TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 210

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 29, 20000000007


Dear Signs of Life,

	We've been looking for a good Chinese 
restaurant for Saturday nights.  That's our 
official Asian feast night out.  Since the Shin 
Shin moved to Sunnyvale, about forty miles south 
west of here, we've been wandering around looking 
for culinary harbor.  We've come up empty.  This 
is an area permeated with Asians and Asian 
cultures.  We face the Pacific Ocean, looking 
west to the far east.  Practically every city has 
a China town, or at least a neighborhood or 
street where all the Chinese restaurants are.  In 
Berkeley, the Chinese restaurants appear in every 
neighborhood.  There are concentrations, it's 
true, but they are as frequent as bus stops 
throughout the city.

	I have gone by a good percentage of them 
to collect their take out menus.  Then we go over 
them to see if there's a hope that the place 
might be a good substitute for the Shin Shin. 
Oy.  There is a menu, recognizable to one, 
instantly, which is from central casting.  It is 
divided into appetizers, soups, chicken and 
poultry, beef, pork, seafood, vegetables, or 
vegetarian, hot pots, noodles and rice plates. 
The same dishes appear, practically in the same 
places on the menus.  The first thing I look for 
is anything odd, anything that an Amurikun 
wouldn't eat because it's too weird.  If there 
are dishes like that, I look further at the menu. 
Then, if it seems authentic enough, we go there 
on a Saturday night, hoping for the best.  We are 
routinely disappointed: sloppy similar sauces on 
different kinds of protein, some 
indistinguishable from the others.  Kung Pao 
Chicken.  Kung Pao Shrimp.  Kung Pao Beef.  Kung 
Pao Pork.  Kung Pao, everybody!  I never order 
the cashew chicken, nor the sweet and sour pork, 
the chow mein, or happy family seafood plate.  We 
don't order sizzling rice soup.  We try to order 
things, a lot of things, a really lot of things, 
way too many things, that indicate to the 
proprietors that we are not honkeys.  If they 
have pig face and duck feet, tripe, or pork 
stomach, I order that.  Octopus, preserved squid, 
bitter melon, I order that.  The eventual goal is 
to endear ourselves to the owners so that in the 
far off future, after we have been coming 
regularly every Saturday night, they will start 
offering us things that aren't on the menu: the 
real Chinese food.

	Well, our search for a good Chinese 
restaurant has come up empty.  We found two 
places that had menus with unusual things, 
authentic things, on them.  One used so much oil 
that, after dinner, you could slide out of the 
restaurant on your oozing shoes.  They also used 
way too much MSG.  Feyna got headaches and 
nausea.  X that one out.  The other was good 
enough, but the preparations were not 
distinguished, clean, distinct.  After a host of 
Saturdays, when they'd already recognized us, but 
not gotten friendly, no special treatment, it got 
boring.  We'd found the acceptable things on the 
menu, and kept ordering them.  The meal each week 
was like the meal the last week, with a variation 
or two.  The service was sometimes awful.  The 
best part about it was looking at the tanks of 
live fish, crabs and lobsters.  The crabs always 
had some interesting dance poses, and we could 
count the number of fish that weren't swimming 
around any more, just lying there, sometimes 
upside down.  Hmmm.

	So we gave up the Chinese search, and 
started travelling the forty miles to the Shin 
Shin in Sunnyvale every three or four weeks. The 
owners were going to retire when they left 
Berkeley, but after a few months of retirement, 
they couldn't stand it any more, and bought a 
little business, a tiny restaurant, take-out 
place that was a Bento-Box lunch time dive.  The 
main business was in multiple orders from 
businesses at the midday meal.  Twenty 
Bento-Boxes, fifteen Bento-Boxes, thirty three 
Bento-Boxes, ready in twelve minutes.  There is 
barely any place to sit down in there, only three 
tables, and not big ones.  They have to push a 
couple tables together for us, party of four. 
And they barely have the serving platters, bowls 
and serving spoons to accommodate us.  But every 
time we sit down to a meal there, the first taste 
makes the long drive absolutely worth it.  Every 
meal is different, new undiscovered dishes, new 
untasted treasures.  Plenty of that weird stuff 
that I look for on the menus elsewhere.  None of 
the things they serve us is listed on the menu. 
We are treated like royalty.  The proprietress, 
Elena, talks to us for a half hour after we're 
done stuffing ourselves.  We squeeze back into 
the van and, with a noticeable added load, we 
drive back home, thinking we could probably make 
the trip every week.  It wouldn't be that bad. 
The next Saturday comes, and we're just not up to 
the drive.  (I'm the driver).  No one wants to 
sit in the car for an hour and a half in the 
evening for a meal that lasts an hour.

	 So lately, we've branched out into the 
Asian continent, and have tested Thai 
restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, and most 
recently, Korean restaurants.  We are new to 
Korean cuisine.  What I like about it is that 
it's hot.  What we don't like about it is the 
dearth of vegetables.  What my mother, who is the 
host, doesn't like about it, is the prices, which 
are steep.  Last night we went to a new place 
that had no English on their florescent sign 
outside.  All in Korean.  We found it by the 
address.  The patrons were all Korean, a good 
sign.  The waiters and waitresses were over eager 
to please us.  We ordered ox tail, beef knee, 
cuttlefish, dried fish soup.  They brought us a 
second dish of Kim Chee (Oh yum!).  Even as I 
shoveled in the fiery cuttlefish (excellent), I 
missed the Shin Shin.  I want my pork kidneys, 
liver, bitter melon and thousand year old egg. 
Old habits die hard.




 
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Wasting Away in Seattle

	When the second quarter began at the 
University of Washington in Seattle, I was barely 
ready to go back to school.  I looked through the 
catalogue to plan my classes.  As a music major 
there were endless requirements for us.  I 
charted out what I had to take and lined it up on 
a weekly schedule, squeezed the mandatory courses 
into the week and then turned to the catalogue 
again to insert more classes that were required 
for graduation.  I came across a terrible fact. 
I was going to have to take physical education. 
They wouldn't let you out of it.  I imagined 
having an endless menstrual period to excuse me 
from participation.  Then I thought about 
breaking both my legs, but how long would that 
last?  Eventually, they'd heal, and then what 
would I do?  I squirmed and finagled, really put 
my mind to it.  I couldn't bear the thought.  But 
more than that, I couldn't bear the thought of 
being in Seattle any longer.  I was depressed.  I 
felt my life caving in.  All of the craziness of 
my first eighteen years was catching up with me 
as I trotted out into the big world.

	College was easy.  I didn't have to work 
very hard to get straight As.  For the first time 
in my school career, I started cutting classes on 
a regular basis.  The first class I cut was 
Italian.  I'd pretty much exhausted the other 
popular languages to take.  Italian sounded good 
for music.  All the directions are in it.  The 
teacher was a bony young man, not much older than 
the students.  He had black curly hair, black 
eyes, really long fingers.  I remember his 
fingers.  He wore slacks that were too big for 
him, and his tie was always askew.  He had a 
thick Italian accent, and honestly didn't know 
how to teach.  He'd stand up there at the front 
of the classroom with the blackboard behind him, 
a piece of chalk in his hand, and he'd call out a 
word, not necessarily a word in our vocabulary 
list.

	"Somebody spell this word for us."

	He'd wait.  No one would volunteer.  He'd 
point at some unlucky kid who would shuffle up to 
the front of the room, receive the chalk and go 
to stand at the blackboard.  The teacher would 
repeat the word.  The student would give it a 
shot.  He'd write it out on the board, then step 
back, looking at the instructor for judgment.

	"No," said the instructor.  "Another person."

	The first contestant surrendered the 
chalk and slinked back to his seat.  The next 
contender came forward, took the chalk and 
attempted an alternate spelling.

	"No," said the instructor.  "Another."

	One by one, a handful of befuddled 
students tried to spell the Italian word.  No one 
got it right.  Our professor finally went to the 
board himself and wrote it out.  Everyone would 
sigh.  Then some kid would always question it.

	"It shouldn't be spelled like that.  Why is it spelled like that?"

	"It is irregular word," he'd say.  There was disgust among the class.

	"Irregular?  How come so many words are irregular?"

	Mind you, this is coming from native 
speakers of English, a language where irregular 
words are in the majority.  Yet if you're going 
to expect us to learn this freaking language, 
shouldn't you make the words more regular?

	I cut Italian.  If I gave a glance at the 
week's lesson, I'd still get As on the tests. 
Then I cut English.  I hadn't read the assigned 
chapter, anyway.  This all got to be a habit. 
And eventually I did fall behind.  But I didn't 
have the energy, the enthusiasm to catch up.  I 
dragged my feet.  I moped in my room.  I crossed 
the alleyway and came in the back door of Hillel 
to mope in company.  I was getting lost, and no 
one seemed to notice.  I wanted to talk to the 
Rabbi, but I didn't have the guts.  What if the 
Rabbi expected me to know something about 
Judaism?  All I knew were my grandmother's 
Yiddish songs, and how to read the Haggadah, 
paragraph at a time.  I had forgotten everything 
I learned in Sunday  school.  I was a poor excuse 
for a Jew.  Did it count that I was having a hard 
time remaining sane?  Did despair count?  It was 
probably Jewish despair.  What could the Rabbi do 
about my despair, anyway.  He could say, "Oy 
gevalt!"  That would snap me out of it.

	It took the first couple weeks of the new 
quarter for me to tumble down hill and give up. 
I called my mother and told her I couldn't stay 
at U.W.  I was crying all the time.  I couldn't 
even practice the cello.  I wanted to come home. 
I wanted it all to go away.  My mother thought it 
over and told me that I could drop out and come 
home on the condition that I enroll in another 
school back home, and also that I would promise 
to see a therapist.

	Yes.  And Yes.

	I gathered all my books together, 
returned them to the bookstore.  I told 
Rockefeller that I was done with his grant.  I 
packed up and came back to Berkeley.

	Wouldn't you know it.  I was still miserable.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net