So what do you do when the world shuts you in?
We made dumplings.
Making Chinese dumplings with homemade skins requires an effort best done in a group, each person focusing on one part of the assembly line. We learned that with everything canceled, and the girls school hours limited, we had the perfect ingredients to make a labor-intensive comfort food: lots of time, remote instruction, and free child labor.
Justin would make the meat fillings and dough during the day, maybe while working by phone. Then when dinner time came we found we could make 100 dumplings, about right for a meal, in 2 hours. We’d set up a FaceTime call with PoPo, prop up the screen so she could see the action, and get to work. PoPo would give us all technique pointers, and Koda would excitedly show off each one that she managed to pinch together with progressing skill.
A few days later we'd deliver some samples to PoPo and YeYe in Walnut Creek, and set ourselves up on chairs on the front lawn while they stayed up at the top of the steps…. Watching us eat their delicious home-cooked meal that PoPo carried out on trays. The main thing that was missing was the hugs - so we tried to have the girls send them air hugs at a distance.
It was both sweet and sad at the same time. I guess dichotomy and dissonance was in season. The spring weather was so beautiful, clashing with the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty about COVID. Hard to hold it all at once.
