Chinese taro root cake and grandma memories

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When I moved out on my own after college, I was pretty frugal and didn’t buy much of anything. But what I did do was do ample research on Chinese cookbooks that were actually authentically Chinese, and I found one that was quite close to what I remembered my grandma made when I was growing up. And once I found them, I bought them and spent lots of time reviewing them. Taro root cake is one of my grandma’s specialties, and one that I always loved eating every Chinese New Year. When I started making it as an adult, I could actually hear her voice scolding me in the back of my head as I was measuring certain ingredients out, chopping others, and likely being too generous with some of the very expensive dried shrimp and scallop fillings. She never measured anything; the closest thing she’d use to “measure” was a rice bowl for things like rice flour or water. Other than that, it was all in her head. I don’t think I will ever be that way in the kitchen. Even if I do not stick with a recipe, I’m still measuring things out, even approximately, according to what I remember.

Every time I have made it, whether it’s been around Chinese new year, for friends’ gatherings, or even the one time I made it for my parents in their kitchen, I always remember my grandma fondly. The entire process is labor intensive, time intensive, but the end result always makes me so happy and feeling so accomplished. Part of it is because I think it helps me remember my grandma, and the other part of it is as though I feel like by making it, I’m keeping her memory alive. She left us no written letter, recipes, notes, anything… so all the dishes I like to make that she made are all from what I believe are as close to what she made based on recipes I have found, whether they are from cookbooks or on Cantonese food blogs. In addition, I know virtually not a single person who makes this from scratch, so it’s also a mini win in my head that I know I’m the only person I know who can and will make this. Store-bought versions and those on dim sum carts just pale in comparison to the homemade ones.

The one part of making this that gets me the most excited is when you combine all the filling ingredients with the steamed taro in the pan. That’s the moment you can see all the parts coming together to make this one delicious, rich, decadent savory cake. It is truly bliss.

Hamilton! the musical!

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Tonight, we finally went to see Hamilton the musical. While it would have been ideal to have seen it when Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator/song-writer, was in it, that ship had unfortunately sailed years ago, but tonight’s performance did not disappoint. I will say that I did read up on Hamilton and his history and legacy prior to watching the musical, and I feel like if I hadn’t, some of the topics/songs being sung would not have made as much sense to me if I had not had this prior knowledge. Plus, it can be difficult to rely on songs and raps that go so quickly for all the bits of information unless you either do pre-reading or pre-listening to the songs. Now, I understand why so many people I know listened to the soundtrack over and over before actually going to see the musical. It all makes sense now!

But now that we’ve finished watching the musical, it’s truly amazing 1) how diverse the cast was (purposely done this way by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and 2) how high energy the entire production was; it was as though there was no calm, no real break in dancing/high energy singing to be had. Lin-Manuel Miranda was quoted saying that he made the cast diverse to really highlight what Hamilton was all about as an immigrant himself from the West Indies. And if you want to highlight that, what better way to do that than to show people of different colors and backgrounds on the set of the show? It’s most definitely one of the most notable Broadway shows I’ve ever seen — the rap and music made it so, so unique and different from anything else I’ve seen before.

This is one of those soundtracks that I’ll likely be listening to over and over again on Spotify, similar to how after I saw Phantom of the Opera, I listened to the soundtrack for months and months after. Seeing the musical has also made me want to learn more about Eliza Hamilton, who was Alexander Hamilton’s wife. She sounds like a force to be reckoned with.

An evening with Hari Kondabolu

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Tonight, we went to Carolines on Broadway to see a comedy show by Hari Kondabolu. I actually didn’t know who he was before tonight, as Chris had booked the show. Last year, we saw a number of comedians from lesser represented backgrounds and geographies featured on Netflix, and it actually widened my understanding of what the comedy scene was like globally. For the most part in the U.S., comedy has been dominated by (surprise surprise) white males… with the occasional black male like Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock. Even white female comedians are lesser known, and of the ones who are known like Amy Sedaris, they tend to have smaller audiences. In recent years, we’ve had more people of color represented, such as Trevor Noah, Hasan Minhaj, Ronny Chieng, and even Ali Wong, who I’ve really enjoyed and appreciated not only as an Asian American female, but also as someone who was born and raised in San Francisco. It’s been a refreshing mix not just in terms of ethnicity, but also the actual topics that are being discussed.

Hari Kondabolu is ethnically Indian but born and raised in Flushing, New York. Of course, given his upbringing, race and ethnicity are big topics for his shows, as well as identity, inequality, immigration, and politics. (It is always laugh-out-loud funny when Indian people poke fun at white fragility). But sometimes it’s the little things that people joke about that somehow stand out to me, the things you never even think are worth discussing but come out in comedy. He joked about the shape of Q-tips, for example, and how ridiculous it is that doctors always warn you not to put them in your ear because you could push ear wax deeper into your ear canal and thus cause a blockage… well, if that’s the case, then why would you make it so that it just perfectly shapes the ear canal, then?!

That is so true.. and something I have personally wondered to myself…!

Impending family paranoia

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I called my mom today on my way back home from work. I can tell she is getting antsy about my visit. About this time every year, she tells me that her health is going downhill, that she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, and that she thinks she needs to have her head X-rayed because she’s constantly getting headaches and her head feels like it’s spinning. She also tends to catch colds around this time of year, so that doesn’t help her mood either. She does the same thing — interrogates me to see which of my family members may have contacted me, or who I may have told that I am coming home. She hates it when I tell my cousins, aunt, or uncle that I am coming home. She thinks when they want to see me, they suggest a meal, and they “expect” her to pay for the meal. “They just sit there, looking! It’s so embarrassing! They are just waiting for me to pay the bill!” she says time after time after time. She says this, yet she or my dad always feel the need to secretly pay the bill in advance, allowing no one the chance to pay. Or, when my cousin or aunt actually does this, they feel guilty and bad, so they feel the need to immediately take them out, or buy them too many excessive gifts. It’s lose-lose no matter what.

This time, when I told her that my cousin was driving up from San Jose to have dinner on my last Saturday in town, she got angry and demanded to know why he was coming. I said it was for dinner with me. She raised her voice, saying she refused to go and she should not be expected to pay since she’s no longer working, she’s disabled, and she cannot pay for everyone anymore. I told her to calm down — no one said she has to pay for anyone. It’s the same stupid conversation every single time. Her main point? She wants me to have no contact with any relatives. Why? This would mean no one pays for anyone, which is her dream… Even though she constantly is asking about each of them every single call.

I always wish I could just see my cousin alone with his wife, but he has to insist his mom or my uncle come. And that’s really when it gets annoying. It can’t just be a regular family get-together because my mom insists that everyone is out to get her. She then accused me of being sullen and said that I should be positive when I call her and not be negative.

Really? I am the negative one? I am not the one making up paranoid, baseless stories in my head about people being out for every dollar she has.

When your two worlds collide

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My good friend came to drop off some things for me at my office today. While I thought she would just wait for me downstairs, I realized she actually came up to our floor and was waiting for me in our waiting area near the front desk. She even surprised me with dried flowers (which should last pretty much forever until they’ve collected enough dust and cob webs). She is the most thoughtful friend I have — surprising me at work with flowers in hand!

I gave her a tour of my office, introduced her to a few colleagues, and of course, walked her around our kitchen, complete with endless snacks, healthy and unhealthy, kombucha, cold brew, beer, and even red wine on tap. She took a good number of snacks and packed them away in her bag (I mean, why else did she want to come up, right?).

She said she imagined my office would be something like this given what she’d seen and heard of other tech companies — she just didn’t realize we’d have things like our bottled tea selection, packaged boiled eggs (??), or Muscle Milk (which, we found out today actually has no real milk, just “milk proteins” — whatever that means, and no real sugar (they use fake sugars!). “So this is what it’s like to work in tech, huh? You guys just get tons of free shit and gain weight over this!” she exclaimed.

Yeah, that’s kind of true. A number of colleagues have told me that within six months of joining our company, they find that their waist lines get bigger or their clothes in general just start feeling tighter. Even when you think you are ordering healthy foods for lunch with our lunch stipend, too much of a healthy thing ends up still being… well, too much, and too much food makes you gain weight. We’re definitely very lucky with our food and perks here, and it was interesting and amusing at the same time to see my friend marvel over our office, our food, and all the things I just find “normal” and take for granted every day. It was a novelty for her, and I could tell she really enjoyed being there and did not want to leave.

Greater Clements and life parallels

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On Saturday afternoon, we went to see the show Greater Clements at the Lincoln Center. The show is about the fictional town of Greater Clements and what looks to be its eventual demise: the town is literally in the midst of voting on a proposition that would dissolve Greater Clements as a town completely. This is partly in reaction to wealthy “coastal elites” from California moving into massive mansions that are going up in the area, who have brought a culture that is unrecognizable in this small mining town in the middle of Idaho. The mine that the town centered around is dead now, though — fully blocked off and illegal to enter. Maggie runs a mining tour and museum that she is planning to shut down, and her unstable and mercurial son Joe comes back from a stint in Alaska, still unpredictable and terrifying both his mother and the locals who have known him all his life. Then, out of nowhere, an old teen love of Maggie comes into the picture and offers to take her away to start a new life hours away… but he’s been diagnosed with cancer. It’s complicated, strange, and a bit hard to swallow all these random tangents this story goes off on. It’s a story that seems to have underlying themes of the American Dream, mostly failed, the new taking over the old, and resistance to change and changing times.

What struck me the most about the play, which I frankly thought was a bit long, was Joe and the performance of the actor who played him. He has a dark past, having attacked someone and nearly destroying his life at an earlier age. He is described by his mother as having the intelligence and social skills of someone only 15-years old despite being 27 years old, and it’s clear that he suffers from an unmentioned mental illness, which seems to have had little treatment. It made me ache to see his monologue talking to his mother, where all he did was try to make her one ashtray after the next in his ceramics/pottery class after seeing how happy she was at the first one. After he had created what seemed like over a dozen for her, his mom responded that this was enough and said he needed to stop; in other words, what was wrong with him? And it suddenly hit him that no matter what he did, no matter what strides in self improvement he made and worked so hard on, he could only achieve so much and be recognized so much, and frankly, it would never be enough to build the perception that he was no longer “weird.” Perception is his reality: everyone thinks he’s “weird” or psychotic, and that would stick with him forever regardless of what actions he did to change it.

It’s clear he cares so much, loves so much, and wants so much to be better, to get better and be the best version of himself, but he realizes he falls short against his mother’s and society’s expectations. It was heartbreaking for me to see the parallels between Joe and Ed. In many ways, Ed was like this: he was cognizant he wanted to be better, to do the best he could. But sometimes, he tried too hard like the way Joe did with too many ash trays. Sometimes, his acts of generosity were just perceived as strange, excessive, even scary. Sometimes, his ways of helping were just overbearing. But he just wanted to be loved and accepted, and somehow, the world could not give that to him. That’s like with Joe in this play. They both have mental illnesses; they both have done things in their past that they weren’t proud of or that scarred their reputations. They both have parents that never fully recognized them and loved them the way they needed to be loved. Their parents perceived them as failures that they are embarrassed of. It was like a painful reminder of the short life my brother lived that has now ended.

Monday before Chinese New Year in Manhattan Chinatown

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I thought I was having a pretty productive today on my day off. Since I get Martin Luther King, Jr., Day off from work every year, it’s always been one of those quiet days when I can wake up leisurely, have an extra long workout, go around the city, run errands, and spend time during the day with friends I’d normally never seeing during the weekday daylight hours. I worked out, cooked and cleaned, and headed down to Chinatown to pick up a handful of items in preparation for some Chinese New Year foods I want to make this year. I thought it would be relatively quiet since it would be a weekday and a lot of people would be at work… and then I was proven wrong almost immediately. The subway cars were full getting on and off at Grand Street along the B train. When I got to Hong Kong Supermarket, it was as though it was totally mobbed by people of all ages, not just the grandmas and the great-grandmas of the world. The surrounding areas were decked out in Year of the Rat signage and other red good luck Chinese signs and lanterns. The lines in the supermarket were so out of control that they had to open registers in areas that I’d never even seen registers before! I can’t remember ever waiting in line that long at this market.

I also stopped by my favorite Vietnamese market, where they had several freshly made varieties of banh chung, or Vietnamese steamed sticky rice tamales for the Tet Lunar New Year. They had the sweet ones filled with ripe banana as well as my favorite mung bean and pork belly ones in multiple shapes and sizes, so I picked up the savory one to bring home and steam. For some reason, I felt so embarrassed when the man selling them tried to address me in Vietnamese, describing the fillings to me, but I could only half understand what he was saying and had to respond back in English. “You aren’t Vietnamese?” he asked me in English. “Well… I am, but I can’t speak it,” I responded sheepishly. Well, at least I know what the food actually is! These are the moments when my level of “Asianness” is always in question, both internally and externally.

This brief exchange suddenly reminded me of a friend I made while I was in Shanghai over 13 years ago; her name was Dong Mei (the literal meaning of her name in English is “winter plum”). We met at the university where she was studying, where I had my exchange program for a month. We became friends because I was randomly interviewing locals on campus, and she took a liking to me, and we started hanging out regularly. I complimented her on the shirt she was wearing; within two days, she showed up at my room with a similar shirt in a different color! I told her at the time that although I had just started learning Mandarin and the actual Chinese written language just a year before that I felt at home in Shanghai. I couldn’t really explain it at the time, I said, and my Mandarin wasn’t anywhere near proficient, but I felt very comfortable. It was just a feeling I had. She responded to me, “Well, of course you feel comfortable here. You are Chinese in China. It doesn’t matter if you were born in England, the United States, or anywhere in Europe. You can be born any place, but your face is Chinese. You look in the mirror, and you will always have a Chinese face staring back at you. The blood in your veins is Chinese. The blood running through my veins and everyone else’s veins here is Chinese. That is why you feel at home here.”

I always remember that conversation for some reason. Is that really why I would feel “comfortable” — because of racial homogeneity around me? Or is it the fact that the cultural “norms” that I have more or less followed around foods, ethnic traditions, just stand as they are and warrant zero explanation to anyone, because everyone there just “gets it” — it is literally just part of their DNA? Because in moments like with the banh chung seller, I didn’t really feel “at home” — if anything, I suddenly felt foreign with someone who looks just like me. Am I an outsider to him because I don’t speak the same language as him, or does he just get me because at least we eat the same foods and look the same?

Microphone quality

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It is always said that you “get what you pay for,” and that is usually the case especially with things like technology. Almost a year ago, I purchased my microphone for cooking videos and travel vlogging, and for the most part, it’s held up pretty well. But today, while going over footage shot in a windy outdoor market in Amsterdam, I started realizing the limits of this $50 microphone. It picked up more of the wind than my voice, and I’m hesitant to even use this specific footage because.. what’s the point if you cannot hear what I am saying? I might as well put music over it and add in subtitles, and I’m not totally sure I want to do that.

So I started researching other higher quality microphones that other vloggers use. Some are clip-on; the majority of higher end mics allow you to test and see what the sound is like while you are recording; that way, no time is wasted and no waiting period to see whether your sound quality is passable or good. But the one that really won, hands down, was a lapel mic that could capture your voice, crystal-clear with nothing else, no interference, even in the loudest wind tunnel on the top of a mountain. How much does this microphone cost? $700!!!

I’m not vlogging at a level where I’ve worked hard enough to deserve a mic that costs that much money. Maybe when I have hundreds of thousands of subscribers or am getting sponsored posts, I can do that, but until then, this $50 mic is going to have to do its thing. I need to start setting goals for subscribers, and once I reach those, I can “reward” myself with new or upgraded equipment.

Premonitions

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While I was in Indonesia, I woke up from a disturbing dream, during which one of my close friends called me to let me know that she broke up with her long-time boyfriend, someone who she thought she would marry in the next year or two. Breakups never seem that bad… until the couple has been together a considerable amount of time, have shared assets, a shared apartment, etc. And that’s what this would have been. I had some feelings based on their exchanged behavior in the last few times seeing them that made me think that maybe this wasn’t going to be “happily ever after,” but with friends, you can never really openly share when you think their romantic relationships look like crap; that is judgment best kept to yourself until the appropriate time, when your friend actually comes to you and explicitly asks for your opinion. The latter pretty much never happens until after the relationship is done with, but you know, you have to be respectful. I haven’t always been tight-lipped, and well, I’m growing up and finally learning my lesson to just listen and not say too much too soon.

So tonight over drinks, she told me that they were having issues, and she wanted to chat with me separately about it. He was with us in a small group at the time, so she couldn’t be as open as she wanted, but I could tell just based on the look on her face that it wasn’t going to be good. She looked pretty dead serious. And for another kicker, I could also tell there was someone else in the picture, as well.

Maybe it’s like we’re family after all these years; you just get feelings that things aren’t right. My mom always told me that she would get weird premonitions in her dreams, and I get them, too, occasionally. They’ve been less frequent in recent years, but when they do happen, they feel spooky.

Birthday surprises and bites

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Since coming back from Australia and Indonesia, I’ve been keeping a pretty low profile at work. I haven’t been as social because frankly, I feel pretty miserable being back in the office environment after being away for nearly a month, and the idea of going back to the usual grunt work does not excite me the least bit. We have a new office manager, and given our old office manager always knew my birthday, I figured I would keep quiet today and not tell anyone it was my birthday… until our legal counsel in San Francisco blew the cover and posted on our team channel that it was my birthday. HOW DID HE KNOW IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY? He isn’t even “friends” with me on Facebook! That got our current office manager excited, and she along with a colleague ran out to get me not one, but two birthday cakes (this was a bit crazy considering there were barely 10 people in the office today), a massive birthday balloon, a card that everyone signed, plus actual gifts for me to take home. I couldn’t believe how over the top she was; it was honestly too much.

Chris took me to L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in the Meatpacking this evening for my birthday dinner. Joel Robuchon has a mini empire of restaurants and Michelin stars, two of which are here in New York City — one is the grill and the other is the l’atelier, or “workshop” as you would translate it from French. The idea of the restaurant is that it would be “open” as a workshop is, so the majority of the seats are around the kitchen. Diners can then see all the meals coming to life right before their eyes. We’ve eaten at other restaurants that have this concept for tasting menus, but none of them were as bright and loud as this one: Robuchon clearly loves the color red — the entire dining room is red and black. We had the “evolution” winter tasting menu, which ranged from small dishes of cold parsnip soup to frog legs (not like anything you’d imagine when you think “frog legs” and no bones!) to Alaskan king crab and lobster, artfully presented and prepared with skinny tweezers. I normally dislike cold soups, but the parsnip soup was creamy and delicious with just the right level of vegetal taste. Frog legs have never really been my thing: I’ve enjoyed them, but I think they taste just like chicken. So if they taste just like chicken, then why am I doing so much work taking all the meat out of these thin little bones for when I could get more meat with less bones by eating chicken? But with the frog legs presented here in what looked like little fried green dumplings on our plate, these were not only boneless, but super crunchy (yet still tasted like chicken). And the breads, which are all made in house, were incredible: they ranged from slim, perfect mini baguettes to “snails” (the texture of shattering croissants!!) to a little flatted croissant with a delicious melty cheese on top. The last time I felt the bread was this notable during a meal at a restaurant was when we went to the now-defunct Bouley, which was in TriBeCa.

I love tasting menus and seeing how different chefs create “art” in bowls, plates, and dishes. I also appreciate them even more knowing how much creativity and hard labor go into each single dish. Watching the chefs and cooks painstakingly plate each one, complete with droppers, tweezers, and the smallest little metal utensils… it almost made my head spin a little. I could never handle that type of precision or pressure in a kitchen. Hence, I’ve had zero interest in ever doing real “plating” at home; I don’t care about doing it myself. That’s the stuff I can go out for and enjoy.