My Stir-fried Life

by Ken Hom

  I said, ‘The grey pills that Yves’s father passed around the tables in France?’

  He said, ‘That’s them.’

  ‘What about them, Ron?’

  ‘I’ve found out what they were.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Ken, those pills were laxatives.’

  He said, in a sombre way, that it accounted for the moment when he felt stomach cramp on the streets of Paris, following lunch and a grey pill at Chez L’Ami Louis. He had made a dash to a public toilet … but did not have a coin to pay for his entry. ‘I would’ve paid a king’s ransom to get into one,’ said Ron.

  As for grumbling Mrs Kelly, she was a fastidious, brilliant cleaner but she would have made a lousy controller of BBC Two. Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery began in October 1984, eight thirty-minute episodes running over eight weeks. It was a phenomenal hit. It launched my career and, ultimately, would lead to my mini industry in woks.

  Yesterday I was back in London, which I adore with all my heart, and a young lady came up to me in the street to say, ‘My earliest memories are watching my dad learn to cook with a Ken Hom wok.’

  I was flattered. ‘Those may be your earliest memories,’ I said. ‘Mine go back a little further.’

  FOOD tells us who we are and where we come from. Food made my earliest memories, and not just food but the sheer excitement of being with others to share the enjoyment of eating.

  Even though we were poor, we still managed to eat well. There were banquets – yes, there were banquets in Chicago’s Chinatown – with dishes of plump pigeons, which my uncles, on my mother’s side, would cook with great skill.

  There were gelatinous soups of shark fin, as well as tureens of bird’s nest soup, said to be good for one’s complexion. The nests are made from the regurgitated spittle of a certain type of swift from the East Asian tropics. Sold dried and then soaked before use, the nest is bland, soft, crunchy jelly that relies on the broth for its flavour, and is an expensive and acquired taste. (Soups are rarely served as a separate course in China, except at the banquets. They are used to signal the end of a course, and to cleanse the palate in preparation for the next one.)

  For adults only there were platters of expensive slices of abalone (enormous clam-like seafood). There were mountains of pink, plump prawns, as well as whole, steamed fish, usually pike, which was caught fresh from nearby lakes. Pike is bony and therefore not to everyone’s taste, but hey, the Chinese don’t mind bones. After birthdays and banquets, the dishes, plates, bowls and platters were returned to the kitchen, spotless: the Chinese always box up the leftovers to take them home. What feasts! Nevertheless, as a kid I was so skinny. I mean, really super-skinny, just like so many of the post-war kids.

  Mum and I lived in a block of apartments on Wentworth Avenue. The block had previously been an office building, and you still knew it. The front doors of the apartments were an ever-present legacy of the office days: they were wooden frames surrounding two sheets of mottled glass. So when you entered the building you felt like you had walked onto the set of a Humphrey Bogart movie. The doors’ top part of glass had been covered with squares of chipboard, the cheapest way of stopping anyone peering in. You know what; even with the board on the glass it still felt like a Bogey set.

  Behind our mottled-glass door, we lived in a two-room flat. The place was small. I had the bedroom. Mum slept on the sofa in the kitchen-cum-living room. For company, she had a fridge, a stove, a sink and a pair of heavy, old-fashioned radiators.

  The communal loo was down the hallway, although the residents on the opposite side of the hall had their own private bathrooms because the apartments were larger. Every month my mother paid the grand sum of $40 in rent. That was about a fifth of her salary, so it wasn’t a bad deal.

  Uncle Winston lived across the hall from us and was skilled at making Chinese sausages, which, when fried, despatched the sweetest smell from the wok and throughout the block. The craving was instant. You just wanted to be there, in that kitchen, so that you could have just one, gigantic bite. Sometimes I was. Uncle Winston also had a bathtub. Like, he had a bathtub! Every Sunday I got to cross the hall, knock on his chipboard, mottled-glass door, and scrub clean and relax in a bath. That was a weekly luxury. (The extravagance of warm water was not wasted on me: I swim most days now, although I only learnt to swim in later life.) Unlike us, Uncle Winston also had a television, and would invite us in to watch it.

  Downstairs, beneath our apartment, there was a bad Chinese restaurant. If you came out of our apartment block and took a left, you’d be on Cermak Road, and would pass the billiards and pool hall and the fire station. One Saturday, my mother was just about to cook lunch when we heard shouting outside our front door. ‘Quick! Get out! Get out!’ A fire had broken out in the bad Chinese restaurant downstairs, and the building was being evacuated. It was pretty scary, with thick smoke billowing.

  The bad news was that lunch was delayed. The good news was that the firehouse was right across the street from us. The firemen just strolled casually over with their hoses. In the history of Chicago’s blazes, it must have been the fastest-ever extinguished.

  Every day the fire engines’ sirens screamed. And they made me want to scream. The worst season for sirens was summer, because we were so poor we couldn’t afford air conditioning. This meant that all the windows were open, and the siren volume was unbearable. Wax earplugs were an unknown luxury back then, though they would have been ineffective against those sirens.

  If you came out of the apartment block and took a right, you were a minute’s stroll from the heart of Chinatown, passing the KK coffee shop where my mother would send me to buy a takeaway if she felt flush on a Saturday and didn’t want to cook. I’d stand at the counter. ‘Ngoh yiu chow mein, m’goih.’ ‘Stir-fry noodles, please.’ Hand over a dollar, and then take them back to my mother.

  On the corner was – to me at that time – the largest grocery store in the world, called Sun Ching Lung. It was an old-fashioned shop, and I would wander the aisles, staring up at the shelves, which reached to the high ceiling and were crammed with foodstuffs and other products from China. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to make the store seem organised. It was a total mess. Typical Chinese. The shelf-stacking system wasn’t really a stacking system.

  But – oh, the thrill when something arrived from Hong Kong!

  There would be a knock on the door of our apartment, and my mother would answer. I can picture the excited faces and voices, as one of our friends broke the news of a delivery at the grocery store. ‘Fai di bei ngoh yat loh Heung Gong lai ge sun sin ma tai.’ ‘Quick! Fresh water chestnuts from Hong Kong.’ A whole barrel. Swiftly, my mother would wrap up warm – you wrapped up warm most days in Chicago – grab her purse and scurry off to the grocery store. We all adored water chestnuts: white, crunchy, walnut-sized bulbs which, in China, are eaten as a snack, having first been boiled in their skins, or peeled and simmered in sugar, or as an ingredient in cooked dishes, especially in southern China. Mum’s purse was not always necessary. Often she needed only to glimpse at the Chinese food; merely to gaze at it.

  She was not alone. Our neighbours and friends also busied themselves by chattering about the delivery at the grocery store. No matter what had been delivered, the messenger always told the listener (in Cantonese), ‘You’ve got to see it!’ There were two compelling reasons for having to see the new delivery. First, it was about the food, and the Chinese want to see anything to do with food. Second, it connected us in Chicago to those in China: it was like a long-lost friend reappearing on the doorstep, and saying, ‘Remember me?’ Or even, ‘Gei m’gei dak ngoh ah?’

  People hung out at the grocery store. They did. This store was the place to be. Some went to the store to collect letters that had been sent from relatives in China who had only the grocery store address. When you were growing up, you may have had a community centre. We had the grocery store.

  If you haven’t been to Chinatown in Chicago, then
I can tell you it was like Chinatown in San Francisco, but smaller. And if you haven’t been to San Francisco, then take my word for it – the large grocery store is a common feature in Chinatowns. Above the store is usually where you will find what we call the Six Companies: they are the big names that would run Chinatown.

  CHINATOWN in Chicago covered, say, four or five blocks. Beyond that, there were the Italians. Then there were the Projects, where the black people lived. Many of my classmates and teachers were black, including Miss Luckett. She was a large woman with formidable presence and the sort of powerful voice that could silence a class of children and make them listen, which is precisely what she did on that January day in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. ‘This is going to be very good for all of us,’ she said. And she was right.

  In fact, Kennedy led a passionate campaign for civil rights and against racial prejudice, and it made him so much of a hero of the minority races that, if you visited any one of the homes in any one of America’s Chinatowns, you were certain to see a photo of the man, framed out of respect, and hanging with pride on the wall.

  I call Kennedy a man. He was like a god to the Chinese-Americans, well beyond the ‘promising’ and ‘charismatic’ descriptions that others gave him. When Kennedy came to Chicago, I went downtown to see him and his cavalcade progressing slowly along the tree-lined avenues, the President in the backseat of a long, gleaming black limo, waving at the cheering crowds and smiling his nothin’ -can-go-wrong-when-I’m-in-charge smile.

  My friends and I were especially impressed and inspired by the news of Kennedy sending in US troops to allow a black student to walk into the University of Alabama when the governor of the state had barred him from entering the building. How can it be right, said Kennedy, that there are Americans who would fight for the country and who would pay their taxes, and yet they cannot even get into school in the same country as the rest of us? On a wall in our apartment I saw Kennedy’s photo many times every day and I did not mind one bit that he shared our home and our lives.

  On 22 November ’63, I was fourteen and in my typing class – typing was a standard part of the curriculum – but the tapping halted as the door opened and a teacher, ashen faced and in shock, came into the room and broke it to us hurriedly: ‘I have some horrible news. The President has been shot.’ I was stunned by disbelief.

  America toppled into an abyss of shock and deep grief. Kennedy was the great hope for us; for those who were not the big, white middle class. As Chinese-Americans, we were a small minority and therefore on the periphery of the civil rights movement, but still, we were motivated by JFK’s pledges and grit. He was there to bring change. His assassination came with the force of a powerful blow to the body.

  By then I had been working for about three years. Since the age of eleven, after school and at weekends, I had a part-time job in a restaurant kitchen. The job was the result of unusual circumstances, centring on my spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to become a criminal.

  2

  The Tea Ritual

  MY LAWLESS PERIOD was not as long lived as, say, Chicago mobster Al Capone, and it evolved shortly after I learnt how to take a bus downtown. Not take a bus in the criminal sense, as in take a bus and not give it back to the bus company, but take a bus, as in board the vehicle, pay a few cents for a ticket, take a seat and feel grown up, chewing gum to feel even more grown up.

  Downtown, I would wander around the shops, mesmerised by what they had to offer. I didn’t have anything and the shops seemed to have everything. It didn’t seem right. So one day, I thought, OK, maybe one of the shops can give me something for nothing. (Was there a little socialist at the heart of this little communist?)

  Now, dear reader, you will never have shoplifted; you won’t appreciate how it works. Let me explain. I took one thing and got away with it. That produced an overwhelming rush of adrenalin and a sense of being unconquerable and uncatchable. Then I swiped another thing. That, too, went into my pocket without a heavy hand coming down on my shoulder. Well, pretty soon I was just helping myself to shopping. Pretty soon after that, I was caught. Probably because I was about ten years old.

  The policeman who caught me then took me to the station. When I was put in a cell and the door closed behind me, I was confident I would never again steal. However, what ensued – and it involved a true punishment, beyond a police caution – ensured I would never steal. It went like this… My mother was telephoned by the police and she came to collect me, accompanied by my uncle Paul, who was lending support and playing the role of interpreter because Mum did not speak English. Once we were out of the police station, my mother meted out a reprimand which was so severe it remains the fiercest retribution I have ever received – though it did not include a slap or a smack, or even one single raised voice. Quite the contrary.

  Instead, my mother did not speak to me. I would get home from school and await her return. ‘Hello, Mum.’ She did not speak. ‘Would you like tea, Mum?’ Silence. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ No response. It was as if I had begun a period of penance, but with no end in sight. It went on and on. Each evening my mother would cook a meal, which she served to me. We ate in silence, and afterwards she would sit in the corner of the room and weep. We’re talking real tears for the son who had shamed her.

  This ritual – silence, cook, eat, weep, more silence, sleep – continued. It lasted for two whole weeks. If my mother felt humiliated at the beginning, by the end of the fortnight I felt suitably mortified and disgraced by my behaviour. I was far worse than merely a ten-year-old fool. I had dishonoured the family name.

  Eventually, there was finality in the form of an act of penance. It would bring closure and, in typically Chinese fashion, it required food and a gathering. Specifically, a crowd of family members and friends came through the chipboarded, mottled-glass door to gather in our apartment. Even the neighbours were there, squeezed into our home and looking on with serious expressions, but in reality they were excitedly awaiting the drama that was about to unfold. I made a pot of tea, carried it to my mother and then knelt before her. With my head bowed, I whispered, ‘Mother, I have made tea for you. Please take the tea, and forgive me.’

  Of course, you have never stolen anything. But if you had, and then had to offer tea to your mother and kneel and ask for forgiveness – in front of family, friends and a few nosy neighbours – you too wouldn’t be in any kind of a hurry to head downtown and steal again, believe you me. After that fiasco when I was ten, I never stole anything ever again. Well, maybe a bar of soap at a hotel, but certainly nothing that would have given my mother nights of sleeplessness or bring shame to our family name.

  THIS is probably an ideal point at which to take a pause and tell you about my name. My birth name was Wing Fei in Cantonese (Rong Hui in Mandarin). It translates as glorious son. To Mum, I was always Fei, and not Ken. Maybe I was not so glorious after the shoplifting episode, but ever after I tried my best to live up to the name. Kenneth was a popular name at the time, and one that was given to many Chinese boys. To Westerners, I was Ken or Kenny.

  I was born in Tuscon, Arizona, on 3 May 1949. At the time of my birth, the final days of the big band era, Harry S. Truman was America’s President and The Barkleys of Broadway was the hot movie. TV was progressing from black and white: RCA was perfecting a system of broadcasting in colour. That same year, in October, Mao Tse-tung established the People’s Republic of China. Britain, meanwhile, was under Clement Attlee’s Labour government, rationing of clothes had just ended, and George Orwell was soon to see the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  I was Tuesday’s child, which, according to the rhyme, means I am ‘full of grace’. Born a day earlier, goes the rhyme, and I would have been fair of face. If I had arrived on the Wednesday I would have been full of woe. So you can’t complain, can you?

  I was the first and, as it turned out, the only child of my parents. Shortly after Christmas of that year, when I was eight months old, my
father died. His death may have coincided with the traveller being born in me. You see, soon after his death we uprooted and moved from Tucson. I did not return to Arizona for twenty years, and then went to visit my father’s grave, to pay my respects and take a photograph of his gravestone, a snapshot to treasure.

  Why did we move? I think there were problems with my father’s family in Arizona. Initially, we went to live in San Diego, California, staying with one of my mother’s oldest friends, another Chinese woman. We had relatives in Chicago who offered my mother a job and so, in 1955, it was time for another upheaval. Chicago, Illinois, was our next stop, and would remain my mother’s home until her death. The city is ‘Hog butcher for the world … stacker of wheat’, though I would be raised on my mother’s traditional Chinese cookery.

  I was five years old and yet to live in an environment where English was spoken: Cantonese was the only language I heard. My mother, throughout her life, never learnt to speak much English, but she knew how to say ‘dollar’, ‘money’ and ‘no’. So my mother would never adopt another language, and she would never take another husband. The subject of her remarrying was never raised.

  For the first year, we lived with my aunt Jean – a relative of my mum – and my uncle Yook Lam, and their children in Chinatown. It was cramped. My mother went to work with many other Chinese people at my uncle’s factory, which produced Chinese food in tins. These tins were shipped off to the army and other destinations. Yook Lam’s food business, quite bizarrely, was called the Great China Beauty Company.

  During school holidays, my mother would head off, as usual, at 7 a.m., and leave lunch for me to have later in the day. Sometimes it was a mixture of sticky rice and chopped pork in a bain marie, which she put on top of a radiator: the apartment was filled with enticing smells as the heat of the radiator slowly warmed the food.