“Stay With Us”
I couldn’t believe my luck. As the sleek Eurostar train slid out of London’s St. Pancras station on an overcast winter morning, I regarded my son with wonder. Somehow, I had managed to convince Sam, 22, to join me on a journey to learn home cooking with complete strangers in my three favourite foodie countries — France, Italy, and China.
At first, my younger son had hesitated. “Um,” he said, that summer when I first broached the idea, his face scruffy with honey-coloured day-old stubble, eyelids drooping with fatigue. He was in our kitchen in Toronto, gulping a glass of orange juice before he bicycled off to his job making salads and deep-frying mini-doughnuts at a neighbourhood barbecue joint. The endless hours with me were a concern. Would we get along? Would we have to live in the same room? Worse, would we have to share a bed?
After he left for work, I pondered the “um.” It wasn’t a flat rejection. But his body language had not been encouraging — shoulders hunched, eyes darting sideways, knees jiggling in that annoying way guys do when they feel trapped.
I am a journalist turned journalism professor. After I covered a school shooting in Quebec in 2006, hate mail inundated me. At the office, I received a package containing my books sawn in half with a power tool. Someone sent excrement. I received an all-caps death threat. The prime minister of Canada criticized me, and so did the premier of Quebec. My newspaper threw me under the bus, and I sank into a clinical depression that lasted two years. While I was sick, my newspaper ordered me back to work and then fired me. After I regained my health, I couldn’t bear the thought of an editor assigning me to another school shooting. I took a job teaching journalism at a small liberal arts university in the Maritimes, dividing my time between Fredericton and Toronto, where my husband, Norman, lived and worked.
The colleagues I left behind in the trenches were initially pitying, then curious, and finally envious.
What? You teach three classes a week?
Me: Sometimes two.
What? You get sabbaticals?
Me: Yup.
My first six-month sabbatical bestowed that biggest luxury of all for a journalist — time. Then my literary agent phoned. We hadn’t spoken in some time. Any books in the works, he asked. Nah, I told him. But the moment I hung up, a glimmer of an idea popped into my head. Food. Travel. Maybe Sam?
I’ve always been a foodie. I’m the granddaughter and daughter of restaurateurs. In the 1930s, my maternal grandmother ran a Western-style restaurant in the small Ontario town of Woodstock. My father’s flagship restaurant, Bill Wong’s, was a Montreal landmark. Dad had opened the first Chinese restaurant outside the safe confines of Chinatown in what was then Canada’s largest city. My Montreal-born father, an engineer by profession, couldn’t cook to save his life — we had to hide the good pots from him so he wouldn’t scorch them. But he was a savvy businessman who hired the best Chinese chef he could find from our ancestral village back in China and, crucially, made him a partner. Dad eventually opened five restaurants and made his first million before he was 40.
It seems quaint now, but his innovations included takeout menus and free delivery. His biggest culinary creation, however, was Montreal’s — and perhaps the world’s — first all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, which he launched in the mid-'60s after dining at an all-you-can-eat roast beef restaurant in Toronto. When he proposed the concept to his four partners, they predicted Bill Wong’s would go bankrupt. Dad prevailed. In addition to dozens of Chinese dishes, he served salads and, yes, roast beef. He scorned fortune cookies, which aren’t even Chinese, and hired a French pastry chef to make strawberry tarts and Black Forest cake with real whipped cream. Lineups stretched out the door. Now you can find Chinese buffets everywhere from Helsinki to Beijing.
Unlike Dad, I loved to eat and cook. I enjoyed reading cookbooks. My idea of relaxing was inviting a couple of friends for dinner. I had a memory not for names or numbers but for meals, flavours, and ingredients. Starting back in 1972 when I was 19, I also became interested in the impact of politics and economics on food cultures. That year I became the first Canadian, and one of only two Westerners, to study at Peking University since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Our campus mess hall was a dimly lit, minimally heated warehouse-like structure of concrete floors and whitewashed walls. We students sat on sawhorse-style benches, hunched over bowls of shockingly execrable food. Meat was rationed. If we got any at all, it was a tiny piece of pork fat the size of a postage stamp, with skin and hair still attached. Rice, also rationed, was greyish, with broken grains. I learned to chew carefully to avoid chipping a tooth on bits of gravel. Those were the good meals. The bad meals consisted of bangzi mian zhou (cornmeal gruel) or baseball-sized lumps of unseasoned steamed cornmeal called wotou.
I remember, however, my aunt in the nearby city of Tianjin making me crisp spring rolls with her rationed cooking oil. I also remember the fiery kung pao chicken with crunchy peanuts at the Long March Restaurant across from campus. When I dropped a brick on my foot and broke a toe during the students’ weekly stint of mandatory physical labour, Norman thoughtfully brought me dinner from the Long March (in an aluminum container; this was before China had Chinese takeout). My future husband, the only American draft dodger in China, couldn’t cook, but he figured the way to a woman’s heart — mine, at least — was through her stomach. He was right. Women’s brains are “significantly more responsive to romantic [pictures] after a meal than prior to it,” according to a neuroimaging study published in the journal Appetite. “Across cultures, food and romantic reward are closely intertwined.”
For the record, Norman and I have been married for more than 40 years.
After studying in China for most of the 1970s, I became a business reporter. In 1988, I became the Beijing bureau chief for a Canadian newspaper, in time to cover the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. During my six years as a foreign correspondent, I travelled — and ate — in all 23 of China’s provinces and five autonomous regions, including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. I even persuaded an editor to let me write a magazine piece about enrolling as the first student at a new cooking institute in Sichuan province. Impossible as it seems now, newspapers were so flush back then that one of my perks was a personal chef. Chef Mu’s Chinese food was too salty and too oily. However, he had been trained by the French embassy and could make spinach soufflés, medium-rare filet mignon, and tarte au citron. A Chinese chef cooking French food was a harbinger of the globalization to come.
Excerpt pp. 13-16 (from beginning of prologue to “harbinger of the globalization to come” was published in Apron Strings: Navigating Food and Family in France, Italy, and China © 2017 by Jan Wong. Reproduced by permission of Goose Lane Editions.
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