It was 10 years ago, before I came to study in this country. I had a neighbor named Ms Ma. Ma was from Shanghai but lived in Shenzhen for many years. Before my family moved to Futian, Shenzhen, Ma was already here. I knew her when it was two months before I left China. She had a cat, and my mother owned a dog. They played with each other on the roof of our building.
I was at home and didn’t go to school, preparing for coming to United States. When my mother was at work, Ma, as one of my mother’s closest friends lived very near to our home, came to our home, and cooked for me. Ma was not very tall – she was about 155cm in height. However, her voice was low and powerful, full of majesty. Her voice made me obey the words she said. For example, she called me loudly on the first floor when dinner is ready while I was doing my work on the second floor, I would go downstairs in a minute because I was afraid of her calling me again or directly coming upstairs and asked me with her very low voice, “What are you doing here? Didn’t you hear me saying dinner is ready?”
Three days before I left for Boston, Ma came to our home as her usual visit. My mother was at home that day. My mother asked me to grab the door when the doorbell rang. I was not surprised it was Ma standing outside of our door. But that time, she brought some wonton skins, ground pork, and freshly bought shepherd’s purse in a red plastic bag. The shepherd’s purse smelled like those was just dug from the ground. I blinked my eyes for a while, looking at Ma, freezing in front of her because of thinking of raw food in the plastic bag. And then I heard my mother coming downstairs, with her dog’s footsteps following.
“What happened, Sara? Is that Ms Ma?” My mother took a seat on the couch in the living room and asked. “Yeah.” I replied, with a lot of questions in my head. “Then why don’t you let her in?” My mother spoke in a very strict voice. I opened the door and let Ma in. “Are you here for cooking lunch?” I whispered, “But mom is at home today.” I looked at her back, her cat was not with her; it meant that she was not here for my mother’s dog.
Ma walked into the apartment and changed into the slippers she used to wear. “Sara, I’m not here to cook for you today. Instead, you are cooking for me today.” Seeing my eyes wildly opened, Ma raised her right arm – which had the plastic bag she brought, “I’m here to teach you how to make Shanghai Style Wonton.”
“Sara! Four is barking,” My mother yelled at me again. Four was her dog. I opened the door bigger. When my mother saw Ma, she held Four into her arm and said “Thank you” to her. Then my mother turned her sight back on me and said, “You won’t have Ms Ma to cook for you in the United States. When you want to have some wonton soup, you should cook by yourself.” My mother said, and then she sat back on the couch and kept watching her TV. On the left side of our apartment door is our dining room, and on the right, it was our living room with TV and sofa. Ma turned to the left side of the room and directly sat by the dining table, and then she took stuff from the red plastic bags: The freshly bought wonton skins and shepherd’s purse, and ground pork.
“Do you know how to make the wonton filling?” Ma asked. I knew nothing about cooking, so I shook my head. She opened the glass kitchen door (In China our kitchen was in a single room, it was not an open kitchen), brought Chinese soy sauce, cooking wine, salt and sugar, and some garlic and ginger out of the kitchen. Our kitchen was a rectangle shape. Closest to the glass door was the dishwasher. On the right side of the dishwasher, it was the stove. On the right of the stove, it was a space for the sauces. Beside the sauce, there were knives, cutting boards and gingers. Ma brought out a lot of things, so she had to take all of them out from the kitchen separately. When she brought the garlic and ginger out, she used her back to hold the kitchen door and asked, “Sara, do you know where your mother put the knife and cutting board? It was not at the original place I used to put.” I shook my head again, but my mother walked into the kitchen, “She knows nothing about the kitchen and cooking. The only thing she knows is how to eat.” My mother spoke sarcastically. I smiled on my face, but I could sense the awkwardness deeply from my heart. I was a fifteen-year-old kid who had never walked into the kitchen! Though I thought most of the Chinese girls at that age did not know how to cook, but it seemed that my mother expected me to know how. Oh my. Luckily it seemed Ma didn’t care about what my mother just mentioned. She quickly put all the stuff on the dining table and took the knife and cutting board from my mother. “Would you mind bringing two small bowls and one big one for me? I need the largest one. Also, some spoons and chopsticks please.” I nodded. At least I knew where the bowls and utensils were.
When I put the bowls on the table, Ma just finished chopping the garlic and ginger. She put the ground pork and the minced garlic into the big bowl. Then she used the tablespoon to get two and a half spoons of soy sauce and one spoon of cooking wine. “You may put in less soy sauce if you don’t like salty flavors.” She pulled a little sugar and a little salt, maybe less than a teaspoon, on her right hand, and put them together in the bowl, “And salt and sugar here are for fresh flavor. Our Shanghai people like to put sugar in all the dishes we make. Fresh is the greatest thing to have. You don’t have to put chicken essence. It is not good to have it.” Ma then put the minced ginger into her right hand and started to squeeze the juice. I saw the yellow ginger juice going into the large bowl. “I cut about half of the ginger (10g) and the same amount of the garlic into minced. I put the garlic inside the bowl directly. If you are tired of cutting the garlic, you can use garlic powder; however, you must cut the ginger and take the juice. This is for fresh as well.”
“I hate ginger.” I shook my head. It did not have any specific reasons, and it was just because I hated the smell and the taste of it. I have a weird spicy feeling inside my mouth every time I accidentally eat them. Ma smiled at me and said, “Well, that is our Shanghai people’s habit. If you hate it, you can add half more spoons of the cooking wine.” Ma started to chop the shepherd’s purse. It was a leafy vegetable and smelled like celery. However, it tasted softer and easier to cut than celery. The shepherd’s purse was also required to minced and then squeezed all the water in the vegetable out. However, this time the water was grasped into a separate bowl, and the waterless vegetables were put into the big bowl, together with the ground pork. “You don’t want your filling to be so watery because the soy sauce and the fat inside the ground pork are juicy enough. If you put the vegetable inside the bowl without squeezing it, there will be soups inside the filling and it was hard to make the wonton.” Ma said so. After she pulled the vegetables into the big bowl, she started to use the chopsticks to mix them up, “The amount of the meat and the vegetable are supposed to be 1:1, it is the best proportion.” Ma said, mixing the filling for three minutes, until all the meat and the vegetables were mixed. Soy sauce dyed the ground meat and turned it brownish. The vegetables were dark green after squeezed.

“Now,” Ma put the chopsticks in the bowl in the bowl with the useless vegetable juice, “I will teach you how to make wonton.” She put a piece of skin on my hand. The skin was soft and easy to fold. It felt like a piece of napkin. To be honest, because I couldn’t find any fresh wonton skin in the United States, I didn’t find any wonton skin which were soft as those Ma bought from Chinese supermarket. But they were enough to use. “Don’t put them in a square in your hand, turn 45 degrees of that and leave it as a diamond shape.” Seeing I turned the skin, Ma continued, “Put a little filling into your wonton skin, and then roll it up to the half of the skin is folded.” I was not sure how many fillings I should put inside, so Ma instructed, “Only 2/3 of your tablespoon. When you get more and more familiar with this procedure, you could do one tablespoon. But now only 2/3.” I rolled the skin after I filled it, but I was afraid it would leak. “Pinch the two sides of the skin tightly, or it will loosen in the boiled water.” I did as what Ma said. “And then use your left and right hand together, and then turn it into an ingot shape. Finally, pinch the top tightly.” She continued. I followed what Ma told me and turned it into a shape like an ingot. The middle part was not big enough, but the shape was beautiful.
“It was not as hard as making a dumpling, and that’s the reason why we like to make it in Shanghai. Wonton is convenient and pretty.” Ma said, “Sara, you should practice, then you can make the wonton faster and faster. If you can’t finish all of them, you can freeze them in the fridge and boil them whenever you want to eat them. Remember, the hardest part is to make the fillings.”
“How to boil wontons?” I knew it was a silly question.
“When the water is boiling, put the wontons into the water gently, then boil them until all of them floating on the top of the water.” Ma said, “While you are boiling wonton, make a wonton soup base in a separate bowl with a teaspoon of sesame oil, half tablespoon of soy sauce and with a little sugar inside it. Don’t forget to chop some green onions and put them inside if you like it. After you finish boiling the wonton, put the water inside the bowl first, and then put the wontons inside.” Ma took the wonton we made into the kitchen, when the water boiled, she put the wonton into the water. “It is not as hard as what you think but will bring you wonderful and cheap Chinese food.” Ma said. I saw the wontons floating inside the boiled water. They looked like puppets dancing inside the water. When all the wontons floated onto the water, Ma took three bowls, adding a teaspoon of sesame oil and sugar, a tablespoon of sugar, some green onions, and chopped garlic. Then she served some boiled water in each bowl to make wonton soup. The sesame oil had a good smell, and I started to feel hungry. Ma put wonton inside the soup after she finished.
“I hope Sara will use it at least once when she goes to the United States. I can’t afford you ordering food delivery all the time!!!” I had no idea when my mother walked into the kitchen. She put her hand on my left shoulder. There was wet flour sticky on my hands, and I hadn’t had a chance to wash it yet.
*
I hadn’t used this skill until the fourth year when I came to the United States, when my roommate wanted to hold a dumpling party with her friends but accidentally bought the wonton skins instead of the dumpling ones. I was called to go back home as soon as possible because none of them knew how to make wontons. After that time, I cooked wonton very often because it was so easy to keep inside the fridge and it was so delicious. However, the wonton skins here are much harder than what Ma bought me in China because the skins are premade and put in the freezers inside the Chinese supermarket. But it is better than nothing.
I haven’t had a chance to go back to China and visit Ma again to thank her on teaching me how to make wonton. My parents moved to the United States in 2019. I seldom talk to my mother about our neighbors in China, but my mother tells me, Ma was there until she left China.
I hope one day I can go back and thank her in person for this wonderful skill she taught me, when I was a young Chinese kid who immigrated to a foreign country on the food from my home country.