s one of the eight major cuisines in China, Cantonese cuisine boasts its unique delicacy and diversity. My hometown Guangning, a small city in Guangdong province, is also one of the contributors to Cantonese cooking style. Among lots of palatable local dishes, Kok Chye (“角仔”, jiaozai) is the commonest but most indispensable for us locals during the Spring Festival and represents the precious cultural tradition of South China.

Kok Chye is a kind of deep-fried dessert with the mixed fillings made of toasted sesame, ground peanuts, coconut shreds, and castor sugar. In Cantonese, “kok” means “angle” (pronounced similarly to dumpling) standing for its near-triangular shape and “chye” is a cute colloquialism referring to younger child or animal. With its wallet-like look and rich stuffing, Kok Chye is taken as a symbol of reunion blessed with abundance and happiness.

Unlike northerners who eat dumplings to celebrate the Spring Festival, my folks enjoy Kok Chye whose history is as long as that of the Cantonese cuisine. The most memorable moment is not only at the dinner table but before that when neighboring families gather in the yard to make Kok Chye. Tiny as they are, making Kok Chye is a two-hour time-consuming and complicated process that people make it as a ritual during the Spring Festival holiday. Women are certainly chefs while men and children join to add up more fun: men volunteer to roll dough out into thin layers and women are responsible for filling, wrapping up and pinching edges into an exquisite pattern like the shape of hemp rope; children run in and out of the crowd playing around. However, my experience of making Kok Chye was not worthy of any great brag. I often stuffed the dough wrapper with so many fillings that they overflew; and my Kok Chye was called “open purse” by joyful neighbors. But how could such joke stop me from joining this annual event!

Historically a frontier and remote region, Guangdong nourished its special local cuisine under the influence of inland civilization and exotic culture, which adds diversified elements to Chinese food culture and make it keep an ever-lasting charm. The homemade Kok Chye is a snack infused with the love and wisdom of ordinary people in South China. During the Spring Festival, Kok Chye is served to treat relatives and friends who are embracing the New Year with hope and best wishes. Sipping tea and savoring Kok Chye while sharing year-long experiences is one of the most marvelous moments of the festival. Today, Kok Chye has travelled with Cantonese people to the world and become an international dessert. Food carries people’s memories and dreams, so does my hometown delicacy Kok Chye.

This is one of the featured essays collected in "The Flavor of Hometown" held by School of English Studies (SES) in Shanghai International Studies University（SISU）. The author, Wei Lingling, is a graduate student of SES. The supervisor, Li Mei, is a lecturer of English at SISU. Her research areas are English-Chinese contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis and language teaching.