Steamed Buns

On day trips to San Francisco, a forty-minute drive from our house in San Jose, we’d swing by Chinatown and double-park our Aerostar van in a sleepy alley while my mom waited in line at the bakery to pick up two large pink boxes of baozi, or pork buns—what we call siopao. Sometimes us younger kids would tag along with an older brother or sister to the back door of the fortune-cookie factory and sneak in to watch the assembly line: hundreds of hot round steel plates turning, each given a squ