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My husband had trouble imagining a marriage in which both partners didn't wholly share all tastes and preferences, meaning his tastes and preferences.
"You've never been to a Chinatown restaurant?" he marveled at an early stage of our intercity courtship. No, I hadn't, except for a few clueless exposures to something foo young or shrimp with lobster sauce in Philadelphia's then submicroscopic Chinese quarter. Marty, on the other hand, had had a Jewish New Yorker's passion for Chinatown feasts at least since the bar mitzvah that he'd refused. He rushed to the phone to order a Peking duck dinner that evening at a lantern-bedecked Mott Street joint that I hated on sight.
I hated the food too. The duck itself I could more or less tolerate, because it was less Chinese-tasting than the other dishes. At every bite, everything else struck me as a tiresomely alien importation from some galaxy at war with all cuisines worthy of the name -- French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, German, Middle Eastern, Mexican. I made polite noises like an Aretha Franklin fan at a Stockhausen concert, and tried to sound faintly more charmed by the duck. This looked ghastly when brought out for our inspection with beaked head lolling at the end of a snaky neck. But at least it offered a few blessed distractions like mini-pancakes with scallions, slivered cucumbers and a sauce sweet enough to drown out other parts of the ordeal.
Marty glowed with the awareness of bestowing on me a treasure beyond gold and rubies: the illimitable glories of Chinese food. To him, Peking duck occupied a rung on the ladder of human achievements somewhere between Copernicus and Picasso. In its glossily lacquered crisp skin, suave flesh and exquisitely chosen sweet-savory accompaniments, he tasted a momentary suspension of all that divides mortals from the highest good. His elation did falter a bit when I begged for a knife and fork.
Beyond the chopsticks
I hoped it would be a very long time until another Chinatown meal. But in what seemed like hours rather than weeks, I was being hauled into a dingy Elizabeth Street eatery to savor the romance of something called fish head casserole -- this time with the encouragement of restaurant-savvy friends, of whom Marty had many.
The chopstick campaign began at once. "It's easy," everyone insisted in helpful antiphony. "You hold the bottom one steady with your thumb and fourth finger" -- it refused to stop wobbling in my left-handed grip -- "and move the other one with your second and third fingers." More food ended up on the plastic tabletop or the front of my blouse than anywhere near my mouth. Marty praised this disjointed attempt like a mother applauding a crawling infant's first approach to verticality, while I silently cursed a civilization that hadn't come up with better table implements in three thousand-plus years.
Chinatown unfailingly hurled us into the roles of evangelist and unconverted.
"Feel like Chinatown tonight, maybe Peking duck?" the eternal optimist would inquire, a week or two after some quarrel-ridden prior venture that he'd bargained his way into by promising that we'd go out for pizza next time. I no longer bothered to bite back an automatic "Oh God, must we?" But it was like arguing with the Atlantic Ocean. I could never decide what I loathed most -- the downtown trek and parking-spot hunt; the silly chopstick choreography; having to share everything with everyone at the table instead of picking my own dish the way people did in normal restaurants like steakhouses; the procession of namelessly repugnant flavors.
A discovery at Hee Seung Fong on the Bowery
Then one day, I got it. In the early 1970s heyday of Hong Kong-style dim sum parlors, a Chinese-born ally in Marty's propaganda mission led a six-person trip to the now-defunct Hee Seung Fong on the Bowery. From a maelstrom of circulating carts and yelling waiters she decisively plucked a succession of little offerings that I would later come to know as har gow, pork siu mai, steamed beef balls, fried shrimp balls, roast pork buns, pan-seared turnip cake, stewed tripe, shrimp-stuffed crab claws, fat "silver noodles," sparerib nuggets in black bean sauce. I had never enjoyed any food more in my life.
I don't really know what triggered the breakthrough. Perhaps it was the charm of wonderful self-completeness in miniature. Or the extraordinary concentration of flavors: the intense quiddities of pork and shrimp mixtures in their delicate dough wrappers, the smoky brio imparted to the noodles by fierce wok heat. But I'm inclined to credit the fact that Marty wasn’t much more familiar with this fare than I was. For once we were exploring Chinese culinary terrain new to both of us, not playing out our usual tug of war between instigator and unwilling follower.
Whatever the reason, it was as if a few words flashing on a mental screen had taught me a new language. What's more, the enlightenment effortlessly carried over from dim sum to foods that I'd previously been repelled by.
Chinese cuisine was my husband's only vindication in many attempts to convert me to his greatest enthusiasms. But it was vindication in spades. I learned to wield chopsticks with confidence; to devour fish-head casserole with joyous greed; to debate the fine points of Peking duck. We were happy to read much into this newly shared passion. Chinese meals became our ritual peace offering after any serious argument.
What neither of us had expected was that I'd eventually develop a stronger obsession for this food than Marty. Or that I'd follow it further.
The great spectrum of immigrants' regional foodways began unmistakably unfurling in America's Chinatowns shortly before 1980. "Oh, Cantonese," New Yorkers would say with the air of fashionable nutrition buffs mentioning last year's pet vitamin. The names "Szechuan" and "Hunan" began to be tacked over sorry eateries in every city neighborhood. I became endlessly curious about Chinatown representations of Fujianese, Hainanese, Hakka and Shanghainese cuisine, along with the legacy of ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.
"We haven't had Peking duck for a while," Marty wistfully suggested one day as I pawed through a stack of Chinatown menus. "Beijing," I corrected. "You know, I've never had those dumplings with the broth inside." And before he knew what hit him we were in Petite Soochow on Catherine Street, both much the messier for a scalding maiden encounter with xiao long bao, the tricky-to-eat steamed "soup dumplings" of the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo coast.
Recipe titles in Chinese characters
When I wasn't tackling restaurant menus I was tackling cookbooks, knowing that I'd never become a really proficient Chinese cook but grateful for everything I could learn by hands-on effort. I mastered some simple dishes that were a joy to both of us, and began to pore over recipe titles in Chinese characters. At that point I stumbled on a book designed to help American food lovers decipher Chinese-language menus. I carried it home to Marty in anticipation of fun-filled hours studying together, and was nonplused when he not only declined the educational offer but became annoyed at my repeated pep talks.
By now the New York where Marty had gloried in Chinese meals for 40-plus years was a changed city. Eventually we joined a parade of adoptive New Jerseyans fleeing the Manhattan real estate inflation of the later '80s. On special occasions we’d trek to our old Chinatown haunts -- but they were changed too, less bustling and prosperous than in the first flush of our culinary love affair. Food mavens reported that "the new Chinatown" was really Flushing. Hudson and Bergen Counties began to spawn offshoots of city Chinese restaurants we knew. Some of them even did quite good Peking duck.
There will always be xiao long bao
This silver lining helped sustain my native-Manhattanite husband in the first years of what he considered exile. The later years were another story: a series of fiscal and physical disasters including a hip operation that left him half-crippled, mostly housebound and sinking into chronic depression and intermittent panic. After a time, he was a textbook example of geriatric abuse of painkillers and tranquilizers.
I saw into the abyss one Sunday afternoon when I'd persuaded Marty to venture out for a Chinese dinner in nearby Edgewater and called ahead to order Peking duck, hoping just maybe to rekindle some happy memory. I helped him from the car and steered him to our table, where the waiter displayed the glistening bird for our inspection and deftly carved up skin and flesh.
Marty picked up a fork, speared a mouthful, and tentatively chewed it. "What is this we're eating?" he asked with polite curiosity.
He died six months later in a Jersey City hospital directly across the river from the World Trade Center, three days after the attacks of Sept. 11.
I still seek out new -- to me -- regional Chinese dishes. I still plug away at reading Chinese-language menus, alternately obsessed with the supreme strangeness of the mental effort for one brought up on alphabetical writing and a crazy desire to secretly share everything I can learn about this inexhaustible cuisine with the man who introduced me to it. Or maybe to trump him?
Four years ago I was driving down a street a mile from home when the Chinese characters for "Little Suzhou" flashed across my vision. Sure enough, there was a Cliffside Park reincarnation of Petite Soochow, the Catherine Street restaurant where Marty and I first covered ourselves with soup-dumpling juice. I've been going back ever since to eat xiao long bao, silently conversing with ghosts of a marriage and a long-ago Manhattan Chinatown.
But even now, I’d rather not face Peking duck.
Anne Mendelson is a freelance writer and culinary historian who has written for various newspapers and magazines. She is the author of "Stand Facing the Stove" (a biography of the authors of "The Joy of Cooking"; Holt, 1996) and "Milk" (Knopf, 2008). The past recipient of honors including a fellowship at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library and the Oxford Symposium's Sophie Coe Prize in Food History, she is currently working on a book about Chinese food in America with the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Photo: istockphoto / Laryn Bakker
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