An Asian Immigrant Parent's Love
Repost of one of my most popular essays along with my family's updated scallion pancake recipe
I wrote the following newsletter almost 1.5 years ago and it has since been the most popular one I’ve written. I’ve made some edits and am resharing it now since we have more than doubled our subscribers, and I also think it’s extremely important these days to share immigrant stories. I (and Q) would not exist had my parents not courageously made the trip across the world to America decades ago. I won’t sugarcoat it—our relationship has been far from perfect and the experience of growing up American in an immigrant family affects me daily. The cultural and generational gaps are wide, but as I navigate adulthood, process my upbringing, and raise my own children, it’s a lot of rediscovery and coming back “home.”
At the end, you’ll find my family’s scallion pancake recipe. It’s a particularly special recipe to me and I’ve decided to offer it to everyone vs just paid subscribers. My mom learned how to make scallion pancakes from my late paternal grandfather (Goong Goong) and I’ve tweaked the recipe based on techniques I’ve learned through cookbooks. I hope you enjoy both the essay and the recipe!
Many of you know the general story of how I came to own a bakery: an engineer who did a 180 career change to work in the food industry. This life-altering decision came with much inner and interpersonal turmoil. It changed everything, not only what I did as my job, but my identity as a dutiful daughter and my relationship with my family. We are still picking up the pieces from the fallout, but along the way we are learning to see each other differently.
My Family’s Immigrant Stories
The first of my family to immigrate to the United States was my paternal great grandmother, Lucy Jen Huang Hickrod (she remarried here, hence the very Scottish last name from my great grandfather). She was a professor, and if you Google her name, you’ll find some of her published works. She unfortunately died before I was born but I have fond memories with my great grandpa as a young child. My parents and both sets of grandparents followed not too long after.
My mom and dad grew up very poor in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Shanghai, China, respectively, and met in college at Illinois State University. My mom tells me stories of their early dates consisting of 99 cent hot dogs and cokes because that’s all they could afford. This is the humble beginning of countless first generation immigrants, coming to the United States with nothing to seek a better life, pursuing a dream of something greater. And like many others, their new start began in the food industry. My Goong Goong and Popo owned a Chinese restaurant (which my aunt and uncle own now) and my parents worked there. My dad was also a Domino’s delivery driver and my Ama worked as a cook at various restaurants for decades.
After college, my parents worked tirelessly to “make it.” My mom, the hardest working person I know, recounts busy seasons where she’d work from 6am-2am, sleeping in a sleeping bag underneath the desk in her office. Excelling in education, stable jobs, and long-term financial security were their goals to escape their childhoods, their poverty. All their hard work happened to pay off, checking the necessary boxes into white collar professions complete with six figure salaries. From my parents’ perspective, it’s no surprise that they wanted their only child to continue on with their legacy. They’ve laid the groundwork for my pursuits to compound on theirs. But what if that life is not actually what I wanted?
A Tumultuous Career Shift
That was the exact place I was in: not wanting the life I knew my parents wanted for me. I had made it a long way down the path set for me even though I had inklings along the way that I wanted to veer off. Sticking to what was familiar and wanting to make my parents proud, I graduated college with a materials science engineering degree and landed a cushy job. I had similarly “made it,” but I was deeply unhappy. I found so much more joy in food and creativity: cooking, baking, and working in coffee shops/restaurants. I knew I would be a million times happier making minimum wage as a barista, so much so I found a part-time job at a coffee shop on top of my full time job.
When I told my parents I wanted to quit engineering, you can imagine it didn’t go well. They couldn’t understand where I was coming from, it was so far out of their radar of comprehension. It was also out of character for me to “disobey” them, and with something so significant. They thought I was not in my right mind. My desire to please them was head-to-head with my desire to pursue something that made me happy. I felt like a failure and an ungrateful child, especially since they just put me through college. The tension of all these things on top of feeling miserable at work was causing me to have regular panic attacks.
After months of wrestling, I quit my job and started working full time at a coffee shop. It was the first time I made a big life decision for myself. I gave up the nice salary, benefits, company car (with paid for gas and insurance), phone, and laptop, but I was content. It felt like an immense weight was lifted off of my body and I could finally live. However, this also began a years-long tension with my parents. Looking back, I remember a particularly awful screaming argument, all the direct and indirect “when are you going to get a real job?” comments, and ugly sobbing after a call with my mom who said I would never get their support in my dream of opening a shop. Thankfully, things have mellowed since then and they have come to a place of acceptance. I’m unsure if I’ll ever make them proud through my work, but they’ve come a long way and I have come to accept how things are.
They Sacrificed So I Could Choose
Although I initially grieved the lack of support from my family, I now realize that their “support” looks different from my own expectations. While they don’t necessarily provide the emotional support I’m hoping for, my parents and the generations before them are the reason I am able to do what I do today.
“Parents don’t want what’s best for you; they want what’s easiest,” is an adage my Vietnamese American friend (also in the food industry) recently messaged me. I can’t stop thinking about this because it really hits home. It helps me to have more compassion and consider all my family has done to make life easy for me. I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life and the fact that I get to choose my career is because of their sacrifice. Similarly, that same friend continued on to say, “I was certainly privileged that I could choose to make food a career rather than out of necessity.”
To expand upon this further, a Korean American friend of mine put it this way: “I think among East Asian Americans, [the food industry] is blue collar work that’s done to survive. It’s the work poor people do (e.g. our parents) so that we don’t have to do it. So when our generation decides to do it even though we have the choice to do literally anything else, it’s deeply disorienting and honestly hurtful. My dad: why would you CHOOSE to live the poverty life I DID when you have a chance to do what I could never even dream of?”
Therein lies the rift between us and our first generation parents. The chasm can be wide. Our parents have done the hard work, out of necessity, in hopes of their children having the illustrious career opportunities they wanted. I can see where they’re coming from and attempting to understand their perspective has helped soften my heart towards them. Even so, this doesn’t mean I must follow their path—I like to believe it means that their sacrifices have given me the freedom to choose a different one. It’s a privilege they might not understand and one I do not take lightly.
Food As A Common Ground
As someone who has done a lot of therapy and processing to unpack my relationship with my parents, I have this normal desire to be unconditionally loved and accepted, to have my dreams be supported by my closest people. I’ve grieved the lack of these things from my parents and I’d be lying if I said I don’t still long for them.
The thing is, the love of some Asian parents is complicated and always will be. It’s love that isn’t expressed in the “usual” ways of physical and emotional affection or words. It’s a love that comes through providing financial stability, food, and criticism they think you need to hear. It’s hard to not think of their love as subpar, especially when it is difficult to receive and not how you desire to be loved.
One way I’ve learned to meet them in the middle is through food. My parents may rarely say “I love you,” but they will pack their trunk to the brim with hard-to-find Asian groceries from Toronto to bring back to me. They may not say they are proud of me, but they will send me YouTube links to Chinese recipes to try out for the shop. As messy as our relationship is, I know my mother’s love through her scallion pancakes, each individually-wrapped spiral prepared and ready for me to roll out for breakfast. It comes through the plethora of food she brings every visit so I don’t have to cook the next several meals.
In return, this whole business is my love letter back to them. A rediscovery of my roots, learning how to incorporate the food and flavors they prepared for me daily growing up. The same food I was once ashamed of, but that I now celebrate and hope to share with the world. I’ve learned that if food is where we can find our common language of love, I will take it. I will accept it, savor it, and eat my fill of all the love I can get.
These scallion pancakes remind me of my mom and her ultimate display of love for me through food. She will make these pancakes up until the spiral portion and place them in Ziplock bags. Sometimes she’ll bring gallon-sized bags for me to thaw and roll out so we can have them fresh for breakfast.
My favorite way to eat scallion pancakes is hot off the pan drizzled with chili crisp OR rolled up with a fried egg, pickled mustard stems, and pork floss in the center. You can’t go wrong with fresh scallion pancakes in any format.
A quick timelapse of how to laminate the pancakes and make the spirals.
My Family’s Scallion Pancake Recipe (Vegan)
Makes 12 pancakes
Ingredients
Dough
4 cups (520g) flour
1 tsp neutral oil
Pinch of salt
6 oz (170g) boiling water
6 oz (170g) room temperature water
Filling
3 bunches scallions, finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 cup (130g) flour
2/3 cup neutral oil
Recipe
In a medium bowl, mix the flour, oil, salt, and boiling water until it forms a clumpy, dry mixture. Add the room temperature water and stir until it turns into a shaggy dough. Transfer the dough onto a work surface and knead until it comes together into a roughly smooth ball. Cover and let rest for 15 minutes.
In the meantime, make the filling. In a small bowl, add the salt and flour to the chopped scallions and mix well. Heat the 2/3 cup of oil in a saucepan until hot and shimmering and pour over the flour/scallion mixture. Stir until combined. The mixture should be paste-like and wet but not runny. Add more flour or oil as needed to get correct consistency and set aside. I usually like to weigh out the filling and divide by 12 so I know approximately how much to use for each pancake.
Knead the dough until smooth, cover, and let rest for another 15 minutes.
Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces (a scale works great here) and roll into balls. Keep the dough balls covered with plastic wrap or a clean towel.
Lightly oil your work surface. Working one at a time, roll out each dough ball into a thin rectangle. Spread the filling in a thin layer all over the surface of the rectangle and roll up using the long edge. Pinch the edges shut. You will end up with a “rope.”
Take each end of the rope and twist in opposite directions to form a twist, then take one end of the rope and roll it up into a tight spiral, tucking the other end underneath. Repeat with remaining dough balls. Cover and let rest for at least 15 minutes. At this point, you can store the spirals in the fridge or freezer and roll them out as desired.
Roll each spiral out into a circle of desired thickness. Thicker pancakes will be chewier and thinner pancakes will be more crisp. You can roll out all the pancakes and freeze them as well (stacked with plastic wrap or parchment in between each pancake).
Heat a frying pan with a splash of neutral oil over medium heat until shimmering. Fry the pancakes on each side until spotted with deep golden brown. Enjoy hot with a sprinkle of salt and/or dipping sauce!
This is wonderful, the recipe too. Thanks so much for sharing.
Thank you for sharing your story and your family’s. There is so much underneath the surface when it comes to our families and relationships with them.