Lamb Soup for the Sol(stice)

“Grief tears us apart but grief also brings us home. Because in our deepest grief, there is nowhere else to go.” - Kai Cheng Thom

My maternal grandmother was born in a small village of Shaanxi, China, heart of the rooster, home to the Terracotta Army, eastern end of the Silk Road. She moved down south to Chengdu, Sichuan, where I was raised, when her military husband was deployed to Tibet in the 1960s, the region next to Sichuan. She then lived the rest of her life, raising three children and their children, in the Southwest of the country.

To the young me, however, grandma always represented something other than Sichuan. She understood the Sichuan dialect but always spoke an accent-heavy Mandarin. When living her day-to-day life in Chengdu, bargaining at the local market, or ordering food at a restaurant, grandma’s otherness was heard. Mandarin in fact became my first language despite me growing up in Sichuan, and it is still spoken in my maternal family to this day. This was partially due to the fact that, in 90s China, one’s ability to speak the national language accent-free was a sign of good education, and my family was susceptible to that. At the same time, the effort to speak a language similar to the maternal ancestry, though at the risk of appearing othered, was our way to preserve the family’s northern roots.

This otherness was further honored in grandma’s kitchen. The biggest dietary difference between the northern and southern parts of China, as I was told, was the main dish being wheat based versus rice based, given the differences in agricultural environments. In Sichuan, people ate at least two meals a day with a bowl of rice; in grandma’s hometown Shaanxi, folks created all sorts of culinary arts working that gluten: from dumplings to noodles to chive pancakes, there’s always a pin rolling and a board dusted with flour in a northerner’s kitchen. Besides the carbohydrates, the choices of meat and the flavor profiles differ as well. Being the endpoint of the Silk Road, Shaanxi’s cuisine was much influenced by central Asian and nomadic cultures, introducing the use of lamb and the beautiful spices like cumin into Chinese people’s daily lives. Outside of grandma’s home, I was a child of Chengdu with an induced obsession over chilies and peppercorns; in grandma’s kitchen, we ate like how her ancestors always ate: on weekends we pan-fried pancakes filled with chives, for New Years we made dumplings with handmade skins. The most special dish, among them all, is the lamb soup on Winter Solstice.

Now, you might argue, lamb soup isn’t something unique to Shaanxi or northern culture. Indeed, in a small town Sichuan restaurant on Winter Solstice, you may find servings of lamb soup, dressed with signature chili oil, and consumed with a bowl of white rice. In grandma’s kitchen, however, lamp soup is served with homemade naan, broken into bite sizes and thrown in the soup by hand. We eat spoonfuls of naan, soup, lamb, daikon, and cilantro. And to me, the strangest addition to this entire dish were the freshly peeled orange peels floating on top of the soup, with an unmistakable citrus fragrance and bright color, so out of place in a hearty wintery soup, yet the trademark of a regional cuisine. Grandma and I would eat across from each other at her round dinner table, connected by the layers of hot steam coming out of our soup bowls. I would slurp it down, avoiding the strange existence of those floating orange peels, responding halfheartedly to grandma’s remark: it’s much better than the outside’s, isn’t it?

“The outside” was a world of Sichuan restaurants dressing lamb with chili oil. “The outside” was a world speaking a different language than her own. “The outside” was a world perhaps she never felt belonged to, no matter how much she understood. In here, around the dinner table, under the hanging light, was a sanctuary where she was one with her ancestors. In here, she found her way home.

In the winter of 2024, seven years after grandma’s passing and fourteen years after leaving China, I recreated this dish for the first time in my apartment in Queens. Recipe based on memory, with research from Chinese Tiktok, and tips passed down from my mom over WeChat (“ginger is the most important spice when stewing meats”). My 600sqft apartment was filled with the aroma that instantly brought me back to my childhood. I ate alone at my square kitchen counter, under the hanging lights, and felt something inside me was opening up.

Behind this opening was the entirety of my Chinese identity. It was a whole universe shut tight and tucked away for the previous fourteen years. Not only was I unwilling to approach it, but in fact I had almost - just almost - forgotten about its existence. Because alongside love, joy, the truths to who I am, and all the answers to the questions I didn’t know how to ask, this universe of mine was also stained with so much grief, fear, shame, and feelings I’m still learning the names of. Yet I couldn’t have completely forgotten about it: the outbursts of emotions that occasionally visited me were confusing for a long time, and now I know that they were parts of myself exiled in that universe trying to get my attention.

In February, 2025, I hosted my first ever Lunar New Year party and taught my friends to make dumplings just like my family did. Later in the year I started including my Chinese name (胡心雨, it means heart and rain) in my portfolio alongside my English name, and every time I do it, it feels so vulnerable as if I’m holding my heart with my bear hands, palms open, presenting it to the world. Some time during the summer, I started writing in Chinese again, consistently for the first time since high school, and realized that my parts-in-exile had been waiting to be spoken to until this moment. All I could say to them was, I see you now, and I’m not leaving again.

This past weekend was another Winter Solstice. I got two pounds of lamb from my local Polish butcher who recognized me and trimmed all the fat off the bones with care. I biked to the Chinese market a few minutes away to source daikon radish and it poured while I biked. Drenched wet, I walked into the Mediterranean restaurant down my block to get fresh baked pita and the Latina shop owner called me sweetheart. Friends came over and brought salads and baked goods, we slurped soup and broke pita and avoided those orange peels, and shared with each other our ancestors that are Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, Indigenous American, and generations of New Yorkers. My apartment was once again filled with the aroma of lamb stewed for hours in star anises, bay leaves, ginger, fennel and cumin seeds. My kitchen windows were fogged up by the warm steam tumbling out of the stove-pots and the oven. My cat meowed for my attention, and my homemade woodwick candles burned with a crackling sound. Under the hanging lights, inside that opening within my body, I was one with my grandmothers. I was finding my way home.