The David R. Chan Collection at Stanford University

You could imagine my surprise last night when I stumbled upon a reference on the internet to the David R. Chan Collection at Stanford University.  The two most likely reactions are (1) it's a joke or (2) it's another David R. Chan.  But, as it turns out, the reference really is to yours truly.  Now I have no real connection to Stanford aside from the fact that I dropped a big bundle there sending my son to law school on The Farm.  So obviously there's a twisted path here.

As I have previously written, I was finishing my undergraduate studies at UCLA right at the time that the formal study of the history of the Chinese in the United States was just beginning.  I hadn't even dreamed of logging in Chinese restaurant visits back then, but I was always a collector of things.  And back then, materials on the Chinese experience in America were so precious that I tried collect everything I could on the topic.  I spent probably hundreds of hours photocopying articles, and even books, from the UCLA library, and I subscribed to any English language Chinese American publication I could get my hands on, including the weekly East West newspaper out of San Francisco.

Of course after the years things really piled up, particularly the newspapers.  In a way it was fortunate that East West ceased publication in the 1980s, stopping further additions to that collection.  The historian in me prevented me from tossing the newspapers out, but I didn't want to be stuck with storing them forever.  I approached the UCLA Asian American Studies Library about taking the newspapers, and they were receptive, saying they would get back to me.  However they never did.  Meanwhile, my daughter enrolled at UCLA so I sent her to the Asian American Studies Library to follow up.  She actually found the person I had spoken with a few years previously (who had gone on medical leave in the interim), who was again receptive.  But once again there was no follow up.

A few years later my son moved to the Bay Area to go to law school.  At the same time, the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco hired their first professional curator, Anna Naruta, and I told her about my newspaper collection.  Anna said there was no known collection of East West newspapers (only a curator would know that) and that CHSA would gladly take them.  Of course there's the question of how you transfer 20 years of newspapers from my house in Los Angeles to the CHSA building on Clay St. in Chinatown.  Now I always did look for excuses to visit the Bay Area, and with my son in school there, I had the perfect excuse to regularly drive north.  Indeed in three years of law school, I made the trek 18 times.  And during 2006 and 2007, a number of those trips were made with boxes of newspapers in my trunk.  Actually, the hard part was the parking in S.F. Chinatown.  Basically there isn't any.  On some occasions Anna gave me access to a parking spot on their premises.  But when Anna wasn't around, I was reduced to carrying the newspapers from my car parked at the Royal Pacific Motor Inn on Broadway to the CHSA building five blocks away.

After delivering the newspapers (and receiving my charitable contribution tax receipt) I didn't give any further thought to the newspapers except to be glad to have found a good home for them.  Consequently it was a bolt out of the blue when I saw the "David R. Chan Collection" referred to in the latest CHSA Bulletin, announcing that Stanford University Library was making available four listed CHSA  "archival collections to researchers, in its Department of Special Collections in Green Library", which had apparently been transferred by CHSA to Stanford some time before.  (It would have been nice if somebody had told me what was going on.)    But I'm happy to make this contribution to academic research.  And happy as I am at this turn of events, I have one regret.  I probably should have taken a larger charitable contribution deduction in 2006 and 2007.

My Chinese Food Articles and the 40th Anniversary of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California

In the three years since Clarissa Wei indirectly launched me on an avocational career writing on Chinese American restaurant topics, I've written a few dozen history and cultural laced Chinese food articles.  (For the uninitiated, most of those articles aren't here on my blog, but rather can be found at this link to the Menuism website. )  But writing these articles has not been a brand new experience for me, but rather a revival after a 30 year writing slumber.  Indeed, the period of writing inactivity was so long that I almost forgot about my previous writing bouts, and really was just reminded of it now as I was just interviewed in connection with the upcoming 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

During that interview it was brought to my attention the forgotten fact (as far as I was concerned) that I was CHSSC member number 8,  At that point in 1975 I was a couple of years out of law school and had written a number of articles on Chinese American history in the six years since I received my undergraduate degree from UCLA.  My specialty areas were the history of the Chinese in Los Angeles and the Chinese Exclusion laws.  Back then the field of Chinese American history was so undeveloped that a rank amateur like myself  could make real contributions to the literature of the day.  My term paper from the undergraduate "Orientals in America" class at UCLA on the Chinese in Los Angeles was immediately published in the pioneering Asian American movement newspaper Gidra, and other iterations of that topic appeared in Bridge Magazine out of New York Chinatown, and in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce 1975 Chinese New Year souvenir program.  My magnum opus, so to speak, was my piece also from 1975 entitled "The Tragedy and Trauma of the Chinese Exclusion Laws", presented to the bicentennial related conference The Life, Role and Influence of the Chinese in America, sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America, and included in the proceedings from that conference that they published.

I then went on to a different area of concentration--American Chinatowns as depicted in turn of the century post cards, as well as cards from later eras.  I took some of my duplicate postcards (didn't want to risk the originals) and put together a display and presentation, first given at a meeting of US government employees in the San Fernando Valley at the Van Nuys Federal Building (at this point in time I have totally forgotten how they got a hold of me--I think the guy's name was Hyman Lee), and later to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and the Chinese Historical Society of America's second conference on the Life, Role and Influence of the Chinese in America held in 1980.  A paper was published in connection with the CHSA conference, though the book wasn't actually published until 1984.  I think that was the last of my historical articles to be published, though probably not the last I had written, as I did write some articles for both of the Chinese Historical Societies between 1980 and 1984.

I guess there was a precursor of my current Chinese food writing activities back in 1977 when I wrote my one and only published restaurant review, of Hong Kong Restaurant in Sioux City, IA for East West, the Chinese American Journal, a weekly newspaper out of San Francisco.  But even then, the review was as much about the setting of the restaurant, as the food that they served, particularly the fact that I ended up driving by the Sioux Bee Honey Factory before reaching the restaurant..  After the early 1980s, life got too busy to continue my writings on Chinese-American topics.  But in 2012, thanks to the publicity resulting from Clarissa Wei's write up on me and my 6,000 Chinese restaurant visits, I received offers to write on Chinese food.  Well meaning people contacted me under the presumption that having eaten at 6,000 Chinese restaurants I was an expert on Chinese cuisine and had the knowledge to be a Chinese restaurant critic.  Nothing was farther from the truth--I was like the guy my co-workers once talked about, who had 15 years experience in taxation, but which did not impress them because they said it was like "fifteen 1 year experiences".  Nevertheless I have taken the ball and run with it, using the opportunity to bring out the themes I used to write about decades ago--the Chinese Exclusion Laws, racial discrimination against Chinese Americans, and to tell these stories to new generations who had little idea of such events that had transpired in the past.

Déjà Vu All Over Again for Los Angeles Chinatown Dining

With the arrival of Roy Choi’s Chego, Little Jewel of New Orleans, Scoops, Pok Pok Thai, and Champ Ramen and the forthcoming large Pok Pok, Chinatown is once again a dining destination, albeit not particularly for Chinese food.  But this is not Los Angeles Chinatown’s first dining renaissance as once before it had emerged from its dining slumber to be a culinary hot spot.

While it is natural to lump Los Angeles Chinatown with other historic core city Chinatowns like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver and many others, in reality Los Angeles Chinatown is uniquely different.  That’s because today’s Chinatown in Los Angeles began as a Hollywood set like tourist only attraction with wishing wells, touristy restaurants and gift shops in a plaza like setting, but virtually no Chinese people actually living in the area.   Yes, Los Angeles did once have a real historic central city Chinatown, but that was leveled in 1933 to make way for the Union Station.  While civic do-gooders thought they were providing two separate suitable replacements in New Chinatown on North Broadway and China City on North Spring, virtually all of old Chinatown’s residents moved out of the downtown area, leaving Los Angeles without a real Chinatown for a good three decades.  From its opening in the late 1930s through the 1960s, New Chinatown dining was largely tourist oriented.  As I kid the only time I ever went to Chinatown was for an occasional banquet at one of New Chinatown’s or Spring Street’s (the two districts had not yet merged to form today’s Chinatown) larger restaurants such as Hong Kong Low, Lime House, General Lee’s, Grand Star, New Hung Far, Golden Pagoda or New Grand East.  We otherwise didn’t go to Chinatown to eat.  Rather whenever we ate out it would be in one of the San Pedro St. City Produce Market (the real Chinatown of that era that few outsiders know about) Chinese restaurants such as New Moon, Man Fook Low, Paul’s Kitchen or Moon Palace (which subsequent became On Luck).

Then came the game changer, the 1965 repeal of the restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States.   With the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong, New Chinatown saw its first critical mass of Chinese residents, and restaurants serving a more modern type of Cantonese food sprang up in Chinatown in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Phoenix Inn, Won Kok Center and Golden Dragon.  Meanwhile, Grandview Gardens captured the imagination of Angelinos, both Chinese and non-Chinese, who swarmed the restaurant on Sunday mornings for their dim sum service.   Miriwa upped the ante by opening  its newfangled dim sum service on carts in 1976 on the second floor of Chunsan Plaza (currently occupied by Ocean Seafood).    

Los Angeles Chinatown reached its first culinary zenith in the 1980s as restaurants filled the street to street Food Center between Broadway and Hill St.  Mon Kee on Spring Street may have been the first Chinatown restaurant to serve Hong Kong style seafood, though it was soon left to the downtown lunch crowd.   But in 1984 ABC Seafood stepped in and introduced advanced Hong Kong seafood cuisine in the old Lime House location, for over a decade serving the best Chinese food in Los Angeles, if not the nation.   However later in the 1980s Monterey Park, and then the rest of the San Gabriel Valley gradually overtook Chinatown, to the point that there is nothing close to a destination Chinese restaurant in Chinatown today.  Indeed, as far as Los Angeles Chinatown is concerned, the best known restaurant may be the touristy Yang Chow with its slippery shrimp, which annually wins  the "Best Chinese Restaurant" award from downtown office workers.. 

Ironically ground zero for Chinatown’s second renaissance is the old Food Center complex, since renamed Far East Plaza, as over the years fewer and fewer eating places populated the center’s premises.  But now, housing Chego, Pok Pok Thai, Scoops and Champ Ramen (as well as the pop-up cat cafe), it really has become a food center again.  Or like Yogi Berra said, it’s déjà vu all over again.    

Me And General Tso

It's great to see that the Search For General Tso movie has garnered a surprisingly wide audience with its release on Netflix and re-release on video on demand.  This is far more than I envisioned when being interviewed for the movie over two years ago.  Obviously food documentaries aren't going to make it on anybody's list of most watched films.  But already five people I know, who didn't know I was in the movie, have seen the movie, and my daughter has received screen shots of me from her friends while they were watching the movie.  That so many people within a small circle have seen the movie indicates that the raw viewership numbers are pretty good. 

More than anything, however, I'm grateful to have even made it into the final cut of the movie and to see and participate in the process of how movies try to garner attention and stand out from the clutter on the way to commercial distribution.  Note that the movie is ostensibly about the search for the origins of General Tso's Chicken, but my part in the film doesn't add anything to that search.  Indeed, as a Californian I was largely unfamiliar with the General Tso's Chicken dish which is ubiquitous throughout the United States, but rarely seen in California, except to be aware of the scarcity of the dish.  (This is probably thanks to the popularity of Panda Express' blockbuster orange chicken dish, and there's probably room for only one orange colored sweet Chinese chicken dish in any particular geographic market.)

Yes, there are other undercurrents in the movie, and perhaps that is why I fit in.  Or perhaps there were more relevant comments from me in the hour and a half of interview time that didn't make it into the movie, but the parts where I was included were deemed better, for which i should thank the masterful film editing.  But still, I don't know why I made it into the movie, while the founders of Panda Express, who were interviewed the same day I was, did not.  Perhaps filmmaker Ian Cheney spotted the human interest angle, as despite just three minutes of face time, I was actually mentioned in some of the film reviews, including Variety, Eater and OC Weekly.  (The Variety piece mentioned me after referring to the "genial assortment of historians, chefs, critics and unclassifiable eccentrics" in the movie, and I'm not sure if I was meant to be in the latter category.)   One blogger used the adjective "pan faced" to describe me, for which I have to keep remembering the part of the Junior Woodchuck Manual that says any publicity is good publicity.  But I certainly have nothing to complain about, as it's been a fun ride.  And of course I now try to eat and mention General Tso's Chicken whenever I can.

Stumbling Onto Chinese Food in New Zealand

While I intended to dine on some Chinese food during our recent trip to New Zealand and Australia, I knew that being part of a tour group would severely hamper my ability to do any real exploration for Chinese food since free time was limited and I would be restricted by the location of the tour hotel.  Indeed, I assumed my best, and perhaps only opportunity would be on a free day in Sydney, where our hotel was going to be within walking distance of Chinatown.  Never did I expect to register successful Chinese meals in three of the five nights we spent in New Zealand.

The first meal literally dropped into our lap as it was our tour group welcome dinner at Eight Restaurant in the Langham Hotel in Auckland.  Now, Eight could be the name of a Chinese restaurant, since eight is a lucky number to Chinese, with numerous 88 and 888 Restaurants in existence.  However it was unlikely that the only restaurant in Langham’s Auckland location would be Chinese.  Furthermore, they explained that “eight” refers to eight different styles of preparation the restaurant used.  The tour guide said it was all you can eat, but not a buffet because your food was cooked to order.  But as it turns out the tour guide was wrong, because it really was a buffet, and the cook to order component was really just the teppan grill we see at many Chinese buffets in California.  And while it was technically not a Chinese buffet since that term wasn’t used and there were Chinese and non-Chinese food items, it was technically a Chinese buffet because it was full of items that Chinese people like, and restaurants with a similar food lineup do call themselves Chinese buffets.  It was no surprise therefore that at least three-quarters of the customers were Asian.  Most obviously was the dim sum station, with one of my favorites, the now seldom seen beef siu mai. There was the meat grill with prime beef and pork cuts in addition to alpaca, kangaroo, ostrich and venison choices.  There was a separate seafood grill with six kinds of fish, as well as clams, shrimp and other kinds of seafood.  There was an Indian station too, with goat masala, as well as lamb, chicken, and vegetarian choices.  Other stations served  raw oysters, mussels, and a decent dessert spread.  But while it was fun eating there, at about $75 US per person it really wasn’t worthwhile, because the flavor of the food was not at all outstanding.   But that sure didn’t stop all those Chinese diners.

The next meal in the tourist town of Rotaruo was even more improbable.  At least Auckland has a large Chinese population and indeed we drove through their budding Chinatown on the way from the airport into town.   But Rotaruo did not have the same concentration of Chinese residents, and what Asian influence there was in that city appeared to be heavily Korean.  Having walked through most of the downtown area early in the day, we were actually headed to Carl’s Jr. for dinner as that seemed to be the most likely venue near the hotel.  But on the way over there we passed a place called Hong Kong City Takeaway, so I stopped in poked my head in thinking I could supplement my Carl’s meal with something from here.  My attention was drawn to a picture of crab with black bean sauce, which indicated this wasn’t a typical tourist Chinese spot.  Then I looked up on the wall and saw a blackboard with several dozen items written in Chinese without translation.   As it turned out, we had stumbled into an authentic Chinese restaurant.  We were lucky that it was very early and the restaurant was empty, as that enabled us to talk to the guy behind the counter and get an idea of exactly what he served.  When we asked him about what kind of vegetables he had, he went back in the kitchen and brought out gai lan and on choy to show us.  When we asked about what kind of fish he used, he reached under the counter, grabbed a supermarket ad, and pointed to the basa ad.  We ended up staying and had the curry fish, tofu chicken, and Chinese broccoli with beef.  All three dishes were quite good, and as we ate our meal we saw numerous Chinese patrons coming in for takeway.  Interestingly a couple of doors up the street was a place called Chopsticks Restaurant, which we had actually spotted at a distance at lunch time, which had extensive Chinese writing on a signboard outside of the restaurant.  But passing this restaurant after finishing our meal, we saw that Chopsticks was totally empty, so Hong Kong City was clearly the real find;.

Our last New Zealand stop was the ski resort town of Queenstown, which personally reminded me of Vail, CO.  I was walking down the street when I spotted the sign “Queenie’s Dumplings” which made me wonder whether there might be an authentic Chinese restaurant in this ski resort.  A couple of the other Chinese restaurants in town, Madam Woo and Lakeside Palace seem to be westernized, but dumplings aren’t normally associated with westernized Chinese food.  And indeed, Queenie carried a full line of dumplings, as well as noodle soup dishes.  The mixed Asian and non-Asian kitchen staff did raise some questions, but the majority Chinese clientele was sufficient validation.  The chicken and corn dumplings (which can hardly be found in Los Angeles) and the beef dumplings were both pretty good.

If anything this experience shows how Chinese are expanding their footprint in places like New Zealand just as they are back home in California.  Which from a culinary perspective is just fine with me.

1976 Rose Bowl Game

One of my all time favorite football games, and most likely my favorite not involving the UCLA/USC rivalry was the January 1, 1976 Rose Bowl between UCLA and Ohio State.  Ohio State was the only unbeaten team in the country and had thrashed UCLA at the Coliseum earlier in the 1975 season.  The score was 41-20, but the final score was misleading because Ohio State ran out to a 41-7 lead before coasting to victory.  All Ohio State needed to win that season's national championship was to beat UCLA again, which everyone assumed they would do quite easily.  Oddsmakers installed Ohio State as a 15 point favorite.   Most of us thought that Ohio State would win by a bigger margin than that.  Indeed I'm not sure why I even bothered to go to the game.  And as the game approached things appeared to get worse.  The UCLA team almost mutinied because Coach Dick Vermeil cracked the whip so hard during the practices leading up to January 1.

Ohio State took the opening kickoff and rolled down the field with little resistance, just as everybody suspected.  But when they got inside the UCLA 30 yard line, Ohio State stalled (aided by some questionable play calling) and had to settle for a long field goal to go up 3-0.  Meanwhile, whenever UCLA got the ball they couldn't do a thing.  They didn't get their first first down until the end of the first half and only had about 40 yards total for the half.  But after the initial drive, the UCLA defense stiffened and the half ended 3-0, in what seemed like an unbelievable moral victory.

But then more unbelievably, UCLA's offense caught fire in the third quarter.  What didn't work in the first half, running and passing, started to work, even though UCLA's best offensive lineman, Randy Cross, was lost for the game at the end of the first half.   UCLA took the opening kickoff, marched down the field, though having to settle for a tying field goal.  Two subsequent Bruin touchdown drives and it was 16-3 UCLA in the third quarter, and UCLA was on its way to a 23-10 win with highlight plays by John Sciarra, Wally Henry and Wendell Tyler, and Coach Woody Hayes memorably trudging over to the UCLA sideline before the game ended.   

But as the years went by my memory of the game started to grow dim, since it predated the introduction of home VHS machines in the United States in 1977.  Consequently I wasn't able to re-watch this game like some of my other later favorites.  I had resigned myself to never reliving that game until I met the star of the game,  John Sciarra, sometime in the 1990s at a presentation he gave on pensions and retirement plans.  He said that after a great deal of effort, he and other members of the team were able to obtain copies of the videotape of that game directly from NBC, which gave me hope that the game tape might some day be made available to the public.  Sure enough, a few years later a collector friend came across a copy and made a duplicate for me.  Unfortunately my copy was a third or fourth generation copy and wasn't conducive to watching on a recurring basis, though it was better than nothing.  Then about 10 years ago ESPN Classics showed the game, and while I didn't get that cable channel, a relative did and taped it for me.  But while it was a good quality picture, it was highly abridged, so I never watched it too often.

However it is now the age of YouTube, and ever since they got rid of their relatively small maximum file size limits, all kinds of older sporting events have been uploaded, including decent copies of both halves of the 1976 Rose Bowl game.  Now I can finally watch the game in its entirety and relive the magic moments that I thought would someday fade away.

Reviving Crunchy Baked BBQ Pork Buns

When I was a kid, the only Chinese bbq pork buns in circulation were the steamed ones, much larger in size than the current buns served in orders of three buns, and referred to back then as "hom bao".  Then somewhere along the line somebody invented the baked bbq pork bun, baked to a golden brown on top with a smooth top having a sweet glaze.  I'm guessing these arrived first in Hong Kong, maybe in the 1980s, though frankly I can't tell you where I first encountered this item in the United States.

But the real gem in this collection is what might be referred to as the crunchy top bbq pork bun.  It's most associated with Tim Ho Wan in Hong Kong, the world's most inexpensive Michelin starred restaurant and seems to have been replicated only by a handful of Chinese restaurants in the United States, most notably Hong Kong Lounge and Lai Hong Lounge in San Francisco. (Strangely, a small bakery in San Francisco Chinatown, AA Bakery on Stockton St., produced them for a while, but seems to have stopped.)  Also, Sea Harbour in Rosemead, CA has a similar item they call a French top bbq pork bun.  The Tim Ho Wan version is the best, but the Lai Hong Lounge version is a good substitute.  Indeed so good, we once ordered four orders of three buns at Lai Hong Lounge, one to eat at the restaurant and the others to take back to Los Angeles.

But the problem with taking these things home is that a dim sum item that starts off with a crunchy top soon turns into a soggy and soft bun that doesn't taste so good.  Microwaving one of these cold buns only makes it hot--it's still soggy.  However after experimenting I figured out how to revive these things at home.  A double passing through a toaster oven cycle gets the top nice and crunchy again.  Unfortunately, that's not enough to warm up the inside fully, and more time in the toaster oven will burn the top.  But after the double toaster oven treatment, 20 to 25 seconds in the microwave, and voila!

Note that this treatment also works to revive pineapple top bbq pork and chicken buns, too.