Of all the dim sum joints in all the world

This weekend we’re taking my mom out for dumplings at a wonderful Taiwanese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s quite a schlep out there from West Los Angeles, so we don’t go as often as we would like to. But it’s my mom’s birthday, and she loves Chinese food, so that’s our destination.

My mom is not Chinese. She’s Caucasian — a blue-eyed German-Swede from Wisconsin. But ever since before she married my father, who was Chinese, she has loved Chinese food. In fact, one of the few other times my family and I have gone out for dim sum with her, we had a reminder of how strange and serendipitous life can be.

Just before Chinese New Year in 2005 my mom was visiting us in Los Angeles. I know because we took pictures of the big rooster decorations outside. She’d picked the restaurant from a list in the LA Times food section. We weren’t experienced dim sum people, so we drove out to the San Gabriel Valley and arrived during a rush. What looked like hundreds of customers, nearly all Chinese except for my husband and my mom, waited inside and outside the restaurant. We were about to give up, when we heard that there were only five parties ahead of us. The crowd was agitated. The 7-11 across the street was looking enticing. We waited another 45 minutes and prepared to leave.

Just before we gave up, we heard our number called. As we elbowed through the crowd of hungry, angry Asians in the front, a voice called out to my mom. No one else was speaking English. We heard my mom’s name again. She turned to the woman calling her, a middle-aged Chinese woman who smiled and repeated her name. My mom was drawing a blank.

“It’s me — Elena!”

My mom recognized her, and they hugged. It was her college roommate, visiting Los Angeles from Hong Kong via Texas. They spent a few minutes catching up while we snagged our long-awaited dim sum table. After that they began to correspond and visit one another. It had been decades since they had seen each other.

What added significance to the coincidental meeting was that Elena had been the friend who first introduced my mother to my father at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s. Of all the dim sum restaurants in all the world, my mom and Elena were both at the same one at the same time on a random Sunday in February. They half-joked about how Elena felt that she should apologize, since the marriage had turned out to be terrible. But, since I was listening, they made sure to point out that, in spite of all the misery between my parents, the marriage had resulted in beautiful children and a grandchild (my daughter).

I sort of hate relaying that story because it sounds like I’m trying to find meaning in everything, that all roads lead back to writing about my father (and mother). But for a long time there seemed to be no end of talismans pointing in that direction. It reminded me of the Shema prayer in Judaism (from Deuteronomy), where a person is commanded to wear the sacred words that have been handed down as “frontlets between your eyes.” I’m not religious per se, but there was something compelling about the edict to remember, particularly the story of where you came from.

This Sunday I’m not expecting any dramatic reunions, just delicious dim sum. There’s something about Taiwanese dumplings, the fresh, light interpretation of otherwise semi-greasy weekend food, that helps me remember what is otherwise too easy to forget in my workaday world of caesar salads and faux-meat burgers.