The Wisdom of My Mother’s Kitchen

My mother, Leeann Chin, was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1933. She demonstrated a keen knack for numbers, mastering the abacus at the tender age of twelve. She’d draw crowds to her father’s grocery store, where onlookers would admire her quick fingers manipulating the beads of the abacus. A tomboy, she soon was delivering fifty-pound bags of rice on the back of her bike, riding up to ninety miles a day.

As a child, my mother was curious about food and cooking, but her mother didn’t want her to learn how to cook—that was a job for the hired help. My mother would sneak into the kitchen and follow the family cook around with wide-eyed fascination. She’d watch as the cook’s cleaver danced across the wooden chopping block, gracefully mincing garlic; she enjoyed the sight of smoking ginger-infused peanut oil with green onion threads being poured over a freshly steamed sea bass, and the sizzling sound the oil made as it hit the fish.