China

Two years ago on Mother’s Day, my daughters Kristen and Kaitlin gave me a scratch map of the world. A scratch map is a map with color and detail hidden by a foil overlay. The foil shows only the outlines of each country. When you have visited a particular country, you scratch off the foil and see the beautiful map beneath.

I quickly realized that I will not personally visit every country in the world, so I gave myself a point system. I can scratch off a country if I have earned at least ten points in virtual travel to that country. Reading a book by an author from that country is four points. A visit to a restaurant serving food from that country is one point. A movie or a documentary about that country is also one point. If you want to know more about my nerdy point system and my crazy huge Excel spreadsheet tracking all this, let me know.

Large countries like China challenged me because on the map they are divided into regions. I decided that I needed to earn at least three points from each of the regions. On my scratch map, China is divided into six regions so I figured out which provinces are contained in each region, printed a list, and planned a trip to Chinatown Summer Nights in Los Angeles with my friends Gladys, Lidia, Joanie, and Phyllis who are always up for an adventure.

In Chinatown we asked around for where we could find restaurants representing different parts of China. Not in Chinatown, the artist making clay faces informed us. In Chinatown, they only have Cantonese food, the most commonly known Chinese food. It originally comes from the area around Hong Kong. If we want to eat food from other regions, he told us, we need to go to the San Gabriel Valley just east of Los Angeles. So we ate Cantonese food that night at the Full Moon Restaurant in Chinatown and everything was delicious. Then I started annotating a map of China (the one attached to this blog) with other restaurants representing other parts of China. Since then, I’ve eaten at most of these restaurants and the food is amazing and diverse.

If you have the opportunity to order take out from any of these restaurants, I recommend them. Here are a few things you might want to know:

· Some of these restaurants are tiny places where few people speak English and they only accept cash. It was worth the difficulty of communication to find something delicious that I had never eaten before.

· I should probably warn you, the Beijing pies look like pancakes, but when you pick them up with your chopsticks and take a bite, a wonderful liquid pours out. I still have no idea how you are supposed to eat them. I ended up drinking the liquid by picking up the plate.

· The most upscale of the listed restaurants is the Tibet Nepal House Restaurant in Pasadena where I ate the Tibetan spicy long skinny noodles & whole wheat fried bread. I’ll try their Nepali food before I get to the blog on Nepal. Warning: just like their neighbors in the Sichuan province, the Tibetan people like spicy food.

· My favorite meal was at Shaanxi Datang in West Covina. Part of the reason it was my favorite was because my daughter Kaitlin and her friend (and my bonus daughter) Andrea ate with me. It was also my favorite because of what we ate. We weren’t sure what to order but we saw another table had this gigantic plate of something that looked good, so we said, “We want that.” Now, looking back at their menu, I think we ordered the Shanxi Spicy Chicken with Potatoes. It was on a bed of gigantic homemade noodles – think of lasagna noodles in size, but thicker and less regular. These noodles were piled with chicken and potatoes in (I believe) a cumin sauce. It was so good! And there was enough to serve the three of us and still take some home.

Before you head to any of these or the many other Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, check to make sure they are open. Hours may have changed with the pandemic. I hope you get the chance to try Chinese food that isn’t exactly what you might have had before and support these unique small businesses.

I have now spent most of my time talking about food (one of my favorite subjects), so I’ll just make a couple of other recommendations.

· Books: I love Amy Tan’s books. Whether she is telling a story from China or talking about Chinese Americans playing mahjong in San Francisco, I find her relatable and interesting. By the way, speaking of mahjong, I have a beautiful set, but I have no idea how to play. Anyone want to teach me?

· Art: In case you haven’t noticed from previous blogs, I love The Khan Academy. Clicking through their art lessons is a joy to me. Here is the one on Imperial China: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-asia/imperial-china

· Documentaries: I watched the Wild China series when it was on Netflix and it is excellent, explaining the geography of many parts of China. It’s not there anymore, but you can find it on Amazon or iTunes.

· Movies: It’s not hard to find movies about China. Here are several that I have watched and enjoyed with their region designated: The Last Emperor (Hebei), Wolf Totem (Inner Mongolia), The Farewell (Jilin), The Painted Veil (Guangxi), Love is a Many Splendored Thing (Hong Kong). Some I watched through Amazon. Some I checked out of the library.

· Travel Shows: I’m a huge Anthony Bourdain fan. Parts Unknown season 8 episode 3 Sichuan with Eric Ripert can be purchased either through YouTube or Amazon. No Reservations season 6, episode 8 on Harbin (Heilongjiang) can be found at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5wbcml

TheCrazyTourist has several galleries on China so I selected the general one here to cover options for a great trip: https://www.thecrazytourist.com/15-best-places-visit-china/. When this pandemic is over, you might want to plan travel to China using your local travel advisor. Shout out to my favorite travel advisor, Kaitlin Darnell at Laura's Travel in Redlands. May the travel industry survive and thrive - may we all survive, thrive, recognize our mutual humanity, learn to deal with our conflicts, and allow peace and health to flourish in China and throughout the world.