08/31/2026
My “nai nai”, grandma in mandarin, was the leader of our pack. She came to Taiwan as an army wife during the war and built a family of five children, and then their children.
As immigrants, the kitchen was where she recreated the flavors of home and fed her busy household. In our Northern Chinese tradition, making a meal was a shared, tactile process. Multiple generations gathered around the table, mixing, kneading and rolling. There was rarely a fixed recipe. You learned simply by being there.
Many of us later went off to other parts of the world and started families of our own. Everywhere we went, we made dumplings. By repeating the rituals of grandma’s kitchen, we hold onto where we came from and carry it forward - a wooden dowel connecting us all.
And that’s how I view kitchens and approach kitchen design today: a place for making, gathering and sharing - where memories are made, roles are passed down, and a family is shaped and lives on.
This is my dream kitchen with Miele x Architectural Digest
