The Obsession with Food

Growing up in Beijing, I don’t think I ever had an obsession with food. The reason was definitely not an over-abundance of the varieties, as my mom was not into cooking until I left home to attend college, and we hardly went to any restaurant. As a little kid, I did not like candies, cookies or cakes. My mom was raising me and my sister with her teacher’s salary, and I recall that we lived on mostly a vegetarian’s diet, not by choice, but rather by necessity. There were indeed a few indulgences in my childhood that I still remember vividly though. My mom took me to this little dingy restaurant that specialized in spicy noodles in Sichuan style (i.e. Dan Dan noodles) when I was at most 9 or 10 years old. It was so spicy but somehow I found it irresistible. Since then, I have been able to eat very spicy food. My first experience eating in a restaurant that served “western cuisine” was when my mom took me and my sister to the Tao Ran Ting Park one Sunday. We were really tired and hungry at the end of the day, and my mom decided to treat us to a meal at the “western cuisine” restaurant in the park. I was shocked at the price of a tiny bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I tried to eat it very slowly to savor the taste. Now that I have a son myself, I can imagine how my mom felt when she saw me eating the soup in such ecstasy.

It was not until I had to go to the military academy for a whole year of training after high-school that I had developed craving for food. Of course, I was not alone. The food there was so bland and so devoid of protein and fat that we all ended up gobbling down a ton of carbohydrate all the time, and still felt hungry immediately afterwards. As a result, all of us skinny girls in high school ballooned. I remember wanting to eat all the time. Looking back, the insatiable appetite perhaps was not only due to the poor diet but also due to boredom and frustration. I remember loving all the food with protein and fat.

Of course, once I returned to civilization at the end of the year, I lost all that weight immediately, as who wanted to eat so much carbohydrate when there was something else to eat? I found the food served in dining halls at Peking University “heavenly”, but somehow did not feel the urge to overeat at all. I was quite skinny again when I arrived in Boston as a transfer student at Harvard. As I was never a picky eater, I was quite amazed at the “all-you-can-eat” dining halls of Harvard dorms. Maybe human beings are naturally rather dim when it comes to deciding whether they should stop or keep eating, if there is always food in front of them. When so many varieties of food were laid out in huge quantities, somehow I ended up overeating again. I did not get as plump as I was in the military academy, but I surely got chubbier, partly due to the high calorie content of the American cuisine, and partly because I did always sample more varieties than necessary during meals. Or maybe it was the sense of anxiety and loneliness that I felt, as a foreign student in a totally foreign environment, struggling to understand what’s going on around her?

At both Peking University and Harvard, I heard others complaining about the dining hall food being really bad. Since I spent two years at each place during college, I actually found both places to be really great when it comes to food, both in accessibility and in taste. I terribly missed having access to such dining halls when I was in graduate school at MIT – an austere institution with austerity stamped on everything. I suddenly found myself having to “find” food, since I usually had no time to buy groceries and cook, and had no money to afford eating out at decent places. As a result, like other graduate students, I loved free food, not only because of the fact that it’s free, but also because it was right there, completely accessible, just like back in the college days at Harvard. This habit of loving free food would stay with me for years, as it does with most former graduate students. It’s a condition that we don’t shake off for a long time. Naturally, due to the scarcity of free food, and the fact that it takes extra energy to either cook or buy food, I lost not only the extra pounds gained at Harvard, but even some more. I was extremely skinny, and would remain so for many years.

Not until I became pregnant with Winston did I start gaining weight again, as well as a strong appetite after the first trimester was over. I did not have any real cravings, except that for a few weeks I ate a lot of bread and ice-cream. Clearly I ate more than before, and I gained almost 50 pounds during my pregnancy – i.e. an increase of over 50% in weight! I noticed that when I was having morning sickness during pregnancy, I only wanted to eat food that I ate when I was growing up (vegetables and grains) – as opposed to food that I came to like in my adulthood. Strange, isn’t it?

The other day, I rented the movie “Julie and Julia”, which has two parallel plots. The one on Julie Powell was kind of boring – it’s about a frustrated office worker writing a blog on her conquering all recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in one year. The other is on how Julia Child became a famous cook and author, which was very entertaining, with the phenomenal Meryl Streep playing Julia Child pitch-perfect. It was a feel-good movie. I could not help thinking that while love is a theme that writers never tire of writing, food is a topic that movie-makers never tire of filming. There have been so many movies featuring food from different countries in the world – “Like Water for Chocolate” from Mexico, “Babette’s Feast” from Denmark, “Mostly Martha” from Germany, “Eat Drink Man Woman” from Taiwan, “Tampopo” from Japan, “The Scent of Green Papaya” from Vietnam, and of course many American movies such as “Big Night”, “Chocolat”, “Fried Green Tomatoes”, and of course now “Julie and Julia”. I am sure that there will be more to come in the future.

The obsession with food is like the fascination with love. Both will live on in the imaginations of writers, film makers and artists, as both reflect the fundamental needs of human beings. Even those of us who claim to have no obsession with food not only cannot live without food, but we all find the topic comforting and reassuring. On a dark rainy day or after a period of stress, what else can be more relaxing than watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child cooking a delicious-looking dish with such gusto in the kitchen? It makes me feel that life could be, just could be, as great as a feast – well, if not all the time, at least once in a while.

Does Everyone Have a Paranoia?

I have known this friend of mine since we were both just 18 years old. I recall distinctively the time when we became close friends. It was literally (as opposed to figuratively) overnight. As freshmen entering Peking University in 1989, we had to spend a whole year in military training at the “West Point” of China. We hated it with a passion, not least due to many ridiculous rules that only the military would institute. Our dorm building had to be guarded 24/7, and the two of us got the worst shift one night - 2-4 am. Since we could not sleep, and there were no enemies (or even pick-pockets) to fight, we ended up chatting. It was refreshing to meet someone who had a distinctively different mind from mine, and yet simultaneously extremely understandable from my perspective. Since then, we have been friends. It was right at the military academy that we said that we would go to San Francisco together after graduating from college. Of course, things did not go as we planned. Many things happened, but now, believe it or not, we both live in San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, our houses are 10 minutes apart by driving.

My first impression of her was that she was not like other girls, in that she was more relaxed, open and confident in a tomboyish way. Since I felt emotionally fragile as a teenager, I found her personality to be extremely compelling. Wouldn’t it be great to live with such confidence and not care about what others think, and still end up popular with lots of friends?

Years went by. She gave birth to a daughter 7 months before I gave birth to Winston. In the past few months, I have been talking to her ad nausea about my constant worry and fear related to Winston – even when he’s perfectly fine and happy, I will go on to a potential worry or fear. I told her and others that I really cannot imagine living on if anything bad happens to Winston. I do not delegate much when it comes to caring for Winston, and I fret over every little cry of his. I wish that I could be as relaxed and trusting as she is when it comes to having others take care of my child. But my paranoia makes it very hard, despite how hard she and others have tried to convince me to relax more. I simply find their words insufficient, since no one can guarantee that nothing bad will happen to little Winston.

Just today when we were chatting about stress in life, she said that she was terrified of losing her job, perhaps to the same degree as my fear regarding Winston’s welfare. She admitted that it’s really a kind of paranoia as well. Somehow, suddenly I understood her words to get me relaxed about Winston, because I understand my words to get her relaxed about her job, as well as the limit of their effects. I told her, “now I feel better.” She laughed and said, “well, everyone has a paranoia, so no one is better than others in that respect.” But I remained incredulous, “well, you and I have paranoia, but I don’t think many others do.” She said, “ that’s because you do not know others as well. Most people try very hard to hide their vulnerabilities and fears from others. You seem to be an exception to that rule though.”

So really, does everyone have an inexplicable or even debilitating paranoia?

Stereotypes of Northerners vs. Southerners

My nanny from Shenyang turned out to be a nightmare, after my mom went back to Beijing and therefore there was no one there to watch over her while I was at work. She was loud; she was lazy; she lied; she argued; and finally I realized that it was my mistake to have hired someone who could not get anyone to serve as a reference except for one woman who employed her for 2 months. Considering that she had been working as a nanny for a few years, it means that no one except for that person is willing to do it. Even that woman hardly praised her, and simply said that without trying out I would never know.

When I mentioned that I finally fired her and hired another nanny from Chengdu,, a rather irreverent friend said to me, “are you actually from China? Anyone Chinese would know not to hire anyone from the northern region of China. They simply cannot make good nannies.” By the way, both he and I are from Beijing. Another friend said, “well, at least the food from the southern region is much better.”

I brought up this topic with a friend from the southern region of China, and she observed that there was really some key difference between northerners and southerners. Having spent a lot of time with northerners herself, she said that her family’s observation was that she was now too direct or abrasive and not sweet enough. I was actually surprised to hear about it from her, since my impression is that she still IS very sweet and mild-tempered. I mentioned that while stereotypes are politically incorrect (in China, the stereotypical northerners are lazier, messier and have more of an attitude problem than the stereotypical southerners), if they are correct more than 50% of the time, we will save ourselves a ton of trouble by going by stereotypes. After all, I am not running an affirmative action shop at home! Sure, I might miss a good nanny from the north, but my chance of finding a good nanny from the south is still higher than from the north! And I only need one good nanny after all.

My friend answered by email, “Let me echo one thing on the attitude. In recent years, people around me keep telling me that my way of expression sometimes offends them. This includes my parents, my sister, my parents-in-law and sometimes my husband as well, all "southerners". Recently it dawned on me that some cultural gap does exist within the family. I've always been attracted to the culture and language of Beijing and Northern China. And I have grown closer to more friends from the north. Inevitably I pick up certain things.

For the past couple months, people invariably comment on how sweet and gentle my sister sounds. I've been amazed at first, because to me she's clearly a more assertive and self-assued person than I am. It took me several rounds of that to realize that there is indeed a way of "southern" talking and southern lady-likeness, which I lost along the way, with no regrets, of course. :) But now I try to keep this in mind when I talk to southerners so as not to cause trouble.”

Another friend from Beijing disagreed that it’s the regional difference. She said, “it’s all about how many challenges one has had to face in her life. I was all gentle and sweet before when I had no worries and no responsibilities. Now I am a lot tougher because life has trained me to be tough and direct. I think those who have maintained a sweet and gentle persona essentially have never encountered any hardships, excessive stress or challenges.”

Because it is Thanksgiving Again

For the first few years after I came to the US, I was interested in learning about everything here, including the holidays, so I ate turkey and went to traditional Thanksgiving dinners. But gradually, I have come to detest Thanksgivng, as I wrote in my blog over a year ago about the Thanksgiving trip we took to Mexico to avoid having to spend it in the US, eating turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, which I would avoid even on non-holidays.

It is Thanksgiving again. This year, because my little boy Winston is not even 6 months old and the flu season makes me (an already obsessive mother)want to hide him in a germ-free environment for the entire winter, I did not go anywhere. I still did not have turkey though. Instead, I have the nanny from Sichuan cook a Chinese banquet and invited a friend’s family over. Meanwhile, I could not help lamenting about the American cuisine to a friend who lives in culinary heaven – Shanghai.

I wrote, “I can’t believe that the best meal of the year is turkey. It really says something about the American cuisine.”

He answered,

“Cuisine-wise, the USA has not outgrown its frontier outpost primitiveness, and will probably never do so.

Come to think of it, most Northern tier countries have bad food - UK, Germany, Sweden, Russia, etc. Deep thinking seems to go hand in hand with bad weather and bland food. People in warm weather and with good food are too busy being happy to have profound thinking...”

That observation intrigued me, and I thought more and replied:

“Regarding the correlation between cuisine and thinking, I agree with you. But how about the Chinese then? The Chinese cuisine (or cuisines to be more accurate) is very good, but the Chinese have produced a lot of philosophers too. Besides, how about the Greeks and the Romans then? They have produced a lot of thinkers too…

However, when I think more carefully, I realize that the Greek, Roman and Chinese thinkers/philosophers were all from two thousand years ago, whereas the German, English, Scandinavian and Russian thinkers were from the past few centuries. Perhaps that means most people were starving to death over 2000 years ago, and the condition for thinking deeply is to not think constantly about the next meal. That’s why where the climate was okay and the food was more abundant (at least relatively speaking) there were at least some intellectual people whose stomachs were full enough to think.

In the past few centuries, I suppose in most regions/countries, at least in the intelligentsia class, getting enough to eat was not an issue any more. Therefore, if the cuisines were too good and there were too many distractions, they would never bother to think, and they would be too happy to think, as you said. In cold climate where the food was bland, people had nothing else to do (no indoor swimming pools in Germany, no central heating in England, and no TV/movies in Scandinavia) so they ended up thinking.

That explains why the Greeks and Romans had Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, but the later Greeks and Italians stopped thinking altogether. Also, all the schools of thoughts in China (Confucius, Mencius, Daoism, etc) were all from over 2000 years ago, and after that, the Chinese culture gave away to romantic poets such as Li Bai writing about getting drunk all the time…”

I thought that I was quite clever! 

An "Intellectual" Email Discussion

These days, most of the time I do not talk about anything more profound than when to sleep train a baby, when to start a baby on solid food, and what to do if a baby is teething. But occasionally, I would have an email exchange or two on something more complex. For example, a while ago, the husband of a very good friend of mine, had an email discussion with me. He’s a well-known academic and also advises the governments of several developing countries including China, where he and I came from originally. The discussion was started by my reading an interview that he gave on India versus China. My stand was that perhaps economic growth ought to happen first before one pushes really hard for democracy, as forcing a political democracy on a destitute country without any experience with democracy might be premature. I figure - if people were starving to death, perhaps they would want to be fed first before fighting for individual freedom. Certain poor countries that went straight for a one-size-fits-all democracy (such as India) did not turn out better than countries that emphasized growth first and gradually transitioned to democracy after they became economically prosperous(such as South Korea and Taiwan).

He wrote:
“I definitely agree with the view that growth will lead to democracy. In that exchange I was reacting to the view that democracy is necessarily anti-growth, a view I disagree with. But—this is the nuance part of the argument—it is not necessarily true that democracy is automatically pro-growth either, just as the case that one-party system is not automatically pro-growth. If I have a Mckinsey one sentence, then it is, “It depends.”

On your point on starvation and individual freedom, the evidence does not support your view. There have been far more people starved to death in authoritarian countries than in democratic countries (think of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China and as many 1/3 of the population of Cambodia was eliminated. I would have thought freedom meant a lot to those Cambodians). Many people have the view you gave, which is “why should I care about freedom if I starve?” but this view is actually a result of a huge selection bias, which is that people only look at successful authoritarian countries without realizing that there are other authoritarian countries that have produced utter economic and human disasters.

Even the experience of China itself does not support the view that authoritarianism supports growth. China today is still authoritarian but far less authoritarian than Maoist period when Chinese economy performed badly (against its peers and its own potentials). As a scientist, you understand this argument well—the dynamics argument, which emphasizes the direction and the rate of change, would support the view that freedom and growth are positively correlated (with the important caveat that all else is equal).”

Very rarely do I get a chance to have such intellectual exchanges with such an intellectual professor, so I wrote back with quite some vigor:

“I now understand (perhaps just a little better) that when people seem to disagree, it's often because their starting points are different - sometimes we think we are talking about the same topic, but we might actually not.

if our discussion is simply around "is democracy better or authoritarian dictatorship?" as if we were talking about a brand new country about to be set up , there is no question that everything else being equal, of course democracy is the way to go.

if our discussion is simply around "is authoritarianism good for economic growth?", there is again no question that everything else being equal, of course it's a bad idea.

if our discussion is simply around "in general are growth and freedom positively correlated?", there is again no question that everything else being equal, yes of course it is.

my stand is that the current china is "better" than maoist china, MORE due to economic policy change (controlled economy transitioning to more of a capitalist market-based economy) than political policy change. you might argue that a capitalist economy comes with more "political" freedom anyways, and that one always comes with the other.

likewise, the current russia is better than the old soviet union for sure, but is in my opinion WORSE than what it COULD HAVE BEEN - i am not saying that they should have kept stalinist government. I am simply saying that if there could be an equivalent of a savvy leader like deng xiaoping (who's ruthless but nonetheless extremely shrewd) in russia pursuing economic reforms ahead of the political reforms and this democracy "with russian flavors" (i think russian flavors essentially mean drunken corruption and reckless behaviors - that's my very biased opinions of the russians in general from movies and novels!), perhaps the russians would be slightly better off RIGHT NOW.

therefore, my view is more around what could be the "optimal" way for a sick and poor country with long history of authoritarian dictatorship, no experience of true democracy, diverse fractions and regions and still large percentage of poor population to transition into a free and prosperous society. are we better off with political reforms/revolution first, or economic reforms/gradual evolution?

granted, if i were 20 years old, i would advocate for absoluteness - a "free" government, an "ideal" society, a "just" system. but i am 38 years old now, and it is more important to me (as well as all the living population) that whatever transition will be the least chaotic and painful and as comfortable as it could be - we only have a few decades to live after all.

Indeed my view might be similar to many "ignorant" chinese people, likely because we think from the perspectives of the following practical questions:

- what do we want most today, given that there is a long list of things we want? if there has to be a trade-off, what would we choose?
- would we want to have gone the way russians did?
- sure we would want more freedom and a less corrupt government, but are we willing to sacrifice peace and prosperity in our lifetime to fight for that?

we think much less if at all from the perspective of correlation and cause/effect, because that's too theoretical and academic to be applied to our daily lives. on the other hand, you are a notable academic and you have to do that at your level (or else you will be as dumb as the rest of us!). Therefore, it is no wonder that when our starting basis is different (i.e. a different context in which we start our discussions/debates), you will be misunderstood/misinterpreted, and you will also find the rest of us hopelessly ill-informed and uneducated. The rest of us silly people (in chinese would be "yu min") might find you "too elite and out-of-touch" - you probably recognize this accusation as frequently the American people's accusation of the Democratic party or any politician that talks in complete sentences.

To be a bit facetious (I do acknowledge that I am a bit facetious here), it's very likely that given the current population of china, if there were an american style election, they would elect a government much dumber and more extreme than george w. bush, who in turn would never assemble sophisticated and leading advisors/consultants like you to help with policy, as they would assemble a group of "joe-the-six-packs" whom they can understand easily.

By the way, I just found a quote from Confucius that explains the difference between us, and why we can never convince each other:

"The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort." - hence our different opinions, because we think of different things first and foremost! We the common people do think of comfort most of the time as the premise..."

Maybe I am a stereotype of what Winston Churchill referred to - "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

Winston movies

Three new movies and an old one:

I've Loved You So Long

For four and a half months after Winston’s birth, I did not go to the theater once or rent a movie once, although I had always loved movies. Last week, since I had a free afternoon, I decided to watch a movie in the theater. I heard that they made a movie about Amelia Earhart, and I have always loved biographical films. After checking out the show times the day before, I happily set out for the theater after lunch and after feeding and burping Winston.

I showed up at the Century Theaters in Tanforan Shopping Mall, which is close to both my office and rental house. Then I looked and looked, and could not find “Amelia” at all on the billboard. Finally, I asked the ticket agent, who told me that the last day for the movie was yesterday! Later when I told Michael about it, he laughed and said that the movie was so bad that they had to cancel the shows before the initial advertisements had finished their run.

Since I could not find any other movies worth watching in the theatre, I decided to go to Blockbuster. I recognized quite a few films that I was planning to see a few months before, so I picked “The Edge of Love” about Dylan Thomas and the two women in his life, starring Kiera Knightley and Sienna Miller, and “I’ve Loved you So Long”, a French movie starring the English actress Kristin Scott Thomas.

“The Edge of Love” is a complete disappointment, as it was utterly pointless. In a way, it was as if the filmmaker was given a homework assignment to make a movie, when he really did not have any ideas at all at the time. The only useful learning from this movie is that ALL poets in movies are selfish lunatics.

Then it took almost 3 nights for me to watch “I’ve Loved You So Long”, partly because it was a slow film, partly because I could only watch it after Winston went to sleep at night and I was usually very tired then as well. He’s such a sweet little angel that he already sleeps 10-11 hours straight through the night on most days, but occasionally he would wake up in the middle, sometimes due to a belly ache, sometimes due to a nightmare, and sometimes due to other inexplicable reasons. While he has been “sleeping like a baby”, I still wake up once or twice in the middle of the night, and I would tiptoe to his bedroom, and listen through the door.

After going through an hour of a typical French movie (i.e. nothing happens, people talk a lot, they smoke and drink and eat, and they talk some more existential nonsense), it was finally revealed why Juliette (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) was in prison for 15 years for murdering her 6-year old son, seemingly without any reasons. He had a terrible terminal disease that caused him excruciating pain, and his mother could not bear to see him suffer any more. When Juliette finally broke her silence and told her sister, I found myself bursting into tears while she was describing how she put her son finally to peace and held him the whole night after she injected him. She screamed, “I wanted to go to prison then. The worst prison is the death of one’s child - You can never get out of this prison. I was guilty because I gave birth to him and then condemned him to death with this disease. ” A movie that is perhaps otherwise mediocre did catch my attention at last because it caught the attention of a mother desperately in love with her son, as Juliette was equally madly in love with her son.

At that moment, my darling little boy Winston was still sound asleep in his crib. I thought to myself how I really have to treasure every moment of Winston’s laugh. To freshen up, I went to take a shower and wiped away all those tears for a fictitious little boy. When I got out of the shower, the very real boy Winston was awake already, with his eyes wide open, quietly lying in his crib. I looked into that sweet little face of his, and thought, “oh sweetie I’ve loved you so long and I will love you forever.” He smiled that angelic smile and his face looked even chubbier…