For Love of Dumplings

(In memory of General Tien-Pie Wang, 1913-2000)

My fourth aunt is always the one to notice. She giggles and jabs her elbow into the ribs of the person next to her, usually me. I look up and we guiltily try to suppress our laughter. One by one, everyone else crowded around the kitchen table—my mother, her five sisters and one brother, my grandmother, and me—stops talking until my grandfather awakens with a start.

"Ba," my aunts entreat him, "you were sitting there snoring again. Go to bed. It’s three o’clock in the morning." But he always refuses, insisting that he is not tired. Like me, he cannot bear to miss any of the gossip, laughter, reminiscing, and bickering that goes late into the night during family reunions.

Whenever my grandparents, Gong Gong and Po Po, come to visit, one of the first things they do with us is make dumplings, or jiao tze. The boiled version of what in English are better known as potstickers, these are balls of meat and/or vegetables wrapped in dough and then boiled until they are done, like ravioli or piroshki or gyoza. Won tons are similar, but a different shape and thinner dough. You will not find boiled dumplings in a restaurant, they are too rustic and commonplace; but for me, they are the centerpiece of family reunions.

We are northern Chinese, and we make dumplings at big reunions and at small gatherings, Christmas and Chinese New Year’s. Po Po says that whenever they visit each of their seven children, the first thing they do is make three or four hundred dumplings, and freeze a year’s supply in that family’s freezer. Then it is time to go on to the next child’s house. We have made dumplings in cities all across America and Canada. I remember my grandmother once slipping me a little bag of dumplings as I was going back to my dorm in Berkeley.

Dumplings are something that you cannot make by yourself. You have to make them with a big group of family or friends. Otherwise, they just do not taste the same, and all you can think of are the people who are not there. Imagine cooking a traditional Thanksgiving dinner just for yourself.

Everyone has a special job in the preparation. Po Po first makes the dough in the food processor and kneads it on the big cutting board until the consistency is just right. She covers the dough with a damp cloth and lets it rest while she makes the meat filling in a big bowl: ground pork, Chinese chives, American cabbage, green onion, egg, soy sauce, sugar, and cornstarch. Then she rolls the dough into a long cylinder and pulls off thumb-sized wads, which she shapes into little balls and then flattens slightly. It is important that they are all exactly the same size and shape.

She then uses a Chinese rolling pin to roll out each little flattened ball—roll, turn, roll, turn, roll, turn—into a perfectly round disk, with a slight "pillow" in the center. Sometimes the Aunties take turns with the rolling pin, but Po Po is the fastest. Gong Gong can make the wrappers, too, but coming from the countryside, he does not use a rolling pin, he flattens the dough perfectly in his palm.

Everyone else—young and old, men and women, aunts, uncles, and cousins—sits around the kitchen table filling each round wrapper with a tablespoon of meat and crimping the edges together. We each have our own special technique. Some look like half moons, others like fat little purses. Po Po can crimp the edges together with one hand. The little kids like to make suns and dinosaur-shaped dumplings.

Gong Gong’s job is to cook and to keep count of the dumplings. He watches the water come to a boil, douses it with cold water, and waits for it to come to a boil again—three times until the dumplings are done and float to the top. Then he lifts them out with a bamboo strainer and calls people to hurry up and eat while they are still hot. One by one, people slip away from the work table, grab a rice bowl, and pour in their own preferred portions of soy sauce, vinegar, hot sauce, and sesame oil. (You know how restaurants make up the potsticker dipping sauce for you? Pure heresy.) Gong Gong watches how many you eat and if you do not eat at least 18, he asks if you are feeling sick. He expects you to consume thirty.

After a big meal of dumplings, Gong Gong always has to have a big bowl of jiao tze tang, or dumpling soup. He says you cannot really feel full until you have topped off the meal with the soup made from cooking the dumplings—you need it to swell up the dumplings inside your stomach, as well as to use up the last of the soy sauce and vinegar left in your bowl.

And then in the morning, we have the leftover dumplings pan-fried until they are lightly toasted on both sides for breakfast—my favorite part—and dipped again in soy sauce, vinegar, hot sauce, and sesame oil.

When I went to visit Gong Gong’s family in Inner Mongolia my third year of college, I made dumplings with every family I visited—his brother, his nephew, his nephew’s daughter. Making them together helped us bridge that awkwardness of being so closely related and yet so completely foreign to each other. The actions were at once familiar and new. They showed me how they freeze their dumplings during the winter in Huhahot—out on the balcony in the snow!

The day after my wedding, all the relatives left except my grandparents, who sat us down to teach my husband how to make the dough and me how to make five different kinds of filling.

This year at Chinese New Year’s, my daughters, aged three and four, were finally old enough to help me make dumplings. When the girls and I made jiao tze together, we talked about how you eat dumplings at Chinese New Year’s because they look like silver ingots (yin bao), and eating them will bring prosperity in the upcoming year, and about how the dough and the filling must be used up at the same time—my grandmother says if you run out of dough first, then you will not have enough to wear in the new year, and if you run out of filling first, then you will not have enough to eat. We also talked about Gong Gong and how much he loves dumplings. The girls were so proud of the jiao tze they made, and when we were all done eating, they asked for dumpling soup. It was Mango who reminded me, "You’re not really full unless you have jiao tze tang."

Is your mouth watering yet? Try your hand at making the Wang family's cherished dumpling recipes yourself!