Ruminations- On Chinese Food

I don’t like food. I love it.

If I don’t love it, I don’t Swallow.

Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Since I am Chinese, having eaten Chinese food all my life. I consider myself somewhat fluent in the ways of Chinese cuisine, but particularly in the Chinese food here in these United States as I spent most of my life here.

My perspective is also colored by the foods that I ate while I was growing up in Taiwan, the foods that my mother prepared while we lived here, the foods that other Chinese ladies made as a part of our cultural celebrations. So it is that I observe with equal parts bemusement and befuddlement the way others view and experience Chinese food in the US. I mostly stay silent as my American friends rave about their personal favorites. I don’t want to burn bridges, and I don’t want to insult my friends, as they are mostly enthusiastic but lack the experience with the Chinese cuisine. I am sure my Indian, Greek, Italian, and Mexican friends feel the same about my bubbling enthusiasm.

We love food for many reasons, not the least of which is the eating experience, involving all five senses: taste, texture, aroma, aesthetics, and the sound of food being cooked or eaten, all make the experience unforgettable. Chinese food for me however, is something more. It is an emotional and nostalgic experience reminding me of the past, the people who were in my life at those times: my relatives, friends, and people who look like me, speak like me, and feel like I do because we shared the common culture and heritage. Hence my attraction to the “authentic” Chinese food. It is a way to regain that emotional center in turbulent times and reminders of emotional attachments to who I was, who I am now, and forever.

I have been to some very fancy culinary palaces along with some real hole in the walls, all in search of the elusive authentic Chinese cuisine.

Authenticity is a food court stand brave enough to serve deep fried stinky tofu filling the food court with the unique smell of frying stinky tofu while knowing that the people who matter don’t mind and the people who mind don’t matter.

Authenticity is a Buddhist temple operated vegetarian restaurant that serves vegetarian dumplings so full of flavor,  with the perfect mouth feel, so aromatic as to make me feel like smelling the fresh steamed dumpling was worth the trip; and so satisfying that almost every American vegetarian cook would fall to their knees and join the Buddhist temple in reverence.

Authenticity is a nondescript dive housed in a basement in the side alley of Boston’s Chinatown, hidden in the shadows of the massive chop suey palaces that caters to the tourist crowd; but whose food is so real and so good that it brought tears to my parent’s eyes as they were transported to their childhood tastes from their memories of China. That little basement dive, parenthetically, ended up owning all three floors of the building where they started.

Authenticity is walking into a serendipitous discovery in Muncie Indiana, a restaurant that just happened to be owned by the same person who owns the Asian grocery store next door. A restaurant where they served real hand pulled noodles that had just that perfect tension and bite as I devoured a steaming bowl of Zha Jiang Mein; where I hesitantly ordered a dish of mouth-watering chicken and experienced the most exquisite heat, spices, soft texture of the chicken, and the pleasure of the hot oil dripping down my throat, drop by heavenly drop.

Authenticity is walking into a seafood palace with multiple walls of aquarium which houses uncountably many different kind of sea creatures, where the unknown sea creatures are brought to your table to demonstrate that not only are they alive, but they are so vicious that they may eat you for dinner instead of the other way around. Yeah, seafood for the Chinese has to the alive and vicious or else they are no good.

Authenticity is also going into a nondescript American Chinese chop suey house in a forlorn town, have the owner walk to your table apologetically and begging your pardon because none of the dishes that he serves is recognizable to a Chinese person, and then having the chef cook up a simple but magical bowl of noodle soup that fills your heart as well as your stomach.

Authenticity is having the waiter of your favorite local place sidle up nonchalantly and whisper their specials that day that are not on the menu because they don’t often get the ingredient; it could be as simple as fresh pea shoots stir-fried with garlic, or as exotic as fresh razor clams. The magic word is fresh.

I treasure those authenticity experiences, but my taste in Chinese foods isn’t limited to the specific, elegiac experiences. As the following quote on the walls of Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton spells out:

Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.

Quidvis Recte Factum Quamvis Humile Praeclarum

Henry Royce. British engineer who was a co-founder of Rolls-Royce.

There are happy discoveries of little gems throughout the mass of Chinese restaurants throughout the world.

There is a Chinese buffet that always have steamed flounder on their steam tables. Contrary to the belief that most American customers will not often opt for steamed fish, that dish disappears quickly. Steamed flounder is not a unique dish, many sit down restaurants offer it on the menu, but their version just doesn’t meet the quality of this buffet place. I once asked the owner what the secret was. He said: we go to Windsor Canada every couple of weeks to buy the fish, to make sure we have the best fish in the area. He does this for a buffet place!

There are specific dishes that I will order repeatedly at specific restaurants, whether it is a simple stir fry dish or a soup, or a dim sum dish, they execute the dish the best out of any other, for whatever reasons. This does not guarantee that they do everything well, it is just that dish, or a few dishes. The chef has achieved mastery for a very limited bunch of dishes.

There was a very tiny Chinese restaurant in the downtown area where I grew up, it seated four tables of four, at best. A seemingly dismal listing of the dishes available was at the order counter, I was disappointed that we were eating there. My dad proceeded to converse with the lady at the counter. He came back to the table grinning from ear to ear, saying that we were in good hands. We were. It was an amazing tour de force by the chef. I lost count of how many dishes we had, each one more spectacular than the last one. My parents would have dinner parties in this tiny little place and their friends would spread its reputation by word of mouth.

Another place that I discovered myself was in a small strip mall. They offered a lunch buffet, nothing spectacular, just a couple of buffet tables worth of food. I found shrimp toast on that table. It was amazing because shrimp toast is expensive and difficult to execute. It is very easy to fry the toast too long and make the bread too greasy and soggy, and having it sit in the bin for too long can make the toast taste stale. This was perfectly executed. Intrigued, I started to order off the menu. As I became familiar with the owners, I come to find out that the chef, one of the family of owners, was a line cook in the Grand Hotel in Taipei, the showplace hotel and restaurant in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Taiwan. The state dinners for the government are often held at the hotel because the hotel is owned and operated by the government. The food at this little place was simple yet sophisticated.

There is a practice amongst the Chinese places of having Chinese menus available for those who can read Chinese characters. Many will complain that this is discriminatory, but the real reason they do this is because the waiters are tired of apologizing for those who insist on ordering these dishes and then complaining that they are not what they are familiar with, the stereotypical Chinese restaurant fares: egg fu yung, General Tso’s chicken, crab Rangoon, and moo goo gai pan. This separate Chinese menu business has disappeared somewhat because of the many American customers who have travelled to Asia. They have learned to know and like the traditional dishes there, and they, like us, are craving for those dishes. Note that as I also enjoy Korean and Japanese restaurants, those owners have quietly slipped a short menu in Korean or Japanese with the regular menu because they think I am Korean or Japanese.

As I had stated previously, I consider any dish that is rightly done worthy of my praise. I have found that the American Chinese restaurants can execute amazing versions of the stereotypical Americanized dishes, although they are rare. There are definite turn offs as well.

I never understood the crab Rangoon. The irony is that many Chinese people develop lactose intolerance. I grew up not eating a lot of dairy, when I moved to the Americas, I developed a definite love for cheese. I hit the pizzas hard and often when I was in undergrad, especially as I had access to some excellent Chicago deep dish pizzas. But middle age stopped all that dead in my tracks. The idea of cream cheese in fried wonton skin seems an anomaly at best, and stomach turning at worst. I do enjoy some fried wonton skin scattered through my hot and sour soup, so it isn’t the fried wonton skins.

The glow in the dark sweet and sour glop some call a sauce is another head scratcher. Too much of both, too sweet and too sour.

For me, a test of the chef’s “chops” at a Chinese restaurant is how they cook beef. Beef and broccoli are a good test. Mike Xing Chen of Strictly Dumpling YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/strictlydumpling fame rails against broccoli in any Chinese dish. I actually like broccoli, but it is very hard to stir fry correctly. It is either too raw and end up breaking teeth or too soggy and muddying the taste of the dish completely. It takes skills to stir fry broccoli, I don’t even try. The trick, as I understand it theoretically, is to blanch the broccoli and hold it out of the wok until the very last possible moment. One needs to cook the beef until it is still rare and then throw in the broccoli for a quick stir and then immediately send it to the table. The residual heat from the quick stir fry will cook the beef the rest of the way while the broccoli still retains an al dente texture. Understand that this is all a theoretical exercise for me as I have yet to succeed in doing this. I usually err on the side of overcooking the beef and undercooking the broccoli. I also don’t order the dish unless I had to. This skill of knowing the sequence and timing of cooking protein and vegetables applies across the menu for all stir fry dishes. Chinese connoisseurs call it controlling the heat. The family Chinese restaurants adds carrots, bamboo shoots, pea pods, water chestnuts to “fill out” a stir fry dish; that is to make it seem like the dish is more substantial than it is without using too much meat, saving on cost. But there is nothing worse than undercooked vegetables to detract from the dish. By the way, I have not seen places like Panda Express or PF Chang’s pass this test, it doesn’t fit the business model, although many Chinese owned restaurants cannot pass this test either.

I have had some decent General Tso’s chicken in my life. Not many, the sauce is usually too cloyingly sweet, and the breading makes the chicken too crunchy to chew.

Lemon or orange chicken is the same, too sweet.

Don’t even bring up chop suey.

The egg roll is a ubiquitous part of the Chinese menu in the US, the thick-skinned chewy egg roll is an unknown part of my youth. What I did know is the spring roll, thin crispy skin, tender and hot filling. The spring roll is the way to go, the egg roll is an abomination. Although some Chinese places are corrupting the spring roll as well.

Since I have become a fan of Uncle Roger, a British comedian whose schtick is to critique the fried rice techniques of celebrity chefs https://www.youtube.com/c/mrnigelng, I became much more discerning about the restaurant fried rice. What was once just fun and games as I watched the Uncle Roger videos became reality to me as I explored the nuances of cooking egg fried rice My own line in the sand is the brown colored egg fried rice. Brown comes from drenching the rice with too much soy sauce. Not only is the rice too salty but it changes the nature of the rice so that the soy sauce obscures the taste of the other ingredients. I am not saying don’t put soy sauce in the fried rise, tried that as well, to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but a balance of salt, MSG and soy sauce does the trick. How to get the correct proportions? Trial and error for your own taste. This is yet another test of the chef’s “chops”.

An interesting book written in 2008 by Jennifer 8. Lee is titled: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, http://www.fortunecookiechronicles.com/blog/about/author/. She tracked the historical artifacts of some of the dishes I have spoken about. Very interesting read.

There are some specific types of Chinese places that hold a place near and dear to my heart. These are culinary specialty establishments that makes my heart go pitter patter.

The Cantonese dim sum place and the roasting place usually are co-located. Dim sum had always been a special treat for those of us who do not live in cities where there is a large Chinese population. The diversity of selection is the key, they must have the traditional dim sum dishes, but they also must also have some variety; most places have incorporated the Shanghai dim sum along with the Cantonese dim sum. The roasted ducks, chicken and pigs hanging in windows of restaurants are ubiquitous in the cities with large Chinese populations. It entices my vision and my stomach, to the point of almost visibly drooling.

Relatively new on the Chinese restaurant landscape is the hot pot restaurant. Chinese hot pots are very different from the Swiss fondue yet are similar in principle. The Swiss use cheese or oil as the cooking medium, the Chinese hot pot uses a broth. In Szechuan hot pot, the broth is filled with a deadly combination of hot oil and Szechuan peppercorn, a dangerous surprise in every spoonful, especially as the broth cooks off as people cook the meats in the both. The Szechuan hot pot place became popular relatively recently, I welcome the innovation, although my own digestive system groans in anticipation of the pain elicited from both ends of my body as it realizes we are approaching a Szechuan hot pot place.

While ramen noodle places are becoming popular in many cities, and I love a good bowl of ramen, I still crave a traditional bowl of noodle that is not ramen.

I love the jam-pong, a seafood laden noodle soup from the Korean Chinese restaurants, as I do the Zha Jiang Mein, from both Chinese and Korean Chinese restaurants. Laksa’s from southeast Asian restaurants feeds a deep need in me.

One of my two most favorites are the Taiwanese beef and noodle soup, with rich, beefy and five spice infused broth, coupled with stewed and tender chunks of beef, and Chinese noodles; the second is the preserved cabbage and pork noodle soup, not spicy but rich in flavor; as well as the juxtaposition of  the crispy texture of bamboo shoots and preserved cabbage with the soft pork.

This is just a short summary of the Chinese foods that makes me happy and a summary of what does not make me happy.

 

Antifragile Volleyball-Antifragility

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Joan Didion

Human decision-making during uncertain times have been shown to be unreliable at best and the results tend to work to the detriment of the decision maker. This proclivity for making dodgy decisions in the uncertain times have been well studied in the recent years. (Dukes, 2018) (Kahneman, 2013) (Konnikova, 2020) 

Our minds default to what author David Epstein (Epstein, 2019) calls procedural thinking, which describes our tendency to use the solutions that are the most familiar to us as the default. Daniel Kahneman calls the procedural thinking the System 1 response, which bypasses the conscious mind. Epstein also describes conceptual thinking as the kind of thinking, as contrasted with procedural thinking, this is where the decision maker fully engages their consciousness in evaluating a solution, or System 2 reaction in Kahneman’s language.

It is not that procedural thinking-based solutions are never applicable to all situations because there are times where the speed of decision is more important than the effectiveness and accuracy of the solution, and conceptual thinking process would be too slow in reacting to a dire situation.

I think of the decision-making environment as generally a system, which has a technical meaning from engineering and sciences. Epstein calls them environments; he describes them as being either kind or wicked. Simple system can be thought of as being the kind environments and complex systems can be thought of as being the wicked environments.

For the sake of explanation, an environment (system) is broadly characterized by two different categories or variables. The first is the internal variables or state variables in system-ese. Internal (state) variables can be observable from the outside, but not necessarily measurable. In the volleyball context, the set score can be thought of as an internal (state) variable; as can each athlete’s level of play, physical exertion, and mental state. The game flow of a team, the players’ responses to the opponent’s actions, the atmospheric conditions of the playing gym and court can be broadly described as an internal (state) variable. In short, internal (state) variable is everything that characterizes all the actions in the game which comes from actually playing volleyball and affects the result of the game.

The second category or variables are the control variables. These are what we do as players and coaches to affect the results. They are the levers that we can pull in our effort to change the outcome, or more accurately change the internal (state) variables which changes the result. In the case of the player, the control variables can be how they perform their skills, whether individually or in conjunction with their teammates; the choices they make; and the decisions they make while setting, hitting, serving, blocking, and playing defense. In short, everything that the athlete can directly control which contributes to their team’s scoring, or to keep the other team from scoring.

For the coaches, the control variables are more subtle and indirect. On the tactical front: the choices of the lineup, the rotation choice to take advantage of matchups, the choice and timing of substitutions, the tactical adjustments on offense and defense during play, and their emphasis on the strategy and tactics used for that set, ad infinitum.  On the communication front they include: the coach’s choices of what to communicate; their communication styles; and what to emphasize before, during, and after each set. On the psychological front: their choice of how to address the team before, during, and after each set or match.

Kind environments (simple systems) can generally be characterized by two features: linearity and non-interaction of the internal (state) variables. Linearity refers to the system characteristic that the predicted result  is known when using a proportional tweak to the known control variable and the predicted result is also proportional. This is based on prior knowledge of the kind environment (simple system).

Because many complex systems behave linearly if the perturbations to the internal or control variable are small, the known small perturbation results can mislead the decision makers to think that their assumption of a kind environment (simple system)  is correct, and the familiar procedural thinking will serve their purposes. Human decision makers like this mode because it  allows us to be comfortable with using the known solutions.  The non-interaction of internal (state) variable is implied by the term “linear”.

The wicked environment (complex systems) is the opposite of simple systems: any lever that we push, the control variables that we can access, will not usually result in what we expect. A big reason is that  the system is opaque; either because we do not have a good model of the complex system, nor can we accurately predict the complex system response. It is all a black box. The second condition of the complex system comes into play because all the internal (state) variables and the control variables are intricately coupled. Sometimes the coupling is direct and measurable: a missed serve means a point; sometimes it is indirectly coupled: a tough serve makes the passer pass a slightly off pass which moves the setter to a slightly less optimal setting position, making her less likely to set the middle, which causes the opposing blockers to focus on blocking the left side hitter, giving the left side hitter a greater challenge to score. One can use the Butterfly effect to describe the indirectly coupled effect inherent in the complex system.

Butterfly effect:

 A phenomenon in which a small perturbation in the initial condition of a system results in large changes in later conditions. Such phenomena are common in complex dynamical systems and are studied in chaos theory. (Butterfly effect, 2022)

Complex systems can react dynamically, with high volatility to unexpected perturbations.

The complexity of a wicked environment (complex system) also means that its uncertainty, unpredictability, and nonlinearity will also react unpredictably to a solution that is based on the kind system (simple system).

Humans generally rely on our knowledge of simple systems as reference for any decisions we need to make in any unfamiliar or unknown scenario, we like having a stake in the ground. We  pivot around our own trusted knowledge of the simple system behavior, nibble around it to feel safe even as we are making decisions in a wicked environment (complex system), because are optimistic creatures, we usually assume that we are in a kind environment (simple system) even when we suspect that we are not.  We do this because we do not want to overthink, to deal with the unknown, the uncertain, and the random. This is not an indictment of our decision-making ability; it is just the way our rational mind works.

The word Antifragile comes from the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb as he describes in the book of the same title. (Taleb N. N., 2012). Taleb entered our consciousness with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Taleb N. N., 2007), which called attention to the unexpected and unpredictable events which upends what we believe about our reality,  not because they are so out of the ordinary but because we are predisposed in our thought process to ignore the potential of the black swan. Antifragile is a part of the Incerto series, along with the Black Swan, of four books from Taleb which investigates complex systems and how we humans make decisions in an uncertain and unknown world. He focuses specifically on  those who make  decisions without knowing the inner workings of the system and cannot predict the trajectory of the system response as they make decisions based on the assumption that we permanently live in kind environments (simple systems) or that all the environments are close enough to being kind that we can make linear approximations and be able to get away with making that assumption.

The definitions of fragile, robust, and antifragile below are definitions that I cobbled together from Taleb’s work and my own understanding of the concepts.

Definitions

Fragile: Something fragile does not like volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and stressors. Fragile systems crumbles under high magnitude shock (perturbations). Fragile systems prefer the deterministic, the known, and the familiar. Fragile systems prefer to operate in a rut and will suffer because of extrapolating solutions based on simple system assumptions.

Robust: Something robust is neutral to volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and  stressors. Robust systems can successfully survive and resist the high magnitude shock (perturbation); although they will only maintain the status quo at best, they will not get better or gain from the situation.

Antifragile: Something antifragile thrives on volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and  stressors. Antifragile systems will not only survive but will benefit from the high magnitude perturbation. In this case, the gains and benefits from the perturbation will be nonlinear, i.e., the benefits stemming from the perturbation increases exponentially.

A volleyball match is a wicked environment, a highly nonlinear and complex system. Indeed, because most sports are highly causal: one action affecting the succeeding action which affects the action after that, ad infinitum, we must model sports actions with Markov chains. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-markov-chains.html

It is this complexity that drew my attention towards examine the volleyball match as a theoretical application of Taleb’s ideas. Specifically, how does a coach avoid building a coaching framework which forces the team to always play a fragile game? How does a coach prepare a team to play in an antifragile way?

I delved into Taleb’s tome while also thinking about hypothetical situations within the volleyball context to try to imagine ways of applying Taleb’s thinking. The examples in Taleb’s book are mostly about the financial markets and the decision making thereof, he did not write about sports and how to apply his antifragile methods specifically to sports, playing sports, and coaching sports. I wanted to translate his ideas about what creates antifragility in decision making, in training ourselves to be antifragile, and how to create antifragile players.

One specific example that I thought of right away and read from Mike Hebert’s book (Hebert, 1995) is his discussion about practicing in system plays. He said he realized that his own statistics showed that he was spending vast amount of time working on situations that happen infrequently because of the strength of his opponents. Indeed, the practice time is better spent on out of system improvisational play. This is not an earth-shattering revelation, yet we find many teams spend an inordinate amount of time passing easily bopped free balls to practice in system plays. The fact that teams are practicing in system plays is not what makes the situation fragile; what makes the practice fragile is that it reinforces the belief that the game is played in a kind environment, that in system plays will prepare the players for the wicked environment, when the opponents are NOT sending easy free balls over. We are turning our players fragile by not preparing them for what they will most likely experience.

This should be fun. And painful. And challenging.

Stay tuned.

Works Cited

Butterfly effect. (2022). Retrieved from American Heritage Dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=butterfly+effect

Dukes, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets. New York: Penguin.

Epstein, D. (2019). Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York : Riverhead Books.

Hebert, M. R. (1995). Insights & Strategies for Winning Volleyball. Champaign IL: Leisure Press.

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. NYC: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Konnikova, M. (2020). The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attnetion, Master Myself, and Win. London: 4th Estate.

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. NYC: Random House.

Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder . NYC: Random House.