Now, Mother’s departure replayed like a recurring nightmare, foisted upon me, conjuring sharp pangs of regret that I had ever loved her. The pain twisted so tightly, forming a pulled braid that ignited a migraine, unravelling into outbursts of rage, leading to unexplained clashes with my family that I worried I could never recover from.

As I fed the baby, I wondered what parts of Mother were inside me. What kind of mother would I be? Could I resist turning into her? Becoming a mother had reignited my questions about her. Where was she? What had happened to her?

A week after we came home from the hospital, Father came to meet his new granddaughter. He came with two large grocery bags, walked directly to the kitchen, and placed his own soup pot on the stove.

“Is the baby sleeping?” he asked, looking around for her.

“Yes, she’s upstairs. Do you want to see her?”

“Let her sleep. I’ll see her later.”

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Jiu gai.” He saw my confused face and reminded me, “It’s for new mothers.”

After Mother left, Auntie Choo Neo did most of the cooking for us, but eventually, even Father couldn’t rely on his sister all the time. He was forced to reach into the deep recesses of his memories to recall how his own mother had fed her children. Perhaps out of necessity, his cooking was different from Mother’s. I regarded it as the kind of food Chinese villagers or peasants must have eaten. Unlike at Hilary’s house, where her mother expertly made her delicious Cantonese cuisine, we didn’t have the same variety of meats, exotic mushrooms, or seafood. Father favoured offal, tofu, eggs, pork, and chicken. And a lot of root vegetables like yam, turnip, carrots, and a few flowering vegetables like okra, eggplant, and bitter melon.

My love for Father’s cooking was a well-kept secret. When I was growing up, I was aware of how different Hakka cuisine was from not only Canadian food but also other Chinese cooking and feared people would see it as inferior, or gross. Hakka food was a guilty pleasure that I indulged in by myself in the privacy of my home.

A few years before, during my second week of articling for an all-service law firm, I was running late for work and knew I didn’t have time to make my lunch, so I grabbed leftovers from dinner the night before. Juk, as I called it, or congee. Saddled with student debt, I didn’t want to spend any money on buying lunch. That day, while eating lunch in my shared office with a fellow student, I was reminded why preserved duck eggs were fondly called “thousand-year-old” eggs.

“Oh! I think your food has gone bad,” my officemate declared. “It’s all black and grey!”

I looked down into my Tupperware and said, “No, that’s just how it looks. It’s just preserved eggs.”

“Are you sure? I would hate for you to get sick.”