General Tsao

So I thought of Jenny 8. Lee today and her Fortune Cookie Chronicles about the phenomenon of American Chinese food.

My grandparents are in the US for the first time, three of them - both from my father's side and one from my mother's side. My dad has been trying to explain to one how to operate the telephone. Another can't say, "Is Mingyu Wang (my mom) there?" over the phone without getting hung up on. However, she is valiantly learning English, one tortured phoneme at a time.

My father's side has lived in a rather rural farming town for most of their lives, transferring to the warmer Szechuan climate recently for health reasons. So it was interesting today to see their first reactions to American Chinese food. We were in a restaurant called "Super Buffet" - a rather mediocre spread of deep fried nothing.

Their sushi was inedible, and that's saying a lot, for a girl who's pretty unpicky with her sushi. The salmon was underwhelming and inexplicably swimming in yellow oil, the onion ring innards had gelled into a tepid mush. I ate my old standby of stir fried string beans and chicken, picking out the rubbery calamari from the seafood soup. All the same, it was reasonably enjoyable.

My grandparents loved it. No matter how I pointed out at the food's inauthenticity ("They have stuff like this for breakfast," my grandmother said in defense of her platter of fried donut, french fry, General Tsao chicken, and crab rangoon, the last of which confused her) or how it was actually a hodgepodge of American fast food and liberal reinterpretation of the far East, they loved how it was all-you-can-eat (a revelation), cheap (another revelation), and unabashedly tasty.

We brought home a carton to one grandparent who hadn't come along. She had already eaten, but as soon as she saw the food, she grabbed a plastic fork and dug in.

"How do you like American Chinese food?" I asked her.

"I like it," she said without any hesitation.