Author Archives: Bangkok Glutton

Unbeknownst to everyone except my friend Galen, I have been kicking around the idea for a documentary about Thai food abroad. It would explore the ways that Thai restaurants adapt to the environments around them, be it in Europe, in the Americas, on a remote island, and in other parts of Asia. It wouldn’t be a finger-wagging exercise in authenticity, I hasten to add — just a sincere exploration of how we all alter ourselves in order to appeal to people who are not us. I imagined the Thai food as a metaphor for me myself: an Asian transplant in a mostly white town, tucking away the fish sauce and the shrimp paste into little corners of herself to make her palatable to a different world. The Thai restaurants and I were one and the same.

So imagine my consternation — but also admiration, OK? — when I learned that Lisa Ling had already done this very same thing, except broadened to several Asian cuisines. It’s a good idea! And like me, Lisa Ling has grown up having to adapt and evolve, assimilating yet losing a part of herself in the process. Because don’t get me wrong: however delicious these restaurants can end up being, they lose parts of themselves in the process, sloughing off the bits that would make their own stomachs happy in order to fit into preconceived notions of what those foods should be: takeaway, cheap, fast, unskilled, maybe even a little bit “dirty”. 

Then when those notions get mirrored back to us, we inevitably absorb them, believing our own food to be dirty and cheap (do you know of a Thai person who has NOT complained of paying too much at a nice Thai restaurant or, dare I say, Jay Fai?) In writing of this, I am thinking of the news story in which a random judge is supposed to decide whether a restaurant is serving Mexican food or not (due to zoning restrictions, two Mexican restaurants cannot be next to each other in this city). 

We all know a “Santa Fe” salad is not Mexican food; or do we? Do we know that California rolls are not Japanese? Or that crab rangoon is not Thai? Therein lies the conundrum for “ethnic” restaurants everywhere. How do Mexican people feel, realizing that throwing beans and jalapenos on something makes it Mexican? And what are the accompanying “signifiers” for Thai food? (Peanuts and chilies, no doubt). If I, a 50-year-old menopausal mother of two, take on the signifiers of a hot girl (long blond hair and big boobs), will guys actually take notice of me? This case opens the door to a whole host of questions.

As the first Asian restaurants to take root in North America (and probably all over the Western world), the Chinese have dealt with these questions for at least a century. Yes, there are some enclaves in which Chinese communities are booming and their restaurants emerge relatively unscathed from the ravages of assimilation (consider Vancouver or Auckland). But most of the older ones, established for decades, have had to create a completely new genre of food in order to appeal to their new customer base: think chop suey, chow mein, cold sesame noodles, and that bewitching deep-fried dish known as “General Tso’s chicken”. 

Chinese-American cuisine has developed fans in its own right, even in Bangkok, where a handful of restaurants cater to Asians like me with colonized tongues and a hankering for sweet and sour fried meat. For some, it’s the taste of their childhood; for me, having grown up in a family that loved to drive for hours in search of “authentic” Cantonese cuisine, it’s the taste of rebellion, eating the forbidden stuff that made up “bad” Chinese food.

So when my friend Janet mentions Tai Tung, the oldest Chinese restaurant in Seattle, I want to go immediately. It has everything I am looking for: a history, an immigrant story, a retro vibe, and of course good food.

Unlike many of the other Chinese eateries in Seattle’s compact-but-vibrant Chinatown, Tai Tung is not the door into a meal in Asia. Instead, Tai Tung leans into its own unique sense of kitsch. Started by “Grandpa Quan” in 1935, the restaurant’s decor seems unchanged from its heyday in the mid-1900s, as does most of the staff. Janet, a longtime customer, tells us there was a longtime customer who posed as a host at the entrance to the restaurant, greeting everyone (but mostly women) as they came through the door. We did not get to see him today.

The menu itself is a piece of food history, showing what Seattle-ites expected of a Chinese restaurant in the 1930s; for example, there are two big sections titled “Chop Suey” and “Chow Mein”. At the last minute I, someone who has never had either dish, inexplicably wimp out, which is vexing in hindsight given that I was called “Chow Mein” throughout most of my childhood. Instead, we order some potstickers (I cannot resist fried dumplings) and Janet’s recommendation, a delicious stir-fry with bitter melon, as well as some stir-fried pea shoots in season and stir-fried “Chinese-style” squid (meaning ginger and garlic, apparently the signifiers for Chinese food). As a nod to Chinese-American food, I order sweet-and-sour chicken.

Everything is as good as we could expect from even the most highly regarded Chinese restaurants in town, like Jade Garden. Well, except for the sweet-and-sour chicken, funnily enough; it bears the one-note flavor of honey and nothing else. The squid, somehow, is the most tender I’ve had anywhere, even in Thailand. Someone get this chef some salted egg yolk or some Thai basil and chilies! The meal as a whole is nowhere near “bad” or even in the realm of the inauthentic; in spite of the kitschy surroundings, it’s a surprisingly straightforward Chinese meal. For some reason, I am slightly deflated by the results, maybe because, were I to be reincarnated in restaurant form, my food would be nowhere near as good.

When we left, the lion dancers were out in full force for the new year, roaming through the Chinatown streets and randomly throwing firecrackers on the sidewalks. I cried out that it was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but Janet said no one would sue here in Chinatown. I heard another person say that only in Seattle could firecrackers ring out and alarm no one (except me and a nearby toddler sitting on his dad’s shoulders). Every time the sharp loud bangs flashed, I cowered in the corner with my hands over my ears, like a true Thai. As much as I’ve had to adapt, it is in these instances where my DNA shines through.

I hope to go again, with adventurers who are willing to try out the chop suey and chow mein (if you’re wondering, this is me asking you, Janet!). It’s a story that has yet to be finished. But I look forward to darkening those doors again, and maybe even running into that customer who thinks he’s a host. It’s nice to try to travel back in time, once in a while.

2022 is but a young green bud on the branch, and the Chinese New Year lurks just under the bark, a twinkle in the eye of the tree that plays the main role in this metaphor, if trees were to have eyes. It’s the time for resolutions, or for the slow withering on the vine of them (if these particular trees were to also have vines), and I have been in Seattle for over a month now, surrounded by many sleeping trees.

If resolutions were buds on tree branches, and the month of January a greenhouse of most people’s hopes and dreams, then what I’m experiencing is the opposite of that, a wallowing in the rubble of my hopes and dreams — a reverse-resolution, if you will. My fairly healthy routine in Thailand, when met with the Seattle cold and snow, has come completely undone. What this means is that, whereas some people lose weight, I gain it. Where some people sweat out their worries in gyms and studios and on rooftops, I stew in front of the TV. Where some start counting the calories on their plate, I ingest indiscriminately and voraciously. And where some commit to a dry January, well … (hides bottles of wine in garage). 

So it’s just me and the couch, my new(old) friend. But because of spotty wifi, I don’t even have working Netflix here, so cannot tell you anything about the exploits of Emily in Paris, or those people in Archive 81, or even Jerry Seinfeld. What I can tell you is that I might need psoriasis shots, am possibly battling insulin resistance, should look into that cool new inhaler that promises me a new day, and could even stand to ask my doctor about Botox for migraines, even though I’m not sure I have migraines. I am struck by how many well-known character actors (and maybe an Oscar winner or two) are taking jobs away from regular jobbing actors in commercials, hawking insurance and detergent as well as starring in well-regarded television shows and movies. As I write this, I see … is that Jewel? … in a murder mystery series on the Hallmark channel. Is inflation really this bad, where everyone must take whatever job they can get, thereby forcing all the other actors to fight over mattress factory and adult diaper ads? It feels greedy, doesn’t it? Won’t someone please think of the regular actors?

I write of this because I also find myself at something of a loose end: what to do in 2022? I am all out of projects, and though I have been lucky enough to have had some great things fall into my lap, I can’t rely on “the universe” granting my wishes forever, however much I’d like it to be true. Should I pivot like an Oscar winner shilling insurance for his Maui vacation home? Or should I stick it out, like the person who has not booked enough jobs to buy a Maui vacation home? Decisions, decisions.

Until then, at least I will have the crackling bonfire of all my previous healthy habits to keep me warm. Here, presenting the first fatal wound to my dreams of sticking to a pescatarian intermittent fasting regime in the States:  nuea khem. My father made this to go with sticky rice and nam prik tha dang (garlicky red eye chili dip) for a traditional Northern Thai-style breakfast during my parents’ time Stateside. It’s delicious and unfairly, unwholesomely easy. Perfect for enjoying while mulling over what to do with the ashes of your former princples.

Nuea Khem (Salted beef)

• 1 lb sirloin or ribeye
• 4 Tbsps fish sauce
• 2 Tbsps oyster sauce
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• A few generous grinds of black pepper

1. Mix all ingredients together. Marinate in fridge for 1/2 hour to an hour, depending on how salty you’d like the meat to be. 
2. After marinating, drain and fry in 4 Tbsps vegetable oil in batches over high heat. Do not crowd pan.

3. Fry until meat curled and edges and is a deep mahogany color.

4. Drain on a plate covered with a paper towel.

5. Eat with sticky rice or white rice with a chili dip or sambal if you have it.

I wasn’t sure about writing this post because it has to do with someone else’s health and not mine. It also has nothing to do with food. But after sending a draft to my friend Karen first, I decided to post a little (or rather lot of) something in case it does end up helping someone navigate a similar situation.

What happened was this: Karen caught COVID, probably in New York, and started showing symptoms while mid-flight on the way to Seattle to visit us. Unlike the teacher en route from New York to Iceland, Karen did not self-quarantine in the airplane bathroom. However, she did text me the instant she landed, asking me to help transport her to a PCR testing site “just in case”, since she had a sore throat, cough and headache, three early symptoms of Omicron. She had already booked an appointment the next morning, the earliest appointment she could find that was near us.

We hung out tentatively, with Karen always masked around us, because even if it wasn’t COVID, she was showing signs of a really bad cold, which none of us wanted. All the same, we believed that the likelihood of Karen having COVID was very low, since she had had two Moderna shots and a recent Moderna booster. She also didn’t seem to be as sick as we would have expected for a person suffering from COVID; she did not have trouble breathing, and she still had her sense of taste and smell. 

Although we’d managed to get one PCR appointment in downtown Bellevue, Karen booked a second PCR test at Bellevue University because results for both tests were expected to arrive anywhere between 24-48 hours after, which is both 1) terribly inconvenient for people who don’t want to spread the virus and 2) something to be expected when holiday-time demand for tests was so high. At this point, Washington was relatively free of COVID; 400 cases had been detected in the state in the run-up to Christmas.

Karen had her second PCR test, and we spent a quiet day at home as she recovered from her cold. That night, you can probably guess the rest: the results from her first COVID test came back positive. That meant everybody in the house had to be tested, but, as it was coming up on Christmas Eve, appointments were hard to come by. By this point, Washington’s COVID cases had grown exponentially and everyone was getting worried about spreading the disease at a holiday gathering. Rapid at-home tests were also impossible to get; Karen made us visit many a CVS or Rite Aid since their websites indicated tests were available, but shelves (for a lot of things, not just COVID tests!) were bare, giving off a kind of surreal, end-of-the-world vibe.

A friend saved the day with a bagful of at-home tests he had at home, and very kindly drove to our house o’COVID to drop them off at our doorstep. We all tested negative, and even though it made us feel relieved, we knew it wasn’t as reliable as an up-the-nose-into-your-brain type of test, the kind they favor back in Bangkok.

The earliest available tests for the household were on Christmas Eve in the morning. So we headed to the test site, where Karen had had a very easy and efficient experience getting her second PCR test. Just like when we took Karen, our car was rejected for being outsized and unable to fit into the garage where a long line of car occupants waited to be swabbed. So we were told by the security guard to head to the upstairs car park, armed with the words “tell them Ron sent you.” Upstairs, we joined a lone woman braving the cold in a sweatshirt and leggings, who had been driving a similarly oversized car and had been waiting for her test since 7:45 in the morning.

Our experience diverges from Karen’s here. I think they saw that Karen managed to bypass the long snaking wait in the garage by coming in an outsized car, and that her quick, efficient experience was not indicative of their “brand”. So a bit after 9am, the lone testing person showed up and promptly told the sizeable queue that had formed that he would only be testing people who had made appointments. That disqualified more than half of the line, including the lady who had been waiting for over a hour in front of us. She did not take this well. When we informed this man that we had made appointments, he asked us for a code that would enable us to go through with the test. I asked him if the code was “Tell them Ron the security guard sent you”. By now it was 9.15, and this ordeal was beginning to resemble a game show where we were to overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty in order to win the prize of having a swab up your nose.

We eventually persuaded this guy that we really did actually know Ron, and were given swabs to put up our own noses that he then took from us to put into our personal beakers. After us he did allow the woman who had been waiting for two hours to finally get a test; thankfully, she now had the code.

We got our results, surprisingly, by Christmas morning (I was the last, of course). We were all surprisingly negative. This could be due to any number of factors, including 1) we were all vaccinated and boosted and 2) Karen was extremely careful around us, especially in the first few days of her visit, when she never left her room and I brought all her meals to her door. This was helpful, since we learned that the first few days are when COVID is at its most contagious. By the end of Karen’s trip, she was absolutely recovered and even tested negative on two (!) at-home COVID tests, which we took to mean that she was no longer contagious.

Some very obvious takeaways to this story that ultimately ended well:

1. The stinginess with which organizations use their PCR tests is, to put it mildly, unhelpful. People have to really, really, really want to be tested, or really, really, really lucky to know someone who can give them access to a test. It is much, much easier to pretend everything is hunky-dory and that, even if you do get sick, it’s not COVID since your non-existent test didn’t tell you so.
2. Vaccines and boosters aren’t Captain America shields keeping you from getting the virus. They are intended to keep you from getting so sick that you need hospitalization, thereby taking up the space of someone else who needs the bed for a non-COVID reason.
3. As Karen said herself, what if she had been another kind of person? It would have been easy for her to pretend she had only had a cold, or to be less vigilant about testing (in fact my parents had been joking that we were planning to do a tour of all the PCR sites in the Seattle area and writing a guide book about them). Even when she didn’t know she had COVID, she had her meals in another room or in front of an open door and wore her mask when around people. Which leads me to the next point.
4. Masks do work in preventing the transmission of this respiratory virus. I know people for some reason (usually Western, and, in Bangkok, a lot of men) like to make fun of them as some sort of evidence of hysteria, but I can personally attest to their efficacy in fighting the spread of COVID. Make of that what you will.