Heart Warming Food

Submitted by Fiona Ng, 4th Year Medical Student at the University of California, San Francisco; MPH Candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; Born & Raised in San Francisco; Daughter of Immigrants for Toishan and Guang Zhou

This submission was a response to a discussion board post in a seminar on Asian American History in the Age of COVID-19 at UC Berkeley on February 2, 2021.

Describe a meaningful food memory (or memories) during COVID-19 from 2020-2021. How is this memory distinct and/or similar from pre-COVID-19 times?

Every year, our family would start the morning of Thanksgiving and Christmas with dim sum at a Cantonese tea house. There would be so many people in line that you can barely walk up the two flights of stairs to put your name down on the waitlist. If we got to the lines at 10am, we can expect to start eating around 12pm. Grandpa usually only eats a few items. Egg custard buns, soup infused dumplings, fish fillet porridge. His goal was really to see everyone sitting around the table, and to watch his son work as an experienced waiter at the tea house.

After dim sum, my sister, my mom, and I would usually go to a nearby Asian supermarket to buy raw material for hot pot: thinly sliced beef, sliced chicken breast, shrimp, fishball, tripe, assorted veggies, assorted noodles, and my favorite -- taro noodles. On cold winter nights, having hot pot with the family is so heartwarming and tummy warming. All eleven of us would hover around two dinner tables and three portable stoves. Some years, we would also bring in the turkey and gravy to accompany the steaming hot pot.

But things were much different in 2020.

The eleven of us have not had a meal together for a year now. Instead of the early morning dim sum, we ordered takeout dim sum to accompany my mom's homemade congee. Instead of the usual hot pot, we each celebrated very differently. For my household, we had smoked ham, mashed potato, and boiled corn. For my uncle's family, they ate sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. Only my aunt's household carried out the tradition of having hot pot as a family of three. Despite eating very different meals, we all decided to FaceTime each other at 6:40pm to have dinner together as a family over the virtual platform. This was a memorable food moment for me, because, I think I saw my grandpa teared up after not being able to see my uncle's and my aunt's families for the past year. This year, I hope COVID-19 will be better controlled, everyone will get vaccinated, and hopefully, and maybe, the three households can celebrate holidays with a warm pot of love and food again.