Sabrina Popo wasn’t like other grandmas. She was my grandma. She lived on her own and juggled a heavy social rotation of dim sum, senior ballroom dancing, and mahjong with her girl friends. I’d have to be penciled in to her busy calendar if I wanted to get time with her.
Despite spending the last forty-five years in America, Sabrina Popo didn’t need to learn English, since she lived in the mostly Chinese community of San Gabriel. But there were moments she’d surprise me with words like “se-do-be-ley”—her Cantonese pronunciation of strawberry—and “Roshi,” her attempt at my childhood dog’s name, Yoshi.
Sabrina Popo loved pretty things: powdery-pink garden roses, pretty people, perfect skin, and pretty people with perfect skin. I’d catch her wearing an oversized visor, like an Asian Darth Vader, while watering her garden. Normally, she cared too much about what she was wearing in public, but if it meant protecting her porcelain skin, all was fair game. She’d pick me up from school in a car with murdered-out tinted windows blacking out the sun, while wearing long white gloves to her elbows. She always looked twenty years younger than her actual age, and had marriage proposals from a different old man every few months. She was graceful with a hint of humility and elegant with a heap of vanity, and we loved her for it.
During the Lunar New Year, Sabrina Popo’s house would be adorned with bowls of kumquats and mandarin oranges, chocolate gold coins, sesame seed brittle, and white chunks of candied winter melon that she’d saved just for me.
The withdrawal of affection that defined both my parents’ childhoods was a common story in Chinese culture….Tough love was the only love.
Steph and I would recite every Cantonese proverb we’d memorized that year, trying to impress the adults enough to collect as many red envelopes of lucky money as we could.
“Sum seung si sing 心想事成,” we’d say, saving the best for last.
“Sum seung si sing 心想事成,” Sabrina Popo would repeat as she handed me a red envelope with both hands and a wink. May all your wishes come true.
While Sabrina Popo would occasionally surprise us with herbal broths simmering on her back burner, a batch of salted-cabbage-and-pork dumplings, or Kraft mac and cheese with evaporated milk, she had been far more of a social butterfly than a domestic genius when she was raising my mom and had relied on her own mother to help out. But when my great-grandmother died from a heart attack while victoriously screaming “Pong!” at the mahjong table, Sabrina Popo told my then-teenage mom that she was the new family cook. My mom didn’t know how to boil water. But someone had to step up and be responsible. So she ventured to an open-air market and timidly pointed at random cuts of meat from a smoking butcher in a bloody apron. Crowds of people were yelling at her to hurry as she fumbled to negotiate. She returned home to stir-fry the mystery meat with some mystery vegetables and served it to the family.
“Your famous cardboard with rubber bands!” Phillip Gong Gong, my grandfather, teased her, chewing the gristly meat and semi-raw cabbage chunks. But he still ate it with a smile, my mom says, and called it absolutely delicious. It didn’t matter how it tasted. They needed to be fed. By fourteen, she’d grown up.
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Phillip Gong Gong was a charmer with a sharp jawline and glossy coiffed hair. The eldest son of sixteen siblings, he saw all of his sisters given away at birth except the youngest, whom he raised as his own when he was still a teenager. He was a self-taught musician who could play almost any instrument, a hustler juggling jobs as a music teacher, bartender, and Ricky Ricardo-style big band leader, until he became a celebrity conductor in Hong Kong with his own variety show on TV—a career he’d later sacrifice to move to America, going from household name to anonymous pianist in San Francisco’s lounges. And he was also a romantic—that’s where I get it from—who lived for the thrill of falling in love.
Sabrina Popo had also been dreaming of falling in love since she was a little girl.
My grandparents were about eighteen when they met. Sabrina came from a high-status family of scholars, and Phillip, the struggling musician and child of butchers, wasn’t enough for her family. While Sabrina’s identical twin sister, Virginia, was arranged to marry a Chinese American man in the States who spoke no Cantonese, Sabrina wouldn’t let her parents stop their love— or stop her from getting pregnant. In a culture governed by saving face, to preserve the families’ reputations, they went ahead and married before anyone noticed.
But even after she gave birth to my mom, and later to three more kids, Sabrina never got used to being a mother. She would walk the streets of Hong Kong, parading her best outfits while shooing away her children, who had to follow several steps behind her. When they were out in public, Sabrina’s best friend would often hold my mother’s hand, acting as a surrogate parent.
The withdrawal of affection that defined both my parents’ childhoods was a common story in Chinese culture. Praising and hugging your children meant spoiling them. Strict rules and expectations shaped children into responsible, disciplined people. Tough love was the only love.
And by my mom’s teen years, my grandparents’ marriage was falling apart. My grandpa had fallen for a woman in the nightclub where he worked. In a desperate attempt to save her marriage, Sabrina made a family announcement: She and the kids were packing up to move to America. I have absolutely no idea how this would have fixed her marriage, but she went all in, flying my sixteen-year-old mom and her three siblings across the Pacific Ocean to Hollywood, without knowing a word of English.
The five of them lived on top of one another in a one-bedroom apartment with bunk beds off Franklin Avenue. My mom enrolled as a junior at Hollywood High School and took care of the house—cleaning, reheating frozen chicken pot pies, and making sure everyone did their homework. Even without much English, she picked up a job—wrapping wontons at a nearby frozen food factory—to help pay rent.
Divorce wasn’t common in the 1960s, and it was the ultimate disgrace in our culture—Chinese people will shame the shit out of women for the failure of their marriage. But Sabrina Popo was brave enough to wear all this shame, so she filed for divorce. Newly independent, she picked up a job as a bank teller in the very white San Fernando Valley. She started leaving my mom and her siblings for weeks at a time to visit her new boyfriend in Boston, Teddy, whom she would eventually marry. My sixteen-year-old mom would be left taking care of three kids under fifteen.
My mom and I talk about it openly now: Sabrina Popo admitted never wanting to be a mother. Both she and my grandfather simultaneously bent to cultural expectations while trying to follow their own passions. Phillip had his music, and, for better or worse, Sabrina had her loves.
It’s hard to picture my mom doing everything on her own at such a young age, including acting like a parent to her siblings. I feel so protective of teenage Alice, who was forced to grow up so fast. But my mom carries it lightly. She has always been a glass-half-full kind of person and knows that Sabrina was doing the best she could. Sabrina went for the things that made her happy, and in a way, she modeled freedom.
Motherhood may not have been her calling, but Sabrina Popo was a loving and affectionate grandmother. She would spend the afternoons with us while my parents were at work, driving us around and blasting Chinese opera. She’d pull over to buy a bag of oranges from the side of the road and come home to complain they had holes in them, not knowing my sister and I were poking them with toothpicks in the back seat. At her house, we’d play hide-and-seek in her closet, and I’d run my hands along cool silk slips, strings of beads, and fur coats. Steph and I would wrap ourselves with her white feather boas and strike model poses, giggling. We’d dance around her vanity lined with photos of Sabrina from her travels, scanning the different shades of lipstick and the neat rows of nail polish. But the best part of all was discovering her collection of wigs. I would put one on and strut down an imaginary runway until she would catch me.
The paradox of my dad is that he could unconsciously say the most hurtful, unfiltered things to your face, but he was also honorable and generous.
Because Sabrina Popo spoke only Cantonese, our common language was food. When she and Teddy Gong Gong would take us for ice cream at Thrifty’s, we’d each order a tall cylinder of ice cream on a sugar-free cone—classic butter pecan for Teddy Gong Gong and pistachio for Sabrina Popo. I’d go for the hot mess that was rainbow sherbet. Popo would lick her cone ever so gracefully, never dripping or messing up the lining of her magenta lipstick. Somehow, her ice cream was always perfect, just like her.
But the strongest tradition we shared was dim sum—it rooted our whole family. Every Saturday, we’d pull up to Sabrina Popo’s favorite restaurant in the SGV. From the outside, the building looked abandoned, but once we made it to the top floor, the chatter of hundreds of people hit me. The banquet hall was total chaos, packed with people who shoved their way toward the front, trying to bribe the hostess for a table with red envelopes. My parents would drop Sabrina Popo’s name, and they’d let us right through.
To say dim sum houses are loud is an understatement: At ours, we would hear families talking over each other, plates and teapots clanging, little old Chinese ladies screaming as they pushed their way between tables with their carts full of food, customers shouting out requests. The tables were draped in salmon-pink tablecloths and ringed with bright red chairs, and each plate had a napkin folded into a swan. Above us, chandeliers shimmered.
Before my aunt and two uncles arrived, my mom would always orchestrate who should sit where. My favorite spot was on the outside of the table, closest to the dim sum carts as they rolled by. I’d settle in and stare at the egg tarts and baked barbecue pork buns, their tops glistening and golden brown. Some carts were stacked high with metal steamers, while others held vats of boiling water to blanch tender stalks of gai lan. I listened for the sizzling of the turnip cakes. The lady handling the cart would flip them on a griddle, perfectly crisping them on each side, before sliding them onto a plate. I’d savor the sweet caramelized bits of Chinese sausage and dried shrimp inside.
My mom’s siblings usually arrived in a sour mood without greeting anyone at the table, my aunt’s brow furrowed and my uncle wearing a sneaky smirk. They were always miserable about something. But things would look up when Sabrina Popo made her entrance. This Saturday, she sauntered in wearing a leopard-print tracksuit and rose-tinted glasses, making her rounds to greet friends at every table. Her entrances were always a vibe. When she finally made her way to us, she insisted on sitting on the outside of the table, close to the action.
Sabrina Popo beckoned the server with a little smile. He knelt down to listen to her.
“Guk fa cha, mm goi 菊花茶,唔該,” she said, asking for her usual chrysanthemum tea in a voice pitched like a Chinese opera singer, yet somehow soft and delicate.
A white teapot arrived at the table, and my sister started pouring the tea into small porcelain teacups lined up in a row. Steph passed one to each family member, spinning the lazy Susan in the middle of the table. She finished pouring tea for my dad, who was busy talk-yelling in Cantonese but tapped two fingers on the table to show his appreciation.
“Har gow 蝦餃! Siu mai 燒賣! Char siu bao 叉燒包!” a woman called out, pushing her steaming cart right at my eye level.
Two metal steamers landed on the table, one on top of the other. My sister divided the buns between our family members, splitting hers in two and handing me the other half. Pork lacquered with a sweet, sticky glaze overflowed from the center of the pillowy bun. For a Chinese kid, char siu bao was as exciting as a bag of candy. The lazy Susan quickly overflowed with our favorites: sticky rice with abalone wrapped in lotus leaves, spare ribs with fermented black bean, curried honeycomb tripe.
While my aunt and uncles fought for control over the lazy Susan, hogging the best bites for themselves, I caught Sabrina Popo’s eye. Egging me on to try her favorite dish, she dangled a braised chicken foot with her chopsticks. I teased her back with a puckered fish face and a giggle. She gave me a wink and a smile.
Sabrina Popo was a slow and steady, methodical eater, and I often joined her in the snail’s pace eating while the rest of the family impatiently waited for us. After we cleaned the whole lazy Susan, the inevitable wrangling for the check began. It was a delicate social dance, a display of your manners and upbringing, ensuring you weren’t raised by wolves—and most times, it was also a power play. You were expected, at the very least, to put up a good fight, and the dance could get real ugly real quick—I’ve witnessed aunties and uncles pounding their fists on the table in a yelling war and checks being ripped straight down the middle. Kids made good accomplices, tasked with sneaking off on a hunt for the bill.
My dad was the first to grab the bill, ready for a fight to the death. But my mother’s brother conveniently excused himself to the bathroom, while my aunt and other uncle turned to talk to each other.
Sabrina Popo reached for her purse.
“Please, Lou Ma Zi 老媽子”—he addressed her as his own mother—“don’t even think about it. My treat!” my dad said, putting up his hand to stop her. There was no way he was going to let an honored elder pay. A good man pays for the bill, and the paradox of my dad is that he could unconsciously say the most hurtful, unfiltered things to your face, but he was also honorable and generous—and he’d sure as hell take care of the family at the dim sum table.
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From The Girl Who Became King by Melissa King. Copyright © 2026 by Melissa King. Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.