Some tourists like to collect seashells on their journeys, or shards of pottery, or nostalgic postcards from the distant places they’ve visited, like the Pyramids of Giza or Timbuktu. But ever since those early days in Taiwan, I’ve always equated the glamour of travel and living in far-off lands with the eternal joys of a good meal. A good meal is always a pleasure when you travel, but for the Platt family, nosing around markets in strange cities and grazing in local restaurants and on a variety of bizarre street food was a way of finding our bearings during those peripatetic years and comforting ourselves as we moved endlessly from one place to another. My brothers and I grew adept at living off the land during the 1960s and early ’70s as we roamed the world, mostly in our tight-knit family unit but also sometimes alone or in pairs, on trains, ocean liners, and creaky single-aisle Pan Am jets, which in those days stopped in Honolulu and Alaska to refuel as they made their way across the wide Pacific Ocean. Food was a constant comfort during our roving life on the road, and even a necessity, when we settled down for a year or two and then moved on again. It drew us out of what my father called the “expatriate cocoon” and gave us the illusion that all travelers crave: that we were connected, in some tenuous way, to the strange, foreign world around us.
In Hong Kong, where we moved in the early winter of 1964 after our sojourn in Taiwan, the third of the voracious Three Tigers, Nicholas Jr., who would be called “Sanhu,” was born in the Catholic hospital across from the apartment where we lived. Thereafter, what had been a gentlemanly eating partnership between two brothers began to evolve into a slightly more frenzied, free-for-all food fight. As with most siblings, we developed our particular well-choreographed roles early on and tended to reprise them again and again. I was the dutiful, entitled eldest son, the consummate teaser and critic who strategized behind the scenes, made lordly pronouncements and needling observations that were generally ignored, and attempted, not always successfully, to coerce my bumpkin younger brothers to do my bidding. Oliver was the jolly, charismatic front man from an early age. The future actor charmed strangers with his antic personality and impersonations (he was famous in the family for his uncanny imitation of an angry water buffalo), negotiating prices when we visited the markets, and sweet-talking cab drivers, flight attendants, and assorted other strangers when we were sent off alone to the airport by our parents or weary grandparents to fly between Hong Kong and the USA. Sanhu was the coddled, plump-cheeked youngest son, a future journalist and financier who was hand-fed all sorts of delicacies from birth by an adoring gaggle of cooks and babysitters and who used to be carried from place to place so often on picnics in the countryside and trips around the city, that we called him the “Baby Dalai Lama,” after the original child prophet, who just years before, in the winter of 1959, had been carried over the mountains out of Tibet to India by a worshipful and devoted band of monks.
In Hong Kong, we lived on one of the middle floors of a spacious colonial-era apartment building at the bottom of Old Peak Road, a twisting two-way street that winds up to the top of the Peak on Hong Kong island, where the British colonial officials and original Taipan business tycoons moved to escape the oppressive heat and smell of the city down below. The exterior of the building was painted the tropical yellow of an overripe mango, and the rooms were spacious and filled with light. A long veranda at the front of the apartment had bright, windy views down to Hong Kong’s famous harbor, which in those days was filled with ferries, fishing junks, and huge gray American battle ships that cruised in from the war in Vietnam and dropped anchor among the smaller boats. We’d ride our tricycles up and down this wide porch, and at night, when the weather was cloudy, we could hear the sounds of foghorns drifting up from the harbor as we lay in our beds. My parents bought a share in a China blue–colored sailing junk called The Star Elephant, which had two eyes painted on its bow for good luck, and rumpled orange sails that unfolded when you raised them, like the ribs of a bamboo fan. On the weekends, we would take The Star Elephant on picnic cruises around the islands, and every few years we would rent The Sea Dragon, a much larger junk, from one of the prominent antiques dealers in town. With the family of a journalist we knew, we’d cruise for days out among the little fishing harbors and deserted beaches in the green rural country beyond the city called the New Territories, which lead up to the border between the royal colony and the vast, forbidden region still referred to in those days as “Red China.”
In those last years of the British Empire, there were a few more cricket pitches scattered among the old Chinese neighborhoods of Hong Kong and Kowloon than there are today. The southern side of the island, around Stanley and Repulse Bay, was where the Japanese army invaded in December 1941, and you could still find faded stitches of bullet holes on the walls of some of the older buildings. A green vintage Spitfire warplane from the Battle of Britain was on permanent display at Memorial Square, by the harbor where you caught the Star Ferry over to the Kowloon side, and the British colony still had a governor who lived in a cream-colored mansion just down the hill from our apartment and who appeared in public every year on the queen’s birthday wearing a curved black admiral’s hat fringed with ostrich feathers. Many of the banks in the city were still guarded by Sikhs from the northern Punjab region of India—giant, stern-faced gentlemen left over from the British Raj who carried sawed-off shotguns and wore their great beards tied up behind their necks under tall, colorful turbans. The finest grocery stores in the colony were still stocked with sturdy, imperishable delicacies from the queen’s empire: lard-crusted pork pies wrapped in brightly colored wax paper; cans of sausages and pickled chestnuts; pots of mango chutney and anchovy relish; sticky, tar-thick Marmite in squat, yellow-lidded jars; and rows of raspberry jams and marmalades from venerable London purveyors like Fortnum & Mason, their labels emblazoned with Her Majesty’s royal seal.
Every morning, while the Baby Dalai Lama took his ease at home, Oliver and I went down the road to the Victoria Barracks Infant School in the center of town, which in its curious customs and sense of formal tradition was almost as strange and foreign as the Mandarin-speaking nursery school we’d attended in Taichung. We dressed in pressed white cotton uniforms in the summertime and scratchy woolen jackets and socks in the winter, and soon the Mandarin I’d learned in Taiwan was replaced with a pidgin Cantonese that mingled now and then with comic, plummy English accents as I gobbled pork pies at lunchtime and attempted to learn how to use a cricket bat during recess time at school. My mother enrolled me in the British Boy Scouts, which required another ridiculously proper, scratchy uniform, and she began making notes in her diaries about all of the mysterious allergies that the delicate, increasingly cranky young Adam seemed to be developing—to wool, or strange foods, or unseen specks of dust in the air. The Platts became members of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and sometimes on the weekends the family would take picnics down to the beach on the far side of the island and watch my father row back and forth among the junks and sampans in long, cigar-shaped boats with other gentlemen of the empire in traditional, English-style rowing regattas. On Sunday mornings, we would dress in jackets and ties and go off to St. John’s Anglican Church, which had been built the century before, on a little rise above the harbor, and still survives today among the forests of glass towers in central Hong Kong. Potted palm trees were set up around the altar at St. John’s, the pews were made out of polished wood and swatches of woven rattan, and enormous ceiling fans turned slowly in the rafters as the congregation sang Victorian hymns and read passages from the St. James Bible. After the service, the members of the congregation would gather on the lawn in their straw hats and patterned cotton dresses and engage in friendly conversation while nibbling on digestive biscuits and sipping cups of watery tea.
But this was the mid-’60s, and beneath this layer of civil manners and polite good cheer the old order was beginning to fray noticeably around the edges. During typhoon season, fierce storms blew in off the South China Sea, and we’d cover the rattling windows around the apartment with big strips of tape to keep them from shattering. One year it rained so hard for an entire week that one of the apartment blocks built into the steep mountain down the road came loose from its foundations and tumbled down the hill, killing hundreds of people. The Vietnam War was intensifying month by month, and China was in the midst of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. There were bombs going off around the city, and one afternoon, after school, my mother took us down through the park below the apartment to crouch under the trees and watch crowds of young Red Guard demonstrators in front of the Governor’s Mansion, chanting slogans of the revolution and frantically waving copies of the Chairman’s Little Red Book. Our father, whose job as one of the colony’s large community of “China watchers” was to decipher these events by reading newspapers from the mainland and interviewing refugees coming across the border, would come home in the evening with stories about the factional fighting getting so violent in the mainland cities that bodies were floating down the Pearl River from Canton, out into the waters around Macau and the northernmost parts of the harbor. Journalists who had young families and were covering the war in Vietnam for the big American papers and magazines were based in Hong Kong in those days, and they would come back from the war front telling stories about wearing flak jackets during bombardments and surviving wild helicopter rides. These stories sounded dashing and adventurous to an impressionable young boy like me, but looking at the family photographs of these young war reporters many years later, you can see the faraway, shell-shocked look in their eyes.
Sometimes at Christmas my parents would invite servicemen from the ships down in the harbor to the apartment for a proper holiday dinner, and I remember that once a friend of my mother’s brought an actual marine lieutenant to visit the apartment. The marine’s hair was shaved close in the classic jarhead cut, and he wore a row of regimental ribbons on his chest. When I stupidly asked the marine if he had ever killed anyone during the war, my mother let out a little gasp and the officer looked down politely at his well-shined shoes. Not long after that, she told me that the nice marine who came to tea had died while on patrol somewhere along the Vietnam border with Laos.
I was always doing awkward things like that during the years we lived in Hong Kong. I caught pneumonia and came down with various other maladies, real and imagined. I got seasick on the junk excursions and carsick as we drove the narrow winding roads in our little VW sedan; one time during mango season I ate so many delicious tropical mangoes that I broke out in a rash of hives. I’d suffer wheezing asthma attacks, which my mother treated by running steamy hot water in the bathtub and having me sit in it for hours, gasping for breath under a wet towel. I got stomachaches and headaches at the regimented British schools and brought home a steady stream of C and C+ report cards, which my mother collected in a folder that I still keep in one of the stacks of papers on my desk. “Adam’s absence on leave has been detrimental to his progress in school,” reads a report from the Victoria Barracks Infant School from the summer of 1965. “On his return he was rather unsettled, but he is beginning again to put some effort into his work.” Young Adam’s delicate mood was not improved by the stout, fearsome headmistresses who ruled these very British institutions. These formidable ladies had comic Dickensian-sounding names like Miss Warmsley and Miss Handyside, and spoke in the hooting accents of the colonial empire. They dressed for work in stiff tweed skirts and jackets, and sported the tall, tightly wound beehive hairdos you see in photos from the 1960s of the wives of Russian cosmonauts. They seemed to enjoy barking at their students in commanding, regimental voices, especially the ferocious, pink-faced Miss Handyside, who presided over the second school I attended after leaving the military barracks. If you misbehaved, which for me seemed to be quite often, she would summon you to her office and, after a stern lecture, whack you on the palms of your hands, or the backs of your legs, with a long wooden ruler or the back of a hairbrush.
My best friend at this new school was a jolly, round-faced Hong Kong boy named Horace, who wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and had a taste, the way my brothers and I did, for the antically named Willy Wonka–style British candy treats of the day. After being terrorized by Miss Handyside, Horace and I would sometimes muffle our anxieties with soft Jelly Babies, crunchy Malteser chocolate-covered malt balls, and rattling boxes of the English equivalent of M&Ms called Smarties, which came in long, colorful cardboard tubes. In Hong Kong, you could find candies with names like Taveners Liqourice Cuttings, or Parma Violets, or Fizzers, which came two to a pack and turned your tongue different shades of yellow, pink, and blue. You could find chewy candies flavored with currants that got stuck in your teeth, and Sherbet Fountains, which you squeezed like toothpaste from yellow and orange plastic tubes. My brothers and I devoured every kind of chocolate bar wrapped in the sainted purple paper of the Cadbury Company, which had received its royal warrant from Queen Victoria herself back in 1854—Cadbury Flakes, Cadbury Double Deckers, Cadbury Curly Wurlys, and Cadbury Dairy Milk bars by the hundreds, which came in golden tinfoil wrappers and were pocked here and there with nuts and raisins and deposits of caramel. We ate Boland’s Custard Cream cookies, with filigreed Victorian designs on top, and chocolate- and nut-topped ice cream cones called Nutty Nibbles, which were wrapped in tight sheets of paper and tinfoil. We also consumed a steady stream of local Chinese delicacies, like the salty, dried sweet and sour plums that came in little plastic bags; wisps of “dragon’s beard” candy made from spun sugar; and blocks of sweet puffy rice, which we bought after school from the vendors who sold them in the park under the shade of giant, brightly colored parasols.
If you wandered the crowded streets of the Central District behind the big office buildings around the harbor, you could find jumbles of food stalls selling all kinds of other local delicacies, like pig’s blood simmered into blocks like some strange, savory Jell-O; bowls of steamy breakfast congee; and warm paper bags filled with squid balls or barbecued octopus tentacles stuck on little bamboo sticks. Interspersed between the street markets were the big air-conditioned tourist hotels like the Hilton, the Mandarin, and the Peninsula on the Kowloon side, which were famous for their high British teas, beginning punctually every afternoon in the lobbies, and for the éclairs, fresh-baked croissants, and sugary palmiers shaped like elephant ears, all served in their pastry shops and stacked in glittering glass displays like in the patisseries of Paris. There were ersatz New York delis in Hong Kong that served watery versions of matzo ball soup and a passable pastrami sandwich; crowded old British sailor pubs with names like Wellington’s Inn and the Mariner’s Rest, where the patrons played darts while dining on scotch eggs and pints of brown ale; and dimly lit Italian grottoes, where the rafters were hung with empty Chianti bottles bound in thatches of twine and the calamari the cooks served up was brought in fresh every morning from fishing junks out in the South China Sea.
In Taiwan we had experienced the glories of proper Chinese cooking for the first time, but in Hong Kong the Platt boys were introduced to the magical, endlessly theatrical pageantry of restaurants. For a taste of northern Chinese specialties—like shreds of crispy orange beef, bamboo trays of steamed xiao long bao soup dumplings stuffed with ground pork and fresh chives just like the kind we’d enjoyed in Taiwan, or strips of cool Xian-style noodles covered with sesame sauce—we visited the American Restaurant, a weathered, aqua-colored establishment a few blocks from the harbor in the Wan Chai bar district. There were floating seafood restaurants in Hong Kong decorated like circus tents with strings of lights, where you could watch waiters scoop your dinner live from bubbling green tanks, and crowded dim sum parlors, where we were encouraged to pick all sorts of strange, tongue-twisting delicacies—rolls of rice noodles in sweet soy sauce, translucent har gow shrimp dumplings, little log-shaped spring rolls of every kind—from carts that floated by the table in an endless happy procession, like little boats on a canal. Unlike in Taiwan, there were Western-style restaurants in Hong Kong: French restaurants, Japanese restaurants, Italian restaurants, and strange, colonial hybrids like Jimmy’s Kitchen, a sailor’s canteen dating back to the 1920s, which served sturdy Western delicacies like Waldorf salad and crocks of onion soup covered with gooey caps of melted Gruyère cheese. The original Jimmy was an American sailor who’d washed up in Shanghai after the First World War and opened a short-order joint for seamen on Broadway, a street in the Bund section of the city, across from the old Savoy Hotel. Another American, Aaron Landau, brought the franchise to Hong Kong, where it still operates today in a shadow version of its former self, serving eight varieties of curries and vindaloos, a rib roast, which back then was probably flown in frozen from Australia and carved off the bone on Sundays; and a stout all-day English breakfast composed of two eggs, pork bangers, black pudding, roast tomatoes and beans, and a rasher of greasy fried bread.
Sometimes, on a birthday or a special anniversary, we’d pile into the little family VW and drive over the twisty roads to the Repulse Bay Hotel on the south side of the island, where a mix of tourists, wealthy Hong Kong businessmen, and local dignitaries left over from the empire gathered on weekend afternoons to peer out at the sandy beach through the trees across the road, over their pressed sandwiches and cups of tea. Like our apartment, the building was painted in shades of tropical yellow and had faded green-and-white canvas awnings leading up to its entrance, like the awnings you might see at a British lawn tennis club. The hotel dated from the 1920s; Somerset Maugham had stayed there, as well as Sean Connery during his James Bond period, and in classic Hong Kong fashion, the building would be torn down decades later by developers and then built again as an ersatz, Disneyland version of its former self. But in those days the rooms still had a faintly glamorous, slightly faded feel. There was a dark bar filled with wicker furniture and a long, screened-in veranda, which was set with linen-covered tables during lunch and dinner. The menu was filled with exotic Continental specialties more notable for the rituals surrounding them than for their actual taste: duck flambé, escargot set in their slippery reused shells and baked in garlic butter, and puffy soufflés spiked with raspberries or Grand Marnier, which my mother would sometimes attempt to duplicate at home. My favorite dish was the house version of steak tartare, which was mixed tableside by serious-faced waiters who spoke in exaggerated, possibly fake French accents and always looked to me, in their stiff suits, like magicians conjuring a magic trick.
Hong Kong has always been one of the world’s great culinary melting pots, and living there, the Platt boys developed all sorts of curious and eclectic eating habits. The breakfast eggs were flown in from Australia, our father told us, and to mask their bland flavor we mixed them with Worcestershire sauce, the way he liked to do, and ate them with fat British bangers and wedges of toast slathered, on occasion, with mango chutney, fermented tofu, or spoonfuls of yeasty, sharp-tasting Marmite. Our cook in Hong Kong was Mr. Wong, a courtly gentleman who, unlike Mr. Yu in Taiwan, hadn’t worked extensively in restaurant kitchens. He came from the rural province of Anhui in the mountains of central China, and he and his wife, Tao, would tell us stories about life in the wild countryside filled with panda bears and bamboo forests and wild tigers that now and then came down to the villages to maul people working in the fields. His specialties were the home-cooked comfort specialties of the Chinese canon: leftover rice tossed with eggs and bits of sweet sausage and scallions, pork and chive dumplings, and red-braised pork, which he made with chunks of fatty pork belly, stewed to a soft tenderness with caramelized sugar and sweet Shaoxing wine in a thick earthenware crock. Mr. Wong and his family had an apartment near Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s red-light district. On holidays—like the Moon Festival in the springtime or the Lantern Festival in February, which marked the end of the Chinese New Year—we’d visit them and go shopping in the markets for roast duck and the addictive strips of sticky, candied barbecued Cantonese pork called char siu, and until they were banned in the city during the Cultural Revolution bombings, we’d shoot bottle rockets and set off long, popping strings of red firecrackers.
Our parents dutifully took us to visit the cultural sites around the city, but they were aware at that point that, given a choice, their hungry sons would rather spend their time touring the local bakery or seafood restaurant than an aged temple or colonial-era museum. As we roved around the world, whether on weekend trips from Hong Kong to the old Portuguese colony of Macau or back to the United States to visit the family, excursions to the market and communal dinners in gently crumbling far-off hotels became a subtle exercise in morale-building and crowd control. One year, instead of flying back to the United States for our home leave by the usual network of cramped Pan Am flights via Tokyo and Honolulu, my parents organized a weeks-long excursion overland from Asia back to New York on a series of slow-moving trains and ocean liners so that we could get a feel for the vast spaces of the world and experience the stately rhythms of pre–jet age travel. We boarded one airplane, from Hong Kong to Tokyo, but then took a small steamship from Yokohama across the Sea of Japan to the Russian port town of Nakhodka. From there, we made our way slowly west by train, across the broad expanse of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, to London and eventually across the Atlantic, on an ocean liner called the SS United States, before arriving at the piers of Lower Manhattan. The highlight of this long journey was the Trans-Siberian Railway, which took a week to chug slowly through seven time zones to Moscow. Several of the trains we took along the way were pulled by steam locomotives with the Communist hammer and sickle emblazoned on their noses, and some of the antique railway cars we slept in were trimmed, as in the days of the czars, with polished wood and fitted with fluffy comforters, which would be covered in the mornings with a thin film of soot from the coal-burning engine outside. The dining cars were beautifully appointed too, in the Orient Express style, and every day the same grumpy attendants would hand out elaborate menus filled with enticing-sounding dishes like chicken Kiev and then inform the hungry Platt brothers, with a sad shake of the head, that the only items available from the kitchen were viscous Soviet-era egg dishes and bowls of warmed-over borscht. So when the train stopped at the little Siberian villages along the way, my parents would lead foraging expeditions up and down the station platforms, gathering loaves of country bread, cold salami sausages, and fresh yogurt decked with bits of honeycomb, which we happily consumed as the train rumbled slowly across the endlessly unspooling landscape filled with wheat fields and long, frozen forests of birch trees, interspersed here and there, as my mother wrote in her diary, “with streams running clear, the color of root beer.”
My mother’s diaries from that long-ago trip are filled with all sorts of food allusions like this, as well as bemused remarks on the struggle to keep her ravenous brood properly fed. She carried candy bars and jars of peanut butter in her purse as emergency rations. When provisions ran perilously low for the Platts on the Siberian steppes, my father and his Russian-speaking friend from the embassy would trade airline bottles of Jack Daniel’s for our sausages and loaves of bread. At the Hotel Siberia in the icebound city of Irkutsk, there was no breakfast to be had, so we found a vendor selling warm pierogi on the street and scoops of grainy ice cream; according to my mother’s diary, we all gobbled down these treats while stamping our feet to keep warm in the bitter cold. Back on the train, chugging toward Moscow, she recorded an epiphany regarding a late afternoon rainbow and a jar of pickled mushrooms. “Our prize purchase of the day was at the last stop before dark,” she scribbled as the train headed west through scenery that reminded her of the Russian novels she’d read in college and the movie Doctor Zhivago, with its puffing steam locomotives and endless snowy landscapes.
We had been sitting in the compartment looking at the most brilliant double rainbow—a magnificent arc showing the whole color range from yellow to purple, arching over the grey sky and lush green wooded hillside. As the train stopped, the rainbow disappeared and we all leapt out. We found a lady selling home preserved mushrooms and bought some for 50 kopecks. They came in a fat, greenish glass crock, and were the most delicious aromatic combination of dill, garlic, onion, all cool as the evening outside, and completely exotic. We had them with some caviar on the heel of a loaf of bread leftover from lunchtime and felt very satisfied indeed.
I’ve never been back to Russia since that trip, but I can still remember the dark, rustic earthiness of those pickled mushrooms at that chilly train station out on the rolling steppes of Siberia—a taste that, for me, is still the essence of that country. Strangely enough, steak tartare is the dish I always equate with Hong Kong, along with bottles of frosty San Miguel beer from the Philippines, which we drank in the noodle stalls when I traveled there from my high school in Tokyo to play in a local basketball tournament. After our frequent home leave visits in New York, the city always tasted to me like pastrami sandwiches from the real Lindy’s deli, on Broadway, or the rich, creamy texture of the oyster pan roast at the Oyster Bar under the sidewalks at Grand Central, and it smelled like the smoky, slightly stale roasted chestnuts sold by vendors, to this day, around Times Square. When I think of Beijing, where my parents moved in the early 1970s after leaving Hong Kong and spending a long stretch of time in Washington, DC, I think of platters of boiled dumplings from a venerable dumpling house in Ritan Park not far from the Great Hall of the People; the sticks of sugared red crab apples called tanghulu, which we’d buy on the street as a snack in wintertime; and the taste of crunchy duck skin and the smell of fresh scallions that you get when you take the first bite of that famous local delicacy, Peking duck.
We left Hong Kong after living there for five years, but returned to Asia in the summer of 1973, when my father was assigned to the first US diplomatic mission to open in China since the Second World War. Foreigners entered the country by train from Hong Kong, and I remember that, as the steam locomotive began its slow passage north from the border, making those familiar chugging sounds and puffing clouds of smoke, we all peered out the windows and snapped Polaroid pictures of the passing fields and rice paddies the way the Apollo astronauts snapped photos of the moon. We spent our first night in China at the Dong Fang, a vast, empty, dimly depressing Soviet-era hotel in Guangzhou. To orient the family in this strange land, my parents did what they often did—they took us out to the local restaurants. On our first night in China, we visited the PanXi, Guangzhou’s most famous dim sum parlor, which was built in a slightly rundown imperial garden and reputedly served a thousand different kinds of dumplings. Beijing was a low-slung city in those days, bisected here and there by wide imperial avenues. It was hot during the summers and windy and bitter cold in the winters, and year-round the air was filled with dust and the smell of charcoal smoke rising from a million heating stoves and braziers around the city. Even in China’s capital, people weren’t used to the sight of big, looming foreigners, and occasionally they would gather to stare at the giant Platt boys as we lumbered down the street. The few diplomats and journalists who lived in Beijing were confined to a dusty compound not far from the emperor’s Imperial Palace. Our apartment overlooked the Avenue of the Long Peace, one of the same wide roads the government tanks would roll down a decade later on their way to Tiananmen Square. We were assigned a cook, who my parents decided was actually a low-level intelligence operative, because all he knew how to make were fried eggs and a strange dish he called “peanut pie.” One afternoon they came home to find him taking a nap on the dining room table, which was as hard and about as comfortable as a traditional wooden Chinese bed, with the tablecloth pulled up snugly under his nose.
My brothers and I visited a dust-filled swimming pool near the compound that summer and patronized the Friendship Store, which was for foreigners only and stocked with strange things: communist-era tchotchkes, winter hats with big flapping ears lined with rabbit fur, wristwatches emblazoned with the image of Chairman Mao, and bolts of cheap-looking silk. After we’d exhausted the limited pleasures of the Friendship Store, we spent most of our time visiting approved tourist destinations (usually with a large picnic basket in hand) and exploring the city, looking for interesting things to eat. We frequented ancient dumpling houses and a Mongolian barbecue joint whose dome-shaped braziers, my father used to say, probably hadn’t been cleaned since the Qing dynasty, in order to preserve the particular smoky flavor of the meat. The best place for spicy Sichuan food in Beijing was the Sichuan Fandian—located in a discreet compound near Tiananmen Square—frequented by Sichuan officials connected to Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping. Even in those days, the Peking duck restaurants were so numerous that we gave them names: the Sick Duck (because it was near a hospital), the Dirty Duck (because the floors were dirty), and the Big Duck, which was the famous, seven-story-tall Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant; even in the depths of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it served hundreds of plump, perfectly crisped ducks every day, with all the trimmings.
When I returned to Beijing many years later, I went back to the Big Duck, which still serves thousands of ducks a day and still occupies a large seven-story building at its original address in the Qianmen shopping area, which is not far from the dusty apartment block where we lived. According to the restaurant’s website, there are now more than fifty franchised and company-owned Quanjude Peking Duck outlets in China, and instead of grimy, stained Mao-style jackets, the chefs now wear tall, French-style toques and use fancy cutlery to carve the duck in front of you on a shining metal tray. What hasn’t changed is the mixture of honey, ginger, and rice wine used to baste the ducks just as they did back in 1864, when the restaurant’s original owner, Yang Quanren, hired a chef from the Imperial Palace (who brought the recipe with him). The crispy duck skin is still served with spring onions and stacks of neatly rolled, house-made bao bing pancakes. Sitting in the restaurant—surrounded now by ring roads and new office towers wreathed in smog—the meal still tasted the way it did all those years ago back in Chairman Mao’s Beijing. It tasted like comfort, community, and the essence of imperial grandeur to me, all mingled together with the excitement and mystery of travel in one timeless, crunchy, delicious bite.