scale of different types of pain. One of them, some type of fire ant, felt like a thousand blowtorch kisses on your skin.

Later that evening I have dinner with S. We walk together to the building where her tango milonga is held. The sky has turned from pink and gold to deep violet. As we approach the place we can hear tango music in the distance and we fall silent, listening. She has described this moment for me before and now we are living it.
 
I get home late and the garden is drowning in moonlight, the house full of blue shadows. In Shanghai there is not enough moonlight. I add this to my mental list of things that remind me how to love this place: ocean swims, the birds, stars rising before dark, homemade marshmallows at Loretta, good Malaysian food, the cute baristas who still work at the same cafés, the way the wind carries sound like the city is a wide valley, encircled by hills and small islands to keep us from stranding.
 
I leave with sun-bleached hair, sunburnt thighs and a suitcase full of dark chocolate, toffee pops, peppermint tea and crumpets. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean I begin to feel fine about leaving again, knowing I’ll be back quite soon, knowing it’s perfectly possible to have two homes at once: one made of skyscrapers and one made of deep sea volcanoes.  

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egg & spring onion pancakes
​葱油鸡蛋饼

4 eggs
1 cup flour
1 1/2 cup water
2-3 stalks chopped spring onions
1 tsp salt 
​
mix all the above in a large bowl until you've got a thin batter consistency. heat a wok or frying pan with a tablespoon of vegetable oil. pour a ladlefull of pancake batter into the wok and fry until golden brown, 1-2 minutes on each side. ​add more oil as necessary. serve warm and eat for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, midnight snack, etc. 
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2016: the year of ice cream & chrysanthemums

12/30/2016

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​The year is almost over and I’ve avoided writing about it until today. There is no point trying to sum things up neatly. I climbed a mountain, I wrote lovesick poems, I went swimming with bioluminescent plankton, I helped publish a poetry journal, I thought I was gonna die from homesickness but didn’t, I travelled alone, I freaked out a lot, ate a lot, wrote a lot. I consumed more dumplings this year than any other year in my life. This year has been my messiest yet, which is a good thing.
 
It’s that weird time when the dieting/exercise/weight loss ads on Twitter and Instagram triple in volume. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about hunger, guilt, bodies, and shame. Some days I have a good relationship with my body, some days I don’t. Some days, a part of my brain actively tries to destroy my love for food by turning it into something indulgent and bad that needs to be restricted. It takes conscious effort to decide not to listen to this voice. I’ve always been good at refusing to listen, but it’s exhausting. Sometimes I fail. We all often fail, and guilt takes over.
 
So, instead, I am going to celebrate. Below is a sort of 2016 food diary; a collection of moments that made me feel really happy to be alive, even in a world like this one. 


蛋挞  EGG TARTS
Late April, our hair soaked from the rain, taking shelter inside Nanjing Xi Lu subway station next to a small bakery stall. The glossy egg tarts in the cabinet give off a golden light under the heat lamps. My friend Louise buys two and hands one to me. The scent hits me: burnt brown sugar, butter, hot vanilla. I take a bite and something happens. I close my eyes. I think it’s one of those moments of discovery I’m destined to remember forever. I’d had egg tarts before when I was young, but those were the less creamy Cantonese type with bright yellow custard and crumbly shortcrust pastry. Portuguese / Mecanese egg tarts are different, smaller, made with flaky pastry and with brown sugar sprinkled on top.
The caramelised bits stick to your lips.
 

MANGO SHAKES
The mangoes in Cambodia are huge and the flesh a deep golden yellow, just like the chrysanthemums we saw everywhere in Vietnam, spilling out of flower carts and swaying in a plastic vase on the bus.
The perfect mango shake consists of nothing but a whole mango blended with ice. We have them almost every day in Cambodia, with banana pancakes for breakfast or with a red curry for dinner. At night, giant moths with white-grey wings fly out of the dark and into the streetlights, so big you can feel the force of their wingbeats when they dive close to your skin. On our second day in Siem Reap we sit in the grass facing the main temple of Angkor Wat at 4:45am, snacking on dried jackfruit. We are sleepy and sick of the mosquitoes biting our ankles but then the sun comes up and everything shines blue.
 

BANH UOT (RICE NOODLE ROLLS)
Breakfast in Ho Chi Minh City: banh uot, a plate of steamed rice noodle rolls filled with pork (a variation on Cantonese cheong fan, but lighter and less slippery) with a pile of fresh beansprouts topped with chillies, mint, coriander, Vietnamese sausage, shallots and deep-fried shrimp pancakes. So crunchy you can crunch right through the shrimp head. I don’t know how it’s possible for something you’ve never tried before to taste like home, but it does.
At the market there are things I’ve never seen before, like light purple eggplants in the shape of tomatoes and yellow fruits that look like clawed hands. I am becoming obsessed with rice noodles of all shapes and kinds (thin vermicelli, thick and udon-like, the flat kind used for pho, wide sheets for banh uot) and am intent on eating them for every single meal. The colours of Ho Chi Minh City make me feel dizzy with glee. The area where we are staying has narrow streets and balcony gardens overflowing with pink and yellow flowers. The doors are painted blue and green. I realise I am in love.
 

PHO
After the bus trip from Hoi An to Hanoi (sand and ocean, fields of dragonfruit trees) we stop at the first noodle place we see. I order chicken pho (pho ga) instead of the usual beef. The broth tastes strongly of lemongrass and the rice noodles are topped with cubes of deep-fried chicken skin. I am so tired and hungry that it is possibly the best thing I have ever eaten.
This pho is the first of many, all of them delicious and never quite the same. Sometimes there is fresh lettuce and beansprouts, sometimes not. Sometimes there are fresh limes to be squeezed into the soup. Sometimes the broth is thicker and darker and I can smell the cinnamon. We eat pho just after a typhoon has passed, a fallen tree blocking the road. We eat fried pho for lunch with iced coffee that tastes like dark chocolate. On my last night in Hanoi I sit on a plastic stool on the street and eat pho for dinner, rain dripping down the side of the awning, the pavement scattered with yellow petals.
 

APPLE & CINNAMON ICE CREAM
First meal back in Shanghai in August: macaroni & cheese grilled cheese sandwich followed by apple & cinnamon swirl ice cream. This is the strangest place—in some parts of the city there are hardly any foreigners and in others, you can buy gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and New Zealand craft beer. But the ice cream is the thing I’ll remember. Spiced apple pie in scoop form, winter evenings and summer Christmases all rolled into one.
The streets are overflowing with watermelons and it’s too hot to be outside for longer than fifteen minutes. At night everything is covered in this hazy pink-gold glow, though I might be imagining it. I'm hungry for something but I'm not sure what. 
 

糯米鸡  LOTUS LEAF STICKY RICE
In the courtyard kitchen I cut fresh lotus leaves into wide triangles like fans. They have a bitter, tea-like smell. At a cooking workshop in Shanghai, Ayi Chen is teaching me how to make a famous southern dish, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. The rice is mixed with pork fat, chicken, tiny dried shrimps, and a single duck egg yolk. The fat yolks glow bright orange in a bowl on the bench. Wrapping the parcels, folding the edges down and placing them in the steamer is just like making dumplings, a slow and fiddly task, the kind where I don’t need to think about anything except the feel of the cold leaf in my palm. Ayi Chen gives me boxes to take home with me. When I told her I lived alone I think she felt sorry for me. I eat them for breakfast every day for the next week and a half, sitting cross-legged on my balcony listening to Chinese indie rock until the late summer heat starts to sink in.
 

柚子  HONEY POMELO
There is nothing more satisfying than cutting and peeling a pomelo (like a giant grapefruit) with your own hands. Sometimes the man at the fruit shop will peel it for me. He has a knife tattooed on the back of his hand that started to fade many years ago. The blade points up towards the curve of his thumb. Someone told me that pink flesh pomelo are sweeter but I buy them because they’re so decadent and pretty to look at, like a giant gaping blood orange. They appeared in the city in late autumn, just as the leaves started to fall. The floor of the fruit shop is littered with their thick skins cut roughly in the shape of lotus flowers.
And just like that the weather is starting to get colder, so cold that I can almost remember how it was when I first arrived. But so many things are different now. I stick the tip of my knife deep into the pomelo and pull it downwards. A soft tearing sound as the skin pulls away.
 

茄子 FRIED EGGPLANT
Almost very day I eat at the halal corner of my university cafeteria where they serve Xinjiang food, from northwestern China, where the majority of the population is Muslim. Along with beef dumplings, lamb fried rice, hand-pulled noodles and vegetarian Mapo tofu, they make a stir-fried eggplant dish with tomatoes, onions, chilli and green peppers. They use a type of bright purple eggplant that holds its colour even after cooking, like the ones in Vietnam. I eat this with a type of baked Xinjiang flatbread that has dotted circular patterns stamped around the edges.
At a cooking class in Yangshuo I learned how to make fried eggplant with sauce made from black beans and preserved chillies. The limestone mountains loomed above as I chopped the eggplant and garlic into small pieces. A break from the roar and colour of the city. Soft sounds here that feel like home: kids playing outside, branches moving in the wind, insects buzzing through the open windows.
 

饼 PANCAKES
On Christmas Eve I stand in my friend Maggie’s kitchen while she stirs a floury mixture with chopsticks. She tosses in a handful of chopped spring onions, cracks an egg into the bowl. Twice I ask for the recipe, and each time she responds (in Chinese), “there is no recipe, it’s so easy, just watch–” so I watch carefully and take notes on my phone, which she finds amusing. A ladle full of oil for shallow frying, a spoonful of batter into the wok. These spring onion pancakes are her father-in-law’s favourite so she always makes them when he comes. We eat them with steamed prawns, fried spinach and chicken soup. I’ve had them many times before but never home-cooked like this.
I thought this Christmas would be hard, but it’s not. It’s pretty perfect. On Christmas morning my friends make pancakes in my tiny apartment and we top them with melted chocolate, fried bananas and stewed apples. The smell of cinnamon and melted butter (the smell of Christmas) lingers for days. 
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​My new year food resolutions go something like this.
 
Continue to eat less meat (full vegetarianism would freak out my Chinese friends and family too much, and also ... dumplings).  Make spring onion pancakes at home. Make a sourdough loaf. Make pavlova and handmade ice cream. Cooking is an act of love, so cook for yourself and others as often as possible. Be kind to yourself. Know that guilt is not necessary. Eat whatever the fuck you want.
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mountains beyond mountains: field notes from yangshuo 阳朔

11/20/2016

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I started writing this post last week and it was shaping up to be a neatly-formed essay. Then the 7.8 earthquake hit New Zealand and for a few days after that, I couldn’t concentrate on much else. The stuff I’d started working on before that didn’t seem to make sense. So I looked through the notes I’d written in Yangshuo, mostly half-sentences scribbled on the train. It seemed better and realer to do it this way. This is how I really am when I travel, anyway: scattered and excited, in a daze trying to remember everything.
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Li River, Guangxi Province (漓江,广西省)
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​3/11/2016
 
This is one of the most beautiful places I know.
 
I first came here when I was thirteen. I don’t remember much because it was a school trip and we were too preoccupied with stuff like whether we’d get to sit next to our crush on the bus. I do remember fresh mango juice and fierce sunburn on my arms after mountain biking in the sun.
 
Yangshuo feels different. West Street is no longer a sleepy little pedestrian street; at night you can barely move, squeezed in on all sides by tourists and vendors trying to sell you flying plastic toys and foot massages. West Street now has a wax museum (!) and a virtual reality arcade. The limestone mountains loom above the street like sleeping giants. Yangshuo hasn’t been “ruined” by tourism; it’s just changed, like everywhere else. In China, you can’t hold on to past versions of places you’ve visited or soon you’ll have nothing left.
 
As our bus rolls into the station, my first thought is: what a relief to be surrounded by hills again, to have something to look at other than skyscrapers, to look around and see green everywhere. The rich green of rice fields and riverbanks and bamboo trees hanging over the river.
 
We walk just twenty minutes away from the main street and come across a dirt road with no one else on it. Only a few grey birds skimming the river with their wings, just visible through the trees. Sunlight turns to soft gold around four o’clock. No sound except our footsteps.

4/11/2016

 
Today I climbed a mountain and I didn’t die.
 
I’d read about this particular mountain, Laozhai Shan, and decided it wasn’t for me (“near-vertical climb” and “iron ladders in some places”) but I did it. Even though we passed a middle-aged Chinese couple who warned us “太危险,真的太危险” (it’s too dangerous, srsly). But the path was so quiet. There were graves dotted along the track with pink plastic flowers laid on top. It made me think of Kota Kinabalu, where my mum comes from, where colourful graves are set into the hillside. It could have been eerie but somehow wasn’t, only peaceful, with the soft sound of our breathing and cool wind coming through the trees. 
 
We scrambled over uneven, unstable rocks on our hands and knees to reach the peak. At the peak itself: a red pagoda, wasps the size of dragonflies, butterflies with huge shiny blue wings. Stretching out below us, a sea of mountains beyond mountains. We stood on the rocks and didn’t speak for a while, just looked. Up there in the sky, we got our breath back.

Ever since I was little I’ve always wanted to see a blue butterfly and now I have.
 
At the foot of the mountain we bought a kilo of tiny mandarins from the ladies selling fruit by the road. For lunch we ate famous Guilin rice noodles 桂林米粉 with crispy pork and coriander while firecrackers exploded in the distance.
 
Later, another brightly coloured butterfly resting in the sun, this time small, the same size as a cabbage butterfly, with bright orange wings that have black and purple patterns on them. My friend points to the tattoo on my arm (a girl with moth wings) – “the markings are like yours,” she says. 
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​​5/11/2016
 
In Shanghai in November there are crushed leaves on the streets. In Yangshuo there are crushed butterflies.
 
After a breakfast of mango juice and mini steamed buns (which the locals call xiaolongbao but are really just tiny baozi 包子) we bike along a dusty road that leads out of Yangshuo towards the rice fields. Women in pink hats sell mangoes and persimmons by the side of the road. Moon Hill, a mountain with a giant crescent-shaped hole carved through it, is just visible from the road. I am grateful that there are no earthquakes here.
 
Chaolong Village, late evening. The dust in the distance is beginning to settle. Yangshuo Cooking School is nestled in a corner of the village next to apricot trees, a veggie patch, and pink bougainvillea flowers climbing over the garden walls. Head chef Sophie teaches us how to cook steamed chicken with goji berries, pork and mint dumplings, and stir-fried eggplant with ginger and garlic. Sophie is the same age as me and is so excited that we can speak her language she conducts the class almost totally in Chinese.
 
I’d forgotten the joy of crushing fat cloves of garlic, the feel of smashing something to pieces in a single blow. Sophie convinces me to add an entire fresh chopped chilli to my wok. “You can take more than you think,” she laughs. She’s right.
 
It’s a relief to be back in a kitchen, focusing on nothing but chopping carrots and peeling garlic. The open-air cooking classroom smells like rice wine and ginger, just like my mum’s kitchen. I look up from my wok every few minutes and note how the light has changed. The mountains on the other side of the valley are slowly turning dark blue.
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egg-wrapped pork and mint fried dumplings
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Yangshuo Cooking School

​6/11/2016
 
In the morning, one last trip to the café that sells mango ice cream, mango yoghurt, and mango shaved ice. I sit on the upstairs balcony eating a giant waffle with ice cream and fresh mango on top. I write postcards to people I haven’t spoken to in forever. I buy a giant honey pomelo for the 17-hour train home.
 
I first bought a pink-flesh honey pomelo a few weeks ago just because it looked pretty and I wanted to write a poem about it. Right now I’m living the kind of life where doing this makes total sense, for which I’m very grateful.
 
I’ve begun to notice that one way you can tell the seasons apart in Shanghai (other than the colours, the leaves, the rain) is according to the seasonal fruit: 
         
         late winter: tiny sweet mandarins
            spring: seedless green grapes
            late spring: papaya, nashi pears
            midsummer: watermelons, watermelons, watermelons
            late summer: pineapples, nectarines, black plums
            autumn: bright red persimmons, green mandarins
            late autumn: honey pomelo

​Sitting in my top bunk on the overnight train, I make another list.
 
          places in Shanghai where reality is altered
            never-ending escalators with mirrors above them
            the weird corridor between the movie theatre and the mall
            campus at night, full of animal noises and soft colours
            wide avenues surrounded by empty apartment blocks
            Walmart at closing time
            strange bedrooms just before dawn
            empty subway trains full of fluorescent light
            empty subway platforms just before the last train leaves
            overnight trains

 
These places used to make me feel lonely but they don’t anymore. They’re all places of temporary existence (of waiting, coming and going) where you aren’t meant to stand still. In the city you’re supposed to keep moving all the time. But I let myself be still. Everything around me is disappearing and reappearing at the same time and I can’t keep up, and that’s fine, because I can write about it.
 
The peace and quiet (and fresh air) has been good for me, because it’s hard to breathe in the city sometimes. But I’m looking forward to going back home to my room, to season 6 of Gilmore Girls, to my bowl of 葱油拌面, to my city where it’s never dark and it’s never quiet.
 
Just after nightfall I look out the window and see a ring of fires burning in the middle of a field. The train speeds past but I can still smell smoke. 
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love is a bowl of noodles

8/27/2016

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HUNGRY GIRLS   //   on food, my body, and being half Malaysian-Chinese

7/28/2016

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A pair of pink plastic chopsticks with tiny blue and green flowers printed on the ends where you hold them. A small bowl full of instant noodles. The room smells like chicken stock and jasmine tea. Steam starts to tickle my nose. My grandmother, Popo, watches me from her lacquered chair across the table.

This is one of those very early memories in which shapes are blurred and colours flare out from them in waves of sudden light. Pink and yellow plastic, deep blue Tibetan carpet. I don’t know if all the parts of it are real or if they came together later in a hazy collision of photographs and dreams. But I know what happened next. In a moment when no one was looking, I tipped the bowl upside down. The rim hit the wood with a loud clatter, flinging noodles onto the table and my pink chopsticks onto the floor. My mum shouted aiyah! as I knew she would. But in the memory-dream Popo hasn’t moved. She sits still, watching me.

I only wanted to cause chaos, but I think it might also have been my first act of rebellion. No more chopsticks. No more noodles, at least not that day.

This was short-lived, of course. I willingly ate noodles of some sort almost every day growing up, so much so that they’re known as Nina Noodles at my aunt and uncle’s house.

But the time came, when I was around five, when I started to hate my weekend Chinese classes. I had bad dreams about the red and gold banners strung across the doorways and the high-pitched nursery songs they used to make us sing. None of the other kids looked like me. None of their dads looked like mine. The sounds of the languages and dialects they spoke with their parents were familiar to me, and I knew a few words, but I couldn’t speak back. Eventually my mum stopped using Chinese at home, or eventually I stopped listening. Words vanished along with the sounds.

米

míng 明 / a sun日 next to a moon 月
yă 雅 / a tooth 牙 next to a bird 隹

米

Big hips, brown eyes, brown hair that turns lighter during a New Zealand summer. The way I look means that people don’t usually know that I’m half Malaysian-Chinese. The way I look has given me enormous privilege my whole life in a series of predominantly pākehā spaces: a white school, white university (in the English department at least), white suburb, white poetry workshops. The way I look means I can lie for my safety when a guy approaches me in a bar to say he really likes mixed girls. The way I look means there’s a lot I don’t understand and never will. The way I look makes it easy for some people to see me as no different from them; it sometimes makes it easy for me to see myself that way, too.

My grandfather, Gung Gung, picked my Chinese name when I was born. It’s also my middle name. 明雅 (Míngyă) means something like ‘bright elegance’. I only really learnt how to say it right when I was seventeen (rising tone / falling-rising tone) and only learnt how to write it when I was twenty, after years and years of avoiding the question in that classroom game of what’s-your-middle-name, muttering don’t worry, it’s Chinese, as if that were the same thing as not having one at all.

米

Wow there are so many Asians here now / oh I forgot /
oh but you don’t count anyway /


米

I starved myself of language, but I couldn’t starve myself of other things. All these dishes I’d been eating my whole life, just as crucial in the memory-map of my childhood as people and places. Wanton noodle soup, Cantonese roast duck, my mum’s crispy egg noodles and her special congee. All the thick, sweet smells of yum cha restaurants where we’ve been eating the same dishes for twenty years.

I remember peeling the sheets of rice paper from the bottom of steamed buns and scrunching them up into little paper flowers. I remember using one finger to draw one of the few characters I knew on the steamed-up glass: 米, mĭ, the character for rice, like an open flower or a six-point star.

When we moved to Shanghai when I was 12, I found a new landscape of sound: voices speaking quickly in rising falling waves, chaotic but familiar. I built myself a new home out of new colours, new friends, and new foods: mooncakes, sesame pancakes, fried eggplant, black tea, and dumplings.

米

To re-member / to undo the dismembering / to put something back together again.
A sun next to a moon, a tooth next to a bird.

米

I taught myself to cook around the same time I decided to pick up Chinese at university back in Wellington. I was hungry to create, to make things with my hands. To relearn and recover what I'd lost.

I used our housekeeper Xu Ayi’s handwritten jiaozi (dumpling) recipe to make my own in the tiny kitchen in my Kelburn flat, trying out different fillings according to which vegetables were the cheapest at the waterfront market: spinach instead of white cabbage, spring onions instead of chives. I researched all the different intricate ways to make congyoubing, spring onion pancakes. I combined them into a method of my own, kneading and folding the layered dough before class in the morning, my hands coated in flour and sesame seeds.

When she was stronger than she is now, my Popo was a brilliant cook. Her kitchen was hers and hers alone. There was always something cooking, some soup or congee made from the bones of last night’s meat. Because I can’t speak Hakka, the Chinese dialect my mum’s family speak at home, we only ever have simple conversations in a mix of Mandarin and English, usually about food. She never spoke much about her life. Or was it that I never tried to ask?

During my last visit to Malaysia, I asked Popo for the recipe for her chicken and eggplant curry. It’d been years since she last cooked but still she knew it off by heart. These days, Popo often forgets whether she’s turned the light off in an upstairs room and goes to check again and again. She forgets if she’s offered you a napkin and offers you another and another. But some other things are harder to forget.

米

女 (woman, feminine): a curved standstill/ a breath being held in /

米

It is tiring being a woman who loves to eat in a world where hunger is something not to be satisfied but controlled, put away. In a world with a long history of female hunger of all kinds being associated with shame and madness. The body must be punished for its every misstep; for every ‘indulgence’ the balance of control must be restored. To enjoy food as a young woman, to choose every day to free myself from the guilt expected of me, is a radical act, an act of love.

My body often feels like it’s both mine and not mine, neither here nor there. Too much like this, not enough like that. But whatever it looks like, my body is what lets me feel hunger.

We must have been fourteen or fifteen, eating burgers at our favourite diner in Shanghai, licking salt and ketchup off our fingers. We were best friends: two half-Chinese girls, one with darker hair than the other, one a little taller, both with nails painted black. An older American man passed close by our table. “You two must be hungry girls,” he said, raising an eyebrow then walking on. We stared after him, angry, mouthed What the fuck. Then we looked at each other and started to laugh because we didn’t know what he meant exactly, only that it was true.

米

I've been learning Chinese for three years now but there are still many days when language fails me, when food feels like the only thing I have to tie me to this home my family brought to me from far away.

The things that get passed from mothers to daughters, between sisters, between cousins and friends. A hot curry puff straight from the oven, a secret batter recipe, a special technique for slicing a mango.

One day I tried making Popo’s curry in my one-room flat. I read all the ingredients labels of all the curry powders at the supermarket to find the closest match. I bought freshly-made roti chanai from the roti shop on Kelburn Parade and carried it home in a southerly storm. The curry turned out terrible; too watery, flavourless, the eggplant overcooked. But for a while my little kitchen smelled like cumin and coconut and crushed ginger. Like running in from the tropical rain, like Popo ladling rice into our bowls, like the lit mosquito coil and the flame lighting up my mother’s hands as she carries it towards me. These things I don’t need language to understand.

-

​This essay was originally published in MIMICRY, a journal of comedy, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, music, art and design by young NZ creatives. Available here.
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summer thunderstorms & sesame pancakes: Shanghai in June

6/24/2016

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We used to go only on days when the sun was out and the air was always full of tiny seed pods floating down from the trees. They got in our eyes, in our hair. Now we go there almost every day in spite of the downpours, the 1000% humidity, the unbearable heat.

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This place is called Zhengsu Lu, a little snack street five minutes from where I have class. There’s a guy who sells baozi 包子 on the corner, whose vegetable buns my friend once described as 'like a warm hug'. Across the road, there's a wanton place with its legendary sesame chilli dipping sauce. On the corner, the fruit shop where the lady likes to chat to me about my family background while she chops the heads off pineapples with a giant cleaver.
 
There is a 拉面 noodle shop on Zhengsu Lu that we visit sometimes but not often, because the 老板 (the boss) is a bit of a creep who gets out his camera every time he sees us. But when he’s not around, it’s calming to watch his son stand in a cloud of flour, stretching and spinning long pieces of noodle dough. He throws the dough against the bench and it makes a whoosh-slap sound. The dough separates into thin strands and he chucks them in the boiling water. The noodles only need to cook for a minute before being tossed in a bowl with soy sauce, sticky fried spring onions, chopped coriander and lots of chilli oil. There’s nothing like the texture of real hand-pulled noodles made from dough you just watched being flung in circles in the air: fresh, springy, each noodle slightly a different size and shape.
 
Then there’s the dumpling shop run by two girls who wear matching orange caps. When I discovered their shengjianbao 生煎包, fried soup dumplings, it was like a new best friend flying into my life just when I needed them most. Almost perfectly round, a doughy but thin skin, filled with pork and chives and lots of hot soup. The best places fry them ‘face-down’ for a thicker, crispier base. I eat them sitting at one of the rickety tables by the street, shimmers of heat rising from the giant wok behind the counter.
 
But between the baozi stall and the dumpling stall is the most important one of all: the Bread Man. The Bread Man sells lots of different kinds of bing 饼. The word ‘饼’ is usually translated as ‘pancake’ or ‘cake’ but that doesn’t quite cut it; 饼 really encompasses anything flat and round and edible, often made with flour. The Bread Man makes savoury egg pancakes 鸡蛋饼, sesame pancakes 芝麻饼, spicy sesame pancakes 辣芝麻饼, pastries filled with red bean paste and lots of other types of 饼 I haven’t tried yet. We each have our own favourite. Mine is the sesame pancake. 
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​​When we lived in Shanghai when I was younger, my mum used to bring these home from her weekend morning walks. We had lazy feasts at the kitchen table: fresh sesame pancakes, boiled dumplings with vinegar and soy sauce. We wrapped leftover pieces of 饼 in greaseproof paper and stored them in the fridge for midnight snacking.
 
芝麻饼 is like a savoury flatbread, chewy but fluffy at the same time. The word ‘pancake’ is misleading but feels like the closest fit. Layers of dough are stretched and folded on top of each other before being rolled out into a circle, giving the 饼 a flaky texture and crisp outer crust, coated in crunchy sesame seeds. Soft, warm, golden. The taste of sesame oil and spring onions and a hint of garlic. The most satisfying crunch.
 
This was the Shanghainese comfort food I missed the most when we moved back to New Zealand. There were no recipes that I could find (in English at least) for this exact type of 饼. The next closest thing was spring onion pancakes, 葱油饼, the Northern Chinese fried equivalent. Sesame seeds appear nowhere in 葱油饼 recipes so I added them myself. I picked spring onions from my mum’s garden, bought fresh yeast and good quality flour. I spent an afternoon kneading the dough, letting it rise, rolling it out, then folding and re-folding the corners of each layer on top of one another, a bit like folding those little origami fortune tellers we used to make at school.  
 
The resulting pancake was nothing like the real thing: dense, not light and fluffy. Too much time spend working the dough with my hands, not letting enough air in.
 
We went back to Wulumuqi Lu a few years later in search of our regular 饼 street vendor, but he was gone. It’s been ten years since then, though, and Shanghai’s 芝麻饼 taste just the same. A lot like home. 
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March and April feel really far away. Back then, everything was still new and overwhelming. The smell of plum blossoms everywhere and strawberries so soft they fell apart in my mouth. After going outside I’d run my fingers through my hair and those fluffy seeds from the trees would fall to the floor. Lots of rain then, too, but nothing like now. 
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​It's June, which means I keep seeing this poem in various places on the internet. It is June. I am tired of being brave. Anne Sexton. The poem is beautiful but boy, it gets me down. It is late June and I am in Shanghai and I am not tired at all. June in Shanghai is for cold bubble tea, for kissing, for 3-yuan soft-serve ice creams and drizzle mixing with sweat on skin. When we touch we enter touch entirely. I think that's the line the poem should be remembered for.
 
I wander back to class along Zhengsu Lu in the afternoon heat, umbrella in one hand, ice cream in the other. The air has that pre-lightning feel to it. It is June.  

What I've been listening to 
- Yumi Zouma's latest album reminds me of peachy gold clouds on Wellington winter mornings. And when people ask me what my city is like, I just want to play them this. 

- I got through 12 hours of bus travel between Huangshan and Shanghai this weekend by listening to The Heart, a podcast series of love stories and anti love stories and everything that's terrifying and beautiful about human intimacy. 

What I’ve been reading
- In the horrifying wake of what happened in Orlando last week, I keep returning to this piece "Please Don't Stop the Music" by Richard Kim. 

- Hera Lindsay Bird has a book called Hera Lindsay Bird coming out next month. While we wait, here's a poem by her called "Monica" that I first read a month ago and haven't stopped thinking about since because it is insane. 

- My friend Jackson Nieuwland wrote a cool poetry chapbook called 100 which you can download here. 
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banana fritters & mango trees: a week in kota kinabalu

5/24/2016

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bananas for days in Kinabalu National Park

​A short break from writing about Shanghai: I’m in Kota Kinabalu for a week, the little city in Sabah, Malaysia, where my grandparents live.
 
Ever since I was little we’ve visited KK every few years. Usually these visits mean long, hot days spent lounging under the ceiling fans, reading Agatha Christie novels and watching Cantonese soap operas. But right now there are cousins and uncles arriving each day from places like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and every night is a family reunion. The big old house, usually empty, is full of voices shouting across each other in various combinations of Hakka and English and Chinese and Malay. There are at least ten pairs of flip-flops piled up by the front door.  
 
Still, each time I come back, Popo and Gung Gung’s house is the same. It has high ceilings and hard floors and the windows covered in mosquito nets. The house is always full of echoes. It’s like the air here is so humid and heavy that sounds get trapped inside it. Even the tiniest noises downstairs can be heard from upstairs: dragonflies hitting the windows, oil sizzling in the wok in the kitchen, geckoes clicking and chirping from behind curtains. The geckoes get louder at night.
 
Sometime between four and five a.m., pre-dawn light sifts through the curtains and leaves a shadow-pattern of leaves on my bedroom ceiling. The distant song of the mosque’s morning call-to-prayer drifts into the room, swirls in the dark. I hear Gung Gung getting up, shuffling down the corridor, switching on the Chinese-language news. Gradually more noises float up the stairs, and more smells: toast, coffee, fried noodles.  
 
We all wake early in the heat but I’m still the last to the breakfast table. Popo brings out the butter for my toast (from the toaster which, embarrassingly, only ever gets used when my dad and I are visiting). Gung Gung returns from the market with fruit and snacks for breakfast. Always the same pink plastic bags. Thick wodges of creamy durian, which my mum loves but no one else can bear. Fresh red papaya, yellow jackfruit, lychees, bunches of tiny bananas. Colourful glutinous rice cakes (known as kuih in Malay), some with bean or peanut paste inside: wobbly cubes in rainbow layers of cotton-candy pink, jade green, blushing red. Squishy coconut-white balls that leave a ring of powdered sugar on your lips when you bite into them. 
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jelly-green cakes and tropical fruit for sale at the markets near Kinabalu
​Then there are the banana fritters, or pisang goreng in Malay. Gung Gung brings home extra when he knows I’m visiting. He tips the golden fried bananas onto an enamel platter, covers them with a tray to keep them warm and keep the flies away. The room fills with smells of oil, sesame, sugar, coconut. 
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​A fresh banana fritter has a good crunch when you bite into it. The batter is almost savoury, in contrast with the sweet, fragrant fruit. When I take that first bite after years away from this place, I can taste tropical heat. I taste the slow hours spent sitting looking at the mango trees in the back garden. I remember the fierce sun, only ever bearable on days when we went swimming at the Sabah Golf Club pool and ate chocolate ice cream afterwards in the shade.
 
There are always those foods you keep coming back to for nostalgia’s sake. It might be the most boring, simplest snack in the world, but you’re obsessed with it. You can smell it from a mile away; you taste it and you’re six years old again. The closest thing you have to time travel.
 
On my long list of favourite childhood foods, pisang goreng is near the top. They’re almost better in the afternoon: softened but not soggy, when the batter has changed from crispy to chewy, somehow less oily than before. When leaving KK, we always wrap a handful of cold banana fritters in paper napkins and pack them in our hand luggage. We eat them with our fingers while sitting watching planes take off into the shimmering heat just visible at the end of the runway.

Banana fritters are usually made using ladyfinger bananas, the most common type of banana found in Southeast Asia (also known as sugar bananas, which is a lovelier name) much smaller than the ones I get every day in Shanghai. They have a sweet but tangy, acidic taste, a little bit like an apple, even after their skin has started to brown. They’re so small I could eat five at once.
 
We snacked on them the other day while driving up the winding road towards Mt. Kinabalu which stands just taller than the tallest mountain in New Zealand at 4096 metres. By the end of the day my aunt, uncle, cousins and I had probably eaten at least six each. Through the car windows, the rocky summit of Kinabalu disappeared and reappeared from behind dark rainclouds. Each time it appeared, we could see new waterfalls streaming down the steep rainforest – big ones and small ones, some beginning far above the clouds. It hardly looked real. 

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We visited Kinabalu National Park when I was little but all I remember is fog, humidity, and dark vines hanging over the road like something out of The Jungle Book. I also remember blue butterflies. Real live ones with iridescent wings that turned green when they caught the light, their wingspan bigger than my two hands put together. But I don’t think this was real; blue butterflies are rare and endangered, only to be found in enclosed butterfly aviaries or framed and pinned to the wall at the Sabah Museum. My six-year-old self was obsessed with the idea of seeing them, imagining them all day and night, pouring over pictures of them in the ancient, falling-apart copies of National Geographic that Gung Gung had collected since the 1960s and never thrown out. Like with most childhood obsessions, in this way they became real.  

In Shanghai I’m often swimming in memories. Sometimes they block everything else out. This is the most I’ve written in at least a month. I've been thinking lately: the more we relive memories, do they become more or less real? How much of our present self unconsciously changes it? Why do we lose some parts of a memory and grab hold of other parts that don’t seem important at all?
 
The rain on the backs of our necks, so loud we could’ve been standing under one of those waterfalls. Water droplets clinging to the plastic leaves. 
 
Right now I’m sitting on the balcony of our hotel room (there’s no space for us at the old house). It’s late evening. If I were at Popo and Gung Gung’s, moths would be starting to fly at the windows. We would light the mosquito coils and place them in blue-rimmed enamel bowls on the floor in the corners of each room. It’s warm and my skin is damp even though the rain hasn’t touched me. I can still smell the rainforest.

As we drove back down the mountain yesterday afternoon we were sleepy from the heat, and so full from all those bananas. A real tropical thunderstorm had started. So much rain we couldn’t see anything out the windows, so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves speak. The only flashes of colour: endless fields of banana trees. I kept looking back until they disappeared into the mist. 

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lush green valleys below Mt. Kinabalu
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the colour of sunshine: pineapple buns 菠萝包

4/17/2016

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菠萝包
Lately the weather in Shanghai reminds me of when I was fourteen, when I went to high school here, when we used to sit on the grass outside Starbucks after school drinking mango smoothies and watching boys with bad haircuts skateboard across the hot concrete. It always smelled like sweat and damp grass. As May got closer it rained more and more. It was hot, but nothing like the bright shockwave of heat that always came in June. Summer was just within reach, and we were restless.  
 
Certain foods attach themselves to memories. Memories attach themselves to foods. My earliest memories are the ones where I can smell or taste something: two-minute noodles and pink plastic chopsticks, apple juice in green cups, chocolate ice cream covered in sprinkles, buttered toast with the crusts cut off, peeling the thin rice paper off the bottom of warm, fluffy char-siu bao.
 
It’s when I’m sitting on the grass doing my homework after class that the teenage-dream pre-summer smell hits me. It must be something to do with the late afternoon light, the warmth, the terrible humidity that’s making my hair frizzier each day.
 
And since I spend lots of time thinking about food, and since I’m back in Shanghai now after eight years, all the taste-memories come rushing back: crispy dumplings, spring onion and sesame pancakes, Starbucks blueberry muffins (which, I discovered yesterday, still taste the same), cinnamon-coated pretzels, chocolate milk, waffle fries from the cafeteria, peach iced tea, and warm pineapple buns.
 
*
 
I can’t remember my first pineapple bun. I think it must have been when I was around ten. Whenever we travelled to see family in Singapore, Malaysia or Hong Kong, pineapple buns were a daily staple. They were everywhere, not just in every bakery but in every supermarket and café, their bright yellow tops shining happily out of shop windows alongside rows of egg tarts and brittle sesame cookies.
 
Like me, and like most things I love to eat, pineapple buns (boluo bao, 菠萝包) are not fancy. They’re usually the size of a bagel and made of fluffy, sweet dough with a crumbly, sugary, bright yellow coating on top. That’s it. They come from Hong Kong and are listed by the government of Hong Kong as part of the city’s official cultural heritage. You can find them in Chinese bakeries all over the world.
 
The name in Chinese literally means “pineapple bread” but the bun contains no trace of actual pineapples, as far as I can tell. The only link, as my Aunty Bin pointed out to me in a comment on my Instagram post (thanks, Aunty Bin) is that when the yellow topping is decorated in a criss-cross pattern it vaguely resembles a pineapple. But the name is perfect nonetheless, full of sunshine yellow. 
 
In Shanghai, I pass several bakeries on my usual route between the university and the subway station. I usually end up biking home with a paper bag in my basket that has a warm boluobao inside. Even when I eat them in mid-winter—or perhaps especially—they remind me of sun, tropical heat, and family.
 
In Wellington we don’t have any Chinese bakeries (correct me if I’m wrong, and also take me there as soon as I get back) but we do have a decent-ish selection of yum cha restaurants. Here, towards the end of the lunch hour, servers carry around trays of sweet treats (the Wellington yum cha scene still hasn’t graduated to trolleys) including egg tarts, peanut cakes, pink gelatinous rice things, mango pudding, and pineapple buns straight out of the oven (er, microwave).
 
On the brink of collapsing into the familiar meat-and-carb yum cha coma, we usually lower our eyes as the trays approach. “No, we’re finished, thank you,” we mutter. And then one brave person calls out: “Wait—we’ll just take some boluo bao.”
 
Mooncakes, the cakes eaten during the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, are meant to look like little moons. Pineapple buns look like shining suns. The kind served at yum cha restaurants are smaller and brighter yellow, sometimes with rich custard baked into the middle. Even after eating twice your weight in dumplings and spring rolls, you can’t resist the smell: like warm sugar and butter and freshly baked bread all rolled into one. The exact stuff dreams are made of.

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I got many strange looks for taking this picture.

For a long time I didn’t actually know what boluobao were called in English.
 
My introduction to Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka, the three languages my mum and her family can all speak, was through food. The first Mandarin words she taught me when I was little were niunai, milk, and mianbao, bread (I guess because I was a little kid who ate a lot, and still does).
 
Along with boluobao, I grew up with Cantonese dim sum classics such as hagao (steamed shrimp dumplings), shaomai (shrimp and pork dumplings), char siu bao (BBQ pork buns), and luobogao (turnip cake). It was only when I got older and ate dim sum with my friends that I realised I didn’t know the English names. To me, English words don’t quite exist for them. “Steamed shrimp dumpling” could mean any old shrimp dumpling, not the delicately folded spheres with translucent skin that are hagao. Until we moved to China when I was twelve, these were the only scraps of Cantonese and Mandarin that I knew. But I knew them well.
 
It’s with words like these that I’ve always managed to communicate with my grandma, Popo, who doesn’t speak English. Ni chi le ma? Chibao le ma? Have you eaten? Are you full? The last time we visited I asked her how to make one of her simple chicken curries. After dinner the three of us sat round the table: Popo explaining the steps in Hakka, Mum translating into English, me writing everything down. In the background I could hear my Gung Gung watching a Cantonese soap opera, and the tiny clicking sounds of moths and mosquitoes flying at the netted windows. 
 
*
 
The sun is out when I stop by Tsui Wah Restaurant & Bakery on my way home. I didn’t know this place existed until something caught my eye as I walked past one day not long ago: a man coming out of the kitchen carrying an enormous tray of enormous shiny buns, straight from the oven, steam still rising from them, and sliding them one by one into the bakery cabinet. I stopped in my tracks. Since then, I’ve been a regular.
 
Shanghainese people really know how to snack. I consider myself a very experienced snacker, but the truth is I know nothing. Here, entire floors of giant supermarkets are devoted to snacks: crackers, nuts, cakes, cookies, candy, dried fruits, dried meat, dried fish, dried octopus, dried everything. The Chinese bakery is a crucial part of this #snacklife. At all hours of the day it is crammed full of grannies and grandpas piling their trays full of pastries, buns, and several loaves of bread. At first I thought it couldn't possibly be all for them but now I'm not so sure. If so, they're living the dream. 
 
The warm smell of the bakery wafts out into the street. Sugar, yeast, melted butter. Standing in the pineapple-bun queue, I can see right into the kitchen where two bakers wearing white hats roll pieces of dough into fat balls. For the crumbly topping, the most important part, they cut what look like large sheets of golden pastry into squares and lay each square over each bun. They brush them generously with egg for extra shine. I try to get a sneaky photo but one of them sees me, then laughs at me for a full minute. I guess no one’s tried to photograph unbaked pineapple buns before. 
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菠萝包 nearly ready for the oven at Tsui Wah Restaurant

If you don’t get your pineapple bun dabao (to-go), it arrives at your table on a plate, cut in half and with an astonishingly thick slice of butter in the middle. Let’s be clear: I’m a firm believer in butter. But there’s a time and a place for it (crumpets, waffles, hot cross buns). “Buttered pineapple bun” may be the cutest nickname in the world, but the fact is: a pineapple bun is beautiful and satisfying enough on its own, best enjoyed while biking home at night or wandering through the streets in the late afternoon. 
 
*
 
Homesickness comes in waves but there are many known cures, even for the biggest ones. Usually it’s the lack of colour here that makes me want to be somewhere else.
 
So I notice things. At the fruit shop where a lady sits carving pineapples out front, I take note of all the colours and try to fill myself up with them. Sunny mangoes, fuschia-pink dragonfruit, blood oranges, watermelons, blush-orange papaya, strawberries so red and soft they look about to burst. I notice when the gutters are full of crushed plum blossoms from last night’s rain. At night I take note of the sky: tonight it is a thick, dark, burning purple. I notice the city lights at night, the way they disperse weirdly in the fog, pink and green clouds eating each other above the buildings. And I read as much as I can. I eat whatever makes me happy. I seek out sunshine. However weak and hazy it might be, it’s there. I feel it.  
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When it rains here, it really rains.
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5 RMB box of fresh papaya #blessed
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There is no better afternoon study snack.
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    about me

    I'm Nina (明雅). I write poems and make zines and eat dumplings. 

    Wellington / Shanghai / London

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