MANDU(만두)
All of the extended family has gathered for another Lunar New Year celebration. At least a dozen are in the kitchen preparing mandu with the leadership and expertise of Grandma Choi, the matriarch of the family.
Chatter and laughter fill the kitchen along with the scent of steamed mandu.
“Look how nice your mandu turned out! See? It must be true because your children are beautiful too!” My grandma said this every year to my mother. Supposedly, a myth says that the prettier the dumpling you make, the more attractive your children will be. Every year, we focused on our mandu-shaping as if the future of our children depended on it.
Making mandu can be a long and tedious process. Each wrapper has to be individually rolled out and each mandu has to be carefully shaped with the filling inside.
But because we did it as a family, making mandu had become our favorite excuse to sit and talk for hours on end.
Like many other Korean families, mandu has always been a staple at every major Korean holiday celebration. Mandu is essentially a Korean dumpling: a flour wrapper filled with a variety of minced vegetables and pork.
Every family’s recipe for the filling is a little different. Our family’s favorite has always been a filling of minced pork, tofu, scallions, and kimchi.
In 2005 — my parents, my younger brother, and I moved to California. I remember our first Lunar New Year without all of our extended family. As a nine-year-old child, I remember feeling scared that the day would feel too empty without the rest of the family.
We decided that we would spend the day making mandu just like any other Lunar New Year. The four of us sat around our new dining room table and began making mandu. At first, I remember it feeling far too quiet for a Lunar New Year celebration. As we busily rolled out the dough for the wrappers and shaped the dumplings, conversations flowed. The empty feeling subsided as we spoke of all of the beautiful memories we had in Korea and the ones we were going to make in our new home.
It was something familiar we could do together as we were adjusting to a wildly foreign life in California, away from all of our friends and family. Ever since that day, my family has made it a point to make mandu together at least once a year.
That is the beauty my family has found in making mandu together. Mandu is comfort food but making them together as a family has also allowed us to keep our memories in Korea alive and form stronger bonds with one another.
“Mandu is a taste of home. But making them together is so important to us because the process makes our family feel closer to each other and our cultural heritage,” said Yoon, my mother.
