Sik Fan

In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you. In the corner on the left, underneath the staircase, there is a table and a booth-like bench built into the wall; at my age, if I’m sitting down properly, my eye level is just above the edge of the table. But this is the perfect height to take in as much of the food I’m served as possible. There’s the savory, salty rice porridge with knobs of fried dough for dipping. Then there’s the molded rice filled with pork or sausage, wrapped in long, green leaves. In my memories, the rice is sticky and steaming and infused with the flavor of the meat inside, which is soft and red with marinade. It’s absolutely delicious; it is my favorite food.

My Bak Bak doesn’t speak any English. When we call her on the phone every Chinese New Year, my sister and I recite the lines our mother rehearses with us before dialing: hello, nei hou ma, this is Xia Ping and Choy Yi (our Chinese names, which only she calls us by). Gung hey fat choy. Do jie for the lai see. She continues on for a minute or two, her voice softly crackling through the phone, and every few seconds or so we say hai, hai ah, good-naturedly implying that we understand. Then we say, okay, I love you, bye, and hang up the phone.

Throughout the rest of my childhood, we never ate much Chinese food. There are multiple reasons for this. First, our parents did not cook it at home. Both of them were born and raised in the United States and grew up as the children of immigrants, speaking only English. As a result, I am more removed from Asia and Asian culture than many of my Asian peers and friends, most of whom are immigrants or first-generation Americans. Second, my sister and I both have severe peanut and tree nut allergies. While we can eat most restaurants now and not have any problems, in the early 2000s this was a significant challenge, as many people did not have the same understanding of cross-contamination as they do now. My mother always called ahead and made sure to tell our servers to check our orders with the chef, which effectively limited us to dine only where the staff also fluently spoke English.

I assume if we had stayed in Massachusetts that things would have been different, and we’d have grown up with home-cooked Chinese meals from our extended family as a regular part of our lives. But the summer before I turned five, we moved to upstate New York, to my mother’s hometown in the suburbs of Albany. Despite living fifteen minutes away from my Chinese grandparents, my only memories of Chinese food there are the takeout beef chow fun they would order when we first moved and ate dinner regularly at their house, and lunch at a Shanghainese restaurant after my sister’s high school graduation. Occasionally, my Por Por brewed chrysanthemum tea in a glass teapot, so we could watch the dried flowers unfurl like ribbons in the water.

***

I’m seven years old the first time we go to the Philippines. It is February 2010, and my great-grandfather is turning a hundred years old. We see my Filipino grandparents in New Jersey multiple times a year, especially on Christmas and Easter, and I’ve been on planes before to Disney World. However, I’ve never met my father’s extended family, never been out of the country. At the airport my mother asks the flight attendants at the gate if we can pre-board, so we can wipe our seats down to make sure there are no crumbs or residue that could give us anaphylaxis. She’s emailed the airline multiple times in the months leading up to now, but on our overnight flight they can’t guarantee that the packaged meals will be safe for us. My sister and I snack on apple slices and lukewarm sandwiches that my mother, ever prepared, has packed in Ziploc bags.

For the week we are in the Philippines, my parents are even more vigilant at restaurants than normal, double-checking that our food isn’t contaminated and our drinks don’t contain ice or tap water. I quickly develop a love for green mango shakes, equally sweet and sour, and I order them almost every time we go out. For the second half of the week, we stay at my family’s house in Tagaytay, and there we fish for small tilapia in the resort pond and stain our fingertips peeling mangosteens. But for the first few days after we land, we stay in a suite at the Oakwood hotel in Manila. At the hotel breakfast I discover guava juice and love it immediately because it’s pink. Surveying the buffet stations, I’m surprised to see jook—the rice porridge my Bak Bak makes in Boston. But the printed label next to it calls it “congee,” a word I don’t recognize. When I go back to the table to tell my parents that the hotel is calling some wrong name, I’m shocked when my father lets me know that it’s the Filipino version of the jook I know, and he grew up eating it with fish and chocolate.

The thing about growing up as an Asian-American is that you feel like you have to prove yourself. It is a foreign idea, it seems, to many other Americans, that an Asian person could be multicultural, that the continent of Asia has multiple distinct cultures, or that individual Asian countries are ethnically diverse. In high school I settled on a succinct way to communicate this: I am half Chinese, half Filipino, and second-generation American. It was easier to say one sentence than to explain my entire family history, or my feelings of cultural inadequacy. At that age, every facet of my identity seemed to encroach upon the other, simultaneously too big and too small. Too Filipino to blend in with my fairer-skinned, straighter-haired East Asian friends; too Chinese to fit in amongst my White classmates and teammates, who barely even knew what the Philippines was. I was only 50% of any one thing; everything, then, felt like a deprivation or a comparison.

The thing about being a Filipino-American is that you get used to people understanding your existence largely in relation to others. We are jokingly called the Latinos or Mexicans of Asia, since we were colonized by Spain for over three hundred years. It’s true that we make empanadas and flan, too, and that our lumpia and pancit developed from Chinese egg rolls and noodles brought to the islands through trade and migration. But that doesn’t make our dishes any less Filipino, just as the food we make in diaspora with the ingredients we have readily available isn’t any less authentic. Once I learned this—that I had full access to multiple rich cultures and cuisines—I was able to enjoy, explore, and expand my palate. In 2020, we spent Christmas apart from my grandparents for the first time, not wanting to expose them to COVID-19. I lamented on a FaceTime call with my parents that I would miss my Lolo’s lumpia, so my dad got the recipe from him and learned how to make it himself. Now, we make it every year: my dad prepares the filling, all of us wrap the rolls, and I like to be at the fryer, eating them as soon as they’re cooked and cooled. When I last visited my grandparents’ house for Easter, Lolo made barbecued pork, plantain turon, and a pot of congee. I helped myself to everything, slurping down my bowl, the rice complemented by pieces of chicken and dried red safflowers.

***

Fast forward fourteen years—I’m on my first date with the man who will soon become my boyfriend. We are at the Met, slowly walking through the 17th-century European paintings on the second floor, quickly bonding over our similarities: we are both Chinese-American twenty-one-year-olds who didn’t grow up speaking Chinese, nor regularly eating Chinese food. Unlike me, however, his grandparents are still in China. He lived with them during his gap year, took Chinese classes, and stayed for college. This is his first time back in the United States in three years, and technically he’s studying abroad, even though he is back living with his mom again in New Jersey, in the same house he lived in when he was five.

In the coming months I will eat what I estimate to be as much Chinese food as I ever have in my life until that point, if not more. In December, he’ll book a reservation at Szechuan Mountain House on St. Marks so I can try frog legs and mapo tofu; in April, we’ll take the 7 into Flushing for sauerkraut fish with his friends for his birthday. Both times I will make a valiant effort to eat as much as I can while avoiding the tongue-numbing seeds of the Sichuanese peppers as much as I can, before conceding defeat and filling the rest of my stomach with rice. Now, though, sitting on a bench in the exhibit, he asks me what my favorite Chinese food is. I flounder for a moment, trying to adequately explain that I don’t eat enough Chinese food to truly have one, then trying to pronounce Bak Bak’s food the way I think I remember it’s supposed to be said. I say dong, with a long “o” sound—not like long, definitely not like dung. He’s puzzled—he doesn’t understand me, doesn’t recognize it when I describe it instead. Later I do a Google search and find a Wikipedia page for something called zongzi in Mandarin that looks like what I remember, but the Cantonese name listed is jung or zung. Still, I think it’s the same thing, but I can’t be fully sure.

Even if I did speak Chinese, I still probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with most other Chinese people. My family is from a village in Guangdong province and speaks that village’s dialect of Cantonese. When I try to remember the words and phrases I once knew in Chinese, I hear them in my Por Por’s voice, with her distinct tone and pronunciation. When I try to say them out loud, I sound nothing like my boyfriend, who learned to speak standard Mandarin. But he sounds different from his mom and grandparents, who speak Shanghainese with each other. My close friend had us over for dinner last summer after she moved into a new apartment, and they played a game where they each said the Chinese translation of one English word. She, from Shenyang in Northeast China, has a different accent compared to her Taiwanese boyfriend, so both of them sound different from mine. I watched the three of them laugh round after round, comparing vocabulary, unable to participate with them.

But food, I think, has always been a stronger shared language. My friend hosts me and our other friends at her apartment to make dumplings, all of us struggling to pinch the wrappers together neatly but laughing the entire time, eating all of them that evening. On our third date, I brought my boyfriend to Mama Fina’s in the East Village for lunch, and took it as a green flag when he enjoyed the beef, garlic rice, and fried egg in his tapsilog. And whenever I think of my Bak Bak, I think of her cooking. I think about how she immigrated to America with nothing, how she fed six children, twelve grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren throughout her life. I remember how she smelled like Chinese herbs, and how I still say my favorite Chinese food is hers.

***

My Bak Bak passed away in February 2014 when I was eleven years old, and my Por Por passed away in November 2024 when I was twenty-two. As the tenth year after her passing came, I realized I had as many years of memories with my great-grandmother as I did without. It saddened me to know I hadn’t eaten her jook or dong in more than half my lifetime, that one day I ate her cooking for the last time without knowing it. After my grandmother died, it hit me that I hadn’t heard her voice in almost three years, not since before her Alzheimer’s progressed and overcame her ability to communicate verbally. I scrolled through years and years of old videos, trying to find one with her in it, before going through my voicemail and finding a message from her in 2019, telling me she’d call back later.

When someone you love loses their memory or passes away, you think about your own methods of remembering differently. My mother recorded the stories my grandmother would tell her about her childhood in Chinatown; in my senior year of college, I began writing a novel, with each chapter focalized on a different character based loosely on me, my sister, my mother, and my Por Por. It feels important to write down as much as possible, so that future generations of our family know what we were like and the things we’ve gone through. But it’s impossible to get everything right. At her wedding in October 2024, my great-aunt told us that she had a recipe for Bak Bak’s jook, but not the recipe, because no one does; she never wrote it down, and she didn’t have the technology that we do now. Bak Bak had to wait by the stove, diligently stirring to make sure the rice didn’t burn, but now we have slow cookers for that. A week later my sister texted in the family group chat that she had tried our aunt’s recipe at home, but it tasted off. Was it the soy sauce, or the scallion, or the ginger that was different? I found myself feeling envious. My sister is three years older than me, so she had three more years than I did with our Bak Bak, three more years to remember exactly what her food tasted like. If I tried to make the recipe, I wondered if I would really remember, or if I would settle for what is good enough.

But time has also opened up new opportunities. To get around my anxieties around cross-contamination in restaurants, I’ve been learning to cook more Asian dishes at home. I follow Asian-American food influencers on Instagram and TikTok, save and replay their videos over and over so I know how to julienne the ginger and scallions properly, and how to douse them with hot oil so they curl into ribbons afterwards as a garnish on top of Cantonese-style steamed fish. And in February 2025, I went to China for the first time, accompanying my boyfriend to Shanghai for a week before his spring semester started. Before our flight, we printed out slips of paper with my allergies listed in Chinese characters, so we could easily hand them to waitstaff at restaurants; having these notes, as well as a free translator, meant that I fortunately had no problems eating and enjoying the food there. We celebrated Chinese New Year with hotpot at Haidilao, and the next day he introduced me to his grandparents, who made a spread of traditional Shanghainese dishes for me to try. Later in the week we took the train to Suzhou, where we walked the stone streets along the canals and ate crab noodles with garlicky broth, which I remember as my favorite meal from my trip.

I will admit that the fear of getting Alzheimer’s, of feeling myself slip away as I die, lingers in my mind. But the beautiful thing about getting older is that I am determined to create as many memories and try as many things as I can, and just as I have gone more to Asia, more of Asia has come home to me. Asian food is increasingly more accessible in grocery stores, especially in the New York Metropolitan area, as well as through online ordering. I now live two blocks down from a Chinese supermarket, which houses the most expansive and fresh selection of produce and seafood for me to choose from, along with imported goods; it’s the only place I can buy mangosteens and live lobsters and jarred jackfruit, which I add to my grocery list so I can make turon. I asked Lolo to teach me how to wrap the jackfruit and plantain together when I visited last Christmas, writing down the steps and ingredients in my phone and adding the note to my “Recipes” folder. After being introduced to Weee, I typed “dong” and “zongzi” into the search bar, delighted when frozen dong in three different regional varieties popped up, ready to be delivered to my door in days. I’m excited to try each one of them, to remember what I can of my Bak Bak.

When the blizzard tears through New York, my sister sends me her newest jook recipe to try, so I can keep warm and have enough food to last being snowed in. I make it the way I imagine Bak Bak did, stirring the rice consistently so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. I don’t remember what hers smelled like, but I imagine it was like this. I imagine my sister, standing at her stove in Boston, adjusting her measurements and remembering our childhood family meals. I imagine what my Por Por might have said if I called her to tell her I tried making it, how she would laugh. It is these thoughts that nourish me: that we are connected through time and space this way. That cooking is an act of cultural retention and care, eating an act of remembering, and remembering an act of love. Somewhere in time, I’m still on the phone with Por Por, still sitting at Bak Bak’s table. It is the love of my family that sustains me, and our food that keeps our memories alive.

Kimi Canete is a writer and journal publishing coordinator from New York. She studied English and American literature, creative writing, and French at New York University. Her poems have been published by Laurel Moon, October Hill Magazine, and The Lupa Newsletter (forthcoming May 2025). She is on Substack, and can be found at: https://kimiinparis.substack.com/