When I mentioned John once thought sandwich wraps were strange, my friends were surprised (photo by Muy Yum)
“John actually started eating flatbread wraps with me, for the first time.” I mentioned this over tea yesterday at a sidewalk cafe. The way my one friend gaped at me, it was as if I just told him John joined a Satanic cult or something.
Eating dinner at the family table at my Chinese wedding ceremony -- while I dine on the veggies, my husband goes for the pork.
I’m excited to share with you my first-ever collaborative article, which I wrote with Susan Blumberg-Kason. Susan is the author of All the Tea in Chicago and the forthcoming book Good Chinese Wife, a memoir of the five years she spent trying to assimilate into a Chinese family.
This article grew out of stories that Susan and I swapped over the past year about going meatless in China, and especially going meatless in a Chinese family. Hope you enjoy it.
Accomplished Chinese food writer and yangxifu Carolyn J. Phillips talks with me about food and what it takes to charm your Chinese family at the table. (photo from zesterdaily.com)
Food is such an integral part of Chinese culture that it’s really hard to fit into a Chinese family if one isn’t adept at the cuisine. I suppose this is true to some extent with any country, but the Chinese are probably on par with the French and Italians when it comes to the importance of dining well.
This is probably doubly important when a yangxifu doesn’t speak Chinese fluently but still hopes to be accepted. Have your readers talked much about this? I truly feel that the old saw about the way to a man’s stomach etc is gospel for us yangxifu.
Carolyn should know — she’s a yangxifu who devoted her adult life to mastering the art of Chinese cooking. She blogs about food at Out to Lunch and tweets about it as @MadameHuang. She’s also working on two forthcoming books on the subject — “Simple Pleasures from a Chinese Kitchen: Authentic Seasonal Recipes from Every Region of China” and “Culinary Goddesses: The Women Who Changed Our Dining Landscape… Recipes Included.” — and is a regular contributor writing about Chinese food for Zester Daily. In addition, she’s even fluent enough in Mandarin to do court interpreting.
In any event, Carolyn has discovered a thing or two about what it takes to woo a Chinese family that truly loves to eat through food. So I sat down with her — from one yangxifu to another — to talk about all things related to food and Chinese family. As Chinese New Year approaches, it’s a topic that will come in handy for lots of readers.
My husband hails from China's land of fish and rice, and my rice cooking skills just didn't cut it. (photo by melanie kuipers)
“My wife cooks great Chinese food.” My husband could never resist saying this in front of other Chinese, especially people we invited for dinner.
Okay, I’ll confess, I make a mean mapo tofu. But I still considered his praise a little crazy. After all, I failed on the most basic measure of a Chinese cook — making steamed white rice.
I never admitted this before, probably because it leads to an unflattering thought — how could she possibly screw up steamed white rice? All right, let’s be clear here. I didn’t really screw it up; Continue reading “How I Finally Learned To Make Fine Rice”
I had only met Arnold a few times, but I felt he was as familiar as the soy cafe au lait I held in my hands. He and I bonded over China one evening at the gym, and pretty soon we went from lifting weights to lifting coffee cups over at the Starbucks just down the street from me. I liked Arnold because he was this huge espresso shot of an African-American, the kind of guy who wasn’t afraid to say — or ask — anything.
“Are you Jewish?” he asked me, after I sat down.
“No, I’m not, actually. I was raised Catholic. Why do you ask?”
“Because you have a Chinese husband. You usually see Jewish women married to Chinese men.”
“Really? How would you know?”
I was so stunned, I still I can’t remember what he said. Maybe it was because he had lived in this city (which I like to think of as Jewish as Woody Allen) his whole life. Or maybe he heard it growing up.
But later, when I left Starbucks, I wondered if I really was out of the mainstream, as a shiksa with a Chinese husband, Was it true? Were Jewish women more likely to marry Chinese men?
The term "Chinese food," like many generalized categories, hides a richness and diversity beneath it all.
HYBRID AMBASSADORS: a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010
You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010
Last summer, my Chinese husband and I swept through central China on a whirlwind tour of the highlights, from Shaolin Temple to the Terracotta Warriors to Chengdu’s gardens. Everywhere we went, we sampled local culinary fare — all Chinese — with as much gusto as the tourist draws. But not every meal went smoothly, especially not with my husband.
A dinner in Xi’an, infused with the aromatic flavors of the silk road. had him running for the bathroom later that night. Another Xi’an lunch the following day — noodles stewed in an exotic spiced broth — left him desperate to leave the region for our next stop: Sichuan.
He described the problem like this: “The spices disagree with me.” This was Chinese food, yet he spoke of it like many of the Western foods he would push away, claiming them as too foreign for his palate.
Thing is, there’s nothing so extraordinary about that. “Chinese food” encompasses such a variety of flavors, cooking styles and signature dishes that, chances are, most Chinese people and Chinese food aficionados would probably dislike at least one, if not more, of the foods available. I sure do. In fact, as a vegan, I probably eat far less Chinese food than almost everyone entranced with this broad style of cooking.
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and the forthcoming book 
