< Previous14 Jia!I have to admit, when we went to Swatow during our honeymoon, I was immediately struck by how food-obsessed your extended family was. It seemed like all we did was eat!I know, right? Homecooked spreads, streetside feasts, lavish restaurant banquets, endless rounds of tea and snacks...Remember how I would always ask about what we would be eating, and they would always confer in Teoswa for a while, then get back to me in Mandarin with not just an explanation of the dish, but also its origin story and symbolic significance...When my mom — who is not Teoswa — met her new family in Swatow for the first time as a newlywed in the 1980s, she was just blown away by how all-consuming the sport of eating was to them. After breakfast, the Zheng clan would talk about lunch, and then after lunch, they would consider snacks, and then after snacks of course comes the question of dinner, so that the whole day everyone was either eating or talking about what to eat next. And this seemed to hold across the entire city.Which is saying something, as your mom is from Sichuan...No slouch in the gastronomic department.For me, nothing captures the spirit of the Swatow culinary zeal like our ride with your cousin and his wife.That’s right, when they were taking us to the airport at the end of one visit. Since we were about to continue our honeymoon Mom and Dad as newlywedsIntroduction 15travels, I was asking them all kinds of questions about where they liked to travel, where they had been, that kind of thing. And I was thinking that because they had traveled pretty broadly in China, which is something that our parents’ generation never got to do when they were our age, I asked, Have you ever thought about moving away from Swatow? My cousin’s wife answered instantly: no, never! I couldn’t possibly live without Teoswa food! Her immediate certainty took me by surprise. I’ve lived my whole life moving around, and now we live in Los Angeles, where it seems like everyone we meet has just moved here from somewhere else too. I’ve become so used to that sense of rootlessness that I’d resented when I was younger, and this Tea growing on Teochew’s Phoenix MountainSliced radishes drying in the Swatow countrysideMy second cousin’s farm outside Swatow16 Jia!exchange was a sharp reminder that my life had diverged so far from my cousins’ even though we were pretty much raised communally by all my aunts and uncles when we were younger. But your cousin had also spent a lot of time in Thailand right?Yeah, and it sounded like if they had to live somewhere else, Thailand would be it. They said that traveling there was amazing: you could rent a motorbike and take it up mountains for an adventure, or you could just take it easy and lounge on the beach; the food was excellent; and as an added bonus for them, they could speak in their native tongue and get by just fine.I remember that moment so clearly — you translated what he said and we both raised an eyebrow because it was such a confusing statement. I think we both thought we just misunderstood him, or that something was lost in translation, right?Yeah, I mean — how could that possibly make sense? How could someone from a part of China no one’s ever heard of go to Thailand and speak his own local dialect? Sure, lots of Chinese go to Thailand as tourists, so it made sense that maybe some Thai people would speak Mandarin? But why on earth would they speak Teoswa?But then we were pulling up to the airport and figuring out more pressing logistical stuff. Right, by the time I thought to ask him to clarify, we were already heading out of Swatow, on our way to Singapore.Singapore!I’d been looking forward to going to Singapore for so, so long. It’s truly one of the greatest places to eat in the world, because it’s a microcosm of so many cuisines that I adore, all squeezed together onto a tiny island nation. Malay, Indian, Peranakan, Middle Eastern, Chinese…mmm I’m getting hungry.Introduction 17A theme emerges...Anyway, while we were there, we kept seeing clues of Singapore’s connection to Teoswa — remember all the ceramics on display at the Asian Civilisations Museum? Some of them had been shipped out of the Port of Swatow, which I should have noted, but really, I didn’t give it too much thought. And there were so many other clues of Teoswa heritage throughout the city, but I really wasn’t attuned to them yet, plus I was too busy planning where to stuff our faces with chili crab, nasi lemak, chicken rice, laksa, and ironically, those Teochew-Singaporean specialties, bak kut teh (page 141), char kway teow (page 93), and fishball mee pok (page 89). So many of the flavors were sort of familiar and comforting, yet different enough from what I’d grown up with to still be new and exciting. Which makes sense, given how Teoswa the population there is.Many Singaporeans do trace their roots to Swatow and Teochew, among other places in Southern China, like Hokkien (Fujian). For centuries, Chinese from those areas have been emigrating to Southeast Asia, although the volume really picked up in the last 200 years.It’s almost laughable now to reflect on this, but before that trip, I had zero idea I had any personal connection to “Teochew.” I kept noticing the term in Singapore, especially in regards to food that felt so familiar to me, and so I finally looked it up. That’s when I came to the mind blowing realization that it referred to my heritage. Char kway teow in Singapore18 Jia!The biggest obstacle to my making the connection earlier was such a basic linguistic one. See, my dad was the only one who spoke Teoswa in my immediate family. All of his family lived in Swatow proper — which my mom, sister, and I always called by its Mandarin name, “Shantou” — and so there were very few reasons to bring up Swatow’s neighboring city — “Chaozhou” in Mandarin — and even fewer reasons to mention that city by its local name, Teochew. So I always knew I had strong ties to “Shantou,” but never connected my identity to the prolific “Teochew” diaspora that had permeated so many parts of the world. I was dumbfounded! So by the time we were home again in America, you had already started to develop a very different understanding of Teoswa cuisine as it related to the world at large.Yeah, I was hungry for more knowledge about Teoswa food, and I had found a few slim English-language volumes on Teochew-Singaporean food. But there really weren’t any resources in English that presented the cuisine of today's Teoswa — where my family lives and where I’m overfed so much delicious food every time I visit — and that talked about the larger story of migration and evolution that the cuisine captures. And I felt strongly about sharing this story even before I knew anything about the Teoswa in Thailand!Yeah, let’s talk about Bangkok — you decided to make it our “base of operations” so to speak, for the research trip.I did, mostly because it seems like kind of a hub for cheap flights in Asia — there was even a daily direct flight from Bangkok to Swatow.Which was harbinger of things to come...Absolutely — really the biggest surprise of my research was the extent to which the Teoswa diaspora has deeply influenced Introduction 19Yaowarat, Bangkokthe food and the culture in Bangkok. It’s not like a typical Chinatown in America, where there is a Chinese community living within a small area. In Bangkok, in the late 19th century, people of Teoswa descent actually made up the majority of the population there, perhaps up to two-thirds of the city, according to some estimates. These days, because of inter-marriage, it’s harder to say who is and isn’t “Chinese,” and the Thai don’t really think of themselves in the kind of ethnographic way that Americans do.It’s a little like being Irish and not knowing about Boston.Yeah, exactly, that’s what I’m talking about — Americans will say they’re “Irish” even when they might have one great-grandparent from Ireland. 20 Jia!But I do have one great-grandparent from Ireland… I know, you’ve told me before.Back to Bangkok — how did so many Teoswa end up there?Well, Chinese workers, mostly men, had been arriving on Thai shores in search of work for many centuries. There are records of an established Chinese merchant class in Thailand dating back to the 1200s! Substantial numbers of Teoswa arrived in the 18th century, fleeing famine back home, but the true flood of immigration began in the latter half of the 19th century, when a few things happened all at once. Overpopulation, floods, famines, and civic unrest made the prospect of leaving Teoswa very attractive. And in 1858, a European-run treaty port was established in Swatow, making it much easier for both men and women to leave. By far the largest numbers sought better opportunities in Thailand. By the early 1900s, half of all emigrants from Swatow were headed to what they knew as the “Land of Smiles” aboard the Bangkok Passenger Steamer Company. The emigration was so common that there’s even a proverb in Teoswa to this day: “when there is nothing left to eat, pack up your bags and go to Siam.”And though the stream of emigration has certainly slowed in the past few decades, it still continues. I just recently found out that my dad has a cousin who moved from Swatow to Bangkok’s heavily Teoswa Chinatown, Yaowarat (named for its main thoroughfare), in the 1970s; she still runs a shop there today!Where else did the Teoswa go in Asia?All over, in smaller but still significant numbers — Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and of course Singapore, where I had my first revelation.Introduction 21Did all this research prepare you for actually being in Bangkok and experiencing the Teoswa diaspora on street level?Absolutely not. Right before Lunar New Year in 2017, when we arrived in Bangkok in a jetlagged daze, it was a visceral shock to see for myself just how deeply Teoswa cuisine and culture had become ingrained in Bangkok’s Yaowarat.Suddenly I understood how my cousins could communicate in the Teoswa language while they were in Thailand — it was everywhere! Not only could you hear it on the street, spoken between gaginang food vendors and restaurant workers, some Teoswa words had even broken into the mainstream Thai language. And outside the boundaries of Yaowarat, there were marks of Teoswa influence on Thailand and its cuisine. In fact, even the royal family can trace some Teoswa in its bloodline.It seemed like everyone we met had a connection to Teoswa. When I was telling my dad about the trip, he mentioned that he had a business contact in the area, a man named Chai. So my dad put us in touch, not knowing if his friend would know anything about Teoswa. And then it turned out Chai was Teoswa himself — his great-grandfather had emigrated from Swatow in the early 20th century.And when we got to Bangkok, Chai took us out for a classic Teochew-Thai lunch at a restaurant in Yaowarat, Tang Jai Yoo, and we got to enjoy some old-school classics like oyster omelet (page 108), Teochew sashimi (page 105), and stir-fried mushrooms and pea sprouts (page 162). Next to us, big round tables of multigenerational families were all gathered for a weekly feast. Growing up in New Jersey, Chinese families would often gather at dim sum parlors for leisurely lunches after Saturday morning Chinese school sessions. We’d always bump into a few tables of family friends no matter which restaurant we decided to eat cheung fun at that weekend. The packed dining rooms and waiting crowds at Tang Jai Yoo reminded me of that. 22 Jia!We ate at a few other traditional Teochew-Thai restaurants in Bangkok, like New Peng Chieng, that also gave off a familiar homey vibe. There seemed to be a whole class of Bangkok restaurants that offered amber-preserved Teoswa dishes that the current proprietors’ grandparents or great-grandparents had adapted when they arrived in Thailand from Teoswa. Of course, you also could spot newer dishes that had been added to the menu since, but you could sense the respect for the recipes that had been handed down through the generations.After Bangkok, we went to Saigon, because you had heard there was a large Teoswa population there as well.I expected Saigon — aka Ho Chi Minh City — to be a lot like Bangkok, to be full of old-school Teoswa restaurants. But it turned out to be eye-opening in an entirely different way. There were far fewer remaining traces of the Teoswa there. Once there had been a prominent ethnic Chinese community, the Hoa people, which included many gaginang, but after Saigon fell in 1975, the Hoa were harshly persecuted by the government. But there is still an ethnic Chinese community in Ho Chi Minh City.Right. Today most of the Chinese-Vietnamese community resides in Districts 5 and 6, an area known as Cholon, where we came across a couple running a Teoswa porridge shop underneath an overpass. The husband had recently moved from Taiwan to join his Teoswa-Vietnamese wife. We asked for other recommendations in the area and he shrugged, saying the shops there all served similar rosters of humble Teoswa comfort food. While we still ate exceptionally well in Saigon, the range of identifiably Teoswa dishes was far more limited than in Singapore or Thailand.Introduction 23So it’s fair to say the research trip did not end exactly as you had hoped?To be honest, I was more confused than anything. Certainly, one big reason we didn’t come across a large Teoswa community on the Vietnamese leg of our trip was that we didn’t have time to visit the smaller cities, southwest of Saigon, that are home to many Teoswa-Vietnamese. But I was sure we’d find a bigger Teoswa presence in Saigon, the largest city in Vietnam. But it soon dawned on me, as I started recognizing Teoswa dishes on Southeast Asian menus in Los Angeles, that I had traveled halfway around the world for a taste of something that had been quietly prolific in my backyard all along.And that was because of the refugee immigrant communities here?Exactly. After the Fall of Saigon, many families in Vietnam — including many with Teoswa roots — were forced to flee by boat to camps across Southeast Asia and eventually resettle eventually in North America, Australia, and Europe. Around the same time, in neighboring Cambodia and Laos, civil wars forced similar ethnic Chinese communities — largely Teoswa — to flee in the 1970s-1980s.Of the refugees who landed in the US, many settled in Southern California. Some of the newly arrived families pursued their American dreams by opening restaurants that served the border-defying foods they knew best — like the noodle soup hủ tiếu nam vang, the Vietnamese spin on a Teochew noodle soup by way of Phnom Penh.And around the same time, Thai and Thai-Chinese immigrants began arriving in America in larger numbers. Teoswa-inflected dishes like deep-fried hoy jo crab rolls started to appear on menus in LA’s burgeoning Thai Town, in East Hollywood. Next >