In the Year of the Rooster

I had been told there was no reason to spend Chinese New Year in China. “Everybody stays at home with their families.” The subtext was that everybody goes home to be with their families and I had seen enough mainland movies to know that train stations were crowded to the point of nightmare at this time of year.

What I didn’t know was  that this migration lasts for forty days and in 2017 was estimated to consist of 2.98 billion travelers. An online English language newspaper said it would finally be over by February 21 and I was leaving exactly one week after that.

I like crowds but the idea of almost three billion people taking to the road, rails, and sky was daunting. Within less than two weeks, my rides on the Shenzhen metro had changed. At first I was traveling with commuters and shoppers who never left a child, a pregnant woman, or an elderly person standing. The trains were pleasantly full and riders were relaxed and friendly. “Shenzhen, “ I told myself more than once, “is a claustrophobe’s dream.”

And that it was. Streets were wide, coffee shops had outdoor seating, public parks were gigantic, and even the shopping malls were civilized places with spacious hallways flooded with daylight and blessed with public seating. In this city of 792 square miles, space was easy to come by and it seemed to have been the guiding principle of Shenzhen’s urban planners. After a week there, I crossed the border into Hong Kong, got as far as Kowloon, and came back shaking; the number of people on the MTR felt unbearable after seven days of being uncrushed in this other city.

But then the suitcases, cartons, and bundles appeared on the Shenzhen metro and a whole other way of traveling began. My hotel was near a bus station and the streets of my neighborhood were studded with clumps of travelers and their baggage, sitting near the sidewalks, waiting for their trip to begin. I thought of how crowded the terminal must be, shuddered, and kept walking.

People left Shenzhen; people came to Shenzhen. After the holiday began, the metro demographic became quite obviously rural. Passengers had loud conversations, their clothing was utilitarian rather than stylish, and even the women had developed the most impressive techniques of manspread that I had ever seen. While the people leaving Shenzhen always left the metro in an almost empty state when it reached a railway station, the new travelers seemed to have more tenuous destinations. They sprawled and chatted and watched their children enjoy the ride, looking at those unfortunates who remained standing with the unmistakable silent message, “I’ve got my seat. Sucks to be you.”

One unforgettable morning when the migration was in its first week, I changed trains at a railway station to save time on a trip to the border. Few people got off the car closest to me and caught in a river of people, I was squeezed on board. And more and more passengers shoehorned themselves on before the doors finally closed so that we were a solid mass of bodies, pushed together with no millimeter between us. This was beyond MTR crowds in Hong Kong. This was the stuff that disaster movies were made of and the pressure per square inch on my body was almost bone-breaking. A mother next to me made a protective barrier of both arms around her small daughter; it took her minutes to get that position in place.

And then little by little, the car emptied out with nobody fainting or being trampled to death and my thoughts of traveling outside of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen area ebbed with those departing passengers. Small matter that a train trip from Shenzhen to Guanzhou took a mere sixty minutes if those minutes were spent on a high-speed sardine can.

As transit became more populated, my neighborhood grew emptier. The convenience stores where I bought large bottles of drinking water slammed down their gates over locked doors. Restaurants turned off their lights in a slow procession of closures. Traffic was sparse on streets where I had feared for my life on first arrival and often I was one of perhaps three pedestrians. Granville Whale’s Cafe, where I drank charcoal coffee in the morning and chatted with the UK-educated manager, went dark. The flaky little pastries filled with bean curd that were sold from street stalls were all gone. In fact everything that I had loved about my neighborhood was gone.

I began to appreciate the virtues of the local shopping mall. Starbucks still sold its lackluster coffee, the Buy It supermarket provided large bottles of water, and a Hunan restaurant on one of the upper floors kept me well fed with its food that was more incendiary than most Thai food is. On Saturday mornings I would have breakfast at a Hong Kong import, Cafe de Coral, and watch families stroll past in the hallway, all beautifully dressed, Shenzhen boulevardiers out to regard their world. The Haiya Mega Mall was my neighborhood’s community center and I learned to respect its function and to use it without my usual disdain for shopping palaces. It was keeping me alive.

When my neighborhood first began to darken, I took my customary Monday morning bag of laundry to be sent out into the world at large. Every week I did that and every week it returned within a day, every last item ironed dry and in sealed cellophane bags. Laundry is my indulgence as a traveler. I don’t do it myself because the end result usually smells like a mushroom farm and it is always wrinkled. Shenzhen was the apex of any laundry I had ever encountered and my clothes had never looked so good.

But that Monday night I came back to that same bag of dirty clothes, still unwashed. “No,” the girl at the desk explained, “New Year.”

I found that the mall's branch of Uniqlo had underwear that fit me, and H&M had cheap socks in packs of six, but after I had spent forty dollars in that first week without laundry, my homestead upbringing took over. As I turned the low wattage hair dryer that was attached to the bathroom wall upon sink-laundered underwear and dresses that had previously been wrapped in a micro-fiber towel to absorb moisture, I felt a tiny surge of self-sufficiency that came with a healthy dose of self-ridicule. “Let it never be said,” I told myself, “that I don’t know how to properly celebrate Chinese New Year.”

How Not to Prepare for Two Months in Shenzhen:Dos and Don'ts from a Woman who Was Clueless

1) Do not take a Google Chromebook. (I did.)
2) Do create a Yahoo email address and give it to family, friends, and the airline that will take you to China. Also to any banks whom you might use, or to businesses that you pay online. (I didn't.)
3) Do not expect to use your credit cards easily. Chinese credit cards are linked to UnionPay and yours almost certainly is not. Make sure your hotel will accept a foreign card before you leave or expect to use agoda.com constantly. (I was lucky. Mine did.)
4) Do bring cash, lots of it. You can carry a small fortune without fear of theft in that city, with reasonable caution recommended. (I did.)
5) Do hunt down maps of Shenzhen before leaving the U.S. because you will find none that you will be able to read within the city. (I didn't.)
6) And DO download as many books as you can. There is one (1) English language bookstore. (Thank you, Eon Books.) (I didn't and therefore learned to read very slowly for two months.)
7) Do put a translation app on your phone and carry a small phrasebook with you in case of emergency. (I used my little phrasebook often.)
8) Do buy the only guidebook available for Shenzhen and download it to your phone or ipad. Yes, you will have to buy it from Amazon and yes it is outdated. But it has parks, museums, streets, and other essentials in Chinese characters, along with the characters for stored-value subway card which you are going to need. (I did that--wish I had also bought the taxi guide to Shenzhen. You probably should.)
9) Do find out where the nearest branch of the Bank of China is in relation to your hotel. That's the only bank where you will be able to use your ATM card. (I didn't and was helped by a very kind brace of bank employees in a smaller bank.)
10) Do make sure you have Hong Kong dollars for an Octopus card when you make your first border crossing. (I didn't.)
11) If you go between November and May, do take sweaters. There is no central heating. A warm coat won't be a bad idea either. (I didn't. Thank you, H&M.)
12) If you are there for Chinese New Year, do not have silly prejudices against shopping malls because they will keep you alive when everything else shuts down. (Without malls, I would have had to buy very small bottles of drinking water from my hotel. And by the way, thank you, Starbucks.)
13) Do accept any and all offers of help from Shenzhen residents. They are the kindest people you may ever meet. (I did.)
!4) Do realize that Whatsapp is a fantastic telephone connection and make sure the people you love best have that app before you leave. (Nope, didn't do that either.)
!5) Do not expect to use Facebook or Gmail unless you find a Hyatt. Do not expect internet service to be anything other than spotty in your hotel unless you are a deluxe traveler.
16) Do use taxis to get to destinations far afield. They're cheap if your hotel staff negotiates the fare for you. Otherwise you'll spend at least 1/3 of your time on the metro. (I did. Great for people watching but those nine subway lines don't go everywhere and so neither did I.)
17) Do not think three months in Beijing is adequate preparation for two months in Shenzhen. (I did.)

Back from Another Universe

Last Wednesday I returned from the most puzzling and isolated journey of my life. I'm still sorting it all out and am even more slowly resuming my usual life in Seattle. After two months of using five phrases in Chinese and having limited conversations in my native language, without connection to google or other staples of my internet existence, with news that was usually a week old by the time I received it, I'm still catching up on every conceivable level that I can think of.

Like everyone I know, I was reeling from the presidential election and its hazy yet horrifying consequences. I thought about it almost every waking moment, read the NYT and news sources on Twitter to the exclusion of practically anything else, and Facebook was my lifeline to friends who were in the same state of mind.

And then I went to Shenzhen, where I was cut off from everything but whatsapp, yahoo (ghastly news source), and occasional bursts of gmail through an AT&T app on my phone. Deprogrammed, definitely, and it was painful.

I am able to travel alone because every night I put photos and updates on Facebook. Family and friends respond and the conversation never stops. Without that connection, I felt adrift for quite a while--well to be honest, for the entire sixty days I was gone.

On whatsapp, a few wonderful people sent news and photos and messages about daily living. Without them, I would have withered.

Meanwhile I realized that in preparing for my trip, I had made every conceivable mistake. Details come later for anyone as clueless as I. Let it be enough to say that three months in Beijing was not really helpful when translated to two months in Shenzhen.

Even so, that city is compelling and (for me) seductive. While I was there, I wrote every day and took more than a thousand snapshots of what I saw. I struggled to get a grip on what it was to live there and where its core might be. I still don't know, but I will spend a lot of time now that I'm away from it searching through the barrage of sensory detail and hours on the metro and journeys through its streets. This blog is where I'll try to make some coherent sense out of my time away.

What I do realize already, and what I am grateful for, is my time in Shenzhen has given me back my life, and I won't let it be taken hostage again. Letting a madman control the narrative is a sure road to madness. Balance is essential and there are more crucial elements in being alive than consumption by politics. I'll keep being aware and active but that can't come first. First is family, friends, food, long walks, welcoming the beauty and pleasure of the world around me.

Glad to be back.

At the Edge of the Middle Kingdom

What would you expect from a city that sprang from a small town back in 1982? Thirty-four years ago there was a sprawl of military structures on the border. Today Shenzhen is rumored to be the richest city in China; “If you want to feel poor, go to Shenzhen” is the ending or a modern day proverb. It stretches for over 700 square miles and is divided into ten districts, four of them recently added.

There are two central business districts, one which has supplanted the original. There are beaches (one of them four miles of white sand) and mountains and what claims to be the world’s largest bookstore. Although geographically in Cantonese territory, Shenzhen is a Mandarin-speaking city with a trilingual subway system. Citibank ATMs are found in 7-Eleven and Starbucks isn’t hard to find.

Two of its beaches are a little over 800 feet from one of my favorite Hong Kong islands, Peng Chau. A subway whisks travelers from the airport to the border in an hour, which is about what it takes to go from JFK to Manhattan. Trains leave every twenty minutes to Guangzhou and the journey takes an hour--no reservations necessary.

Zara provides clothes for well-padded Western women, just like in Bangkok, but Cantonese food is harder to find than the cuisine from other parts of China. Food streets are common.

The Shenzhen Library has a black granite waterfall wall that can be seen from the second floor and a collection of books in English on the third. Western magazines are easily bought, except for The Economist and those of that ilk, and there is an English language newspaper that costs one yuan, which is I think somewhere around fifteen cents.

I began to write down places I wanted to go and how to get there in a notebook and had to stop after an hour. This city is going to be as surprising to me as Bangkok ever was, and probably every bit as frustrating. It even has illegal taxi drivers for that ultimate blood pressure elevator.

I can’t wait.

One Man, One Act at a Time

Yesterday I went to Chinatown and as I walked through it, I saw a small Asian woman carrying a black garbage bag across Jackson, with no regard for traffic lights. A huge collection of bags and a heavily laden large wheeled suitcase waited for her at the curb and she was rather small. After I went to the bank, she had brought everything to the opposite corner of the street and was carrying it, a bag or two at a time, down to the bus stop at Bartell Drugs.

That was my next destination and as I followed in the woman’s wake, I saw a tall familiar figure walk toward me, pulling a very large, very deep black wagon. “Marcus, how are you? And shouldn’t your wagon be red? Tis the season after all.”

“I bought it for her,” Marcus replied, stopping near me and the mountain of bags. He upended the wagon and drained the rainwater that had dampened it on his walk. “She carries those bags around every day so I went down to Home Depot and picked one up.”

“You’re a good man,” I said and he answered, “Making up for past transgressions.” The small woman had returned for more belongings and Marcus said, “Here. Put them in this.” She swept past him without slackening her pace and walked back with another burden of bags.

“This is for you,” I said, “he bought it for you.” I reached out to touch her arm and she spat “No!,” like an angry cat. As she walked away, I said “I can’t speak Chinese,” and Marcus said “She speaks English.”

“I should leave you alone. She knows you and maybe she’ll listen,” I said and Marcus’s response was “No. Don’t go.”

He is a tall man in his midyears and although his smile is contagious and his voice is gentle, he takes up a fair amount of space and he is black. “Maybe she’s frightened,” I told myself, “Maybe having a woman with him will make her more at ease.” I stayed.

After minutes of quiet persuasion, finally she stopped, turned in Marcus’s direction and responded to him. “I can’t get that thing on the bus.”

“Yes, you can,” I argued, “it’s like a wheelchair. You can put it on the ramp.”

Marcus held out a new red rucksack that Santa might well envy. “This too,” and he dropped it in the wagon. “And here. I just found this on the street. It’s not mine. Take it,” and he held out a folded, obviously new, bill, its denomination carefully hidden.

“Please take the wagon. You’re a little woman and this is all so heavy,” I said as softly as I could. She glanced at me and then back at Marcus. “He is a good man,” I told her and she nodded almost imperceptibly.

Her eyes assessed him and were met by that glorious smile. “Take it,” he repeated in a tone you would use with a frightened child. He put the money in her fingers and she didn’t drop it. When Marcus picked up some of her bags and put them in the wagon, she didn’t object.

I left them and went on to finish my errands. When I walked out of the drug store some minutes later, there was a red wagon, filled with bags, a red rucksack still empty, and a large wheeled suitcase, all belonging to one of the figures that leaned on a metal bar that served as bus stop seating.

One man, one woman, a cold street, and possessions that once had obviously known a place to hold  them--I walk past this almost every day and do not help. Marcus didn’t only help; he looked, found a solution, and didn’t step on that woman’s dignity. And although I may not find his grace within me to conduct  that same sort of action, I know I have to try.

I hate the term angel when applied to humans, and saint is not in my lexicon either, but I know goodness when I see it and from the first minute I saw him, Marcus has radiated nothing but good. He was sitting on the landing of the International Apartments when I first moved into the building and introduced himself with that radiant, sweet smile. We found that we share a passion for travel and had chats in the hallway based on that.

He invited a friend who had recently gone off drugs and needed a home to stay in his apartment while he was on a journey. The man took everything Marcus owned and broke a window before he left with the last of the loot. “He even took my leather jacket,” Marcus told me, “I had just bought it. It cost me 400 dollars. I hope I don’t see him because I want to kill him.”

I had just returned from Asia with an editing payment and it was Christmas. I put 100 dollars in a card, wrote a little note, and left it with the building manager to give to Marcus when he saw him. He returned it with thanks.

And after that, several times, a bouquet waited for me outside my apartment door, from Marcus.

Still my neighbor, in a neighborhood that is still mine, this quiet, kind, compassionate man is a signpost without noise, goodness without stint.

Apocalypse Day After Tomorrow?

At the end of this coming week, I will turn 68. Whether I celebrate this occasion or not depends on what happens in three more days.

My birthday has always come four days after an election but I have never felt as though that would blot out my happiness at entering a new year. This year is different. This year threatens to darken many of the ones that follow it and I have been sickened by this for months.

For me my 67th year has been one of mixed blessings. There have been too many deaths, but on the other hand I received the friendship of three girls, two small and one almost grown, who make me feel hopeful about the state of the world to come. For more than a quarter of 2016  I went through my days without smiling, but during that time I was sustained by my children, my friends, and a cousin whom I hadn't laid eyes on for half a century. Later that same cousin and I ate ice cream and rode a carousel together in Manhattan, the city where we both were born months apart. Her renewed presence in my life has been a gift and an unexpected one, which is always the best kind of present.

I discovered the excitement of traveling in my own country this year and that was another joyful surprise. New York and Los Angeles are as much fun to explore as Bangkok and Beijing. We have not yet become a homogeneous country and for that we can thank immigrants. Please give us more. They, like my grandparents and great-grandparents in the past century, bring texture and vibrancy to a country that has always been sustained by its new waves of population. Current threats of wall-building nauseate me to the point that I feel waves of vertigo. This is not what the United States does. From an economic standpoint alone, this is madness. And from a cultural standpoint, all anyone needs to do is go to Jackson Heights in Queens or Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and feel buoyed up by the energy and life that comes with new arrivals to our country.

Facebook's annoying little yearly memories were particularly poignant today. Four years ago, I posted exultant cheers at President Obama's swift victory, one that had been by no means assured. On Tuesday night, what will be said? The terror of what might happen is tarnishing the afternoon sun and the glint of light on leaves that are still green and shimmering through the window that I face right now.

By no means will this election be the end of the horror that has come home in the past year. No matter who wins, the repercussions will be difficult. Victory will not be a band-aid no matter who achieves it. We are too divided a country to lapse into any sort of peaceful complacency.

I won't be in the United States for the inaugural ceremonies but I won't stay in the country where I will spend the beginning of next year. One of the other gifts that I received this year is the understanding that I do have roots, and they are found in the eastern corner of the U.S. It's an odd thing to learn as I approach the last quarter of my life (if I'm lucky). But when I make shoofly pie, a dish invented by my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors who have lived in the Lehigh Valley for three hundred years, when I laugh with a woman whose blood and humor and joy of life are all things that we share in spite of fifty years of distance, when I think of the energy that I get only on the Eastern seaboard, I know this is a true fact of my life.

This is my country and that is my corner of it. And that is a present that may well change my life, once again. Whatever happens on Tuesday may blight my birthday celebrations but it won't send me to Mexico or Cambodia. It may make me and many other people like me bitterly unhappy but it won't make us quit. We are all better than the stereotype and it is time to prove that, win, lose, or draw.

Back to Life as I Know and Love It

Almost two months ago my dental debacle was completed. Suddenly I had my complete face back again, smile, grimaces, and all. My world enlarged to its normal size once again, no longer truncated by missing teeth and I reclaimed my usual enthusiasm for life and all it has to offer.

It was a source of complete exhilaration to talk and laugh without covering my mouth, speaking to strangers and going outside of what had become my comfort zone. Within a month I was on a plane to New York to reacquaint myself with one of the people who had been a mainstay of kindness during the past months, a cousin whom I hadn't seen in fifty years.

I'm still warmed by our visit,  by the friendship that we're claiming, and by the ties with family that were never a part of my life when I was growing up. It's a gift that I never expected and am overjoyed to have received.

Along with this came a rekindled love of the city that I was born in, in a section I'd never explored before. Although Manhattan has become bland, Queens is more vibrant than any other part of America that I have yet seen. I wandered through the Chinese city of Flushing, the invigorating diversity of Jackson Heights, and the windblown shore of Far Rockaway, and began planning my next visit long before I checked in for my flight back to Seattle.

Los Angeles is my next destination where I'll be staying in the still-Mexican community of Boyle Heights, exploring that as well as many other parts of that far-flung and exciting city. Although summer is almost gone in Seattle, I'm extending it through these journeys, chasing the heat and light that I incompletely enjoyed from April to August.

But my withdrawal from the world and my rediscovery of it has pointed out a very jolting truth. I have lived in my new home and have explored my new neighborhood since the beginning of this year. I've enjoyed both the house and the area around it but the novelty is wearing off. It's been replaced by a feeling of familiarity and comfort; I've found "my" corner of the living room, "my" favorite walks and places to eat. I'm beginning to recognize people in the neighborhood and we greet each other as we pass by. And as this began to happen, I began checking up on different cities on Craigslist.

"Philadelphia!" I began announcing to friends. "I can afford it and it's only an hour or two from New York."

Last night I lay awake, juggling finances in my head, trying to figure out the most economical way to move me and the cat across country. Then this morning something slapped me hard. Every time I begin to feel at home somewhere, I look for ways to move away from it.

I have no idea why this is so deep-rooted but I've felt this way ever since I can remember. It's not just a flaw. It's an illness. And it really has to stop.

Traveling doesn't mean a prelude to uprooting--or it shouldn't. I've called myself a geographic trollop but that's too gentle a description. In truth this is more akin to geographic nymphomania and it isn't cooling with age.

But it is time to let myself learn that comfort is not a prison sentence and that a trip has a beginning and an end, both of which are equally satisfying. As I approach 68, this is my goal--to go somewhere, enjoy it, and come home without saying "I want to live there."

Shaking on the Inside

I feel sick to my stomach and it would take very little to make me begin to cry. When I look at my hands, they are steady but inside I'm trembling. I should be hopeful but there have been too many glitches in the past four and a half months to keep me from feeling that way. Instead I'm scared, perhaps not to death, but closer to that than I would like to feel.

My two bottom front teeth were pulled in early April and it is only now, in early August, that they may be replaced. This has been a time of inertia. I finally even stopped writing because all that came to the page was my missing teeth. There are places I haven't gone, people I haven't seen, and things I haven't done because I have felt disfigured.

It doesn't matter that friends have said they haven't noticed the gap in my mouth. The most difficult thing I have done perhaps ever was to leave the house and speak to people without clapping my hand over my mouth. And yes, people have noticed, in the same way that I in the past have noticed other people's missing teeth, with a mixture of pity and revulsion.

At first I castigated myself for being vain but that isn't really fair. This has been like walking through the world with any sort of visible disfigurement; it's not like leaving the house without wearing eye makeup. The best that could be said was that this was temporary; the worst is that it was not temporary enough.

Other people have said they have friends and family who have gone through the same thing, with a gap in their mouths for months. It seems to be normal dentistry. But if that's true, this is a profession that needs serious revamping.

There is a temporary disposable denture for these situations. I've read about it in Dentistry Today. Apparently my dentist has not, since she insists that any denture used in the beginning will then become the permanent one. I've stopped discussing it with her, but if I ever see a dentist again, that will be at the very top of my agenda before submitting to care.

I have gone to this office before, eager to have a permanent crown or this same damned denture put in my mouth, only to learn that something else went wrong and there will be another delay. This is why I'm shaking now. If I go tomorrow and learn once again that this isn't ready, I am truly afraid that I will hurt someone.

Wish me luck, please. If all goes well, I'll be smiling, if I can only remember how.

Sentient? Hell Yes...and Divine

“Loving is a habit and takes practice, like any other,” Martha Gellhorn said when she rescued a small cat on a West Indian island. She bought it a little basket and carried it with her as she hopped about by boat in the Atlantic during WWII. Before flying back to the States, she realized the absurdity of what she had done and gave the cat to an Air Force base while realizing it had been much happier in its original forest home.

A judge recently decided that a dog was a sentient being, not a lesser creature, which is a fine thing to recognize, and high time too. But still that dog is subjugated to the whims of its owner. What and when to eat, where to sleep, even the elimination of its body waste is on somebody else’s schedule--and then there’s the true crusher. Dogs and other animals aren’t admitted to into heaven. Even Buddhism allows that to happen only after a human incarnation, although dogs, far more than many people, exemplify the Buddha nature like nobody’s business.

Cats of course go way beyond sentience into omniscience and divinity, a state that no doubt existed long before humans could record their speech in writing. Among modern deities, Shiva is the one they are most closely related to, but cats would rather destroy worlds that others have created than to take that energy to create one themselves. That is what humans are for, and lurking in the dispassionate gaze of any cat is the sad truth that we are doing a piss-poor job in that ongoing act of creation.  Still we are the best that they’ve got for the task and they continue with their silent directions which we ineptly follow.

People who dislike cats are the ones who are most closely attuned to the power that felines wield, although they fail to articulate that vague knowledge. “Dogs love their owners; cats tolerate them,” is usually as close as they get to voicing their unexamined knowledge that cats rule the universe. And what’s more, cats are certainly not going to let us into whatever heaven they may have constructed.

Like Martha Gellhorn, my life feels incomplete unless it includes a cat for me to love. Still I have never really believed that my love is reciprocated in the same way that I bestow it upon any of the felines that have shared my bed and board. When I do their bidding, they emit approval that at times I can almost convince myself is affection. Even the small black feral kitten that I adopted in Bangkok never gave me the same regard that he had for his counterpart, another small black kitten who found him and became his partner in crime. I was always the warm lap, the pair of opposable thumbs, the imperfect instrument who made sure that he had what he wanted.

In The Summer Book, Tove Jansson just about sums it up when she describes the hopeless passion that a little girl feels for an impervious tomcat. For a long time I thought this was the perfect depiction of the flawed nature of human love, but now I know I was wrong. It’s a recognition of the despair that we feel when we realize that our divinities are impervious to human demands and desires, especially the feline variety.

Desperately Seeking Fried Rice

Some days all you want to eat is simple food and you don’t want to cook it for yourself. Whether you call it diner food, bistro food, or street food, it’s all based on comfort. Why else would a grilled cheese sandwich prevail as a popular menu choice well into the 21^st Century? Why is macaroni and cheese making a sudden resurgence in chicken and waffle joints across Seattle, if not the country?

When I lived in Thailand, an American friend and I would play a sad and masochistic little game called What Will You Eat First When You Go Back Home. Surrounded as we were by one of the world’s greatest cuisines that waited for us right outside any hour of any day, we had humble yearnings for our introductory meal. “Chicken fried steak,” was my friend’s usual answer while mine was “A meat loaf sandwich.”

Simple food can’t be confused with food that’s indifferently prepared. Nothing is more disgusting than a burnt grilled cheese sandwich or mac and cheese that’s soggy, except perhaps a meat loaf sandwich that’s been made with overly fat ground beef. Simple dishes are perhaps the most demanding of all food choices, because they rely on only a few ingredients without a lot of culinary flourishes.

Like most foreigners in Thailand, I found the gateway drugs to what became my lifelong street food addiction were dishes that were comforting, easy to find and to pronounce, and somehow familiar: wok-fried rice and noodles with chicken and soy sauce. Gradually my choices became more adventurous but these street food staples remained as two of my favorites. The stinging miasma of garlic and chile sizzling in a hot wok would lead me to the places that would give me what I wanted, where I knew I’d find my Bangkok version of simple, satisfying comfort.

It had been a long cold post-holiday season here in the Pacific Northwest and as we neared the end of January, I needed Thai fried rice. In Seattle, this isn’t an easy dish to find. The almost toxic cloud of garlic and chile frying at high heat would cause an entire restaurant to flee the premises and wok cookery isn’t just an art—it’s hard, hot, and painful work. Many other things are much easier to prepare than fried rice, and that’s what most people make: curries, grilled meat, and braised Sino-Thai dishes. I couldn’t blame them but nonetheless, in the same perverse and nostalgic spirit that prompted me to occasionally search in Bangkok for a hamburger that wasn’t a Big Mac, I wanted khao pat that would taste as though it had been made on a sidewalk in deepest Thonburi.

To find that, I needed to find a place with woks, and Thai Tom in the University district of Seattle came instantly to mind. The owner had found an old diner and kept it intact. Cooks worked behind the counter in full view of the customers who were seated nearby on stools. Woks were at center stage and when the place first opened, people crowded to the place, eager to watch the spectacle of open flames shooting menacingly above the guy who was making their food.

Now there’s more than one wok behind the counter and each one is smaller than the original that I remembered from twenty years ago. The joint is still hopping. I showed up well after the lunch rush and two cooks were still in motion, which was a good sign. I ordered my rice and watched and waited.

“How hot do you want it?” the waitress asked me and I said, “Normal. Just please bring me some fish sauce with chili and I’ll fix it myself.” She ladled what I’d asked for from a container behind the counter and handed me a little bowl. The chili was so finely diced that it looked almost like powder and the fish sauce smelled old. I braced myself.

The cook tossed a handful of sliced pork into the wok and let it sizzle, then added an egg and tossed it about for a while. Then he scooped out enough rice to feed several starving orphans and dumped it into the wok. There was a spurt of obligatory flame and then he turned his attention to someone speaking to him from the kitchen. Then he returned to a short burst of moving the rice around the wok and then it all went on a plate—my plate.

It wasn’t the worst fried rice I’ve ever had. That honor goes to Phnom Penh Noodle House, which once brought me a plate of it that had been scorched. It was however a plate of rice that had been heated, not fried. There were hunks of warm chicken, a slice or two of onion, and some basil leaves. I could, and have, done better myself at home, and I left most of it uneaten.

It took a while before I had the strength to resume my quest but at last a day dawned that was bright and sunny, daffodils and crocus decided to bloom, and my optimism returned. On a whim I stopped at Song Phang Kong on Jackson Street, the one place in Seattle that is so much like a Thai noodle shop that I always expect to see motorcycle taxis waiting outside it when I leave.

I’ve had good food here, sausage both Thai- and Lao-style, papaya salad with a generous dash of fermented fish, and chicken that had been grilled over charcoal. I knew that the lady who had presided over the kitchen had died but her husband was still in place. Although fried rice wasn’t on his menu, fried noodles were, so I asked if he could make me what I was longing for. “Yes,” he said.

Before disappearing into the kitchen, he made me a Thai iced tea that was almost sinful, tart with lemon and tamarind and topped off with a thick layer of half-and-half. Traditional? No. Delicious? Absobloodylutely. My hopes soared a little higher and were nourished by the view of one of his arms, visible through the kitchen doorway, moving in the St. Vitus dance of a seasoned wok user. My only reservation was the rice he had taken into the kitchen, scooped out from deep within a rice cooker. Perhaps, I told myself, it was rice that had been cooked the day before.

He brought me a plate that was heaped high with rice, chunks of chicken, sliced onion in profusion, and a generous helping of broccoli and carrots. That was fair. Although the green vegetable usually used in fried rice was sold right across the street at Viet Wah, he had no reason to have pak kana in his kitchen. I’d ordered off the menu, after all, and he’d obliged. When he showed up again to ask me how my food tasted, I told him it was delicious.

I lied. The rice was clumped together as if it had been meant for sushi. It was soggy and mushy and I couldn’t finish it. I ate enough to be polite and asked that the rest be put in a box, although I never intended to touch it again. But it was my fault, not his. I’d asked for fried rice and he had cooked fresh rice for the day to accompany the dishes he had on his menu. I told him I’d be back soon for his sausage and I certainly will be—but fried rice will never be my request again.

I was still hungry. Slowly and sadly I made my way up to the end of Broadway on Capitol Hill, where Rom Mai has been for decades. Full disclosure: I’ve known the owner for over twenty years; we became friends long before he opened his own restaurant. So when the waitress asked me what I wanted, I told her I wanted to ask her boss a question.

“Can you make me fried rice with pork? Not with broccoli but with pak kana, like Bangkok? The kind where the rice isn’t soggy?” I was almost in tears and his answer was swift and reassuring. “My wife takes the rice from the top of the cooker and she works out all of the lumps. And we give people whatever vegetables they want to eat. She’ll make you Bangkok khao pat moo.”

When the rice was put in front of me, it was spread out on the plate in almost individual grains. Each bite had the flavor of the garlic, onion, and pork with which the rice had been fried. It was succulent, without a trace of sogginess, accompanied by pak kana cut on the diagonal and pork that was thinly sliced but still flavorful. In a restaurant that is almost formal in its decoration, where dining is the word that comes to mind rather than diner, I had khao pat moo that was as good as any that I’ve eaten on a sidewalk from a pink plastic plate on a table that bears a holder filled with a roll of toilet paper. And for me there is no higher praise than that.

Rom Mai offers fried rice with crab as one of its specials. I’ll be back. Soon.