My Grandfather's Kitchen

loving memories

My grandfather’s kitchen has changed many times — and even a continent — over the years. I’d like to hope, and pray, that he was able to find solace providing food for his family during the worst years of China during the Cultural Revolution, or in the tense moments of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or the early hopeful years of the end of the Cold War. Despite living through these massively major historical events, what I remember the most about his kitchen was the love that he put into every dish. My favorite dish was a rendition of small pieces of tender lamb, fried up in neutral oil, and doused in cumin. It was a homemade version of what we would get on the streets of early Communist China, where enterprising vendors would sell lamb skewers drenched in chili oil. I remember that I cried because the skewers were too spicy, and hence the homemade version was born.

My parents went to America before I turned five, so my grandfather was my primary caretaker during my toddler years in China. We played Tetris, took care of a box turtle, and went to “the people’s park” where I would devour masterful creations of melted-sugar-turned-zodiac animals. I didn’t know it then, but I do now, that this was the same type of affection that he gave my mom during her childhood years, and that I was lucky enough to be a recipient of his love.

Later on, my grandfather would cook meals in our first home in Texas. Before he was able to become a permanent resident, I always knew that our visits would only last a few months before his visa expired and that he had to return overseas. What I missed the most when he was gone were the humble, but incredibly delicious, noodle and pork dishes that he would make every day. As he became older, this was his chosen form of lunch fare, always.

I think and talk about my grandfather’s kitchen because in a lot of ways, his cooking — and my interactions with him around it — has been a formative part of my life. With moving away, the chances to experience my grandfather’s cooking shrank to almost nothing, but even in his senior residential living days, he would always have something prepared for me in his small one bedroom apartment in the complex. His unwavering dedication to making sure that I was fed, and fed well, has stayed with me as a small, yet hugely significant, sign of unwavering and unconditional love. His cooking brought him joy because it brought me joy. It was the truest form of selfless love.

This summer, I moved into a new place with a beautifully large kitchen — not as big as the million dollar plus homes that you may see a few zip codes away — but definitely an upgrade from the small and increasingly dank apartment that I had been living in since the pandemic.

If you open the cabinets of our new kitchen, you might discover a few things about my personality. The first stop is the “I swear I’m not a hipster” shelf with definitely more than a dozen mason jars, which serve as drinking glasses for “definitely not hipster” homemade kombucha, filtered water, or apple cider. Taking a sharp right and up one level, a blender sits waiting to dutifully gulp down way too many smoothie ingredients, not unlike a post-recovery version of a goose fattened by gavage.

My kitchen resembles nothing like my grandfather’s kitchen, though I’m sure he would have loved it the same. I didn’t realize it until recently, but his love for creation and trying out new things rubbed off on me in ways beyond just cooking. (Sidenote: He even discovered ChatGPT before anyone else in our immediate family and we have three engineers…) I love experimentation. I love discoveries. I love cooking. I love jiu jitsu. Besides the jiu jitsu part (which I’m sure he would have loved to try out if he hadn’t been too old) — all these traits were a result of sitting at the table, during my most formative years, to eat and converse with him about whatever I found interesting that day. He valued me as a person who was worthy of attention, and, despite all of the horrific things that he had experienced in China, he never became a person hardened by the worst of what humanity.

Instead, like most good chefs, he used what he was given to create something worth living for. The harsh sting of spice, transformed, into memories for a lifetime.

In loving memory, March 1933 to June 2023