You Eat: my white girl search for Chinese Chicken Soup Part Two

It's pretty common parlance to say we want something so bad we can taste it. Maybe not for younger people, I have personally had way more fun saying "I am super horny for that" for anything that is very obviously non-sexual. Who knows what the youths are saying now to dramatize desire, but growing up, wanting something so much you could practically taste it was how people got their point across. 

I have wanted Bumpa's soup so badly I could practically taste it. 

It's not weird to say when the thing you want is a food, though. 

I was not ready to throw in the towel on my search for where my grandfather is from, but I was ready to move on to another phase: reckless experimentation with zero regard for legacy or tradition. 

I am a spectacularly unreliable narrator. 

Not because I'm an intentional liar, but because I am a flamboyant romantic with a penchant for prose laden, hyperbolic soliloquys instead of just bluntly fuckin' saying the damn thing I mean. See previous sentence to illustrate my point. I can get very carried away with how I romanticize memory, to both myself and to others. When I am recalling my afternoons eating soup with my grandfather, I would describe them as something like...

"The oppressive heat and humidity of Florida afternoons may not seem like the ideal setting for a lunch of belly warming hot soup. Given the climate, it may seem strange that day after staggeringly warm day, I would walk through the afternoon dampness to have congee with my grandfather. With little regard for my things, I would toss my backpack down in the yard behind their fenced in driveway and walk in their home, heading straight for the kitchen. 

Whether my grandfather was quiet because English was his second language and spoken communication was a struggle, or his deliberate silence was just a character trait, he would always break the silence I walked into after school with a loving, "you eat?" And I always nodded and smiled. Sitting at the tiny table in Bumpa and Nonni's modest kitchen, enjoying each other's company in the familiar, familial quiet that a good meal deserves, Bumpa would ladle out a double helping into our bowls, putting mine in front of me as he sat down in his seat with his own bowl. He would pat my hand and say again, "you eat". And so I would. Together with my Bumpa." 

Which like...isn't untrue, but is also some bullshit. That's not real. Reality is, I would get bussed to Western, I would walk to my grandparents, Bumpa would be like, YOU EAT? kinda loud because he was hella deaf, and he'd be fixing me a bowl before I could answer. The part about him patting my hand is true, and the familiar quiet of good food enjoyed by people who love each other is, too. But the language is unnecessary. 

So when I recount the way that I remember the soup, am I trustworthy? The smells, the way it tasted, the ingredients I think I recognize from memory. Are those real, or did some flowery bit of nostalgia inspire me to Christopher Nolan the reality of Bumpa's soup?

Who fuckin' cares. 

When I decided I wanted to make the soup and see if I could recreate it from memory, I had a discussion with Derek about how I've kind of good cook-ed myself into a corner. My memory says that Bumpa's soup was a clear broth with chunks of veg, and it was always super rice heavy (like I said, he served it congee style a good deal of the time), but I don't personally do clear broths. I know way too much about good flavor, and building a strong soup foundation. Was I going to try and be accurate to my memory, or was I going to say fuck it and do it my own way and out soup my own grandfather?

I chose the out-soup route. Of course I did. If there's one thing I like to do, it's upstage dead people. 

When Derek and I go to Costco, I almost always get the kids a Costco chicken. Honestly, you are hard pressed to beat paying 5 bucks for a big ass whole chicken that tastes and smells fuckin' AMAZING. Every time the family would finish a chicken, I would ask them to please put the carcass in a bag in the freezer for me. When I have two carcasses in a bag, it's time to make stock. As a general rule, I go for a pretty standard herbaceous stock with the usual suspects: peppercorn, garlic cloves, basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, bay leaf, and whatever veg scraps I have on hand, usually carrot, onion, and SOMETIMES celery, though not often. I will bloom the aromatics in a tiny bit of oil for a few minutes, then I dump in my carcasses and veg scraps, and a couple gallons of water, and then I let that shit simmer until it sits right in my spirit to turn it off. Good stock. The remaining chicken falls off into the stock, the good yummies leech out from the bones, and the base flavor is roasty yumminess because the chicken is cooked by fire on a spit. It's perfection. It's more like bone broth, too. Calling it a stock doesn't quite do it justice, and calling it broth is a downright lie, but bone broth is fuckin' MEATY for a liquid. Not really like, Asian flavor in my carcass water, though. So I knew I would have to go for a different kind of base. 

mmm. Dead stuff.

Take..one?

Aha!

I knew my broth needed more punch, but I also knew that there was no fucking way that my grandfather did all of this shit making my soup. So at some point, I wonder if I should stop calling this "My Bumpa's Soup" and start admitting that I had every intention of upstaging him, and if I wanted to be true to my memory, I should have just boiled a fuckin' chicken with raw ass veg and served that shit over rice when it was done. But I mentioned earlier that the little monster that drives my brain machine is such an unrepentant wearer of rose colored glasses, so this is her love letter to what truly is a wonderful memory, even if the bare bones reality is less culinarily proficient to a Western sensibility.  

See, the filtered water is clue one that I am not staying true to the reality of this soup. My Bumpa didn't use filtered water, he used horrid, horrid, sulfur tasting Florida garbage tap water. Fetid, heinous, unforgivable. My version was not lacking in sulfur on the front or back palette. That being said, neither was Bumpa's. Truly his soup was delicious. 

We're cooking now! Simmering. Boiling. Whatever the right term is, that's what we're doing. 

I was right on. I DO  know too much about making aromatic stocks, but isn't this ALSO part of legacy? Adding your turn to whatever the recipe is? I hear people saying no in my brain, and honestly...fair. Accurate. Honest reporting. No. I should have just done it the other way. The way I think my grandfather did it. And like...I will. I have already talked to Derek about doing a side by side and seeing if Bumpa's assumed way produces a just as good or better result. Eventually. There is a time for that, but that time isn't yet. 

I let that stock simmer together for maybe an hour and a half. Enough time to get deep flavors, but not too much that I would start concentrating the stock. Here is the result, and just LOOK at that layer of fat on top:

Oh. Oh my, yes. The color! The fat! The little bits of soupy goodie floaties! I've only really heard unctuous used as a pejorative until the last year or so, which is funny, because I think it sounds like such a positive word. I don't know if the positive spin on it has caught on en masse, but if it has, that shit looks unctuous. If it hasn't, it looks something not unctuous. 

Is that a clear broth? Eagle eyed readers may note that it is rather on the opaque side of the clear spectrum. Well. Sorry, Bumpa, but you're welcome to my flamboyant writer's brain!

Let's take a moment to see what my live in critic thinks:

More salt. Harrumph. 

Harrumph but fair. I hadn't salted the stock at all, as I was relying on each eater to salt their own dish. I mention in the video that Bumpa and I would eat it with our own sesame oil and soy sauce, but...I am questioning that memory in this moment. Thinking very hard, I think all that was ever on the table in the kitchen for seasoning was salt. I really am a fucking unreliable narrator. Jesus. Well. I still think each eater should salt their own dish, whether or not there was soy sauce and sesame oil on the table, and whether or not we used them together. I'm not your maid. 

But we have a delicious, delicious winner for the stock, so I think we call that done! Time for the more tedious part of the soup recreation:

Taking out all of the bones and aromatics, and jarring up the excess...

Are you a person who thinks this looks gorgeous, or are you a person who is wrong?

..and now that everything was separated from the broth and the extra was canned, it was time to shred the chicken from the bones...

And then put in the veg. I do think that I was right, that Bumpa's soup was a two phase process. Not as extra as all of the shit I was doing, but not just chucking some raw chicken in with some raw veg and calling it good after twenty minutes of boiling. I think the middle of that and my over the top method is where Bumpa's soup actually lives. 

And that was it. I did it. I spent an afternoon just...trying it out, and I did something that...while perhaps not identical to what Bumpa made for me every afternoon three decades ago...related enough that my quest for his soup feels complete. 

And honestly, my take away from this?

My take away is what the actual fuck. Because here's where we're at:

Number one, and perhaps most important: I have had the skills to make this soup for literally a decade plus and I've just been sleeping on the idea that it was just...just a fuckin' chicken soup with an aromatic base that is considered Asian. I could have had this years and years and years ago. I don't know if it's regular ol' racism that made my memory exoticize the simplicity of this dish, or if it was my enduring fondness of my Bumpa that wanted the reality of the dish to be more complicated so I could further lionize the man I grew up with as my only grandfather on my father's side. Maybe the truth is in the middle, maybe it's nowhere close to either, but for sure this is just a really good chicken soup. I hunted for something so simple and I honestly did not fucking have to. And if that isn't 75% of my entire lifespan, I don't know what is;

Dos: I am on a real hunt for my grandfather's life now. The soup was a gateway into a mystery that is so much bigger than the me chasing that taste for years and years could have ever dreamed.

Over the last several months, I have been trying to understand what life events my grandfather lived through. I always knew him as quiet, deliberate, and kind...I stepped on one of his cockatiels when I was a little girl. I killed it. It was entirely unintentional, but I remember my grandfather picking it up from the hallway and carrying it outside. I followed him, crying and apologizing, and thinking he was going to yell at me...yell at me, then bury his pet. He did neither thing. He threw it in the trash can and walked back inside, giving me a little shoulder pat on his way in. He didn't say another word about it. I was too little to wonder what kind of life makes someone that pragmatic or detached. But I wonder now. And it doesn't seem like my family has a lot of answers for me, and without the least bit of judgment, the answers they HAVE had for me and largely incorrect. So I set about finding them myself. 

You Eat: my white girl search for Chinese Chicken Soup Part One

As a little girl, I thought I was Asian. 

I said this once during a podcast episode with Steffie, Derek, and our friend Pinkney and I remember everybody present...and everybody watching Pinkney's instagram live of us as we podcasted...laughing at me. 

I laughed along with everybody, more out of embarrassment and shame than finding anything funny, but then I rushed to explain myself. I grew up with my grandfather from China, I said, and followed that up with saying he was the only grandfather I knew until I was older. 

I knew I sounded dumb. Like. Y'all.

I am white.

I am so white. 

And like...I know that...now. But when I was little, I didn't. I saw my grandfather, a Chinese man, and assumed we were alike. I didn't understand biology from marriage, nobody told me my grandfather wasn't my "real" grandfather, so what other conclusion should I have drawn? I had a grandpa from China, so I was part Chinese. 

My memories of my family are flooded with my grandpa. My Bumpa. He and my grandmother raised cockatiels. My Bumpa was brimming over with ingenuity and skill, and he would invent amazing things, like turning an exercise bike into a water bicycle. I do not actually recall that story from memory, it's a funny story my aunt Mei-Ling tells. But it tracks from the things I DO remember about Bumpa. His PVC pipe garden walls in the backyard. The TV cabinet he built that had something written in Mandarin on it, but I never knew what it said. The table in the living room that he was always playing solitaire on. He built me an amazing dollhouse that I used to play with all the time when I went to Bumpa and Nonni's, but I don't know who has it now. I think Mei Mei has it, actually. In fact I feel fairly certain she does, because I think she showed it to me when I last visited her in NC and she was like, do you remember the dollhouse Bumpa built? Here it is! I was like, yeah...I remember because he built it for me. She said she didn't remember that, but she loved the house and was glad to have it. I whispered to Derek how sad I was at Mei Mie having that, Renee having all of the photos and sewing stuff my dad said Nonni left to me, and me having fucking nothing from either of my grandparents. I've low key always felt like both my dad and I were the black sheep of the family, but I maintain that my dad has an easier time of it than I do. I see the relationships my other cousins have, the relationship my aunts have with my other cousins, and I have always wondered why my aunts and uncles didn't try harder to have a relationship with me when I was younger. Maybe they did and my mom stymied them, I don't know, but it's always made me sad and slightly bitter. I love my family, but I feel like I've had to love them at arm's length. 

My Bumpa and Nonni lived maybe two miles away from my house in south Florida. Probably less, actually, though walking there was a long enough walk that my mom didn't REALLY want me doing it. I did, anyway. I would head to their house after school and hang out until I absolutely had to go home. Amber and I hung out there a LOT together. Russell and his friend Chris would come hang out, sometimes, as well, but initially it was just me. And Bumpa would always have food ready for when I came over. I would get off the bus, walk the ten or so minutes to Nonni and Bumpa's, throw my stuff down in the driveway, and head inside to have congee with Bumpa. It wasn't necessarily ALWAYS congee, but there WAS always...soup. 

Bumpa would have a vat of the most delicious soup on the stove always. It was always exactly the right temperature, and in my memory, it is a very lovely clear broth soup with bits of chicken, bok choy, onion, and carrot, and it smelled like no soup I had ever had before. My olfactory memory of this soup knows that if I were to walk into a kitchen tomorrow and someone were making this exact soup, I would be like, looking around for my reincarnated Bumpa. Or Zombie Bumpa. Though if zombies can make that soup for me, they are welcome to my brain. I've been craving it for years. 

Back when Derek and I still lived in Texas, my dad wanted Alex to come by for a week during the summer, and it so happened that my aunt Mei-Ling was having a July 4th party at her house. Why didn't Derek and I just visit for a bit at the same time? Cool, we thought. So we drove Alex down to Florida and stayed a couple of days so we could be at the party. Pretty much the whole family was there, all of the aunts and all of the remaining uncles. I was chatting with my uncle Kevin and I figured I would ask him if he had Bumpa's soup recipe. 

What kind of soup was it, he asked me. I told him I had no idea, I think it was just a chicken soup, sometimes he used it as a base for congee. Kevin said he'd check his recipes from his dad, but that it didn't ring a bell off the top of his head. 

A week or so later, I got an email from my uncle titled Chow's Chicken Curry! Well. That certainly wasn't fuckin' it, but I did remember Bumpa's curry. I was never a fan, the wings always stayed a little too wet feeling in the mouth for my preferences, but I was glad to have a Bumpa recipe. And besides, I still recalled Bumpa's curry with a humorous fondness. Anytime he made it, I could always immediately tell not from the curry smell that lingers in the house, but because Nonni's mouth was a tattletale, and for a day or two after curry night she always looked, as I described, like she had mouth fucked a highlighter. I put away the search for Bumpa's soup and continued to quietly crave it. 

I asked my dad several times about it. Did he remember the soup? No, he said. He did not recall the soup, but did I know that he used to own a restaurant in Syracuse called Lung-Hai? 

Well no I fuckin' didn't...did he serve my soup there, god dammit?? I was pretty singularly focused on JUST that soup for a really long time. I have this thing, where I see a food, or hear about a food, and I have to eat it. Have you ever read the original Snow White, Rose Red story? Where the mom is pregnant as fuck, looking out of her tower window at the witch's gorgeous garden, longing for her cabbages and that cabbage longing leading to the either sale of her children or her swift demise? Have you read that and thought to yourself...over cabbages? Or any food? Fuckin' weird. 

Well.

I have read that and been like, YES BITCH ME TOO. 

When I want something, the thought of it consumes me until I have it. Sometimes it starts as a tiny nag and grows into an avalanche, and sometimes it just starts as a tsunami of need need need. I can think of several tsunamis of need, but Bumpa's soup was more like a little tiny ripple. 

That would eventually turn IN to a tsunami. Not because of the need for his soup, but because of what the drive to find the recipe would turn into. 

A few people I've talked to about my grandfather, when told he was from China, have looked at my face very intently and said, "oh yeah, I can see it."

Oh, you. What a fun, sweet little lie! There's never been any backpeddling when I say that no, actually, I am not Chinese, it's just my grandfather was, and he isn't my biological grandfather. It's been some variant of, "well...you do look kinda Asian."

I don't. I don't at all look any semblance of Asian. Sometimes I see photos of my aunt Mei-Ling and I'm like, oh I can tell we're related, but that's because the Irish in her matches the Irish in me, because her mom is my biological grandmother, and my biological grandmother is Irish. Gene expression is fun that way. 

Here's the deal: my dad's biological dad, Richard, left the family. I won't get into specifics, not because I'm not a gossip hound but because I don't really have a lot of details. My dad's biological mother, Marilyn, was left with my dad, my aunt Mary, my aunt Renee, and my uncle Paul. Several years pass, my grandmother meets Ray, my Bumpa. As my dad tells it, Bumpa and Nonni were only meant to be a fling, but he knocked her up and did "the righteous thing"...my dad's words, not mine...and married her. Bumpa and Nonni  had Mei-Ling, my aunt, and Kevin, my uncle. Until I was a teenager, I did not know my biological grandfather. The only grandfather I had ever known my whole life on my dad's side was Bumpa. Ray. You could not have told me that Bumpa was not my real grandfather. You still can't, even though I know the difference now between biology and marriage. He was, is, and always will be my grandfather. 

I asked my Aunt a few years ago if she knew the soup I was talking about. She didn't know it, either. 

I did not fuckin' hallucinate this fuckin' soup. 

Amber remembers it, but doesn't recall eating it. Nonni always had the more kid friendly goodies...eclairs, ice cream, chips. But I still ate my soup that Bumpa always had on the stove. I never saw anybody eat it but me. Me and Bumpa. Nonni didn't eat it, either. I think that's why I've always associated it as something that was just between me and Bumpa, and I've always talked about it like it was something that he made just for me. To my recollection, we are the only two that ate it. 

When all of my relatives came up empty on knowing this soup, I wondered out loud to Derek if maybe this was a regional congee that could be found more easily if we knew where Bumpa was from. So I was going to send my aunt a message asking her where my Bumpa was born, but then I remembered she made a little book about him a few years ago that she called The Legend of Kong and the Monk's Riddle. It was two separate stories, both written and illustrated by her, telling the story of my grandfather. I thought maybe that would have his birthplace in it. So I took out my copy and it does have a birth place...but the name of the city was not as accurate as it could be, Mei Mei was writing it down from memory phonetically. Which kind of put me back at the starting line. 

Derek and I love a puzzle, so we read the story my aunt wrote again. My bumpa lived in a village and there was a lot of farming they were doing...peanuts and peaches and cotton are the things that stood out to us. So Derek and I looked up provinces in China where peaches and peanuts and cotton grew. This was not terribly helpful, either, as those are pretty prolific crops over the entirety of the country. What we DID know is that Bumpa's village was flooded by the Yangtze. Which actually IS a pretty good starting point, because there was a fucking monumental flood of the Yangtze in 1931.  

Seeing as we were coming up kinda empty, I asked my Aunt if she knew where Bumpa was born. She did not. Not for sure. Mei Mei told me that my aunt Renee had once done an extended video interview with my grandfather two decades ago, Renee might be a good place to start. I do not like my aunt Renee at all, she is a bigot and a bitch, so I asked my dad to ask her for me knowing that she similarly does not care for me, and I assumed she would be disinclined to help me. My dad reported back several days later than Renee had long recorded over that video, and she also does not recall anything Bumpa talked about. I asked my dad if HE knew where Bumpa was from. He said he thought Bumpa was from Shanghai. That didn't seem right to me, but I'll get into why another time. This is a whole mystery, and we're only at the very beginning of the thread. 

Derek and I spent days looking at maps, at flood maps, comparing them to crop regions, and reviewing them over my aunt's retelling of my Bumpa's stories and the information we had gleaned from my grandfather's table recreation of his village. Literally days. It consumed us. Derek would come home from a day at work and tell me about the insights he had into new places we could look, I would tell him I had yet again determined I was just going to buckle down and learn Mandarin so I could read these fucking maps, and we would collectively dream about taking our search to China itself and perhaps looking out over the Yangtze in the vague area of where my Bumpa's village had once been. You know. Once we figured it all out and had sleuthed our way to the finish line. 

And in all of those fantasies, I pictured myself doing a victory lap over a bowl of Bumpa's soup. 

In the days and weeks that followed, I put my need to eat Bumpa's soup, which had grown to a low, ever present buzz in the part of my brain that is always yearning for one thing or another, on hold. I learned so fucking much about farming in different regions of China. What crops likely grow where. I learned a lot about different cultures in China while trying to track down a tidbit from my aunt's story. I learned about the flooding of the Yangtze, the devastation that wrought, the deaths, the displacement, the famine. I learned about the wars as one learns about wars...like a voyeur into the past burdened with a horrible knowledge of what's coming, and what its arrival means. 

Obviously there was no room for soup here. And I was getting frustrated.

As fun as this puzzle was for Derek and I, and as much as I love being devoured by a rabbit hole, what I wanted more than anything was to have my Bumpa's soup. Food is such a wonderful way to connect between the dead and the living. I may not ever sit at the table with Bumpa to eat ever again, but I can sit at a different table, eating the same soup, and share memories of him. Food is transcendent, and in some ways it makes death obsolete, provided we live as long as we're remembered. Food may be the great equalizer. 

I halted my research and told Derek that I was just going to try and reverse engineer the soup. I would start by making a chicken soup with the things I could VISUALLY remember, create a patchwork stock from there, and then we would taste test it and I would work backwards. 

And work backwards I did, with my signature over the top panache.