Michelle
22 and Never Fried an Egg
Since the start of the coronavirus, my mum has been cooking two meals a day, every day. We wake up at around 11 or 12, have brunch, then at 7 or 8, dinner. Our brunch is a simple fare—we alternate between macaroni, instant noodles or oatmeal with boiled eggs. For macaroni or instant noodles, Mum throws in whatever she can find—sometimes frozen dumplings, sometimes sausages—boiled along with the noodles. On weekends, she is more creative. Pancakes made from Japanese pancake mix, or grilled hash brown and fish fingers. Brunches, on the whole, are quick and simple food.
Dinner is a whole different cuisine. We don’t go out to buy groceries anymore. All we eat comes from online shopping. Naturally, the items we can get are frozen food like chicken and fish fillets, and sauces that come in jars in different shapes and sizes. My favourite is frozen ox tongue, but these days they are often out of stock. With these limited variations in ingredients, my mum does her best to make different dishes every day.
Take today as an example. I have just had grilled pork knuckle in black pepper sauce and pan-seared shrimp paste, and am now here writing with a full stomach that rests uncomfortably atop my bulge of a tummy. My mum first submerged the knuckle into a pot of water and boil, before resting it on the table. With a tweezer, she pulled out the fine hair on the knuckle one by one, her eyes crossed with concentration. “When boiled, the skin would shrink, and the hair stands up and is easier to look for,” she says. I know from the few times I’ve helped out that this is by no means an easy job. It takes some force to pull hair, especially fine hair, out from shrunken skin. Your thumb and forefinger quickly redden and swell with the pattern of the tweezer imprinted on them. Sweat forms on your skin, and your fingers slip. “You don’t want there to be hair in your mouth when you eat the collagen,” she told me one time when I had wanted to give up after five minutes of hair-pulling. After twenty minutes of this eye-watering, hand-torturing job, my mum put it into the oven. After a while, she took it out and poked the skin with a chopstick. It was still too soft and flabby. She popped it in a second time. Another good fifteen minutes passed before it was taken out again, and rested on the table. “Do you want it think or thin?” she turned around and asked me, knife suspended in mid-air.
“Whatever you think is best.” I was sitting on the sofa behind her, waiting to get my hands on a slice. The knife went down on the wooden chop board. My mum turned around, a thick slice of meat dangling between her fingers. A drop of juice was hanging on to the lowest point of the meat, trembling in the air. I sat forward and opened my mouth. The piece of heavenly good landed, its juice oozing out between my clenched teeth and trickling down my throat. The skin is now a bit chewy, just the way we like it. “Is it salty?” my mum asked, cutting the pork knuckle with a rhythmic “chop chop”. I tore out the remaining meat hanging outside my lips and put it in my mum’s mouth. “Perfect,” I said. The scrumptious taste still lingers on my teeth. I followed my mum into the kitchen and tilted the pan while she cooked a black pepper sauce. She poured the simmering sauce over the pork knuckle in a small stream, her hand steady and eyes unblinking. And that’s how a plate of grilled pig knuckle with black pepper sauce came to glisten on our table under the yellow ceiling light, and later sit in my stomach.
My mum is a great cook. Not only can she cook some great pork knuckle, she is also an expert in making char siu, Chinese crispy pork belly, stir-fried beef glass noodles, deep-fried cashew nuts… However, as her daughter, I don’t know the first thing about cooking.
The truth is, I have never fried an egg in my life, and I just turned 22. My culinary skills are limited to boiling—I boil eggs, dumplings, meatballs, veggies and noodles. Anything beyond that is beyond me.
I went on an exchange in the University of Toronto in the first semester of Year 3. I chose to stay at the Scarborough campus instead of the downtown one for a Creative Writing course, and my entire family thought I might not survive. Three and a half months, no one cooking. I dragged two heavy luggage with me across the Pacific, one of them packed with instant shrimp roe noodles, instant abalone noodles, instant udons, sesame sauce, sesame oil and cereals. The first things I bought in Canada, which my mum made sure I did even before I got onto campus, were oatmeal, milk, eggs, Nutella and bread. For two weeks, that was it. In week 3, my housemates and I got friendly enough to travel together to the nearest supermarket, a Walmart in the town centre half-an-hour of bus ride away.
I went grocery shopping every Wednesday afternoon, ate my dinner in the canteen at three and picked up my weekly supplies of bread, eggs, and milk, and if necessary, frozen veggies, beef balls and fish. The rest of the week, I alternated,
Breakfast: a boiled egg + a piece of toast with Nutella/honey + oatmeal/cereal;
Lunch: school canteen food from Asian Gourmet/ Pasta Bar/ Pizza Pizza;
Dinner: sesame sauce with instant udon/shrimp roe noodles/abalone noodles + boiled beef balls/steamed fish + boiled veggies.
There was not one occasion where I borrowed cooking oil from my flatmates. Growing up in Hong Kong, I have always ordered the same things in the same restaurants once I found something I like. I always order fish ball vermicelli in Tsui Wah, and Filet-O-Fish with small fries in McDonald’s, no matter for breakfast, lunch or dinner. How long can that last before I get bored? Turns out my tolerance for the same food can last for more than three months, and I still found the boiled eggs, the oatmeal, the Nutella or change of honey, and the instant noodles pretty good.
When I got back to Hong Kong, my mother was surprised—I lost weight when almost everyone else gained weight on a Canadian diet. Those few pounds lost found their way back to my belly within a month. My mum’s cooking did it.
It’s not like my mum never offered to teach me. She asked me to stand next to her while she cooked. She narrated steps like when to add the ingredients and which direction to stir-fry. I leaned on the door frame of the kitchen, looking in.
To me, the kitchen was never an appealing place. Full of dangers—knives on the counter, oil simmering in pans, fire burning in non-illuminous blue. The refrigerator-freezer hybrid and the washing machine took up the right half of the kitchen, and the stove the left. There is only space wide enough for one person in the middle. Every day, when I go in to grab bowls and chopsticks to lay the table, I crab-walk into the tiny space, with my mum standing sideways while cooking. I pass by, pressing on the dials of the burning stove, my bum feels unbearably hot for a second. I pat the hem of my shorts covertly, fearful of it somehow catching fire, while fearful of being teased for such irrational fears.
And let’s not forget about the frightful reaction of burning oil mixed with water. Oil sits motionless in a dry pan, even as fire simmers underneath. Then comes something with water, like chicken wings or shrimps or fish or veggies—a roaring sizzle comes on, as if the dial is turned up to the max. Droplets escapes from the searing pan and jump onto the cool white tiles, leaving tar-like tracks of tears. The tiny dots on the stove that ring the pan stand as testament. I am three steps away in the living room, peering into the kitchen. My hands have never been burnt with boiled oil—never had the chance.
Do these sound like excuses? Most people are scared of fire and oil. Most people remember exaggerated warnings by parents when we are three. We have heard of horror stories that took place in kitchens as adults. Nothing has ever stopped generations upon generations of women going into the kitchen. Not the sweat that drenches their shirts and burns their eyes, not the aching back from bending down at the counter for hours on end, not the sore arm from repetitive chopping, whipping and slicing. All these just for a scrumptious meal for their families. Am I making excuses for my lack of patience to stand outside the kitchen and learn?
True. My mother’s skills took years to grow. Yet my personal preference sits on top of having a choice to make in the first place. This choice—whether to learn cooking or not—is one that is only very recently given to Chinese women. My parents’ hard work and Hong Kong’s general subscription to gender equality in recent years give me a choice.
My mum started cooking by six or seven, cooking to feed a family of five. My grandpa worked as a dim sum chef, waking up at 3 am to go to work in preparation of the morning rush of customers coming in at 6. My grandma worked at the local cha chaan tengs as a waitress. Such manual work was tiring. They were too drained or too late to cook by the end of the day. The work landed on my mother, the only girl among the three children.
She’d bring a bright red plastic stool from the living room to the kitchen. From atop that brittle stool, she saw inside the giant iron wok on the yellowing stove. She spread the oil in the wok with a spatula in a spiral. The wok must have stared back like a swallowing abyss. She lowered her hand into the wok to test the heat, just two inches away from the searing surface, before gingerly picking up a plate of meat, holding it to the edge of the wok, pushing the food down with the spatula. The wok could scream, and oil droplets pranced around. She could not step back on the small stool. Sideways put her into that small dark kitchen crowded with lines of pots, pans and jars. She leaned back as best as she could with her head turned to the side. She had to stir the meats and turn them over. The meats sizzled again, her fist tightening around the wooden handle. The iron spatula was heavy in her deft grip. She was scolded, sometimes slapped, if the expensive meat was burnt. She is the only daughter. Her older brother went out and the younger one played, she said, on his own outside, waiting for her to feed. She shifted a tiny bit forward on her red stool and looked down. Her spatula wobbled. It dived into the smoldering abyss again.
This did not happen to me. I am blessed to be living with my parents, in a middle-class family in a more affluent society. We are not the kind of middle-class that “drink coffee and watch French movies” regularly—the definition of middle-class that Mr. John Tsang, our former financial secretary, subscribed to and apparently shared with his then-HK$302,205 monthly pay cheque. Despite so, we can afford for my mum to stay home and not work after my parents got married. My dad’s hard work in his one-man office is just enough for the entire family to live on. With my mum’s hard work at home, teaching my brother and me, cooking every meal, I can afford the choice of not learning to cook.
It’s also true, diminishing boundaries between gender roles in my generation gives me more freedom to be out of the hot kitchen. While many Western societies are exploring new and fluid genders, and certain Asian and Middle Eastern cultures are still hard wired in their preoccupation of gender roles, Hong Kong has been coming to terms with gender equality. Girls no longer have to wear pink, skirt or heels. Boys in Hong Kong do not have to wear blue, suits or ties. Higher education levels combine with mounting costs of property, so most women work in Hong Kong now even after marriage. If one of the parents has to quit his or her job to care for young children, it is no longer unquestionably the woman—money comes first. We see more female billionaires, like Nina Wang, or decision-makers, like Carrie Lam, and no one qualms about it because of their gender. Women have proven that nothing differentiates a man and a woman intellectually.
My paternal grandma asked my mum to cook her a meal before my parents got married. Good cooking skills used to make a woman “wife material”. Of course, my mum passed with flying colours, but think of what would happen if I am asked the same! She was only a few months older than I am now when she got married. If I was born a generation earlier, I would be looking into a wok with unidentifiable black mass that were impossible to wash off. The “auntie”, who would never become my mother-in-law, would stand at the kitchen door and awash me with disdain and disapproval. I would never have found myself a husband. Not marrying off would be a whole other set of problem. Cooking is still viewed as more of a woman’s role, yet people are much more accepting towards boyfriends and husbands cooking instead of girlfriends or wives. The external report-writing, errand-running and bootlicking is split between husband and wife now, so are the internal grocery-shopping, floor-sweeping and window-wiping.
Then again, Hong Kong people are cooking less. Eating out and having takeaways become routine. “無飯夫婦” (“no rice couple”) emerges—a wordplay on “模範夫婦” (“model couple”, as in “model student”). Both sounds exactly the same in Cantonese. All of which adds up to women no longer needing to cook, which benefits me, and numerous other women in Hong Kong. We are given a choice—to learn or not to learn cooking, that is a question for modern Hong Kong.
I wonder now, as the pandemic is still running amok in the streets, virtually in every corner of the world, what happens to me if I am living on my own? What if I was studying abroad, staying at the dorm and could not return home? I could only die from tastelessness—or maybe my taste buds would hibernate for me to scrape by.
For now, I continue to lean on the wooden frame and look into the kitchen from the outside, waiting for the delicacies that my mum is making, enjoying the privileges that my parents and the society has given me. I’m 22, I don’t know how to cook, and I’m grateful for it.
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