One of the things folks might not realize is that Las Vegas has an incredible Chinatown.
Stretching out over Spring Mountain Road and extending across Decatur, it sprawls like the Mojave itself. It’s not walkable, unlike the more tourist-driven Chinatowns in SF & NYC, nor is it vast like LA’s San Gabriel Valley. But some plazas can be a day-long experience in themselves between massage and CrunCheese Korean Hotdogs (a fav for my youngest kids) and boba and shops that sell everything from bento boxes to chopsticks and woks, to gigantic bags of sushi rice along with their outsize fresh fish counters. It is, I’ve found, one of the richest cultural patches of Vegas that we have.
When we first arrived from NYC, I knew we could live here after I went shopping in Chinatown. I found SF Market, 99 Ranch, 38 Mart, International Marketplace (a little outside of Chinatown) - have I told you how much I love a market? How I judge every place by its markets, and that I am not talking about how many Whole Foods or TJs can occupy a suburb? I do love a market.
Then, there are the restaurants….
Chengdu Taste (Sichuan), Asian BBQ + Noodle (Cantonese/ curried tendon), Big Dan’s Shanxi Taste in the SF supermarket (Shangxi/ cold noodles), Monta (ramen), Shanghai Taste (Shanghainese/ xiao long bao), Raku Toridokoro (yakitori), Kaiseki Yuzu, Yui Edomae, Sushi Kame Omakase (all sushi), District One (Vietnamese), New Asian BBQ (Peking duck), Shang Artisan Noodle (Shangxi/ hand-pulled noodles), Yummy Kitchen in the other SF Supermarket (Singaporean / Black Pepper Crab), Lamaii (Thai), Chubby Cattle (hot pot), Hobak Korean BBQ (Korean, family style).
I mean, I could go on and on. Vegas has an amazing Chinatown.
This week our cookbook group, Please Send Noodles, got an invite from James Beard semi-finalist, Chef Jimmy Li to make zongzi with Jimmy’s mom, Adie Zheng at his restaurant, Shanghai Taste. The whole process takes hours and is made specifically for the Dragon Boat festival in the Spring. Adie makes thousands for the festival. She is famous in Chinatown for her zongzi.
Adie pre-prepared two types for us to fold and cook; one savory with pork, mushrooms, and sweet rice, the other sweet with adzuki bean paste and a snowstorm of sugar. The inside of a savory zongzi is a pillow of comfort, long cooked sweet rice, in pork fats and meat, almost like the soft unctious insides of a mid-western casserole or a dense stock-infused risotto.
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To state the obvious, women’s labor is often under-compensated, invisible, dangerous, and taken for granted. This zongzi making is so different. It tapped into something that feels elusive to me. It made me remember the ways women’s work can actually be empowering and visible. When the cooking is about passing on knowledge, and teaching and passing along meaning, there is a change in the drudgery of kitchen work that happens.
For me, with a young autistic daughter who has a very limited menu and switches her preferred foods, eating the same food for months and then changing it up all of sudden, making the 5th teriyaki chicken of the day can be grueling, a sort of energy-sucking affair that makes me want to take to the bed and moan. Or making her three dinners, none of which she will touch, even though she asked specifically for them and gave me strict instructions on their preparation and plating.
Sometimes I hate cooking, honestly.
Sometimes I wish it wasn’t my job in the house.
This is even harder for women with greater challenges and fewer privileges. A meal might be cobbling together something out of a shitty box of pantry foods, the same you got last week. It might be shopping at a convenience store and burning up more cash than you would at a supermarket. A meal for someone who can barely raise themselves out of bed because of depression or other mental illness, might be crackers with butter and a soda. A bag of cookies. A person without a kitchen might abandon cooking altogether and live wholly on prepackaged foods. A person with many young kids might rely on box Mac and cheese.
I wouldn’t have a microwave, but my kids need it to make simple foods. And still, the younger ones ask me to cook for them, over and over they ask me to prepare the thing they could just shove into the microwave and cook themselves, yet there I am cooking another hot dog in the microwave, hating that the kitchen is a drudgery, knowing that what I make for dinner will be eaten by some and snubbed by others, only to hear later they are jonesing for food at 9pm.
But group cooking is the antidote, it seems. Or it feels this way making sticky rice dumplings.
While making zongzi, I feel plugged into something bigger than a task or a job to finish. I think of Korea’s kimjang and the centuries old process of making kimchi, that started with the arrival of the shrimp and anchovy boats in the spring, the salt for the brine coming in the summer, the chilies dried and turned to dust after harvest in the Fall and then the whole community coming together to make kimchi for everyone. No one was left out.
I think of women in Italy coming together after harvest to make and share vats of sauce they slow-cooked from still hot just-picked tomatoes, or brining olives among the trees in the orchard. I think about mothers-in-law teaching daughters-in-law, and children. I think of people laughing and gossiping while they fold and wrap, cut and stir.
I think of community cookbooks and junior league texts, and the battered ones that change hands across immigrant families, the ones that circled around New England and the South where recipes were collected and food traditions shared through church suppers and grange dinners, junior league and firehouse breakfasts. And the proliferation of oral recipes, check out this great piece in Vogue on oral recipe traditions.
I think about how zongzi has many cousins: Mexico’s tamales, the pasteles of Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, Stewed Conkie in Barbados, Guyana and St. Kitts, a mix of grated corn meal, pumpkin, sugar, sweet potatoes wrapped in banana leaves.
There are Hallacas from Venzuela, Nactamales from Nicaragua, Humitas from Bolivia, Pamonhas from Brazil and Guatemalan Chuchitos. There are Blue Draws from Jamaica made from cornmeal, green banana, or sweet potato, pumpkin, yam, plantain, or cassava, mixed with flour, coconut milk, and spices. There’s Dukanu from Belize and Doukounou from Haiti. There are Cameroonian corn tamales wrapped in banana leaves, known in Africa as Conkie Corn.
In Hawaii, it’s lau lau, pork and butterfish wrapped in taro leaves, steamed and eaten with rice and poi. In Eastern Europe, it’s stuffed cabbage rolls. I love the way Joe Mascaglione, owner of Shanghai Taste, told me about his own Italian heritage and how zongzi reminds him of making bracciole, beef serving as the “leaf” around a stuffing of bread, eggs, milk, parsley, garlic, cheese, raisins and nuts. The Navajo have a corn tamale called “Kneel Down Bread.”
We are not alone in the world with our foods, so why do we cook alone so much?
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One of the things that comes to mind while I watched Adie’s demo — and then joining in, filling the bamboo leaves with either the red bean paste or the pork filling, and then fumbled to get just the right cone shape, not too much pressure or you’ll flatten the little package and it will come out looking blockish and flat — I was reminded how much I love cooking with other women.
I am reminded of this reading the work of Renée Hirschon, an anthropologist who did extensive research on the social life of Asia Minor refugees in the Greek city of Piraeus in the 70’s. “Women would often gather in each other’s yards to assist with food preparation, and it was an unspoken rule that when a neighbor helped her friend with the chopping of vegetables or nuts for desserts, the latter would thank her by giving her a plate with a small portion, a ‘smell’, of the finished dish to take home.” Hirschon wrote, “ The plate would not be returned to its owner empty, but containing a sample of a dish the second housewife thought worthy of displaying. This pattern of reciprocal gestures helped establish exclusively female forms of socialization…”
Unfortunately, many of us are more isolated than ever. Pressed for time, stressed about money, no time for self-care, keeping shit going on fumes and thread and Xanax, have to get dinner on and get to the next thing. I get it.
The long-form, work-heavy labor of cooking doesn't always come to our minds when thinking about how to make community connections. How do we get started? What does it cost us to invite people in? How do we organize it?
I recently heard about a local neighborhood party being planned - such a great thing for the neighborhood - but the food will be provided by local restaurants. On the one hand, we should be supporting independently-owned restaurants, so that’s great, but on the other, we have disconnected from the days of community preparation, camraderie, women cooking in groups to make community food, and so we miss the pride of feeding the community, sharing in the highs and lows of food preparation, the getting through things together in the thick and thin of cooking.
We miss that small portion, that “smell” that someone passes over to us on a plate to taste, an intimate act that can only happen in the very depths of the crowded kitchen.
I can honestly say that a lot of my strong relationships with the people in Please Send Noodles came from cooking for the community together during the pandemic. The pressure, the joy, the missteps, the tasting of each others food, it all cultivated an intense connection among people I can honestly say I know and love and “see” and who “see” me, because of all that effort.
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At one point in the zongzi demonstration, Adie winds the string around the cone, deftly ties it one-handed and then bites the string off with her teeth. When she does it, I have to stop from squealing with joy over this simple act. It is the hack of a master craftsperson, something you won’t find in a cookbook. You kinda had to be there to see her hands fold deftly and tie and cut.
You get immediately that she has made tens of thousands of these across her lifetime, and fed thousands of people with her zongzi.
It was a joy to be invited into a big cook again. To learn from Adie. And, to feel less lonely in my cooking.
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ENDNOTES:
Wanted to drop some fun book news here. Got two early reviews back and I am thrilled that they aren’t terrible. LOL.
Shelf Awareness is widely read by bookshops and book buyers so its an important review for discoverability. (Check out book publicist Kathleen Schmidt on discoverability). The second is Kirkus. I am feeling grateful. Largely because there is no control, I am free falling through book publishing, and so far (knock on wood) it hasn’t been gruesome or obliterating, which is kind of not what I expected.
But there’s still time…. LOL
I will probably write about my experience with book publishing at some point, so please feel free to email questions or things you want to know about the process. Happy to share from beginning to end.