{"id":107850,"date":"2017-02-17T10:53:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T15:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107850"},"modified":"2017-02-17T11:26:35","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T16:26:35","slug":"sour-sweet-bitter-spicy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/17\/sour-sweet-bitter-spicy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy"},"content":{"rendered":"

An installation at the Museum of Chinese in America\u00a0documents a quickly shifting American culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From \u201cSweet, Sour, Bitter, Spicy,\u201d an exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

There used to be a restaurant at Fifty-First\u00a0and Lexington, a relic of white-glove Chinese fine dining, called Mr. K\u2019s. Its interior was all baby pink and Art Deco with high-backed plush seats and gold flatware, gold chopsticks, and gold soup bowls with little clawed feet. They served sorbet in between courses and kept a tea candle lit beneath the entr\u00e9es, which were mostly plated versions of classic take-out fare: hot and sour soup, sweet and sour pork, eggplant in garlic sauce. The Peking duck came out prerolled in flour pancakes painted with hoisin sauce and scallion ribbons. Near the front entrance, there were glass cases of chopsticks inscribed in red with the names of celebrities and politicians who frequented the restaurant.<\/p>\n

Ruth Reichl panned it when it opened in 1998\u2014her central critique was about the restaurant\u2019s authenticity. She describes the food as \u201cnot-quite-Chinese\u201d and lamented that \u201cunfortunately, Mr. K\u2019s is serving Chinese food from another American era, a time when people had not yet experienced the real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought of Mr. K\u2019s when I went to see \u201cSour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America,\u201d a new exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America that collects the stories of chefs from around the country. I had put off visiting for months, reticent to draw a direct line between my interest in Chinese food and my identity as Chinese American. But this is part of the reason I\u2019ve always liked going to MoCA<\/small>; there\u2019s no better place to be disabused of the notion of homogenous Chinese American culture and to be reminded of how fragile and quickly-shifting narratives about a category of people can be.<\/p>\n

Throughout the elegantly decorated hallways of the museum are artifacts from the days that Cantonese gangs roamed Lower Manhattan, propaganda from the decades of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and posters from the years directly afterward, when China and the United States became allies during World War II. THIS MAN IS YOUR FRIEND<\/small>, one poster depicting a smiling Chinese soldier declares, HE FIGHTS FOR FREEDOM<\/small>. Recently, the museum set up a \u201cresponse wall,\u201d welcoming visitors to write down their feelings about America\u2019s future and pin them according to how they identify as immigrants: first generation, second generation, and so on. (Unsurprisingly, the presiding feeling expressed is that of fear and uncertainty.)<\/p>\n

\u201cSour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy\u201d is set up like the private party room of a restaurant. The installation recalls Judy Chicago\u2019s Dinner Party<\/em>\u2014place settings for chefs of Chinese American restaurants line a long table. Abstract ceramic sculptures that represent their respective signature dishes rest on white plates. The middle of the table is decorated with colorful centerpieces that each stand for a style of Chinese cooking from different regions. Unlike Chicago\u2019s installation, however, you can reach out and spin the lazy susan and take a seat in front of a placemat to get a closer look.<\/p>\n

I quickly became captivated watching the exhibition\u2019s interviews with chefs, which are projected onto three walls of the room. Ming Tsai, who I grew up watching cook on television; Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese Food; Anita Lo of Annisa; and Cecilia Chiang, who established Chinese cuisine in San Francisco, among others, reckon with questions about cooking and identity. But even as Wilson Tang describes the origin story of Nom Wah\u2019s unique egg roll, it is clear how little the exhibition really has to do with food and how much it is concerned with the difficult and often subversive work of documenting\u00a0a new American culture. If Mr. K\u2019s had represented one well-worn method for capturing the culinary space between China and America, of bridging the gap between \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem,\u201d these interviews were speaking to the expansive range of chefs who continue to experiment in the space between those two poles, complicating it, broadening its borders, and, in the process, transforming it from a vague interstice into solid ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome customers, especially the Chinese expatriates, they grabbed me and asked, Do you have authentic Chinese food?\u201d Peter Chang, the chef of China Grill in Maryland, says. \u201cI simply asked, What do you mean by authentic?\u201d<\/p>\n

The protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston\u2019s novel Tripmaster Monkey<\/em>, Wittman Ah Sing (his father wanted to name him after the poet), is an unemployed playwright and recent UC Berkeley graduate in the late 1960s, blessed with a wild beatnik stream of consciousness, which he often uses to lament the state of Chinese American identity: \u201cWhere\u2019s our jazz? Where\u2019s our blues?\u201d he moans at one point. \u201cWhere\u2019s our ain\u2019t-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street-strutting language?\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he sticks up for Chinese Americans, he sneers at the unassimilated immigrants he spots in Chinatown; patronizes Asian American women for cutting their monolids then dating white men who can\u2019t tell the difference anyway; and rages at the mainstream culture in the United States that thinks Asian American culture is monolithic. He is equivocating, angry, playful, and full of contradictions. He impulsively marries a beautiful blonde girl with a slick Porsche convertible to dodge the draft, then spends a chapter or two searching for his lost grandmother, whom his parents admit isn\u2019t even related to them, isn\u2019t even Chinese, in fact.<\/p>\n

He pieces together a play that incorporates Rudyard Kipling, James Baldwin, Chang and Eng, and Rilke into a retelling of The War of the Three Kingdoms<\/em>. His final monologue, raging at the reviews of his play, which some described as \u201cexotic,\u201d wandered into my head as I watched one of the videos projected on the wall at MoCA<\/small>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m having to give instruction. There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West. I am so fucking offended. Why aren\u2019t you offended? Let me help you get offended \u2026 They think they know us\u2014the wide range of us from sweet to sour\u2014because they eat in Chinese restaurants \u2026 This other piece says that we are not exotic. \u2018Easily understood and not too exotic for the American audience.\u2019 Do I have to explain why \u2018exotic pisses me off, and \u2018not exotic\u2019 pisses me off? They\u2019ve got us in a bag, which we aren\u2019t punching our way out of. To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question about Americans or about humans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wei Tchou is a member of\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker\u2019s\u00a0editorial staff and\u00a0is one of the\u00a0<\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondents<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no better place to be disabused of the notion of homogenous Chinese American culture and to be reminded of how fragile and quickly-shifting narratives about a category of people can 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