My Mother Left Me a Garage Full of Mysterious Ingredients—And So Much More
After immigrating to the U.S., my mother dispensed with some traditional cooking methods, but when she died she left behind an apothecary of TCM, dried herbs, and ancient ingredients.
Reported by Vogue.
Grief has a way of reorganizing your priorities fast. When writer and daughter Christine Hyung-Oak Lee returned to Los Angeles in the summer of 2024 after her mother was moved into hospice — given a week or two to live — she stayed for five months. What she found in that time wasn't just loss. It was an inheritance she hadn't known to ask for.
Her days ran on ritual: early mornings fielding Slack notifications before the house woke up, afternoons assembling mystery Pyrex containers from a fridge crowded with leftovers, evenings at a Baldwin piano in the hospice common room playing pieces her mother had once quietly placed in front of her. The one constant? A Thermos of Hong Kong–style yin yang coffee — Ceylon tea, black coffee, evaporated milk — the single thing her mother always wanted. Food, as it turned out, was the whole language.
The Garage Was a Love Letter
Her mother, the eldest daughter of seven, had grown up in a three-bedroom Hong Kong flat in the 1950s and '60s learning patience the hard way — washing, soaking, marinating, gutting, descaling, deveining — absorbing generations of technique around a wok while tuning out the noise of a crowded, competitive household. She immigrated to the U.S. and evolved: ditched the bamboo steamers, embraced the microwave, became an enthusiastic Daiso devotee who replaced fine serving ware with plastic and banished anything heavy to the garage. Her daughter jokes she was born with a plastic spoon in her mouth. But when her mother passed peacefully on February 22nd at 2:22 p.m., what she left behind in that garage was staggering — an entire apothecary of TCM herbs, dried seafood, and ingredients stored in repurposed mayonnaise jars and Costco biscotti containers, hand-labeled in Chinese script. Some items, including dried tangerine peels and pu'er tea, had been brought back from Hong Kong and were over a hundred years old, according to Vogue.
Now, with Google Lens and resources like The Woks of Life, she's working her way through the collection — scanning labels, researching uses, cooking for her father's approval, and carrying ingredients back to New York to keep going. It's not nostalgia, exactly. It's more like a conversation that got a late start but hasn't ended.
The clothes, the jewelry, the cloisonné bracelet that slipped up her mother's thinning arm — those are heirlooms. But the garage full of unlabeled jars? That's the real inheritance: a woman's lifetime of knowledge, quietly waiting for someone to finally have the time to learn it.
Read the original at Vogue.
