The Healing Power of Food and Family: Hong Kong

By Lauran Bell

I couldn’t believe it, my husband, six-year-old daughter and I, with our extended family, were flying from San Jose, California, 6,937 miles across the Pacific Ocean. It was December 2018, a time when we were unrestrained by the Covid-19 virus. We were on our way to Hong Kong – an absolute utopia for food lovers and dim sum aficionados.
Once we made the trek to Hong Kong, right from the start, my daughter who had never tried dim sum before, who had hardly experienced even Americanized Chinese food, sampled Hong Kong’s Shanghai soup dumplings and crispy Peking cucumber duck wraps like a pro.

Hard Beginnings

Many things have not come easily for my daughter, starting from the day she was born. She entered the world, to our surprise, with a rare medical condition, which we learned was called Apert syndrome. During our Hong Kong trip, my daughter by six had already been through seven surgeries.
So to be sitting in an actual Chinese banquet hall, surrounded by our family and large tanks full of swimming sea bass, would have seemed like a fantasy to me early on in her life when she needed to be hooked up to an oxygen tank when sleeping.

The first seven months of her life was the only time she struggled with food. The first three months were the most difficult. She literally “fell off the growth chart,” and her medical condition was making it so she struggled to breastfeed and ended up burning more calories than she was intaking, only when she was breastfeeding. As difficult as it was for me to mentally accept as a mother, the nurse, who was the voice of my daughter’s medical team, insisted I bottle feed a lot more than I breastfeed. It was a dire situation, a choice the team made with my baby’s survival in mind. Giving my child formula and breast milk from a bottle is not what’s normally considered the healthiest choice for a typical baby, and this weighed on me psychologically.

The Food Journey Begins

What I didn’t know that year was that once my child could eat solid food, from then on, food was something that we would delight in, and it would be the pleasure through the pain. And there, after seven surgeries and countless obstacles, we were vacationing together – my daughter, husband, and myself – and my dad’s side of the family. My daughter would have the rare opportunity at her young age to experience the tastes and textures of food that even I, as a 39 year-old, had never experienced.

Hong Kong Style Breakfast

We would wake up in the morning, and my father’s wife, Kathy, who was born in Hong Kong, and who had lived there until she was college-aged, would pick out our morning breakfast spot. Sometimes it was our hotel’s breakfast buffet, the Regal Kowloon Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, with foods from all over the world, or we went to dim sum. My daughter’s favorite breakfast, however, was anywhere that served the popular Hong Kong French toast.

We could walk across the courtyard from our hotel and pick from a number of different restaurants, one right next to the other, and most of them would serve Hong Kong style French toast. Watching my daughter’s joy as she dug into the buttery toast, dripping with maple syrup, right alongside her cousins- who we only get to see a few times a year- made me happy. Being in that simple moment of joy and love made me forget for awhile the trauma that my little immediate family had been through. It’s as if the old memories of kneeling on the hospital floor overcome by the fear of losing her infinitely were being re-drawn in my mind, not re-written, just re-drawn in lighter colors.

Dim Sum

After a day of walking through the Hong Kong pet or flower markets, or going to lush parks surrounded by skyscrapers, we would follow Kathy and her extended family, who still live in Hong Kong, through the crammed city streets, past colossal malls, and food stands, and every day, lunch was something new. My daughter was able to experience dim sum in a small, Michelin awarded restaurant called Tim Ho Wan, swarming with people.

Kathy, my stepmother, would ask her what she’d like to eat,
and she would know her order – steamed beef meatballs (au yuk kau), prawn dumplings (har gau), and fried egg-shaped dumpling with pork (harm shui gok). Dim Sum, which can be translated in Cantonese to mean “a little bit of heart” was bringing us together. Those moments around the table were helping to restore, little by little, our faith in the goodness of life and the healing power of food and family.

Chinese Hot Pot

Dinner was always the ultimate experience of the day. We would walk until it felt like our limbs would fall off. Kathy’s extended family would take us through alleys and buildings, up elevators. Small, dingy corridors would open up to some of the most glamorous restaurants I have ever seen. On one of our last dinners in Hong Kong, my daughter got to experience a special food memory from my childhood – Chinese hotpot- but she was experiencing it overlooking the Victoria Harbor. We sat at a large circular table with a panoramic view, sixteen of us, face to face. Together we dipped raw meat and seafood into large pots of boiling water. My daughter with her modified chopsticks, sampled thin slices of beef, tofu, fish meatballs, and even baby hotdogs and dipped them into a variety of sauces.

As a child, Kathy would make our family hot pot every winter. Those memories are connected to a time when I did not have a never-ending list of medical to-dos, when I did not have to worry about whether or not the world would be kind to a child, my child, with physical differences.

Re-connecting Through Food

I wish I could say that when we got back from Hong Kong that all of our struggles disappeared. They did not. (Little did we know that two years later we would have to “shelter in place” because of a global pandemic, and we would postpone many medical appointments because the virus was more of a threat to my daughter’s health than anything else.)
The trip to Hong Kong, however, opened us not only to a new world, with new tastes and experiences, but it opened us to our extended family and let us re-experience joy and lightheartedness again. It got us in touch with what we could still do, what we could still enjoy, despite hardships. The
basic act of eating, and eating with loved ones, was a powerful reminder that life goes on. Breakfast, lunch, dinner in a new way, in a new reality, with my incredible child who could eat with the best of them.