When it comes to eating, there are moments that stay with you. Maybe it’s the smell of walking past the bakery on the way to school or your local chip shop growing up, or the first time you tried hot, sticky sweet and sour with egg fried rice.
Mei Pang’s food is full of memories, of her mum crimping dumplings in their dozens and dozens as cousins, uncles and aunts would descend on them for family get-togethers. She grew up with food all around her, and that instinct for feeding people flows through to her fingertips, as she pinches and twists her own perfect parcels on the kitchen counter at her home in Edgeley.
Tasting one of these bundles of absolute joy, fresh from the steamer, handmade just a few minutes before, was a revelation. Something I’ll always remember; the day I found and ate the perfect dumpling.
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Mei makes it look effortless, of course. She can produce 6000 of these in a week, for her business Oh Mei Dumpling, set up in 2016, sometimes nailing Netflix series as she goes. It’s mindful work, methodical and skilful, but also calming and meditative too.
Her previous life was not like this. She was a teacher in prison for young offenders and then, flipping to the other end of the scale, a careers specialist at an ‘outstanding’ all girls school in East Manchester. “It was challenging, but rewarding,” she says. It was also stressful.
Though hugely different, both environments were highly pressurised. But she knew deep down that she longed to work with and be around food. This perhaps in spite of her upbringing, rather than because of it.
Her parents arrived in Europe from Hong Kong in the early 80s, seeking a new life in the West. They landed in Holland first, where Mei was born, before moving to the UK, arriving in Bury when she was four.
There, like so many of that generation of Hong Kong immigrants, they bought a takeaway business - a Chinese chippy called Wing Lee. It was hard, with the family - Mei and her brother and her mum and dad - all living upstairs.
But by opening late and with something of a captive audience from the bikers' pub over the road, they just about got by.
They would have a family dinner at 4pm every day. Depending on how business had been the week before, it would be some noodles or rice or soup, or if things had gone well, a whole steamed fish from Bury market, with ginger and spring onions. It would always be something simple and delicious, made from scratch. “Always authentic Hakkanese food,” Mei says. “Very humble.”
‘A takeaway kid’, Mei worked from age nine or 10, helping in the back after she’d done her homework, buttering the barms, sealing up containers, fetching the buckets of cut chips from the shed. So, of course, she would see first-hand the sickening racist abuse that would be thrown at them daily.
“I was told to ignore it, which, now when you think about it, isn’t right,” she says. “It should never be accepted. But you can become quite conditioned. My parents at the time lived in a lot of fear. They did it for my brother and I. My mother was attacked, my dad was attacked.”
She’d moved away to university in Preston when she got the call to say that the family business had been burned down. Thugs had been coming in and demanding food for free. When her mother finally refused, this was the price they paid.
No one was hurt - her mum and dad had moved into a house by this stage. Had they still been living upstairs, the consequences would have been unthinkable. They rebuilt and started again.
It’s probably why when Mei said that she was planning to resign from teaching and start her own food business, her parents worried. Her father in particular did not want to see her go through the same hardships they did.
She’d spoken to her boss to ask if she could go part-time. They agreed, and as a formality, asked for her to put it in writing. She penned the letter, stared at it, then deleted it all and resigned completely instead. “I thought it was about time I followed my own careers advice,” she laughs. “For me it’s always been food. My passion. For my parents, it was survival.”
This was 2016, and with support from her husband Sean, she took the plunge. Her mum gave her a crash course in dumpling making - she’d never made them before - with no recipes written down, no quantities, just feel. When the dumpling dough is right, it’s right.
One day, she posted to her Instagram page a picture of her kitchen, saying that one day she would love her kitchen to be her office. Jason Bailey, co-founder of food market Grub, was following her and offered to help her start up.
And so, with no idea what she was doing, and without telling her parents, she was soon wrapping up 600 dumplings using her mum’s recipes to sell at a food market stall. They sold out in a couple of hours. “I just kept it a secret,” she says. “I didn’t tell my dad. I just didn’t know it would work.”
Before long, she was setting up at Stockport’s Foodie Friday, then the Makers Markets in Didsbury, Cheadle and Knutsford, not to mention selling packs of frozen dumplings ready for the steamer through her webshop. “It made me think, ‘you know what, I can do this’,” she says. “My confidence has never been great, it’s still not.”
During lockdown, she tried delivery, but the demand was so high, she had to ask people to come to her instead. There were queues down the street.
After not telling them initially, her mum, Amy, is now a regular fixture helping her out on the stalls. She’s also behind Mama Mui’s chilli oil, her own recipe, served with the dumplings but also sold in jars at the stalls and at Chinese supermarkets in town (it’s a secret recipe, not even Mei knows it).
Such is the word-of-mouth success of the stalls, she’s found herself in some rarified situations, catering for smart garden parties in Cheshire where there are swimming pools, tennis courts, footballers and soap stars. She also won Best Street Food Trader at the Manchester Food and Drink Awards in 2020.
Things did get a bit on top at one stage. She found working over weekends and then prepping all week, with other events in between, was slowly burning her out, and she was not seeing her family, half the reason she started the business in the first place.
So she started looking after herself better. She cut down the number of markets, started exercising more, and doing yoga. She’s running her first yoga and dumpling retreat in an idyllic mountain location in Andalusia in Spain later this year, combining her two loves. There will be yoga and mindfulness, and then cooking classes.
Taking on less is something that has been difficult, but essential. “Now I can be there and watch my kids grow, be there at sports day,” she says.
“My parents didn’t have that time. I’ve already had a better life than they did. But what I’m doing now is all thanks to my mum. She’s taught me everything. She’s helped with the business. Helped with the children. I’m just so grateful for her.”
Indeed, without Amy, it would be a different story altogether. The recipes are all from inside her head and drawn from her heritage - the pork and prawn open-topped sui mai, the wantons, the beef with five spice, the fried curry pumpkin - all passed on, in the same way that Mei’s daughter, who is only eight, is now making dumplings and noodles herself like it’s second nature. It’s just about feeling and knowing when it’s right. And when it’s right, it’s absolute perfection.
You can find Mei at the Makers Markets in West Didsbury, Cheadle and Knutsford, at Foodie Friday in Stockport and at the street food market at the University of Manchester every Tuesday.
Follow her on Instagram here...
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