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.

My First Celebrity Sighting

For something that happened over 60 years ago, I can vividly remember my first celebrity sighting.  It was around 1957 that I saw the legendary Buster Keaton, song and dance man Donald O'Connor and glamour girl Ann Blyth make personal appearances in the Thrifty Drug Store in the shopping center on the corner of La Brea Ave. and Rodeo Road, now known as Obama Blvd.  I particularly remember O'Connor being introduced and coming out in a brightly lit area with a fair number of spectators ringing the scene.  (Thanks to a parallel thread I started on a neighborhood message board, that was in the area normally occupied by the Thrifty diner.)

While I have thought about this event occasionally over the years, it never occurred to me to figure out the nature of that event.  I mean why those stars and at that location?  I guess one reason is that there really wasn't any way to get an answer, except maybe to ask my parents while they were alive.  But like so many other things, as I once wrote a few years ago, unknowable facts in the past become easily answered in the internet age.  And a simple Google search today for "Buster Keaton Donald O'Connor Ann Blyth" revealed instantaneously that Donald O'Connor and Ann Blyth starred in "The Buster Keaton Story" which was released in 1957.  So that appearance by the trio was a promotional event for the release of the movie.

It took a little more searching to figure out why they appeared at that particular location.  We moved into the adjacent Crenshaw area in 1952, and even then it was a largely a minority neighborhood, predominantly African-American, but with a relatively large concentration of Asian-Americans and a few holdover whites.  I could see such event at the nearby Crenshaw Center (now Baldwin Hills Plaza) which featured department stores and specialty shops, and whose 1947 opening indeed was star studded with Mel Torme, among others, celebrating the opening of this shopping center so newsworthy that it was covered in Life Magazine.  But the La Brea/Rodeo shopping center only contained Thrifty Drug Store, Alpha Beta Market, and a small arcade area that included a small barber shop, maybe a shoe shine stand, and a couple of other stores.  However after a little digging I discovered that the Thrifty drug store was the largest location of that chain in the country at the time and was reminded that the property was also home to Thrifty's corporate headquarters.  And when the complex opened in 1952, there was a star studded celebration that included Anne Baxter and Tony Martin.

So who knows what other big name celebrities may have passed through that modest looking shopping center over the years.. 

Chinese Restaurants Take A Pounding From The Pandemic

Obviously these are tough times for everybody, rougher for some than others.  Particularly hard hit is the restaurant industry due to the precarious economics of the business, where a restaurant operation can expect net profit of 3 percent on sales even in good times.   Even more precariously situated are restaurant workers, as restaurant wages are often 25 percent or more of restaurant costs, so it doesn’t take much of a decline in restaurant revenue in such a low margin industry to trigger labor cutbacks.

However, Chinese restaurants have been hit by a triple whammy during this pandemic.  Not only have they been buffeted by the general economic disaster as amplified in the restaurant industry, but they have suffered additionally for being Chinese restaurants.  This is because COVID 19 originated in China, and from the beginning has been associated with things Chinese, as indicated by unfortunate terms such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”  Immediately as the virus spread through China, business at Chinese restaurants in the United States, and indeed throughout the world, began to sink even before the rest of the world economy and other types of restaurants became impacted.

Startled by this unwelcome rise of xenophobia, the food community attempted to fight back.  Food bloggers around the country attempted to whip up support for neighborhood Chinese restaurants.  An organization called No Appetite For Ignorance started a campaign to support Chinese restaurants around the world by having Chinese food personalities, including the greatest Chinese food expert of all, Fuchshia Dunlop, highlight their favorite Chinese restaurants.   (You can check out my own recs here.)

Unfortunately this did not stanch the bleeding, and indeed one Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up, Kim’s Restaurant, had to shut its doors due to anti-Chinese harassment after serving the neighborhood for over 40 years.  Meanwhile, things got ugly at Taste of China Restaurant in Chesapeake, Virginia.  The restaurant owner saw her car vandalized with anti-Chinese graffiti and “Go Back To China” written on it.   People have run into the restaurant screaming anti-Chinese epithets and pouring water in the premises.  Fortunately both of these episodes had happy endings.  At Kim’s Restaurant, upset customers tracked down the restaurant owner and presented him with a ten page printout from the neighborhood online message board from customers decrying the anti-Chinese harassment and saying how much the customers missed the restaurant.  After seeing the extent of neighborhood support, Kim’s Restaurant reopened.  Meanwhile, the customers of Taste of China organized a takeout tailgate in the restaurant’s parking lot, overwhelming the restaurant with orders.  Unfortunately, the reported episodes of anti-Asian Covid 19 related bias have numbered in the thousands (not counting people calling up Chinese restaurants to order bat dishes) and most of the endings are not so happy.

Of course the early body blow to the Chinese restaurant industry can’t be blamed completely on anti-Chinese xenophobia.  Admittedly, Chinese-Americans themselves started abandoning Chinese restaurants even before the corona virus was making a conspicuous presence in the United States.  I remember exchanging Chinese New Year’s greetings with one of my old Chinese friends this past January.   But when the subject of our annual Chinese New Year lunch meeting came up, he told me that he was not going to set foot in a Chinese restaurant until the whole corona virus thing blew over.  And while Chinese New Year restaurant gatherings were not largely affected at the end in January, business at Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, which cater almost exclusively to Chinese diners, fell off throughout the month of February as Chinese-Americans went into a shelter-in-place before being ordered to do so by government officials.   I remember having lunch with another friend, a former Chinese restaurant owner, at the end of February and he estimated that business had already dropped by roughly 30 percent at San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants, at a time where dining out in the greater community had yet to decline.

Things started to crash a week into March when we drove up to one of the more popular Chinese restaurants, Henry’s Cuisine in Alhambra on an early Sunday evening and we weren’t even sure whether the restaurant was open or not.  At first we thought it was just kind of early for dinner, but we saw the sign on the door which indicated they were in fact open, but would be closing the following day until May, due to a sharp decline in business.  That first episode was quite a shock. But then in the next few days we heard of a few other Chinese restaurants doing the same thing.   Later in the week, cities started ordering dine in restaurants to cut their seating capacity by 50 percent, and by weekend, dine-in operations were ordered to shut, with only takeout or delivery permitted.

The closure of dine-in eating in the middle of March was obviously the watershed moment for restaurants in general and Chinese restaurants in particular.  Large Chinese restaurants with a high cost structure and smaller, marginal Chinese restaurants were the first to close, either on an interim or permanent basis.  Since then, Chinese restaurants have been struggling to adapt to a take out and delivery world.  Some which tried to make a go of takeout and delivery subsequently closed.  But others, like Woon in Los Angeles, closed initially on a strategic basis, and as their subsequent path became clear, re-opened for takeout and delivery.   Henry’s Cuisine did reopen for takeout in early May, but closed again after two days with plans to reopen again in a month.  Quite often the continuing operations came on a modified basis, including changes to hours, changes to the menu, adding inventories of food products and supplies for resale, refusing credit cards and taking cash only, and other adaptations.   

Industry statistics indicate that the closure rate for Chinese restaurants during the pandemic have been more than double than that of other categories of restaurants in the United States.  While part of that may be connected to the current stigma of being a Chinese restaurant, another factor is that a higher percentage of family owned Chinese restaurants are operating on a “shoestring” compared to other types of restaurants.  As celebrity Chinese American chef Ming Tsai has stated, the post-pandemic future for mom and pop restaurants in general is bleak, warning that half of these operations are not likely to survive.  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ming-tsai-50-of-mom-and-pop-restaurants-cannot-get-through-coronavirus-pandemic-191715552.html?.tsrc=fin-srch    And mom and pop Chinese restaurants would seem to be at greater risk.

We all hope things return to normal as soon as possible with the least amount of disruption.  But realistically it is unavoidable that some restaurants will not reopen, and in this regard Chinese restaurants are more vulnerable.  Besides falling into economic distress at an earlier point in time and the xenophobia factor, there is a particularly high concentration of “mom and pop” Chinese restaurants      Unfortunately, then, it is quite likely that many of us will not have the opportunity to ever eat at some of our favorite Chinese restaurants again.

Why I Was Wrong About Gibraltar

2018 was a climatic travel year in that we visited three locales where I never dreamed I would ever visit.  Well maybe I dreamed of visiting these places, Dubai, India and Gibraltar, but I never thought it would actually happen.  Now when traveling anywhere you haven't been before, you can see pictures before your trip to get an general idea of what the destination is like, but of course there's nothing like actually being there.  However, in the case of Gibraltar, the reality turned out to be 180 degrees different from the expectation.

The reason for the gap between expectation and realization was the purchase of this computer that I am currently writing on.  It was a brand new Dell, Windows 10 computer, and Windows 10 instituted a startup screen showing landscapes or other pictures of Windows' choosing, sometimes identified, sometimes not identified, showing up for several startups and then disappearing not to be seen again.  One of the early startup picture was something that looked like the Rock of Gibraltar, with the rock teeming with crowded structures all the way down the rock.  Since Gibraltar sits across the strait from northern Morocco, this Moorish type of scene seemed logical to me.  But like I said, the startup pictures may or may not be identified, and this one was not.

So imagine my surprise when I got to Gibraltar and found not a crowded Moorish landscape, but rather a sparsely populated British looking (obviously not surprising in hindsight since Gibraltar is British) one.  And while I was still excited to be in Gibraltar, this stark difference did diminish the excitement to some extent, though I also met my goal of having a meal there, if a ham and cheese french bun at the St. Michael's Cave gift shop can be considered a meal.

As I said, the Windows 10 pictures don't repeat themselves.  Except that two years later the picture that I thought was Gibraltar did reappear, and with identification.  What I thought was Gibraltar was actually Uchisar, a town in central Turkey, built around a large rock formation that actually didn't look like the rock of Gibraltar except for this one particular view.  And now I have a sense of closure knowing where I have to go if I want to see the Gibraltar I had imagined in my mind.

This is Uchisar.

  

This is Gibraltar.

I Wasn't Dreaming After All--This Restaurant Does Exist

When I first started this blog back in 2009, it wasn't a Chinese food blog, or any kind of food blog at all.  Rather I thought of it as a personal diary which I could easily access rather than fumbling around looking for some kind of paper book, never dreaming that anybody else would read anything I wrote.  As such I even posted some of my more unusual dreams on the blog.  

Which leads me to write about Wok N' Tenders.  Since Howlin Ray’s became a sensation in Chinatown’s Far East Plaza, turnabout would be fair play if a Nashville Hot Wings and chicken tenders placed opened up just down the street from Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken on Crenshaw, and also served Chinese food on the side. But then if you told me that they’re serving Peruvian Chinese food I would have told you that I’m actually asleep right now and having another of my weird dreams that I actually used to post about.

Now the Chinese influence on food in Peru is quite real.  Chinese arrived in Peru at about the same time they came to the United States for the California gold rush.  Their presence has led to a style of cuisine called "chifa," based on the Cantonese term for cooking (in our Toishanese dialect, "ji faan") which literally means to prepare rice.  Chifa is essentially Chinese food made with local Peruvian ingredients.  There is also "chaufa", which specifically refers to Peruvian fried rice, from the Cantonese word "chow faan", which means fried rice.  The term chaufa also can refer more generally  to Peruvian food cooked Chinese style.

If you look hard enough you can find restaurants in the United States that serve a wide range of Chinese-Peruvian dishes.  There are a couple here in Los Angeles, though the greatest concentration I have run into was in Orlando, Florida.  Indeed, I actually stumbled into one in Buenos Aires.  But if you walk into any straight-up Peruvian restaurant in the United States, there will most likely be something in the way of chifa or chaufa on the menu.

Still, Chinese-Peruvian food is not so common here for me to find a Nashville hot wings/Chinese Peruvian restaurant and not think that I was having a strange food dream. But in fact I’m wide awake, and Wok N’ Tenders on the corner of Crenshaw and Venice is the restaurant, just two blocks from where I attended Mt. Vernon Junior High School in the 1960s, since renamed Johnnie Cochran Middle School.  Who would have thought something like Wok N' Tenders would eventually show up there?

The Chinese menu is relatively short. There’s chicken or beef chaufa (fried rice), chicken or beef tallarin (meat with noodles), and lomo saltado (Chinese stir fry with french fries). I had the chicken tallarin and it was really great.

At this point in the cycle I only phoned in my order and quickly picked it up. Wok N’ Tender has only been open for maybe 2 months, certainly a rough time to get started. They do have free local delivery for $25 orders, and I hope to take a closer look when things settle down.

Chef Tony Staggers Into Town

Don't get me wrong.  The dim sum at Chef Tony's is quite good, innovative and visually appealing.  But when Richmond BC's best dim sum comes to the Los Angeles area, admittedly third tier behind both Vancouver and San Francisco, a nearly transcendental experience is expected.   They still may reach that point since they're still in soft opening, but Chef Tony is not currently ready for prime time, particularly in light of the hefty bill.  The first clue was walking into a restaurant at 11:10am to find only one other table of 2 occupied.  At the same stage, Longo Seafood's much larger premises were full by 11am and Palatte Tea House in San Francisco was likewise full.   Because I was a solo diner I could only try five items on this visit.

The crispy baked bbq pork bun was excellent, perhaps even the best I've eaten.  One issue, though is that there were sugar crystals sprinkled on top of the bun, making this the sweetest pork bun I've ever eaten.  Like I said it tastes great but I'm not sure if this is what I want in this dish.  The custom made bowl does add a nice touch.

Visually I was extremely impressed by the gold leaf shrimp dumpling which reminded me of the gold leaf dim sum I ate in Hong Kong.   But it tasted like any other good shrimp dumpling and was a bit pricey at $11.80 for an order of four (I paid $9 for these three.)

The pandan pork and shrimp buns looked very interesting.  Tastewise the only notable thing was that the bun was sweeter than the typical steamed bun.

The one really great thing about Chef Tony is that some dim sum items can be ordered by the single piece, so you don't have to worry about getting stuck with $8 or $9 for a full order of something you don't like.  This is the gold foil lava bun, which was excellent (though this is a hard dish to mess up).

Lastly, the signature coconut bunny.  Can't say it was better than anybody else' s coconut bunny.

At this point I think the question is whether Chef Tony is any better than its sister restaurant Sea Harbour or not.  (They're using Sea Harbour packed hand wipes right now.)  The dim sum certainly is prettier than Sea Harbour, but a deeper dive would be needed to see if it's equal to, better than, or not as good.  And then the question is whether it's worth the price premium, as the pictured items added up to over $37 including tax and tip.