It only took 59 years, but Lynette Lo Tom is excited she can finally say she knows about her family’s Chinese heritage.
Awhile back, she sat down with her mom, Lorna Lee Lo, and asked her to give her Chinese food recipes she was hoping she would absorb into her own memory, but it wasn’t so easy.
“I was bothering her so much, for two years,” she said with a hearty laugh. “I am very American. We become more and more Americanized. I am 100 percent Chinese. (My mom is) from that generation. They tell you about your heritage and you don’t listen.”
Today, Lo Tom, a fifth-generation Chinese-Hawaii born, has written a cookbook called “A Chinese Kitchen,” using the recipes she gathered from her mother, friends and family. A Chinese Kitchen is part of a series from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, which explores Hawaii’s ethnic cuisines through writers who grew up in Hawaii.
Exploring her culture through these recipes was enlightening and exciting, despite it being untimely, Lo Tom said.
“Look at me, almost 60 and just now learning about my heritage,” she said.
Lo Tom learned that her maternal great-great-grandfather, Wong Kwai, recruited Chinese people to Hawaii to work in sugar and rice plantations. Back then, the area he brought them to was called Heong Shan, where about 75 to 80 percent of Hawaii’s plantation workers came from.
Most of the dishes in Lo Tom’s cookbook are from one region: Zhongshan, which is in Canton, the southern part of China. That’s not to say other regions are represented, it just means most Chinese food people are familiar with is Cantonese.
“When people say Chinese food, people are picturing Cantonese food,” she said. “Canton is a port city, so when times were tough, Chinese people went around the world and went where they would take them.”
Of course, every village in China has different specialties, she said. Lo Tom kept that in mind when writing her book.
Lo Tom explores Chinese food by telling a story for most of the dishes she makes and sprinkles in vignettes and family portraits throughout the book, which brings each recipe to life.
But gathering the recipes themselves was trial and error, she said. It required her going back and forth to her mother’s house for a taste test.
“My mother would just say, ‘I’ll just whip this up,’” Lo Tom said. “She doesn’t make it with a recipe. Just many of her tasty dishes, I would make with her.”
Lo Tom started A Chinese Kitchen with her mother in mind but once she got started, her idea evolved and pretty soon, she had friends and family involved.
“I’m hoping to keep the food memories alive,” Lo Tom said.
Lo Tom will present her cookbook and tell her story at the Lihue Public Library at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
