After Over a Decade of Cooking for Others, They Forgot What They Like to Eat

Selling the hands that cook

Struggling to eat properly

Sixty-six-year-old Su Ying, a domestic worker and Beijing migrant, is preoccupied by one worry: she never has time to eat. Even though she would dearly like to eat properly, and knows exactly what to eat and how to prepare it.

Su Ying hails from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia and arrived in Beijing in 2008 to work as an hourly domestic worker. At the end of last year, she decided to live alone and moved into a shared rental flat for migrant workers in Wangjing. Her room was converted from a store room, measuring just seven square metres. Apart from a 1.2-metre bed, a shelving unit, a single-door wardrobe stuffed to capacity with clothes and bedding, and two wooden chairs, there is simply no room for anything else.

Entering this ground-floor flat, a long, dark corridor stretches ahead, lined with closed doors on both sides. There is no living room, but a large kitchen draws the eye, which is precisely why Su Ying signed the lease despite the cramped size of her room. Su Ying loves to cook, particularly flour-based dishes. Over the past decade or so, she has moved five or six times, yet she has always kept her electric griddle and a large dough-kneading board. On her days off, she prepares large batches of savoury vegetable buns, steamed dumplings and plain steamed buns, freezing them to eat on weekday mornings.

But even before she moved in, the belongings of four households and six people already filled the space. This open-plan kitchen had no storage left for Su Ying. She had no choice but to wedge her board into a narrow gap beside the washing machine, stack her pots on top of the fridge, and leave her remaining cookware and spices scattered across various corners.

The flat is only ever at its busiest in the early morning. Just past six o’clock, the tenants wake one after another. Most of these self-employed traders and junior office workers need to be at work by eight. Four households queue for a single secondary bathroom, six pairs of eyes fixed on the kitchen’s microwave and two-burner hob, the only way to guarantee they can squeeze onto the buses and metro lines on time.

Su Ying struggles to get time in the kitchen. It is most often used by the couple in the master bedroom, and at other times by a middle-aged woman living alone in a single room who works on her feet all day. Su Ying is reluctant to vie for it, fearing she might disturb others, and is always anxious that taking up space might upset her roommates.

Only when she finds the time does she boil water in her own room to prepare milk powder bought by her daughter, eating it alongside some biscuits. Her daughter has repeatedly stressed that breakfast must include protein to be properly nutritious. Now, she has finally taken this to heart.

The bathroom is just as much of a scramble. After waiting too long, there simply isn’t enough time left for the commute. At that point, she can only grab a steamed bun or vegetable dumpling from the freezer, along with a packet of pickled vegetables, and eat them while walking to the bus stop. She never eats these foods in her own room, worrying that stray oily crumbs on the floor might attract cockroaches.

She must be at the first household by 8 a. m. to begin cleaning, and at the second by 10 a. m., where she works until 1 p. m. Fortunately, she is able to have her lunch at her second employer’s home. She then arrives at the third household at 3:30 p. m., finishes at 6:30 p. m., and eats dinner there as well.

While eating at a client’s home might seem more convenient, Su Ying usually rushes through her meal, eating mostly just the staple dishes. She remains keenly aware of not wanting to impose: “Sitting at other people’s tables and using their chairs feels a bit uncomfortable.” She also brings her own bowl and chopsticks.

Hui Rong, originally from Jiaozuo in Henan, arrived in Beijing a year before Su Ying. At 58, she shares a cramped corridor-style apartment block (tongzilou) with her husband in a village on the city’s eastern outskirts. Each morning at 5 a. m., her husband, a security guard, must rise to catch the 7 a. m. queue for clocking in, and she gets up alongside him. For breakfast, she eats pancakes or steamed buns she made the evening before, before heading out for her hourly shifts. Her employers do not ask her to stay for lunch, so once the mealtime window has passed, she finds something to eat herself, rushing through it to avoid being late for her next assignment.

In these corridor-style apartment blocks, gas stoves can only be set up in the shared hallway. Yet Hui Rong has insisted on carving out a “kitchen” space for herself, complete with a clear layout and workflow, and the spice rack is adorned with flowers she has gathered from the fields (we will return to the story of these domestic workers cultivating their own plots later). Before her child went away to a boarding high school, this corner served as her vital battlefield.

After that, she found a bit of relief, only needing to prepare dinner for the two of them before her husband got home at 7 pm — her husband, whose work hours are unpredictable, now keeps an even more irregular schedule than she does, having breakfast at 10 am and lunch at 3 pm.

At this pace of work, stomach problems have become the norm for many domestic workers. In recent years, Su Ying has noticed her appetite shrinking, and she gets bloated by anything hard to digest. Hui Rong, too, suffers from bloating in the evenings; both she and her husband struggle with stomach issues.

The Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre distributed a survey to 325 domestic workers in Beijing. The findings reveal that, in the course of their work, more than 14% of respondents reported long-term malnutrition resulting from chronic overexertion in heavy manual labour and persistently poor diets. Additionally, 54.7% of domestic workers suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, while 44.6% endure health issues linked to prolonged exposure to cleaning agents and cooking fumes.

Su Ying also suspects that the pesticide residues on leafy greens in Beijing have taken a toll on her digestive health – having grown vegetables in her hometown of Chifeng, she knows that many leafy greens carry varying levels of pesticide residue. Before taking on these two current employers, she had no fixed meal times, much like Hui Rong. In an effort to save time, she would eat reheated frozen meals and frequently eat on the go. These habits are key factors that trigger stomach ailments.

But what do I actually like to eat?

Despite renting a small room with a large kitchen, Su Ying still struggles to name what she “likes to eat”. She prefers to use the space to host friends who are fellow Beijing migrant domestic workers.

On her weekly day off, Qiu Hua does not feel inclined to cook for herself. Originally from Weinan in Shaanxi, she is a woman who loves to laugh and tell stories. Since arriving in Beijing in 2017, she has worked almost continuously as a live-in domestic worker for the same family, responsible for cleaning, watering plants, laundry, and cooking. She is highly skilled at preparing braised dishes, wheat-based foods, and stir-fries, yet on her day off, all she wants to do is head straight to a park the moment she wakes up. She carries a bottle of water and a few snacks to see her through lunch, and upon returning to her employer’s home in the evening, she simply boils a handful of frozen dumplings. Qiu Hua seldom eats out, finding restaurant meals neither tasty nor economical. Biscuits and bread pose a lighter burden, both on her digestion and her wallet.

In truth, female domestic workers do have their own standards for what is “delicious” and “healthy”. Yet over seven or eight years of working in employers’ homes, these personal preferences have gradually been worn down by a different set of criteria aimed at satisfying those employers.

Qiu Hua has observed that her employers place great importance on expiry dates and well-known brands, while paying little heed to ingredient lists or pesticide residues. Although she is skilled at braising meat and steaming traditional mantou, her employers prefer the deli counters at chain supermarkets and the mantou from Daoxiangcun. Having shared their dining table for eight years, she knows precisely which family members favour a richer soy sauce flavour and who prefer lighter dishes, making the planning of a weekly menu a matter of precise calculation.

But when I asked her what she actually liked to eat, Qiu Hua realised she had lost the habit of voicing her own preferences. “I’ll eat pretty much anything and I’m not fussy. It’s just that sometimes if I cook something different, they won’t like it, and I don’t want to cause them any trouble.”

As our conversation went on, Qiu Hua casually mentioned that she actually has a taste for spicy food. It is a staple condiment in her hometown of Weinan in Shaanxi. For noodles, nothing compares to that first bite of chili oil, which brings a deep sense of satisfaction. Yet ever since working in clients’ homes, she has seldom added spice to her cooking.

She is also careful to note which ingredients are the more expensive ones. Unless her employers warmly invite her to join them, she will not lift her chopsticks.

Su Ying is equally particular about the healthiness of her ingredients: they must be natural and lightly flavoured. Around twelve noon, with the temperature already climbing, we set off on foot from her home to an underground supermarket a kilometre away to buy groceries. She has found that the produce here tends to be fresher and is often on discount.

We bought cucumbers with their blossoms still intact, free-range eggs and celery. Having worked the land herself, Su Ying believes that such crops carry fewer pesticide residues.

The cucumber, celery and free-range eggs came to just under nine yuan. Another standout on the table was the organic beancurd sheets—a gift from fellow domestic workers she had met at the Hongyan Social Work Service Centre, a non-profit organisation.

A lavish meal is ready. But I know it’s only because I’m here. For Su Ying, cooking just for herself is a luxury.

On her weekly day off, when she can finally sit down for a meal, Su Ying simply stir-fries one dish and cooks noodles. She always leaves a portion over—to freeze and eat later, which is less hassle than cooking for two separate meals. A chopping board, washed clean after she’s finished prepping, is balanced across two stools to make do as a dining table. She eats quietly and quickly, keeping an eye out to see if her roommates are home; only when they are away does she allow herself to scroll through short videos.

Cooking seems to be perpetually about others, never about oneself. Female domestic workers rarely pause to consider their own needs; more importantly, they simply no longer have the time to do so.

In 2008, Hui Rong brought her husband and her child, then in the second year of primary school, to Beijing. The stability of family life did little to make matters of food more efficiently organised; rather, the entire burden fell on Hui Rong. Her days began early with cooking, and she would always leave boiled water in the kettle so her child could prepare instant noodles (she was too afraid to let a child only in the second year of primary school operate the gas stove) — a smell the child now actively avoids. In the intervals between two afternoons of hourly domestic work, she would head to the market, prepare dinner for her child, tidy the room, and set out breakfast for the following day.

According to 2008 data from the National Bureau of Statistics, women spend significantly more time on unpaid care work (27.3 hours per week) than men (10.6 hours per week). These figures are drawn from residents across ten provinces and municipalities, including Beijing.

It has always been this way back home, and Hui Rong grew accustomed to it: farming, cooking, cleaning — all tasks she handled alone. Her husband, meanwhile, was responsible for “looking good”. “In my next life, I won’t be choosing a man just for his looks!” Hui Rong laughed heartily.

Hui Rong reckons that when eating alone, making do is quite enough. Hui Rong and I sat in the hallway of the corridor-style apartment block she rents, talking for what felt like ages. She smiled throughout, her eyes curving warmly, yet she could never quite put into words what she truly liked to eat.

A week later, I finally found a new way to get her to open up: is there a particular taste from your hometown that has lingered in your memories, something you have longed for since leaving home but have found difficult to enjoy again?

This instantly had Su Ying speaking with clarity and at length. Her favourite dish is a home speciality known as millet rice leaf wraps (a regional dish of rice and egg sauce wrapped in cabbage leaves): wash the Chinese cabbage leaves thoroughly, soak them in salt water to clean them, then wrap a homemade stir-fried egg paste, spring onions, coriander, and rice inside the leaf. The rice and egg paste are traditionally cooked over a rural wood-fired stove in a large iron wok. Come autumn, villagers love to eat it to warm their bodies. When Sister He first arrived in Beijing, she missed the millet rice leaf wraps more than anything, but with just a gas hob and a small iron pot in her rented flat, she found it nearly impossible to recreate that steaming, comforting flavour.

Qiu Hua also recalled the baked sweet potatoes she used to eat as a child in the countryside around Weinan—pushing aside the warm coal coals left in the kang stove after cooking, burying a few sweet potatoes in the ashes, and retrieving them when preparing the next meal to eat, a taste that evoked memories of her mother. Similarly, Hui Rong mentioned the frozen sweet potatoes from her hometown in Jiaozuo: steaming sweet potatoes grown in their own fields, leaving them outside to freeze overnight, and then sun-drying them during the day. Baked after this process, they were remarkably sweet and fragrant—and afterwards, one could drink a soup made from boiled sweet potato leaves. Whenever her stomach trouble flared up at night, she would just want to drink some of that sweet potato leaf soup.

No longer chewing biscuits alone / Finally, a kitchen large enough for two

“The employer’s home is the employer’s home; there is no scenery in shopping malls or parks that belongs to us.” This is how female domestic workers put it. Is there a place where they can speak openly in their hometown dialects and eat the food they enjoy?

Each Saturday, a small space in a residential building in Wangjing is at its busiest—most domestic workers take their weekly day off on this day. By morning, quite a few have already arrived. Tables are piled high with red sausage brought from home, fresh eggs from the morning market, and mung bean vermicelli that employers tend not to eat… Here, there is finally a kitchen large enough for two, complete with plenty of bowls, plates, spoons and chopsticks.

By lunchtime, the women in Beijing most adept at cooking fall into an orderly division of labour. One home-cooked speciality after another is stir-fried and swiftly set on the table by hands accustomed to work. As they chat and eat, someone begins to sing aloud a song they wrote themselves. In the lyrics, they are sisters gathered from every corner of the country. They dance, massage each other’s tense muscles, and swap second-hand items and ingredients.

This is the home of the Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre, a non-profit organisation. On domestic workers’ rare day off each weekend, Hongyan charges no fee, brings together people from their home regions, hosts activities, and offers a chance to meet companions. After learning about Hongyan in 2023, Qiu Hua finally stopped wandering the parks alone, eating biscuits.

Kitchens bring together people from all corners of the country, each with their own distinct character. Over the past decade, the Hongyan Centre has moved seven times. With every relocation, limited space meant they had to part with some belongings, but the pots, pans and crockery were never discarded. Whenever a new premises included a kitchen, there was a noticeable rise in the number of sisters attending the weekend gatherings.

At one point, the basement on a mezzanine level was not equipped for cooking. Still, the women found ways to gather round a table. Some would bake their own flatbreads to bring along, while others learned to use Pin Haofan, a meal-splitting service, teaming up with two sisters so they could each enjoy a dish for just one yuan. One woman from Inner Mongolia even turned up with lamb shanks sent by her son and a small electric steamer—her only piece of cooking equipment in her rented flat—to teach everyone how to wrap lamb shaomai.

In the spring of 2025, while preparing for her domestic workers’ stand-up comedy routine at Hongyan, Qiu Hua would make the journey to Wangjing every weekend. Her employer’s home is in Shunyi, meaning she was crossing the entire city just to get there. The midday meals grew steaming and convivial. During festivals, she would also bring along dried chillies, fruit, and novel ingredients from her hometown that her employers typically shunned…

Hongyan founder Mei Ruo believes that food carries the essence of home in the lives of these Beijing migrant women. Food connects them with their hometowns and gives everyone a chance to speak openly about where they come from. “When you eat food from home, you’re less likely to feel homesick. I think there’s a healing quality to it.”

The Worn Body

Holding Fast to a Plot of Land

Yet I remain curious: after all these years in the city, navigating the compromises of working in employers’ homes, commuting, and adjusting to cramped living quarters, do they long to return to their roots? Or, through sheer effort, can they forge a sense of stability and routine within this constant flux that brings them inner peace?

I have found that another way domestic workers sustain their connection to their homeland is by growing their own vegetables.

In Su Ying’s memory, the spring air back home has always carried the sharp tang of pesticides. She once tended a plot of barely two mu of cabbage and aubergines in her native Chifeng. Each spring, to ward off pests and ensure the outer leaves tightly wrapped the heart, she had to spray the cabbages. That scent lingers in her memory so strongly that, even after all these years, she still refuses to eat cabbage.

After years of working away from home, she discovered her husband had leased her land to someone else—along with the twenty-odd trees on it—yet she only received 500 yuan in rent last year. She had never consented to the arrangement. Still, she thinks of her plot often. For more than a decade, legal advocacy and grassroots campaigns protecting the land rights of rural women who marry out have risen in waves, but it takes time for such efforts to reach each woman’s natal and marital villages, and to truly shift local customs and traditions.

Hui Rong, meanwhile, began growing her own vegetables in Beijing. After moving to Village C in the city’s eastern suburbs, she found neighbours were all planting crops: there was a stretch of green belt land bordering a neighbouring village that had long lain fallow. Some filled polystyrene boxes with soil for simple plantings, while others broke the ground themselves amid the rubble.

It was not until 2024 that a dispute erupted between the two villages over the use and upkeep of the land. The plot was ultimately reclaimed by the neighbouring village. Hui Rong had no option but to find another vacant patch within her own village and plant discreetly. She became the only one who kept on farming.

Hui Rong buys vegetable seeds online, ordering anything that looks edible based on the name and photo. Most of her experiments succeed. Peacock greens and Beibei pumpkins, for instance, thrive without pesticides and yield the best harvests; stir-fried greens and steamed pumpkin have become regulars on the table. The list goes on: Chinese chives, coriander, mugwort, shiso, spring onions, hollyhocks, mint…

She has fallen for misleading claims, too, buying coriander supposedly programmed to stop growing at a ‘perfect length’, and ‘Mediterranean’ celery with leaves so tender they can be torn off and eaten raw. In the end, the coriander grew leggy and bolted, while the so-called ‘Mediterranean’ celery leaves ballooned to an enormous size in no time, becoming so thick they couldn’t even be torn by hand. Though she quickly realised these varieties were inedible, Hui Rong still kept them going, watering them alongside the rest of the crop.

Hui Rong believes her commitment to growing vegetables stems from a farmer’s inability to sit idle. She jokes that compared to cultivating the land, domestic work is almost too easy. “On hourly shifts, I can visit four or five homes in a single day. People are always surprised, asking how I manage it and whether I don’t get tired. I just tell them, that’s nothing at all.”

Her enthusiasm for growing vegetables rubbed off on a neighbour down the same stairwell. She gave him some seeds (which, unfortunately, included the ill-fated tall coriander). Taking her lead, he also gathered some plastic foam boxes and flowerpots to grow his own. Today, that coriander stands out quite noticeably amongst the rest.

Qiu Hua does her gardening at her employer’s home instead. The family enjoys eating Chinese chives, but supermarket packs tend to be too large and often go off before they can all be used. Last summer, the employer bought some chive roots along with seeds for pak choi and spring onions, and suggested she get them planted.

This plot is far more compact than Hui Rong’s. What gets planted is dictated mainly by the employer’s preferences, but Qiu Hua does not mind; she quite enjoys the work. “Growing your own food is convenient and fresh, and it keeps you occupied.” Pak choi and spring onions are common in her home village, so she knows how to raise them from seed. She has also cultivated radishes, Chinese cabbage, aubergines, chillies, cucumbers, loofahs, pumpkins, winter melons, and courgettes given to her by a neighbour. They all taste different from what you buy in shops.

For Hui Rong, whose days are spent working in all weathers, the vegetable patch once offered a steady source of comfort to look forward to. With her child finally at secondary school, she had found a little spare time.

When she first arrived in Beijing, Hui Rong worked at a frozen food factory on the city’s outskirts. The plant was so cold that even a thick padded jacket couldn’t keep the ache out of her joints. Fearing the long-term toll on her health, she moved back into the city and returned to domestic work.

But in 2025, a car accident left Hui Rong injured. She stopped working in clients’ homes altogether.

She was knocked down by a turning car while crossing the road in her village, sustaining nerve damage in her leg. Now she spends her days confined to her corridor-style apartment block, trying to keep herself occupied. She eats far less than before—partly because she is less active and her appetite has diminished, but also to save money. Yet she still tends to her little plot, even though carrying water to irrigate it, plus loosening the soil and pulling weeds, has become so much more demanding.

By the time we returned from the garden, Hui Rong had harvested her homegrown chives and soaked the dried tofu skin and glass noodles. She warmed a wok with her own rendered lard, then taught me how to make chive and egg stuffed pancakes as large as the pan itself. They had a flavour I had never experienced before.

At sixty-six, Su Ying’s back and legs are also giving her trouble. On the walk of over a kilometre to the supermarket, we stopped several times; Su Ying’s knees were aching, and her right foot, prone to swelling, needed a rest. Even while kneading dough and pan-frying flatbreads, she had to sit down periodically. Friends who knew her in the past would always describe her as brisk and highly efficient. She still does her best to keep everything running smoothly, and has already hosted several groups of companions in the large kitchen.

A 2024 paper by Han Wei of the Chinese Academy of Labour and Social Security Research highlighted that domestic workers, especially those in cleaning and live-in roles, face numerous occupational injury hazards. They are prone to falls and impacts, alongside occupational risks such as lumbar disc herniation and arthritis, as well as injuries stemming from overwork. Yet, for reasons ranging from a desire to safeguard their employment to a lack of awareness of legal rights, many domestic workers do not report workplace injuries. A Brazilian study further underscores this: Among domestic workers, 51 per cent use painkillers, 34 per cent have spinal problems, and 47 per cent report high blood pressure.

Su Ying dreams of moving back to the suburbs one day, to a home with a small courtyard of her own, and ideally to open her own noodle shop. It would not need to be large or located on a busy street; as long as it allows her to cook buckwheat noodles, steamed buns and flour-drop soup, she knows these are the most delicious and wholesome dishes. “It would be wonderful if I had someone to help me; my legs simply cannot stand for too long.”

Through Each Other, We See Ourselves

During my placement at the Hongyan Centre, I watched the organisation implement various initiatives to help the women recognise and care for their physical well-being. Today, “physical and mental health” stands as one of their core programmes. Through collaborative learning, the women began to see one another’s needs, and in caring for each other, they gradually came to understand the importance of looking after themselves.

Yet this shift did not come easily. At first, the very notion of “self-care” appeared entirely foreign. For these rural women living as Beijing migrants, enduring hardship was simply the most familiar way to cope with pain and hunger.

Su Ying once recounted at the Hongyan Centre how, in 2015, she reached the age of 55—a significant threshold in Beijing’s domestic labour market at the time. After 50, steady work became scarce, and by 55, she was mostly confined to casual hourly shifts. Every morning, she would leave her home on the city’s outskirts at 4 a. m. to wait in line for the first bus into the centre, sometimes shuttling between five or six employers in a single day. Her habit of eating while on the move, along with the persistent swelling and pain in her feet, both began then.

I also noticed another hourly worker at the centre who managed five jobs daily, yet still protected a two-hour window between 11 a. m. and 1 p. m. to cook and rest. A northerner with a bright, outgoing personality, she loved storytelling and was always quick to lend a hand. Gradually, more women were inspired by her example, squeezing out moments between their shifts to care for themselves.

I came to realise that the first step toward change involved stepping away from their identities as domestic workers and wives, and temporarily returning to their “natal home”—a metaphorical sanctuary. There, they could gather with women who, though different in temperament, had walked the same path of leaving their villages, working in employers’ homes, and hunting for jobs, and who shared the same burdens of exhaustion and wear.

On 1 January 2026, the women finally reunited around the table after a long separation. Qiu Hua was there, leading everyone in a rendition of “A Carefree Life”, her powerful voice echoing through the room. Hui Rong could not attend due to a foot injury. Having been close friends for years, Su Ying filmed several clips and shared them in the Hongyan group chat, tagging @会荣. “I’ll watch the livestream from bed!” Hui Rong replied with a laugh.

*Author’s note: Terms such as “baomu” (domestic helper) and “ayi” (auntie) function much like “product names” in the domestic service sector. “Baomu” carries heavier historical baggage, reflecting feudal-era attitudes towards care labour. While certain academic papers and agencies still use it to describe live-in staff responsible for cleaning, cooking, and childcare, it has faded from everyday conversation. Conversely, “ayi”—a word traditionally used by toddlers to address their nannies—has surged in popularity, fuelled by growing childcare needs since the 1990s and the recent boom in digital platforms. The women interviewed here may refer to themselves as “ayi” when addressing clients, but in private or when introducing themselves to peers, they consistently prefer the professional title “domestic worker”.

*This article draws on the 2021 report published by the Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre, titled “Green Domestic Workers: From Household Care to Leading Green Lifestyles – An Exploratory Study Based on Social Work Practice”, authored by Ms Li Wenfen.

*To safeguard the privacy of those interviewed, the names Su Ying, Hui Rong and Qiu Hua are pseudonyms.

– This is Foodthink’s 816th original article –

Unless otherwise stated, all images are courtesy of the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

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