Teacherland Lessons

The lessons I have learned and the lessons I have taught in my years abroad as an international school teacher

Delicious History Lesson: Mexico Buns in Hong Kong

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Recently, our family went on our first international family vacation with a small child. Our daughter is 10 months old and while, yes, we have traveled home to America (with a 15 hr long haul flight!) already, I don’t really count that as an international vacation. Traveling by plane was certainly a challenge but my her grandparents were waiting with a playroom and warm bed for us. This time around, we traveled as a family of 3 to Hong Kong. Coming from Bangkok, the air travel wasn’t as daunting but staying in a hotel, using their cot instead of our own, meal planning while exploring a new city, and all the unknowns I couldn’t prepare for as a new mom… well, it was definitely a new challenge! Thankfully, the new stressful moments were manageable and the family bonding was priceless. Plus, Hong Kong had some amazing food for my husband and I to explore so it was a 10/10 vacation.

BUNS

One of the beautiful things of traveling is food! I absolutely love Chinese food and could eat xiao long bao soup dumplings every day if I could. While Bangkok has some great dim sum (and a Din Tai Fung :P) it’s always great to have food in the place it is from. Xiao long bao didn’t originate in Hong Kong but what is unique to the city is the Pineapple Bun and Mexico Bun, though you can find versions of these buns in Taiwan as well. I’ve seen them in Bangkok but they do not compare to the bun you can get in Hong Kong bakeries. Excuse me while I try to describe them for those that haven’t had a luck to taste them before:

Pineapple bun: A sweet bread roll that is light but, as many of my Thai friends use as a compliment, “not too sweet.” The bread is soft and easy to pull apart. The top is sweeter and crunchier. When you bite into the bun, the crunchy top breaks apart and falls all over the table and your lap but the parts that make it into the bite compliment the bread perfectly. You have to be careful when you eat them that you don’t lose too much of the top because that is the best part. Often, a visibly large slice of cold butter is slid into the middle of a hot bun. There is no pineapple in the bun- which had deterred me at first. Because the top is crinkled, it looks like a pineapple and thus was named a pineapple bun.

Mexico Bun: Similar to a pineapple bun, the Mexico bun has a slightly sweet white bread roll with a crunchy sweet top but the top is finer and less crumbly. Instead of baking the bun to a golden crisp, the top is softer and kept whole, not cooking it to the point of a cracked pineapple top. Instead of big crumbles that land all over your lap, you have smaller crumbles like a short bread cookie. Another way to describe this bun is: Love, Beauty, All that is good and pure in this world. In other words, this was my favorite food all week.

History of the Hong Kong Buns

I’m not sure if you research the history of just about anything like my husband and I do, but when two social studies teachers get married and come across something called a Mexico bun, they immediately start researching on their phones and excitedly talk about what they found through the whole meal and in the days that follow.

Hong Kong buns are a story of immigration, as many food histories are. In the mid-19th century, many Chinese faced hardship in the Guangdong province and opted to migrate elsewhere to seek better opportunity. This story may sound familiar to you if you know anything about the California Gold Rush because Chinese immigrants played such a huge role in that global event. While many migrated to California due to all the letters sent home of golden opportunities, some migrated to Mexico. Mexico didn’t have a gold rush to pull migrants but it did attract a sizeable flow of Chinese men. While America was responding to the influx of Chinese migrants with foreigner taxes and outlawing marriage to white women, Mexico was encouraging the migration of Chinese, allowing for better legal standing than in America. Fast forward to the 1930s when a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment swept through the country and led to the deportation of countless Chinese families with many Mexican family members back to China. While many returned to Guangdong, the Portuguese influence in Macao and parts of Hong Kong brought many Mexican Chinese to live in the city. Thus, you eventually find food that merges the two cultures such as the Mexico Bun.

There’s actually a very interesting and complex history of the Chinese immigrants in Mexico told in the Zolima City Mag that I don’t need to recount in this teacher blog but if you would like to know more, I encourage you to give it a read. There is further reading at the end as well but since I’m writing from a teacher’s perspective, I’ll keep to my craft and explain how this history can be used in a classroom.

In the Classroom

Even in the first paragraph of the above article, my AP World History teacher brain was spouting out themes and terms we use in the class. It can be a little tricky teaching World History sometimes because you move between huge global trends and specific examples and sometimes my students get lost knowing the difference. Immigration in the 17th to 20th century can be like that sometimes:

  • The teacher explains that indenture servitude was a common practice in the colonial era and accounts for many in the lower classes of society moving between continents
  • The teacher uses the Irish moving to the British Colonies as an example
  • The student hears the example as the sole fact about indenture servitude and creates a link in their brain: indentured servants = Irish in North America
  • The student encounters a document or a question on a test about Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean and stalls to put the two facts together

To counteract that neural link, more exposure to examples helps to build a mental bridge between the global trend and what it actually looked like on the ground. Mexico Buns could be that exposure for my students on a number of things: push/pull factors of immigration in the mid 19th century, anti-immigrant reactions post WWI, the cosmopolitan nature of Hong Kong and Macau after years of British and Portuguese influence, the list goes on. Here’s how I would use Mexico Buns in my AP World History classroom.

Mexico Bun History Lesson

With tantalizing pictures, I would start off class with a description of the bun and ask if a student has ever had the chance to eat one. Then I would ask for any guesses for why it was called a Mexico Bun and for them to use their AP World knowledge to help them out. Hopefully someone steps on a thread of truth and I’ll pick it up and pull on it to help them out. Then with some pictures of Chinese immigrants in Mexico, I give detail to the history of the Mexico Bun. If my students ask if they should take notes, I would say it’s not necessary but it could be an example they used in an essay later on so some might jot a few things down.

Once the history has been taught, I ask the class to make some connections to their reading or the past chapter we studied. Usually, I’ll have a few hands up from my usual talkative students and I try to facilitate a small informal discussion about broader themes. Then I explain about my earlier point about broad themes vs specific examples- encouraging students to understand how capable they are to make those connections if we keep practicing it. “Maybe the AP test will have a question about Chinese immigrants in Mexico but I bet they won’t, it’s hard to guess what specific documents they will choose but you know enough context to reason through anything they throw at you.”

Now to use the content to practice a skill: writing an introduction paragraph. I have students work in groups often so I would instruct them to turn into their table and discuss. the prompt:

Using your knowledge of World History, compare immigration patterns in the 19th and 20th centuries.

With the prompt up on the board, I would include the following details:

  • We are not writing this essay but imagine this was a prompt to a DBQ and you had documents to use
  • Challenge: write your introduction paragraph and use the Mexico Bun for contextualization

I like having students craft a written response together because it helps them to slow down their thought process. Verbalizing what they think should be included also showcases to the students in the group that are struggling to see how it works. For scenarios like this once, I like to give my students a white board marker to write out the sentence on their table because my classroom has large tables that aren’t damaged by white board markers. I also like that they can edit quickly with a smudge and it provides a sense of drafting better than writing pen on paper or typing.

I walk around and explain the history of Mexico Buns again for students who ask. When one group finishes before others I give them my feedback. If they get the contextualization point but others are still working, I challenge them to write a thesis statement.

I could take it further and have students walk around to look at each others sentences and give feedback. They could also write a list of other examples they could use for contextualization from their reading.

And since I’m writing up a make believe lesson plan I crafted while on vacation, I’ll add in one last step that I could only fantasize about… Class ends with a fresh batch of Mexico Buns delivered directly to my classroom so that my students and I can enjoy a little treat full of history.

A Mexico Bun, Coffee Bun, Pineapple Bun, and my own little Bun 😛

Further Reading