Rice is the basic foodstuff of most modern Chinese the world over. Whether sitting in the midst of south China’s verdant rice fields or working in the basement kitchen of a San Francisco Chinese bistro run by an eccentric girl from New Jersey—every bona fide Chinese craves and eats rice. Vast amounts of it! An average, active Chinese person eating a traditional Chinese diet will consume about 8 cups of cooked rice daily. Most of the Chinese people with whom I lived in Taiwan ate even more.

Rice is the staple of the archetypal Chinese diet. Even northern Chinese, whose basic starch is noodles and bread-stuffs, eat rice. Those who grow up in regionally schizophrenic north-south households, like myself, are hooked on both—often in the same bowl and at the same meal.

Vegetables occupy the second-most important tier in the Chinese diet. They are what perches gloriously on top of the rice in the everyday Chinese bowl.

Yet, in spite of the Chinese love for vegetables and the primacy of vegetables in the diet, it is difficult to be strictly vegetarian in a traditional Chinese setting. If you proclaim yourself a Buddhist, there is a nook of vegetarian eating imported centuries ago from India. However, if you proclaim guilt in killing a chicken or concern for your health, the average Chinese will think you are silly or perhaps sick. For, to the Chinese way of thinking, a vegetarian life is one-sided and out of balance. The culture is tipped always to inclusion: For every 3 cups of rice and 2 cups of vegetables in the typical Chinese bowl, there is a crowning dollop of meaty sauce or perhaps a few slices of fish. Without them, the meal is considered nutritionally incomplete and culturally un-Chinese.

That, as much as anything, is the reason for the sparseness of strictly vegetable dishes in this book. The Chinese know perhaps better than anyone how to cook vegetables and how to show them off, but the yin-yang scheme of Chinese eating demands that a bit of animal protein enter the picture and the bowl. Poultry stocks are happily splashed into vegetable stir-fries, and bits of dried shrimp are insistently strewn amidst the beans. It’s all the tradition, which may be very wise.