by Eddie Huang
—
She greeted Evan and me with my least favorite question.
“So, you like the hip-hop?”
“Yeah, I listen to hip-hop.”
“Cool. Me, too. Hakka Bar play hip-hop.”
“Word.”
“I see your show. I think many people watch your show. My friend from Thailand is chef, he watch your show, too.”
“That’s cool!”
“I can’t wait to try your food. I hear from Vice people you are great chef.”
“I’m OK. I’m known for making sandwiches.”
“Oh, I love sandwiches. What sandwich do you want to make?”
“I don’t want to make sandwiches here. I want to cook things I eat at home and see what people think.”
“Just home food?”
“Yeah, red-cooked pork, bitter melon, seaweed, tea eggs, homestyle food.”
“Ahhh…why?”
“I’m just curious if people will like my food. I’m Chinese, but I grew up in America. What if I’m a fraud? Or maybe I’m not? I just always wanted to know what would be if I was born in China.” I felt flop sweat forming on my forehead.
“Just make it spicy. People in Chengdu like spicy.”
When people speak about regional palates, they always make it sound that simple. Every cuisine has a few go-to moves when you wanna preach to the choir. Paris’ll put you to bed with butter and burgundy; Houston’ll drip it up in au jus and drape it out with horseradish;*2 and Chengdu’ll set your mouth on fire, then extinguish it with Newport guts.*3 And it’s true, when you’re lazy on a Sunday afternoon playing the matinee home game, you might roast a chicken on cruise control and hit it with regional bottled sauce, but this was my first time in Chengdu, and I wasn’t about to half-step and burn their palates before I understood them.
Upstairs from Hakka Homes, Heather ran two more spots: the Hakka Bar and the Living Room at the top of the Super 8. It was one of the main reasons Evan chose to stay at Hakka Homes. He had worked out an arrangement with Hakka Heather where we could cook at Hakka Bar on Friday nights and serve locals. The kitchen at Hakka Bar consisted of a sink, a cupboard, a fridge, and one jet burner. In every Chengdu home I visited, there was one very powerful burner that could power a wok. If you put a skillet over it, the flame would pour over the sides and roast your handle. It was great for woks, bringing water to a boil, and freebasing.
At the Living Room, Hakka Heather served “Italian” food cooked by an Irish guy who was dating one of her friends.
“You like Italian food?” she asked me.
“Yeah, my dad had an Italian restaurant and my girl is Italian.”
“Ohhh, you should cook Italian!”
“I’m down to cook Italian, but I really want to cook Chinese and see what the locals think.”
“No, no, no, locals will like your Italian! Authentic!”
“I mean, I know a few dishes, but I’m not an expert on Italian food. I’d rather cook Chinese.”
“But we rather eat Italian! We have so much Chinese. Italian is so cool!”
“I want to know what Chinese people think about my Chinese food, not my meatballs.”
“But you know the Italian! We rarely see Italians.”
“You know I’m not Italian, right? I am Taiwanese-Chinese from America.”
She looked at me quizzically. As if I just blew open her universe.
“But Americans make Italian food, no?”
“Yeah, we have a bastardized red-sauce version of Italian food and identity proliferated by Republicans from Staten Island, New Jersey, and parts of Pennsylvania, who would still love to call black people mulignans but have been told not to.”
“But one day, you make this Italian?”
“Maybe.”
She was disappointed with me. Being the flirty, bohemian Hakka representer she was, I’m sure she met a lot of foreigners who were quick to act the part and satisfy her curiosity. I didn’t blame her. The eagerness to understand identity in listicles and soundbites wasn’t specific to Hakka Heather; she couldn’t be the only one reading Buzzfeed, right?
But I decided to hold back and resist her invitation to speak in broad strokes about American demographics. Usually, I enjoyed exporting my gross caricatures of American whiteness for comedy, but a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous…especially in eager hands, without a radar for sarcasm, like Hakka Heather’s. While Evan just feigned ignorance of the things Hakka Heather asked about, I just kept asking “Why?”
Why do you like Italian? Why do you like America? Why are you sick of China? And then we started to get somewhere. I looked around—despite her anywhere-but-here approach to Chengdu, Hakka Heather was too impressive to dismiss. Still in her late twenties,*4 Heather had a one-floor boutique hotel brand, a hip-hop bar, and an Italian restaurant. She’d done well for herself and clearly understood her habitat. I wanted to know how she did it.
“Yo, Heather, how’d you get into this business?”
“When I young, I party. I meet people. I start business.”
Veni, vidi, vici.
“So you partied, you met people, and you opened up a hotel within a hotel?”
“Yeah, then I open bar and restaurant.”
Anticipating my skepticism, Evan jumped in: “Dude, Heather knows everyone. I came to Hakka Bar one night, you could buy anything: hats, bootleg Pyrex, weed, hash, tickets to a party at Jellyfish. Everyone meets here at night.”
“You party, you meet people, you open business. You don’t open business, you lose.”
“You ain’t lie.”
“No, I don’t lie. I tell you truth in China. YOU MUST DO THE BUSINESS! My parents lose their business, then they lose their home, then the government move them to new area. Many Chinese, the government want their property, they take it, then move them. Life not fair. Also, I own business, I wake up when I want to wake up. I sleep when I want to sleep. I party when I party and make money when I party. YOU MUST DO THE BUSINESS IN CHINA.”
I let it soak in. It was one of the most frantic yet clear-eyed pleas for kill-or-be-killed commerce in China I’d ever heard. Not only that, it was generous—anytime someone speaks the truth when they could’ve just deflected, it’s a gift. Hakka Heather gave me one and then offered up another.
“So you want to try real Chengdu food?”
“Yeah, what’s good?”
“My brother has a restaurant that’s very good. You can learn from him.”
“What’s the spot called?”
“Wei Ji Rou.”
“Cool, what kind of food?”
“Wei ji rou.”
No hesitation, no apologies, your mans does one thing: spicy cold chicken.
Hakka Heather, Evan, and myself got in a cab and rode toward her brother’s spot.
“Yo. Heather, why’s the internet so slow at Hakka Homes?”
“Not Hakka, internet slow everywhere in China.”
“Well, I know it’s blocked, but it’s slow even on unblocked sites.”
“Yes, I know. Slow on purpose. China doesn’t want us use internet.”
“Stop playin’.”
“Yeah, Ed,” Evan interjected. “I talked to the Beijing Vice dudes, they said it takes a full day to upload a five-minute video.”
“China keep us blocked out. We can’t see anything without VPN.”
“What’s VPN?”
“VPN give you IP address in different country so you can see the internet.”
“I mean, you can see the internet, it’s just slow.”
“No, with VPN you can read New York Times, Google, Twitter, Facebook. We can’t even Facebook in China!”
“Trust, it’s better without Facebook.”
“Easy for you to say, you already had it.”*5
We drove another ten minutes, construction sites everywhere we went. China was disappearing by the second. Scooters weaved around the trucks and construction barriers, out of the past and into the present. Some scooters had ha
lf a hog on the back; another with whole chickens laid across the rear hopped a curb to make an illegal left turn.
It started to rain. At a stoplight, I saw a guy with a wheelbarrow full of wood put plastic bags on his feet, then buck across the street. There was no mercy. As soon as the light turned green, wheelbarrow man didn’t trip, he knew what time it was. All is fair on a Chinese six-lane thruway.
“Damn, that dude almost got hit.”
“Chengdu too fast now.”
“People can stop, though.”
“Selfish. Everybody think somebody else will stop, so they keep going.”
“That don’t make sense. It only works if everybody stops.”
“Yeah, well, I stop but nobody else stop, still no use.”
We finally got to the restaurant. It was in a nice part of Chengdu, once we got off the thruway. There was a sidewalk, preppy Chinese women in tennis skirts, dudes on beach cruisers, and a G-Wagon in the parking lot. Inside the restaurant, there were a few large parties.
I couldn’t tell who had the G-Wagon. It’s a fun game to play in China. Whose G-Wagon is it anyway? You can never tell who’s the real stunna in China. First of all, there’s a lot that’s counterfeit. Some people are also hood rich. But people who really got dough may come through with a visor, shorts, tank top, and dress shoes, then drive home in a G-Wagon. Chinese people just don’t care. I’d see what I thought was a lunch lady roll through with a Chloé bag, order three dishes, and return two ’cause they were cold.
On a table catty-corner to us, I saw the spicy cold chicken. I hit the punching bag in my mind, it smelled so good.
“That is wei ji rou.”
It was a real humble-looking dish to the virgin eye, just hacked-up bits of brown bone-in chicken.
“Wei ji rou look simple, but very special. My brother ate this dish at restaurant once, then beg the chef to teach him for long time. He buy the recipe and practice, make his own change, then open wei ji rou restaurant.”
I checked the dish on other people’s plates and noticed the caramel color, the bouncy skin, the sharp edges on every cut. Each piece looked like chicken sushi, little Lego bits of brown chicken with the bone hanging by a thread. Finally, our wei ji rou arrived. It was spicy, it was tingly, it was grounded by the leeks, but listen….I know you ninjas fuck with cold pizza so peep game. There is a particular sweetness that comes from the essence of cold poultry captured and frozen in time. Serving chicken cold isn’t some lazy, check-what-I-made-last-night shit. There are certain dishes that channel the properties of a cold bird and capture a sweetness that echoes in your mouth, like you are chomping on cold chicken chewing gum with Sichuan peppercorns. Yes, that sounds fucking disgusting, but if Altoids dropped Spicy Cold Chicken Mints, you could open a tin over John Doe’s face and give a cadaver a boner, that’s how good the shit was. And that’s why distilling a regional palate to modifiers like “it’s spicy” doesn’t work; it’s deeper than that.
Everything else at his restaurant was hot trash. Literally, steaming hot trash. They brought out a plate of steamed green beans and squash with chili sauce to dip it in. Illest Chinese Struggle Plate I’d ever seen. Limp green beans and squash sentenced to death in mediocre chili sauce. But unless you’re a Yelper, it really doesn’t matter if they have ninety-nine problematic dishes, it’s a Sam Perkins*6 restaurant.
I sat there and marinated on the wei ji rou. I laughed to myself ’cause I used to hate these brown chicken dishes, where you spent most of your time gnawing on bones. It was my grandma’s Dong’an ji, a classic Hunanese dish, that schooled me on the genre. Grandma Huang stayed with us in Orlando for a while, and every few weeks she’d buy some dark meat, chop it up, stir-fry it with chilis, garlic, wood ear fungus, bamboo, green onions, dark soy, and wine and fuck the spot up. I remember it stunk so bad my brand-new Penny Air Ups smelled like Dong’an chicken after she made it. And for what? I looked at this bowl of jagged chicken bones with small pieces of brown meat and wood ear fungus popping up like hemorrhoids. Twelve-year-old Eddie hated Dong’an chicken.
“Mom, these bones in the chicken just make me feel poor!”
“What? Bone-in chicken make you feel good! Nutrition in the bones.”
“Nutrition in the bones. Nutrition in the skin. Nutrition in the cartilage. I feel poor from all this nutrition.”
“Where you think chicken meat comes from? The bone! You want to pay more money so somebody hide the bone from you?”
“Yeah, I don’t want to see it! I don’t want the blood from the bone, I don’t want to spit the bits out, why can’t you just buy tenders?”
“HUANG SHOO SIN! NI ZU GHU ER ZHI FA FONG LU!”*7
Pops ran downstairs like someone broke in the crib.
“What happened? What’s going on?”
“Your son too good for the chicken bones now! He want chicken tenders!”
“Chicken tenders twenty-three cents more per pound than bone-in breast and sixty-nine more than boneless skinless thighs and a dollar seven more than chicken quarters! Chicken tender is like Hennessy X.O.”
“You think we have money for Hennessy X.O.?”
“Dad just bought a Dodge Stealth! Why can’t we eat chicken tenders?”
“Dodge Stealth! Dodge Stealth? My Dodge Stealth cheaper than Mitsubishi 3000 GT! That is VALUE sportscar.”
“There is no such thing value sportscar! You buy that car so we can’t ride with you!” screamed my mom.
“Don’t make me look like bad guy. That car fits four people!”
“Yeah, and you have five people in your family, plus your mom: six! And that seat so small, you couldn’t fit four Fukienese people!”
Fukienese people being known for packing dragon boats into New York.
“Look what you did! Now your mother going to yell at me all week because you stupid ass want Dong’an chicken tenders!”
“No such thing Dong’an chicken tender! You want Dong’an chicken tender, better wait till McDonald’s figure out Hunan food!”
“Ha ha, yeah, fat-ass Eddie go to McDonald’s for Dong’an chicken tender….Hi, I’m Eddie Huuuuuang. My fat ass wants Dong’an chicken tenders with sweet and sour sauce please.”
My pops loved imitating me, but I deserved it. I wanted chicken tenders because they were convenient, they were clean, they weren’t challenging. Dong’an chicken was fiery, complex, flavorful, and inconvenient. Your breath stank, your hands got dirty, and you had the illest spicy farts when you played Mortal Kombat later that night. When I had Dong’an chicken every other week, I couldn’t run from it fast enough. But then Grandma left. I remember my mom trying to make Dong’an chicken.
“Ay-yah! Ni yoh jah lu chu!”*8
“Dong’an chicken too straightforward without vinegar, just dry heat and bamboo!”
“That is Hunan food: dry, sharp, heat! You made this chicken ceviche!”*9
“I like vinegar! Spicy needs sugar and vinegar. You don’t know food.”
“What are you talking about, I don’t know food? My restaurants pay for this food!”
“Grandma’s is better, Mom. Stop adding vinegar to everything.”
“Xiao Tsen, ni biao tsa jwa!”*10
Once I got my driver’s license, I got to eat all the chicken tenders I could stand. Barbecue, sweet ’n’ sour, Polynesian, honey mustard, Tabasco ketchup, etc. I’d tried pretty much every chicken tender, and they were all the fucking same. Most of the time dry, sometimes tender, but even then flavorless. The same went for pork loin. I’d buy chicken tenders to cook myself, trying to replicate my grandma’s Dong’an chicken ’cause I couldn’t stand all the vinegar in my mom’s food.
“Ha ha, look at Eddie making Dong’an chicken tenders!”
“Oh, we got a McDonald’s in this house now? Let me try!”
“Shut up, Dad! You can only make one dish.”
“Two dish! Fried rice AND Taiwanese mei fun.”
“And leftover paradise!”*11 said Emery.
“Oh, shut
up, leftover paradise is just for survival when your mom is gone.”
I took a bite of the Dong’an chicken tenders still in the wok.
“How is it?” asked Emery.
“Go away!”
“Don’t be a dickhead, dude. I’ll fuck you up!” threatened Emery.
I felt bad. Emery was just being curious, but I was embarrassed. The Dong’an chicken tenders were so stupid. It came out looking like something meant for a Panda Express steam table. Beautiful, glistening pieces of genetically engineered chicken breast surrounded by brown sauce and oriental vegetables. Sure, it was the portrait of convenience and refinement, but without the bones, the sauce had no depth. The wood ear fungus and bamboo were lonely without the chicken bones and skin that usually came with Hunanese brown chicken hemorrhoid stir-fry. There’s nothing I could add to re-create or mimic the essence of chicken bones. I had to lose it to love it. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.
“Heather, why are all the pieces of meat so small in China?”
“You think it is small?”
“Yeah, I mean, this whole dish of wei ji rou is probably less than one chicken quarter cut up into ten really small pieces.”
“I don’t know. This is just what we eat.”
“I like it a lot, but it’d be better if the pieces of meat were bigger.”
“Hmmm, I don’t know. It’s flavorful this way. Small piece, lot of bone, you suck the bone.”
“I guess, but I’d rather just have more meat.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Oh no, I’m full.”
“Then why you keep complain?”
She was right.
“You think if you didn’t grow up eating wei ji rou like this, you would like it?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. This is just how it is, but that’s why I travel a lot. I have many different friends. American friends, Europe friends, Thailand friends, they show me things. Only way to see world is to get out.”
