You boys must have some very bizarre and mixed-up food memories,” my mother said to me once as we looked through the old family photo albums together. My mother was an observer by nature, a collector of sensations and images and fleeting moments that struck her as true or beautiful in her Proustian way as she traveled through life, and I’m probably the most Proustian of her large, Rabelaisian sons. We are the worriers of the family, and we often like to watch the world at a critical distance, or at least from a safe remove, standing toward the side of the room. My mother kept a series of journals during her exotic overseas travels with my father, and, for a time, when I was trying to duplicate this kind of life, so did I. Our pinched handwriting style, experts will tell you, is a sign of introversion, although her tiny, neatly ordered characters were always much more legible than mine. She was shy as a child growing up, and so was I. My father and brothers have busy, restless temperaments, but for whatever reason, my mother and I can spend long stretches of time sitting in one place, watching the clouds change shape in the sky. Toward the end of her life, she had arthritis in all of her joints and problems with her circulation, first in her legs and hands, and finally in her heart. She took what she liked to call her “puffs” of powerful chemical-laced medicine several times a day from an inhaler contraption that sat by her bedside. After a lifetime of travel, she and my father rarely went on their excursions anymore to Shanghai, or to Tehran to tour the great mosques, or to Cambodia to cruise the Mekong River and view the temples at Angkor Wat. On summer weekends, and even in the winters when the weather was clear, they would drive together across the Hudson to their small house by a green marsh next to the river, where she liked to sit out on the porch overlooking the water, there where the river narrows and bends southward past the city and out to the sea, and watch the flocks of birds come and go across the sky on their long migrations up and down the coast.
My mother began putting together photo albums of our family travels shortly before we moved to Asia in the early 1960s, when my father was sent to Taiwan as a young diplomat to study Mandarin. She compiled them in her deliberate fashion as we moved over the years from Canada to Hong Kong and back to Washington, DC, to Beijing and Tokyo, to southern Africa and Manila, and to Islamabad, Pakistan, where we all flew in one Christmas and drove up to the Khyber Pass to snap photos of the border guards dressed in their plumed hats left over from the British Raj and take portraits of the Platts, looking across the border toward the craggy mountains of Afghanistan. In the end, there were eleven volumes in all, lined up side by side on a long shelf in the apartment: a Talmudic record of her family’s exotic wanderings. Over the years the linen covers have grown smooth and faded with age, like worn pieces of coral. The album pages are filled with notations and dates, written out in her small, neat hand, with crinkled pieces of wax paper set between the pages to keep the prints from sticking together. My original birth certificate is pasted in one of the books from the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, with its tattered edges and shadowy gray imprints of two tiny feet. She titled a photograph from the summer of 1960 of the future plump-faced restaurant critic, sitting with his mouth open and both hands on a dining room table, “Adam Anticipating His Lunch.” There are photos of graduations and weddings and misty views of mountain hikes and long-ago picnics in places like the Ming tombs, outside of Beijing, and the Great Wall of China, sites that were mostly deserted ruins in the days when they lived in China. There are fuzzy snapshots of vanished twentieth-century ocean liners and coal-burning steam trains, and many of the kind of artful, atmospheric still-life pictures my mother loved to take—of flower vases, of views from Victorian hotel windows, of the little bowls and trinkets she’d pick up at different markets, many of them patterned in her favorite colors, blue and white.
We’d moved to Asia in the winter of 1962 from Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, where my father got his first government job, at the age of twenty-three, processing visas on the Canadian border. He had joined the Foreign Service with dreams of glamorous postings to the grand embassies of Europe, but after his time on the visa line, he’d changed his mind. China was in the midst of its dark Maoist age, and during the Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn witch hunts of the 1950s, an entire generation of Foreign Service China hands had been purged from the State Department. Unlike in Europe, which was crowded with ambitious young diplomats fluent in German, Russian, and French, there were opportunities in Asia, especially for those who were willing to go through the tortures of learning a language like Chinese, which took two years of training at a special government institute in Taichung, a small city on the eastern coast of the island. The first year of Mandarin study was devoted to learning the intricate spoken tones of the language; during the second year students learned how to read and write Chinese characters. My father liked to say that you didn’t really know a language until you started to dream in it, and by the time they left Taiwan two years later, my parents would both be dreaming in the mellifluous, singsong sounds of Mandarin Chinese.
My mother couldn’t remember how they found the classic Japanese-style house on the outskirts of Taichung. She guessed that it had been built by a Japanese merchant or official when the Japanese occupied the island in the decades leading up to World War II. In many ways, it combined the classic touches of Japanese architecture with the functional style of a well-to-do Chinese family home. A double-door gate out front was painted a bright firehouse red, which is the color of good luck and good fortune in China; it opened onto a classic Mandarin courtyard, surrounded by a series of rickety wooden walls, with living quarters for our cook, Mr. Yu, and his family in the courtyard. The house had two living rooms downstairs, one covered in traditional Japanese tatami matting and the other a Western-style room, which my mother decorated with curving rattan peacock chairs that looked like they’d been lifted from the set of a James Bond swinger spy movie from the 1960s. From the bedrooms upstairs, there were long views toward what my mother described in her letters back home to New York as “the marvelous heap of rumpled blue mountains beyond the town.”
This new world was filled with all sorts of strange wonders. Turning the pages of the family photo albums, you can see the colors of the pictures slowly change from bleak black-and-white shots of snowbound Canadian streetscapes to bright color photographs of gardens and street markets and cloud-shrouded mountains. In our new neighborhood there were pig farms and an eel farm filled with dark green pools of water covered with lily pads, and in the mornings farmers would herd dust-covered water buffalos down the road beyond the house, out into the fields. Every morning my brother Oliver and I were pedaled off to kindergarten at the local Presbyterian church, bouncing out between the rice paddies in the back of a metal pedicab powered by an energetic elderly man on a bicycle. On the weekends, we wobbled on the backs of our parents’ bicycles to the local markets, where we bought bags of steaming pork and scallion dumplings and long stalks of sugarcane, which vendors shaved with long knives or squeezed through a rusty wheeled press to produce little plastic cups filled with sweet sugarcane juice. The markets sold live snakes, which were cooked in medicinal soups, and soupy bowls of breakfast porridge laced with salty eggs or dried fish or little bundles of pork floss, and all sorts of magical tropical fruits we’d never seen before, like long green papayas filled with mysterious-looking pods of black seeds, hairy coconuts, yellow watermelons, and waxy orange-green star fruits, which had the tartness of lemons and the sweet, chewy consistency of summer plums.
In those decades after Mao’s revolution, Taiwan was filled with all kinds of dislocated refugees from the suddenly vanished capitalist economy on the Chinese mainland: limousine drivers, jewelry makers, bankers, butlers, and hundreds of accomplished cooks and restaurateurs who’d been on the wrong side of the war and whose livelihoods had dried up in Chairman Mao’s China. The most famous of these culinary masters was Peng Chang-kuei, who ran the banquets operation for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the capital of Taipei and who would later introduce a grateful New York dining public to the glories of General Tso’s chicken. Even in our little town, you could find accomplished cooks trained in the mysteries of everything from Cantonese dim sum to Imperial dishes from the Emperor’s Court like Peking duck. Our family cook was the gentlemanly and talented Mr. Yu, from Shandong in northern China. In addition to many of the home-style specialties, like lo mein tossed with chicken or shrimp, different kinds of dumplings, and pork dishes stewed, fried, and simmered in endlessly delicious ways, he knew how to prepare comparatively tedious Western classics, like chocolate chip cookies, bacon and eggs for breakfast, and on special occasions carefully layered cakes, which he covered, like a first-class pastry chef, with waves of sugary frosting.
In the old photo albums, there’s a photograph my mother took of Mr. Yu carrying one of his frosted vanilla cakes across the garden on my fifth birthday, and another photo of him standing in front of the painted red gate outside the house one morning with me and my brother, the two of us dressed in white pinafore smocks with little red Chinese characters on them that spelled out the name of our nursery school. Mr. Yu gave us Chinese names—“Big Tiger” (Da Hu) and “Second Tiger” (Ar Hu)—and after school we’d visit him and his wife, Mei, in the kitchen to practice our Mandarin and watch him turn a pile of leftovers (yesterday’s rice, eggs, sweet fatty slivers of “la chang” sausage) into a sizzling meal of fried rice, with what seemed like just a flick of his wrist. We watched him conjure up pancakes from flour and water, dapple them with green onion tops from the market, and fry them in the wok for savory after-school snacks. With my mother, he taught us how to make pork dumplings by combining pork with vinegar, scallions, and soy, depositing spoonfuls of the mixture on carefully rolled-out dumpling wrappers, wetting the round edges, and then folding them in a half-moon shape and crinkling the edges together like the ridge of a seashell. We watched Mr. Yu shape large “Lion’s Head” meatballs out of ground pork, plenty of Shaoxing wine, and a mash of onions and ginger. We watched him roll little cigar-sized spring rolls, stuffed with bean sprouts and shreds of chicken, that tasted as different from your standard American-style carryout egg roll as a delicate cheese blini does from the heavy, leaden microwave burritos we’d buy later at the grocery store chains back home.
In Canada and the United States, we’d subsisted on the grimly forgettable casserole and lunchmeat delicacies of postwar America, but in Taiwan my brother and I grew fat on Mr. Yu’s magical cooking and ate, in retrospect, like two portly little food critics. Instead of gobbling breakfast cereals in the morning, we took to commenting on the quality of our morning noodles, and we took trips to the market, where we consumed golden, crunchy cruller-like strips of fried dough called youtiao for breakfast, sometimes dipped in cups of soy milk, or wrapped in strips of flat, white rice noodles, or eaten by themselves in twirling cones of newspaper. Instead of bacon and breakfast sausages, I became obsessed with eggs: chicken eggs brought in fresh from the farms around the house; large, salty duck eggs with their vivid orange yolks; and the darkly mysterious Thousand-Year Eggs. Buried for weeks in a mixture of salt, hulled rice, quicklime, and soy, these eggs, with their slightly seductive suggestion of danger (yes, quicklime is not good for you) and translucent, darkly jellied texture, were a fine introduction for a hungry and impressionable four-year-old boy to the mysterious, rewarding, lifelong pleasures of adventurous eating and to that strange, addictive taste I would hear described many decades later as “umami.”
Having endured her share of grim, overboiled, unadventurous dinners as a child, my mother had never experienced cooking like this before. Like her husband, she’d grown up in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and both of her families had deep roots in what Newland Archer, in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, describes as that “hieroglyphic world” of knickerbocker New York. She never talked much about these family roots, and it was only after she died and I was putting together her obituary that I found out that one of her ancient relatives had commanded the cavalry escort that accompanied Ulysses Grant to accept Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in the spring of 1865. Her mother’s family, the steelmaking Burdens of Troy, New York, made a fortune providing horseshoes to the Union Army during the Civil War, and her grandfather ran a publishing house and was a friend of Wharton herself. Both of her parents were figures straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and they met in the most Gatsby-ish way possible: on the North Shore of Long Island, where their families owned neighboring summer estates whose rooms were filled with French antiques and whose lawns, I used to imagine, were long and green and flowed together down to the water. Her father was a talented and genial Wall Street banker who owned a succession of sailing yachts and power boats, several of which he named after his only daughter. Her mother, an only child, lost her father in a hunting accident when she was young, and she never felt quite at home, my mother said, as a member of the formal WASP family into which her own mother would eventually marry. My grandmother was a glamorous debutante as a young woman, with pale skin and large, blue eyes, but the sense of wistful, elegant shyness she cultivated in her youth seemed to harden into an air of stern disapproval as she entered motherhood and middle age. She was beloved by our New York cousins, but my brothers and I didn’t see as much of our Maynard grandmother when we were living abroad, and we used to call her “Pilgrim Granny,” after the grim, unsmiling Puritans we’d read about in history books. Pilgrim Granny suffered from various maladies, and like my mother’s father, she would die at a relatively young age, in her early sixties. There were no sacred dining rituals on that side of the family that I ever heard about, or raucous cocktail toasts. My most vivid food memory of Pilgrim Granny is of visiting her for a formal Sunday lunch, after she and my grandfather had parted ways, sitting down to a table set with rows of silverware on either side of the plate and little stacks of over-refrigerated butterballs, which were stamped out from an antiquated wooden butterball mold by a friendly cook who wore a frilly white apron tied around her starched black dress.
Sheila Maynard grew up in a redbrick townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, not far from the home of my great-grandfather Choate, who was also partial to homemade butterballs and stodgy formal sit-down dinners, and on special occasions her family would also visit Giovanni’s down on Fifty-Fifth Street, just as the Platts used to do. For more casual meals, they’d visit Hamburger Heaven on East Seventy-Ninth Street, where they’d eat messy cheeseburgers with all the trimmings, she told me, or they’d dine on cream cheese sandwiches at the New York chain Chock full o’Nuts, in which her father, who prided himself on being a healthy eater before the era of healthy eating was fashionable, was an investor. Walter Maynard was the managing partner of a Wall Street investment bank, and a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, and during the war he’d been a member of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command in London, the group that orchestrated the flights of B-52s that pulverized Hitler’s Germany. Unlike some of his blue-blood friends, he preferred bread “with bits of seed in it,” my mother remembered, and he liked to sweeten his coffee like a frontier cowboy: with spoonfuls of honey and blackstrap molasses. He was an avid gardener and a director of the New York Horticultural Society, which may have been why his favorite place for a celebratory meal toward the end of his life was the flower-filled dining room at Le Grenouille, on Fifty-Second Street. He believed that the most civilized dish in the world was grilled Dover sole with drawn butter and just a touch of lemon, although he would confound the waiters there, and in other fancy joints around the city, by asking for a bowl of bran cereal for dessert instead of the usual sugary pastries and soufflés.
My mother was always diplomatic on the subject of Pilgrim Granny’s cooking skills, which apparently did not evoke the usual warm childhood memories of flapjacks for Sunday breakfast, platters of roast chicken with all the trimmings, and fresh baked wheels of apple pie. As a little girl, she developed an aversion to garden vegetables from the family farm, which tended to be oversteamed and sometimes contained boiled caterpillars in their sodden depths. Her childhood bedroom was patterned with dark wallpaper painted with more garden vegetables—eggplants; string beans; long, twisting ears of corn—and she told me that she used to dream at night that the vegetable stalks and vines were creeping down from the walls and twisting around her bed, until she woke up in a cold sweat. Once when I asked her to try to summon up happy images from this food-challenged youth, she told me a similar strange Alice in Wonderland tale about a lunch at one of the Astor family estates called Ferncliff, up the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, New York. Her parents were apparently distant friends of Vincent Astor, who had inherited Ferncliff when his father went down with the Titanic, and one Sunday they went to family lunch at the house, which sat at the end of a long and twisting driveway, on top of a hill overlooking the river. There must have been some kind of renovation under way at the estate, which was famous for its indoor swimming pool and supersized ballroom, because as they drove uphill, past the gates, through the long alley of trees, they could see volumes of musty leather books stacked up in tall towers on the lawn. The lunch was a very formal affair, held in the large dining room, with crystal goblets at every place setting and butlers, in full black-tie regalia, standing behind every chair. My mother doesn’t remember what they ate for lunch at the Astors’, but there were tiny bottles of ketchup at every place setting, and afterward Mrs. Astor asked the children to take any book they wanted from the lawn. My mother took the heaviest book she could find, a large volume of Webster’s Dictionary bound in calfskin, and she used it to preserve the collection of wildflowers that she picked that summer, by pressing them between the heavy pages, lined with sheets of wax paper.
My mother was just twenty years old when she made the rash decision to leave college, get married, and set sail on a life of adventure and risk around the globe. She would return to college in time, earn two degrees, and build an impressive, far-ranging career working with refugees and adopted children, and developing a variety of programs for the United Nations and other international organizations in the field of crisis management and post-traumatic stress. And out in Asia, away from the judgmental gaze of Pilgrim Granny and the narrow cosseted world of finishing schools and debutante balls that she’d grown up in, the magical, madeleine moments began to pile up one by one. “We always knew these were the good old days,” she liked to say as we turned the pages of the photo albums together, one by one. The Taiwan book is one of the earliest and most tattered of the volumes. It was made in Italy of more delicate, less durable paper than the other books; instead of linen, the cardboard cover is patterned with rows of gray-and-white deer, and the pages have the worn, slightly falling apart feeling of delicate parchment paper. It has the snapshot of my brother and me in our nursery school pinafores, standing with Mr. Yu and squinting in the sun before going off to school. There are pictures of the dumpling-making sessions with Mr. Yu, pictures of the food markets, and pictures of the weekend picnics the family took by bicycle, riding out between the rice paddies to visit little villages up in the hills. There are photographs of the Platt boys eating fat, round bao-dze dumplings on a trip up into the mountains, which run through the middle of Taiwan island, and a photo of the famous Grand Hotel in Taipei, a giant multistory structure that is rimmed with red columns, in the traditional Imperial style, and looks a little like an Imperial cruise ship stuck, like Fitzcarraldo’s famous opera house, on the side of a jungle-covered hill. The hotel was one of the ceremonial centers of diplomatic Taipei (the banquet kitchens were featured in Ang Lee’s excellent food-themed movie Eat Drink Man Woman), and my parents stayed there when they went to Taipei to attend a garden party given by Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The Generalissimo, who had ruled China during the tumultuous years leading up to the Second World War and then retreated to Taiwan after Mao’s revolution in 1949, was a doddering old gentleman by then, my mother remembered. He was dressed in his military uniform, and his wife, who was one of the famous Soong sisters from Shanghai, wore a long silk dress patterned with elaborate, carefully sewn flowers. While the Generalissimo stared off into the middle distance, Madame Chiang asked animated questions about life in the USA and they all ate cucumber tea sandwiches rolled flat, with their crusts cut off, in the classic English style.
As we flipped through the parchment pages toward the end of her life, my mother liked to remember other things about those early days in Taiwan. She remembered attending banquets at the Palace Hotel in dining halls the size of the Astors’ lawn, and that after her steady diet of Chock full o’Nuts back home and hamburgers on Madison Avenue, the cooking there and in other restaurants around Taiwan seemed like a kind of miracle. In addition to Mr. Yu’s cooking, there were restaurants serving fiery specialties from China’s spice-loving interior provinces, such as Hunan and Sichuan, and restaurants serving refined coastal delicacies from Shanghai like soups made with spider crabs or freshwater eels. There were the famous soup dumpling restaurants, which like General Tso’s Chicken, were first popularized in Taiwan, where you sipped the gently cooked pork broth from the spoon before popping the rest of the dumpling into your mouth, and restaurants that served a Shanghai dish called Beggar’s Chicken, which you had to order days in advance. The cooks stuffed the chicken with chestnuts, mushrooms, and handfuls of sticky rice, wrapped it in lotus leaves, and baked it slowly inside a ball of clay. When it was ready to be served, they brought the ball of baked mud to the table and let you crack it open with a small hammer, to get at the soft, melting bird inside. There were Cantonese dim sum restaurants in Taipei and Taichung and restaurants devoted to one dish only, like our favorite Mongolian barbecue—a communal beef and lamb barbecue buffet tossed with vegetables and different sauces by the cooks on giant, curving, charcoal-heated braziers and then served, with messy ceremony, between fresh-baked sesame seed buns. Mongolian barbecue isn’t actually from Mongolia, it turns out. Like Chef Peng’s famous chicken, the dish evolved in postwar Taiwan as a fusion mash-up between Japanese style teppanyaki, which was popular during the Japanese occupation, and the lamb barbecue that the Mongolians brought with them to northern China during their invasions from the west.
Our favorite Mongolian barbecue restaurant was out in the countryside, between the hills that you could see from the upstairs windows of our house and the bustling center of the provincial city. The cooking was done in a low-slung building set out in the rice paddies, and driving toward the restaurant from a distance, you could see threads of smoke curling from the flat roof, up over the tops of the trees. Mongolian barbecues are almost as popular in Taiwan these days as pancake houses are in the United States, although modern fire and health standards require that the lamb and beef now be frozen and the stoves heated with gas. When we lived in Taichung, however, the meat was fresh, or semifresh, and the grilling was done over charcoal fires that the cooks would tend with large bamboo fans. Diners collected their lamb or beef in a bowl, then mixed it with vegetables like cabbage, fresh scallions, and coriander, a strange, miraculous herb that ever since those days has always tasted like the essence of exotic Taiwan to me. We’d mix the meat and vegetables with soy and sesame oil and splashes of sugar water and rice wine, then hand our bowl to the grill men, who’d spread out the contents on the domed braziers with long spatulas and sizzle them in billowing clouds of steam. The smoke from the fires would keep the mosquitoes away, so in the summertime we’d eat outside, where you could hear the cicadas and frogs out in the rice paddies and watch the fireflies lighting up the tops of the trees. My brother and I would eat the meat hamburger-style, in sesame buns, and wash our dinner down with soda pop. Then we’d put bottle rockets in the empty soda bottles, shoot them out over the rice paddies, and watch the fireworks pop in the evening sky.
The closest home-cooked approximation to Mongolian barbecue we ever managed to find in Taiwan—without sending the kitchen up in flames—was another communal northern Chinese delicacy called Mongolian hot pot. The dish is cooked fondue-style, like all of the other regional hot pots that flourish around China, although in those days the stoves were small, charcoal-burning chimney ovens made out of brass. The chimney had a mouth in the bottom for the flaming charcoal, and a small moat, filled with water, was forged around its center, which led to a smoky tapering top shaped like a chimney. When the charcoal fire at the bottom of the brass stove got going, the water heated to boiling and diners, using chopsticks, gathered around and also cooked pieces of beef in the simmering broth, into which we’d put tofu, wood ear mushrooms, fans of cabbage, and tangles of glass noodles. When the beef was done, we dipped it in a sesame-based sauce that we mixed ourselves—just as in the classic Taiwanese Mongolian barbecue experience—from sugar, soy, sesame oil, splashes of rice wine, and plenty of chopped scallions and coriander, which were all arrayed around the table in blue-and-white rice bowls.
After leaving Taiwan, my parents would collect Mongolian hot pots in the markets of Hong Kong and Beijing, where they lived in a tall, dusty apartment block not far from Tiananmen Square. When we moved back to Washington, DC, my mother perfected several of the family-style dishes from Mr. Yu’s repertoire—stir-fried rice with eggs and onions, frozen peas, and slices of processed American hot dog; an excellent version of cold sesame noodles in which she often substituted peanut butter for sesame paste; and pork and scallion dumplings, using sacrilegious frozen skins purchased in Chinatown instead of rolling them out from scratch the way Mr. Yu did. And when a crowd of guests came over, whether gathering for a special family occasion or to warm up a cold winter night, my mother liked to get out the family hot pot. The Platts had an impressive collection of these contraptions in the end. Lined up along the top of the kitchen cupboards in the different houses we occupied during our extended family travels were a half-dozen chimneyed brass ovens, in different sizes and states of disrepair, that my mother would set up the way other cooks displayed their favorite antique pots and pans. I took one of the little brass smokestacks with me after I graduated from college, as a memento. I even kept it for a while, getting it out for my little parties to try to re-create a sense of family and community as I moved from apartment to apartment, and even country to country, during my long bachelor years, the way children who grow up rambling from one place to another tend to do.
WE LEFT TAIWAN IN THE WINTER OF 1963, AND THERE’S A PICTURE in one of the faded parchment pages of the actual propeller airplane we took when we left. It had the curved, gleaming, silver exterior of a spaceship, and it made the famous approach into Hong Kong’s original Kai Tak Airport flying so low over the tenement rooftops of Kowloon that you could see people cooking lunch through their kitchen windows. My mother doesn’t remember what happened to our Japanese house in Taichung, or our favorite Mongolian barbecue, both of which I’m sure vanished long ago under a patchwork of skyways and housing developments. She never went back to Taichung, although she remembers that by the end of our time there both she and my father were dreaming in Mandarin. Her father never made the long trip to visit us in Taiwan, although he would come out to Hong Kong with his second wife and put up at the Mandarin Hotel downtown, where the city’s most famous tailor, A-Man Hing Cheong, cut several charcoal-colored business suits, made from expensive British wool, to his exact specifications. Pilgrim Granny never visited either, although for Christmas one year she sent soldier costumes to me and Oliver direct from FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, complete with plumed helmets, swords, and silver pieces of armor. My mother took photographs of us waving our swords at each other in the dusty garden of the Japanese house and sent Kodachrome copies back home to New York.
That last winter in Taichung, President Kennedy was shot. My mother remembers that it was Mr. Yu who came out from the kitchen with the news. “Something terrible has happened to your president,” he said to my parents, in perfectly intonated Mandarin, so that the children wouldn’t hear the news in English and get upset. Mr. Yu left for America not long after we flew off for Hong Kong and settled with his family in the suburbs of Washington, DC. One evening when we were living back in Washington, subsisting once again on a diet of casseroles, irradiated Swanson’s TV dinners, and bags of roast beef sandwiches and greasy double cheeseburgers from the local Roy Rogers up on Wisconsin Avenue, my father and I went to visit him in the Italian restaurant where he worked preparing fettucine Alfredo and platters of chicken parmesan for the discerning gourmands of Bethesda, Maryland. Mr. Yu still had the manners and bearing of a courtly Mandarin gentleman, but his dark hair was growing gray around the temples and he cut an incongruous figure, dressed in his starched chef’s whites and surrounded by portly red sauce waiters and rows of cheap, straw-covered Chianti bottles. He said that he’d worked in several Chinese restaurants around Washington, but that the heavy style of cooking—the thick burrito-bomb egg rolls; the soupy, vulcanized omelets of egg foo yong; the gallons of cornstarch and MSG—was as foreign to him as this heavy, Americanized version of Italian food. He still cooked dumplings and fried rice and little blini-sized spring rolls for his family at home, but his children had American names now, he said with a faint smile, and even their tastes were beginning to change.
Toward the end of her life, my mother’s tastes began to change too, although she never lost her fondness for those delicacies from long ago, back in the good old days out in Asia. A few of the brass hot pots are still set up on top of the kitchen cupboards in my parents’ little house by the Hudson, although when my mother prepared the dish when her grandchildren used to visit during the winter holidays, she used a small portable gas cooker that she found in one of the Korean supermarkets down the road in New Jersey. She’d gather packs of frozen sliced beef from the same supermarket, along with a head of Napa cabbage, a bag of wood ear mushrooms, sprigs of coriander, fresh scallions, and a few spools of glass noodles, which she said the shopkeepers in the Korean market called “cellophane” noodles nowadays. We’d boil the water and make the special sauce to our different tastes from the bowls of sesame oil, soy, chili, and sugar, spread out on the kitchen table. When the water was bubbling, we’d simmer the meat with our chopsticks, just like Mr. Yu taught us to do, then add the vegetables, which take some time to cook, followed by the noodles, which slowly soak up the flavor of the broth. At the end of the meal, after the meat and vegetables and tofu had been cooked and eaten, my mother would slowly stir the stew of noodles and beef juices and vegetables together with a little of the leftover sesame sauce until it thickened into a soup and then serve it as a settling digestive, the way soups are often served at the end of a Chinese meal. It was her favorite part of the dish, she used to say, and on a chilly winter night in suburban New York, with the bright moon rising outside over the river, it still tasted the way it did all those years ago—exotic and magical and strangely soothing, the way the best home cooking tends to do.