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Tracing a Cookie Trail
As interesting as the local food was to me, I was interesting to the locals. You could see their minds processing: She looks perfectly Chinese, she speaks Chinese perfectly, but something is amiss. Perhaps it was the way I moved, the way I dressed, the way I laughed. I wasn't, they felt, of China. Hong Kong? Taiwan? they asked. "I'm American," I explained.Their reply: "No, you're Chinese. You were just born in America."
I thought, Maybe the same thing was true of Chinese food back home: It's Chinese. It just happened to be born in America.
Or maybe the truth was closer to this: It's American. It just happens to look Chinese.
That morning on the subway as I read about the Powerball winners, people swarmed around me as usual. I wondered, How many had eaten Chinese food in the last week? How many had read their fortunes and saved their favorites? How many might have played the lottery with those lucky numbers? I was entranced by the idea that so many people took that same leap of faith on March 30 and played the identical numbers from a fortune cookie.
Right then and there, I decided to track the winners back to where they'd eaten. Following the Powerball fortune cookie trail, I believed, would help me understand why nearly every one of us has a go-to Chinese restaurant in our lives. (Yes, you could charitably describe me as passionate about Chinese food, though I'll admit that the line between passion and obsession is a wobbly one.)
Within hours, I identified one of the Powerball restaurants, Lee's China, in Omaha, Nebraska. I looked up the number online and dialed. A woman picked up.
I started out by introducing myself in Mandarin Chinese. I received the telephone equivalent of a blank stare.
I switched to basic Cantonese.
More blankness.
I tried English.
The woman cut me off. "We're Korean," she said in a thick accent.
And she hung up.
Over the next year, I compiled a list of the Powerball restaurants and winners, drew up an itinerary and began a consuming journey that crisscrossed the country. By the end, I had visited 42 states. I had driven cars until bugs splattered across my windshield like egg whites dropped in soup. I'd taken red-eye flights, pulled all-nighters driving on interstate highways, stewed on buses for 23 consecutive hours and crashed in the relative air-conditioned comfort of Amtrak trains.
At the end of my travels, I had many ponderous food-related thoughts along with a well-tended stomach. I also had this, delivered as if it were a deep insight: "Do you know how to tell if it's a good Chinese restaurant?" people would ask. Then they'd lean over conspiratorially and say, "Look inside the window. See how many people eating there are Chinese."
Monty McCarrick, a truck driver from Wyoming with a long black ponytail and a receding hairline, called his wife, Joyce, from Iowa, where he'd stopped during a trip across the country.
"Are you sitting down?" asked Monty, whose right arm is marked with a tattoo of an American flag.
"You wrecked the truck," Joyce said anxiously.
No, he crowed. They'd won $100,000 in Powerball.
Two months earlier, they had gone to their favorite Chinese restaurant, in Powell, Wyoming (population 5,000-plus). There, Monty found his lucky numbers in a fortune cookie. Five weeks later, he bought the fateful ticket in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on his way to Ohio.
I dropped by the McCarricks' home, a modest one-bedroom apartment they shared with their cat, Coco, who sometimes accompanied Monty on his road trips. The couple's most valuable asset was their extensive Elvis memorabilia until Monty won the Powerball drawing. They paid off $20,000 in credit card debt.
In Monty's drives across the country, Chinese restaurants were reliable, accessible eating establishments. "They are pretty much in every town you go to," he told me. "And they're fairly inexpensive. You get all you want to eat for anywhere between five and seven dollars." What's nice, he noted, is how predictable they are. "You get the sweet-and-sour pork, the lo mein noodles and the egg foo yong. It's pretty tasty."
He explained that there are some exceptions, like egg rolls. But for Monty, the predictability is reassuring. "I don't like a lot of change. I'm a simple person."
Louisiana had two of the 110 Powerball winners, but, more important, it had Cajun Chinese food. When informed of my quest, a colleague told me I should visit Trey Yuen Cuisine of China, in Mandeville, outside New Orleans, to try dishes like Szechuan alligator and soy-vinegar crawfish. Trey Yuen had been serving Szechuan alligator since the late 1970s, shortly after alligator meat became legal. It was one of the more popular dishes.
Trey Yuen was owned by five brothers named Wong, whose great-grandfather had taken a boat to San Francisco in the late 19th century, seeking work. The brothers traveled across the states, working in Chinese restaurants, until they found the opportunity to open the original Trey Yuen. Their mother used to tell them, "You guys are like my five fingers. Individually, you are not very strong. Together" -- she would form a fist -- "you are solid." Together, the five brothers have owned their restaurants for more than 35 years.
Trey Yuen's Szechuan alligator dish ended up being light-colored chunks of meat mixed with ginger, garlic and crushed pepper. The alligator looked like cooked chicken but tasted surprisingly springy and tender. "I call it bayou veal," said Tommy Wong, the fourth of the five brothers, in a Texas twang. "Some people are squeamish about trying alligator," he added. Of course, he eventually does tell those who dine on bayou veal the truth -- "after they've eaten it."
Tommy showed me a plate of raw chicken lying next to a plate of raw alligator. I would not have been able to distinguish between them if it weren't for the fact that the alligator meat came in long, pale strips. "See how nice and lean it is, and clean. High in protein," said Tommy.
Chinese cooking isn't a set of dishes, I was discovering. It's a philosophy that serves local tastes and ingredients. That idea continued to reverberate as I encountered creations like cream cheese wontons (also called crab Rangoon) in the Midwest and Philly cheesesteak rolls (egg rolls on the outside, cheesesteak inside) in Philadelphia. Chinese food, it seemed, does not have to originate in China.
And some so-called Chinese restaurants are not even Chinese. In the early days before P.F. Chang's became known as a national chain, customers would genially ask how Mr. Chang was doing. There is no Mr. Chang. The "P.F." stands for Paul Fleming, a creator of Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar and the founding visionary of Chang's restaurant chain.
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