Published Date: 2021 June 23rd

I’d like to think I've had quite a transient childhood growing up.

I was originally born in Beijing China, my family moved to Saudi Arabia and left before I was old enough to form memories, then we moved to California around the time that I start kindergarten. We moved around between different states in the US before finally moving back to China when I was around the fourth grade.

Since most of my experience with school up to that point has been the American kindergarten and elementary school system, adjusting to a Chinese elementary school, where child education was considered more of a race for success rather than a journey of education, was nothing short of a disaster. I can think of many horror/funny stories of how I was forced to quickly adapt to such an unforgiving system and environment but this isn’t the post for that, a story for another time perhaps.

At the time my dad was working for a western company, his job involved a lot of meetings in the US, so he would be away for a week or so and bring back different types of food from America whenever he had meetings there. He would bring big chocolate bars, bags of pretzels, and so on. One of my favorite foods from America however, was the Kraft single, a slice of gooey, cheesy pure American deliciousness that couldn’t be found anywhere in China at that time.

One of the staple foods in China is called a “馒头” (Man-tow), it’s a white and soft steamed bun, some would say it’s the equivalent of bread in China.

As a kid, my breakfast would usually consist of a steamed bun, some milk, and sometimes some pickled vegetables to go with the bun. Whenever my dad brought back a pack of Kraft Singles, I would cut the steamed bun in half, lay a yellow sheet of cheese between the two halves, and let the warm steam melt the cheese, making sort of a knockoff grilled cheese, for lack of a better word.

10-year-old me never got sick of that combination. It was one of the more unique combinations of food I have had as a kid, but maybe it was more than that, maybe it was a piece of warmth that I could touch and smell, and bring some joy to me that the cold early mornings of Beijing couldn’t.

I remember liking it so much that I used to dream, “If one day I got all the money in the world, I would just have as many of these kraft single ‘grilled cheeses’ as I want.” A naive child’s daydream of course, but not a disingenuous one.

Years later now, my family moved to Canada and we’ve all become Canadian citizens. I don’t know why after all these years, this specific moment stuck with me, it could have something to do with nostalgia or the silly nature of it.

I haven’t tasted a steamed bun in years, maybe I should keep some in the fridge to remind me that things aren’t so bad, after all, I’ve achieved my childhood dream.