Recounting PRC-Chinese Food Story to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I was introduced to Chinese food at an early age thanks to my older sister. She worked as a waitress and later as a hostess at a Chinese restaurant while going to college, because she found out about staff meals.
My sister loved Chinese food, especially the food of
Guangzhou (the area around Hong Kong, where most of America’s Chinese population came from to
build the railroads in the US). I think
she ate something with shrimp, calamari, and mussels everyday. She wanted me to like this nutritious food
and learn how to make it, too. The
Chinese owners of the restaurant said they would take care of me on one of her
shifts, so I could learn about Chinese food.
The food was “Chinese-American,” but this ersatz Chinese
cuisine made Chinese railroad workers strong enough to connect the West Coast
with the East Coast of the United States, so I eat my beef-broccoli with
relish.
When I talked to the editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000), she said she would love an article on Chinese food and asked me to
write one. She gave me the article word
number, and away I went.
I have always taught my daughter Florence about China. I knew she wanted to work in theatre and film
when she grew up. I told her that
knowing about China is important, because they have a large film industry and a
theatre tradition that she should study.
So, my article for the Monterey County Weekly is
below. Florence read my articles in addition
to her schoolwork, so learned quite a bit about social studies due to my
comments over dinner, too. I wanted her
to be a well-informed actress, singer, director, and or/or screenwriter – no
matter what she chose to do. My article
on Chinese food follows. Please note
that editors choose headlines not the writers:
Egg Foo Yuck
My sister worked as a waitress at the Ho-Ho Inn, a Chinese
restaurant, on Cass Street in Detroit, Michigan. She sat a plate of Egg Foo Yung in front of
five-year-old me.
I had a way with words and quickly renamed this, “Egg Foo
Yuck.” Tears ran down my cheeks as I
thought about eating this worm-like mess of food. The Chinese waiter came in and looked at me.
He took the Egg Foo Yuck and threw it in the garbage. He went to the freezer and gave me one of
those ice cream treats that Chinese restaurants serve – a coconut and mango
combination.
My sister came in and glared at me. George said, “She ate everything, so I gave
her an ice cream.” I smiled sweetly at
George. My love for the Chinese people, if not their food began at that
instant.
When I was fifteen, I raised money with 21 other young
people to visit the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1979. We wanted to see how a “developing” country
was able to provide a stellar education for its students in addition to
visiting the Great Wall and Forbidden City.
I dreaded the culinary side of the trip, though. I did not like pork, which is China’s staple
meat. I was suspicious of all seafood
except shrimp.
I impolitely took half of the serving plate full of sweet
and sour shrimp when that appeared on the table. My tour mates curbed this behavior by telling
me that the shrimp were really cat, rat, and dog.
I subsisted on rice and soup broth for two weeks. I left
unknown soup ingredients in my bowl. I
cringe now when I think of wasting food in a country that still had a
collective memory of famine. (The Great Leap Forward)
At lunch on a commune outside Shanghai, the tour guide I sat
with asked me if I would like some pork.
“No, thank you,” I politely responded.
She smiled and put a large spoonful of pork on my plate.
“Would you like some soup?” she asked.
She smiled and put a large spoonful of pork on my plate.
“Would you like some soup?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” I politely responded again.
She smiled and ladled some wonton soup into a bowl, which
she placed in front of me.
I, “the foreign devil” recognized a lost battle.
“I’ll try a little of everything,” I said.
Our tour guide placed something hot, white and topped off
with pork got placed in front of me. The
white stuff was bean curd – dou fu – tofu, in Japanese.
I tried the bean curd with pork and loved it. I asked our tour guide, “Please tell the farm
workers that Chinese food is delicious.”
In college, I began working for a “translation” company that
was really a boutique public relations firm specializing in international
trade. Everyone at the firm knew how to
do deal with Japanese and Chinese marketing work or learned to quickly. (These were the most profitable accounts at
the time.) I had many opportunities to
go out for “Chinese lunch” there, including dim sum and banquets at the
restaurants downtown and in Chinatown.
I bought a wok when Florence was little and seasoned
it. I used a cookbook called The
Encyclopedia of Chinese Food that listed forty different cooking
techniques and said this was “just an abbreviated list” of techniques.
I had to relearn how to chop vegetables for these different
cooking techniques. (I used Tropp’s China
Moon Cookbook to do this.)
One chopping pattern resembles a trapezoid. I never thought I would see one of those
again after taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test to get into the University of
Chicago.
To cook Chinese food you have to supply your kitchen with
things like oyster sauce, soy sauce, transparent noodles, rice wine, ginger
root, garlic, and dehydrated shrimp.
I tried several dishes, but my family had its favorites: Cantonese
rice (fried rice, eggs, chopped pork, shrimp, carrots, peas, and scallions – a kind
of Chinese hash), egg drop soup (stirring the egg in is the hardest part), and
stir-fried beef in oyster sauce.
When my daughter was little, I would show her China on the
map and say, “Rice grows in southern China, where it is hot and rainy in
summer.”
I would then point to northern China and say, “The Chinese
grow wheat there for noodles and dumplings.”
I showed Florence how to fry bok choy and hoped she would
visit China one day.
End of Article
By Ruth Paget, Author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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