If you ever go into a Chinese supermarket, there's definitely a huge lack of fruit juice. It's not like in a Western style grocery store, where you have lots of variety: straight-up apple, orange, pineapple or mango juice (among many other fruit juices), or various fruits blended together. Chinese supermarkets do sell 'Western' juice, but under 'juices with chinese/asian labelling', there is, instead, aloe (it's a pulpy, sweet liquid, but is it really a juice?), chrysthanamum drink (that's not a fruit - that's a flower!), grass jelly (heat the jelly and 'drink' it as a dessert)...

Why is fruit juice less popular in China than here? So I put my poppa to the test. Her response?

"No, no, the Chinese like juice. We drink apple, orange, watermelon..."

How do you get the juice of the watermelon, which is 91% water? You don't squeeze it, you blend it to get the water out! Then you add crushed ice. It is now a frozen dessert.

She then explained that, when it was really hot, red bean popsicles are very popular too: boil the beans with sugar or simple syrup and then put them in a mold. Then add milk. Frozen dessert.

I realized the conversation was taking a huge turn: milk? I was bemused to think that Chinese people drank milk; what about that stereotype that Chinese people didn't eat dairy products? I asked her if you could buy milk in Chinese back when she used to live there.

"Yes! In Hong Kong I drank two bottles everyday. And ate two eggs." She showed me the size of a bottle, which was about the span of an outstretched index finger and a thumb. Tiny bottles! Her comment, though, struck me as odd. As she was explaining how they also used to have milk men deliver these mini-sized bottles of milk, I thought to myself that, perhaps, they also delivered eggs at the same time - maybe that was why she mentioned eggs?

The real reason for mentioning the eggs was because it was routine that occurred every morning during the last year that she lived in Hong Kong. She mentioned that she never liked milk up until that point, but then started to want it everyday, along with two eggs. It was then she realized that she was pregnant with my first aunt, my mom's older sister.

She told me that when she had the twins, my mom and her sister, she ate a ton of spicy foods. When the youngest was born, peanut butter was the answer.

And that is how my poppa thinks of her pregnancies: through food. That's how she thinks about most things: travel, her past, her family. And I'm glad that she does because it means that, language barrier aside, we have something in common - a love of food.

As for milk - it was later clarified that when she was a young girl, it wasn't sold yet in China. It was tea, tea, tea.