Sweet and Sour Cola Chicken Tenders: A Taste of the Kitchen Shared Between Mother and Me

My Mother's Sweet-and-Sour Cola Chicken Strips

My mother is not one for eating out. In the days when she rarely worked outside the home, she still cooked almost every meal, bought a few tiered thermal lunch boxes, got up in the morning to cook rice, packed a lunch for herself, or put the ingredients into a thermal cooker so that by noon there would be a fine dish ready.

When I was a child and my father had not yet left home, the family was still reasonably well-off, and my mother was not yet burying her head in work day after day. She would always make some variations in her cooking, and if she really could not think of anything to make, she would buy cookbooks, or sign up for cooking classes to improve her culinary skills, or else, in the era of my childhood, watch cooking shows like "Fu Pei-mei's Time."

Once, the cooking class was going to teach "sweet-and-sour cola chicken strips," so my mother took me along. I tugged at the hem of her clothes, unable to sit still in the cooking classroom, touching things here and wriggling there, wondering what cola mixed with vegetables would actually smell like. Would there be bubbles? Would it still be salty?

My mother and the other mothers taking the class watched the teacher's demonstration intently. I craned my neck but could not see the wok surrounded by the grown-ups in front of me. Unable to hold back, I asked my mother: "How much longer?"

"How much longer!" Cooking always requires waiting. From shopping and preparing the ingredients to turning on the heat, it all takes time, let alone actually starting to cook. Is it a slow simmer over low heat or a quick stir-fry over high heat? Or perhaps cold dishes and pickles that need no fire at all, all of which need a certain amount of time before they can be taken off the heat, plated, and served.

Perhaps a few years later, after my father left home, my mother worked day and night to repay the pile of debts he left behind. The job of cooking fell to my older sister, and watching over the soups and dishes on the stove became my job.

The Battle for the Kitchen's Territory

My mother always hurried in and out of the kitchen preparing ingredients, turned on the gas stove, put the ingredients that needed simmering one by one into the pot, then turned her head and said to me: "After the water boils, turn down the heat. After twenty minutes, put the rest of the things in."

I stared at the clock on the dining room wall, watching to see whether the hands had reached the time my mother had said, pacing back and forth, afraid that being off by even a second, too early or too late, would ruin the flavor of that soup and that dish.

Occasionally, when I wanted to pick up the spatula, my clumsy movements and my steps that followed no rules always got me barred from the kitchen. Those winter melon chunks cut too large, and that thickening cooked as thick as snot, are still a joke in the family when they recall my cooking. No matter how delicious the dishes I later photographed and posted on facebook looked, the kitchen is my mother's territory and cooking is my mother's right; it always takes a great deal of effort to return to this space, to make a dish for myself and put together a meal.

Fighting over territory always takes energy. From choosing pots, pans, bowls and basins, to the way ingredients are prepared and organized, to the order in which soups and dishes are cooked, to the way the kitchen is finally cleaned up, nothing looked right in my mother's eyes. She always grumbled about why I had bought those ABCD plates. She would pick up that steel wool and scrub hard at the pots coated with non-stick coating, as if without scrubbing that hard it did not count as washing the pot. Or else, for a pot that clearly did not need high heat, she would turn up the stove until the pot smoked in all directions, and before long a good pot would be ruined.

So no one wanted to stir up the kitchen war anymore. Even though my mother always grumbled that she was like an old maid, having to put together every meal for us, we still were unwilling to step into this territory of my mother's and enter into battle after battle.