Yet those culinary hours have compensations, enabling a middle-class girl to polish the traditional skills that help towards finding a suitable husband.
"When I was a little kid in 1950, clothes weren't so cheap, and I remember we only had three or four dresses and that was plenty for a middle-class girl, " Ms. Quan said.
If an upper middle-class girl has one or more African parents, for example, she has likely schooled in the United States or Europe -- maybe even a generation after her own parents have.