these same crescent moons: guōtiē 锅贴

pork and ginger filled 锅贴 for 6 RMB, from a street vendor close to campus where I eat lunch almost every day.

​At 11:45am on a Saturday I wait in line at my local Yang's Dumplings. It smells like hot oil and toasted sesame seeds. Steam gathers near the ceiling. As the peak lunch rush approaches, noise in the food court builds.

The regulars and the serving staff are used to me by now. Only a few older aunties stare, and when I look back at them they look away. A little boy waiting in line behind me bumps into me. His father apologises in English. "Mei guanxi," I reply. It's all good. He looks surprised for half a second, then turns back to his phone. "Wo è si le," the little boy moans repeatedly. I'm starvingggg. Me too, little bro. 

There are no seats, only one long stainless steel bench where grandmas and their grandkids sit elbow-to-elbow, shovelling soup and dumplings into their mouths. I can't read the menu but it doesn't matter since there are only two separate windows where you queue for two different kinds of dumplings: the famous shēngjiānbāo 生煎包, fried soup dumplings, and guōtiē 锅贴, pan-fried dumplings. I hand the chef my order receipt and he piles four fat guōtiē into a plastic container. He points me towards the vinegar-and-chopsticks station before remembering I already know where it is. He chuckles. 

I eat them standing there under the fluorescent lights, right next to the chopsticks-and-vinegar station. First the crunch, then hot soup scalds my tongue–I wasn't expecting soup–then gingery, garlicky meat in the middle. I've got soup in my hair and all over my chin and there's a grandma staring at me who finds it hilarious, but I don't care. I take one bite, and every single worry melts away. I take one bite and I'm home and away from home at exactly the same time. 

*

During my first week in Shanghai, I tried all kinds of dumplings I can't find at home. But after six days I needed something familiar. I needed comfort food that was something other than Oreos. 

Guōtiē 锅贴 (literally potstickers) are the pan-fried version of shuĭjiăo 水饺, boiled dumplings. I love both kinds equally and which one I choose depends on my mood, the time of day (breakfast or lunch means shuĭjiăo, dinner means guōtiē) and whether or not I've waited an acceptable length of time (two days, or one if feeling fearless) between eating a lot of fried food. 

The first time I tried real guōtiē—not the sad, withered kind you can get at Chinese takeaway shops in Wellington—I was twelve. We had just moved to Shanghai from New Zealand, and everything about the city was loud and bright and bad-smelling. Like all expat families here, we had a housekeeper. Her name was Xu Ayi.
 
There is nothing like the sound of water hissing as it hits the wok and the lid being clamped down over it. Xu Ayi made dumplings in our kitchen almost every day. I came home from school to the smell of vinegar and the sound of her smashing cloves of garlic on the kitchen counter. I used to watch her mix Shaoxing wine with soy sauce and a cold beaten egg, then add minced pork, chives, garlic, ginger and white pepper to the blue-rimmed enamel bowl.
 
She showed us how to fold the dumplings but my mum and I were never very good. Her expert fingers sealed each one shut with precisely four folds spaced evenly along one side of the curve. On a plastic tray that had strings of blue roses printed along the edges, she laid them all out like rows upon rows of tiny crescent moons.
 
We took her recipe home with us, tried to recreate them. They were good enough; we made them almost every week. We got very good at folding. But the filling, the xiànr 馅儿, was never quite the same. The difference was never something we could pinpoint. It wasn’t to do with the ingredients but the texture, the ratio of crunch-to-soft, the feel of holding one between two chopsticks. Maybe it’s impossible to recreate the exact weight of a memory. But we keep trying.
 
*
 
Tonight I walked down the road to my nearest dumpling joint, the name of which I can’t yet read. The staff wear orange t-shirts and the girl at the counter has stick-on jewels on her nails. At 7 o’clock, long after most families have gone home, young people are grouped together at tables but are actually eating alone, watching TV shows on their iPhones propped up against the chopstick dispensers. No one looks up when I sit down.    
 
The guōtiē are cheapest here, 5元 for a plate of four. The skin is almost as thick as the dough used for shēngjiānbāo 生煎包 which makes for extra crunchy bottoms. They come sprinkled with black sesame seeds and chopped spring onions. These Shanghai guōtiē, the kind you can get at street stalls all over the city, are unique. They are big, heavy, and filled with soup as well as meat.
 
They taste a little bit like home: like eating breakfast with my mum with the radio on in the background, or eating dinner in my one-bedroom Kelburn flat with the windows steamed up. They taste like that one winter in Beijing when I thought I might die from cold and homesickness and dumplings were the only cure. They also taste like a new place. Black sesame, much sweeter vinegar than the kind I’m used to. Thick skin.
 
Walking home after dinner, I paused before crossing the road to watch clouds of steam rising in the dark above the man tossing strips of meat in hot chilli oil and sesame paste at his food cart. I got distracted by the sky; although well after dark, it was purple and burnt orange around the edges. I keep noticing what smoke does to the sky here. The way smoke warps light and colour. Forgetting for a moment that green walking signals are meaningless, I almost walked into the path of a bus.
 
But today a girl asked me for directions in Chinese and I could actually give them to her—in Chinese. I’m learning. I’m learning to cross the road like I know where I’m going. I’ve learnt to stab the dumpling with one chopstick to let the hot soup cool before biting down. 

Street-side 锅贴 for sale at a water village close to Shanghai called Qibao, a.k.a "snack central".