I made it to Zhongshan without any problems on the road, despite the furious winter weather that still rages north of Guangdong province. I had barely settled in when my parents announced we were all going to dim sum.

My parents would never let a visit pass without going to dim sum at least once or twice, especially at their apartment complex's restaurant. It's affordable, reliably good, and like Cheers, it's where everybody knows their names. "Hi 关先生 and 关太太...oh, your daughter's back again, huh? Must be an occasion to celebrate." "Would you like the usual table and your usual pot of tea?" After 20 years in the service industry in the US, it's no wonder my parents love being on the receiving end of good service in their retirement years.

Dish after dish came to our table. There were the usual har gow (shrimp dumplings in translucent wrappers) and Chiew Chow dumplings filled with pork and greens. Then came a web of something crisp with dumplings underneath. Turns out, these were pan-fried dumplings, except the pan-frying method was a tad more elaborate than swishing around a hot wok for a few minutes.

The first thing we saw in front of Shiqi Lao were two cooks frying what appeared to be big balloons of dough. They repeatedly turned the giant puffs in their woks so that they would be evenly fried and crispy. In front of the cooks were finished fried puffs, waiting to be brought to expectant diners.

The fried puffs are one of the many local dishes served at Shiqi Lao, which specializes in food from Zhongshan's surrounding villages. The restaurant's rather gaudy exterior, with a 10-foot cartoon pigeon, disguises the fact that it is a foodie haven. Hong Kongers flood the dining room on weekends, taking a 3-hour bus ride just for great inexpensive eating. My family and friends in Zhongshan know to go on weekdays, when they can eat with slightly smaller crowds.

As eyesore-ish the outside was, I was impressed by what the restaurant did with the interior. From the tin panels on the ceiling, I guessed the space used to be a factory or warehouse. Overhead lights were woven like elaborate wicker baskets. You could choose between regular tables or booths in boat-like structures.

*On how this lunch relates to the environment and Blog Action Day, scroll to the last 2 paragraphs.

I had never tried emu before and would never have expected to eat it in China, until my great-aunt invited us to a "Cantonese-style western" restaurant. Located in the old part of Zhongshan, it was curiously named Grace Conqueror Restaurant. There was a pretty courtyard with tables, a fountain, carambola trees, and aloe vera plants. From the courtyard you can hear the occasion bell of the biking recycling collector, who rides through once a week.

If the restaurant had served straight-up Cantonese food, or well-made food of any type, I would have been happy. Instead we ate a bad "fusion" meal. To be fair, my great-aunt and other family members had dined there many times before, and later said the poor food quality this time was very uncharacteristic.

Last night Jacob and I escaped our work desks and had a quintessential night out for being young in a small Chinese city: dinner at a sushi-go-round, an hour of games at a local arcades, and drinks at a boba tea café.

Boba tea , also known as pearl milk tea or bubble tea, is a Taiwanese creation that gained popularity in East Asia in the 1990s, and later spread to US, Canadian, and European cities with large Asian communities. In China's coastal cities, it seems that every other block boasts a café serving boba tea. Not a bad thing considering other places to sit down and have drinks can be either too raucus (tea parlors) or overpriced (Starbucks and imitation Starbucks chains.)

In Beijing we had gone to an rbt for not only boba tea but because some tables had dangling bench-like swings as seats. Zhongshan's rbt also had swings, which was why we chose it over the 20 or so other cafés in the vicinity. Now, the swings may be novelty, even a bit childish, but tell me the idea of sitting on a swing sipping a drink with bubble-like pearls doesn't put a smile on your face.

Zhongshan is over 2,000 kilometers from Beijing, farther than Miami is from New York City. Twenty years ago, it was hard to find northern-style foods in this Cantonese-speaking and Cantonese-food-eating city. How times have changed. At our local hypermarket Da Run Fa 大润发, the prepared foods section is dominated by northern style foods, including every type of noodle and dumpling and pancake you can hope to find in Beijing.

Today for lunch I picked up a few items from the snack section: (from left to right) pumpkin pancakes 南瓜饼, flat bread pockets with Chinese chives 东北大馅饼, and taro cakes 芋头饼. All were good, after a little salt added to the latter two, and were a nice change from the Cantonese fried rice I've been having for lunch almost every day. (Not that fried rice isn't tasty, but change does your tastebuds good.)

I could go to the hypermarket every day and not get bored; it would take me at least a month or two to cover all the meat, baked goods, and prepared foods they have. Maybe I'll post a video next.

Even in a small city like Zhongshan (small by Chinese standards, anyway), there is a huge variety of dim sum restaurants, ranging from tiny mom-and-pop's to large elegant banquet halls. Prince Restaurant, a 10-minute walk from my parent's home, fits the latter description. We forgoed our usual bakery breakfast for dim sum with my parents and a big group of their childhood friends.

Hargao, shaomai,* spring rolls, oh my. Plates and baskets streamed steadily to our table: crispy squid, pork buns, fried dough, lotus leaf rice, coconut pudding. Along with the standard Cantonese dim sum I've had countless times, there was something new, a flaky delicate fan-shaped pastry. The filling? Oysters.

Oysters that are served at dim sum are usually stir-fried or fried, hardly ever in the form of a pastry. The layers here reminded me of phyllo or mille-feuille, though the technique is different. To make this pastry the baker or pastry chef first divides the dough in half, kneeds one part with water, the other part with oil. With the filling in the middle, he then folds the two parts into each other multiple times, then turns the dough inside out before baking so the tiny folds are visible.

In late September or early October, Jacob and I are heading to
Zhongshan to spend a few weeks with my parents and my grandparents.
Zhongshan is my mother's 老家, or home town. Since many people in China live in a place for generations, 老家 can also be an ancestral home.

Zhongshan, in Guangdong province about an hour from Guangzhou, used to be a small undeveloped town where everyone rode bicycles. Now it's a large town with new condos, a gleaming 5-storey shopping center, and streets where everyone scoots around on motorcycles. (At least until they can save up money for a car.) Even though Zhongshan has experienced much development in the last 10 years, it is still very relaxing to stroll up and down the tree-lined streets and not be stuck in a throng of people. The streets and air aren't polluted. There is a 500-year-old tree that juts out into a major road, but nobody will cut it down because it's 500 years old.