For Auntie Shu, a steamed pork patty evokes memories of her childhood. 

“My mom used to make it for us a lot when I was little,” she told me, explaining that she learned to make it from her mother to assist with chores at home. The dish was usually served with blanched vegetables with oyster sauce. 

During her childhood, she told me, China’s economy was quite poor, so being able to eat even a meat dish like this was already quite special. 

“When we were studying, we would eat things like winter melon peel and different kinds of wild vegetables, because they weren’t expensive.”

After she came to the US 26 years ago from Guangzhou, where she grew up with her five siblings, she continued to cook, but noticed that the food didn’t taste quite the same as when she lived in China. 

“The foods we ate when we were younger were almost all natural,” she explained, “but here in America, it’s different because there’s so much frozen food—so the ingredients are very different.”

Now that she lives at Fireman, she’ll still make her steamed pork patty now and again, even though the taste has changed.

“It goes really well with rice, and there are no bones,” she said. “And it’s home food, you know? You just can’t get that at restaurants.”