I DON’T KNOW how seriously to take the alarming talk about the spread of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. For now I prefer to think of it as SAMS, or Severe Acute Media Syndrome, as David Baltimore, the president of Caltech, recently called it, suggesting that its danger has been greatly pumped up by television and the press. But, either way, it is not going to keep me out of Chinese restaurants, whose business, according to various reports, has been hard hit by the SARS scare. “The food of my people” is what I call Chinese food. When I say this, I refer to the unrelenting enthusiasm of Jews for Chinese food. An old joke has it that Jewish civilization has existed for 5,764 years and Chinese civilization for 4,701 years, which is why for more than a thousand years the Jews went hungry.
Jews make up a large, in several places a preponderant, part of the clientele of many Chinese restaurants. “How is it,” the comedian Jackie Mason asks, “you see so many Jews in Chinese restaurants and you never see a Chinese in a Jewish restaurant?” The answer, obviously, is that Chinese food is so much better.
The only similarity between the two kinds of restaurants is one that is dying out: the presence of ever so slightly belligerent waiters. Innumerable are the Jewish waiter jokes (“Which of you gentlemen ordered the clean glass?” “They seem to be out of cream in the kitchen. Would you take your coffee without milk?”) The old Chinese waiters somehow strove to make plain that they were above their work and that, in a more just world, you would be waiting on them. This made it incumbent upon you to establish that, since we all had to live in an unjust world, you’d like to start with the Won Ton soup.
My mother, who was beautiful and highly intelligent, but less than a four-star chef, prepared the first Chinese food I ate. The dish was chop suey, itself not a genuine Chinese dish but, I’m told, an American invention. Hers was made up of large chunks of beef and vast quantities of cooked celery soaked in soy sauce and served atop rice. Nothing of the subtlety of Chinese cuisine was even hinted at in this dish.
My first official Chinese food was eaten at a neighborhood restaurant called Pekin House. Cantonese was the style of its cooking. Nothing very exotic was served: egg rolls, eggfoo young, shrimp in lobster sauce, fried rice, the standard fare. So completely Jewish was its clientele that in time the restaurant’s owner, a Chinese, himself began to look Jewish: He wore the same clothes as his customers, he had black-framed glasses, his very mannerisms came to seem Jewish.
In the summer of my fourteenth year, for two weeks I replaced one of the busboys at the Pekin House. After the restaurant closed, busboys could eat anything they wished from the menu, except shrimp dishes. I was a gastronomically unadventurous kid, and so I ordered the plainest provender. It may be that I am still trying to make up for that missed opportunity.
Part of the hardship of being in the peacetime Army for me was the paucity of good Chinese restaurants in Texas and Arkansas. In Little Rock, I discovered a Chinese restaurant that, in the attempt to ease its customers over the cultural bump, began all meals with a small salad instead of an egg roll and supplied its diners with white bread to sop up the gravy.
I must have been in my thirties when Chinese restaurants with Mandarin-style, soon followed by Szechuan, cooking came to Chicago. Like Bertrand Russell, who discovered sex around the same age, I couldn’t get enough. Truth is, I still can’t. I could eat in Chinese restaurants, good ones, four nights a week, and in merely okay ones the other three nights.
A new restaurant opened recently in our neighborhood, a joke spinning off the oldest cliché about Chinese food has it–half-Chinese, half-German. It’s very good, but the problem is, an hour after you’ve eaten there, you’re hungry for power. My only problem with Chinese food is that I find it eats too fast. Which is one of the reasons I am pleased to have learned, many moons ago, to use chopsticks. Even though I’m fairly adept, they permit me to abandon my heavy shovel method.
No other Asian food quite works for me. Thai food is too sweet, Korean too hot and too blatant; Indian food I consider mud and peppers, with curry added; Japanese food, though prettiest of all, is somehow insubstantial, with sushi, in my coarse view, being fit only for castaways. Chinese food is the only one that I look forward to eating with serious excitement.
Hot and sour soup, Singapore noodles, scallops and Chinese broccoli, Kung-pao chicken, beef and pea pods, these are some of the names of my desires. Bubonic plague, maybe; threat of earthquake, quite possibly; invasion by aliens, of course; but SARS will not keep me out of Chinese restaurants. I’d like to begin, I believe, with the pot stickers.
–Joseph Epstein
