Category: Queens

Asian Pacific Heritage + Mother’s Day

Saturday: worked a table at the CAPA Festival, held at the UN instead of Union Square because of construction. Attendence not quite as good as it usually is at Union Square, but the site is a lot better for the people there. First – actual trees that provide shade. Second, the Japan Society is across the street, and they have Toto Washlets – WOW, I really miss those restrooms in Tokyo. The current Shibata Zeshin exhibit is a tour de force in lacquer works – the lost art of painting with lacquer is something spectacular.

Dinner in Flushing for P-‘s mom at the Full House Seafood Restaurant – a whole steamed fish and calamari were spectacular, the chicken and beef dishes kind of ok. The thing to get that we missed out on was the steamed seafood casseroles.

Sunday: Studio photos with my mom courtesy of Microsoft, followed by lunch-dinner at Teresa’s Polish Restaurant, and then a hairstyling makeover for my mom with my hairstylist.  All worked out real well.

Chinese Restaurant Chronicles

This past weekend, in between interleaving celebrations of P’s sister’s 30th birthday (she had 3 parties), we checked out the wedding banquet hall. We had the three set menus for the banquet to choose from, which turned out to be the ultimate in Chinese “special menus”. We had a hard time figuring out what they said, because they were 1. written in Chinese (one of those times I wished I actually went to Chinese Saturday school), 2. written in Running Script style (which P’s parents had a hard time reading – think super-wild calligraphy), and 3. written in super-flowery language that only Chinese culinary veterans could know (and P’s dad, as an retired Chinese chef, had a hard time explaining some of them).

After polling our friends, our best resource was my best man’s wife, who is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, and managed to type out everything into Microsoft Word. That was a God-send, as I could then just pump up the fonts and produce a Reader’s Digest large-type version. For kicks I also ran it through Babelfish and Google Translate to get independent rough translations. Some of these translations literally converted the flowery language, resulting in 幸福炒飯 “Two Silvers Fried Rice” (no silver is involved), and the 雙喜伊麵 “North Mushroom Burning of Iraq” (sic) which actually means something like Beijing-style mushroom noodles.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

At the time we were struggling through these choices, P bought for me Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which is a bittersweet look at the world of Chinese food and its place in Chinese-American identity.

She covers definitively the sources of fortune cookies (not from China), the soy sauce packet (more often than not has 0% soybeans), chop suey (fresh leftovers – that’s what for dinner!), and the take-out container (something recycled from the turn of the last century). General Tso – the man, the myth, the legend of General Tso’s Chicken fame: Lee goes to his ancestral town to learn the truth.

She somehow figures out a way to expense both around-the-world trips to find the best Chinese restaurant (perhaps she can hook up with Cheuk Kwan’s Chinese Restaurants series), and a search through the American Midwest to find Powerball lottery winners that used fortune cookies for their numbers. She is able to connect with those who take the idea of takeout and literally run with it, and those that are not as lucky and run into hard times in the middle of Nowhere, U.S.A.

My biased rule of thumb for determining how thorough a book on Chinese or Chinese American history has been researched is to see whether there is any mention of Hakka Chinese. (I am Hakka, so that is why it draws my attention.) She succeeds in making two mentions, and then has coverage of the Taiping Rebellion, which the aforesaid General Tso brutally put down the Hakka-led revolt. That won’t stop me from ordering his namesake dish, a totally American invention which Lee suggests is the inspiration for the Chicken McNugget.

The book makes for an engaging evening read, all the more amplified by the author’s effervescent appearance on the Colbert Report, which happened to be playing in my living room at the time. Great books are those that you feel that you are having an involving conversation; this was a great one to have with Lee and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Recommended.

Sunday

I don’t spend any amount of time in K-Town or Flushing, but I found this article really interesting. Or am I silly for thinking the Times may educate me on Korean-American culture in NYC?

I had a hoot reading this article: NY Times’ Sarah Lyall on Patrick Stewart, as he’s about to do MacBeth in NYC! He’s returning to his beloved Shakespeare, but has a warm spot in his heart for Capt. Picard and the Star Trek universe. Aww!

Also, I loved that the article included the photo of Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard from “Star Trek: First Contact,” in his Action Hero Mode – where you could tell he worked out to make sure we can appreciate Picard as not just a cerebral sort. Don’t forget – Stewart’s only two years older than Harrison Ford, who was still beating people up as an active US President in “Air Force One,” a year after Stewart in “First Contact” (umm, yeah, checked on imdb.com for that bit of trivia).

Plus, great slide show on Patrick Stewart’s theatrical roles.

Sarah Lyall also reports on What Does It Mean to Be British, as the Brits debate on whether to adopt a national motto and trying to figure out what they are and where do they fit in today’s world. It does take a bit of a debate to wonder what does it mean to be a nation at all these days, when there’s now a Scottish Parliament and the idea of a “Britain” was something that evolved during the course of history (I had taken this British history class back in college; yeah, apparently, things got way complicated, umm, pardon about being flippant there, but a serious analysis could take more than a semester).

NY Times’ Bill Carter writes on whether the writers’ strike will change the way tv series are made – will there be an end to presenting over-done pilots and may The Powers That Be allow series to develop and evolve in a coherent manner? Maybe the strike will give shows like “Dirty Sexy Money” and “Life” a real chance, since their 1st seasons were pretty much pushed to hiatus like this and they were on the ratings bubble (i.e., the edge of being renewed or canceled). Who knows?

Then again, the last serious writers’ strike resulted in some weird episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (written and filmed in a rush because they knew the then-writers’ strike was coming) and the time after the strike led to some of the best episodes – particularly the third and fourth seasons, where the characters evolved and, of course, where Captain Picard was assimilated into Borg and evolved into truly Awesome (or close to it anyway; he became nuts and Action Hero-y Awesome in the big screen movie “Star Trek: First Contact” – as I noted above).

Can’t believe that “Rent” will really close this summer. (great slide show on the Times, by the way).


Time’s Lev Grossman posts on the Time blog, “Nerd World” on the trailer and teaser trailer of the upcoming “Get Smart” movie (starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway as Agents 86 and 99). Oh, dear – the trailers were funny to me. I laughed out loud. I hope this means the movie’s good and that they didn’t just use the movie’s best moments for trailers. I might even watch it when it comes out this summer. Might!