What is the taste of home? Let's talk about the flavors of hometown in our memories

If I possibly could, I would go home and cook dinner every day.

This is not an easy thing, especially when you factor in your own work pressure and fluctuating moods, and sometimes I want to ask myself why I care so much about eating dinner at home. In order to cook dinner, before leaving the house in the morning I have to first think about what we are going to eat over the next few days, and then when I take Xiaolu and Tietou out I make a detour to Muzha Market to buy groceries, and before going home and stepping into the office I get all the ingredients that need marinating, washing, soaking, and portioning sorted out. Before picking up Xiaolu after work I go home first and press the button on the rice cooker to start the rice, and after getting home I shoo Xiaolu, whose mouth is full of snacks, off to take a shower and then shut myself in the kitchen to stir-fry. When Xiaolu sits down at the table to eat, I grab the chance to slip into the bathroom, and then usually right when I start washing my hair, Lu Niang and Tietou happen to come home for dinner.

If this tightly packed dinner hour has brought me any joy at all, it is nothing more than seeing the satisfied looks on my family's faces, and then hearing Xiaolu say: "You have to teach me, so that later I can cook for you guys too!". But more often than not, I am actually thinking of my mother.

I remember that when I came home from elementary school, my mother, who looked after other people's children at home, would take the okara left over from making soy milk in the afternoon, mix it with granulated sugar, milk, and fresh cream, and pan-fry it into fragrant, sweet okara cakes for us to eat. I remember that on weekend mornings, my younger brother and I would fight over who got to use the siphon coffee maker, and then my mother would always say that the first brew was too bitter and too strong, and that it was fine for the kids to drink the second brew. I remember that for a while my mother really liked making smoked chicken, and then one day an unprecedented burnt aroma drifted out of the kitchen, and when I turned my head to look, it turned out the pot for smoking the chicken had caught fire entirely. I remember that when my younger brother and I made a fuss about wanting to go eat steak at the mouth of the alley, my mother would go to the market and buy steak that the vendor had already marinated, bring it home and pan-fry it, and then teach us how to mix granulated sugar, oyster sauce, and char siu sauce into a sauce in our own family's style to toss with noodles. I remember that in summer, a big washbasin would be placed on the dining table, and my younger brother and I would work hard washing the jelly fig seeds (Ficus pumila var. awkeotsang) that my mother had bought at the market, just because she said the aiyu jelly at the market was all fake. I remember that after reading one of Sanmao's essay collections, my mother, who was romantic by nature, also went to the market to buy fish, meat, radishes, and green peas, all just to hide the vegetables we normally would not eat inside the dumplings we loved. I remember that right beside that dining table, my mother would leaf through the account book and, entry by entry, tell me how tight the family's finances were at the moment, and how we were going to save on everything else so that my younger brother and I, still growing, could have more nutrition.

And so, for me, the dining table is the most important "thing" in this home, and it must always be empty but clean, because the dinner that is about to be placed on it reveals our expectations for this family.

Of course, I have not always liked cooking dinner; for a very long period, I even detested cooking. It is just that over this past year, I have gradually come to understand that my earlier loathing was because I did not know how to play the role of a father in a family. I was just like the father in the Asuda family, always complaining that I had been forced into becoming a father, yet never having thought about how to change. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have no Mita to help me, so it took me a whole year before I understood my past shortcomings, and I slowly found the joy of being a father.

Last year, I forget which book I was reading, I only remember that the book had a very long passage all tangled up in "what is our family's flavor?", and on the bus, I kept thinking, "what is my mother's flavor?" No matter how I thought about it, I could not recall it. As I thought and thought, I cried. And it was probably from that day on that I began to see cooking dinner for my family as an important thing, because I want there to be a day when Huang Xiaolu and Tietou come home, open the door, and say: "Ah, smells so good, it really is our family's flavor" - even if that flavor is often soy sauce, curry, tomato, or steamed fish, it is all fine.

What about you? What is your family's flavor? Find some time, and cook a dinner for your family.