Vignettes in Red
My father was born and raised in Hong Kong. His childhood in Fontana Gardens, a sepia corner of Causeway Bay, left a deep and lingering impression on him – one that would follow forever. My childhood was spent in Dubai, where my grandfather’s house was decorated like any upwardly mobile Tamil-Muslim house might’ve been expected to be decorated, with Islamic calligraphic prints, a smattering of ornate carpets, a small wall of portraits which the family was divided on keeping up, all accented with some modern chinoiserie: an intricate sculpture of a lychee branch with a burnt orange cicada on it, collectible tea ceremony sets (out of which pressed cakes of raw pu’erh were to be drunk), a stunning chessboard in the style of the terracotta warriors, and NBA-height glistening porcelain with entire forests etched into them. I don’t remember my siblings or I appreciating any of these, but I think about them often now – a nostalgia by proxy for a desi life in dependent territory Hong Kong.
Many of my friends are lifelong sinophiles. Zahra, for example, is another British desi Muslim who shares an attached-detached curiosity towards the Island-Giant nexus. She’s lived in Hong Kong and Beijing and now flits between European capitals. She went to the same school that many of my cousins went to over the years, one of the Island Schools. We talk a lot about memory and memory-making together, a topic within her master’s thesis on the Bosnian genocide. In a recent conversation, I soberly realised that I didn’t recall large portions of a road trip we took a few years ago (a fact that will become relevant later in this story is that I didn’t eat a single Asian meal during the summer we spent abroad together). Depression deadens recollection, and I’d like this essay to be an exercise in remembering some of the last decade.
They say that olfactory triggers are potent in resurfacing nostalgia or trauma, and I do my most successful remembering around mountains of chilies and oily vats of peppercorn broth. The highly formulaic nature of the ‘Sichuan’ canteen-restaurant anywhere in the world makes it a familiar physical checkpoint within which I can assess how the last week, or month, or decade went. How did I feel when I was last in a xiao wei yang, or hai di lao, or unnamed oriental student mess?
The first restaurant I can remember going to was called China Sea – it’s the sort of authentic family-run, family-style restaurant that would go platinum on Food Twitter or feature on the thinking man’s Substack. My father is a creature of habit beyond repair, and we’d go to China Sea at least once a month, if not once a week, for the hand-pulled lamian you could see through a window that looked onto Deira Clocktower, and the whole steamed ginger-slivered bass, followed by a drive, maybe to Jumeirah Beach, or a walk down the creek. We graduated from China Sea to Xiao Wei Yang at some unidentifiable point, and that’s where I learned about the joys of hotpot.
Xiao Wei Yang and a now-closed Harbin-ese hotpot restaurant were where I became a mala fanatic. My father knew a lot about Harbin because he was taking multiple trips there at the time to make large orders of industrial power production equipment, a duty of his work. The DIY-ness of it coupled with the exhilaration of making my own sauce was all I needed as a 10 year old, one who already saw himself as being exceedingly cultured for knowing the difference between sushi and sashimi. I realise now that the deeply held attachment I have to that sui generis smell of beef slices intermingling with the peppercorns is not an attachment to the food, but to a time where my family felt close and together, when my grandparents were still alive, and where I felt safe and uninhibited. I can recall with minute precision the moment I discovered Wang Zai milk drink, and how it tasted like a liquified White Rabbit. My brothers and I never had much White Rabbit growing up, but we loved talking about how Wang Zai tastes like a white-rabbit milkshake, as though that’s what our parents’ generation might say.
When we moved from Dubai to Singapore, we had a bit of a cooling off period. It was as though being in almost-Hong Kong disappointed my dad, and for a few years I don’t think we ate out very much at all. We cooked a lot of idiyappam and meen annam at home, all of us missing a more crowded house and a more inviting city, one that felt like the back home of Chennai. But once he discovered the Muslim-friendly cha chaan teng called Tang Tea House, we rinsed it to death – a running gag among my brothers. I think the aunties running it knew my school teachers’ names. And after Tang Tea House it was YiZun Beef Noodles, with their faux Ming bowls and gigantic vats of chilli oil; it was something between a China Sea and a Xiao Wei Yang. My mother, someone who was never particularly scintillated about eating out, unusually appreciated going to YiZun and Aisyah, maybe because they more conspicuously called themselves Muslim-owned restaurants (the same style of restaurant in London never turns out to be any good).
The first friend I made at university, and one I ended up living with for three years, was Southern Chinese, with the quirk of being born and raised in a small town in Norway. We navigated Scotland together and unpacked Edinburgh with the brochure-diverse friend group we had created by the end of the first few weeks in the strange and mystical city we would be in for the next four years. With them, I discovered Xiangbala.
Xiangbala was a cramped, all-you-can-eat hotpot restaurant which can only be described as ‘unpretentious’; it was £16.99 (or something like that) for a buffet that included crab, scallops, tea eggs, and brusque but never rude service in Edinburgh’s Haymarket, an area we didn’t really have much business hanging out in. It wasn’t close to our campus, or where any of us lived, there was no simple public transport access there, and, in the unforgiving Edinburgh haar, never particularly pleasant to get to. But the novelty of the place seemed to get us all out and about. We discussed our loves and heartbreaks, our family values, the people who pissed us off, and everything in between. Life was pretty uncomplicated. It wasn’t quite Xiao Wei Yang for me, I think, but it came pretty close. Xiangbala gave me the validation of my Sino-platonic group and those in our periphery. I thought those unconcerned with the cuisine were impressed that I knew the difference between ‘ma’ and ‘la’, and at the very least my Chinese friends were amused that a brown man would care so much about their food. With Wilhelm and his siblings, Willy and Wictor Zhao, I felt particularly comfortable existing in my mishmashed skin. They were Chinese Norwegians, and I was still deciding what flavour of Indian diaspora I was, or was allowed to be. All I really knew is that we all kind of liked hotpot, and Xiangbala was sufficiently familiar that we knew what to order without looking at a menu, but not so familiar that it didn’t feel like a special affair. I therapised myself at £16.99 a pop once a month. Not a bad deal.
My closest friend, a gal from Hong Kong, often repeats something her mum offhandedly said to her once about how it's no surprise that her nearest friends are Indian. Children who grew up in the Commonwealth, or at least in the style of the Commonwealth, tended to have the same quirks instilled in them – namely, a certain kind of anglophilic literacy, such as reading the entire Roald Dahl canon and loving to write. I cemented my friendship with the only friend I kept from high school, another South Indian, during a quiz competition in Hong Kong. Years later, when he started dating an Island girl, Janis and I became pen-pals – her up in St Andrews and me down in London. I wasn’t sure why we only ever wrote postcards to each other. Maybe we forgot lined paper existed, or hoarded too many novelty postcards and had to use them up. When we last met, years after we stopped writing to each other, Janis told me about a dim sum house that her parents, émigrés, quite liked in Northwest London. It was funny, if a bit sad, that the only things we were really able to talk about were how I ordered cuttlefish and pickled veg dumplings from a WeChat account called huijiazhu666, and how she read that a random restaurant in Bloomsbury served Shanghainese hairy crabs during the right time of year. Despite all this commentary, I realised that I wasn’t committed enough to dumplings to have a strained meal over, so we never ended up going.
After I moved down from Edinburgh to London, I think I became seriously unhappy – the period is a bit of a black hole in my memory. I mean, I lived here, I had a job or two, I took the tube a lot, and I was sad on the tube a lot. But what I really did in the lead-up to the pandemic and in the middle of it is a complete blur to me. For someone who recounts periods of life using food memories, I can't recall a single thing I ate, or cooked. I had a weird job I got fired from, and then I left London and lived in India for a year. I was deep in the doldrums and couldn’t quite pick myself up. I can’t locate a turning point or practice that took me out of this, but I started feeling a bit better at some point and I went out into the world again, looking for some spice.
I spent three months living in Camberwell, a period from which all I recollect is the Art Deco retrofit of the second-floor bathroom in an ex-council house, and alternating evenings alone at Wuli Wuli and Silk Road. Wuli Wuli for the chilli-oil wontons and Silk Road for about six cumin-lamb skewers, but never a big plate chicken as it was a bit too obscene to be eating alone, and even more embarrassing to be doggy bagging home.
Now, where I live in London is pretty close to central Chinatown – somewhere I never make the mistake of entering, and which is also close to many universities filled with international students who need to be fed their home food. The entirety of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury seems to cater to this captive audience – Indonesian canteens inside fish and chip shops, a dozen regional Chinese restaurants within a 100-meter radius, the Indian YMCA, and a fat handful of banh-mi spots: the Regent’s Park-Oxford Circus-Holborn-King’s Cross parallelogram. None of my family lives here, and my friends from university either moved back home or became busier, invented fuller lives, had long-term partners, or just lost interest in my company. The patheticness of investigating each new homestyle restaurant in my area, alone, week on week, lulled me back into those COVID days. I tried to make new friends, joined a callisthenics class in Deptford, started swimming at the Serpentine in Hyde Park, picked up a connection on LinkedIn and read groaningly about the male loneliness epidemic that was killing me. I took Adam to JWD Lamian and was disappointed by most of the menu being sold out. And I think I caught a viral flu, but Jack didn’t, at Xi’an BiangBiang. The reverb of the trains rolling over the bridge every three minutes was like the lowest intensity massage.
In the canteen polygon, I had a terrible takeaway iftar from ‘yangs braised chicken rice’. It reminded me of the worst hawker centres in Singapore, particularly as it was dished up with my personal hell serving of protein (bone-in chicken thighs cut Chinese style, as my grandparents might say). At Mealtime Malatang, another Chinese chain opening its first few outlets in Europe, I was regaled with tales by Fidel, a friend I fiercely guard as my only true London-native chum. He told me about his neverending workplace drama and concerned me with his choice to start seeing a woman who had young children. My friendship with Fidel was built mostly over pizzas, first at a place called Palmyra in Edinburgh which did the greasiest 3 am ‘margharita’, then at a classy New-York slice shop affair called Civerinos, and most recently, Icco, ‘The People’s Pizzeria’ up the road from my current flat. Having a template meal which you mutually come to understand, and as a bonus, enjoy, with a friend, sibling, or formulaic stranger (blind dates?), takes away the decision-making fatigue and lets you focus on the conversation at hand. It’s never really about the food but knowing that you’re both somewhere comfortable and familiar which lets your guard down. I seem to scrutinise a restaurant’s offering a lot more when it comes to the sustenance, rather than a setting for company. Yang’s really wasn’t good, but I’m not sure Mealtime was either – but I was only bothered by one of them.
Asian food is to the American what desi food is to the Brit – sometimes a backdrop against which you can showcase your worldliness, wokeness and wealth. Or sometimes it’s the cheap, cheerful, common man’s food, depending on which neighbourhood you’re in and what your parents did for work. A combination of historical and socioeconomic factors means that on one side of the transatlantic coin, one population knows more about noodles and the other about naan.
With food media, I tend to gravitate towards reading about Asian food, because the vastness of the food writing universe makes it unconquerable unless you pick a rabbit hole to explore. Over a few recent trips to the US, I learned about Jonathan Gold, did a few weeks of reading about San Gabriel Valley, and ultimately visited one noodle restaurant, Chong Qing Special Noodles, with my hero Henry, a Californian in a WMAF. Between LA and New York City, I’d come to realise that the complexity of desi food that we take for granted in London and the UK in general is what they have access to in North America in terms of East Asian cuisine. Not just sheer variety, but also complexity within individual nations; innovations in Korean barbeque and boba and hotpot that rival or even surpass the homefront. I was delighted to learn about the number of ‘mainland’ Korean or Chinese brands that had outlets in the US, and felt some glee in visiting them, knowing that I was a long ways away from making another trip to China or ever going to Korea. In New York, I took a disinterested cousin to Flushing just to look at the now-closed Dumpling Galaxy, a restaurant famed for having over 100 types of xiaolongbao. Funnily enough, it’s something I never ate while living in Singapore – despite the national restaurant of the youth being Din Tai Fung – because it was all pork. I hid inside Xi’an Famous Foods whenever it rained in Manhattan, and wondered whether the ‘accidentally Wes Anderson’ Nom Wah Tea Parlour was somewhere only tourists like me went anymore.
What’s in it for me? The combination of a performed interest, the nostalgic value, and the familiar comfort.
I remember with stunning detail my first time eating Xinjiang lamb skewers. I was on holiday with my family on a two-week trip to China. We had just emerged from a Beijing textile-tailor market, having just ordered a blue linen, red-lined mandarin knot and collar shirt. In a heavy downpour, we saw a croaking old person barbecuing lamb on a makeshift portable grill perched on top of a shopping trolley. We hid alongside them under a barely helpful umbrella, and ate steaming yang rou chuan, my father making some comment about Chinese Muslims. I like looking for the chuans wherever they might be available. They’re often quite good, but never quite Beijing market-style. I like recalling that story in particular often, because it ties into a Bourdainesque narrative of authenticity (even though the distance between Ürümqi and Beijing is probably the size of Europe). My moody attachment to a variety of cuisines from a country I have no real affiliation with is no stranger than any other amateur special interest, like growing a bonsai or playing sudoku. Not for any real reason, but simply because it leans into a certain part of yourself, following you forever.
Many of my friends are lifelong sinophiles. Zahra, for example, is another British desi Muslim who shares an attached-detached curiosity towards the Island-Giant nexus. She’s lived in Hong Kong and Beijing and now flits between European capitals. She went to the same school that many of my cousins went to over the years, one of the Island Schools. We talk a lot about memory and memory-making together, a topic within her master’s thesis on the Bosnian genocide. In a recent conversation, I soberly realised that I didn’t recall large portions of a road trip we took a few years ago (a fact that will become relevant later in this story is that I didn’t eat a single Asian meal during the summer we spent abroad together). Depression deadens recollection, and I’d like this essay to be an exercise in remembering some of the last decade.
They say that olfactory triggers are potent in resurfacing nostalgia or trauma, and I do my most successful remembering around mountains of chilies and oily vats of peppercorn broth. The highly formulaic nature of the ‘Sichuan’ canteen-restaurant anywhere in the world makes it a familiar physical checkpoint within which I can assess how the last week, or month, or decade went. How did I feel when I was last in a xiao wei yang, or hai di lao, or unnamed oriental student mess?
The first restaurant I can remember going to was called China Sea – it’s the sort of authentic family-run, family-style restaurant that would go platinum on Food Twitter or feature on the thinking man’s Substack. My father is a creature of habit beyond repair, and we’d go to China Sea at least once a month, if not once a week, for the hand-pulled lamian you could see through a window that looked onto Deira Clocktower, and the whole steamed ginger-slivered bass, followed by a drive, maybe to Jumeirah Beach, or a walk down the creek. We graduated from China Sea to Xiao Wei Yang at some unidentifiable point, and that’s where I learned about the joys of hotpot.
Xiao Wei Yang and a now-closed Harbin-ese hotpot restaurant were where I became a mala fanatic. My father knew a lot about Harbin because he was taking multiple trips there at the time to make large orders of industrial power production equipment, a duty of his work. The DIY-ness of it coupled with the exhilaration of making my own sauce was all I needed as a 10 year old, one who already saw himself as being exceedingly cultured for knowing the difference between sushi and sashimi. I realise now that the deeply held attachment I have to that sui generis smell of beef slices intermingling with the peppercorns is not an attachment to the food, but to a time where my family felt close and together, when my grandparents were still alive, and where I felt safe and uninhibited. I can recall with minute precision the moment I discovered Wang Zai milk drink, and how it tasted like a liquified White Rabbit. My brothers and I never had much White Rabbit growing up, but we loved talking about how Wang Zai tastes like a white-rabbit milkshake, as though that’s what our parents’ generation might say.
When we moved from Dubai to Singapore, we had a bit of a cooling off period. It was as though being in almost-Hong Kong disappointed my dad, and for a few years I don’t think we ate out very much at all. We cooked a lot of idiyappam and meen annam at home, all of us missing a more crowded house and a more inviting city, one that felt like the back home of Chennai. But once he discovered the Muslim-friendly cha chaan teng called Tang Tea House, we rinsed it to death – a running gag among my brothers. I think the aunties running it knew my school teachers’ names. And after Tang Tea House it was YiZun Beef Noodles, with their faux Ming bowls and gigantic vats of chilli oil; it was something between a China Sea and a Xiao Wei Yang. My mother, someone who was never particularly scintillated about eating out, unusually appreciated going to YiZun and Aisyah, maybe because they more conspicuously called themselves Muslim-owned restaurants (the same style of restaurant in London never turns out to be any good).
The first friend I made at university, and one I ended up living with for three years, was Southern Chinese, with the quirk of being born and raised in a small town in Norway. We navigated Scotland together and unpacked Edinburgh with the brochure-diverse friend group we had created by the end of the first few weeks in the strange and mystical city we would be in for the next four years. With them, I discovered Xiangbala.
Xiangbala was a cramped, all-you-can-eat hotpot restaurant which can only be described as ‘unpretentious’; it was £16.99 (or something like that) for a buffet that included crab, scallops, tea eggs, and brusque but never rude service in Edinburgh’s Haymarket, an area we didn’t really have much business hanging out in. It wasn’t close to our campus, or where any of us lived, there was no simple public transport access there, and, in the unforgiving Edinburgh haar, never particularly pleasant to get to. But the novelty of the place seemed to get us all out and about. We discussed our loves and heartbreaks, our family values, the people who pissed us off, and everything in between. Life was pretty uncomplicated. It wasn’t quite Xiao Wei Yang for me, I think, but it came pretty close. Xiangbala gave me the validation of my Sino-platonic group and those in our periphery. I thought those unconcerned with the cuisine were impressed that I knew the difference between ‘ma’ and ‘la’, and at the very least my Chinese friends were amused that a brown man would care so much about their food. With Wilhelm and his siblings, Willy and Wictor Zhao, I felt particularly comfortable existing in my mishmashed skin. They were Chinese Norwegians, and I was still deciding what flavour of Indian diaspora I was, or was allowed to be. All I really knew is that we all kind of liked hotpot, and Xiangbala was sufficiently familiar that we knew what to order without looking at a menu, but not so familiar that it didn’t feel like a special affair. I therapised myself at £16.99 a pop once a month. Not a bad deal.
My closest friend, a gal from Hong Kong, often repeats something her mum offhandedly said to her once about how it's no surprise that her nearest friends are Indian. Children who grew up in the Commonwealth, or at least in the style of the Commonwealth, tended to have the same quirks instilled in them – namely, a certain kind of anglophilic literacy, such as reading the entire Roald Dahl canon and loving to write. I cemented my friendship with the only friend I kept from high school, another South Indian, during a quiz competition in Hong Kong. Years later, when he started dating an Island girl, Janis and I became pen-pals – her up in St Andrews and me down in London. I wasn’t sure why we only ever wrote postcards to each other. Maybe we forgot lined paper existed, or hoarded too many novelty postcards and had to use them up. When we last met, years after we stopped writing to each other, Janis told me about a dim sum house that her parents, émigrés, quite liked in Northwest London. It was funny, if a bit sad, that the only things we were really able to talk about were how I ordered cuttlefish and pickled veg dumplings from a WeChat account called huijiazhu666, and how she read that a random restaurant in Bloomsbury served Shanghainese hairy crabs during the right time of year. Despite all this commentary, I realised that I wasn’t committed enough to dumplings to have a strained meal over, so we never ended up going.
After I moved down from Edinburgh to London, I think I became seriously unhappy – the period is a bit of a black hole in my memory. I mean, I lived here, I had a job or two, I took the tube a lot, and I was sad on the tube a lot. But what I really did in the lead-up to the pandemic and in the middle of it is a complete blur to me. For someone who recounts periods of life using food memories, I can't recall a single thing I ate, or cooked. I had a weird job I got fired from, and then I left London and lived in India for a year. I was deep in the doldrums and couldn’t quite pick myself up. I can’t locate a turning point or practice that took me out of this, but I started feeling a bit better at some point and I went out into the world again, looking for some spice.
I spent three months living in Camberwell, a period from which all I recollect is the Art Deco retrofit of the second-floor bathroom in an ex-council house, and alternating evenings alone at Wuli Wuli and Silk Road. Wuli Wuli for the chilli-oil wontons and Silk Road for about six cumin-lamb skewers, but never a big plate chicken as it was a bit too obscene to be eating alone, and even more embarrassing to be doggy bagging home.
Now, where I live in London is pretty close to central Chinatown – somewhere I never make the mistake of entering, and which is also close to many universities filled with international students who need to be fed their home food. The entirety of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury seems to cater to this captive audience – Indonesian canteens inside fish and chip shops, a dozen regional Chinese restaurants within a 100-meter radius, the Indian YMCA, and a fat handful of banh-mi spots: the Regent’s Park-Oxford Circus-Holborn-King’s Cross parallelogram. None of my family lives here, and my friends from university either moved back home or became busier, invented fuller lives, had long-term partners, or just lost interest in my company. The patheticness of investigating each new homestyle restaurant in my area, alone, week on week, lulled me back into those COVID days. I tried to make new friends, joined a callisthenics class in Deptford, started swimming at the Serpentine in Hyde Park, picked up a connection on LinkedIn and read groaningly about the male loneliness epidemic that was killing me. I took Adam to JWD Lamian and was disappointed by most of the menu being sold out. And I think I caught a viral flu, but Jack didn’t, at Xi’an BiangBiang. The reverb of the trains rolling over the bridge every three minutes was like the lowest intensity massage.
In the canteen polygon, I had a terrible takeaway iftar from ‘yangs braised chicken rice’. It reminded me of the worst hawker centres in Singapore, particularly as it was dished up with my personal hell serving of protein (bone-in chicken thighs cut Chinese style, as my grandparents might say). At Mealtime Malatang, another Chinese chain opening its first few outlets in Europe, I was regaled with tales by Fidel, a friend I fiercely guard as my only true London-native chum. He told me about his neverending workplace drama and concerned me with his choice to start seeing a woman who had young children. My friendship with Fidel was built mostly over pizzas, first at a place called Palmyra in Edinburgh which did the greasiest 3 am ‘margharita’, then at a classy New-York slice shop affair called Civerinos, and most recently, Icco, ‘The People’s Pizzeria’ up the road from my current flat. Having a template meal which you mutually come to understand, and as a bonus, enjoy, with a friend, sibling, or formulaic stranger (blind dates?), takes away the decision-making fatigue and lets you focus on the conversation at hand. It’s never really about the food but knowing that you’re both somewhere comfortable and familiar which lets your guard down. I seem to scrutinise a restaurant’s offering a lot more when it comes to the sustenance, rather than a setting for company. Yang’s really wasn’t good, but I’m not sure Mealtime was either – but I was only bothered by one of them.
Asian food is to the American what desi food is to the Brit – sometimes a backdrop against which you can showcase your worldliness, wokeness and wealth. Or sometimes it’s the cheap, cheerful, common man’s food, depending on which neighbourhood you’re in and what your parents did for work. A combination of historical and socioeconomic factors means that on one side of the transatlantic coin, one population knows more about noodles and the other about naan.
With food media, I tend to gravitate towards reading about Asian food, because the vastness of the food writing universe makes it unconquerable unless you pick a rabbit hole to explore. Over a few recent trips to the US, I learned about Jonathan Gold, did a few weeks of reading about San Gabriel Valley, and ultimately visited one noodle restaurant, Chong Qing Special Noodles, with my hero Henry, a Californian in a WMAF. Between LA and New York City, I’d come to realise that the complexity of desi food that we take for granted in London and the UK in general is what they have access to in North America in terms of East Asian cuisine. Not just sheer variety, but also complexity within individual nations; innovations in Korean barbeque and boba and hotpot that rival or even surpass the homefront. I was delighted to learn about the number of ‘mainland’ Korean or Chinese brands that had outlets in the US, and felt some glee in visiting them, knowing that I was a long ways away from making another trip to China or ever going to Korea. In New York, I took a disinterested cousin to Flushing just to look at the now-closed Dumpling Galaxy, a restaurant famed for having over 100 types of xiaolongbao. Funnily enough, it’s something I never ate while living in Singapore – despite the national restaurant of the youth being Din Tai Fung – because it was all pork. I hid inside Xi’an Famous Foods whenever it rained in Manhattan, and wondered whether the ‘accidentally Wes Anderson’ Nom Wah Tea Parlour was somewhere only tourists like me went anymore.
What’s in it for me? The combination of a performed interest, the nostalgic value, and the familiar comfort.
I remember with stunning detail my first time eating Xinjiang lamb skewers. I was on holiday with my family on a two-week trip to China. We had just emerged from a Beijing textile-tailor market, having just ordered a blue linen, red-lined mandarin knot and collar shirt. In a heavy downpour, we saw a croaking old person barbecuing lamb on a makeshift portable grill perched on top of a shopping trolley. We hid alongside them under a barely helpful umbrella, and ate steaming yang rou chuan, my father making some comment about Chinese Muslims. I like looking for the chuans wherever they might be available. They’re often quite good, but never quite Beijing market-style. I like recalling that story in particular often, because it ties into a Bourdainesque narrative of authenticity (even though the distance between Ürümqi and Beijing is probably the size of Europe). My moody attachment to a variety of cuisines from a country I have no real affiliation with is no stranger than any other amateur special interest, like growing a bonsai or playing sudoku. Not for any real reason, but simply because it leans into a certain part of yourself, following you forever.