This piece is from the brilliant little Manchester-based Filler Zine, lovingly put together by Holly Eliza Temple. You can find her and Filler on Instagram at @fillerzine.
The issue is sold out, so I’ve taken the liberty of including my words in their entirety below…but please support independent publications such as Filler and BUY THEM UP!
When I was a teenager, I lived in Beijing with a Chinese family for a year. Every day after school, I would come home to our apartment, and to the sound of my host mother, calling out to me from the kitchen as soon as she heard the jingling of my keys in the outer metal front door, “回来了吗?” (“Are you back?)” It was always me; my host sister was always still at school, already studying for the massive exam she would take two years down the road. And my host dad was more than likely already home, sitting in his underwear on a low plastic stool, intently playing on the computer and internet he was fortunate to have in 1998. (He was also a Communist Party member, so that maybe explained his “luck” at having online access back then.) But still, she would call out to me upon my arrival, and sit me down with an afternoon snack when I finally made it through the door.
That year, I was so frequently ill. I think it was a combination of anxiety, homesickness, pollution (in the ‘90s, people said the air in Beijing was so toxic it was equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day), unfamiliar food and just being a teenager. Whatever it was, my stomach seemed to always hurt, and my host mom didn’t know what to do with me, food wise.
But she just kept trying. And I remember one day I came home after school and she made me the dish every foreigner who has ever gone to China knows oh-so-well— 西红柿炒鸡蛋— stir-fried egg and tomato— and I loved it. I still do.
It’s not that special. It’s super simple. But it comforted and soothed me in 1998 just as much as it does in 2023. It tasted like home then and still it tastes like home today.
Back then, I was a supremely picky eater and was really, truly anti-vegetable. Oddly though, I always liked the cabbage- 大白菜- that would inevitably land in front of me at a meal on one of our school excursions, or be plopped into a Styrofoam container, next to some rice and tofu with mystery-delicious brown sauce, by the vendor who set up a lunch cart in an alley off Xinjiekouwai Street. I loved it. Still do. But in my host family, 大白菜 was a no-go.
Never. Not once. It never made an appearance at our table. Toward the end of my year in Beijing, I finally asked my host mom why.
During the Cultural Revolution, the government sent my host mother, like so many others from the cities, away from her home, off into the countryside to learn farming, hardship and, along the way, patriotism. She told me that every single day, at every single meal, for four years straight, she ate cabbage. She ate cabbage and waited for the day she could return home. She recalled the sound her boots made in the squishy mud of the farmland, the aches in her young joints and the hunger—hunger that was never satisfied by cabbage. Decades later, she couldn’t even stand to look at it, let alone cook it. It was a Proustian trigger for a time in her life and her country she would rather forget.
For me, cabbage is a different kind of trigger. It brings me back to youth and to China and to the importance of asking questions, getting to know people and learning history. It’s also just fucking delicious.
I live in London now, but every so often I catch a whiff of China in the air. Plaster construction dust. Cigarette smoke. A hint of garlic, onion— something being fried. And sometimes it’s just pollution, hanging heavy in the white-grey sky. I breathe it in, smile to myself and then it’s gone. But mostly, I just dream of China.
Last night I dreamt I went to….China again. I was in Yunnan Province this time, wandering streets I once knew, looking for shaokao and finding instead modern mega-restaurants charging $150/head for a meal. Wenlinjie and its cafes had been replaced with a multistory glass and steel shopping mall. A Manchurian friend who’d owned the once legendary Camel Bar in Kunming and done odd jobs for local crime bosses now drove for Uber. And then I woke up. And I was back in London, back in my home—husband next to me, toddler in the room next door, cat…somewhere.
My China dreams are vivid and memorable. Simultaneously unsettling and comforting. And they’ve increased tenfold since the start of the pandemic. China dream-no dream-childhood home dream-no dream-nightmare-China dream. Repeat. For three years now. And I like it. I like the hints of memory and youth creeping back into my waking consciousness. I like it just as I like the smell of construction dust mixed with stale smoke. I travel with my mind. And with my senses. And in my kitchen.
So I make gongbao chicken, twice-cooked Swiss chard, tofu with peppers, fried rice, chicken and chestnuts, ziran lamb, Sichuan mashed potatoes, yuxiang eggplant, blistered green beans. And it is delicious. And it takes me home. It tastes like home. I am at home. I am home.
My home is here, at my table, with my family. It is a night of stir-fried cabbage, saffron rice and gazmakh, a seven-layer bean dip in the summertime, a Valentine’s Day cheeseburger, a warming bowl of ash reshteh, eggs and tomato, echoes of time, flashes of days past, hope and anticipation for the future.
My toddler is growing up with this kind of food. It might not all be in my blood, in his blood, but it is in my heart and soul. It is the food of my home and, now, of his. And, well, at the risk of sounding absurdly cheesy, isn’t that what food and cooking should be all about— sharing what we love with those we love? Isn’t that home?