Recounting PRC-Chinese Food Story to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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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Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In the year 2000, I began working as a restaurant critic for the Monterey County Weekly newspaper (Circulation: 200,000), which serves an area that is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.  (I have always been able to drive Big Sur.)

One of the reasons I was hired was that I have an excellent knowledge of foreign cuisines and cultures, lived overseas as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding program, and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in East Asian Studies and an undeclared minor in art history. 

My husband Laurent and I both wanted our daughter Florence to know about world cultures, so we took her along on restaurant reviews.  I had a meal stipend from the newspaper for two diners, but paid extra for Florence to come along. 

Florence had excellent manners (i.e. she did not climb around seats and tables, throw things, or talk loudly).  She was actually pretty good cover for restaurant critics going to moderately priced restaurants.

The first place I reviewed for the Monterey County Weekly was the Orient Express in Seaside, California.  I went to the library and looked up Korean recipes, so I would know more about the spices, seasonings, and techniques used in the foods.  I cited the cookbooks I used in the restaurant reviews, if people wanted recipes or cultural information.

The following is the article that was published in the Monterey County Weekly.  The Weekly editors chose the headlines for my articles, which I have left intact:

Seoul Food

For twelve years I have been practicing what Raymond Sokolov calls gastro-ethnography learning about a country’s culture by studying its food, meal rituals, and history of the cuisine’s dishes.  I read some Korean cookbooks, made a list of questions, and set out to do some tasty fieldwork at the Orient Express Restaurant in Seaside, California.

I took a Korea travel guide to get a conversation going with our server.  Our server, who was dressed in a white-collared shirt and black slacks covered by a blue apron, asked if I was (sic) going to Korea.

I told her “not yet” and that I wanted to learn about Korean food.  She beamed a wide smile at me.  She said she would love to talk about Korea.

For lunch she recommended three typical dishes to us: bulgogi (grilled strips of marinated beef), jap chae (noodles with beef and vegetables), and dak man doo kuk (Korean New Year’s soup with beef and rice cakes).

We ordered tea and beer.  When I asked if there were Korean beers, our waitress smiled at me.

“Do women in Korea drink beer?” I asked.

She said they had just recently started to and disappeared into the kitchen.

She reappeared with a metal teapot that she held in her right hand.  She put her left hand under her right forearm saying, “This is how we serve tea.”

She served my husband Laurent first and said, “We always serve others before ourselves.”

She looked at Florence and said, “We never serve children like this,” as she poured Florence’s tea with her right hand only.

The tea smelled and tasted like corn on the cob, because Koreans use ground-roasted barley and corn to make their tea.  I wondered when and how New World food products like corn and chilis arrived in Korea.

The advertising slogan on the Hite beer cracked me up: Beer Rich with the Spirit of Pure Spring Water in Green Mountains.  Canada must share these same qualities, because the Hite tastes like Molson and Moosehead.

I easily understood why the Koreans eat duk man doo kuk soup as a New Year’s treat with its three-inch pork and scallion-filled wonton noodles, strips of beef, thin sheets of scrambled egg, and oval-shaped rice cakes floating in a chicken broth seasoned with scallions and garlic.

The bulgogi beef strips arrived sizzling with onions.  Florence claimed the bulgogi as her own.  The jap chae had strips of grilled beef in it, too, buried among the translucent noodles colored brown by the sesame oil used to fry shredded carrots and onions.

The Korean use of beef is unique in East Asia where Japanese cuisine revolves around ocean fish and that of China around pork, fresh-water fish, ocean-water fish, and chicken.  Koreans are partly descended from beef-loving Mongol invaders.  The pasturelands of Korea’s Cheju Island, south of the mountainous peninsula allow Koreans to regularly eat beef.

Our server told us that cooks marinate beef in soy sauce, water, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and a little pepper before grilling it.

Our server brought out twelve vegetable side dishes, pan ch’an.  These included white, rectangular pieces of tasteless mung bean jello, bean sprouts, raw garlic cloves in soy sauce, potatoes in soy sauce with sesame oil, crunchy broccoli stems, seaweed, and spinach.

(Note: pan ch’an changes with the season and what is available on the market.)

There were three kinds of chili-coated kimchi (radish, cucumber, and cabbage).

I could easily make a meal of cabbage kimchi and rice like many poor Koreans have done.  (I was not being facetious when I wrote this despite what one book reviewer said when I put this article in my book The Edible Tao. I have had to be a vegetarian for financial reasons several times in my life and knew about protein combinations and vitamins that chase away colds.  Kimchi is the vegetarian elixir of life, if you can stand the garlic.)

From a gastronomic point of view, I love kimchi for its juicy, salty taste of the cabbage followed by a chili and raw garlic heat wallop that makes my nose run.  Eating rice cools off the tongue.

Some Korean restaurants give you gum when you leave to kill the smell of raw garlic on your breath from the kimchi.  I thanked our server and said I would be back to do more research.

End of Article

I took Florence back to Orient Express after school many times and to other Korean restaurants in our neighborhood throughout Florence’s youth, but the main spot we would go was Orient Express.

The owner of one of the restaurants even lent me bilingual Korean-English folktale books for children, so I could read them to Florence and teach her about Korean culture.

I am glad that my restaurant reviews encourage many people to try “strip mall restaurants.”  They soon found out that many of these strip mall restaurants have a lot of free parking and modern plumbing in the bathrooms and kitchens.

I liked our vacation in the US restaurant outings.  I also love all the Korean cookbooks that are coming out on Amazon Kindle now.  They are very reasonably priced.  My favorite Korean cookbook, though, was published by the Ten Speed Press out of San Francisco, California:

-Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Teaching French Rallye Games to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Teaching French Rallye Games to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I was the social chairman for my French Club at Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Michigan and wanted to use this club to help improve my speaking skills and learn about French culture.  Everyone in the Club seemed to agree with me, because they let me do this volunteer job for three years.

Before I go into getting items from the French Consulate for the French club, I would like to mention how to use an English book I recently bought to promote speaking activities.  This book is called The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities - for Kids Ages 3 - 12 by Linda Dobson.  Translate the activity directions into French.  Then, do them in French.  Master one item at a time at the lowest age level and then move on to the next activity.

There are a variety of activities in this book that deal with numbers, the joy of language, chemistry and backyard bugs, social studies and geography, art, and housekeeping and organization games and activities.  People do learn by doing.  If you can add reasoning in French to your club and talking about a variety of topics helps promote fluency and makes learning a language fun for children.  I would definitely use this book for foreign language learning with second-year French students in a club setting.

We had a limited budget for club activities, but I knew that most embassies had cultural sections that gave out educational materials to teachers.  We had a French consulate in downtown Detroit to serve French expatriates working in Michigan that I told my French teacher about.

I volunteered to go to the Consulate and get materials for the Club, so my French teacher could attend her PhD classes at Wayne State University in Detroit.  She already held a master’s degree in linguistics. 

My French teacher called the French Consulate to arrange for me to get the materials.  I would go there about every two weeks with a wheeled cart to pick up various sundry items for the French Club.

My favorite items for the French Club were the special editions of Le Monde that dealt with various aspects of French culture such as:

-decorative arts

-French fashion

-French regions covering history, notable people from the region, famous regional dishes, and wine from the region

-regional French recipes

-French movies

-French singers

-French scientists

-French writers

I preferred Camus to Sartre, because Camus wrote The Plague.  I preferred Betty Shabazz of Nation of Islam to Simone de Beauvoir, but I still took Simone de Beauvoir's material.  I did not belong to Nation of Islam, but I liked how they cared for and educated children in the inner-city of Detroit.

I also liked Louise Michel.  Louise Michel is the only French woman to have a subway station named after her in the Paris Metro besides Abesses in Montmartre.  She was a Socialist childrens' educator, who had lived in French Polynesia and developed many educational theories based on how to educate poor children.  Her work is available only in French, but all of it is on Amazon Kindle.

Naturally everyone in the French Club thought Le Monde was the best newspaper in the world for helping us obtain a valuable job skill in the Detroit job market.

The French Consulate also gave us materials they had donated to them from Renault executives in the suburbs for us.  These were not crappy donations.  These people knew that Cass had a fashion design program and trained industrial artists (advertising artists and political cartoonists for newspapers).  So, we had many back issues of French fashion industry magazines to work with such as Numéro, L’Officiel Femmes, and L’Officiel Hommes.

I also took the promotional travel brochures of different regions (I would not be surprised if some of my classmates went to work for Club Med); mini biographies about famous French scientists, writers, authors, filmmakers; decorative arts and interior design ideas; and so on.

Of course, the Consulate gave us posters of regions in France like the Touraine and Anjou with their many gorgeous castles and gardens.

Once I picked up the materials, the French Club decorated our teacher’s classroom.  We wanted it to look nice.  We had a nice tree house club to play some of the games that the Consulate, churches, and Alliance Française had donated to us.  Even if these games were based on American models we had to speak in French to play them:

-Cluedo (French Clue)

-Monopoly (French Monopoly)

-Trivial Pursuit (French Monopoly)

-Mille Bornes (the French car driving game that requires fast thinking)

We saw that the French used American games, so we brought in our own and played them in French and jokingly called game days “Monte Carlo Casino Nights.”  Some of the games we played include:

-Bingo

-Go Fish

-Old Maid

-Rummy

-Uno

-Black Jack

-Backgammon

-Yahtzee

-Tic-tac-toe

-Poker

-Hearts

-Euchre

-Mini Roulette

-Ouija Boards

European aristocrats play card games and dice games and remain a part of French culture.

We had some donation comic books, which would be called graphic novels today about French classical literature.  These are the stories I remember:

-Notre Dame de Paris (by Hugo)

-The Three Musketeers (by Dumas)

-Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (by Verne)

-Gargantua and Pantagruel (by Rabelais)

-The Count of Monte Christo (by Dumas)

As the Social Chairman, I would read these magazines, special editions of newspapers, and travel brochures and prepare a short presentation that I would give to the Club in French.  I would answer questions in French as well.  If Club members were interested in those topics, they could borrow the magazines, brochures, or newspapers. 

My French teacher had a lending library set up and gave the magazines and other items to French club members to keep track of what we had.

I played Victorian Parlor Games when I was growing up and knew the French played them as well, especially in families with lawyers and accountants.  We played these in French to hone our French skills and our ability to think in a foreign language:

-20 Questions

-I Spy

-Charades

-Who am I?

-Market Basket (Cumulative, alphabetical memorization game)

-What Next? (Story building game)

-Simon Says

-I went to the Mall and Bought (alphabetical memorization games)

-I Spy

We read Le Petit Prince in class, wrote and adaptation of it, and performed it for the younger French students.  I was L’Allumeur – the person who turns the lights on and off.

We went to dress rehearsals of Moliere plays at Wayne State University using our bus passes.  We did not have to pay for this privilege, because we were “focus group” for feedback on the performance.  Cass Tech has an awesome theatre and performing arts program, so the students really know how to do constructive feedback and not “teardown the competitor” criticism.

Our French teacher taught us French Christmas carols as part of our French Club activities.  We walked around all eight floors of our school and sang them. 

The French Consulate also sent us Jacques Cousteau documentaries and a film projector.  I became devoted to preserving the oceans at eighteen, because I understood that even landlocked countries are part of the water cycle. 

I still love the little French Club we had at Cass Technical High School.  We did not have a big budget and used our bake sale money to help the seniors go on a senior trip to Montreal, Canada.  (I had already been there, but did not mind helping other Club members go on this trip.)

Our bake sale taught us to be quick retailers.  We sold everything and knew how to much make and turn a profit.  

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Introducing Japanese Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Japanese Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

When I was the Youth Services Librarian for Monterey County California, I organized workshops around the County to introduce young teens to introduce young teens to Japanese culture.  Monterey County is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont put together. 

I drove a lot from Big Sur to Pajaro (the farmworker side of Watsonville, the organic strawberry capital of the United States).  All of my Hispanic colleagues at the library told me that they wanted more programming about cultures besides their own.  They wanted me to come to Salinas Valley festivals and do library outreach, of course, but they loved it when the Chinese magician-acrobat who performed at summer reading also told them about the traditions of the Shanghai Circus.

The publishing world had recently described young teens (middle schoolers) as tweens due to their developmental needs (i.e. junior versions of graphic novels, manga, and manwha – Korean graphic novels).

I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics in Monterey (CA) and bought some gaily-patterned origami paper to make little farmers with triangular hats, sofas and samurai hats.  All of these items are part of Japanese culture.  The book I used was written in Japanese, but had illustrations, so I could still make the origami.

Florence already knew how to do origami from her Japanese class at the Waldorf Charter School she attended as a young girl.  In her Japanese class, the children learned Japanese songs, dances, listened to haiku poems in Japanese, wrote haiku poems in English, did calligraphy with Japanese ink and rice paper, and learned ikebana (flower arranging).

I had some qualifications to teach these workshops on Japanese culture as well.  I had lived in Japan as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding program on a scholarship from Chrysler Corporation.  I wrote a young adult book about this experience called Eating Soup with Chopsticks that is available on Amazon Kindle (the print version by iUniverse was taken out-of-print by the author).

My family hosted exchange students from Japan, Belgium, and Spain through Youth for Understanding, Sister Cities, and People-to-People International for long- and short-term stays.  I also helped Japanese nurses, who were studying at Wayne State University, learn English through People-to-People. 

I learned all about Mexico and Latin America at programs with speakers at Wayne State University as part of my political science requirements for high school at Cass Tech in Detroit. (Our government teacher said, “Anything with a budget is political science.”)  So, I went to every political science meeting held at Wayne State University with permission from my school principal and wrote up what was happening in the world.  

I had Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Bolivian, Greek, Hungarian, and African-American friends who invited me into their homes for home dance parties and sweet sixteen parties.  Detroit is also like Chicago in that every nationality of the world has restaurants and bars in their “ethnic’ neighborhood there.  They all cater weddings, baptisms, and other special events.

When I went to the University of Chicago for college, I studied East Asian Studies, which allowed me to study Buddhist art, the Japanese language, East Asian history (China and Japan), and study art of the West at the same time.

I did several activities while I worked at Ernst and Young to help me build my skill base.  I helped build the telephone list of potential donors to call for the First Japan Festival in Chicago that staffers at JETRO (Japan External Trade Organizations) could contact for funding.  I lived across the street from where I worked and would go home to Marina City for lunch to fundraiser.  

I put together my telephone list and would meet with the Number-2 in charge at JETRO about twice a week to give her the list of names with phone numbers and addresses of people I had found.  (You can do a lot in downtown Chicago, if you are strong enough to walk in all weather situations.)

Another volunteer project I did was to help publicize the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program in the program’s first year by doing presentations throughout downtown Chicago, including at Youth for Understanding Returnee workshops run by returnees and program volunteers.  I made several friends at these returnee workshops, who remain my friends today.

I also showed the tweens at the Japanese culture workshops images of the Tokaido Road between Kyoto and Edo (modern-day Tokyo) that the Japanese painter Utagawa Hiroshige painted.  I used information from the book How to Look at Japanese Art by Stephen Addiss to structure my discussion.

I showed Monterey County children books about Chinese landscape painting, so they could compare Japanese and Chinese art as well.  We looked at some Japanese manga (cartoons) and anime (cartoons using the techniques of film on paper) to see how the Japanese artists Hiroshige and Hokusai influenced Japanese manga techniques..

I had some library books about Japanese gardens (notably Kumamoto in Kyushu and Ryoan-ji in Kyoto), ikebana flower arranging, kimono books, and the Japanese tea ceremony that I showed the tweens, too.

We had a ton of art books that showed children how to draw manga and other art projects.  I ordered an art school of nonfiction books for these talented children and made sure they all knew how to get the books from other branches through online ordering.  (There was a music school of “how-to” books in the Monterey Country Free Libraries that I bought for the kids, too.)

The artist Jose Ortiz, who painted Chicano murals in Salinas and has exhibited in museums, did drawing workshops for the Monterey County Library kids and teens as part of summer reading, too.

When Florence and I left these Japanese culture workshops, all the kids were drawing buildings in perspective it seemed.

There were also origami clubs in several of the branch libraries of the Monterey County Free Libraries.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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