A Wok Through Time
I am the firstborn daughter of a firstborn daughter of a firstborn daughter— each born on a Tuesday. I descend from greatness— and that greatness is derived from overcoming hardship. My grandmother, or PoPo, Ming Lin, is the pillar of strength for her family that led them to success through the struggle; she is greatness.
Ming Lin sat solitarily stationed at the round dining table that proudly holds memories and served weekly meals to three generations of our family for the past 19 years since I was born. The same style of round dining table exists in every Chinese household, ideal for family-style meals where food is more than just fuel for the body; it is the fuel for connection and conversation that brings people together. She read notes off a piece of binder paper that she’d prepared for our interview, filled front and back with loopy English handwriting that she had to work extra hard to write out. English did not come naturally to my grandmother, though the love she conveyed was never lost through her broken grammar.
Behind her sits a shrine dedicated to my late grandfather, Gong Gong. Though he’s been deceased for 30 years, new incense is lit and fresh fruit is laid by his photo on a daily basis. Respect and gratitude towards ancestors are fundamental values in Chinese culture. The walls around her boast school photos of her nine grandchildren, her pride and joy, documenting the evolution of her lineage and legacy. Once a week, the house is filled with their youthful chatter and laughter as PoPo’s unparalleled cooking fills their bellies and warms their souls. You can taste the love in the tong, or soup, crafted with carefully selected ingredients and the secret ingredient of “healing magic.” Food is her love language now, but it wasn’t always so abundant for her. The weekly feast that occupies the round dining table presents a stark contrast from the scraps of food PoPo survived on in her poverty-stricken youth.
My PoPo has known struggle since before she was even born. While she was in utero, her father fought at the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, defending the Chinese position. The war was terrifying; Chinese women intentionally uglified their faces to avoid being kidnapped, violated, and killed by Japanese soldiers, and men who went into battle hardly ever made it out. It was more than daunting for my great-grandmother to be pregnant with no promise of her husband’s return, PoPo told me. “They told my mom ‘don’t cry, you have baby inside, you cry it’s no good.’” After three months in battle, “my dad come back home, groaning,” malnourished, but alive. The terrors and trauma of Japan were scarring and significant for my great-grandfather. “My father was the only one in his group to come home. It’s very, very lucky.”
“So my grandma, every day make the soup for him. So he get stronger, stronger,” PoPo tells me. Food has acted as an expression of love in my family for generations. The healing properties of the hot, homemade soup that my great, great grandmother once made for my great-grandfather are still evident in the weekly concoctions my grandmother makes for me. Just as the soup was pivotal in nursing my great-grandfather back to health, I grew up with the knowledge that PoPo’s soup is a fool-proof cure for sickness. PoPo’s soup is the result of generations of curation, and the history of my family seems to be a key ingredient.
“I was born in 1942 in Kuan Tong Province, China,” she began, “and 1949 was the [end of the] Civil War.” The conclusion of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945 precipitated the uprising of the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang. The impending grasp of communism over freedom and democracy in China pushed my PoPo’s parents to seek refuge in Hong Kong with my grandmother and her older brother when she was just seven years old. “In China, my father was very rich— has house, has land, has everything. But you know, China becomes communist. Some people went to Taiwan and some went to Hong Kong. So we become refugees to Hong Kong.”
A cramped, neglected hut provided them shelter as my great-grandparents worked to build a life in their new country. “My father is a very smart boy. He make money from his meat company [as a butcher] while my mom is selling the vegetables in the market. I was take care of the house! My oldest brother and me get one meal a day. Very poor situation.” Shouldering weighty responsibilities from a very young age, her sacrifices became a primary part of who she would become..
The family was extremely poor, but “between not having knowledge of birth control methods and increasing the labor pool for the family,” PoPo’s parents produced three more children after moving to Hong Kong, according to Losana Blair, my mother, and PoPo’s first daughter. The family of four that had sought refuge in Hong Kong was now a family of seven, with three boys and two girls. As the oldest sibling, PoPo adopted the role of caretaker at a very young age.
Education was a luxury for the impoverished in Hong Kong, until the Christian church made it accessible in exchange for adherence to their beliefs. Up to her high school graduation in 1964, “I helped them talk about Jesus Sunday,” PoPo explains, “and I don’t know, I just followed them. Teach the kids how to love Jesus. And after that the church people give them one piece of bread, one cup of water to those small kids. They don’t have slippers, nothing. It mean a lot.”
In the midst of a life that had been nothing but fighting to survive, Ming didn’t have time to fantasize about love. But after meeting through a mutual friend, “Well, I married your Gong Gong,” she told me, the softness in the way she said his name, evident through the phone. Mrs. Lin Wong Sau Ming married Mr. Lin Peng Fai in 1969, and in 1970, had their first child— my mom. Three kids followed, two boys, two girls, and they all studied in a private school in Hong Kong which was ruled by Britain at the time. The six of them could only afford a little two-bedroom apartment, 40 stories up with no elevator.
Although they had settled down and started a family in Hong Kong, fear still pervaded the sphere regarding China’s potential power. Hong Kong was a safe haven for now, but living under democracy was not a long-term guarantee. “We were just scared they will change to be communist,” PoPo articulates.
“In 1975, my mom bring Auntie Alice and Uncle Timmy with my Gong Gong to immigration to United States. My mom stayed here [in the U.S.] and my father went back to Hong Kong. Uncle Timmy begging me so many times to immigration to here! But your Gong Gong, he don’t like to come here, so what can I do. After ten years, my mom put the petition for me to come here.”
At 40 years old, my Gong Gong foresaw the challenges involved in starting a new life in a new country. If it were up to him, he would have lived out the rest of his life in Hong Kong, and he did withstand a decade of attempted persuasion. However, one conversation with a friend in 1985 ultimately shifted his perspective. Immigrating to America was a cultural craze. A land promising opportunity, freedom, and success in exchange for hard work was extremely appealing to those who had been working hard for little to no reward in the East. “You have to go because United States is good for the kids, more opportunity,” the friend urged Gong Gong, “You go, you are young at 40. Whatever you want to do. Just working hard, you can do it. The kids don’t need to pay for school, it’s free. You can just work for the house payment. The food is cheap. You and your wife working hard. You will be okay!” When the friend shed light on how America would benefit his children, Gong Gong began to seriously reconsider the move. It was up to him— PoPo had been convinced for a while already.
“I told him, you want to go now? Call Uncle Timmy.” Uncle Timmy was pivotal throughout the process.
Immediately after receiving Gong Gong’s call, “Uncle Timmy got up at the crack of dawn, drove from Watsonville to San Francisco to line up in front of the Immigration office and fill out a tall stack of paperwork by hand with his limited English all before the internet existed,” my mom explains to me, and just like that, the family of six was set to depart in six months.
They successfully immigrated to the United States in 1985 and spent some time in Watsonville, California before settling down in San Jose, California. It seems they made the right choice, as political turmoil between Hong Kong and China is still prevalent to this day. “You know, right now the One Country system, there’s a lot of problems. Don’t go yet,” she warns me over the phone, “It’s still very uncomfortable to be there. It’s not the same. 4 years I haven’t gone to Hong Kong,” a poorly veiled pain in her voice.
Unfortunately, the family of six dwindled to five just seven years after immigrating to the U.S. At age 52 in 1992, Gong Gong passed away after a long, two-year battle with cancer.
While coping with the loss of the love of her life, PoPo had to sustain herself and her four children in a brand new environment where she didn’t know the language. She had no choice but to work as hard as she could to establish their lives— they had come too far to fail. “I had to work hard to take care of my husband when he was sick for two years and keeping the household running. When he died, I was holding down multiple jobs and working night shift at the hospital to support the family… I worked from 3–11, 11–7, almost 16 hours a day for 10 years.”
“I’m so happy all the kids are grown up, graduated from college, have good jobs, and have gone on to start a family of their own,” PoPo says, smiling through the phone. “I love all my grandkids,” she reminds me, “that’s why I still cook for them every week. But after I get the cancer and the COVID-19, I stopped to cook every week. But I still cook sometimes and call you guys to come home and pick up the food.”
In 2019, Ming Lin was diagnosed with GI cancer. The diagnosis prompted months of grueling treatment that required immense support from the same family that she had worked so tirelessly to provide for. After decades of selfless sacrifice for her kids, it was time for the roles to reverse and for them to tend to their mother. “Lewis came over in the middle of the night once,” she recalls, explaining that, “they think I would kill myself because I was hurting! Chemo and radiation is very bad. I was depressed, you know.”
Ming Lin was no stranger to fighting for her life, but this situation was different. She had struggled circumstantially in the past but had maintained relatively good health throughout her immigration journeys. She had watched cancer slowly take away her husband, and now, she faced the same threat. She desperately wanted to continue cooking for her nine grandchildren and watch them “finish college, get a job, get married, and settle down.” Cancer further contributed to the decline of her mental health when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, isolating Ming further away from her family. The chemo had already deteriorated her immune system, so weekly family dinners were off until further notice. Still, through it all, she kept cooking. Despite the inevitable agony that accompanies cancer treatment, PoPo still cooked and packaged full-course Chinese meals for her family to come to pick up from her house. The cooking simultaneously served as a form of communication and therapy. Masked and distanced, her love was still conveyed through the food, though the meals were no longer shared at the round dining table in her living room. Cooking for her family brought a sense of normalcy in a truly weary, unprecedented time.
When she’s not cooking for her family, Ming volunteers at a senior citizen center at lunchtime to help distribute food and does Tai Chi in her local park with her friends. “I hope I can stay for so many years to see all the grandkids get married. Finish college and get married,” she wishes aloud, emphasizing, “I love all my grandkids.” Being the first of them, it is an honor for her to be able to see me move across the country for college and forge my own destiny while appreciating her legacy. “When you come home, just call me,” she tells me, “I’ll make the food for you. I made char siu last week, over one pound. Your brother ate it all!” For PoPo, cooking is the clearest method of transmitting love. The connection she fosters with her loved ones through food compensates for the language barrier she sometimes faces in her communication with them; it is always a guarantee that at PoPo’s house, a filled belly also means a filled heart.
Ming Lin is the epitome of bringing the American Dream to fruition and proves those journeys are not for the faint of heart. “That’s why I stand up for working hard,” she emphasizes, “because look at how far we’ve come.” Her lifeforce energy is unmatched; she has instilled an incredible work ethic and a “bring it on” attitude into her children and grandchildren. Having played a myriad of roles in her lifetime: refugee, wife, mother, immigrant, nurse, widow, head of household, and patient, just to name a few, grandmother and chef are by far, her favorite. My grandmother survived cancer, COVID-19, and communism, and “today,” she says proudly, “I can say that all my hard work over the years has paid off.”
