Life and Leisure

The food of love

By Tan Yingzi
Updated: 2009-05-11 00:00

Growing up in Alberta, Canada, Katherine Walker was fascinated by the idea of coming to China. “I remember I was very young when I first heard about China. I was in the garden with my family and my mother told me that if I dug a hole very deep, through the center of the earth, I would come out in China.

“The idea was riveting. Did people walk upside-down there? Did they know they could dig a hole to come to my house?”

The now 25-year-old’s China story has had a very different beginning — dumplings.

“Dumplings are very romantic,” says Walker. She would know. Five years ago, she fell in love with a Chinese man who always took her out for dumplings in Chongqing.

Now they are happily married and run a popular dumplings restaurant on Foreigner Street (Yangren Jie), by the Yangtze River, in China’s largest municipality.

Walker met her husband Zheng Yunfei when she arrived at Chongqing Airport in 2004. The business major from the University of Alberta had been sent by a Canadian investment company to work with its Chinese partner.

She had been to Hong Kong and Taiwan before but it was her first trip to the Chinese mainland.

“I came here all by myself and was shocked when I landed at Chongqing airport,” she recalls.

But then she saw the young Zheng waiting for her in the arrivals hall.

The manager of the local partner company never thought he would be meeting his future wife. The handsome and considerate young man from Zhengzhou, Henan province, immediately won Walker’s heart.

“It was kind of love at first sight,” Walker says.

Instead of taking her to the famous local hotpot restaurants, Zheng invited Walker to try all kinds of dumplings, a favorite food in his hometown.

Two years later, in order to stay with her beloved, Walker quit her job after she refused the company’s assignment to work in Beijing. They soon tied the knot and held a small wedding in Chongqing in 2006.

“My husband eats dumplings a lot, so we decided to open a dumpling restaurant with all our savings,” she says. “It is all about family and being together when you sit down and make dumplings.”

Walker was the first foreigner to open a store on Foreigner Street but things were not as hard as she had expected.

“I thought it would be difficult to get the business license and deal with the government,” she says. “I found that those things were actually quite easy.”

Walker’s restaurant offers eight to 15 kinds of dumplings and the most popular ones are the red (with carrot juice) and green (with spinach) dumplings.

“It’s a kind invention,” she says. “And I got the idea from my mom. When I was little, she made spaghetti with vegetable juice to make me have more vegetable.”

The two-floor restaurant with 40 tables is one of the major attractions in this international catering area.

“Business is quite good,” she says. “Many people like to see a laowai make dumplings.”

The biggest challenge for the business school graduate was how to be a good boss to the 15 employees.

“I used to be too strict with my waitresses and one of them even cried,” she says. “In the beginning, a lot of them quit.”

Walker then changed her management style and tried to be more encouraging. “Now nobody goes and most of them stay with me for a long time.”

Walker has already mapped out the future for the restaurant.

“In the first three years, I was just finding my rhythm,” she says. “Now since I have become so famous here, I am going to use my brand value to branch out.”

Dozens of other foreigners have followed Walker’s lead by opening restaurants in the street and thanks to her fluent Chinese, she helps and advises newcomers.

“Kathy is a born leader, very friendly, warm-hearted and straightforward,” says Gong Hua, who works at the office responsible for businesses operating on Foreigner Street.

Currently, there are about 30 foreign entrepreneurs from a dozen countries, bringing a variety of overseas cuisines to local people.

“Chongqing has been changing so quickly,” Walker says. “There are more opportunities for smaller companies like ours.”

The largest city in China with 30 million people has a small foreign community and “almost everybody knows each other”. Most of them are either business people or English teachers.

“It is exciting to see foreign entrepreneurs on the street,” she says.

Life is good for Walker and her husband — they have bought their own apartment and car, and had a baby girl, Maizie, in October, 2007.

They have had endless disputes over how their daughter should be raised because of cultural differences but Zheng is happy with how Walker has fitted into his life.

“She feels like a Chinese now,” he says. “She has become part of Chinese society.”

Recently they were upset when a local news story described their relationship as “a rich foreign girl marrying a poor Chinese guy”.

“My husband is my equal and I am not rich. We are together because of fate, because of love,” Walker says.

“We are two people that met in a town very far away from our homes. He is my best friend and every day with him makes me smile.”