a chinese chef from yucatán

househusband

In my family, the parental dynamics were subverted. My mother had a two-hour commute by train and often worked overtime. The generous paychecks from her prestigious architecture firm made her the breadwinner of the house, a status that she later came to regret for how it impacted her relationships with her children. In contrast, my father’s work was within a twenty-minute drive of both the house and the local elementary school. His company was ahead of the curve in terms of American work culture because he had the flexibility to work from home if he needed to take care of any sick kids.

As a result, my dad took on most housework duties, most notably cooking. This always came as a surprise to first-time guests who came over for dinner. Some of them would even have the balls to make a veiled insult about my mom shirking her “wife responsibilities” and making my dad pick up the slack in the kitchen. In response, my dad would hum dismissively at the guest. He genuinely loved cooking and didn’t give a damn if that complied or clashed with other people’s views.

I’ve always been a fan of my dad’s cooking. It wasn’t because I was in the minority of American children who enjoyed eating vegetables because my dad properly seasoned them with aromatics and didn’t over-boil them into soggy oblivion. It also wasn’t because he took on his kids’ challenges to recreate dishes we’d seen on TV or at restaurants, often serving up a tastier and cheaper version than the original. From a young age, I could tell that my dad was the kind of person who could never settle for “good enough,” and he was constantly trying new ingredients and cooking techniques to elevate his signatures.

With Chinese dishes, he almost always hit a home run. His old reliables included lap cheong fried rice, steamed eggs, and Chinese tomato egg stir-fry. A smidgen of dried scallops, a different way of cutting scallion, a new mix of chili oil — Chinese cuisine had a variety of staple techniques which he could mix and match in dishes. In contrast, Western classics were a toss-up. I still gag thinking about the time he attempted a remix of spaghetti & meatballs by replacing the meatballs with odorous chunks of tuna and boiling the pasta in tuna juice-infused water. But hey, I guess that moment taught me that not every gamble can be a winner.

discovery

In the microcosm of our house, everyone liked my dad’s cooking, but I assumed it was because he didn’t have competition. I was too short to reach the stove, my older sister Rachel refused to put in any more effort than operating a microwave, and my mom (if she had free time) somehow had the intuition to horribly fuck up cooking times, to the point that she once literally burned pasta in water. I thought we were just incredibly lucky that the last man standing was a decent cook.

It wasn’t until first grade that I found out everyone outside our house also liked my dad’s cooking. My elementary school hosted an international potluck night, and I convinced my dad to cook up a storm of vegetable mei fun (aka “Singaporean noodles”). I was simply looking forward to eating as many servings as possible without getting yelled at by my parents. I wasn’t expecting to watch grown-ass adults practically stampede themselves to inhale second and third helpings of his food.

The next day, all my classmates found out from their parents that I had a chef for a father. At that age of innocence, they didn’t flinch at the idea of a man doing the cooking for the family. If anything, they ate up the novelty of my dad being the better cook between my parents, and I ate up every inch of the secondhand fame.

I proudly boasted about my classroom celebrity status to Rachel, to which she rolled her eyes.

“Of course everyone likes his food,” she had said. “He used to be a chef at a Mexican restaurant, you know?”

Like all older siblings are want to do, Rachel enjoyed teasing me with exaggerations and lies, often waiting hours before pulling the rug and poking fun at my shit critical thinking skills. This chef claim was a rare instance of veracity on her part. As she found out from a social studies project on family histories, our dad came from a humble family of rice farmers in a rural town in Guangzhou, China. Upon graduating from high school, he took one look at his hometown’s bountiful opportunities of being a rice, chicken, or fish farmer, decided he wanted to do more with his future, and fucked off to the Yucatán Peninsula.

There, he had an uncle who owned a Chinese restaurant and agreed to train him to be a chef. “Train” is a liberal term. He’d taught my dad to never throw water onto hot oil, then immediately plopped him behind a wok and threw him head-first into the restaurant assembly line.

The food they served was a far cry from the Cantonese cuisine my dad had grown up with — it was seasoned and spiced beyond high hell to appeal to local tastes, so my dad initially didn’t have any reference to judge his skill at preparing dishes. He did his best to watch and learn from the experienced chefs when he had the time. Talking to them wasn’t usually an option because most of the chefs relied on muscle memory and couldn’t for the life of them verbalize their cooking processes. Moreover, my dad didn’t know a lick of Spanish (I’d argue he still doesn’t, contrary to his claims at dinner parties), so he had to get creative with his hands and facial expressions when arguing with the Mexican waitstaff about who would take accountability for a messed-up order.

Mexico was a literal baptism by fire, one that graced my dad with the money to immigrate to the States, with the cooking skills to win the hearts and minds of any skeptics. Once in the US, he picked up a cooking job at another Chinese restaurant, working part-time while studying for an associate’s degree in software engineering. He roomed with another Chinese classmate who was coincidentally from his home province, and my dad ended up fancying his roommate’s younger sister.

The sister reciprocated his feelings, but she was worried about her mother who was insanely fastidious about her daughter’s choice of significant others. She’d already dismissed over half a dozen suitors, including a scion of one of China’s richest pharmaceutical companies. My dad was and still is famously dense to the passive aggression of others, so he decided to cook her some shrimp fried rice as an act of generosity. Not as a bribe, just as the duty he believed he should carry out for his girlfriend's mother.

One bite of that fried rice had that proud lady on her knees begging her child to marry this man, and that’s the story of how my parents tied the knot.

struggling pupil

There’s plenty of comedy in the understanding that my dad only learned how to cook Chinese food once he left China and traveled to a whole other continent. (That I literally owe my existence to his cooking skills adds more flavor to the entertainment.)

Truth be told, in comparison to my dad’s escapades, my cooking journey has been milquetoast. I didn’t have any motivation to get behind the stove until I went out of state to Washington, DC for college. I went to one of a handful of American universities that didn’t have a dining hall, instead relying on prepaid dining credits to purchase takeout at affiliate restaurants in the local district. Within the first week of freshman year, I was dismayed to realize that the overpriced food in the city was far below the standards established by my dad. Although there was no chance I’d be able to match my dad’s skills, I figured that the least I could do was learn how to cook for my taste buds.

The next week, I yoinked a bunch of chicken noodle soup ingredients from the local Safeway. I toted my grocery bag down to the basement where we had a communal kitchen. I then opened the door and looked across the common room to see if anyone was in the kitchen. I was affronted by the sight of Anthony, the perpetually-stoned business major, hacking into a bleeding slab of raw steak on the naked kitchen counter. Blood pooling on the counter, dripping onto the floor, and — when he turned to wave at me — splashing onto the white walls.

I did not wave back. I shut the door. I walked back up to my dorm. With a sigh, I pulled out the instant ramen pack from my closet.

My freshman cooking experience both began and ended that day.

In sophomore year, I had a private kitchen that spared me from any future Anthony-like encounters. However, most of my evenings were sucked up by multi-variable calculus, and I again settled for overpriced takeout. I planned my turning point for spring semester. I tried to follow in my father’s footsteps with recreating my favorite meals. I spent hours poring over online recipes and practicing the basics: beef and pork meatballs for Italian wedding soup, a roux for white cheddar mac & cheese, brioche dough for chocolate babka — the list was supposed to go on, but then Madam Corona took the world by storm and sent me home early.

Of the scant pros about Zoom University, at the top of the list was getting to eat my dad’s food again. The tender normalcy of my dad’s cooking ran in stark contrast to the erratic fuckery of the pandemic, and it was a grounding force that curbed the worst of my catastrophizing. He cooked my childhood favorites as consolation for finishing the academic year at home; I enjoyed a much different flavor profile from the rest of the family, yet he still went out of his way to prepare multiple versions of lunch and dinner to cheer me up. I get what people mean when they say cooking is a universal language of love.

I appreciated his efforts, but the love in his food made me all the more remorseful about freeloading. I felt bad that I never bothered to cook with my dad while I was home. The misery of lockdown had me listless and direction-less, unwilling to direct even the smallest bit of energy into basic chores like taking out the trash. Cooking for a family of four was a much too exhausting endeavor that exceeded the emotional capacity of my 2020 self — which only made me more guilty about having pushed that burden onto my dad every day for the last two decades.

“Do you want to help me cook dinner tomorrow?” he’d ask every other day.

“I’ll think about it,” I’d say in response, knowing it wouldn’t cross my mind until the next time he asked.

Even when I returned to DC for in-person classes, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment every time I chose to call in a takeout order instead of cooking something in the apartment. I’d think back to my dad’s slightly downcast look whenever I declined his invitations. Most days I’d still succumb to the ease of convenience, justifying the extra expense with the ache in my back from the uncomfortable desk chair at my internship’s workplace, the hours of essay writing or coding I had to wrap up before the weekend, the chronic migraines from managing recruitment for my student orgs.

But there were some nights when I’d look back at my dad’s eyes, put the phone down, and rummage for leftover ingredients to throw into the wok and make a haphazard meal of fried rice. Those nights, I’d go to bed with an emptier stomach but a clearer conscience.

inheritance

I was about halfway through writing this answer when I made two telling realizations.

1. The question referred to a “dinner guest” in general, yet I never thought to invite people I wasn’t acquainted with.

In other words, I automatically crossed celebrities off the list. I’m not going to pretend I wouldn’t eat a desk chair if that’s what it took to have a dinner date with a hot actor or someone like that, but I’ve been more meaningfully impacted by the people around me than I have been by idolizing or worshiping a celebrity. It’s a lot easier for me to picture myself spending exclusive time with someone I know and care about. Call me unimaginative, I don’t care.

2. The question referred to “dinner” in general, not a home-cooked meal.

Companies love to tack on “handmade” to sell something as authentic and deserving of appreciation. On the tag of a knitted glove set sold at Whole Foods, that word comes off as derisive to me.

But when it comes to food? Of all the meals in a day, I believe dinner is the only one that requires quality food — a good conversation can’t rescue a trash dinner, and what I see as “quality” is “handmade.” And if you’ve gleaned anything from this rambling post, the high standards by which I judge a handmade meal were all set by my dad.

I’ve reflected more on my feelings during the beginning of the pandemic, on beating around the bush whenever my dad asked for help in the kitchen. I think another reason why cooking with my dad was daunting was because I didn’t feel that I belonged in that kitchen. Not in an empowering way where I believed women shouldn’t be shackled to a patriarchal division of house labor, no. It was more that I saw myself as a trespasser in a home kitchen I’d long come to understand to be my dad’s jurisdiction. It wasn’t just the physical space; I realized that I’d never once cooked a Chinese dish before the pandemic. Was that also an unconscious aversion to what I felt belonged to him?

That aversion was juxtaposed by the degree to which I’ve assimilated so much of my dad’s kitchen practices into my own. It’s common for young adults to adopt bits of their parents’ habits into their routines, and my dad’s Mexican chef mythos was a magnetic, almost unavoidable impulse for me to follow his lead. Much like how he’d learned most of his best practices by watching the Yucatán chefs in action, I’ve let myself be guided by memories of watching my dad from the sidelines during my childhood. I smash my garlic cloves with the flat of my knife before peeling and mincing them, I always remember to score X’s into tomatoes for an easy peel after they’ve cooked, and I know the ratios of baking soda to marinade when velveting beef, all because I remember seeing him do the same. To my dismay, I sometimes find making the same exasperated growl as my dad whenever I’m disappointed with the color of a cooked vegetable or the viscosity of a sauce.

I’ve long accepted that I would never be able to cook on the same level as someone who got a wife out of his cooking. Still, shrinking away from what my dad perfected was no way to honor the work he did to feed me throughout my childhood. He ingrained in me the commandment that I don’t ever have to deny myself the joys of eating good food — why should I deny myself the joys of making that same food? Once I got over that mental wall, I started taking the initiative to learn Chinese recipes.

I’m beginning with foods I’ve enjoyed at restaurants but never saw replicated at home, protecting myself from potential disappointment when comparing my food to my dad’s version. The recipes I find on Woks of Life have been integral to my growth. The website is run by a Cantonese family, and it’s so refreshing to see both Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations of dishes and ingredients in the recipe notes. Instagram has also introduced me to Made With Lau, a family enterprise centered around the cooking wisdom of Mr. Lau, who is a Guangzhou native like my dad. Every time I watch a recipe video and hear him explain a technique my dad has used, I’m mentally hooting and hollering like I’m seeing a celebrity cameo.

Learning is a process for sure. There are days when I’m delighted to see my meal has come out the way it looks in the pictures. There are others when I say fuck it and accept that I’ll have to eat a week’s worth of meal-prepped mistakes. (Those days are decreasing in frequency, believe me.) Who knows how long it’ll take me to feel comfortable cooking Chinese food for my family? Will I let my perfectionism bleed into the kitchen and only offer to cook after achieving a 100% track record over a month? Or will I embrace the deviations as a personal signature? Only time will tell.

So, cheers to the Chinese Mexican chef that started it all. Thank you for all that you've cooked in my life, and I’m sorry if you get food poisoning once I finally invite you over for dinner.