My Stir-fried Life
Page 5
For the spring onion brush: Cut off the green part of the spring onion and trim off the base of the bulb. This should leave you with a 7.5-cm (3-inch) white segment. Make a lengthways cut of about 2.5 cm (1 inch) long at one end of the spring onion. Roll the onion 90 degrees and cut again. Repeat this process at the other end. Soak the spring onions in iced water. They will curl into ‘flower brushes’. Pat dry before use.
Fresh chilli flowers: Trim the top of the chilli but do not remove the stem. Make 4 cuts lengthways from the stem of the chilli to the tip to form 4 sections. Remove and discard any seeds. Soak the chillies in cold water. They will ‘flower’ in the water. Pat dry before use.
Tomato roses: Use firm tomatoes. Using a very sharp knife, peel the skin from the top in one piece, as if peeling an apple. Do not break the strip. Roll the strip of tomato skin into a tight coil.
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SPEAKING of walking into restaurants, I remember going to Australia in the early 1990s. For about three weeks, I travelled the continent and ate in sixty-three restaurants. I had to eat substantially and more frequently than anyone else on the planet, as I was in Australia to judge the Restaurant of the Year awards.
I was accompanied by an extremely tall blonde woman. She was striking and statuesque and looked like a beautiful Viking. She was the PR person, escorting me from table to table – and picking up all the bills.
One time we walked into a Chinese restaurant and I ordered eight dishes. I wanted to sample all of them. I will never forget the look of alarm on the waiters’ faces when the beautiful Viking – and not I – asked for, ‘the bill, please’. Then, when she – not I – handed over a credit card, their jaws were on the ground. I tell you, when the Viking and I walked out of that restaurant, a regiment of Chinese waiters lined up to glare at me and, although they did not say it, their expressions were shouting, ‘Hey, you little guy, you’ve got this big lady paying – you must be one helluva stud.’
I worked for Uncle Paul for four and a half years on weekends and school holidays. I can’t say I really enjoyed all of it, even if I was learning as I went. It was a bit Dickensian – the young boy toiling for poor wages – even if the story was set in Chicago rather than Victorian London. My friends were out playing ball while I was working.
My uncle paid me 75 cents an hour. After two years he gave me a raise, which I desperately wanted. My mother was unaware of the hike in my pay, so I would steam open the envelope, remove the money that amounted to the raise, and then re-seal the envelope. This I handed to my mother. She took the lion’s share. Secretly, I retained the pay increase. One day, my mother confronted Uncle Paul. ‘Ken’s been working so hard and you never give him an increase.’
Uncle Paul, taken aback, responded sharply, ‘I have.’ Yet again, he was right. Uncle Paul was never wrong. I’d been rumbled.
THE nearest school to Chinatown was called Tilden, and I was destined to go there after Haines, my junior high school. It was renowned as the place where young tough guys went before moving into jail. I mean, it was a dangerous school where kids didn’t have time to study because they were too busy having fights and gang battles.
Uncle Paul, forever the fixer, came to my rescue and sorted out the potential problem over my schooling. He happened to employ a chef who, when he wasn’t a chef, helped his wife run a launderette. Let’s call it the laundry, as that’s what we called it. (The Chinese in Chicago tended to be in the restaurant business or the laundry business, or both.) This laundry was in Chicago’s North Side, deemed to be a ‘safe’, white neighbourhood. The kind of place where I wouldn’t get the living daylights kicked out of me.
The plan was simple: all we had to do was tell the school authorities I had moved to the address of the laundry, and it would mean I could go to the nice school. In modern-day parlance, I’d be in the school’s ‘catchment area’, though to me catchment involved a group of thugs chasing after me and then circling me.
Anyway, we followed the plan and lied our socks off. I got into Amundsen High School. It was scrupulously clean and attended by students who had no desire to stab one another. So my life was spared.
There was a downside. If the lie had not been a lie, and I had genuinely lived at the laundry, I could have walked to school in a couple of minutes. But because we’d all lied and in reality I lived near Chinatown, it took me about an hour and a half to get there every day.
In the winter months, when the roads were clogged with snow, slush and ice, the walk took two or three hours. It was vile and ridiculous. Each year it was taking me the equivalent of three months to walk to and from school. All the other kids actually lived nearby, and they’d go skipping into the classroom. I’d trudge up to the school gates, shivering, exhausted and bedraggled. Forget about the North Side; this was like the North Pole. Sometimes I just didn’t go to school. I mean, would you?
So yes, there were mornings when I would get up at the same time as my mum, and I’d watch her put on her coat, and I’d get mine too. Then, I’d say, ‘Look at the snow. It’s gonna take me hours to walk to school.’ She would nod, and make noises of sympathy. Then I’d hear the door close behind her. At that point, I’d remove my coat, climb back into bed and go back to sleep. Don’t act surprised. I told you, I like my sleep.
There was an upside to the Herculean treks. I was introduced to the north of Chicago, and that was like a whole new world to me. Until then, I knew only Chinatown and Downtown. In the north there were new cultures. Like, I met Greek people!
I started to make lots of friends, and discovered places where young people went to dance. On West Lawrence Avenue, there was the Aragon. Built in the 1920s, it had been a ballroom where all the big bands played. In my time it became the Cheetah, a disco and a venue for ‘monster rock’ concerts – there were so many fights it was nicknamed the Aragon ‘brawlroom’. But I went in the 1960s, an era when they would play and we would dance and boy, did I dance. My friends and I fancied ourselves as being black, as being cool.
At the Cheetah, I saw stars of Motown such as the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, as well as Neil Diamond and Eddie Floyd, riding high in the charts with ‘Knock on Wood’. They weren’t like concerts; there were no seats. If you wanted to watch the bands, you had to stand and watch. Come Friday and Saturday nights, we all swarmed to the Cheetah. It was really cool and, more importantly, we felt cool just being there.
James Brown came to town to perform at the Regal Theatre and, as we set off to see him, others in Chinatown warned us about going into the predominantly black South Side area. ‘You won’t come back alive. They’ll kill you.’ Instead, the young black people thought it was fantastic that we were fans of James Brown, dancing in the aisle to his music. The tickets cost $5, but he played for four hours: we got our money’s worth.
One of my friends in Chinatown had a car, so we would drive up to the Cheetah, cruising along, and we’d try to pick up girls – we liked the Italians. We’d ask them to dance and they might say yes. But you know, it was odd for us. We weren’t black and we weren’t white, and our eyes were slanted. We looked remarkably different to everyone else. Some of the girls were interested in us, but some of them were not. They didn’t see too many Asian people at that time, especially in Chicago.
If you wanted to see something Asian and exotic, you went to Chinatown, such was the level of segregation in Chicago at that time. Similarly, my friends and I found it weird to see mostly white people. But this area was ethnically mixed as well, and there was a substantial number of Greeks around North Side. There were also many Poles and, from my experience, they could have benefited from one of my mum’s chats about racism. (There were many Chinese, however, who hated the Japanese for the atrocities of the Second World War. ‘Two was not enough for them,’ they would say; a reference to the atom bombs that were dropped on Japan.)
At the age of sixteen, I started dabbling in shares on the stock market. That sounds a bold and adult remark. A bit arrogant, perhaps. Truth is, I was too young t
o trade. So my mother signed the paperwork and I traded under her name. No kidding.
By this stage, I was beginning to make money. By now I had quit King Wah. Uncle Paul was working me too hard, and I did not have weekends off to spend clubbing with my friends. After leaving the restaurant, I worked at a supermarket and then as an office assistant. I had saved up, had a decent stash, and became what is now known as a day trader. Admittedly, I was probably the only day trader who traded under his mum’s name. For a few weeks, I viewed myself potentially as a sharp-suited, financial demon making millions from buying and selling on Wall Street. Without the suit. But you know, I was never that good at trading, and finance did not interest me. The excitement faded as I realised that a comfortable living was all that I wanted. Also, let’s not forget that I was supposed to be a student but was working harder at making money than at studying.
The best purchases were the ones that improved my mother’s life. I could give her cash and buy her things for the home. I bought her an air conditioner and a sofa.
And I bought a television for my mother, which meant less-frequent visits to Uncle Winston’s across the hallway. Watching American television, I identified totally with the happy, prosperous, American and white family scenes it portrayed. My Chinese boyhood friends, I know, shared my sense of being ‘American’; our folk heroes were the Lone Ranger and Superman. We knew we were not quite the same as our Irish, Polish, German and black schoolmates, but this did not make us doubt our own place in America.
My childhood in Chicago had in fact been a rather sheltered one, but there was no question in my mind that I was growing up ‘American’. However, this sense of belonging, even if I were a cultural hybrid, was weakened, undermined and assaulted as I had made the transition into adolescence.
It was as a teenager that I first began to realise what it meant to be an ethnic-racial minority and an Asian male in America. At that stage, when I expected to move out into the mainstream of society, I was brought up short by situations and challenges I had earlier escaped, or unconsciously ignored. In the first place, it was then that I met with or finally recognised racial prejudice. Strange stares as if I had just landed from Mars, or comments that I should return to China.
In retrospect, I now realise that racism, anti-Asian prejudice, had been all around me as a child, but in my innocence and in my identification with America, it had not affected me.
I don’t understand now how I could have sat through all those movies and television programmes I enjoyed as a child, watching in isolation, with their depiction of supposedly typical, and certainly stereotypical, Chinese and other Asians: Hop Sing, the excitable but always faithful cook in the popular TV series Bonanza; the egregious Charlie Chan films with their inscrutable, clever detective, speaking in a refined pidgin English and his ‘Number One Son’, so faithful and so uncomprehending. And these, I think, were the good images of Chinese manhood!
Stereotyping of all Asians – indeed, all non-Caucasian men – had a cruel impact on my image of my developing manhood. Whatever the stereotypical Asian image in films and on TV was, it was not a sexually powerful or attractive one. To the pubescent Asian male, trying to figure out his identity, trying to come to terms with his growing sexual imperatives, this only added to the confusion.
Even if my father had been alive, would that have helped? If John Wayne symbolises the epitome of American manhood – and Madison Avenue makes money out of it, to this day – consider the situation of the Asian male confronting such an ideal. A ‘man’ is supposed to be tall; I, typically Asian, am relatively short: five feet, seven inches. Hair symbolises masculine virility. I, again typically, have a relatively hairless body. No hairy (manly!) chest, no impressive beard or flowing mustachios for me.
When a little peach fuzz struggled through above my upper lip, my horrified mother plucked it with her fingernails – to the Chinese, hairlessness is a sign of male comeliness.
However, when I was older and wanted to be allowed into bars, I was shooed away at the door because I looked so young. I did not have ID (as I had no intention of learning to drive, so was without a licence). The only way around this, I figured, was to grow a moustache. This would make me look my age. It worked. I kept the moustache until I was thirty-five years old, at which point I shaved it off, confident that the facial hair was no longer a necessity to get past the doormen at bars and clubs.
The hair on my head would have to wait longer before it was removed. Men who are going bald have a choice: keep it long or cut it short. However, there was a moment when I tried other options, having seen snippets of myself – and my hair – on television. These snippets brought the striking realisation that I was losing my hair and it was not a good look.
I tried a hair restorer which claimed to rejuvenate hair growth. In my case, this claim was unsubstantiated. Next, I read up on hair transplants, but most of them were dreadful and I dropped the idea because it was simply too absurd. There was, of course, the option of wearing a toupee. Again, this seemed ridiculous.
The solution, I concluded, was to divest my head of all its hair, every last wave and wisp. I shaved it. Surprisingly, people said, ‘You look great.’ They could have been lying, but the general consensus is that I look younger, and nowadays people don’t even remember me with hair. One time, someone said to me in astonishment, ‘I saw an old photo of you – I didn’t even know that you used to have hair.’ I figured that during introductions at social events I could adopt that as a funny punchline to put everybody at ease: ‘I don’t know if you remember, but I used to have hair.’ It gets a laugh, by and large.
6
Going West
THE GOLDEN NOON sun was so powerfully bright that I needed a blindfold. I was happy with shades. Beneath my feet, the powdery sand was so hot it was taking me towards extreme levels of pain. Boy, it felt good. My skin was being scorched by the rays. I did not mind one bit. Excessive heat was a pleasurable sensation.
Before me, the beach and the glittering expanse of the Pacific, and a few storm petrels hovering over the waves, ready to swoop under the water to pick up a lunch of tiny fish. Behind me, a forest of towering redwoods, 1,000 years old. Even further behind me, by about 2,000 miles, was Chicago, shivering like Niflheim – the kingdom of ice in Norse mythology – in the state of Illinois.
I had dreamt of California. Now I was here.
A few things had caused my migration across the States. First, I had been invited to Arizona, to attend the wedding of my late father’s niece, and this would place me about a twelve-hour drive from California. Second, I reckoned I could take the opportunity of heading to California after the wedding and staying there for the summer. Third, my friend Jeffrey Moy, who owned an antiques store in Chicago’s Chinatown, said that if I could get myself to San Francisco then he had friends in the city and they’d put me up until I found a home of my own.
So I went to the wedding, and then to San Francisco. Smitten! I thought, Wow this is not Chicago. I was right; it was San Francisco. But I mean it was so extraordinarily cool. Everybody had long hair, smoked dope, and went to rock concerts at the Fillmore.
In those days, it was easy to find work in the States. You’d simply say that you’d done this and that, smile, and you’d get a job. I wandered into an office, smiled, and got a job in the mail room and running errands for the staff. I was there through the summer, and concluded: this is where I want to be. California, that is, not the office.
During those summer months I had made friends in Berkeley – only forty minutes by train from San Fran – and the camaraderie strengthened my resolve to move there permanently. Plus, I had money saved – a nice kitty – so I could do it. I was twenty years old and told myself, this is where I’ve got to be.
I returned briefly to Chicago, gathered my bits and pieces, and took a Greyhound back to the west. It was December ’69 and Chicago was under a blanket of deep snow and the city’s temperature was down to minus ten. As I headed along Route 66, my m
other’s farewell words echoed in my mind. ‘I know you have to do this,’ she had said to me. ‘It’s hard. But I understand.’
The legion of uncles in my life had also shared their concerns: ‘Don’t forget your mother.’
To each of them, I had responded with the assurance, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t.’ I did not, as you will see.
JUST as others, a century earlier, had rushed to California in search of gold, I prayed and hoped for a destiny of promise and excitement. I moved into an apartment, and my flatmate, Len Lesachander, found me a part-time job as teacher at a pre-school nursery, where he also worked. This gave me a bit of breathing space, and soon I was enrolled at the local college, called Merritt, in Oakland. Also, I applied for a place at the University of California, to study History of Art.
The college played its own role in America’s history of civil rights because, pre-dating my arrival by only a few years, two of the students were Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. In 1966, they founded the Black Panther Party, the revolutionary organisation that fought, and fought hard, for the constitutional rights of black people. This band of activists wanted the basics – decent housing, education, jobs and an end to the police brutality of black people. They also had a reputation for violence, and there were members who carried guns and, from time to time, shot people.
The Black Panthers had an established, faithful core at Merritt, and I remember glancing down the hallway to see Huey Newton walking in my direction. He was there to deliver a rousing speech to the many black students at Merritt.
I am not a violent person and do not condone violence. But I admired the stance of the Black Panther Party. These young people had devoted themselves to a struggle for their rights, trying to do something different, and most of the students were caught up in the movement. Meanwhile, I became involved in the Asian-American community centre. Before going to California, I wasn’t political, but now I was immersed in the prospect of change.