On our family day (aka quality time with my mom), we decided to make dumplings. Besides actually making dumplings, I got inspired to create a how-to about it.

This spontaneous act of CAS turned into something more meaningful to me as I decided to create a guide to making dumplings. As someone who shares a Chinese/Asian heritage, I never came to appreciate how important it is to experience and understand my own culture until recently, partially due to the realization that I will be leaving this country in a little bit more than one year.

In the experience of making the dumplings itself, I learned to be more in-touch with my culture. In fact, I never properly learned how to make dumplings until recently. To me, they are more than a type of food, but a dish that I identify with in some sense. I am fortunate enough to experience this unique culinary art that brought my mom and me closer.

To further the experience, as I mentioned earlier, I created a how-to for dumpling-making using Canva. While making dumplings, a random thought suddenly struck me and inspired me to do this: why not share my culture with the world? Food is also, essentially, a medium that connects people together.

The process of making this how-to wasn’t necessarily the easiest. To depict each step clearly, I took photos with my flour-covered hand. However, this results in a less accurate representation of the actual step. For instance, for part one of step six, it is virtually impossible to fold the sheets together with one hand, but the inaccuracy in this case surprisingly, in my opinion, contributed to a better understanding of the action. Watching me struggle, my mom decided to help me take a photo for step seven.

Regarding the stylistic choices for this piece, I edited each photo with VSCO first with a similar undertone. For every photo, I used the M5 filter on VSCO, lowered the exposure, and “grained” each photo. This is to create a vintage vibe for

dumpling making! by Yu Sunny Fang