Thin, long, silky noodles; crunchy carrot strip slivers; tender chicken breast cuts; pillowy scrambled egg puffs; crisp, yellow onion tendrils; and bouncy green onions. Oh yes, and Chinese cabbage, light green, healthy, and perfectly cooked to have the right amount of bite, the right amount of give. A bit of soy sauce, salt, and of course, a spoonful of sugar. This was medicine of the heart. This was my mom's chow mein, and probably from the time I was two years old on, she made it for every one of my birthday parties. Just the other day, I asked her why.
"長壽," she replied. "We always celebrate people's birthdays with chow mein for health and long life." She was referring to life back home in Taiwan.
"Longevity..." I sighed. "Good health... why didn't that shit work?"
"Don't ask me," my mom laughed in an exchange of dark humor that's developed between us since I came home at 36 with a mysterious, chronic disease brought on by catching Covid. A disease that has me mostly bedridden and thinking, trying to make sense of the life I lived before this, the life I live now, and the life I may live in the future. They think that maybe the virus was able to get so entrenched in my body because of a compromised gastrointestinal system.
I think of all the food I've eaten all over the world in my time as a university student, grad student, adventurer, anthropologist, and polyglot: The decadent food. The elaborate food. The simple food. The nostalgic food. The new-to-me food. The poisonous food.
Yes, much food has been enjoyed and appreciated in many corners of the world. And so while I could blame all those adventures for the deterioration of my GI system, thereby causing me the incredibly complicated case of Covid I developed and more than a lifetime's worth of suffering, I choose to be glad and grateful for my global culinary explorations.
But it all started at home. With things like chow mein and birthday parties in the American Midwest in the '80s.
I have a suspicion that health and long life wasn't the only reason my mom made chow mein for me and my friends on these occasions. It was also because chow mein was so palatable to the white American. My mom may have been foreign and therefore judged by the Nebraskan ignoramuses that abounded, but in many ways she was smarter than pretty much everyone else there.
Chow mein was her soft power, like Hollywood traditionally lured in cultural admiration for America; baguettes and berets made Francophiles; and Hello Kitty, anime, and Nintendo made Japanophiles.
By slipping it in the mix, Mom effectively got me in with the popular kids at school without me having to do much. She cared little for popularity but knew the importance of having neighbors and friends in foreign territory.
"Oh my God. This is the best food I've ever eaten in my life," my American friends would declare upon first bite of birthday chow mein, their homes stocked to the nines with Doritos, Tostitos, Teddy Grahams, Cokes, and Mountain Dews. The diet of American champions.
The fun didn't stop at chow mein though. Mom also turned our backyard into the perfect relay race course, sticking posts in the green grass for us to round with our wooden relay sticks or our hard-boiled eggs in spoons.
In those moments, the backyard was filled with the sounds of children's laughter and screams of delight, excitement, and encouragement for each other. It was a snapshot of the quintessential American dream, something my mom actively sought and achieved.
To be honest, Mom's life was originally a lot cooler than the American dream. She was a literal rock star, along with her three sisters in Taiwan, who together made up the band, the Tsai Sisters. Mom played the bass; Aunt Lucy (like a second mother to me and my current guardian ancestor) played the drums; Aunt Mitzua (former child arm-wrestling champion, a black belt in karate, and an overall small town New Mexican thug) played the lead guitar; and Aunt Mieko (a world-class yodeler, beauty and fashion diva turned Las Vegas poker dealer and property investor extraordinaire) was the lead singer who'd mix in the steel guitar or ukulele based on location and audience. Their musical success in Taiwan led them to blossom beyond the island, traveling and performing their way through Okinawa, Kenya, Nigeria, Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, Mexico, and the U.S., starting in New York City, moving through just about every supper club in every random city you could imagine like Omaha (where I was born), eventually hitting all five Hawaiian islands and Alaska. Because of multiple ties to Omaha (Dad was the nightclub manager in Omaha where they performed and Uncle Rick was the keyboardist from Omaha who married Aunt Lucy), that's where Mom and Aunt Lucy settled with the words of my grandfather, "Leave Taiwan. Settle in America," reverberating in their minds.
It always fascinates me how readily my mom was able to transform herself into your rather typical, suburban-dwelling, American housewife and mother. Complete with a success perm, a big house, a vegetable garden, a Ford Aerostar minivan, and a rigorous sports and academic schedule for me and my brother (that when compared to other Asian immigrant parents' schedules for their kids actually wasn't rigorous at all), we were doing the damn American dream.
So when it came to birthday party time, backyard relay races happened... as did a piñata. Hung on the same bamboo pole my mom hung her banana leaf-wrapped zongzi on. Tootsie Rolls and Starbursts and Hershey's bursting out on one blindfolded kid's perfect CRUNCH of the papier mâché. The children would dive forward seeing just how much candy they could hoard.
Meanwhile, Mom did nothing to make sure the spoils were evenly distributed. She just laughed and went back to her food buffet inside as we sorted through our takeaways. A good lesson in survival of the fittest.
A couple of years ago, at age 35 going on 36, I had another birthday party, this time my mom flying out from Vegas to Long Beach to attend and of course, to cook for. The adult birthday party version.
On arrival, I drove her down to Irvine's Din Tai Fung, where we got our fill of soup dumplings. An experience that can be put on repeat over and over and over again and never disappoint. Next, we headed to a giant 168 Chinese market where I got lost in the full array of herbs in the Chinese pharmacy.
Catching up with Mom some time later, she'd already loaded her cart up with mooncakes and rice noodles, as well as ingredients for dumplings and egg rolls. Classic. The egg roll was another Midwestern favorite. Of course.
Passing by the pig's feet and pig ears, I begged her to buy them and finally, here and now in a globalized California in 2019, to make something more authentic to our culture.
"Please, will you make pig's feet, Mom?"
"No, nobody wants to eat."
"Oh, but they do, Mom. They'll like it!"
THEY, of course, were my friends who were all either Taiwanese American, Chinese American, Sinophiles who had lived in the East Asian region for years, or global cosmopolitans from Iraq, Sri Lanka, or Long Beach, with ethnic roots that made them open to the good shit.
A lot had changed since I was a kid. I was in California now, not Nebraska, and at the same time, foods once considered to be too Chinesey and exotic had become en vogue due to the likes of Bon Appétit Magazine, Sunset Magazine, and the ubiquitous YouTube content creators from ASMR dumpling mukbang-makers to Fresh Off the Boat's Eddie Huang eating his way through China and Taiwan. In particular, soup dumplings had become everything it seemed. Showing the prowess to know how to eat or "be able to eat" our food meant one had cultural capital. Put simply, white people were all about our food now and random Lisas were doing instructional online videos on how to make soup dumplings, because knowing how to make, not just eat, gave one even more cultural capital. This weirded me the fuck out. And yet it was predictable.
I wondered to myself if the Midwest was still kinda stuck on the chow mein and egg rolls though, even in 2019. If we still lived there, would we still have to bust that out for our neighbors and friends to accept us? Or would they wanna take us out for soup dumplings now?
Whatever the case, here and now, I, too, eat the chow mein... the long life noodles... the extension of my mother's heart.