Six hundred dumplings

Every year my mother says we'll start at ten and every year we start at ten thirty because my uncle is late, and every year she says something about my uncle, and every year my aunt says "Mei, he's here now," and then we make the dumplings. Six hundred of them. That's not an exaggeration; my mother has a number in her head that's been the same since I was small, and it's six hundred, and it's for a family of about twenty-five, and by the end of the day about a hundred and fifty have been eaten in the kitchen by people "checking," and there are still too many, and they go in the freezer and last till March. The system is this. My mother makes the filling, alone, in the big steel bowl, the night before. Nobody helps. Nobody's allowed. I asked her once for the quantities and she said "until it's right," and I said that's not a quantity, and she said "then you're not ready," and that was a decade ago and I'm thirty-six and I've made my peace. Morning of, the table's cleared, floured, and everyone gets a job by seniority. My grandmother, ninety-one, sits at the head and doesn't make anything; she watches, and occasionally says a dumpling is ugly, and she's right. My mother and my aunt roll the wrappers, by hand, with the small pin, a stack of perfect circles that come off the pin so fast I still can't follow it. The uncles fold. My cousins and I fold. The kids, my cousins' kids, and there are a lot of them now, do the "special" ones, which means the ones that come out looking like small accidents and get boiled first so the kids can find their own. My husband, who is from Adelaide and had never seen a dumpling made before he met me, has been doing this for eight years now, and every year my grandmother watches him fold and says something in Cantonese, and every year I don't translate it, and every year he says "was that good or bad?" and I say "she noticed you," which is true.

This year something was different, and I'm still working out how I feel about it. We started at ten thirty (my uncle). My mother made the filling. But when the rolling started, she rolled for about twenty minutes and then put the pin down, and rubbed her wrist, and said, quite casually, "Lin. Come and do this." The table went quiet. My aunt looked up. My grandmother looked up. "Mum, I can't roll." "You can. I've watched you. You do it wrong but you can." I took the pin. It's small, like a fat stick, and the trick, which nobody teaches you, which you're just supposed to absorb across thirty years of watching, is that the wrapper turns and the pin doesn't, and the middle stays thicker than the edge, and you don't look at your hands. The first one was a disaster. Shaped like Tasmania. My grandmother said something. "What did she say?" "She said it's ugly." My husband, folding, without looking up: "She noticed you." I did about a hundred and twenty. They got better. By the end they were round, or round enough, and the stack came off the pin at a speed that was maybe a fifth of my mother's and I was sweating and my wrist hurt and I understood, for the first time, why she rubbed it. She sat next to my grandmother and folded. She hadn't folded in years; that's a job for people further down the table. She was slow and precise and she didn't say anything to me for an hour, and then, when the first batch came out of the water and everyone was eating standing up, she handed me one on a spoon and said, "Yours." I ate it. It was fine. The wrapper was a bit thick on one side. "Next year," she said, "you do the filling." "You said I wasn't ready." "You're not." She took the spoon back. "Do it anyway." We finished at four. Five hundred and eighty-ish; my uncle miscounted. My husband was told, via me, that his folding had improved, which is the first positive thing in eight years and which he's going to be unbearable about. My grandmother fell asleep in the chair. I've got the filling in March, apparently. I've started watching my mother's hands more carefully. She's noticed. She's started, very slightly, doing things slower when I'm looking.