Hello!
The notion that writing worth reading can be stitched together through sheer research, editing, visuals, and utility is a fallacy that I cannot convince myself out of. For this reason, my writing morphs quickly into reading other writing to reassure myself that what I plan to write should be written. It doesn’t make sense, which is why I prefer to work. Work is straight forward: put in the hours and get paid in compliments or cash. Not starting on tasks for my client or side projects felt like a Herculanean exercise of will. The effort required to ‘do nothing’ to get through to the writing was so taxing I took a nap after lunch. After that nap, I had no choice but to fill the remaining afternoon. It was more enjoyable than I’d anticipated, which is why I’m sending these notes to you.
Personal updates: I have gone a bit overboard with the Asian Food projects, but collaborating with Jason Li to do the Asian Eats Directory and snowballing the Berlin Asian Food Map to 3000+ views of the 150+ Asian restaurants and groceries in Berlin is pretty rewarding.
Last weekend, I was on the phone with a friend who had to cancel her spring trip to China when I heard a faint mumble in the background. Guessing that her father was on an extended visit, I asked if her parents were getting to each other’s nerves being stuck at home. Her father was struggling, but not with her mother. He wrestled daily to tame either his walking addiction or his horror at Covid-19 exposure — in Greater Toronto residential suburbia.
My friend’s mom has spent the whole winter in Shanghai and her struggles are externally triggered. Her daily ordeal is cooking for a father who occasionally concedes that her dishes are 还可以 | passable, but more often exclaims: 这种东西还能吃下去? | How can I possibly eat this? 你竟然让我吃这种东西! | How could you have me eat this? I imagine a Shanghainese silver-haired gentleman in a cardigan balancing some mouth-watering food substance is at the tip of his chopsticks in good-natured disgust. Covid-19 has put him in mortal danger of being killed by his daughter’s creations, which lack the flavour only two hours of anticipation for amazing food can create in Shanghai’s once-bustling eateries.
“He’s such a queen!” The force of her laugh required holding the phone at arm’s length. It’s also precisely why I called.
We speculated on when she could make up this China trip — maybe the Fall — and all the things she planned to eat. She reminisced about the last trip she took. “We had a stopover in Lanzhou, and we went to ten places. My husband asked if we should see some sights, and I told him we had no time for that.”
I had to tell her I could not stomach that agenda. “I don’t mind watching you eat the last seven meals.”
Our friendship had sprouted years ago out of the wasteland of inedible university canteen food. Even if our tolerance for bad food has waned, our friendship’s roots are deep and resilient. She didn’t mind and without skipping a beat told me what she was spending the whole morning preparing: an elaborate braised chicken dish and 煎餅果子, which summoned a culinary blank for me. Independently, 煎餅 translated to fried cakes which could be anything passably horizontal — dry, flat bun with a filling, to greasy pancakes, to exploding wraps. In Japan, 菓子 is both common and consistent: sweets. The contemporary Chinese 菓子 could refer to a Chinese version of Japanese sweets, to one of the hundreds of street snacks in obscure cities and towns.
The Chinese Wikipedia entry introduces 果子 / 餜子 / 菓子 as 所有 | all (emphasis inserted) sugar, rice, flour products that are not for main meals. Most are small and do not make satisfactory main dishes. Tracing the genealogy of these words that say the same thing could probably fill a Master’s thesis. They could just be accidents in transcription. Chinese is littered with transcription errors. In a WhatsApp conversation, the word choice is spotted as a mistake; on a storefront, a questionable stylistic choice; but on a 2000-year-old copy of the Dao De Jing, it is worthy of ten thousand interpretations.
But my friend was referring to the current understanding of 煎餅果子, an eggy crepe credited to Tianjin. The photos show fillings that could include meat and cabbage or sticks of fried dough. Some look dry and round while others are neatly folded and slathered in sauce. I conclude that the dish is best produced from a greasy joint with a billowing curtain of smoke from which a face emerges to take your order. It’s the type of food that tastes better after your mouth has warmed up shouting your order and your nose is infused with the twenty takeouts handed to others right before your eyes. This edible glory cannot be summoned in quaint suburban kitchens, no matter the elaborate tools and techniques used. My friend was embarking on a doomed venture.
Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying it so far, please spread the positive vibes to a friend or loved one.
A Google search returned ‘Tianjin Style Jianbing’, which lead to the English Wikipedia entry that begins ‘Jianbing guozi (Chinese: 煎饼馃子) is a "deep-fried dough sticks rolled in a thin pancake’. The entry goes on to mention Shandong, Shanxi, and Tahe (Heilongjiang) styles of the same snack, which means that in theory, any filling customers are willing to pay for will probably do. Its distinctive ingredient is the mungbean, combined with flour and eggs to create the sticky dough needed to pour over a cast iron round grill. This name, like many Chinese dish names, is like code: useful for people in the know, and confusing for everyone else.
This got us down the rabbit hole of Chinese names for dishes. We were particularly proud of our Chinese language’s propensity for hyperbole, understatement, and imagination. Take a laborious and sophisticated dish being ubiquitously known as Beggar’s Chicken, while the amputated feet of chickens are styled Pheonix Claws at dim sum. Sticky rice wrapped in a swamp-coloured leaf is referred to as Pearl Chicken. The latest global phenomenon xiaolongbao means Little Basket Dumplings, but is conveniently punned to be Little Dragon Dumplings that spit scalding juices out at the untrained eater. Water-cooked fish is a cauldron of oil filled with numbing chili (fish, optional). Dong Bo (Braised) Meat comes in layers of melting fat and Confucian romanticism: the scholar-official Su Shi / Su Dongbo is credited with inventing the dish when he was in exile, when in dire poverty.
Banquets are the best places to discover how chickens are transformed into phoenixes and fishes into dragons. On the menu, Chinese characters are strung into eight-character (or longer) incantations of good fortune. Yet, when guests reminisce about a divine dish from an endless night of eating, all of them will be reduced to the chicken, the duck, the fish, the lobster, the noodles, the rice.
Of course, a vast majority of dishes are just description: a location, like Yunnan or Lanzhou Noodles, or the ingredients like Deep Fried Sauce Noodles [from Beijing] and Fishball Noodles [from Chaozhou]. Walking into one type of restaurant and ordering another region’s dishes can lead to regrettable meals and conclusions about a place’s culinary merit.
In the end, it only took my friend two tries before she managed to create the dish she wanted. Unlike me, she actually reads instructions before ruining a dish. There was probably a better way to learn how to write than to use whatever was readily available. But it seems that I learn to write as I learn to cook: working backwards to make improvements after witnessing the extent of the problem I’ve created. Fortunately, there are as many discoveries as there are disasters. Thanks for joining me today!
—Athena
PS: Here’s an English recipe for Tianjin-style pancakes (not tried) and you can see my friend’s results below.
Listenings and Readings:
Giri / Haji on Netflix
The Bold Type Season 4 on Freeform
Podcast: The Jungle Prince 3-part podcast (3 episodes) on the NYTimes; or long-form article with visuals “The Jungle Prince of Delhi” by Ellen Barry
Podcast: Hunting Warhead by CBC and VG (TW: child abuse); alternatively, the long-form article “Hunting Warhead”; further reading “Meet the Hacker Who Busts Child Pornographers on the Dark Net” on Vice
Podcast: Verified hosted by Natasha Del Toro (TW: date rape) on the systemic abuse of Couchsurfing by an Italian police officer
Podcast: The Assassination (10 episodes on the story of Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan) on the BBC World Service (reading might be better than listening to the ego-centric host)
“Not a Black Chair” by Amélie Lamont
A visualised directory of web skills compiled by Andreas Mehlsen
Rivers by Miyamoto Teru & Translated by Ralph McCarthy and Roger Thomas
Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A.D. 907 by Charles Holcombe