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.