From Ottawa To Berlin, My Mom s Curry Always Brings Me Home
Food was our cultural sustenance, our tie to the homeland. June Chua Updated
The author and her mom in the 1990s. (Photo: June Chua)
I live half a world away from my parents. When I eat, I think of them. As I’m tucking into my dinner in Berlin, my parents are preparing their lunch in Calgary. The forced separation due to COVID-19 is a bit reminiscent of living away from home when I moved to Ottawa for university in the early 1990s. Home was a five-hour plane ride away and we didn’t have computers and video calls back in the day. Cross-country calling was expensive. I might as well have been in Berlin.