My Days as a Ma-Jiang Line Cook
Until then, cooking was never an interest of mine.
Sometimes when I look back on my cooking addiction—like a weathered alcoholic recalling the initial spark of love from her first sip of beer, I guess—I recall a period of innocence before I started abusing it as an antidepressant. There was a time when I used to cook, purely and incandescently, for the simplest and most uncomplicated purpose.
Cash.
I started cooking at sixteen because I wanted to earn five dollars off my mother’s ma-jiang table. It began as good old earnest greed for green, but little did I know that I was sowing the seeds of an obsession with cooking for the next twenty years to come. Back then, once a week (as claimed by my mother, but it was in fact closer to twice) (three times max, she says), a highly competitive assembly of four middle-aged Taiwanese housewives would gather in one of their homes and engage in the stationary sport of calculating tiles and outlasting one another’s sore asses. Sitting for ten to twelve hours straight on barely padded chairs, conducting high-risk management and gossip warfare, these aunties took their sport with all seriousness, allowing just one single meal break to fuel the fire. That’s where I came in.
The rule was that each of these fine ladies would pay five dollars to fund their meal, and if I could manage to feed them on twenty dollars or less, I got to keep the change. Easy, right? I mean, how hard could it be to feed a pack of middle-aged housewives? Well, that depends on how much you know about 1990s-era Vancouver.
It wasn’t just a city vibrant with Asian immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam; at its prime it was notoriously the Chinatown of all North America, a renowned status earned by a supreme standard of Asian cuisine that some say superseded that of its countries of origin. It was a breeding ground for a colony of jaded connoisseurs whose taste buds were sharpened by years of immersion in top-notch ingredients—Dungeness crabs, geoducks, British Columbia sea urchins, and young, supple pigeons—the master-level preparations of which flowed through the days like breakfast cereal. These ma-jiang housewives didn’t just expect to be fed. They expected to be fed well.
As a teenage girl whose cooking experience amounted to counting calories and microwaving face masks, I quickly realized that I was in way over my head. Either naturally or through PTSD, I have lost all recollection of the first meal I cooked for them, but a few softly spoken words from one of the aunties as she slowly lowered her chopsticks burned into my memory like a hot iron on a slab of meat: “We could also order takeout next time.”
Ouch, bitch. Now you’ve made it personal.
Typically, I’m all about quitting at any sight of an obstacle. I’m just easygoing like that. But that day, for some reason something propelled me the other way, onto an unfamiliar path I believe they call . . . keep trying. I started to take cooking seriously, which is ironic because until then, cooking was never an interest of mine.
Growing up, I watched my mother, a good cook who nonetheless automated this socially imposed task apathetically, year after year, sometimes with barely concealed aversion. I thought to myself then that if I were ever to spend this amount of time doing something—anything—it wouldn’t be because I should, but because I fucking liked it. And who knew? It turned out that cooking is just what I like.
Cooking for the aunties soon became about more than just making money: there was curiosity, perhaps, and an exhilaration at making new discoveries. Soon I found myself spending three hours meticulously nursing a clay pot of oxtails braised in soy sauce and caramel, or crisping the skins of a silver pomfret, bothered more by a missed corner of imperfection than the occasional painful splatters of oil. In the end, my net profit was nil, if not bleeding red. But at an age when the friends around me didn’t even know how to avoid Hot Pockets–related explosions in the microwave, I was proud and intrigued. That said, not even remotely did I think this episode of mine would change the rest of my life.