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The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to celebrate Mother’s Day with an engaging virtual roundtable conversation about identity, cuisine, and motherhood, featuring cookbook authors Cathy Erway, Sarah Leung, and Clarissa Wei, moderated by author Michelle T. King.

Beloved memories of mom or grandma’s home cooking are an indelible part of identity for many Asian Americans. But what happens when you become the parent? We ask three notable Chinese and Taiwanese cookbook authors — and recent moms — about their latest experiences with home cooking. Has motherhood changed the way they approach the task of home cooking? What values are important to them when thinking about how they want their children to eat? Has their new identity as mothers impacted how they think about or experience their own Chinese or Taiwanese identity? As working moms, how do they juggle the balance between home and career?

Join us to hear their answers to these questions, plus their top recipe recommendations for busy parents from their cookbooks!

About Cathy Erway

Cathy Erway is a James Beard Award and IACP Award-winning food writer. She is the author of The Food of Taiwan, Sheet Pan Chicken, and The Art of Eating In, and she co-authored Win Son Presents: A Taiwanese American Cookbook. She writes the column “Shelve It” for TASTE, where she explores foods found in the grocery store.

About Sarah Leung

Sarah Leung is the co-founder of The Woks of Life, a multigenerational recipe blog that has become one of the internet’s most trusted resources for Chinese recipes—what Bon Appétit has called “the Bible of Chinese Home Cooking.” Along with her sister Kaitlin and parents Bill and Judy, Sarah has been developing recipes for over a decade, honoring traditional techniques while making them accessible to home cooks. The Leung family’s debut cookbook, The Woks of Life: Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family, was a New York Times bestseller, a James Beard Award nominee, and an IACP Award finalist.

About Clarissa Wei

Clarissa Wei is a Taiwanese American writer and cookbook author. Her debut cookbook, Made in Taiwan, celebrates the island nation she calls home. It won the 2024 IACP Julia Child First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2024 James Beard Award for Best International Cookbook. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets. Her second cookbook, focusing on postpartum recovery food, will be published by Norton in 2026.

About Michelle T. King

Michelle T. King is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in Chinese gender and food history. She is the author of Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, which was named one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2024, NPR’s Books We Loved in 2024, and a Saveur Best Narrative Food Book of 2024. A National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, she lives in Chapel Hill with her family.