the return journey

China, July 2017.

There’s this short stretch of road between Yangshuo and the Fairland tea plantation that smells of pine trees. I have been in China for about 3 months now and have been assaulted with lights, language, smells, tastes, trying to make new friends so I might have some semblance of a social life, all the while dealing with the headaches that come with opening a restaurant.

This forested scent on the way out of town is immensely comforting. It reminds me of a place where I could stop and ask for directions if I got lost, where I didn’t have to mime my needs all the time, where my words worked and I could purchase a nice loaf of bread at a grocery store and make a dumb joke to the cashier and then maybe go a tacqueria and have a basket lined with greasy paper full of tacos and *all* the salsas. Everyone here is wonderful, but they are still new to me. I miss home, my friends and family.

But my god, the food is kickin. And with a quick bite of fresh, steaming carrot and mushroom bao from the market, I have forgone my need for tacos.

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Nearly one year, one major flood, a metric fuck ton of adventures and one restaurant later, I left. My last hours in China were spent sobbing in the Beijing airport. I wasn’t sure if I was overjoyed by the fact that cheese was about to become a constant in my life again or if I was legitimately going to miss all of the chaotic insanity of that massive country and how I got to enjoy it with the people that I ended up calling my friends.

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Boulder, CO. Wednesday, July 2018.

I’m back in the world of western cooking, and I have a day off. I went to the supermarket and in an attempt to purchase ingredients to make dumplings, I found myself quickly passing the ‘Asian/Chinese’ section in about 2 strides. A majority of what comprised these shelves was Japanese or Thai with the exception of artisanal General Tso’s pre-made sauces. I went to the produce section and stared sadly at the massive Italian eggplants, followed by a heartbreaking trip to the butcher where everything was already sectioned off and the ground pork was described as ‘Extra Lean’ with no other options to be had- was it pork shoulder? Pork belly? Can I add some fat to this please? Where were the skins?

I realize that I am complaining. I am comparing. I was supposed to be ecstatic about the aforementioned dairy options.

Nostalgia for the daily Chinese market hit me hard. I remembered the piles of oranges, gorgeous mushrooms, stacks of exotic greens, open garage-like store fronts that hawked fermented sauces and vegetables and what seemed like a million types of vinegar, gigantic cuts of pork laying casually next to buckets of blood, caul fat and intestine, the lap cheong and long cuts of cured and smoked pork belly moving like windchimes along metal bars next to the meat stands, and how I clumsily navigated through it all while trying to unsuccessfully jump over the language barrier.

I remember these things fondly, and then I remember how many sad moments I had as I stared at a frozen block of low quality mozzarella at a Western market. There were two in town, one of which could be found behind a nondescript door in an anonymous alley and was made up of 2 large walk in freezers (with boxes of ‘cheese product’, one kind of salami and miraculously, 2 types of pretty good butter from New Zealand) as well as what I can only describe as a dirty shed room that looked like it might have been used as a place to hold hostages, now refurbished with dusty metal shelves (lined with jars of olives, some Heinz BBQ sauce and large bags of penne pasta) dimly lit by one bare, dangling lightbulb; the other was on the edge of town, run by a sweet family that spoke fairly good English.

….But then I think of that sweet family who sold those products to me, how he and his family were ridiculously friendly and how he’d manage to order flour tortillas to appease his Western customers like me who were hurting for something more familiar to break up the monotony of street noodles and dumplings. He’d offer me a cigarette and ask me what I used the round bread (tortillas) for. I told him about Mexican food before asking what all of the packages of strange seasonings were on the shelf. He’d list off Chinese 13 spice, cumin, Sichuan pepper, salted chili pepper, star anise, and then I’d be off to try desperately to recreate good salsa so I could have some pork tacos.

….But then I think about the dumplings.

My mind is a mess and I am dissatisfied with everything as I leave the grocery store. I’m still really hungry. Reverse culture shock is a real thing, and it's getting in the way of my lunch.

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Family dinners were a fixture in my childhood. Like, every night: meat, vegetable, salad, 2 Oreos for dessert. My aunt would always put something together on the stove or in the oven and my mom would get excited in the summer about grilling everything in sight. Family meals were usually served around 7 pm and were different most nights of the week. We ate around a table, sharing each dish and watching TV.

In the summer, my brother and I would visit my dad and stepmom in the South Carolina countryside, where our family dinner traditions were carried on around the table in the trailer. My dad occasionally went hunting on his property, taking down deer that provided enough meat to last a few months. We always had that: family dinner. It was a constant in both households, and considering that neither side was particularly rich, it was always easier and cheaper to share food.

Maybe this is why I fell for Asian food in the first place. The fabrics and food seemed brighter, like they had some colors that would never be available to me in the United States, something I couldn’t find at my family’s dinner table. I'd always loved dipping in and out of the Disneyland of American Chinatowns, walking away comparing everything to my Western notions of what things should be, and if they didn’t match up, thinking ‘Oh wow! So authentic!’. We wanted Chinese food as a novelty, when it was delivered to our door and our participation in the culture went as far as using chopsticks for shoveling half of our meals down before opting for a fork. It was food that didn’t hold the same weight as my family dinner. It was easy, fried, a secret treat that we had every once in a while and meant that we didn’t have to put the same effort into thinking about the food. All of the menus that we see for Chinese food in the USA is set to the same tune of sesame chicken, general tso’s chicken, garlic green beans and lo mein. Americanized Chinese food has us all praying to Digestive Jesus, hoping we can cram in one more potsticker between plates at the buffet, knowing that we might try and make some version of this food maybe once a year in our own kitchens.

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An important interlude:

I’d like to take a second here and make it very clear that I have eaten at countless Chinese food buffets and I love them. I’m not going to turn my nose up at heaping pile of General Tso’s chicken. It’s delicious, but it’s not Chinese food.

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I first saw pictures of Yangshuo when I was 19 and living in Yosemite National Park. When I finally got to Hong Kong 7 years later, I ordered an obscene amount of food using only exaggerated hand gestures, lots of pointing and one of the few words I knew in Chinese: ‘xie xie’ (‘thank you’). Hong Kong is a fairly easy place to get around as a non-Cantonese speaker. The public transportation is easy, the international presence is heavy and if you are really in a bind there is usually an English speaker close by. The moment I stepped over the border, however, I entered China and I can only describe the feeling of being there as ‘overwhelmingly foreign’. As I wrote in my journal, Chinese men smoking cigarettes would kneel next to me, pointing at the page and laughing at the sight of English writing. I didn’t know how to ask where the bathroom was, how to ask how to get to my destination, or, if I miraculously figured out how to ask, to understand what the response meant.

When I got to Yangshuo, I tried most things on the menus of local restaurants, relishing in how different it was from everything I had come to know as Chinese food at that point. It was shocking seeing the wet market, the barbeques at night, how nothing was sold as a complete meal (dishes are usually sold in large portions as only one item rather than as an entree, vegetable and salad/soup on one plate, which pushes people to share). At the end of the month, I took on a new memory of Chinese cuisine: I’m sitting at a large table with friends from all over the world, my Chinese friend (or whomever spoke the most Chinese) ordering a mess of dishes for everyone to share. There’s a pork dish drenched in a beautiful glaze, tender stuffed eggplants, sauteed pumpkin and green beans, a hot pot with an assortment of vegetables, some chicken dish that is far too spicy for me to eat more than one bite of, tofu skin and black fungus, a bucket of white rice and a large pot of tea. Everything is set on a lazy susan that delivers food from across the table conveniently over to where I’m sitting, and I eat each dish from a small, hand sized bowl using chopsticks. Everyone becomes a family as the meal goes on, reaching for more until we’re all full but still able to drink the local beer-which is so low in alcohol content that it’s practically water anyway.

I’m reminded of my family dinners.

Just over a year later, I returned with the hopes of cooking western food for the expat population and learning all I could about the local cuisine. I had met a guy who wanted to open an American style diner in Yangshuo, and upon my return I told him that I was looking for any excuse to go back. I recipe tested for months, drew up prep lists and extensive plans as to how I could make my first stab at being head chef -and on top of everything else: in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language- a little easier. On the second day of my arrival at the restaurant, I realized that all of the lists and recipes and planning I had done were completely useless. I wanted to cry, and as a matter of fact, I did lots of actual crying over the next few months. When I first got there I didn’t know which thing on the shelf was baking soda or that you can buy soy sauce and vinegar refills in bags. I didn’t know what anything said, and my pride was getting in the way of me asking everything I wanted to from the community. It was intimidating even when people were willing to help, because I had questions about every single thing I saw, and I often found myself in the position of having literally no idea what to do. While I can look back on the process now and feel accomplished, maybe laugh occasionally at something weird that happened while I was trying to unearth something familiar, it was stressful and time consuming trying to figure it out. The help that I did receive made an unspeakably large difference, and I will never forget that. Being alone in a foreign country isn't easy, and I think that I got extremely lucky with both the local and expat community that eventually became a very eccentric, exciting version of family. I was finally settling in after 5 months. A month later, the diner was sold by the owners at our half year mark, leaving me out of a job and stuck in rural China.

Fortunately, I teamed up with a very good friend after a few weeks off, using her kitchen to do recipe testing over the winter. We’d often enjoy meals together that were simple, but full of love. We hosted holiday feasts and family dinners during the week, where both Chinese and Western dishes made up the spread. I began cooking with Chinese moms, dads, grandpas and grandmas, foodies and restaurant owners, people who had also called the kitchen their home. Food was made using giant woks and stoves with flames that sounded like a jet engine starting up. There were no measuring utensils to be found anywhere (once I got a hold of some I would bring them everywhere and try to compare how much of certain ingredients made it into the wok), and a good stove was difficult to find. Through this substitution of tools- which pairs down what you actually need to cook a nice meal- Chinese cuisine has taught me more than any other cuisine that the power of taste and familiarity with food are often the most important tools in cooking.

There are shared elements in both American and Chinese food cultures, and while not all of them will work well with the other, I often felt surprised by how one ingredient when seen out of context felt completely foreign and when put into another dish, reminded me of home. Americans have invented a breed of cuisine all their own, just as the Chinese chefs in China who are making ‘Western Food’ have created an entirely new type of cuisine. With matters of bridging the gap between the two cultures, we are dealing with a few giant leaps: texture, bones, fat, parts of the animal that are used, fermentation, the absence of raw vegetables, flavor profiles, table manners and basic food handling. Some of these issues are more approachable than others, and I will not try and cover all of the cultural differences surrounding food here. That would demand a Bible-thick book (or books) that wouldn’t explain my journey in this incredible country. The best part about having spent a long time in a place like China is the unexpected; the fact that I, as a Westerner, cannot begin to comprehend the breadth and complexity of some of these dishes that have roots in lush history, crippling poverty, or a well established family tradition. Most of what we can do as tourists in someone else’s kitchen is observe well practiced techniques with respect, and understand that Chinese food is a family cuisine that does not differ so much from the way of eating with which I grew up​.