Chinese Cooking and Life Lessons

My favorite Chinese restaurant is no longer serving Moo Shu dishes. I learned why not—and a lot more—when I went to pick up a take-out order from the restaurant a few days ago.

We have been ordering Vegetable Moo Shu from the restaurant for many years. I love putting some of the steaming mixture of shredded cabbage, carrots, and other vegetables, mixed with bits of scrambled egg, into a rice pancake, adding hoisin sauce, folding it all together as neatly as I can, then usually adding a little more sauce, and then chomping away. I always request more sauce and usually extra pancakes to eat with leftovers the next day. There is almost a small ceremony involved in eating moo shu, and I am going to miss it.

I am going to miss the taste and textures
of a moo shu dish

Why did our restaurant decide to eliminate moo shu from its menu? I received a very detailed explanation when I went to pick up our order. And only part of the explanation involved cooking. I simply asked Sherry, who has owned the restaurant for more than 30 years—since not long after she emigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan—why their newly printed menus did not include moo shu dishes, and she took off from there.

“With the virus, it has been hard to get the ingredients for moo shu,” she said. “I have had to wait in long lines to get the Chinese cabbage and other vegetables. Long, long lines. And cooking moo shu is hard. You may not know it, but the cook has to stir the food more than 130 times across the wok to prepare moo shu. He can make five orders of sesame chicken in the time it takes to make one order of moo shu, or four orders of ginger shrimp or beef and broccoli.”

Making moo shu is hard work.

By now, Sherry was pretty wound up with her explanation. That led her to other problems, not necessarily moo shu-related. Some customers have gotten angry that their orders have taken longer to prepare, and they have taken out their frustration on the owner. And they have been more than rude about it. “One person began yelling at me,” she said. He shouted ’Chinese virus, Chinese virus.’ I even took his picture when he got in his car to leave. Here he is, and this is his license plate. I thought of calling the police, but I didn’t. Why did he order food from me, if he was so angry with Chinese people? I have been in this country for more than 30 years, I am a citizen. I vote.”

Sherry might have kept going, but more customers were coming into the small restaurant, and I was eager to leave and get my food home for dinner. I was a little sad that there would be no vegetable moo shu tonight or maybe in the near future. But I was even more disgusted with the intolerance and ignorance of the customer whose license plate she showed me and others who are quick to parrot foolish and hurtful slogans.

One wondrous thing about Chinese food is how a cook blends many different tastes and textures into one dish. If only people could imitate those qualities of their food. Maybe that would be a good message to include in a fortune cookie.

Small Robberies

As far as pandemics go, this one has not been so terrible for our family. None of us has gotten sick so far, and we have found ways to carry on our lives with as little interruption as possible. We have been able to work and shop and eat too much and even attend two Zoom birthday parties in the last two weeks at which we could share news and good wishes with family members and friends from around the country. To be honest, I even wore ugly but comfortable shorts and sneakers without socks to both of the parties, and no one, not even Audrey, offered any criticism of my attire. I did put on a clean and respectable polo shirt, and Audrey added a scarf and makeup to spiff up her appearance, but below the neck, we were just plain “comfortable.” Which makes me wonder what everyone else was wearing.

I am painting a rosy enough picture of this pandemic, but it has taken its toll on many of us, and that toll has not been only health-related. There have been many small robberies.

My extended relatives Sherry and Eddie have not been able see or hold or squeeze their new granddaughter who came into the world 800 miles from their home in Savannah, Georgia, but who is one scary plane trip and possibly 14 days of quarantine away. Imagine taking that flight being fearful of breathing in some whiff of infection, arriving at their son’s home, and being able to greet the new family wonder with only waves and smiles through a closed window. And Sherry and Eddie’s situation has been echoed hundreds or thousands of times in other families in the past few months. It is only a small robbery, but something big has been stolen for now.

Grandparental love can overcome any barrier.

We have all found ways to deal with the thefts, but do these ways really compensate us for our losses? We hold a FaceTime update with our son in New York each week, but there is often the sense that a clock is ticking in the background keeping us from feeling fully relaxed around each other. Our synagogue’s longtime custodian—a wonderfully upbeat and always helpful person— is moving with his wife to another state, and the special dinner we wanted to hold in their honor is being replaced with a drive-by shout and wave through the synagogue parking lot. Is it enough? It will have to be for now.

Small robberies.

Audrey and I purchased a vacation home in the Berkshires a few years ago, close to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We spend time up there each summer to bask in the abundant music, dance, and theater available in the area. But those have all been put on hold until at least 2021, and I miss them.  My daughter might call these “First World” complaints, and I feel a little guilty making them. But I also feel a little bit robbed.

In the Berkshires, the season is kicked off during the July 4th holiday each year by a concert or two from musical star James Taylor, a local resident who has made more than good. The concerts are what we Baby Boomers call “happenings,” and more than 18,000 fans overstuff the concert pavilion and lawns at Tanglewood. The grounds are so packed with tarps, chairs, and bodies that, if you feel the need to pee, you would rather hold it in than traipse all over other fans to get to a restroom. Now that can be a double punishment for a claustrophobe with an aging bladder like me.

Bodies and music fill Tanglewood for a July 4th JT concert

But the discomfort becomes worth it when Taylor sings “Sweet Baby James,” and croons the lines:  

Now the first of December was covered with snow
So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.

We find ourselves dreaming with him and singing along with out-of-tune but enthusiastic voices.

I can remember when both James Taylor and we were
this young. We have aged together.

Sadly, we were robbed of live James Taylor concerts this year, but some fans devised a fitting way to deal with their loss. They climbed aboard kayaks, took along a small boom box and CDs, and rowed together onto Stockbridge Bowl, which borders Tanglewood. There at 8 p.m., the time the Taylor concert would have begun, they played a few of his hits on CD, including “Sweet Baby James,” closed their eyes, and sang along. Audrey and I were not along for the replacement concert, but I am sure it was sort of “dream-like,” and I hope it was satisfying for the rowers. Small robberies deserve fitting payback.