My father was not a man who expressed himself easily in words. He grew up in Jiangnan — the fertile Yangtze delta region that includes Shanghai and its surrounding counties — and he carried with him the particular emotional reserve of that generation, of that place, of men who had survived things they didn't speak about. He came to London in 1987 with my mother, working first in a restaurant kitchen in Soho, eventually saving enough to open his own small place in Streatham. He cooked professionally for thirty years. He came home on Sundays and cooked for us.
Hong shao rou — red-braised pork belly — was his Sunday dish. Every week, without fail, from my earliest memory until the autumn I left for university. Pork belly, cut into thick squares. Rock sugar caramelised in the wok until the kitchen smelled like burnt toffee. Shaoxing wine hissing into the oil. Dark soy turning the pork that deep, lacquered red. And then the lid going on, and the whole thing sitting on the lowest possible heat for nearly two hours while he read the newspaper and said almost nothing at all.
The dish itself belongs to a tradition stretching back well into the Song dynasty — there are accounts of something resembling it in writings attributed to the poet Su Dongpo, who reportedly prepared a version during his governorship in the eleventh century. What my father made was distinctly Jiangnan in character: sweeter than the Hunan style, with more rock sugar, more Shaoxing wine, and a gentleness to the spicing that put it at some distance from its earthier Hunanese relative. He never explained any of this. He didn't need to. The dish explained itself.
I moved to London permanently after university. He and I had a relationship made mostly of phone calls and visits home at Christmas, of brief conversations about practical things — had I eaten, was I warm enough, was the job going well. He died of a stroke in February 2023, very suddenly, at seventy-one. My mother had predeceased him by four years. I took a week off work and went back to the house in Streatham.
On the fourth night, I found his wok. I found the Shaoxing in the back of the cabinet, and the dark soy and the light soy lined up in order of frequency of use, as they had always been. I found rock sugar in a paper bag he must have bought not long before he died. I bought pork belly from the Cantonese butcher on the high street — he knew my father, he didn't charge me — and I came home and I made the dish. I got the sugar too dark the first time. I started again.
The second time it was right. The smell, when it came, was so specific and so complete that I had to sit down. I ate it at his kitchen table, from his bowl, with white rice and no accompaniment. It tasted like Sunday. It tasted like a man who didn't say the thing but made the thing, every week, for as long as I was there to eat it. I understood, sitting in that kitchen, that he had been saying it all along — for thirty years, on Sunday afternoons, with a wok and a bag of rock sugar and two hours of silence.
