Tag Archive | Chinatown

Trip to Chicago

This past weekend I took a mini road trip to Chicago to visit my first and oldest friend. Hana is a professor of history and Asian American studies on the East Coast (check out Campu, her podcast on Japanese American incarceration!), but she’s spending the month doing archival research in Chicago, which is not so very far from central Iowa. I left Grinnell on Friday afternoon and drove east on I-80 (it was only my second time doing so; the first was on my single visit to Iowa City). At one point, I noticed a billboard for the World’s Largest Truckstop, but I didn’t think much of it. Eventually, I was getting a little low on gas, and I saw a sign for plentiful gas stations, so I decided to get off at the next exit. Only when I was on the ramp did I realize I was arriving at the World’s Largest Truckstop. It was practically a campus. I filled my tank and nipped into the nearest building, which housed a vast gift shop and a food court. I’m sure there were many amenities, but there were a lot of semis, and I made a mental note not to stop here for gas on the way back.

A mural at the World’s Largest Truckstop

I-80 in Illinois was quite pleasant (fewer big rigs). There was a big slowdown on the freeway into Chicago (typical rush hour, probably), but I finally arrived at Hana’s building in the South Loop. After dropping off my stuff and briefly meeting her dog, Bertie, I drove us to Avondale so we could eat dinner at Staropolska, a restaurant one of Hana’s friends had recommended. We ordered the Staropolska salad (with dried cranberries, goat cheese, and pickled beets), the potato pancakes, and the potato and cheese pierogi. The salad and potato pancakes were delicious; I found the pierogi a bit dense, though they tasted good. We shared the apple cake for dessert. It was more turnover-like, with sliced apples cooked between layers of pastry. There was cream on top, as well as scattered grapes and a dusting of powdered sugar. It was also very good.

On Saturday morning, we headed out toward Printers Row. We stopped in an Asian bakery called Sweet Bean just to look around, and then Hana grabbed a pistachio doughnut next door at Stan’s Doughnuts (unrelated to the Stan’s Doughnuts by UCLA, which, alas, has apparently closed!). We stumbled upon the Printers Row farmers market, which had lots of intriguing stands (tamales, honey, a savory pastry called “the love child of a sexy empanada and a hot muffin,” bean pie, and more). Then we visited Sandmeyer’s Bookstore. It was a nice shop with hardwood floors, ample natural light from large windows, and a single spacious room for all the sections. I ended up buying The Way Spring Arrives: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation. I recognized the cover from Twitter because I follow one of the translators. Sandmeyer’s SFF section wasn’t that extensive, but they had this!

We walked north toward our next destination, but we were on the lookout for something quick to eat. We stopped in a coffee shop called Happy Monday and bought Texas-style kolaches with egg, spinach, and feta. (Iowa is full of kolaches too. They’re a food of Czech immigrants, and multiple vendors at the Grinnell farmers market sell them, in a variety of fruit flavors. I haven’t found the ones I’ve tried to be particularly impressive. Our savory kolaches were filled buns, not flat, danish-like pastries like the sweet kolaches in Iowa.)

We arrived at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in what seemed to be the theater district, right on time. We’d come to see the film 80 Years Later, a documentary about two Japanese American elders who were incarcerated during World War II and their intergenerational conversations with their children and grandchildren. The showing was a partnership with and benefit for Chicago’s Japanese American Service Committee, which was founded to help with Japanese Americans’ post-war resettlement and today offers a range of services and cultural opportunities. The movie was under an hour long. Its central figures were Kiyoko Fujiu and Robert Tadashi Shimizu, who lived in Chicago and Cincinnati, respectively, after their incarceration. Kiyoko and Robert are first cousins. While the film did touch on their experiences and those of their parents during the war, it was very much not a Japanese American incarceration 101 story. Instead, it focused more on their coming to terms with what they endured, the experiences of their often mixed race children and grandchildren, and the reverberations of that traumatic history through the generations.

After the screening, a local professor moderated a panel with the crew and cast of 80 Years Later. The crew members included the film’s director, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, who is Robert’s daughter-in-law. The Chicago cast members were Kiyoko, her daughter Jean, and two of her grandsons. The moderator had a few questions, and then she took several questions from the audience. Hana asked the last one, about something Kiyoko had said in the film, namely, that when she was forcibly incarcerated, she felt rage that she couldn’t express because it wasn’t safe to do so. Hana wondered how she had come to a place of expressing it. In her answer, Kiyoko referred to a conversation she’d had with Mary Oliver, the poet! This answer aside, it was rather sobering to hear Kiyoko speak. She’s 97 years old, and she acknowledged that there’s a lot to despair of in the world (for instance, how the international community has handled a global pandemic). She more or less said she didn’t expect to live to see things get a whole lot better. But it wasn’t all hopeless. Another interesting thing she said was that she’d like to know what the impact of her telling her story to various audiences was. What happens after? How are people changed, and what does that lead to?

On our way out, Hana and I picked up some JASC swag (stickers and magnets, with their pretty lotus logo). Then we made our way a little bit east and south. We saw the famous bean from outside Millenium Park. We walked over to Lake Michigan to stroll along the water, toward the Field Museum. (When I was in high school and our Quiz Bowl team went to nationals in Chicago, we walked a similar path! And when I came to Chicago to accept the Friends of American Writers’ Young People’s Literature Award for Sparkers, I stayed near Grant Park.) The color of Lake Michigan’s water in Chicago is always so pretty.

Sailboats on Lake Michigan

Next, we visited another bookstore: Exile in Bookville, inside the Fine Arts Building (which appears to house at least four or five luthiers!). This shop had very high ceilings and bookshelves that extended far above our heads. That and the fact that it comprised three smallish rooms gave Exile in Bookville a different feel from Sandmeyer’s. The selection was great, and we browsed and talked about books we’d read (or not) for a while.

For dinner, we got takeout from Nepal House and ate it with Bertie (he wasn’t sharing the food) on the terrace of Hana’s building. We had butter chicken with rice, vegetable momos, naan, and mango lassis. Then we returned to her apartment to eat dessert while watching a movie. We’d ordered rasgulla and kheer (rice pudding). I’d never had rasgulla before, and the texture was unexpected and not quite to my liking. I enjoyed the kheer. We decided to watch Clueless to remedy a glaring gap in the list of cult movies I’d seen. It was entertaining (and I knew what the Valley was!). We also tried the Ovomaltine chocolate bar my Swiss second cousin had given me the previous weekend. After Clueless, Hana had me watch the first episode of A League of Their Own, about women baseball players during World War II. I liked it a lot, but it still won’t prod me into actually starting to watch TV.

On Sunday, we headed to Chicago Chinatown for dim sum at MingHin (which is a chain). There were no carts; instead, we checked what we wanted off a picture menu. We ordered har gow, radish cake, shrimp crepes, chicken and dried scallop steamed buns (which also had shrimp in them), sesame balls, and, obviously, egg tarts. (The menu had all the typical dishes I’m familiar with, as well as some that were new to me.) The har gow and sesame balls were both excellent. The radish cake was also great; it had much bigger chunks of radish than I’m used to, but it made the dish more vegetable-y. The egg tarts were perfect. We drank only tea.

After brunch, we explored the rest of the little mall the restaurant was in. We looked at the pastries in the Asian-style French bakery and peeked in a Chinese bakery too. There was a square with statues of all the animals of the Chinese zodiac, so we read the description for those born in the Year of the Horse, which Hana and I both are. It was similar to what’s on those ubiquitous Chinese restaurant placemats, and I’ve never thought it fit me very well. We crossed the street and went into an Asian grocery store. It looked like a convenience store from the outside and was fairly cramped, but there was a lot crammed inside, including fresh seafood. They were also selling discounted mooncakes. I didn’t get any mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival earlier this month, so I was interested in finding some in Chinatown, but the grocery store only had boxes containing four large mooncakes each, which was too much.

We walked under the Chinatown gate and down Wentworth Ave., which seems to be the neighborhood’s main commercial street. (One interesting thing about Chicago Chinatown is that there were a lot of Chinese flags flying.) We went into several more bakeries, most of which were selling similar items. One of them seemed to be a hangout for elderly Chinese men. Something that stood out to me was that most of the bakeries sold two kinds of egg tarts, one just called egg tarts and the other called Portuguese tarts (these looked more like pastéis de nata, with the blistered surface). I’m used to Asian bakeries only having one kind of egg tart, though they can vary in type, from the Cantonese dim sum ones to the more “deep-dish” ones I’d get at Taiwanese bakeries in LA. Anyway, Chiu Quon Bakery & Dim Sum had miniature mooncakes, so I bought one with lotus seed paste and also got a 粽子 for good measure.

Soon it was time to say goodbye to Hana and drive back to Iowa. I ate my 粽子 for dinner on Monday; it had mung beans, pork belly, Chinese sausage, and a salted egg yolk. I had the baby mooncake for dessert, and it was delicious too. Chiu Quon was cash only, and I think it must have been there that I picked up two shiny 2022 quarters I later found in my wallet. These brand new coins depict Wilma Mankiller, a former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, and they have a couple words written in the Cherokee syllabary on them!

San Francisco IV

Dec22

In mid-November, before the latest twist in the pandemic, I traveled to northern California for a friend’s wedding. (The title of this post is a reference to my actually rather frequent trips to San Francisco. This was my second trip to the Bay Area since I graduated from UCLA in 2019; by comparison, I have not yet been back to Los Angeles, except for transferring at LAX on my way to Honolulu.) After teaching on Friday morning, I drove up to the Twin Cities and caught a flight to San Francisco. I arrived late in the evening and caught a shuttle to a nearby hotel. The next morning, I picked up the first car I’d ever rented by myself and headed south. (I would like to brag that I managed to drive everywhere I wanted to go the whole weekend without GPS and without getting lost!)

Retro charm in Aptos

My destination was Aptos, a little seaside town near Santa Cruz. I visited UC Santa Cruz as a prospective grad student years ago, and the road through the wooded mountains seemed familiar. When I arrived in Aptos, I left my rental car at the hotel and set out in search of lunch. After cutting through the parking lot, labyrinth, and cemetery of the adjacent Catholic church, I discovered, in the nearby strip mall, Companion Bakeshop. I could tell by sight that their viennoiseries were good, so I went in and bought a goat cheese-arugula-pickled onion on baguette sandwich. It was excellent. I resolved to return the next day for breakfast pastries. If you ever find yourself in Aptos (or Santa Cruz), I absolutely recommend this bakery.

Almond croissant from Companion Bakeshop

Happily, I was able to check into my room early and put on my wedding-appropriate clothes (my backup plan was to change outfits in the hotel’s public restrooms). The wedding was at Sand Rock Farm, a venue tucked up in the woods. We guests arrived by shuttle. It was the wedding of a high school friend of mine: Dustin and I both went to grad school in the LA area, and we also used to meet up around the holidays in Minnesota. I was 99% sure I would be the only person from high school in attendance, and I knew the odds were low I would know anyone else at the wedding besides Dustin’s mother. This turned out to be true, but I still had a good time. During the pre-ceremony mingling, I met some of Dustin’s grad school friends. While we were standing around chatting with glasses of lemonade or iced tea, one grad school friend opposite me said, “Dog,” and I looked down to see a wolfhound pressed against my red dress. His name was Pirate.

Redwood (?) illuminated by the late afternoon sun at Sand Rock Farm

The ceremony was unique and lovely, and the rest of the evening was enjoyable. I met Dustin’s now-wife, Jiejing, for the first time. Some of the speeches over dinner made me realize just how poor my Mandarin comprehension has become. Dustin and Jiejing were very gracious hosts. I hadn’t expected to have much time to talk to Dustin, seeing as it was his wedding day and he had all sorts of family and friends in attendance, but we actually did get to talk. I enjoyed meeting some of the other guests too (did everyone work in machine learning except the veterinarian specializing in exotics?).

Flying pelican off the pier at Seacliff State Beach

The next morning, I returned to Companion Bakeshop for an almond croissant, a ham and cheese croissant, and a kouign amann. Then I walked down to Seacliff State Beach. Jiejing had recommended it, though I probably would have gone anyway. I walked out onto the pier, the end of which was closed off by a chicken-wire fence, presumably to keep humans away from the flocks of roosting cormorants and pelicans. I left the pier and walked across the sand toward the water. I watched the waves for a while; I was especially amused by the train of waterfowl swimming parallel to shore that would go bobbing over the incoming breakers like so many rubber duckies. Before leaving the beach, I ate my almond croissant for breakfast; it was scrumptious.

Over they go!

I left Aptos and drove back up to San Francisco, where I ditched my rental car and took BART to Chinatown. In St. Mary’s Square, I ate my ham and cheese croissant for lunch. It was also scrumptious. I checked out the memorial plaque to Chinese American soldiers who died in the World Wars, the Korean comfort women memorial, and the huge statue of Sun Yat-Sen.

“Comfort Women” Column of Strength, by Steven Whyte, in St. Mary’s Square

I walked up Grant Avenue, keeping an eye out for Chinese bakeries where I fully intended to buy egg tarts. After a little bit of reconnaissance, I went on to City Lights Booksellers and skulked around the basement between the children’s/YA and SFF sections until I finally settled on P. Djèlí Clark’s novella The Black God’s Drums.

Justice for Vicha Ratanapakdee mural in Chinatown

After buying my book, I turned the corner back into Chinatown, ready for egg tarts. I also checked out a number of holes in the wall selling dim sum items out of huge steamers, but some of them had lines out the door, and I also didn’t want dumplings right then, and I wasn’t sure hot food would keep till my next hotel. So I just went back to Eastern Bakery for egg tarts.

Eastern Bakery in Chinatown

The bakery wasn’t open to the public; there was a man taking orders behind a plastic table set up on the sidewalk, blocking the entrance to the shop. I was a little worried when I got in line because something I heard made me think there might not be any egg tarts left, but that wasn’t the case. I asked for three, and the man told me it was four for $9, so without thinking very hard I said sure. Then he asked whether I could wait ten minutes or so for them, and I said yes. I also ordered a baked pork bun. The man told me I could sit on a nearby bench to wait for the egg tarts, so I did. While I waited, a Chinatown tour led by a white man came by; he told his group that Eastern Bakery made the best mooncakes in the world. Eventually, my egg tarts were ready; I took the paper bag with the fresh tarts hot out of the oven and went back to the bench to eat one right away. Before I was finished, the man approached me from behind and asked me if it was good. I was so startled I said something incoherent and ungrammatical. I meant to say it was good.

Waiting for egg tarts in Chinatown

I left Chinatown for Glen Park, to meet up with my friend Katherine and her toddler son Walter. We went on a walk around the neighborhood in search of interesting vehicles and then returned to their backyard to ferry pinecones from bench to flowerbed. Walter warmed up to me and even said my name, which was very cute. I had bought several egg tarts thinking I’d offer a couple to them, knowing that they might not like or want them (pandemic times being what they are). Indeed, Katherine turned them down, which meant I still had three egg tarts all for me. This was not really a problem.

Passionflower in Glen Park

After sundown, I headed further north, across the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Rohnert Park, where I’d booked my last hotel. I ate the pork bun for dinner. The next morning, I ate my last pastry from Aptos, the kouign amann, which I think had gotten a bit stale. Then I went to Dhammadharini Monastery in nearby Penngrove to visit my friend Kaccāyana, who as of this fall is a fully ordained bhikkhunī. We walked over to the campus of Sonoma State University and wandered back into the woods, where we sat on a fallen tree across a dry streambed and talked.

When it was getting toward lunchtime for the monastics, we returned to the monastery, and I left to go back to San Francisco. After returning my rental car, I went to investigate whether there was a food truck outside the terminal, and indeed there was! It had an extremely generic, non-descript name, but it turned out to serve Filipino and Mexican food. The cook seemed to be Filipino, and the more Filipino-oriented dishes sounded appealing, so I ordered the teriyaki chicken plate with garlic rice and lumpia. I ate it on the sidewalk; it was delicious.

My teriyaki chicken plate with garlic rice and lumpia

All in all, it was a very successful trip. I got to see one high school friend, one college friend, and one grad school friend (in order!). I feel lucky to have made it out there to see all those people. Now I expect to hunker down for the winter, and I hope that as the year comes to a close you are also safe, healthy, and warm.

Yosemite and Beyond

Oct5

Next up in my Northern California trip: Yosemite! My mother and I drove there from San Francisco, stopping for lunch in Tracy. Quite by accident, we stumbled upon an Indian grocery store/restaurant called Apna Bazaar, where we ate a delicious meal. Plus there was a case full of different flavors of barfi, labeled in English and (what I think was) Hindi, and the aisles of the grocery store were full of millet flour and pickled mangoes and rusks!

The last time I was in Yosemite, I was not yet born, so this was my first real visit. We stayed in a tent cabin in Half Dome Village in the valley, and we had two full days in the park. On the first day, we walked past/through the prescribed burn in the Ahwahnee Meadow. The smoke billowing under the pines and the flames licking the earth were a rather eerie sight. Naturally, when I noticed the sign for the Yosemite Cemetery, I had to go check out every gravestone and marker. Then we went up to Glacier Point to take in the views and hiked to McGurk Meadow, where we ate wild blueberries.

Me and Half Dome

“Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

On the second day, we hiked along the shoreline of Tenaya Lake (where there were still patches of snow!). Then we went to Tuolomne Meadows and climbed Pothole Dome.

Tenaya Lake

The following morning, we returned to San Francisco. My mother flew back to Minnesota, while I headed to San Francisco Chinatown. It was in fact the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) that day, and I was determined to buy moon cakes. I just walked up Grant Ave., impatiently overtaking tourists and keeping my eyes peeled for a bakery amidst all the kitsch. (I must have looked like a tourist myself, pulling my little suitcase and wearing a stuffed backpack.) On one street corner, a man sat on an overturned bucket playing the erhu. I finally found Eastern Bakery and proceeded to buy three moon cakes, a 粽子, and an egg tart, which I promptly ate on the street (just the egg tart).

From Chinatown I went to Berkeley, where I was staying for the night. My friend Isabelle had told me about an exhibit by Alina Chau at a Berkeley gallery called Tr!ckster, so I decided to go see it. I hadn’t realized Tr!ckster was both a gallery and a charming comic book store. Alina Chau’s paintings were gorgeous, and there were so many intriguing and beautiful graphic novels to page through. Best of all, I was invited to an impromptu tea party with the owner, a volunteer, a young customer, and his guardian. It was a magical afternoon. Before I left, I bought Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda.

One of the paintings in the exhibit

中秋節 – Mid-Autumn Festival

Sep10

Monday was the Mid-Autumn Festival, a Chinese celebration of the harvest and the full moon. On Saturday, my roommate and I traveled to Chinatown to buy moon cakes for the occasion. We first met a friend of mine who goes to Caltech for lunch at Sam Woo, where we ate braised fish with tofu (a dish which included, to our surprise, a fair amount of pork), green beans with minced pork, and beef pan-fried noodles with pickled vegetable.

We then walked to Phoenix Bakery for the moon cakes. The bakery sells quite an assortment of pastries and confections, from French-style viennoiseries to mochi ice cream, from enormous frosted cakes covered with sliced almonds to savory buns and dim sum items. And moon cakes, of course! What’s more, they were 25% off!

They had the traditional red bean paste and lotus seed paste fillings I like, so I bought one of each, both without egg yolks inside. The moon cakes were labeled in Chinese and had quite poetic names. The lotus seed one was marked 雙鳳蓮蓉月 (shuāngfèng liánróng yuè), which means “double phoenix lotus seed paste moon.” (The character for lotus, 蓮, is in my Chinese name.) My roommate’s lotus seed moon cake with two egg yolks was labeled 雙黃 (shuānghuáng), “double yellow” instead of “double phoenix.” To my surprise, the red bean paste moon cake was labeled 玫瑰豆沙月 (méiguī dòushā yuè), which means “rugosa rose bean paste moon.” I’m not sure why a red bean moon cake is called rose. Maybe because roses can be red?

We waited until Monday, the day of the festival, to taste the moon cakes. Both the red bean and the lotus seed were very good.

Red bean paste moon cake

Lotus seed paste moon cake

Blurry inside of lotus seed paste moon cake

Since I figured it would be a long time before I had another chance to visit a Chinese bakery, I bought a couple of other things too. First, a baked barbecued pork bun, which I hadn’t had in ages and which tasted exactly how I remembered.

Second, a rice dumpling (粽子 – zòngzi), which the bakery called a Chinese tamale. It’s a packet of sticky rice filled with pork, Chinese sausage, a salted egg yolk, and other tidbits (I’m accustomed to mushroom and peanuts, but this one had neither and I think had mung beans), the whole thing wrapped in bamboo or lotus leaves and tied with string. Zongzi are associated with the summer Dragon Boat Festival, but I will happily eat them whenever. They are so good. My great-grandmother used to make them.

Sadly, when we visited, the bakery didn’t seem to have any egg tarts, the delicious yellow custards in flaky crust that you can get at dim sum. If there had been any, I definitely would have bought one. Or several.