The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (34 page)

At the end of my frantic travels, I landed home with lots of notes, dozens of interviews to transcribe, many ponderous food-related thoughts, and a wel -tended stomach.

Now I had to decide: What was greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside of Greater China?

Was it Davé in Paris, for being a place where people know your name, and for people whose names everybody knows? Would it be glamorous Hakkasan in London, for reinvigorating the sexiness of Chinese restaurants? Would the honor go to China Garden’s Nelson Wang in Mumbai, for influencing the Chinese dining experience for more people on this planet than any other single person? Would it be Ho Lee Chow in Seoul, for repackaging “authentic”

American Chinese food as something new for Koreans? Or might it be Tokyo’s überexpensive Reikasai, for having the most impressive story behind its food?

During my travels, I repeatedly heard a tip from people who seemed pleased to have discovered a deep insight. “Do you know how to tel if it’s a good Chinese restaurant?” they’d ask me. Then they’d lean over conspiratorial y and say, “Look inside the window to see how many people eating there are Chinese.”

Numerous other conversations from my trips echoed in my head: That people want a restaurant they can talk about (Melbourne). That Chinese restaurants split into camps for Chinese and non-Chinese (Los Angeles). That part of the authentic Chinese dining experience subconsciously values whether the waitstaff is Chinese (Dubai) and the patrons (San Francisco) are Chinese. That it can be appealing for a Chinese restaurant to be something of a dive and somewhat hidden (Rome).

The convergence of al these factors led me to one restaurant. But I hesitated, because the strongest argument for naming Mumbai’s China Garden the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant was the influence that Chef Nelson Wang has had on the second most populous country. Suddenly, looking at my notes, I realized that a technicality weakened this argument: many of Nelson Wang’s Indian-Chinese dishes had been created before he’d opened China Garden. So while Nelson Wang was influential, that did not mean that China Garden was too.

Final y I felt that I could make my decision with precision. The world’s greatest Chinese restaurant outside Greater China as of the early twenty-first century is:

Zen

Fine

Chinese

Cuisine

outside

Vancouver—Sam Lau’s modern Chinese restaurant located on the second floor of a suburban strip mal .

Why? Because it manages to uniquely balance a set of circumstances specific to the Chinese dining experience. From both the Chinese and the non-Chinese perspective, Sam Lau offers something audacious. His menu says “fine dining,”

but its second-story strip-mal location is not where you expect to find such fine food. Aside from the restaurants in Singapore (which is 75 percent ethnical y Chinese anyway), Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine was the only modern Chinese restaurant I visited where the patronage was overwhelmingly Chinese. That is an amazing feat, since most Chinese don’t want their cuisine modernized.

So Zen’s Chinese clientele meant that someone who was non-Chinese could walk in and, surrounded by a Chinese staff and Chinese diners, feel like they were having an “authentic” Chinese experience in a place that, as far as top-flight food goes, is a bit of a dive. For Chinese people, Zen offers Chinese food that they cannot get in their own homes, or in many other places.

Whether Chinese or non-Chinese, downscale or upscale, diners leave Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine with a grateful stomach and a story to tel . What clinched it for me? Zen’s half-price special was a bargain: an eight-course gourmet meal with squab and half a lobster. Never forget that “bang for your buck” is a hal mark of Chinese food around the world.

There is no consistent name for “Chinatown” in Chinese. Other languages around the world have coalesced around names:
le quartier chinois
in French,
el barrio chino
in Spanish,
chukagai
in Japanese,

and
Chinatown
in English, Russian, German, and Korean.

But

in

Chinese,

the

names

vary.

Newspapers use one name, popular speech uses another. In the Chinatown subway station in New York City, the chosen modern translation is delicately pixeled together with colorful tiles:
huabu
. I never knew this name until the Chinese characters appeared on the wal after a subway renovation, but it struck me. The
hua
in
huabu
means “Chinese,” but with a sense that transcends the nation-state. After al , New York City’s Chinatown has lived through the fal of two governments, a split, and a reunification just in the last century of Chinese history.
Hua
is an encompassing term, free of the fissures caused by military détentes and colonization. It is the distil ed essence of being Chinese.

It is the link that ties together the Chinese I met while circling the world, where we are known as
huaqiao,
“Chinese sojourners.”

With a worldwide diaspora that began in earnest two centuries ago, you can be
hua
even if you hold a passport from Singapore, the United States, or Peru. You can be
hua
even if you have never set foot in China and don’t speak a single word of Chinese.

The
huaqiao
label sticks, albeit technical y inaccurate in many cases, as though one day we al might return, as though departure from the homeland is only temporary, even if it may last for generations upon generations. Such is the presumption of the long, muscular tentacles of Chineseness.

This book began as quest to understand Chinese food. But three years, six continents, twenty-three countries, and forty-two states later, I realize it was actual y a personal journey to understand myself.

I’d never real y grasped the widespread fascination with genealogy in America, since I knew exactly when my family showed up in the States. But this journey had become my own genealogical search:

an

investigation

into

how

Chinese

immigrants, like Chinese food, have embedded themselves in places around the world. They have adopted Italian first names, Thai last names, and, in Jamaica, Roman Catholicism (the church usual y ran the best schools).

Sociologists have noted that a sense of national and cultural identity is often built on a triumvirate: blood, language and culture, and citizenship. In some countries, such as Japan, you need al three to be considered Japanese—anything less, and you’re incomplete. The Japanese even cal Japanese-Brazilians who return
gaijin,
foreigners.

In America, there is no blood requirement.

With the Chinese, there is only a blood requirement.

As I moved from culture to culture, I met Chinese people who listened to
reggaeton
and danced salsa in Peru, played guitar in reggae bands in Jamaica, and spoke Hindi in India. Yet in some sense, despite generations in other countries, we acknowledged each other as Chinese—even when we spoke no common languages.

China is the largest immigrant-producing country in the history of the world. The United States is the largest immigrant-accepting country in the history of the world. I, like the Chinese food I grew up with, sit at their crosscurrents. Look at me, and you may see someone Chinese. Close your eyes, and you wil hear someone American.

Of al the people I met in my restaurant journeys, the person I most related to, the man who crystal ized for me the purpose of this sweeping diaspora, was a chef named Ming Tsai. Ming’s restaurant outside Boston, Blue Ginger, doesn’t identify itself as Chinese, even though Ming himself is arguably the most famous Chinese-American chef of his generation. Instead, his restaurant and cooking show highlight a skil ful, East-meets-West interweaving of techniques and ingredients. He draws his influences not only from China but from Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and other places throughout Asia. His creative combinations range from the casual to the gourmet: Asian sloppy joes made with hoisin sauce (based on his mom’s recipe), foie gras–morel shu mai, pork and ginger–Fuji apple chutney pot stickers.

For a wel -received Thanksgiving television episode (which helped win him an Emmy in 1998), he made turkey shu mai dim sum and turkey fried rice.

The first time I drove to Wel esley, I found Blue Ginger’s quiet facade located on a curved street, just down from a church with a white steeple and a bel . Upon entering the restaurant, you’re confronted by a wal of Mingness—including a picture from when he was selected one of
People
magazine’s most beautiful people. Ming, who is now in his forties, stil has the round cheeks, beguiling smile, and unself-conscious joy of a little boy. He’s six feet tal with thick forearms, energetic and outgoing—an alpha male showman with mannerisms to match. He trades fist high fives with his staff. The first time I met him, I felt like I was talking to a highly articulate, intel igent American jock—only one who looked Chinese. But Ming’s Chineseness manifests itself in interesting ways. He and his wife, Pol y, had a feng shui expert check the site for the restaurant before they committed to buying it; he wears a piece of green jade around his neck for protection; he chats in Mandarin to the Chinese kitchen staff.

Ming is about a dozen years older than me, and his family, like mine, came to the United States by way of Taiwan and mainland China. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, spending afternoons after school helping his mother, Iris, at her mal Chinese restaurant. He studied mechanical engineering at Yale, where he was on the squash team, but Ming wasn’t a quantitative academic superstar. On one of his physics exams, faced with a question he knew he didn’t need to answer to pass, he scrawled, “I don’t care.” As he joked to me, his motto during his senior year was
D
is for
diploma.

Having spent his sophomore summer at Le Cordon Bleu’s cooking school in Paris, he decided he wanted to be a chef. His mom told him that she just wanted him to be happy. His father agreed, adding,

“You weren’t going to be a great engineer anyway.”

I related to Ming in part because I saw paral els between my own modest cooking efforts and Ming’s sophisticated recipes—cooking grounded in Chinese tradition but heavily influenced by the cuisines of other parts of Asia, with another layer from the Euro-American tradition. Mine is an erratic hodgepodge, without the intel igence of his creations.

Among the dishes I serve my friends and family: pesto pad thai with sun-dried tomatoes and marinated artichoke hearts, miso-basil marinated salmon, matzo-bal egg drop soup (great for Passover), French-style crepes fil ed with Korean barbecued
bulgogi,
and Vietnamese summer rol s incorporating mango, avocado, cucumber, and shredded chicken.

Cooking is like a language: the ingredients are the vocabulary; the techniques are the grammar.

You can mix and match across different traditions absorbed from the people and influences you’ve been exposed to. I learned Thai recipes from a long-ago boyfriend whose family owned a Thai restaurant in Georgia. (He’s long gone, but the recipes endure.) I learned to appreciate stuffed cabbage from a friend born in Kraków who took me to a Polish diner in Brooklyn for my birthday. I have fal en in love with dishes like seviche and
aji de gallina
from my travels to Peru and from the cooking of my half-Peruvian roommate.

But there were other similarities, ones that ran deeper than what we did in our kitchens. In one of our conversations, Ming told me, “If I can give my kids at least what my parents gave me, then that is the definition of a true success.”

I reflected on his words. What his parents gave him set him apart from most of the other Chinese in the restaurant industry I had met. Many of them had told me, “We cook so our children won’t have to.” Ming began to cook because he wanted to, not because he had to.

Once my father brought dinner to a family friend who was too il to leave her apartment on the Upper West Side. When he entered the building with a plastic bag of Chinese takeout, the doorman said to him, “No flyers on the floor.”

My father is just a Ph.D. away from being a deliveryman. I’m just an education away from jotting down takeout orders.

In coming to the United States, what my parents gave me and my siblings is the freedom of choice. I write for a living because I want to.

Sometimes I stop and think how odd it is that I earn my income wrestling with a language that my own parents struggled so much with. When I was young, my dad’s company paid for him to have private lessons to remove the harsh angles of his Chinese accent. I stil remember fal ing asleep to the sound of his practicing his short
a
—“cat,” “can,” “cab”—into a tape recorder, his tongue struggling to stretch out to let the vowel out. The diphthongs that slip effortlessly off my tongue are ones that my parents have to careful y parse. Whenever she read, my mother used to underline words she did not understand with a red pencil. Years later, I stil randomly encounter the faded, wavy red lines under individual words or phrases in books on her shelf. These echoes of a long battle for self-improvement appear in
The Great
Gatsby, Charlotte’s Web,
the
New York Times.