|
As a kid, I didn’t get excited about a lot of food that wasn’t grape Crush, Kraft singles, fries, xiao long bao, or my grandma’s homemade rice cake with bean sprouts and char siu. There was one meal, however, that was made on occasion that guaranteed my bowl would be empty by the end of dinnertime: white rice, canned fried dace with salted black beans, and thinly sliced and deeply fried canned lunch meat, popularly known as Spam. There was something so incredibly addicting about lifting up a slice with my chopsticks, its planes crisped so expertly that they presented even bubbling from the hot oil, and having it yield to a clean-cut bite.
|
|
|
|
I didn’t grow up eating Spam brand canned meat, nor did I ever refer to it in English–at my house we always called it by its Cantonese name, 午餐肉, which translates to lunch meat. The above combo is served best with white rice. Some simple stir fried vegetables could be included as well, but I don’t know her.
|
|
|
There is an abundance of other preparation methods you could employ to achieve maximum satisfaction based on your textural preference and your choice of essential carb companion. Some like it cubed and pan fried just slightly, maintaining its blush tone as it’s piled on rice, scrambled egg, and fried onions before being slathered in kewpie mayo in a simultaneously comforting and indulgent Spam mayo rice. It could be left tender and warmed in salty, sesame-forward instant noodle, accompanied by a fried egg and slurped up among the hustle and bustle of your favourite Hong Kong Cafe. Or sandwiched between crustless white bread and perfectly folded soft scrambled eggs. It could also provide extra protein in a fried rice (I ate this over the weekend), or be secured atop sushi rice with a strip of nori for a Spam musubi. This old Spam advertisement suggests pairing it with pancakes–probably a passable combo, but I’ll leave it up to you to try:
|
|
Want to know more about the history of Spam and its significance throughout Asia and its diaspora? Well, I admittedly had quarantine fog brain this week that restricted my writing capacities, so here is some extra reading material:
Eater: A Brief History of Spam, an American Meat Icon by Erin DeJesus
TIME: The WWII Origins of Spam in Asian American Cuisine by Ang Li
Hyphen: The End of Spam Shame: On Class, Colonialism, and Canned Meat by Sylvie Kim
|
|
|
This Book Sneak Attacked Me
|
|
Ann Hui’s Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants is a companion to her 2016 two-part Globe and Mail piece outlining her and her husband’s 18-day road trip across Canada from Victoria, British Columbia all the way to Fogo Island, Newfoundland with the aim to visit select restaurants serving distinctive Chinese Canadian “chop suey” cuisine. In both works, Hui imparts in great detail the history I absorbed from some of the best during my 6-year stint working in Vancouver’s Chinatown–the early migration to Canada that tore families apart, sacrifices that were made in the pursuit of the myth of Gold Mountain that simultaneously built new and resilient communities in their wake. Before arriving at the sole Chinese restaurant on Fogo Island, the reader sees Hui and her husband driving in their tiny rental Fiat through places like Boissevain, Manitoba and Truro, Nova Scotia, as well as recounts of phone interviews with those they don’t visit, such as The Silver Inn Restaurant in Alberta–the site of the birth of the famous Ginger Beef (or Calgary Ginger Beef, as I grew up calling it).
I started this book looking forward to discovering more about a type of food that was at the periphery of–and at times part of–my life that consisted of dishes such as heavily battered and fiery red sweet and sour pork, honey garlic spareribs, and egg foo young (which I ate once, and only once, in 2015). Hui describes her encounters with specific regional Chinese Canadian dishes distinct to each Province, but glimpses are all we get in this book as the focus isn’t on the food, but rightfully on the restaurant owners; those who moved across the world in hopes of a better life, who displayed courage and adaptability, and took on an insurmountable amount of work to make it work.
At the heart of the book is Hui’s relationship with her dad, John, and her arduous task of weaseling out information from him about the circumstances that led him to immigrate to Canada, and the Legion Cafe, the restaurant her parents owned in Abbotsford, BC until she was one year old. The book alternates between Hui meeting restaurant owners and hearing their stories, to reconstructed memories from her dad’s youth, or her moments of frustration with him and his caginess–a reaction to being probed about a shattered, foggy past that would rather be forgotten. Hui attempts to collect the tools she hopes will help her on the convoluted, messy, and ultimately unachievable quest of piecing together a history of a drawn out journey of migration propelled by intense trauma and the desperate hope that the unknown could hold something better. Like many of us, she wrestles with making linear something that could never be, with the hope that knowing about the past would make concrete an abstract part of the present, but rather she encounters roadblock after roadblock that states that it isn’t important to bring up the past. But when only hardships are highlighted, we struggle with a self-imposed burden, a need to be unfailing in our achievements.
|
|
|
“So now, here we are,” I said, gesturing around me at my five-dollar latte, at the crowd of women in their shiny heels and the men with their briefcases, at the gleaming office towers above us with their marble foyers and contemporary art collections. This place we were both living in that felt worlds away from the lives of our parents.
She just kept nodding. She seemed to understand what I was getting at.
I wanted to ask her about dealing with the guilt. And the question of how we could ever repay them.
But instead I settled on this: “How do you know if you’re living up to the expectations?”
|
|
|
|
It was this integral element of the book that hit me hard, leading me to pause and whimper pathetically alone in my room, whispering into the air:
|
|
|
|
|
