The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (4 page)

Trey Yuen was owned by five brothers named Wong, whose great-grandfather had taken a boat to San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, seeking work. His sons and grandson fol owed him and found work in Chinese restaurants. (One of them even married a Chinese woman he’d never met. A live rooster stood in for him at the wedding ceremony back in China.) Eventual y the Wong brothers’

grandmother established a chop suey restaurant in Amaril o, Texas, along historic Route 66.

The sons traveled across the States, working in Chinese restaurants, until they found the opportunity to open the original Trey Yuen. Their mother used to tel them, “You guys are like my five fingers. Individual y you are not very strong.

Together”—she would form a fist—“you are solid.”

Together, the five brothers have owned their restaurants for over thirty-five years.

Trey Yuen’s Szechuan al igator dish ended up being light-colored chunks of meat mixed with ginger, garlic, and crushed pepper. The al igator looked like cooked chicken but tasted surprisingly springy and tender. “I cal it bayou veal,” said Tommy Wong, the fourth of the five brothers, in a Texas twang. “Some people are squeamish about trying al igator, especial y people from out of town,” he said.

Of course, he eventual y does tel the people who dine on “bayou veal” the truth—“After they’ve eaten it.”

Tommy showed me a plate of raw chicken side by side with raw al igator. I would not have been able to distinguish them if it weren’t for the fact that the al igator meat came in long, pale strips. “See how nice and lean it is, and clean. High in protein,” he added. “Most people leave it in big chunks—that’s where the mistake is. Because of al the connecting tissues.”

Could you get Szechuan al igator anywhere else in the world? Probably not in China, yet this dish in front of me was arguably—even recognizably—

Chinese.

A driving force behind Chinese cooking is the desire to adapt and incorporate indigenous ingredients and utilize Chinese cooking techniques, Tommy explained. Chinese cooking is not a set of dishes. It is a philosophy that serves local tastes and ingredients.

That idea continued to reverberate with me as I encountered creations like cream cheese wontons (also cal ed crab Rangoon) in the Midwest, Phil y cheesesteak rol s (egg rol s on the outside, cheesesteak inside) in Philadelphia, and the chow mein sandwich in New England. Chinese food, perhaps, does not have to originate in China.

In Rhode Island, home to five of the Powerbal winners, I stopped at Chan’s Egg Rol and Jazz in Woonsocket, a restaurant with a century-long history.

In its latest incarnation, the owner, Jon Chan, had turned it into a nightclub drawing prominent jazz acts from around the country.

This part of New England features the fabled chow mein sandwich, a subject of study for Professor Imogene Lim, a third-generation Canadian who speaks better Swahili than Chinese.

I dragged along my friend Lulu Zhou, a girl whose doe eyes and round cheeks make her appear like a thinly disguised anime character. Though she is Shanghainese and was raised mostly in Hong Kong, Lulu speaks flawless English with the lilting ticks of an American teenager. (For instance, “And then the dragon freaked the guy shitless” was her retel ing of a Chinese fable.) Her parents, both lawyers, now live in Beijing, but she had spent most of her academic career in English-language schools—mostly in Hong Kong, as wel as a brief period in New York City when her father was at NYU’s law school. When she was six years old, she glimpsed her parents’ green cards with their photos and RESIDENT ALIEN stripped along the top. At the time,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
was popular, so the idea of extraterrestrials was in her head. “Are my parents aliens?” she thought in shock.

That suspicion was exacerbated when her parents snatched the cards away from her.

In col ege, Lulu developed a fascination with Jewish guys—partial y from working on the school newspaper, she believed. In response, I bought her a book cal ed
Boy Vey!,
a tongue-in-cheek guide to dating Jewish men. She read it cover to cover and began sprinkling into her conversations with Jewish guys questions about whether they were Sephardic or Ashkenazi.

When the chow mein sandwiches were set in front of us, Lulu looked at them with a combination of mock horror and genuine fascination. Trapped between two pieces of white Wonder bread was a crunchy pile of fried Chinese noodles slathered in a brown gravy flecked with bits of celery and onion. It was moist and soft and crunchy, al at the same time.

Lulu giggled. We weren’t sure how to approach it. The gravy had softened the bread, making it too messy to pick up with our hands. I attempted to attack mine with a knife and fork. Lulu plucked the crispy noodles out of the bread. It wasn’t bad; the gravy gave the sandwich a lot of flavor, and the textural mix of crunchy noodles, sodden bread, and flavored liquid was quite intriguing. In some other life, we might even have thought it was quite good. But that day, we couldn’t get our minds around the concept of a starch-on-starch sandwich.

The trail of the chow mein sandwich then led me to Fal River, Massachusetts, and the Oriental Chow Mein Company, arguably the largest supplier of chow mein mixes in the world, limited market though it is. When I stepped into the brick building, I was embraced by the warm smel of frying noodles, which guides lost customers to the store. Founded in the 1920s, the company had been passed down through the family, and is now largely managed by Barbara Wong and her sons. Barbara was born in Canton, China (before it was known as Guangdong). She came to the states when she was seventeen, fol owing a father she had known only through letters.

At the factory, heavy dough was flattened by continuous rol ing into a thin sheet, cut up into strips—

they looked like the end products of a corporate paper shredder—steamed, and then fried. Piles of discarded noodles were scattered across the floor. A methodic
swish-chunk
sound streamed through the factory: boxes being sealed. There were stacks and stacks of boxes waiting to be mailed, addressed to Tulsa, Oklahoma; Locust Grove, Georgia; Lake Oswego, Oregon; Dunnel on, Florida. “Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. My customers are from al fifty states!” Barbara cheerful y explained. Many customers had grown up in the area but had been pul ed away.

For many, the chow mein sandwich captured memories of growing up: Mom’s home cooking.

Hanging out after school. Flirting. First dates. The sandwich evoked both family and friends. Locals even shipped the mix overseas, unleashing the force of the chow mein sandwich on foreign soil. During the first Gulf War, residents sent chow mein mixes to local men who were serving abroad. When I heard this, it reminded me of a phone conversation I’d had after the 2003 Iraq invasion. I was in Washington; a number of my friends had been swept up in the historic journey: cynical journalists, idealistic nation builders, mercenary contractors. Many of them informed me of the two improvised Chinese restaurants that had popped up next to the landing pad of a military hospital in the Baghdad Green Zone, a ten-minute strol north of Saddam Hussein’s palace. The restaurant in the back was slightly more popular because patrons figured it would be less likely to be damaged by an insurgent attack from the street.

These Chinese restaurants in Baghdad had neither Chinese nor Arabic on their menus, only English.

Though the Chinese restaurateurs had never been to America, they knew how to attract large crowds with American-style Chinese food like sweet-and-sour pork and pan-fried dumplings.

Among those friends of mine deployed was Walter Mil er, a foreign service officer who resembles a bookish version of James Dean. We would chat by phone (his cel phone in Baghdad had a 914 area code, as though he were only in Westchester). In one of those conversations, I wondered aloud why the Chinese restaurants were so popular with my friends in Iraq when, after al , in the Middle East diners should indulge in the authentic local cuisine of kebabs and hummus.

“It’s a taste of home,” Walter said. Even against the whirl of Medevac helicopters, Chinese food had become a beacon for American patriots.

“What could be more American than beer and takeout Chinese?”

Favored cuisines become refuges in times of crisis. On September 11, my friend Daniel Hemel and his friends, after their high school classes were canceled and they had learned that their parents were safe, headed to a local Chinese restaurant in Scarsdale, New York, cal ed Chopstix to watch the news and eat stir-fry. Chinese food was comfort food for him and his friends: something predictable and familiar when they needed an anchor in an explosion of uncertainty.

I looked back at my journeys across the numerous Powerbal restaurants. American Chinese food is predictable, familiar, and readily available. It has a broad appeal to the national palate. It is something nearly everyone nowadays has grown up with—both young and old. I marveled that on a single day, Chinese food had united so many different people from different parts of the country: a schoolteacher in Tennessee, a farmer-veterinarian in Wisconsin, a research microbiologist in Kansas, a police

sergeant

from

New

Mexico,

retired

septuagenarian snowbirds from Iowa, a bank clerk from South Carolina, a salesman from New Hampshire.

Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie. But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie?

How often do you eat Chinese food?

In November 1976, Misa Chang, a petite Chinese immigrant and mother of three, opened a Chinese restaurant on the southeast corner of Broadway and West Ninety-seventh Street in Manhattan and waited for customers. A good decade before the gentle currents of gentrification climbed along the northern edges of Central Park’s western neighborhood, people were leery of being out much at night. It was cold. It was dark. It was dangerous. Often the staff of four would outnumber their customers. After two frustrating weeks of watching the largely empty tables under the naked fluorescent lights, Misa had a piercing insight that would shift the trajectory of the restaurant industry in New York City. If the customers didn’t want to come to her, she would bring the food to them. She would begin a delivery service. Diners had long looked to Chinese restaurants for takeout, but free door-to-door Chinese delivery would be something intriguing. Misa may not have understood English very wel , but she understood Americans. She printed up hundreds of white paper menus and walked from apartment to apartment herself, sneaking into buildings to slip the menus under residents’

doors.

Two hours after her first tour through the apartment buildings, the phone rang. The order: wonton soup and an egg rol . Misa hadn’t hired any Chinese delivery boys yet, so she walked the two blocks through the snow to make the drop herself. A woman answered the apartment door, amused that a five-foot-no-inch-tal Chinese woman had appeared with her order. She handed Misa a one-dol ar tip.

At the time, the idea of making food deliveries to people’s doors was quixotic. Misa launched her delivery service wel before the popularization of ATMs and VCRs. The idea that something—entertainment, food, cash—could be available on a consumer, rather than industry, timetable was startling.

But customers intuitively grasped the idea of delivery. Orders began to trickle in, then to pour in.

Misa made the next hire to her staff of four: a delivery boy. Eric Ma, a scrawny sixteen-year-old busboy from a nearby Chinese restaurant, was a student at Norman Thomas High School. For his new job, Eric bought himself a used bicycle for fifteen dol ars.

Soon the orders began flooding into Empire Szechuan Garden at an unrelenting pace. The phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Misa hired more delivery boys.

The bags didn’t fit on the tables and had to be lined up on the floor. Eric and the other delivery boys would be sent out with eight orders at a time, perilously balancing the bags on their handlebars. It was a sel er’s market back then. Empire Szechuan could deliver during the hours and to the geographic region it wanted. Customers were appreciative of the steaming hot food that appeared at their door, tipping generously. When the delivery boys were wet from the rain, they offered them towels.

For a long time, the neighborhood around the original Empire Szechuan was stil relatively ragged. But Misa found a new way to deal with the homeless men. With fried rice and noodles, she bribed them to stay away from her front door.

I grew up about a mile and a half north of Misa’s restaurant, largely oblivious to its significance but cognizant of its evolution. It gobbled the Blimpie’s and a Mexican restaurant, opened a glass-encased outdoor café that later disappeared, and settled into a neon pastel motif in the early 1990s.

By the time I met with Misa, the restaurant’s floor space had expanded fivefold. The place stil had the
Miami Vice
–era feeling from its last renovation, but the red pil ars of the original restaurant remained intact. In person, Misa, now a sexagenarian grandmother of ten, was a chirpy combination of age and energy. She wore oversized jewelry and carried two cel phones. She was always in motion, shuttling from restaurant to restaurant—Empire Szechuan had expanded throughout Manhattan—and to the Fulton Fish Market, so she carried a toothbrush and toothpaste in her purse. “That way I can wake up from a nap in the car, brush my teeth, and be ready to go,”