Illustration by Molly Zhou
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For decades, this was my mother’s daily assignment. Every day, she would wash, cut, cook and serve hot, flavourful meals – a luxury I now realize not every family enjoys.
Growing up, I rarely witnessed the process. My job was to stay in my room or at the dinner table doing my homework. Later, as her adult daughter, my job became sitting and relaxing in the living room, waiting to be summoned by the familiar call when the food is ready: “食飯喇! (Sek fan la!)”
Today, being here to witness every movement of Mom’s hand, every angle of the Chinese cleaver as it touches the ingredients and every sound sung before the first taste, I realize how solitary this space is. So many mothers like mine, year after year, fulfill their daily assignments alone. The only evidence of their labour is our empty bowls of rice.
I didn’t grow up with many hugs and kisses, but I shared my childhood with the rhythmic tock-tock of the cleaver and the percussive clink of chopsticks. Today, I stay to listen: the brittle crack of garlic, the confident smash, the clean accuracy of each cut. Even the chilies seem to carry a kind of courage. This is the 煮飯 (chui fan), the conscious preparation.
I watch her eyeball soy sauce, cooking wine and sugar – not guessing, but sensing. Chinese mothers seldom follow recipes, even when they claim to. They follow memory, instinct and the mood of the day. I used to think this was stubbornness. Now, I see something else: She is smelling, pausing and responding to what the chicken needs today. A silent conversation between her and the food. The marinade’s confidence meeting the curiosity of the cooking wine, the saltiness of the soy sauce balancing the sweetness of sugar.
Staging my home for showings is exhausting me
Living in Hong Kong, Peru and Canada, Mom has spent a lifetime adapting to changing ingredients. The ginger of my childhood used to have a sharper bite; now it is milder, softened by time and place. No matter where we lived, she always found a way to make Cantonese food taste like home. Like her ingredients, she has lived beside me and witnessed my changes – my voice, my quirks, my needs – and adapted to every transition I went through.
I had long concluded that my parents were incapable of seeing me, validating me or understanding me. Praise was scarce, encouragement rarer still. But watching her today, I realize something: Mom does notice. She tastes and adjusts, always adding her own quiet touch. She is uniquely herself, yet she makes room for the other.
Time, ingredients and skill aren’t enough. A good stove is needed for proper 鍋氣 (wok hey). In Canada, Mom never had the luxury of a flame – only an electric stove, cleaner and more convenient, but lacking the breath of the wok. Still, the kitchen told its own story: chipped, mismatched bowls, pots with blackened bottoms and a range hood coated in a fine layer of oil. Evidence of a life spent feeding others.
Before 開飯 (hoy fan), the call that breaks the kitchen’s silence, Mom cuts the chicken with the same certainty she has carried through every season of our lives. The thud of the cleaver, the hiss of the pan, the sharp perfume of ginger: 60 years of love expressed without words.
I see the intimacy of that love now. It was never only the food that nourished me. There has always been something about Mom’s cooking that no Michelin-starred restaurant could ever reproduce. I used to think it was the gas stove in Hong Kong, or the sharper ingredients in Peru. Now I understand that every meal carried her attention – her own way of caring.
Leaning into a sideways trip to Pisa
For years, I believed love should sound like words of affirmation or feel like physical affection. I didn’t recognize my mother had been speaking a different language all along. Her love was in the making room, the remembering. I could not understand that language until I learned to speak it myself – until I, too, learned to bear witness and love through attention.
Standing here, watching her cook, I understand she has been present all along, through the quiet discipline of feeding a family.
I couldn’t see it because I was never in the kitchen. I used to move through this space as a passerby, dismissing the cluttered counters, the greased utensils and the sink that was always full. I saw mess, but she was making meaning. This was where love was prepared.
This kitchen has always been her way of seeing me.
食飯喇! (Sek fan la!)
I love you too, mom.
Sandy Ho lives in Markham, Ont.