Authentic Chinese Food
First, a moment of silence for the eight lives lost in the Atlanta shooting. I’ve read that a few of the families aren’t comfortable with their names being released, so I won’t list them here, but I am thinking of each and every one of them. Someday I might have words to speak about how wounding and revealing this moment has been for me as an Asian woman, but I don’t have the distance yet. I hope these eight souls find peace. I hope we create better lives for the people who are still here.
A lake of water lilies, seen from a bridge. A woman in an orange dress poses among them.
The last time I was in China, I was walking around a mall with my cousin and excitedly pointed to a restaurant advertising hand-pulled noodles. I told her about the delicious hand-pulled noodles I’d found in Chicago’s Chinatown and nudged us toward the restaurant, but she stopped me. With a laugh, she told me that the hand-pulled noodles I ate in Chicago were probably more authentic than the hand-pulled noodles I would eat in Nanjing. She explained that it was more likely that a chef from Lanzhou, the city most associated with hand-pulled noodles, would open a restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, than Nanjing, China; the Nanjing noodle guy was probably a local who claimed to sell authentic hand-pulled noodles as a marketing tactic.
If this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s because this doesn’t make any sense unless you have some background on migration within China and immigration to the United States. Within China, it’s still relatively rare that people move provinces. There are historical and legal factors I don’t fully understand that go into this, like the hukou system. Short version: it would be strange and difficult for a noodle master from Lanzhou to move to Nanjing. It would be less strange for a noodle master from Lanzhou to move to the United States, where he might find success opening a noodle shop in a Chinatown.
I remember standing on a mall escalator, teasing out this conundrum — Chinese noodles more authentic in Chicago than in… China. My American brain had grown up in Chinatowns, where my mom would poke me and say, “She’s from Fujian,” or “He’s from Guangdong,” and we would get our hair cut by nice Vietnamese ladies who communicated with us through glossy magazine photos of model hair and then gossiped in Vietnamese to each other for the rest of the haircut. In a Chinatown, everyone is from somewhere else, and that somewhere else isn’t even statistically likely to be China. That’s what the United States does — it collapses diaspora and identity into one community. You can argue that’s good. You can argue that’s bad. Either way, that’s what I had internalized. Without realizing it, I had collapsed China into China, but as my cousin pointed out, Nanjing is not Lanzhou.
What then, does “authentic” mean? Every non-white person I know has grappled with this question. We even police each other, claiming language, food, family, culture, religion, holidays, knowledge of customs, as markers of being “____ enough.” We try to disqualify each other from being "____ enough” for not speaking the heritage language or not understanding the traditions well enough to pass them down to our children. My five-year-old nephew can read and write Chinese better than I can, and therefore, I’m not Chinese enough. In the United States, having my face means I’m Chinese enough. I speak Mandarin, but the Nanjing dialect, and with an American accent. Is that authentic? Is that Chinese enough?
But these are unfair markers. Living in the United States means forced assimilation, and that means factors out of our control beat our language, our culture, our food, out of us. My mom says I came home from kindergarten and asked her to stop speaking to me in Chinese because the kids at school made fun of me. At five-years-old, this country was already trying to erase a perceived difference. We remained a bilingual household, and I don’t remember this happening. I’m sure there are countless other instances of this erasure and forced assimilation that I can’t recall. Because of this, anything I’ve held onto is enough. Anything that survives this country is enough.
The curious thing is, what survives the United States is not what survives in our homelands. What we leave behind continues to grow without us to witness it. Take the hand-pulled noodles, for example. (Everything circles back to noodles, for me.) In the U.S., hand-pulled noodles became a viral sensation. This craft, somewhat common in China, became special in the United States. If you could pull noodles, you could make artfully produced viral videos, and then you could make money. At Haidilao, there’s a noodle dancer who literally dances while pulling noodles tableside to cheers. When I bragged to my cousin (different cousin, this time) about seeing the noodle dancer in LA, he told me they stopped doing this in China’s Haidilao because it was old news. We crave a taste of home in the United States, while taste moves forward in the homeland.
Even my mother, who is by most measures more Chinese than I am, has experienced this. We were in an old CD shop with my aunt, and my mom was spinning the stacks looking for a particular artist. When my aunt found out who, she began to laugh and told my mom that her taste was old: stuck in her high school years, fossilized in the China she left. When she is in the United States, my mother chases what is Chinese, craving the fruit of her childhood. When she is in China, my mother chases what she remembers, craving the food of her memory. Sometimes nobody makes the dish that way anymore. Sometimes my uncles go to remote corners of the city to find the one stand still making that particular food.
A quote from the Xi’an Famous Foods cookbook captures this beautifully:
“I had this image of China, frozen in time for seventeen years, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that the Xi’an I knew is gone.”
I’ve come to believe that authenticity is the search for memory. It is the desperate wish to make something beloved come alive again in exactly the way you remember. The Nanjing of my mother’s childhood is gone, her high school replaced with a factory, only the front gate still standing. The Nanjing of my imagination is gone, surviving only in the stories told to me by family members. What we make authentic in the United States is something that no longer exists in that form in China. This is beautiful, and this is sad. This is also the way of culture, but instead of being passed from generation to generation, with traditions falling away and new traditions being started, our culture is being passed across ocean to ocean. Some things are forgotten. Some things are discarded. Some things survive, and our memory makes that feel authentic.
When my mom tells me to find her some “authentic Chinese food,” I know exactly what she means. Find her the taste of memory.
