The Difference

Hey, does anybody else hear frogs?

Once in a long while, we at Pearl East will get a special party of Chinese guests. This is actually a noteworthy occasion because 99.9% of our guests are older, white people from Long Island. After all, though we are a Chinese restaurant, we all know that restaurants outside of Chinatown are actually Chinese-American restaurants.

So while you have been sucking down egg rolls and sweet & sour chicken your whole lives and calling it Chinese, I'm sorry to inform you that it is a very far deviation from authentic Chinese food.

Most of you know this already, but for those who do not, the difference is quite substantial and it would do you some good to learn about both. Especially since you white dudes seem to love Asian girls so much. You can't hurt your chances of winning over an overly strict Asian father by knowing a bit about our food culture.

When we do get parties for Chinese people, you can imagine they are not ordering from our dinner menu. They are calling ahead and arranging a banquet with my mother, who then sends her chef in to Flushing, the most epic concentration of Asian immigrants on the East Coast, to get the real ingredients.

Now Pearl East markets itself as a (hopefully) paradigmatic Chinese-American restaurant. We give you the more familiar style of Chinese food, and we try to do it as well as we can, while trying to throw in some authenticity here and there. It's a gentle gradient between the domesticated stuff and the foreign stuff. And while chicken chow mein and sesame chicken are huge sellers, we are very capable of doing the mainland Chinese cuisine. I mean, after all our chefs are not PF Chang automatons, they are cooks from Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.

In fact, all of them have no appetite whatsoever for the American stuff. At Va P, when mistakes were made or dishes sent back 99% intact, we'd often taste them to see why the customer didn't like it, or if nothing tangible was wrong with it we'd give it to the dishwashers (they have the hardest and shittiest job in the kitchen, it's important to treat them well). Often I'd kind of welcome the error as long as it wasn't from my station. What? They thought this lamb tastes "funny?" Shit, I don't get to eat baby lamb chops every day, hook it up, son!

The same deal at Pearl. Dishes get sent back here and there, and I'm like, "What? Free rice paper shrimp rolls? Score!" And of course, I offer to share, but no one wants any. And they're not just being polite, they honestly don't like Chinese-American food. They always say "Na shi lao wai xi huan chi de.." meaning "that's what foreigners like to eat."

Well fine, this foreigner is going to get his grub on.

So as you can see, Chinese-American food is apparently so repulsive to Mainlanders that they won't eat it. There exists a book on this phenomenon, Chop Suey by Andrew Coe, that examines the cultural history of Chinese food in America. This shit has been going on since day one, when we were building y'all's railroads (and now flooding your higher education with incalculable numbers ... taste it, bitches). Though we started off cooking this kind of food so as to appeal to Westerners, apparently we never really ate it.

So what does real Chinese food look like? Well, I've never been to China. I've had the authentic food in the states though. Basically, Chinese-American food sits on the flavor spectrum towards the sweet side. Sweet & sour is a very prevalent flavor profile. Real Chinese food is much more heavily spiced and on the savory, salty side. Of course, China is a ginormous country, and millennia old, and its regional cuisines are almost unrecognizable to each other. But if I had to put a blanket over it, that's what I would say.

And of course there's the whole thing about exotic ingredients.

Americans walk through a Chinatown market and if they aren't a little horrified, they're definitely confused. Most of the animals are still very much alive (and being killed indiscriminately), they are of an origin that is completely unfamiliar, and things ... smell funny. It's that funky herbal smell that pervades through all Chinese supermarkets. I get the feeling it's the tea and rhino penis.

A bit jarring for an obese little American kid who thinks chickens naturally come in nugget form.

I poke fun, but in reality, it's very foreign to me as well. That's why I need to watch this banquet go down.

Chinese banquets often involve very intricate fruit and vegetable carvings. Presentation is just as important in Asian food, but we take it a bit more literally. Whereas European cuisine has the edible garnish, and beautifully sauced plate philosophy, Asian food has towering structures of carrot and turnip that form craggy mountaintops with swans made out of dough and potatoes. And while these presentations are technically "edible," no one is going to start munching on an uncooked yam turned in to a basket or something. It's pretty amazing to watch a skilled carver at work though, using little knives and scalpels to turn an ordinary root vegetable in to an extraordinary sculpture.

And then the tasty bits are put alongside. Maybe a stir fry under a large "tree", or maybe dumplings beautifully arranged on a gelatin "lake" with "lily pads" made from lotus roots. But ah, the tasty bits? What are they?

Well frankly, as I'm watching Ah Gau and our dim sum chef, Luo Shi-fu do prep, I am at a loss. I've never seen ANY of these things before. What are those yellow, chive looking things?

My mom explains, "Jiu-huang, yellow chives. They're garlic chives grown in darkness, so they never turn green." Oh, like white asparagus and Jason Schenkel. They smell funky delicious!

Then a plate of conch shells. I figure just for decoration. Nope. "Stewed conch meat with Eight Treasure Sticky Rice." Gotta love the way Chinese people name things.

Then giant ass shrimp, the likes of which I've only seen on the West coast, bigger than a gerbil. They sit in ice water with a strange red herb. What are those?

"Gou-ji. Uh, there's not an English word." Oh... they smell ... strange. They might be flower buds, but they look and smell like red raisins. Some kind of aromatic herb.

So how's this all going together? Oh, they're making tian ji. I'm not sure what tian ji is, but my rudimentary Chinese thinks "Oh, sweet chicken. So maybe like a shorthand for sweet-and-sour chicken, which would be tian suan ji." Though it seems awfully strange that a Chinese banquet would be having sweet-and-sour chicken. Is this like an ironic thing?

Short aside: Here's the problem with the Chinese language, and why the State department says it's one of the four hardest languages for non-natives to learn.

It's very tonal and dependent on context and inflection to determine meaning. The word tian can actually be pronounced four different ways, with various tones. But there aren't only four definitions for the word, there are probably more than fifteen. You have to use context to figure out which word you're using. Off the top of my head it could mean heaven, or sweet, or field, or to fill out (an application), etc.

So tian ji does not necessarily mean "sweet chicken." It's just the first thing that comes to my mind because my vocabulary is on par with most Chinese 6-year olds.

Seriously, does anyone hear frogs?!?!

Oh...

...

...

Oh no...

...

Oh sweet mother of God...

As if on cue, a jiggling plastic bag is produced.

Oh no.

FROGS!?!? How the hell does "sweet chicken" become frogs!??!

Apparently tian in this case refers to a small divot in a rice paddy, where water collects and forms a very habitable environment for amphibians. So tian ji means "field water hole chicken," a very cute colloquial name for frogs. Why can't we use the word I know!?

Listen, I got nothing against frogs. I think they're delicious French bistro style, i.e. marinated in garlic, parsley, salt and fried. It's fucking delicious. But why LIVE frogs?!

I mean a live fish I get. It's not meant to survive on land, if you lose grip on that thing it's going to harmlessly flop on the ground until you chop its face off. But that flimsy knot on that shopping grade plastic bag is containing creatures that could easily run away from you, and hide somewhere in your kitchen so that even eleven Chinese dudes with cleavers can't round them up. Plus, they are tiny, slippery little bastards. Why live frogs??!

As if to silence my dreading questions, Ah Gau pulls out a frog, somehow without letting the rest of the fuckers out, and neatly bops it on the head with the back of his cleaver. GG frog.

Oh.

That's why, live frogs.

And then the gruesome ordeal is nearly over. A rhythmic motion of bop, chop head off, rip guts out, cut feet/hands/toes/appendages off, chop frog in half (at the balls I might add) and then quarter. It makes me wonder if Ah Gau spent time in some kind of slaughterhouse just killing various animals for four years. He is dangerously efficient at taking apart critters.

I get little tastes of everything here and there, and real Chinese food is definitely ... exotic.

I grew up eating Chinese-American food and I loved it. Sesame chicken and pan-fried noodles almost every night (hence the fat kid thing). It's like McDonald's for me. Chicken McNuggets is not a far departure from sesame chicken, double-fried nuggets of white meat (let's remember that that is a recent thing for McDonald's) slathered in sweet-and-sour sauce. Hand me a diabetes-inducing Coca-Cola, my good man.

But as my palate has refined and grown more adventurous (in a "expanding my cultural borders" way, not a "drunk college freshman girl making out with her hot friend, because ya know .. it's college" kind of way), I've really come to appreciate this kind of food.

This is ancient history. This is food connecting me to my primordial roots. I most definitely had an ancestor who waded in a rice paddy and ate frogs like it was his business. It's delicious and even spiritual. At least as spiritual as food can be.

It only strengthens my desire to learn more about my culture. Not only has Chinese-American food been bastardized, but the supposedly more refined "fusion" cuisine is not much better. There is no more overused, trite and poorly executed concept than fusion. I've heard of Thai restaurants serving pasta carbonara, I've heard of a restaurant in Chicago called Italiasia.

FUCK YOU.

Stop raping two beautiful culinary histories and philosophies by hatefucking them together in a glitzy, kitschy, tacky restaurant concept. It's irresponsible. It's like in Underworld when Bill Nighy realizes that they're trying to make a Lycan/vampire hybrid. Abomination, he says! (Okay the first one wasn't that bad, and Kate Beckinsale in leather is always worth it)

And if you are going to do it? You better do it right. Subtly, with deep understanding and respect for all culinary technique, history and tradition you are pulling from. Beautifully, mixing two things so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And tactfully, which means no throwing soy sauce in your salsa pomodoro and calling it fusion. Italiasia, you've got to be kidding me.

I don't wanna call it fusion, what I wanna do. David Chang of Momofuku glory, or Gray Kunz at the Lespinasse of yesteryear are probably more like it. Chang likes to call it "pseudo fucked up bad fusion." Some of the combinations are "fuck you" offensive in their concept, others are more refined. It's all about personal style, and since I don't have one yet, I won't name it.

All I know is I have such a deep curiosity and passion for Asian food, and am considering bearing the mantle of redeeming Chinese-American food in the states. And all I know is I have such a hard-on for French classical technique, and the European school of cooking that I can't possibly ignore its importance in the whole spectrum of culinary history.

How those are going to mingle together to create some evil demon spawn brain child of mine is yet to be seen. I just hope you're as excited as I am.

EP6