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Illustration by Catherine Chan
In my family, Saturday mornings were always for dim sum.
Instead of pancakes and waffles, my weekend would start with a heaping plate of shrimp dumplings, beef tripe and rice noodle rolls, washed down with pots of over-steeped pu’erh tea.
“If you want to eat it, you have to learn to read it,” my mom would say, thrusting the restaurant’s flimsy, yellow order sheet at me. Squinting down at the unfamiliar characters, I would fumble through the names of the dishes, trying to pick out the telltale characters for “bun,” “meat,” or “rice” to match the images in my mind.
“You need to keep up your language,” my mom would add, noticing my difficulty. “Dim sum is about connection to family.”
For my family, yum cha (drinking tea and eating dim sum), took place exclusively at several local cha lous, so-called tea houses that doubled as Chinese restaurants and even wedding banquet venues in the evenings. All of them were loud, unassuming places, with carpeted flooring and flowing purple, red or gold table linens and noisy, white ceramic tableware.
The cha lou was where my immigrant mother would come alive. Usually timid, making up with smiles where her broken English faltered, she would become a charismatic, popular woman amongst the wait staff, asking them about their health and their children, sharing a quick-witted joke or store discount she had just learned about. In return, they would discreetly scribble an indiscernible mark above our order sheet, a code that would discount our meal by 10 per cent. Dim sum was her connection to home, to a social context that felt easy, natural and kind.
It was unsurprising, then, that it was over a plate of fresh, pan-fried turnip cake one Saturday morning that my parents told me about their intentions to move back to Hong Kong, after years of supporting my brother and me in Canada. My grandparents were aging and they wanted to be able to see them through to their last days. I had recently left home for college and was visiting after my first month away. I stuffed an egg custard bun into my mouth and averted my gaze, mumbling that they should do it, if that was what they wanted.
Sensing my apprehension, my mom silently picked up the last shrimp dumpling from the steamer basket and dropped it in my bowl.
“Eat up,” she said, “you might not get dim sum for a while.”
In the years that followed, I often rode the bus downtown from my college campus on Saturday mornings to the closest “ethnic” grocery store in the Hamilton region. It was located in a large shopping mall next to a liquor store and every time I ducked into its entryway, the indiscreet chatter of intermingled Asian dialects would remind me of the jovial hum of the cha lou. Walking up and down the aisles, I perused the options – mostly frozen or day-old dim sum items packaged into take-away boxes, priced at a premium. Most days, I took home a box of steamed cha siu baos, barbecued pork buns, and I ate them greedily, microwaving two or three at a time, in open defiance of dim sum’s communal philosophy. Arranging them on my plate in the most inviting way I could, I would take a photo on my phone and send it to my mom.
“A bit dry,” I would write, “but hits the spot.”
In response, my mom would send me a view of her own cha siu bao from the day, unquestionably shinier and juicier, with a glowing, oily spread of glutinous rice dumplings and beef noodle rolls in the background.
In the years that followed, exchanging photos of dim sum became our common language for sharing our daily lives. In face of what often felt to be insurmountable differences in our realities – mine as I struggled with my identity in a tumultuous young adulthood – and hers as she tried to rekindle her sense of belonging to a home that had she had left decades ago – dim sum remained sacredly uncomplicated. Through our arguments about my career, her politics and our respective life choices that we hadn’t yet forgiven each other for, the knowledge that we could still eat the same cha siu baos and be tethered by the shared experience of dense crumb and savoury tenderness allowed us to hold onto our relationship and believe that we could always have something precious and familiar in common.
We struggle, still. In the same ways I fumble over the characters of the dim sum menu, my experiences of living, being and feeling are often lost in translation with my own parents. I have come to terms that there may never be the right words – but there is always, always the right food. Whenever my parents and I visit one another, the first thing we do is go out to dim sum and pile each other’s plates with greasy, delicious siu mai and perfectly golden egg tarts, as if to say, “I’m sorry,” “I missed you,” “I love you.”
In Chinese, dim sum translates literally into the verb phrase “touch the heart.”
And for me, it always lives up to its name.
Sharon Yeung lives in Toronto.
