This is an essay in two parts. I’ll publish Part Two next week.
Part One:
We stand around the kitchen island – all of us. This is a few years ago now, the last time we gathered as a full family before the pandemic. There are, let’s see, almost thirty of us – from full Chinese to full Anglo, from summer dark brown to pale pink. In the middle, a bowl of meat mixed with various spices, veggies and sauces, and a large lump of dough. Over the course of a few hours, we’ll transform these raw materials into a few hundred neatly folded dumplings. Rolling, filling, folding; then frying, steaming and eating. Pork is the meat of choice in my family. That said, there are always several made with peanut butter and sugar – a western bastard of red bean paste – and sometimes a section of shrimp stuffed ones as well.
On this day, I roll the dough and everyone else fills and folds. I have a martini while we do the work. And it’s work. A few hours of cutting the big lump of dough into thick ropes, cutting the ropes into small lumps, rolling the small lumps between the palms of our hands into balls, and then with a rolling pin, rolling the balls into thin, round skins, ready to receive the pork or peanut butter or shrimp filling. It’s a merry affair. Everyone gives the pinker people shit about their inadequate folding skills (they aren’t, actually, but it’s tradition). Everyone gives everyone shit about everything, actually. That’s kind of the way that my family works.
It can take some getting used to, as my wife can attest.
We’d been in China for a few days. I’d met Caroline a year before, and we weren’t married at that point, but I knew. I’m not sure she knew, but I did. Anyway, she’s pink – Caucasian, that is. When we went to China, it was the first time she’d met any of my extended family. Her first real exposure to the way that, as a clan, we interact was when we were on a little bus, thirteen of us (not all of us, but a good showing), heading up into the hills of central Fujin, returning to our ancestral village for the first time in eighty years and two generations. None of us had ever been there before.
My uncle, to fill out the picture, was giving my dad shit about our tour guide, who had managed to get us lost in the first two days of our tour. She’d sent us to the wrong airport for our flight out of Shanghai to Fujin. In typical Chinese fashion (she was Canadian by birth, but only one generation removed, so close enough), she not only accepted no responsibility for this, but actually scared us into silence. She was friendly, sure, but her voice and eyes had a kind of coldness about them that put you firmly in your place. Friendly in the way that a guy packing a shiv might be friendly. “No really, say it again,” kind of friendly. Just give me the chance to hurt you kind of friendly. She probably cost a bit less. This is very Chinese. You always want to save a few bucks, even if it means living in fear.
“Where did you get her?” Bill, my uncle, was sitting at the back of the little bus with Aunt Betty. My dad was toward the front. It was unclear whether he could hear Bill. The bus was loud, and my dad is hard of hearing, though we all suspect that this is as much a choice as anything. “She makes Atilla the Hun look nice.”
“We all got here,” my dad says. Guess he could hear. And this was technically true, but only after sitting in the wrong airport in Shanghai for several hours, and then having to re-book on a separate flight to the provincial capital.
“By the skin of our teeth,” says Bill. “We could have ended up in Timbuktu.”
“Everything turned out fine,” my dad reasserts. “I’m sorry you got so scared, Bill.”
This, of course, is calculated to rankle Bill.
“I wasn’t scared of the situation. I was scared of her.” This is the first time since we’ve been in China that she isn’t with us, so the first time anyone has openly stated this, though we all feel the same way.
My dad doesn’t reply, staring instead at the passing, summer green hills, the landscape neatly divided into maturing rice and vegetable fields, with a cloudless blue sky overhead. Bill, of course, doesn’t let this go unnoticed.
“Oh, now you can’t hear me,” he says. He isn’t smiling, but we all know he’s just kidding around.
All of us, that is, except for Caroline, who is poking me in the ribs and giving me terrified looks. She’s wondering if this is going to erupt into some kind of conflagration, if my father will get fed up with Bill’s needling and launch himself across the five rows of seats at his younger brother, fists and profanity flying.
I actually don’t know what she’s reacting to at first. This is so normal for us that I hadn’t thought to prepare her for it; so normal that I guess I must have assumed that it’s normal for everyone – which, of course, it isn’t. Now she’s sweating in her seat, thinking that I need to perform some kind of intervention to prevent the outbreak of a Hatfields and McCoys, Chinese style. When I finally figure out why she’s freaking out, even my explanations don’t really work. She remains nervous for the next half-hour, until it’s clear that the moment has passed and no one is whetting their blades.
What’s notable in our family is what we don’t joke about. My brothers and I all cook. I worked in restaurant kitchens starting when I was fifteen, as a dishwasher at a pizza joint. I was “promoted,” (yes, there is irony in the term) to sandwiches and salads, and later to pizzas themselves. I worked at the place, Angelo’s, for three years – which, to a teenager, is a lifetime. That was in Minnesota. After that, I got a job as a line cook in a seafood restaurant in New Hampshire (not a good one); then I was a barista at a campus cafe at Reed, where I went to college; and after that, back to line cook at a shitty cream-sauce joint in Portland, OR. This was all in the 80s, long before America had made the shocking discovery that it didn’t know how to cook. Still, my work in the kitchen acquainted me with bistro techniques – searing, deglazing, roux, sauces, gauging meats’ doneness, herb and spice pairings, knife work, etc.. It was a useful, if not great, education in the basics, and I now deploy it daily in our kitchen.
My brothers are far more accomplished home cooks than I am. My older brother, Ken, prepares meals with an enthusiasm that the pandemic has amplified to borderline fanaticism. Being at home gave him free rein to indulge his culinary deep dives on a nightly basis. He will post his meals to the family text thread regularly:
ceperonata
cod alla griglia
smoked brisket
kartoffeln salat
torta alla fruta
That’s on a Wednesday. My younger brother Tim is a weekend cook, but no less ambitious. Lasagna with handmade (by him) pasta, sourdough from his own starter, cinnamon rolls on Sunday morning, veggies from his garden. And they are competitive about it. As I summarize their capabilities, I can hear them rankling about perceived slights that I may be unintentionally delivering. The family thread has, at times, resembled a social media version of top chef. We take food very seriously.
We grew up eating a version of Chinese food, most meals. Breakfast was American – pancakes, waffles, cereal, eggs, sometimes bacon or sausage when we could afford it. But lunch and dinner were 90 percent Chinese.
A version. My mother cooked all of the meals, though she is not Chinese. She tells of Mama, my Chinese grandmother, taking her aside when she and my father had just married, to teach her how to cook all of the dishes that he liked. There is a tone of mild resentment when she recounts this, and it’s earned. Mama was one of the first women given an undergraduate education in China, and shepherded her young family through wars, revolutions, exile and emigration. She was a strong-willed, intelligent, resourceful, and tough-as-nails woman. But as regarded her oldest son, she was not progressive. According to her, my mom’s place was behind him – in the kitchen, in the home, caring for his needs while he went out into the world to forge his fortune.
The reality of this was more complicated. The world where he ended up, an exile from China who naturalized to America, was a white one; it accepted a very limited form of him. My father was an academic librarian, a position of authority. But he was also a brown-skinned, black-haired man, and in the academy, as everywhere else, the expectation of his complexion was servility. This was delicate for him, as the expectations of his positions were leadership. The dance of the minority. My white mother, on the other hand, though a woman, was given a good deal more credibility and access in the public sphere. Limited, because of her gender, but she didn’t get looks, slights, and epithets – unless she was with him. Even then, they would be directed at him.
In spite of these involutions, as regarded matters within the four walls of our home, my mom was a housewife, my dad a provider, just as Mama had probably envisioned her own role several decades previous, before the tides of history had made a mess of her best laid plans.
The first step in making jiaozi is assembling the filling. As mentioned, we’re a pork leaning clan, so that’s what you start with – ground pork. Don’t get it too lean, as that will result in drier filling with less flavor. Put it in a bowl three times larger than the lump of meat. In the old days, the add-ins would be chopped up by hand, but my family is good with gadgets, not to play too much to type. A Cuisinart does the job better and faster. Cabbage, red onion, garlic, ginger, and scallions all go into the shredder. Just imagine a troupe of tiny Martin Yans smiling and mincing it all up, if that does something for you. This mis will be about equal in amount to the pork. You dump it in and start mixing with your hands to incorporate. Add to this some rice wine vinegar (not too much), sesame oil, soy sauce, salt, white pepper, chili flakes, sugar, and either a little flour or corn starch, to hold the cooked filling together. Some people add five spice powder. Some people mix beef and pork. Some even add shrimp. There are as many variations as makers. In fact, I don’t have a recipe, not officially. Sometimes I add more of this, less of that. It’s extremely important that the filling is salted well enough – this is the only thing I’ll say about amounts. Salt is what blends and brings out all of the other flavors. Not too much, but too little is as bad as too much. Once you have the filling done, cover it and refrigerate. The longer it sits (a day or two), the better.
I’ve been thinking lately about why my brothers and I are as food obsessed as we are. Maybe the pandemic has brought it to my attention – the first time in my life when I experienced what looked like might be a more than temporary food shortage. It wasn’t, as it turned out, but previous to this, I’d only ever seen anything resembling this in the absurd, pre-snow-storm insanity of Westchester County, SUV suburbanites raiding grocery stores for bottled water and sterno, dreams of Jack London blizzards howling in their heads. That was obvious stupidity. Both the obviousness and the stupidity of possible food shortages due to a worldwide virus outbreak are still, from my perspective, unresolved matters. I have beans in my closet. We’ve started a yeast culture. Our freezer is stacked with meat.
Perhaps coincidentally, my family started a daily text thread. We’re not daily texters – at least, we weren’t. But my aging parents were then living by themselves in rural NH, one brother and I in Austin, and another in California. We didn’t know when we’d see each other again, and this made imminent contact seem more needed. Among the first things that started cropping up as a regular element was, as mentioned, food.
hoisin pork tenderloins
roasted broccoli
cilantro rice
roasted beets with mustard cream
“We are a bit simple tonight,” says my brother’s husband Aubrey.
My mother wasn’t a terrible cook, but she wasn’t an enthusiastic one either. The rites of wife and motherhood are not for every woman any more than the rites of tackle football are for every man – which may go without saying these days, but merits repeating nonetheless. My mom was raised in a pretty traditional community, with pretty traditional expectations, but she was never very fulfilled by the notion of making a neat house and cooking three square a day. She ended up saddled with these responsibilities by the times. And Mama.
Which may or may not explain why food in our household was something of a contradictory affair. Mealtimes were sacredly observed. We did not eat in front of the television. We didn’t wander in and out of the kitchen, snacking our way to satiation. We all sat down – three brothers, Mom and Dad – at pretty much the exact same time, every day, all together. We observed meal times. My sense is that, if my Mom was going to cook in spite of having other things she’d rather be doing, then we were going to appreciate it.
Problem was, for me, that I didn’t like much of the food we ate as kids. Part of it was the simple fact of it being Chinese food. I’ve had countless adult friends say to me, “You’re so lucky that you got to grow up eating Chinese food. I’d have killed for that.” These are all white friends. I don’t blame them. It’s like getting to eat a once-a-month treat every day – for them. For me, it was a constant reiteration of difference. I spent my childhood moving from one American small town to another – Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota – and in these towns, if there were other Chinese families, I don’t remember them. Occasionally there were white folks who had spent time in China, and wanted to connect with my dad over that. But in our social circles, we were the Chinese population.
And as most kids, I didn’t really want to stick out. I wanted to belong. Chinese food every day was a visceral assertion of this impossibility. It was difference. I have grown to embrace this difference, but as a kid, and perhaps especially as a kid who moved around a lot, I was never very happy about it. I wanted hot dogs and baloney and French fries. And Pop Tarts, of course. We never had Pop Tarts. Okay, we had them like once a year – which is never to a ten year-old. You are what you eat, and I wanted to eat American food. Whatever it was.
All of which is say that food has been, for my brothers and I, a thing - from the beginning.
smoked ribs
smoked salmon
caponata
fagiolini
cole slaw
homemade barbecue sauce
Rolling through the central Fujin highlands, it was in this state of either familiar ease or heightened anxiety – depending on whether you were me or my wife – that we eventually crested a rise and dropped down slightly into a small, enclosed valley. The road straightened out in front of us, winding along the edge of a series of neat fields – broad-leafed melon plants, dense rice thatches, wheat, sorghum. Up ahead a quarter-mile or so, it looked like some kind of festival was taking place. There was a gathering of people in the road, and they seemed to be celebrating something. A marching band was playing, and there were a few fireworks shooting into the air and popping over the heads of the crowd.
We looked on in curiosity, wondering if we should perhaps find another way through, as it seemed that the crowd was occupying the entire road, and had no interest in moving. It was a slow realization on all of our parts that, in fact, this celebration wasn’t a chance event. Everyone in the gathered mass was looking at our approaching bus. And waving. This was Luo Feng, our ancestral village, and they were there to welcome us.
A little (more) explanation is in order here. When my grandmother had died several years back, we had found in her personal effects a booklet, of sorts. Maybe ten or fifteen pages long, and all in hand-written Chinese, which nobody in our family had the chops to decipher. The gist was that it was a story about some place, but the details were obscure.
My uncle Bill decided he was going to get it translated, which he did, and what we discovered was that the story in the booklet was in fact the story of Luo Feng – a village that we knew of from my grandfather. It was the village he had grown up in, left when he was a young man, and due to the war, and the revolution, never had a chance to return to. He had died in his fifties, from smoking, drinking, and exile, and with him the memory of Luo Feng had died too, as no one still living in our family had ever been there.
Until we found the booklet. The booklet had been laboriously hand-written by someone, sometime in the 70s, it seemed. Then carried (again, probably quite laboriously) to some more urban place, with a copy machine and bindery (Luo Feng had enough electricity to operate the village well when we visited, and that was all), copied a few times, and then sent out into the world – by which I mean to say that it was sent to known living Luo Fengians who had departed and now lived elsewhere. One of these recipients had been my Aunt Phoebe, a wondrously eccentric woman who had lived alone all of her life in Hong Kong, teaching music. When she’d died, the booklet had come to my grandmother, Mama.
The last page of the book was an entreaty: if you are a Wei, Luo Feng is your home, and we’d like you to visit, so you can understand who you are and where you come from.
End, Part One