As Jason Wang writes in Xi’an Famous Foods (2020), he didn’t really appreciate the life he had when he was living in Xi’an, with his extended family, before his parents decided, when Wang was aged eight, to move to the United States.
He describes eating cumin-dusted lamb skewers cooked over charcoal in the Muslim Quarter. “Those lamb skewers were almost the only thing I would eat as a kid. They were irresistible to me – smoky, savoury, spicy, with a touch of char, snapping with crushed cumin seeds. Every other dish I tried paled in comparison.
“And yet, the food would be there, a daily constant, just like the red scarf I wore to school every day and the morning salute to the Chinese flag. On weekends, I’d walk to school, hum the Chinese national anthem, learn some grammar and math, and walk home for lunch with my grandfather, who always had a bowl of lamb pao-mo ready for me.
“After a nap, I’d head back to school again, and then arrive home just as my mother put on a pot of hong shao ribs and started washing rice for dinner, all the while yelling at me to practise piano. On weekends, I’d go to my grandmother’s house, where I watched my aunt tend to the garden, harvest eggs from the chicken coop, and pick loquats and walnuts from the trees framing the front door.
“I didn’t know how good I had it.”
Then Wang’s parents announced the upcoming move: “I’m excited, expecting annual trips to Disneyland and a magical elixir known as hot chocolate […] We’re dropped into the snowy woods of Michigan, and I see my childhood of concrete and smoke replaced with cookie-cutter houses, painted red and blue and yellow, with porches and lawns and the tallest oak and evergreen trees I’d ever seen. My life turns into a ‘coming to America’ reel […]
“Our family lasts three years in Michigan before we take off for the suburbs of Connecticut – another promise of a better education, a better future. I enrol in a Catholic middle school and become a latchkey kid while my parents work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I roll out of bed, walk to school, let the racist jokes roll off my back.
“Come back to an empty home, heat up some dinner from the freezer, chat aimlessly on AIM, watch The Simpsons until bed […] Once a month, we head to Flushing, New York, filled with people who look kind of like me and walk and talk kind of like me.”
The family moved again, to Queens, in New York, where Wang’s hard-working father, David Shi, who had been working in Chinese restaurants, finally realised his dream of opening his own place, a hole-in-the-wall space specialising in the food of Xi’an. “[He] starts with two dishes: spicy and sour liang pi ‘cold skin noodles’ and rou jia mou, our soon-to-be signature ‘burgers’.
“He knows instinctively that the local market is itching for authentic street food, intensely flavourful yet quick and cheap. So he starts making the food at home, pushing it over in a cart, and then praying it doesn’t rain so he can stay open all day and break even.”
The business soon catches on and Shi moves to a bigger space in a popular shopping centre. Then one day, when Wang is at university, he gets a call from his father. “There’s a tall, old white dude here with a film crew. Do you know who he is?”
It was Anthony Bourdain.
The book has recipes for the many specialities sold at Xi’an Famous Foods, including liang pi noodles, rou jia mou and a variety of dumplings. Other recipes include the spicy cumin lamb skewers Wang loved so much as a child, spicy and sour carrot salad, twice-cooked pork belly, spicy and tingly lamb face salad, spicy cumin buns, spicy steamed potato hash, sweet fermented rice soup, and tang yuan (glutinous rice dumplings) with sesame or hawberry filling.
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