I read somewhere that to have children is to preserve and carry on one's legacy - to grant oneself immortality.
While I don't particularly subscribe to those thoughts, lately I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about my parents, my grandparents, and other relatives of elder generations. I try to recall the lessons they taught me, their mannerisms, favorite sayings, and the stories that they told.
Faced with a baby to be born in a few months, I am suddenly afraid that I don't remember all the tales of generations past, important family traditions, treasured cooking recipes...that these would be mangled by my fuzzy memory and I can't do justice passing them on to my child...
Both Nancy and I grew up being very close to our maternal grandmothers. We were both raised with tremendous love and extended nurturing from our respective 外婆, who both mastered the kitchen.
When Nancy was a child, Nancy's grandmother specifically instructed her not to learn to cook, that her future success was to be in the books and she was to focus her energy on school.
My grandmother, on the other hand, enjoyed teaching her recipes even though I wasn't always an attentive student in her kitchen. I did learn some simple dishes, but my grandmother always prophesied that many of her recipes were certain to be lost after she passed away.
She was right. She passed away in 1997.
It is a week to Chinese New Year. When I was a child, Chinese New Year was always the biggest celebration of the year. We would stock up on foods, decorative flowers and items, clean our home, and put out new clothes to wear on New Year's day. My grandmother liked to prepare many foods to celebrate New Year's. My favorite, as a child, had to be the home-made chips that she'd prepare as a New Year's snack. It comprised of a mixture of four or five different roots that she'd gather pounds of, cut up into very thin slices, and deep fry them into chips. My favorite root was 茨菇. It's a small, sweet root similar to water chestnut about the size of a ping pong ball with a stem. It's sweet and makes really delicious chips.
I haven't had them ever since my grandmother passed away. See, I never learnt to make it. Granted, slicing and deep frying a root can't be overly challenging as a recipe, but for me it was simply a snack that only my grandmother made. As she often said, only she can efficiently cut slices thin enough to be fried into crunchy chips. She had mastered the technique as a young lady slicing 桑葉 to raise silkworms.Last week I saw nice 茨菇 selling at 99 Ranch and decided that I should give it a try. After soliciting some important tips from my parents, I set out one Saturday evening and deep fried 茨菇 chips. After 4 hours, two sore wrists and an aching back, and a stinking kitchen, here's the result in a small glass bowl:
I was ecstatic when my first chips turned up and they tasted decent. Jumping with joy, I immediately gave some for Nancy to taste. With a little frown of her brows, she proclaimed, "they are just like potato chips, aren't they?"In truth, they probably are. But with wrists sore from hours of meticulous slicing and back aching from deep frying in small batches, these precious chips were a lot more to me. They represent a childhood memory recreated and a recipe restored. They are not all lost from my memory, what a relief!
I hope to capture these recipes, memories, family traditions and pass them to my child. I am sure Nancy and I would have many of our own to add. Our child will have lots to learn and memorize. Surely, for a long, long time he/she probably won't care to listen, recall, or enjoy much of what we have to tell...
until one day when he/she becomes a parent perhaps.
