In two days’ time I will have landed in Hong Kong. Our birthplace, as far as I know. It will be seven years since I last returned. Popo was still alive then – tiny and frail, but alive. I’ll visit the temple for her, for you. Light three incense sticks held close to the forehead, bow three times. Popo taught me how to do this for you, all those years ago. Do I need to do it twice now? Or is it more an act of collective ancestral remembrance, learned rituals passed down through generations, unquestioned, tucked into memory.

Some things are harder to keep hold of. I can’t stop picturing the disappointment that might have lined your face, realising my mother’s tongue is no longer my mother tongue. Luckily, you are not here to hear the way it no longer comes reflexively, but instead in stilted half-sentences, half the words missing, conversations only half understood.

The rest of my family, I imagine, will look at me with half pity – because I can barely converse with them – and half-surprise at how well I’m doing, considering.

It is entirely my fault that I failed to keep my Cantonese. Over the years it gradually slipped away – unpractised, unnoticed. I had forgotten the simplest words that connect a sentence: such as, because, and so. When Covid arrived and Chinatown shut down, the disconnection felt more acute. Access to the flavours that reminded me of your cooking – that reminded you of home – was denied. It pushed me to learn to cook the dishes you would have wanted to eat, dishes that always seemed a little too complicated to make in my own kitchen.

And then I found Mama Cheung’s channel on YouTube. A surrogate, of sorts, she began to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Each unpolished tutorial is accompanied by the gentle tinkling of a jazz piano. She often wears a floral apron, and there’s a slight purple tinge to her black hair. She greets viewers, tells us what she’ll be showing us how to cook, then points to and explains the ingredients laid out on a kitchen surface: a tablespoon of sesame oil and of cornstarch, a thumb-sized piece of ginger, a little dish of fermented soybean paste. She speaks Cantonese softly, her words subtitled in English. She has 402 videos, 592,000 subscribers and over 113 million views.

I thought, maybe, if I followed her instructions carefully enough, I might absorb the language by eating the food made with her words. I have watched her braise Hainanese pork with pickled cabbage, poach soy chicken, wrap bamboo leaves around sticky rice dumplings filled with pork belly, split mung beans, peanuts, wind-dried sausage and salted duck egg yolks.

But while I know what to do when Mama Cheung tells me zoeng lin ngau mok pei, I don’t truly know how to ask my elderly auntie after her health. And though she taught me how to make lo bak go and chasiu sou, her words just don’t taste the same. It should have been you teaching me the language for peeling a lotus root.

So I pound black sesame seeds with honey and lard, roll them into balls of glutinous rice dough, and brew ginger, oolong and osmanthus flower tea sweetened with rock sugar and goji berries in which these will be eaten. And I look to the left from the counter where I work, see your graduation certificate from the Hong Kong & Kowloon Restaurant & Cafe Workers General Union Vocational School: ‘This is to certify that Leung Po Chu has attended the course of professional cookery lessons and has successfully passed the examinations, dated 10 November 1989.’

In two days, when I touch down in the place where I learned my first language – and the language I left behind – I will at least be able to show my aunties, your sisters, a photo of those glutinous rice dumplings and tell them:

Tai ha, gam go sing kei ngo zoh tong yuen. Yan wai hai Yuen Siu Jit. Wai zo ga ting tyun zeoi. Ngo zung mei mong gei.

‘Look – I made tong yuen this week. For Lantern Festival. For family reunion. I haven’t forgotten.’

And it might be halfway good enough.