I remember a time when steaming dishes of dumplings were laid out before me on the dining table. I was five years old, and my small bowl of Chinese vinegar with two drops of sesame oil sat under my nose, eagerly awaiting the three hot dumplings that my grandma would soon drop in. She’d always break them in half for me in my bowl so my small fingers could navigate my chopsticks, and that day, I was the pride and joy of my family for devouring a total of nine dumplings.
That was the last time I remembered looking at a plate of dumplings without fear — at least until recently.
Somewhere along the way, food transformed into something I avoided. Any plate became a conversion of fat-protein-carbs in my eyes. The rich fat on pieces of decadent red-braised pork belly remained untouched on my plate, and even my mom’s delicious stir-fried dishes were secretly rinsed off in the sink before I’d attempt to pick away at them. Passing bakeries consumed me with conflict for the rest of the day because they looked so, so delicious. I wanted a taste so bad, but no, I couldn’t.
What my family saw as a “glow-up” before college was, in reality, my refusal to cook with salt or oil. I limited myself to raw foods for weeks and pretended I had simply outgrown my love for my childhood favorite foods. Steering clear of soup dumplings, BBQ skewers, and hearty pots of Chinese stew, I opted instead for bland salads and spinach smoothies.
The restriction ate away at me as I started college. I refused to eat before drinking to “save” the calories. Despite the arrays of dishes in the dining halls, I spent 90% of my time at the salad bar, and the rest of the time lurking in the dessert section mustering the occasional courage to nibble a cookie. The additional walking in New York City resulted in me rapidly losing weight my first semester, which, as I anticipated, was celebrated not only by my peers, but also by my family.
My mother’s beauty was hard to miss. She’s a slender petite woman with voluminous curly hair, big bright eyes, and her classy fashion choice was always a topic of envy. She taught me the meaning of strength, independence, and courage as I saw her create the life she wanted for us in America. My mom gave up her life in our shabby Northeastern Chinese town when I was six years old. During our first few years in the states, I watched her work consecutive night shifts and still get up in time to wake me, cook breakfast, and take me to school. When I started college at NYU, she slept at work six days a week to put me through school, only to come home for one day to dust off the house. I was too young to understand it at the time, but when she bought her first house in 2019 after 13 years of moving here, those walls represented something only immigrant parents can really understand. Her words were “I just wanted to give you a home.” What she meant was, this is something that is finally ours. In a place where we had to start over, we had something that finally belonged to us.
My mom imparted invaluable lessons growing up, but our culture also taught us that a woman’s beauty is paramount. Despite her exhaustion, my mom maintained her elegant appearance. She always reminded me that as immigrants, we must pay extra attention to how we looked; we shouldn’t give anyone a reason to look down at us. My naturally tan complexion contradicted the porcelain-white Chinese beauty standard, and the fixation on my appearance naturally grew towards my weight as I got older. While genetically slender, my mom and her three sisters dreadfully feared weight gain. As I rounded out my teenage years, comments about my weight, what I was eating, and what I was wearing gradually took up a dangerous amount of space in my head.
Eating disorders are addictions. You’re stuck in a cycle, and even though you know it’s bad for you, you don’t know how to stop. Years of restriction led to an overwhelming preoccupation with food, which manifested in binging, then overcompensating by purging. The painful details of my four-year struggle with bulimia are oddly blurry, numbed by a filter of shame as I walked around hiding this part of me that I despised but couldn’t let go.
In a culture where famine was still a childhood memory for many, food was not meant to be wasted. Food was nourishment, and the idea of intentionally restricting or purging would have been absurd to those like my grandparents who grew up in the countryside and never had enough to eat for their four little girls. Northeastern Chinese stews were hearty, crafted to keep hunger at bay. Buns and baos were designed to fill you up for hours. My thoughts and behaviors would have been incomprehensible to my traditional Chinese family, which is likely why I wouldn’t touch my favorite foods for years, at least without bringing it back up.
This past March, I visited my family in China for the first time in six years. There was a stillness unlike earlier springs. The winter chill overstayed its welcome, seemingly in response to my grandpa’s passing just a few weeks prior.
My grandpa always requested peanuts with his dumplings, sometimes a Tsingtao beer, if grandma allowed it. He liked sauerkraut or chive filling since meat was hard on his dentures, which made clicking sounds when he chewed. This time around, we bought giant sauerkraut dumplings from the morning market made of purple forbidden rice. My grandma still broke them in half for me, except only one giant dumpling could fit in my bowl. This time, I couldn’t eat nine, but I ate until I was full, and over the memories of my grandpa’s clicking and the warmth of my belly filling up, I found solace.
