After More than a Decade of Cooking for Others, They Forgot What They Themselves Like to Eat

Selling the Hands That Cook

A Struggle to Eat Properly

66-year-old Suying, a Beijing drifter working as a domestic worker, is preoccupied with one thing—she simply never has time to eat. Even though she very much wants to sit down to a proper meal, and knows exactly what to eat and how to prepare it.

Suying is from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia. In 2008 she came to Beijing to work as an hourly domestic worker. At the end of last year, she decided to start living on her own and moved into a subdivided rental in Wangjing, a flat let to migrant workers on a shared basis—her room is a converted store cupboard, just 7 square metres, with barely room for anything beyond a 1.2-metre-wide bed, a shelf, a single-door wardrobe stuffed solid with clothes and bedding, and two wooden chairs.

Step inside this ground-floor flat and a dark, long corridor stretches ahead, lined on both sides with closed doors. There is no living room, but there is, strikingly, a large kitchen—this is why Suying, regardless of how cramped the room was, insisted on signing the lease. Suying loves to cook, particularly dough and noodle dishes. Even after moving five or six times over more than a decade, she still carries her own electric griddle and the large wooden board she uses for kneading dough. On her days off, she makes batches of vegetable dumpling balls, steamed dumplings, and steamed buns, freezes them, and pulls them out for breakfast on workdays.

But before she moved in, the four households—six people in all—already had plenty of stuff. The open-plan kitchen had no storage space left for Suying. She could only prop her cutting board in the gap between the wall and the washing machine, stack pots on top of the fridge, and scatter the rest of her cookware and seasoning around the various corners.

The flat is liveliest in the early morning. Past six o’clock, the tenants wake one by one. These small business owners and junior office workers generally need to be at work by 8 a.m., and four households queue for a single spare bathroom while six pairs of eyes fix on the microwave and two-burner hob in the kitchen—the only way to make sure they squeeze onto their respective bus and metro lines on time.

Suying can never get the kitchen. The couple in the master bedroom cook there most often; at other times, it is a middle-aged woman who lives alone in one room and has to stand on her feet all day at work. Suying is reluctant to compete with anyone, afraid of being a nuisance, and always worried that taking up space will upset her housemates.

Only when she has time does she boil some water in her own room, mix up a serving of the milk powder her daughter bought, and have it with a biscuit—her daughter has repeatedly stressed that breakfast needs some protein to count as proper nourishment. Suying has finally taken it to heart.

The bathroom has to be fought over too. Wait long enough and there isn’t time left for the journey, so she has to grab a steamed bun or a vegetable dumpling ball from the freezer, pair it with a packet of pickled vegetables, and eat on the way to the bus stop, walking and chewing all the while—food she never eats in her own room, for fear that greasy scraps from cooked dishes might drop on the floor and attract cockroaches.

By 8 a.m. she has to arrive at her first client’s home for cleaning; by 10 a.m. she is at the second, finishing at 1 p.m. At least she can eat her lunch at her second employer’s place. She arrives at the third household at 3:30 p.m. and finishes at 6:30, having dinner there as well.

Eating at a client’s home sounds better, but Suying usually eats very quickly, mainly just the staple. She is still afraid of being a burden: “Sitting at someone else’s table and chairs feels a bit awkward.” She brings her own bowl and chopsticks.

Huirong, from Jiaozuo in Henan, came to Beijing a year before Suying. At 58, she shares a small tongzilou—a long-corridor walk-up block of tiny units—in a village on the eastern outskirts of Beijing with her husband. The flat is cramped. Every morning at five, her husband, who works as a security guard, has to get up and rush to queue for his 7 a.m. clock-in, and she gets up with him. Breakfast is the flatbread or steamed buns she made the night before, and then she is off to work as an hourly domestic worker. Her employers do not keep her for lunch; once the mealtime passes, she finds something herself, eats in a hurry, so as not to be late arriving at the next household.

In a tongzilou, the only option is to set up a gas burner in the corridor. Huirong insisted on arranging her own little “kitchen” out of it—with a layout, a workflow, even a flower she had picked from her plot perched on the spice rack (we will come back to the story of the domestic workers tending their own vegetable plots later). Before her child started boarding at high school, this corner was her key battleground.

Only after that did things ease a little. Now she just needs to have dinner ready for the two of them before her husband gets home at 7 p.m.—his work is irregular, and nowadays his schedule is even more erratic than hers: breakfast at 10, lunch at 3.

At this pace of work, a stomach problem has become the norm for many domestic workers. In recent years, Suying has noticed she can hardly eat much anymore, and anything hard to digest leaves her bloated. Huirong gets bloated in the evenings too; neither she nor her husband has a good stomach.

The Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre distributed questionnaires to 325 domestic workers employed in Beijing. The survey found that, in the course of their work, more than 14 per cent of respondents reported prolonged, excessive heavy physical labour and chronic poor nutrition from not eating well. In addition, 54.7 per cent of domestic workers suffer chronic sleep deprivation, and 44.6 per cent are harmed by cleaning agents, cooking fumes, and the like.

Suying also blames her poor stomach on the pesticide residue in Beijing’s leafy greens—back when she grew vegetables in Chifeng, she knew that many leafy greens carried varying degrees of pesticide residue. Before she started working at her current two households, she was no different from Huirong: no fixed mealtime, always grabbing reheated frozen food to save time, often eating while on the go. All of these are key triggers of stomach trouble.

But What Do I Actually Like to Eat?

Despite signing the lease on a small room with a big kitchen, Suying still cannot say what she “likes to eat.” She would rather use the kitchen to entertain friends who, like her, are Beijing drifter domestic workers.

On her one day off each week, Qiu Hua does not feel like cooking for herself either. A cheerful, story-loving woman from Weinan in Shaanxi, she has worked as a live-in ayi for essentially the same family since coming to Beijing in 2017, doing the cleaning, watering the plants, the washing, and the cooking. She is skilled in braised meats, dough dishes, and stir-fries, yet on her day off all she wants is to get up and take a stroll in the park. She carries a bottle of water and a few snacks to make do for lunch, and when she returns to her employer’s home in the evening she just boils some frozen dumplings. Qiu Hua never eats out—she finds the food neither good nor worth the price. Biscuits and bread are easier on the stomach and the wallet alike.

In truth, the domestic workers are not without their own standards for what is “good to eat” and what is “healthy.” But over seven or eight years of working in people’s homes, those standards have been gradually worn down by another set of criteria—the ones that please the employer.

Qiu Hua has noticed that her employers care a great deal about whether food is past its best-before date or comes from a big brand, but pay little attention to the ingredients list or pesticide residues. She is adept at braising meat and steaming flour buns, yet her employers prefer the braised meats from the chain supermarket and the steamed buns from Dao Xiang Cun. Having sat at the same dining table for eight years, she knows which member of the family likes a heavier touch of soy sauce and who wants things lighter, turning the design of a weekly menu into a matter of precise calculation.

But when I ask her what she herself likes to eat, Qiu Hua realises she has lost the habit of expressing her own preferences. “I eat whatever is put in front of me, and I am not fussy. It is just that sometimes I make something a little different and they do not like it. I do not want to be a bother like that.”

As the conversation deepens, Qiu Hua mentions almost in passing that she actually loves spicy food. It is the everyday seasoning back home in Weinan, Shaanxi—boiling noodles is best with a good splash of youpo lazi (sizzling hot-oil chilli), and it makes you feel at ease. But since starting her household shifts, she has hardly put any chilli in her cooking.

She also keeps a close eye on which ingredients are the more expensive. Unless the employers warmly invite her, she never touches them with her chopsticks.

Suying, too, has her own standards when it comes to the health of her ingredients: they must be natural and lightly flavoured. At around midday, when the temperature is already well up, the two of us set off on foot from her place to an underground supermarket a kilometre away to buy some vegetables. She has found that the produce here is relatively fresh and often on discount.

We buy cucumbers with the blossom bud still on, free-range eggs, and celery. Suying, who has worked her own plot, believes that crops grown this way carry fewer pesticide residues.

The cucumbers, celery, and free-range eggs come to less than nine yuan in all. Another star on the table is organic yuba (dried tofu skin)—a gift from other domestic workers she has met through the charity Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre.

A generous spread is ready. But I know this is because I am here. Cooking just for herself is a luxury Suying cannot afford.

On that one day off each week when she can actually sit down to a meal, Suying just stir-fries a single dish and makes a bowl of noodles. She always saves some over—to freeze and eat later, which is less hassle than cooking for two separate meals. The cutting board, once the vegetables are chopped and it has been washed clean, is propped on two stools and serves as her dining table. She eats quietly and quickly, then checks whether her housemates are home; only when they are out does she scroll through short videos.

Cooking seems to be about others, never about oneself. The domestic workers seldom give thought to what they themselves need; more importantly, they no longer have the time to.

In 2008, Huirong brought her husband and her child, then in Year 2 of primary school, to Beijing. A settled three-person household did not make eating more efficiently organised; rather, the whole of it fell on Huirong: up early to cook, hot water left in the kettle for the child to make instant noodles (she did not dare let a seven-year-old turn on the gas stove on its own)—the child, now, would rather not smell instant noodles at all. In the gap between two afternoon shifts as an hourly domestic worker, she buys the vegetables, makes dinner for the child, tidies the rooms, and prepares the next day’s breakfast for the whole family.

According to 2008 data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the time women spend on unpaid care work (27.3 hours per week) is far greater than that for men (10.6 hours per week). These figures cover residents of ten provinces and municipalities, including Beijing.

It has always been this way back home, and Huirong is used to it—farming, cooking, cleaning, all done by her. Her husband’s job is to “look good.” “Next life, I am not looking for a good-looking man!” Huirong says with a wide laugh.

Huirong feels that if she is eating on her own, it is enough to make do. Huirong and I sit in the corridor of the tongzilou where she rents her room, talking back and forth for a long while. She keeps smiling, eyes curved into crescents, but she simply cannot say what it is she actually likes to eat.

A week later, I finally find a different way into the question: Is there a taste from home, a memory you carry, that you have been longing for since you came out to work but can barely find again?

This immediately sets Suying talking, clear and unbroken. Her all-time favourite is a dish called “xiaomifan dabao” (millet-rice parcels) back home: cabbage leaves washed clean and soaked in salt water, then filled with her own scrambled-egg sauce, spring onion, coriander, and rice, all wrapped up in the leaves. Both the rice and the egg sauce are cooked over a wood-burning stove in a big iron wok. Every autumn, the whole village eats this—it warms you from the inside out. When she first came to Beijing, Sister He missed xiaomifan dabao most of all, but the gas stove and small iron pot in the rental flat simply cannot recreate that steaming, mouthful of comfort.

Qiu Hua, too, recalls the roasted sweet potatoes she used to eat as a child in the countryside around Weinan—prying apart the still-warm coal in the kang stove after cooking, burying a few sweet potatoes in there, and pulling them out again by the time the next meal is ready, ready to eat. That is the taste of her mother in her memory. Unprompted, Huirong mentions the frozen sweet potatoes from her home in Jiaozuo: steam the sweet potatoes grown in your own field, leave them outside to freeze overnight, then dry them in the daytime air, and roast them once so treated—they come out extra fragrant and sweet. And after eating, you can drink a soup made from the sweet potato leaves. Sometimes, when her stomach aches at night, all she wants is a bowl of sweet potato leaf soup.

No More Chewing Biscuits Alone / At Last, a Kitchen for Two

“The employer’s home is the employer’s home. Even in shopping malls and parks, there is no scenery that belongs to us.” The domestic workers say this. Is there a place where they can speak freely in their hometown dialect and eat the food they actually like?

Every Saturday, a small space in a residential building in Wangjing is at its liveliest—most domestic workers take this day off. By the morning, quite a few people have already gathered. The table is piled with red sausage sent from home, fresh eggs from the early-morning market, mung-bean glass noodles the employers do not care for…… At last there is a kitchen where two people can stand, and enough bowls, plates, spoons, and chopsticks.

By lunchtime, the women who can cook best in all of Beijing fall into an orderly division of labour. Their signature dishes come out of the wok one after another, carried to the table by hands long accustomed to work. They chat, they eat; someone starts singing aloud a song she wrote herself. In the lyrics, they are sisters from every corner of the country. They dance, massage each other’s tense muscles, and swap second-hand things and ingredients.

This is the home of Beijing Hongyan Social Work Service Centre, a charitable organisation. On the rare weekend rest day that domestic workers get, Hongyan charges nothing. There are fellow townsmen and women, there are activities, and you can make friends. In 2023, after learning about Hongyan, Qiu Hua finally stopped wandering the park alone, chewing biscuits by herself.

The kitchen brings together people from every direction, with vastly different personalities. Over more than a decade, Hongyan has moved house seven times. Each time, limited space meant having to throw things away, but the pots, bowls, and pans were never among them. Whenever the space has a kitchen, noticeably more sisters come to the weekend activities.

Once, the basement on the mezzanine level had no kitchen. They still found ways to eat together: someone would bake flatbreads at home and bring them along; someone learned to use Pinhaofan (a group meal-ordering service) and bring two sisters with her so all three could each get a meal for just one yuan. Another sister from Inner Mongolia hauled in a leg of lamb her son had sent and a small electric steamer—the only cooking appliance she had in her rental flat—and taught everyone how to make lamb shaomai (steamed dumplings).

In the spring of 2025, preparing for her domestic-workers’ stand-up show at Hongyan, Qiu Hua still made the trip to Wangjing every weekend—her employers’ home is in Shunyi, a distance that spans the whole of Beijing. Lunch became steaming hot. On festivals and holidays, she would also bring dried chillies from home, fruit, and brand-new ingredients the employers never ask for……

Mei Ruo, founder of Hongyan, believes that food carries the qualities of home in the lives of these women workers, all Beijing drifters. Food can connect them to their hometowns and gives everyone the freedom to talk openly about where they come from. “When you eat food from home, you do not miss it so much. I think there is something healing in that.”

Worn-Down Bodies

Holding Fast to a Patch of Land

But I am still curious. After so long in the city, after all the wear and compromise of household shifts, commuting, and live-in work—do they want to return to their roots? Or can they, through effort, build some order of life that gives them peace, even in the constant movement?

I have found that another way the domestic workers maintain their connection to the land they come from is to grow their own vegetables.

In Suying’s memory, the spring air back home has always carried the smell of pesticide. She once grew less than two mu of cabbage and aubergine in her family’s plot in Chifeng. Every spring, to keep the worms out and make sure the outer leaves close properly over the heart, she had to spray the cabbages. The smell never quite left her memory; even after all these years, she cannot bring herself to eat cabbage.

Years after leaving to work in the city, she learned that her husband had leased the land to someone else—the twenty-odd trees in it included—and that last year she received only five hundred yuan in rent. She had not agreed to the arrangement. Even now, she still worries about her land. For over a decade, legal policy advocacy and public attention around land rights for women who marry out of their villages have come in wave after wave, but reaching each woman’s hometown and her husband’s village, shaking the village rules and traditions, takes more time.

Huirong, for her part, started growing things herself in Beijing. After moving to Village C in the east suburbs, she found that the neighbours were all growing vegetables: a strip of green space bordering the next village had been left idle for years. Some would fill polystyrene boxes with soil and plant something simple; others cleared a patch in the ruins and tilled it by hand.

That went on until 2024, when the two villages fell into a dispute over the use and upkeep of the land. In the end, the neighbouring village reclaimed it. Huirong had no choice but to find another idle plot in her own village and grow things in secret. She became the only person still holding on.

Huirong orders vegetable seeds online, buying anything that looks edible by name and picture, just to try it. Most experiments succeed. Take the peacock greens and the Beibei pumpkin, for instance—no pesticide needed, they grow the most and the best. The greens go into a light stir-fry, the pumpkin is steamed plain, and both become regulars on the table. There are also Chinese chives, coriander, mugwort, perilla, spring onion, hollyhock, mint……

She has been hoodwinked, too. She bought coriander that was supposedly supposed to stop growing at “the perfect length,” and Mediterranean celery with leaves so tender you can tear them off and eat them raw. In the end, the coriander grew spindly and bolted into flower, and the so-called “Mediterranean” celery put out enormous leaves in no time at all, so thick you could not peel them apart. Long ago she realised these things were not edible, but Huirong keeps them going all the same, watering them on schedule like the rest of the vegetables.

Huirong thinks that the stubbornness to keep growing vegetables is simply the farmer in her who cannot sit still. She jokes that compared with farming, being a domestic worker is a walk in the park. “As an hourly domestic worker I can do four or five households a day. People are always amazed—they say, how do you manage it, are you not tired? I say, this is only the beginning!”

Her enthusiasm for growing vegetables has caught on with a neighbour in the same corridor. She shared some seed with him (unluckily, including that wretched leggy coriander), and he has started looking for polystyrene boxes and flower pots to grow things in, too. Now the coriander stands out in there like a sore thumb.

Qiu Hua grows things at her employers’ home. They love Chinese chives, but the supermarket ones come in such quantities that they often go off before they are finished. Last summer, the employers bought chive roots and seeds for baby bok choy and spring onion, and suggested she grow them.

The plot is far smaller than Huirong’s. What gets grown is mainly dictated by the employers’ needs, but Qiu Hua does not mind. She enjoys it. “Growing it yourself means it is convenient and fresh to eat, and it keeps you busy.” Back home they also grow baby bok choy and spring onion, so she knows how to raise them from seed. She has also grown radish, cabbage, aubergine, chillies, cucumbers, silk gourd, pumpkin, winter melon, and courgettes the neighbour sent. None of them taste like what you buy outside.

For Huirong, who goes out in wind and rain, the vegetable plot was for a while a constant something to look forward to. By then the child had finally started secondary school, and she had a little free time.

When she first came to Beijing, she had also worked at a frozen-food factory on the city’s outskirts. It was so cold that even in a padded coat her joints ached. Worried about the damage to her body, she went back to the city proper and took up domestic work again.

But in 2025, after a traffic accident, Huirong was injured. She stopped working in households altogether.

Crossing the road in the village, a turning car knocked her down. Her leg sustained a nerve injury. Every day she stays in the tongzilou, finding small tasks to fill the hours. She has eaten far less since—partly because she moves less and her appetite has diminished, partly because she hopes to save a little money. But she still tends the plot, even though carrying water, weeding, and loosening the soil have become so much harder.

By the time we got back from the plot, Huirong had picked the Chinese chives she had grown and pre-soaked some yuba and glass noodles. She coated the wok in lard she had rendered herself, cooked up the stir-fry, and then taught me to make chive-and-egg parcels the size of the wok—tastes I had never experienced before.

Suying, at sixty-six, has bad back and legs, too. On the kilometre-and-a-bit walk to the supermarket, we stopped several times. Suying’s knees are in pain, and her right foot, prone to swelling, needs a rest. Kneading the dough and baking the flatbreads takes its toll, and she has to sit down from time to time. In the past, friends who knew her well would say she was brisk and efficient, always moving with purpose. Even now she tries to keep everything as smooth as she can, and has already hosted several rounds of friends in the big kitchen.

In a 2024 paper, Han Wei of the China Academy of Labour and Social Security Sciences noted that among domestic service workers, those in cleaning and live-in roles face the most sources of occupational injury—slips, falls, and bumps are common, and there is a risk of lumbar disc herniation, arthritis, and overwork-related damage. But for various reasons—cherishing the job, not knowing their legal rights—many domestic service workers never report the injuries they sustain. A study in Brazil adds: 51 per cent of domestic workers use painkillers, 34 per cent have spinal problems, and 47 per cent reported high blood pressure.

Suying hopes that one day she can move back to the suburbs, have her own little courtyard, and ideally open a noodle shop of her own. It does not need to be big, and it does not need to be on a busy street—just somewhere where she can make buckwheat noodles, steamed buns, and geda tang (a thick, lumpy batter soup). She is confident this is the tastiest and healthiest food there is. “If only someone could help me out. My legs cannot stand for long.”

Seeing Oneself Through Each Other

During my internship at Hongyan, I watched the organisation work through various means to help the sisters see and look after their own bodies. One of its workstreams is now simply called “Physical and Mental Wellbeing.” In their group learning sessions, the sisters began to notice each other’s needs, and through the process of caring for one another, they gradually came to understand the importance of caring for themselves.

But this shift was not easy. At first, the very concept of “caring for oneself” seemed not to exist. Endurance was the most familiar way these Beijing-drifter women from the countryside related to pain and hunger.

Suying once shared at Hongyan that in 2015 she had turned fifty-five—then a hard threshold in Beijing’s domestic worker market. After fifty, work became harder to find; by fifty-five you were largely limited to hourly and casual jobs. Back then, she had to leave her home in the Beijing suburbs at four in the morning every day, queue at the bus stop for the first bus into the city, and sometimes shuttle between five or six households in a single day. The habit of eating on the road, and the swelling and pain in her feet, all started in that period.

But I also noticed that Hongyan had another hourly domestic worker, a middle-aged woman who did five jobs a day yet still carved out two hours between eleven and one for cooking and rest. She was from the northeast, cheerful by nature, loved telling stories, and was always ready to help. More and more sisters began to be inspired by her, finding small pockets of time in the gaps between jobs to look after themselves.

I have found that the first step of the shift lies in stepping away from the identities of domestic worker and wife, temporarily returning to the “natal home,” and gathering with these sisters who share similar experiences of leaving home, taking up household placements, and finding work—different in temperament, yet bound by shared exhaustion and pain.

On New Year’s Day 2026, sisters who had not seen each other in a long while finally gathered at the table again. Qiu Hua came and led everyone in singing “Sāoshǎ Zǒu Yī Huí,” their voices bold and thundering. Huirong’s foot was injured and she could not make it. Suying and Huirong have been close friends for years, so she recorded lots of little videos and sent them to the Hongyan group chat, tagging @Huirong. “I’m lying in bed watching the livestream!” Huirong replied with a laugh.

*Author’s note: Words such as “bǎomǔ” and “āyí” can be regarded as the “product names” of the domestic service industry. “Bǎomǔ” carries a heavier historical connotation, reflecting the feudal era’s understanding of care labour. Although some academic research and staffing agencies still use “bǎomǔ” to refer to live-in domestic workers who manage laundry, cooking, and childcare, its usage in everyday conversation has declined. “Āyí,” originally a word young children use to address a childcare worker, has become more prevalent with the growth in childcare demand since the 1990s and the ongoing expansion of the platform economy in recent years. The women interviewed in this piece, while they may refer to themselves as “āyí” in front of clients, prefer to call themselves “domestic workers” when they are together or introducing themselves.

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

*To protect the privacy of those interviewed, Suying, Huirong, and Qiu Hua are pseudonyms.

– This is Foodthink’s 816th original article –

Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are provided by the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Xiao Shu