​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.

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

(four windy, sunburnt weeks spent back home)

​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. 

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. 

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. 
​

​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.  

​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. 

​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.

​
​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. 

​​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.
​

​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. 

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.

​
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. 

​​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. 

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. 
​
​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.  

​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. 

​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. 

​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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.  

Last weekend we sat squeezed together on a bench in a narrow lane, eating noodles out of cardboard containers balanced on our knees. It had begun to rain. It’s only April but it had the taste of summer rain: warm, fragrant, heavy. We were deep inside the maze of little lanes known as Tianzifang 田子坊. The place was packed full of tourists. We sat out of the way of the sea of umbrellas, blinking rain and steam out of our eyes.  
 
Where tourists abound in Shanghai, so does overpriced Western food. We could have picked anything: waffles, sandwiches, New York style pizza, Chicago style pizza, spaghetti Bolognese. We’d taken a bus and changed subway lines three times to get here. But when you’re tired and hungry and your feet ache and it’s starting to rain, there is only one thing that will do.
 
*
 
When I learned that cōngyóu bànmiàn 葱油拌面 (literally spring onion oil mixed noodles) existed in the world, I knew they would become a big part of my life. The dish consists of a bowl of fine hand-pulled noodles tossed with spring onion-infused oil, dark soy sauce (the thicker, less salty kind), and strips of spring onions (scallions, if you’re American) that have been fried until dark, bittersweet, almost crisp and caramelised.
 
This is the Shanghai version of cacio e pepe: simple, satisfying, beautiful. Like with most Italian pasta dishes, the magic lies in the noodles-to-sauce ratio. Here, the ratio usually sits it an excellent 7:3. A modest amount of sauce, and an unspeakably huge amount of noodles.
 
The chef spoons the oil and the crispy onions over a thick wad of noodles. You use your chopsticks to mix it all together yourself. Then you demolish them. With practice, you learn not to regret it. You learn to think of those fried spring onions as a real, genuine part of your daily vegetable intake. You learn to prioritise happiness.    
 
*
 
Cōngyóu bànmiàn are sometimes called ‘bànmiàn’ for short. At breakfast and lunchtime (and dinner, if you’re me) people shout these two short syllables across counters and tabletops all over Shanghai. The sharp falling tone of each word makes me want to say them louder, to give them more oomph, a bit like saying a swear word. Sometimes the lady at the cashier knows what’s up before the second syllable has left my mouth. She nods, serious and businesslike. Girl’s gotta get her bànmiàn.
 
It’s become a kind of ritual. I ride my bike there after class, I order my noodles, I collect my chopsticks from the little chopstick washer and dispenser that hums pleasantly in the corner, and I sit at the bench full of people eating alone. More than half are eating bànmiàn.
 
Back in Wellington I do things alone all the time during daylight hours. I work, I eat, I write, I go for walks. But at night, things change. At night, aloneness in a public space means strange looks and unwanted attention. It means knowing the quickest, safest route. It means pretending to talk on the phone and gripping your keys tightly in your pocket.
 
But here, maybe like all big cities, aloneness is part of the city itself. I never feel unsafe. I walk long distances with my earphones in, never once needing to cross the road to avoid someone. I ride my bike through the quiet campus without glancing behind me. I order my noodles and eat them in peace, and for a little while, I don’t feel like an outsider anymore.   
 
*
 
Today there were three downpours. The first coincided with me needing to get to class. I stepped out of my building and wondered if I would actually make it; I had never seen so much water fall out of the sky, never heard it make so much noise. Rain streamed down the sides of my umbrella and splashed me in the face. Bikes and scooters tore through the water, small waves breaking against the footpath. In between downpours the air smelled like mud and crushed flowers.
 
It rained again as I walked to my closest dumpling-and-noodle joint called 豫申园 for dinner. It’s not my favourite but it’s the cheapest, which counts for a lot when you live in a Shanghai on a student budget. The road was splashed across with pink and green from the neon lights above the street. Steam, or smog, seemed to be rising from it.
 
I could smell my noodles before they reached me: warm, bitter, a little sweetness mixed with the sharp smell of soy sauce. Like all best foods, bànmiàn are messy. They’re impossible to eat with any degree of restraint or attractiveness. Another benefit to eating alone is that the only person you can splatter with soy sauce is yourself. With each bite I feel increasingly powerful and glorious.
 
The man next to me devoured his bànmiàn alongside a plate of six fluffy, crispy, soupy shengjianbao 生煎包. This is a level of Shanghai hardcore I have not yet reached. But I’m getting there.
 
*
 
Each time I’m at a new place where the menu is only in Chinese, I take a picture of it on my phone and later look up the words I don’t know. This is how I discover new ways to eat.
 
葱, cōng, is one of my favourite characters. It’s complex and messy but also elegant, made up of twelve short strokes that fit closely together like a cluster of leaves. Or like the dark shreds of crisp onions left in the bottom of the bowl. When 葱 is combined with 绿, lü, which means ‘green’, it becomes ‘lush green’: bright green, verdant. A colour you see everywhere in New Zealand. A colour you don’t see here. Except in the food: handfuls of this colour sprinkled over dumplings, into bowls of noodles, over pieces of dough being kneaded and rolled out by the old man in the white cap. I can taste it.