Notices by monstreline (monstreline@ottawa.place)

@skinnylatte

Enjoy!

I was just looking up my all time favourite dumpling to ask you if it would be available where you are today…it’s really hard to find where I am…while looking it up to make sure I spelled it correctly, I learned that it is actually a Teochew dumpling. The restaurants around here usually call it ‘Chiu Chow’

@skinnylatte some my earliest memories are of dim sum. Sitting in my tiny, white, interloper family of just my mother and me. We’d be sat at the table the staff used for folding napkins and filling condiment pots as it was the only table for two.

The rest of the hall would be full, every table brimming with a family. Some families quiet, others rowdy, many easy and funny, and the odd one stern. But each family was the same in that they had convened for dim sum and would use that time to be together. I adored those meals. It was a great early lesson that generations don’t have to exist in lonely little silos. If I hadn’t had that exposure, I’d probably be so lonely right now, trying to live the same generationally isolated life that all my white peers adopted. Because it’s still just me, and her.

My dream for the future, from a young age has always been to enough participants for a standing dim sum appointment! A group large enough and enthusiastic enough that when the available members arrive, a table can always be filled.

I feel like (as an outsider) Chinese family meals allow for more moods and individuality…if it’s a bad week and one’s feeling quiet, the group is large enough to support conversation while the weary recharge with food and silence, while the next event provides opportunities to join in!

I’ve finally reached an age that’s reproductively ambiguous enough that people have finally stopped insisting that I will get blindsided by the desire for a child. What a relief. WHY THEN has it been replaced by people adamant that I will develop an interest in birds…that I have no choice, it comes for us all???

@rustoleumlove @Cassandra my mum very very briefly bemoaned the fact that she wouldn’t have any grandchildren as my sister and I are both childless…then she started to realize how many of her peers are just being used and abused as free childcare with little concern about the fact that granny has her own life and now she seems quite content to have no grandchildren!