Food has always been the way my immigrant mom, a mom who otherwise avoids affection, shows me her love. More specifically, she expresses this love through Hong Dou Tang, a red bean soup. But my mom’s dish has been industrialized into a can that can be found on the shelves of your typical Asian supermarket.
Residents of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong consume Hong Dou Tang after devouring their seven course family style meal. For them, it is a dessert. During the cold winter months, the dish remains a reminder of comfort. During the humid summer months, chefs add ice to cool it down. Leftovers can be frozen to make popsicles. Hong Dou Tang is all you could want in a dish: it is healthy, sweet, and versatile. It is even better when a loved one personally invests hours of their time to make it for you.
When my mom was a child, my grandmother made this dish for her when she had period cramps. My mom continues this tradition for me—almost like a rite of passage. While my mom passes down some of my grandmother’s wisdom, she adjusts the recipe to cater to my American palate and preferences. She makes the dish extra sweet, just for me.
My mom’s dish, whenever I consume it, reminds me of love, womanhood, and family. It grounds me in a crazy, chaotic world. She is raising four children and navigating America as an immigrant, but she still finds ten hours in her schedule to make me my favorite dish. While she may not show me love in typical motherly ways—comfort and understanding—she shows me love through food.
When my mom cooks Hong Dou Tang for me, I am able to accept that this is the way she shows me love, rather than with words of affirmation or physical touch. It legitimizes my own experience. For me, the story I create is one where my mom shows her love by cooking this dish every time I get my period. She drops everything and starts to prepare the beans. With the manufactured version of Hong Dou Tang, there’s no story to tell.
The canned version is an industrialized product. It becomes standardized and stripped of its character in order for the masses to consume it. The corporation that produces the canned version of Hong Dou Tan has control over every single ingredient of the soup, its taste, consistency, and packaging. I, as a consumer, am completely unaware of the processes that the canned soup has gone through before entering my mouth.
My mom is not an industrial worker manning part of an assembly line. She has the ability to express herself and control the outcome of her dish. It is one of the few things that she has control over.
At least, this is what I tell myself. My mom’s dish gives me agency to create my own story, one that allows me to appreciate all that my mom has given me. This recognizes that my mom drives an hour to the nearest Asian grocery store to buy ingredients. This is love. This is her sign of affection. This is the way my mom proves to me that her immigrant expressions of love go beyond just the expected.
