When my family first came to the United States, we brought a lot of living essentials that we thought we could not find in America. Of course, all of them represented our Chineseness. Bed covers with flowers that I don’t know how to describe because of the weird combination of colors, pillows filled with Chinese herbs that weight over 2 lb each, and brushes with hard texture that actually destruct the shoes rather than clean them. Most of those items are gone now, but luckily, there is one item that continues our family tradition. Yeast, more precisely, it is the yeast that we always buy in the Costco at South San Francisco that connects our Chineseness and Americanness. My parents love mantou, a traditional Chinese flour made food that is popular in the north part of China. The most familiar versions to Americans are buns and dumplings, which has a variety of stuffings inside. Mantou is the kind that has nothing inside and to be eaten with stir-fried dishes. My father eats mantou every single meal so that my mother has to make it everyday or sometimes every other day. To make mantou, yeast is needed to ferment the flour, and we easily found it in the Costo that not far from our house. Then my mom would pour the flour on the cooking table, add water and yeast to make it a dough and let it ferment for 30 or 40 minutes before knead it. My parents love mantou, however, mantou is the beginning of my confusion of self-identity. 

– Wenmao Ji

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant