Editorial Illustration for Houstonia Magazine
"Reflecting on Four Decades of Houston’s Asiatown"
Written by Melissa Hung and art edited by Amy Kinkead.
pub. May 19, 2023
Read the article here.
"I keep thinking about what makes a place feel like home. When does it switch from feeling foreign to familiar? To feeling like you belong? Partly, I think, it comes from the spots you frequent. You have that one place you visit for that one thing.
Asiatown’s foods nourish a sense of home for my family, of comfort. My dad buys his cha siu baos from one bakery in Asiatown. At the end of my mom’s life, when cancer stole her appetite, her friends brought homemade jook and one of her favorite dim sum dishes, ha gao, from Asiatown.”
“As my parents had children, three of us in all, we moved further west to a house with a crepe myrtle tree in a mostly white neighborhood. We shopped at the nearby Randalls, a store with a staffed floral department but no seaweed or ha mai (dried shrimp). To cook the Cantonese foods we ate nearly every day, we had to make the 30-minute drive to the new Chinatown.
There, we referred to restaurants by one name in Chinese, but their English monikers were different (and, sometimes, misleading, as in the case of Shanghai Restaurant, which is actually called 富仔記 and serves Cantonese food). We ordered birthday cakes from St. Honore Bakery, light and spongy, topped with fruit, and not too sweet. On Fridays, we learned piano from a tall, gentle man as my mother waited in the foyer of his home. (His wife taught violin.) Mom got her hair cut in the back of a bookstore by a woman called Pony.”