How I Became A Writer

As I remember hearing some anonymous person saying many years ago, my most outstanding trait is clearly my humility. So even as people tell me what a good writer I am, such as the comment by a novelist and television journalist, "David is doing some of the best, most idiosyncratic food writing in the country right now," I try to stay humble about this.  And for good reason, because I don't know how a became a good writer, having started out in life as a very poor writer.

Indeed, I think back on my Advanced Composition class at Dorsey High School and I wonder what magic transformation occurred.   I think that the only reason I was even in Advanced Composition was that they used a tracking system such that all the perceived better students took the same classes together, be it English, Science or Social Studies.  I remember one composition was so bad that the teacher read it in front of the entire class, fortunately without attribution, as an example of an awful composition.  Not only was my writing poor, but I couldn't produce anything more than a couple pages long, and only in the formulaic structure that they taught us.

My writing troubles continued at UCLA where you had to write a composition before the beginning of your first semester to see if you were required to take "Subject A", a.k.a. "Dumbbell English" if your composition wasn't good enough.  I failed.   I remember just a couple of things from the first day of Subject A.  The instructor was a 60ish woman named Catherine Wheat, and she already knew one of the other students, Mr. Johns, a burly African-American with a southern accent.  It didn't take long for me to figure out he was a football player who had previously flunked the Subject A class.  What I didn't realize until later was that he was a Senior, and in fact had completed his football eligibility in the previous semester, so I guess we have to hand it to him to keep plugging in class even though his football career was over.   And on the first day, everybody got a second chance to write another composition and waive out of Subject A.  I think the topic was a letter of advice to someone planning to go to college, so I wrote my imaginary letter to my second cousin Carl, who was a grade behind me at Dorsey.  So guess what?  It was good enough to waive out of Subject A, and indeed the instructor read my essay aloud to the class before being excused from the class.  In hindsight I'm thinking that the conversational nature of this composition might have been the difference in my flunking the original composition but waiving out.

Nothing during my undergraduate years at UCLA would indicate anything that would have improved my writing skills.  I think I only wrote two term papers in my four plus undergraduate years, as I took mostly business and economics courses.  And my only "C" grade as an undergraduate was in English 1.  Yet something happened to my writing skills during those years.  The second of my term papers was written in my very last semester at UCLA, for the pioneering "Orientals In America" class.   As I have written in the past, that was a transformative class for me, and my term paper was a history of the Chinese in Los Angeles, which the organizers of the class also ran in the pioneering Asian American movement publication Gidra.  The thought didn't occur to me at the time (and indeed first hit me while writing this essay), but it must have been relatively well written from them to have chosen my paper for publication.

It wasn't actually until  a year later that I consciously had any clue that I might somehow be turning into a good writer.  I had a summer internship at the Big 8 CPA firm Touche Ross & Company (which subsequently became part of the merged Big 6-5-4 CPA firm of Deloitte & Touche) during the summer between my graduation from UCLA Business School and beginning UCLA Law School.  As a summer intern I was obviously at the bottom of the audit team totem pole, and was responsible for writing up the engagement's summary of procedures and observations.  In so doing, the senior on the job, Chris Massey, a former swimmer at USC and subsequently longtime Big 8 CPA firm partner in Los Angeles, told me that I wrote excellent memos.  (He also told me how USC was going to smash UCLA in football that fall, and I could only nod my head.  Final score:  UCLA 45, USC 20.) 

So somehow even before starting law school, and without doing much formal writing, I was beginning to develop writing skills.  After that it was a matter of improving those skills.  It's hard to go to law school and not become a good writer, as law school is all about writing and making convincing arguments.  Meanwhile, I was following up on my published article on the history of the Chinese in Los Angeles with similar pieces even while I was still in law school, and continuing when I started working for the CPA firm of Kenneth Leventhal & Company.  And even though I had to stop writing historical articles in the early 1980s due to professional and family responsibilities, my job at Kenneth Leventhal, which eventually merged into Ernst & Young, was really a writing job.  Essentially I would write legal tax memos analyzing and applying tax law to specific factual situations, but most often as an advocate for the client, as opposed to the impartial position of a judge.  As such, I realized that I was writing in a storytelling format, perhaps influenced by the historical writings I had previously done on the side.  And whether it was writing a tax memo, a historical article, or a restaurant article, use of a storytelling type of framework results in a product that is very pleasing to readers.

Solving The Broccoli Beef Mystery

Even as Chinese food in the United States becomes more and more authentic, there also seems to be renewed interest in Americanized Chinese food, as indicated by the invitation I received to be interviewed about Americanized Chinese food on the Jim Jefferies podcast, which I declined as it involved going into a radio studio during the lockdown.  As I have explained in the past, there were two separate and distinct sources to today's Americanized Chinese food.  There's the category of food which was rooted in the Toishanese immigration to the United States, from the time of the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century until the late 1960s repeal of discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws in the United States.  Basically this was rural Cantonese food as adapted to ingredients available in the United States, as well as to the taste buds of the American public.  In this original category one finds classics such as chop suey, egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and wor won ton soup, which most of America erroneously believed representative of food eaten throughout China.

However after the change in American immigration laws, Chinese people of different backgrounds began to come to the United States.  In the 1970s these were the urban Cantonese from Hong Kong and the Mandarin speaking Taiwanese, most of whom themselves had evacuated the Chinese mainland to Taiwanese as the mainland fell to the communist regime.   Taiwanese chefs, many of whom had arrived in Taiwan from Hunan and Sichuan provinces two decades previous, arrived in New York and starting serving what they remembered as Hunan and Sichuan food.  But since they were serving these dishes to native New Yorkers, not natives of Hunan or Sichuan, of whom there were very few in the United States at that time, new styles of Americanized Chinese dishes became featured--mu shu pork, General Tso's chicken, and sizzling rice soup to name a few.  

While we're now used to seeing a mashup of Cantonese and non-Cantonese dishes at Americanized Chinese restaurants these days, the difference between the two was originally like night and day, except perhaps for the presence of white rice at both styles of restaurants.  Furthermore, since during the first half of the 20th century, there was little migration from China, and what migration there was consisted almost exclusively of friends and relatives of the Toishanese already here, Chinese restaurant menus during this period were remarkably stable.

Which leads to my mystery of broccoli beef.  This dish is not found on Americanized Chinese restaurant menus in the early 20th century.   Yet, it had become a standard dish in Americanized Chinese restaurants before the second wave of Americanized Chinese food in the 1970s.  Plus as a mild stir fry mixture of meat and vegetable, it clearly fell into the Cantonese style of cooking.   So why did this dish arise during a period of time where there was little evolution in Chinese food in America?

As it turns out, there was a simple reason there was no broccoli beef in the early 20th century.  It was because there was no broccoli, period, in the United States at that point in time.  Broccoli did not arrive in the United States until 1920s when it was brought by Italian immigrants.  And it didn't become a mainstream vegetable in the United States until the 1940s.  So it was an evolution in American food, rather than anything specifically due to Chinese food or the Toishanese community, that led to the introduction of the classic broccoli beef.