From the car trunk, egg-yolk-glazed barbecue pork buns brim like miniature suns from a horizon of Shin ramen packages, Japanese rice crackers and dried seaweed. It is as if someone has packed my childhood into grocery bags and loaded them into my mother’s Prius.
Leaving campus to visit home for dinner, I first have a delivery to make. I navigate to an east-campus dorm, dial a foreign number and in a few minutes, an unfamiliar freshman happily comes to retrieve the aforementioned bag along with the well-wishes of her parents.
In the recent weeks, the parents gathered on the Chinese social media app WeChat have worked together to deliver Asian comfort food care packages to their freshmen students. With deliveries ranging from fruit, fresh-baked pastries and snacks, this parent community has organized to send perishable Asian food across the country — precisely by not sending food across the country.
Rather than resorting to shipping these deliveries, this parent community has taken to WeChat, a social media and instant messaging site now ubiquitous in China, to connect with parents who live near Stanford. Through a WeChat group of over 150 people, out-of-state parents can contact local parents to buy and deliver care packages of otherwise perishable food to their children.
Through this WeChat group, local parents may volunteer to purchase food items, which they then pass on to their child, who is then charged with delivering the package to a fellow freshman somewhere on campus. Contacts, food requests, phone numbers and even payments are easily exchanged through the WeChat app. Outside the app, food is passed from parent, to student, to the happy recipient.
The later weeks of Autumn quarter, as I have found, come with repetitive dining hall meals, a decline in free food events (or in some cases, time to attend these events), and a general nostalgia for home-cooked food. Whether it’s Hong Kong egg tarts from the grocery store deli or a steaming bowl of ramen, food has an incredible way of inspiring the taste of home.
Through this parent network, it has been amazing to get to deliver home to my fellow freshmen — one overloaded grocery bag at a time.
Contact Irene Han at irenehan ‘at’ stanford.edu.