The Origin of Horrible Chinese Food
The place that you can’t go except in your imagination is back in time, so you must close your eyes and pretend that you are in The Rickshaw restaurant on Pacific Avenue in Stockton, California, about 1958. Unless you were an overseas Chinese or the friend of one, or lived in a big city on an internationally recognized coast, this is what your first impression was of Chinese Food: gray bean sprouts and bamboo shoots tasting of tin, weird crunchy curlicues tasting not even of salt, but leaving a coat of grease on your lips, fried rice interspersed with reddish ham and Bird’s-Eye frozen peas and carrots, omelets with the bean sprouts in them, Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice, and most famously, hunks of breaded pork infecting a vermilion cornstarch organelle that tasted of white sugar and Heinz white vinegar.
This food had to come from somewhere. It was in imitation, or maybe even a memory, of some dish in some province that a real ancestor of the restaurant owner had eaten, and it was what all of them in the collective wisdom of the imitative market had decided Americans wanted to eat when they went out for Chinese Food in Stockton, or in St. George, Utah, as recently as the 1980’s.
Now everything is simultaneous, self-referent, nostalgic, and ironic and you can get this sauce at Jing Jing in Palo Alto under the name of “American Sweet And Sour Pork”. But last night in Xi’An, we were served it in its home.
There is a lot of sugar here. Our hired guide for Xi’An, whose American name is arbitrarily “Tom”, ordered for us the food that he grew up on in Sichuan for breakfast (even though it was dinner), which is a porridge of rice kernels floating in a glossy rice starch clear broth, with fruits and nuts. Also, as we wandered through the street, we were instructed to try dried persimmons, fried and stuffed with liquefied dates, and something that tasted like warm flat Dr. Pepper. As you can tell, we aren’t being very tourist-halal.
Speaking of halal, the sweet and sour red sauce had chicken bits in it. We were at a Muslim restaurant in Xi’An, so much so that it didn’t serve beer, on the first day of a guided tour we contracted for over the Internet some weeks ago. So far it’s been pretty successful. Tom is a nice guy whose English is good enough. In the course of the afternoon, he took us to the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, and the medina, a total distance of about 800 yards. We aren’t moving fast.
In the medina is the Great Mosque of Xi’An. Islam came to China along the Silk Road in the first century A.H., and has been reinforced by periodic invasions. There are a lot of things to note about Chinese mosques. The Arabic script in some places gets wadded up into little squares that look from a distance like Chinese. The dragons on the floor indicate the approval of the emperor. You can’t walk under the main wooden gate because it was damaged in the Sichuan earthquake in May. (There are also cracks in the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower). The imam says “Allahu Akbar” with a Beijing “r”. (We were there at the time of afternoon prayers. Xi’An, like all China, is on Beijing Time; we are far enough west now that it feels like Daylight Time and will get even weirder later.)
The curiosity that our guide repeatedly noted was that any of these monuments existed at all. Tom carefully explained under what ruse the three places that we went had been preserved from the Red Guards, China’s Taliban during the Cultural Revolution.
China’s Gen X doesn’t even remember the Cultural Revolution, let alone Tom, who is 23. The line taken on postcards of Mao is that it was a mistake. A lot of it is recycled as kitsch. We have Dick and Jane, they have Thinking Of The Consumers As We Grow Vegetables. If we wanted to come back with a suitcase full of bronze Mao busts we could, except, excess baggage. They won’t go up in value; there are hundreds of millions of them.
The Red Guards systematically destroyed everything older than 1949. It’s an old trick — the founder of the Qin Dynasty did the same, the Taliban did the same with the Buddhas, the Americans made it illegal to speak Indian languages and in many cases to physically survive: one must not underestimate the effect that having a 25 cent bounty paid on the scalps of Indians can have on relations with indigenous people, and this was the official US Government policy for a long time. Maybe the Chinese will try it in Tibet, since we seem to be taking pages from each other’s torture manuals these days.
What is with the Indian masks in the shops in the medina? I saw several, with feathers and stuff. Where are we, Germany?
And so, as with every facial representation that survived in the museums of Kabul, and every Albigensian relic that survived the Middle Ages, there is a story behind each surviving Chinese building. The ones in Beijing were too close to the seat of power. The Chinese government was not about to have rowdy Hitlerjugend of any nominal opinion rampaging in the actual capital. In Xi’An, the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower were both converted to office buildings. The Great Mosque became a warehouse. The warehouse was used to store furniture stolen from Chinese kulaks when they were sent off for re-education, and in the case where they didn’t come back (Nazi art collectors will recognize this part) the furniture is still there, and forms a substantial collection which is on display in the secular parts of the mosque.
In the mosque we were asked our religion. Outside we got a Santa Claus (a man ran up to sell us Santa Claus trinkets), a couple of Marx-Engels which in the local pronunciation take some processing to get, and a Leonardo da Vinci, which I hadn’t heard before but Dave said he had.