LA Times
Chinese Postpartum Traditions & Modern Meal Delivery
A feature on Chinese postpartum traditions and the evolution of postpartum meal delivery in Southern California, featuring JingMommy founder Nicole Huang.
Read the articleNicole’s Story
From a daughter of Taiwan to founder of an American tradition.
Every mother deserves to be taken care of after she gives birth.
Not discharged with a pamphlet. Not left to figure it out alone. Taken care of — the way generations of Chinese families have always understood it: with warmth, with real food, with someone who knows exactly what a body needs after the most demanding experience of its life.
Nicole Huang built JingMommy because she knew what that care felt like — and she knew too many mothers in America were going without it.
Nicole grew up in Taiwan, immigrated to the United States, and eventually earned her MBA from Cal State LA. She moves between both worlds fluently — the traditional Chinese culture she was raised in, and the modern American life she built. That fluency is exactly what made her see something others missed: that the most important month of a woman’s postpartum life was being left entirely to chance.
When Nicole had her own children in the United States, her parents were in Taiwan — and there was no one to cook for her. So she did what she has always done: she researched. She immersed herself in the principles of Zuo Yue Zi — the traditional Chinese practice of postpartum nourishment followed across East Asia for over 2,000 years — and applied everything she learned to her own recovery. What she found on the other side surprised her. Not just physically, but in the way it felt to be genuinely nourished and genuinely cared for at the moment she needed it most.
She couldn’t stop thinking about all the mothers who weren’t getting that.
She began helping friends. Then friends of friends. She started writing on Yahoo! Blog — at the time, the most widely read blogging platform in the Chinese-speaking world — and her readership grew to over 160,000. Mothers across the United States found her: Chinese-Americans who had grown up with the tradition but needed guidance navigating it in America. Immigrant mothers, far from family, doing it alone. Non-Chinese mothers who had discovered Zuo Yue Zi through research and felt, instinctively, that this was exactly what they had been looking for.
What began as a blog became a community. What began as advice became a calling.