It was a week into my great American solo road trip, and just like a pregnant woman in her third trimester, I was nursing a colossal craving. It was so dire that I felt ready to kill if I had to, just to get my hands on a bowl of noodles or a plate of fried rice. It didn’t have to taste good or look right. Hell, it could even have been left overnight to marinate in a bucket of MSG1 and fried with a fistful of salt (which, I suspect, is how most Chinese restaurants in the US cook their dishes). I just wanted Chinese food. I was so desperate that I would even have settled for any dish on the menu of P. F. Chang’s, a chain of pseudo ‘fusion’ Chinese restaurants that has sold its soul to western taste buds. I wanted Chinese food, and I wanted it bad.
Over the past week, I had burnt countless miles and rubber on my rented Ford, all the way from Los Angeles International Airport to Las Vegas through Zion, Bryce, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and past the great American Southwest cowboy icon, the buttes of Monument Valley. I had just crossed the border from Utah into Arizona and was taking a breather in a little town called Page. Aside from the Vatican City, this is probably the holiest Christian site on the planet. I counted 11 Christian churches of various denominations, from Catholic to Seventh Day Adventists, lined up side by side like a theological buffet and leaving worshippers no excuse to miss their Sunday obligations.
However, this was a pilgrimage of a different sort for me. I had come to explore Antelope Canyon, a slot canyon with alternating bands of orange-hued rocks, exquisitely cut by the cultured hands of an extinct river that once ran through it. It is blessed with beams of piercing light shafts between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon, as the earth makes its giddy rotation around the sun. Antelope Canyon has always been a mecca for serious photographers, and so mesmerised was I on my first visit that I had to come again. So here I was, determined to take even better pictures than the ones from two years ago.
All visitors to the canyon usually have to sign up for a tour with several companies located in Page. Most of these tours are catered to the needs of photographers, from special photo tours timed to capture the shafts of light, to the rental of tripods, without which, photos taken within the canyon would be a complete waste of flash memory or film given the unique lighting conditions.
I hit it off with a Taiwanese guy in my tour group, a solo traveller like me, and we decided to meet up later that evening at the Mandarin Gourmet, one of Page’s two Chinese restaurants, to exchange notes on our travels within the region. Up till now, I had survived on a diet of the four basic food groups in America — McDonald’s, Burger King, Carl’s Junior and Wendy’s. But there was only so much beef and potato my stomach could take before it staged a revolution.
Unfortunately, the Mandarin Gourmet was closed when I arrived and we had made no contingency plans to meet elsewhere. In fact, the entire row of shops on that block was closed and I didn’t want to linger around the dimly-lit carpark for too long. I headed over to the other Chinese restaurant after 15 minutes, thinking that perhaps he had gone there instead. As luck would have it, I was greeted by the sight of an empty unit where the diner once existed. Having had enough Happy Meals™ on this trip to send me to a mental institution, I tried my luck at a Mexican restaurant instead.
That night, my deprivation manifested itself in my dreams. I dreamt I was in an old dim sum restaurant, the kind with round marble top tables and wooden chairs packed tightly together. The walls bore hints of peeling paint, and white-haired ladies were pushing silver trolleys laden with tall stacks of little round wooden steamers. They moved amidst clouds of steam and frenzied diners, who were pushing their way through the maze of chairs and tables to get to the food. I joined in the hunt, but became increasingly desperate as the stacks quickly whittled down until there were hardly any left. And just as I forced my way into the inner circle surrounding one of the ladies, she cried out loudly in Cantonese, “Mou le (no more)!!” Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night.
I began my drive back to Las Vegas in the morning. Breakfast had been dismal — bread that could have been used to stone sinners (or people who didn‘t go to any of the churches on Sunday) and coffee that was probably made from the dredged mud of Lake Powell. My route took me through Zion National Park and St George, where I had hoped that some enterprising Chinese fellow had set up a restaurant. Alas, I had no such luck.
By the time I reached the gambling capital of the world, the sun had disappeared from the horizon. It was close to 10pm and I was exhausted. Dinner had been another drive-through burger-and-fries affair in the car. Despite the exhaustion, I still managed to drag myself to the Bellagio with my trusty travelling companions — my camera and tripod. Here, after long hours of lonely travel along desert routes, I pretended to be in the company of celebrities as Frank Sinatra took to the stage, supported by the dancing jets of the Bellagio. It was as if Frank was still very much alive and there in person, his unmistakable voice reverberating and lifting everyone in the vicinity to aural nirvana.
I woke up just in time for lunch the next day, feeling refreshed after about ten hours of deep slumber, but with my unsatisfied craving still haunting my belly. I sprinted down the Las Vegas Strip, ducking into Aladdin, Paris, the Bellagio and Caesars Palace in search of fulfilment, but just couldn’t find any Chinese restaurants. Instead, most of the offerings were all-you-can-eat buffets cooked by chefs on minimum wage and extended shifts. As I walked along dejectedly, I passed yet another Chinese restaurant that appeared to have closed down.
I’ve always been a regular subject of Murphy’s Law but this was getting ridiculous. Why had all the Chinese chefs disappeared? Had they all been abducted by aliens? Or were they being hunted down for swaying American taste buds and threatening the livelihoods of burger joints?
After wandering in and out of at least five casinos and turning away disappointed and increasingly hungry, I finally arrived at the Imperial Palace casino, the last bastion of hope in a sea of bad calories. After all, there had to be Chinese food in an Imperial Palace, right? So straight to the directory I went: Betty’s Diner, Burger Palace, Pizza Palace, Quesadilla and… voila, the Emperor’s Buffet! Surely there would be Chinese in an emperor’s buffet! I sprinted to the restaurant, excited about finally satisfying the week-long craving for something tasty and familiar, something that would transport me home as I devoured fried rice, stir fried chicken, vegetables in oyster sauce, and other generic Chinese fare…
Yet, waiting for me at the buffet spread was none of the above, but the mother of all anticlimaxes. I had paid for my buffet before inspecting the spread and walked in confidently, only to be let down yet again by food fit only for a desperate late-night microwave meal to overcome gastric pangs. The spread was small, the food inedible, and worst of all, there was no fried rice! The emperor was most displeased!
Five hours later, I turned up at the doorstep of my good friend’s home in Hawthorne. I fell down on my knees, grabbed her hand and begged her amidst a torrent of tears to bring me to a Chinese restaurant. Well, it didn’t happen quite so literally but she got the message and an hour later, I was sitting down with her and her husband in a cosy corner of a nearby Malaysian restaurant, waiting impatiently for my nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice) to arrive.
If there’s a moral to this story, it is this — never forget to pack your instant noodles for a roadtrip!
1 Monosodium glutamate, a common food additive and flavour enhancer