< Previous24 Jia!Gradually, other gaginang arrived from the mainland, from Hong Kong, and from Southeast Asia, and they established seafood-focused banquet and dim sum restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County.Not that the menus say “Teoswa” anywhere...Not usually, but if you pay attention, you’ll see evidence of their circuitous routes to Southern California in the multilingual menus. You can usually find English and Chinese translations next to the Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Thai names of dishes like Teochew noodle soup (page 83), house special lobster (page 126), and pork and olives (page 146).Is the next generation of restaurateurs — people our age — are they aware of the connection to Teoswa?I think it varies, but the answer is no more than you’d think. Their parents, like mine, can recount with precision the convoluted paths their families took from Teoswa to America. But for most second- or even third-generation gaginang, the whole concept of Teoswa is very abstract. At a local noodle shop, I asked the proprietor’s daughter, a native English speaker around my age, about her family ties to Teochew or Swatow. She said she didn’t know too much herself, but her grandma was born in “a place called Chiuchow — I think it’s a small village somewhere in Vietnam.”To be fair, I remember you used to describe your dad’s hometown as a small nowheresville, out in the boondocks of China —And it turns out there are more than five million people living in Swatow! And there are more than 11 million in the entire Teoswa region. Yeah, I was way off about that, even if 11 million people — a larger number than the populations of many European countries — is not all that many by China’s standards.Introduction 25Your dad really never mentioned anything about there being a Teoswa diaspora in America, nothing about meeting fellow gaginang in America?That’s what really amazes me — well, it doesn’t really. Like a lot of immigrant parents, my dad isn’t really one to wax poetic about the old days, or to tell stories about his travels, unprompted. It was only in the last few years, now that my sister and I are adults, that we started asking him more probing questions about his childhood.Not to butt in here, but I was the one that asked him those questions!Haha — right, yeah you wanted to know if he played any Chinese musical instruments, and he started talking about sawing away on an erhu on his porch as a kid, and he started reminiscing about summers spent in the ocean, swimming out to buy fish from returning boats, or the small flocks of ducks and other small animals he and his siblings would tend as pets, until they became dinner.Like that scene in Master of None, where the Taiwanese dad gets sad about killing his pet chicken.Except that when we watched that episode with my dad, he was like, “That’s not accurate — I never got attached to my pet chickens.”Of course, eating chicken was a rarity — a special treat. My dad grew up in Swatow during an extremely difficult time in China’s history. He was born right after the Great Famine, and was raised during the Cultural Revolution. He was actually among the first high school students in Swatow to be offered a college entrance exam again once the Cultural Revolution had run its course, so when he was 16 or 17, he spent nights studying for hours by candlelight, and piecing together a rudimentary education in Mandarin by listening to radio programs.26 Jia!And then, the way he tells it, there was a small miracle — he was accepted to the Beijing Institute of Technology. So, at the age of 17, he left Swatow for the very first time, boarding a train that swept him away from rice country and deep into wheat country.Did he have a hard time communicating when he got to Beijing?When he first arrived, his Mandarin was so thickly accented his classmates couldn’t understand him at all, and when he got letters from home, the writing was completely indecipherable to any friends reading over his shoulder. Though Teoswa is written using the same characters as those used throughout China, they are often combined in a way that’s unintelligible to outsiders.And even indecipherable to auto-translate.Right — my Swatow family loves to communicate via WeChat text messages, but I don’t speak or read Teoswa, so I rely on the auto-translate feature, except that only really works for written Mandarin. I ended up asking them to leave voice messages for me in Mandarin instead.When did your dad start learning English?Not too long after learning Mandarin, in college — he picked up a few ABCs of English, and he and his classmates talked half-jokingly about going abroad, to America. When he eventually did in 1984, he landed in Corvallis, Oregon, to begin a Master’s program — to begin a new chapter in a strange new land, in the tradition of so many gaginang before him.Did he meet any gaginang in America?Incredibly enough, when I recently asked him about those specific years, he said he once met some Cambodian refugees in his first year in America. He used to chat with them in his native tongue, a strange but powerful little reminder of his faraway home and his family.Introduction 27How has learning about your place in a diaspora changed the way you think about life — or about food?I think the one thing that still gets me is that I’ve been delighting — unwittingly — in the food of the far-flung Teoswa diaspora my whole life, just sometimes at restaurants that more prominently advertise other layers of their identity: Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Cantonese.When I first considered writing a book about Teoswa food, it was out of a bewilderment that Teoswa food seemed so hard to find in America, despite its deliciousness. But by the time I began recipe testing, I had come to a totally new understanding: Teoswa food was all around me, hiding in plain sight.For instance, when we were in college, do you remember the noodle shop we used to go to on Mott Street?The place with the duck noodles?Yeah, exactly, the place with the incredible duck noodles (page 88)! The restaurant was called New Chao Chow, but I had no idea at all that Chao Chow was a reference to the Teoswa people, to my dad’s people, my own people.Or right after college graduation when we took a celebratory trip to Spain and France — after a week of delicious but rich, heavy meals, I had an intense craving for light, brothy noodles. I had read about the many Vietnamese restaurants in Paris, and looked up a place to fulfill my soup cravings while we were there. We actually ended up at a Cambodian-run place and I remember marveling at how good the noodle soup was — better than most I’d had in America. I didn’t give it much thought until years later, when I was reading Eric Low’s Teochew Heritage Cooking, and I learned 28 Jia!that Paris is home to the most Teoswa Chinatown in the world. It all makes sense; the French colonized so many Southeast Asian nations with thriving Teoswa communities, that some gaginang were bound to head to France alongside their ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian countrymen. Now I just wish that I’d known this while we were there so we could’ve sought out more Teoswa-Parisian food! Regrets.Your dad never pointed out Teoswa items on restaurant menus when you were growing up?I think, like so many immigrants, my parents were always focused on forging ahead. They didn’t have the luxury to look back on their childhoods or to think broadly about their particular culture’s place in the American melting pot. But — and I’m so grateful for this — it is something I’ve been able to do: to look back, to think deeply, about their culture and their food.But to answer your question, I remember growing up, though we mostly ate at home, when we were living in Maryland, we visited a Vietnamese restaurant every few weeks. And just this last year, after we got back from our research trip in Saigon, I called up my dad to see if he remembered that restaurant or its owner. He paused to think. “Oh yes, she was Teoswa-Vietnamese,” he said. How did he know that? “I used to speak to her in Teoswa,” he said, thinking nothing of it.Introduction 29The Teoswa Way of Cooking and EatingIn Teoswa, everyone cooks. It’s second nature to put together a simple meal to feed yourself, your family, and your friends — because from the moment you were born, you were immersed in an obsessive food culture. Even within food-centric China, the Teoswa are known for their exceptional dedication to gastronomy. Though there are many delicious opportunities for eating out, cooking is still ingrained in the rhythm of daily life for most Teoswa people. And since it’s an everyday kind of thing, it doesn’t command the same reverence-slash-fear that it sometimes does in American home kitchens. By extension, the attitude towards DIY-ing everything at mealtimes is much more lax; there are no hangups when it comes to supplementing a homecooked spread with an order of fried rice flour dumplings or sweet popiah from a street vendor. Knowing how to put together a balanced and interesting meal is more highly prized than the ability to flawlessly execute every dish on the table. When I first began shadowing my aunts in their day-to-day shopping and cooking, I was surprised by how much local vendors contribute to the work of meal preparation. In Teoswa, open-air wet markets have yet to yield to the swanky indoor grocery stores that are starting to conquer much of urban China. Swatow market vendor30 Jia!Here, it’s still common to inspect the goods of competing vendors before instructing a fishmonger to filet and slice a good-looking carp, and reserve the bones in a separate bag for broth, please, so you can bring it home to make a rich porridge. Or to visit several butchers before selecting a piece of fresh pork with the perfect meat-to-fat ratio and instruct the butcher to mince it to the exact right texture for a stir-fry. A few times, as I was practicing popiah-folding techniques or taking notes on particular ingredients, I would ask my aunts something like, “Did you make this popiah wrapper?” They would chuckle and say, aiyah, of course not! Why would they, when there was a skilled artisan who rolled his cart of freshly made wrappers through the streets every day? They had no qualms leaving particularly labor-intensive ingredients — or even whole dishes — to the seasoned professionals. I think the Teoswa people have developed a very healthy attitude towards eating. You should take the enjoyment and appreciation of food, tea, and the act of sharing a meal very seriously — but don’t take the preparation of a delicious meal all that seriously. Everyone has a few flubs in the kitchen, but with time, your Swatow market vendorsFresh popiah vendorIntroduction 31culinary successes and failures will teach you about your own preferences, and you can adapt recipes to suit your own tastes. Their pragmatic approach to eating well has informed my selection of recipes for this book. As a result, none of the recipes here belong to the category of Teoswa dishes that require years of dedicated practice to master — such as delicate banquet dishes that show off fancy knifework, as well as the humbler genre of kueh, that ambiguously defined food group that includes sticky, stretchy rice flour desserts, as well as tender-yet-bouncy fresh rice noodles, and translucent dumplings of all sorts. Now, you can certainly look for and find recipes for fresh rice noodles online, but I personally don’t think this kind of project is a good use of my time, if my goal is to eat a heaping pile of good noodles. (On the other hand, the process is great as a meditative ritual.) Even if I put in the hours to make the batter from rice flour, then patiently steam each sheet in an oiled cake pan, the texture will almost certainly be wrong. Without years of practice, the right equipment, and access to freshly ground high-quality rice flour, it’s quite difficult to produce supple, delicate, and fragrant rice noodles — and nearly impossible to produce them efficiently. A recipe can only take you so far with an unforgiving dish like this. The most important ingredient is intuition, earned through experience — the kind of intuition to adjust liquid levels for the day’s humidity or a particularly dry batch of rice flour. I won’t pretend I’ve achieved that level of noodle mastery or that it can be taught through words on a Chive kueh ready to be fried to order32 Jia!page. (But if that type of challenge piques your interest, by all means — go for it! And please invite me to dinner.)Instead, I’ve chosen to include homey dishes that have a high deliciousness-to-labor ratio. A few of my recipes do require a bit of advance planning to maximize flavor (e.g. salting ribs the day before making a flavorful soup), but most can be produced quickly enough for tonight’s dinner. When I was on the fence about a complicated recipe, I would ask myself: what would my Swatow aunts do? Followed by: if they probably wouldn’t make this from scratch, do we have access in the US to a decent storebought alternative? Luckily, Teoswa cuisine typically calls for restraint when it comes to fancy seasonings and equipment, so you don’t need an extensive pantry to make something delicious. Next >