Our Taste of Home: Wontons

By Curtis Wong

Cold mornings and days call for soup. And the best type of soup to eat during those times is wonton soup. Unfortunately, I was 300 miles away from home, struggling with my first year of college classes, and did not have access to a kitchen on campus. The closest thing that would come close to my mom’s wonton soup was a local Thai restaurant near campus. And the soup was just...okay. Yes, I could clearly taste rich and fatty pork, the mild kick of white pepper, and the subtle umami coming from the shrimp hidden in the wontons, but it just wasn’t the same. During my first couple of years in college, the food was good, but it never tasted like a place that I would call home.

Photos courtesy of Curtis Wong

But the actual home is messy and complicated. It’s full of stories that your mom and dad won’t tell you of their lives from their home countries. It’s full of intergenerational trauma and conflict, where new ideas clash against traditional hierarchy. It’s full of messy arguments between you and your parents. Yet it’s also full of love. It’s where you wake up and see your mom and grandma making wontons on the dining table, with flour all around as if a mini snowstorm happened. It’s where you can smell the deep rich aroma of chicken stock that has been simmering for hours on end. It’s where you can taste the hidden bite of ginger and the fresh bitterness of green onion with each wonton. Home is the place where you smile and cry and eat in silence because you already understand.

Whether I like it or not, food has always been one of the few ways to talk with my parents and connect with my roots. Wonton soup is such a simple dish, but it’s the fact that my mom spent time wrapping each wonton, so that it can look like a golden ingot waiting to be discovered amongst the rich broth. Even in the middle of a messy argument, I knew that the love and understanding was still there when we sat in silence slurping our noodles.

Now, during this time in quarantine, when I am 300 miles away from home, I found myself making wontons from scratch. And during this process of wrapping 100 wontons, my mom FaceTimed me to offer advice (and to criticize me on overfilling my wontons). Sure, it didn’t taste exactly like hers, but it tasted like home—messy and complicated, but ultimately filled with love and a sense of connection.

Photo of Curtis and his mom FaceTiming. Courtesy of Curtis Wong.