My Hakka Mentor

I met Fah Liong in 1971 when I joined the staff of Sunset magazine, where she also worked. She was one of the first Hakkas I met to whom I wasn’t related. Throughout my journey, this self-taught cook, who took great inspiration from her Indonesian parents, agrees to share her repertoire of Hakka dishes and answer my many questions. We shop and cook.

Fah, husband Henry, and daughter Irene sailed from Indonesia to California when Henry came to study at Stanford in 1962. “I had to learn to cook; otherwise, we would have starved,” says Fah. For this young wife and mother, cooking was a matter of survival. Fah arrived with no practical cooking skills, but she hungered for the aromas and flavors of her mother’s kitchen. There were very few Hakkas in the San Francisco Bay Area. “When I shopped in Chinatown, the Cantonese shopkeepers just turned away from me. I had to learn to speak Cantonese,” she explains.