Chinese for a Week: Happy New Year!

Today Manhattan’s Chinatown was abuzz with activity, and Miss Cheapist appreciated it all with the gaze of an Orientalist. There was nothing more satisfying than seeing her own culture as an outsider and preserving it into idealized images, frozen in time. She embraced everything: gold paper glittering from sidewalk stands, a woman carrying plum blossoms wrapped in brown paper, burnt reds of roast duck hanging from windows and customers crowding the markets in search of fresh produce for Thursday’s feast. Chortles of new year greetings rang across alleys and doorframes. Merchants even happily allowed Miss Cheapist to photograph their colorful interiors.

To beat the February blues, Miss Cheapist recommends throwing a Lunar New Year party, if only for an excuse to experience the bargains and festivity of a Chinese supermarket. Her favorite one-stop store for first-timers is "Dynasty" at the northeast corner of Hester and Grand streets. All kinds of supplies can be found here. You can also wander around the area to supplement what you buy there. For any Lunar New Year party, you can find the following items (with preparation suggestions):

Dumplings (a category unto themselves): You can buy different varieties of frozen dumplings and play them off as your own creation, or make them from scratch. The very adventurous can make their own skins; but fresh dumpling skins are found in every grocery store. Round skins are for fried/steamed dumplings (gyoza) and the square ones for won tons. Communal dumpling making is a delightful way to entertain guests, popular in China, especially in the North. You can easily find dumpling recipe online, but remember to always include these ingredients when you create the filling: white pepper (grind the peppercorns whole), Shaoxing cooking wine, a couple tablespoons of cornstarch (so the meat doesn’t become dry), green onions (minced), and Chinese dark soy sauce ("Kikkoman" will not cut it for this dish). If you don't like pork, experiment with shellfish, or ground turkey and chicken, but make sure you use lots of cornstarch and season appropriately. Go light on the sesame oil--just a few dashes will be enough.

The Sauces/Dried Goods Section:

While you are in the sauce section, pick up Japanese rice vinegar and oyster sauce to mix together for a dumpling dipping sauce, and for guests who like to prove their mettle with spicy foods, choose the funkiest hot-sauce you can find on the shelf. Many prefer the Vietnamese brand Siriacha, but Miss Cheapist likes something darker, chunkier and oilier. Other condiments to try are chive oil, peanut sauce and hoisin. In these aisles, you will find many instant marinades to experiment with as well. Each bottle is usually between $1 to $2, so it's worth it to try things out. In light of recent scares, avoid sauces made in mainland China, go for those bottled in Taiwan, Hong Kong, California or New Jersey. Read the fine print! After all, it should be in English.

Stock up on tea, and remember to serve after the meal. Miss Cheapist likes to buy tins of loose leaf oolong, jasmine and green tea. She also likes chrysanthemum tea with a touch of honey, but word on the street is bugs creep their way into the dried flower during the drying and bagging process. Drink at your own risk.

Frozen Food Section:

The scallion pancake: it's a crowd pleaser and you don’t have to make it from scratch. Pick up a frozen package, and fry in a cast iron pan or wok with generous amounts of oil. Cut into triangles with cooking shears, and use the same dumpling sauce.

Edamame/Soybeans: Although corner greengrocers north of Grand Street charge about $3.00 for a bag, you can find sacks (even the shelled variety) of these tasty morsels for at least a dollar less in Chinatown. Stock your freezer!

Sweets: Frozen mochi balls ("tong yun") with red bean or black sesame centers can be quickly boiled and served in a jasmine ginger tea broth for a delicate and surprising dessert. This section also contains Asian flavored ice creams and sorbets. Miss Cheapist likes corn and green bean popsicles, but they are hard to find. Some have stated that Chinese cuisine suffers from a paucity of quality desserts, but that is just not accurate. For more sweets, check out a Chinese bakery. Miss Cheapist likes Fay Da, a bakery with many locations in Manhattan Chinatown and Flushing. More tips on navigating a Chinese bakery later...

Meats: Some grocery stores will have small, affordable trays of thinly carved meats which can be used for a Korean BBQ dish or shabu shabu (hotpot) dinner options.

Fresh Produce: Greens and Fruits
Many different types of greens can be found in an Asian grocery store. Most have made it into mainstream Western diets, so the novelty may have worn off for readers. But to state the obvious: the bittersweet, crisp flavors of these dark veggies make wonderful additions to dishes, or can be served on their own: mustard greens, baby bok choy, gai lan (looks like a slightly larger broccoli rabe), oong choi (looks like watercress)… And don’t forget to spice up your dishes with the herbs: scallions, chives, and cilantro. All these greens are incredibly affordable in Chinatown. To prepare, Miss Cheapist's mother recommends shaving off the tough edges of the greens, chopping them into smaller pieces, and then boiling a few tablespoons water in the pan with dashes of vegetable oil and soy sauce. When the water bubbles, blanche the greens with the cover on until they are still crunchy but well done. Partway through the cooking process, add cooking wine, salt and white pepper. Remove water before everything becomes soggy.

At the end of the meal, you can also serve a medley of exotic fresh fruits such as lichee, long an (see mystery fruit in first picture), durian, fresh tangerine, persimmon or asian pear. Or just stick with an old standby--oranges, served cut against the grain, with skins intact. Fruits at the end of the meal are believed to ease digestion and cleanse the palate.

Prepared Foods:
To kick it up a notch, or to avoid cooking, buy 2 pounds each of roast duck, char siu (BBQ pork) and soy sauce chicken from the prepared foods section. This should cost you no more than $35.00 and you can serve about 20 people with these amounts.

While this guide is by no means comprehensive, it is a start. For every party, remember to decorate with red and gold, invite a diverse group of friends, and make sure everyone has enough to eat and drink! There will be no cheapness in hospitality…bad luck ah.

The Kind that Bind

At the start of a road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles with her family over the holidays, Miss Cheapist enjoyed the intimacy of the parent/child relationship. She reveled in being able to have mature, non-judgmental conversations with her mother where “active listening” prevailed. It was initially comforting to be with someone who knew her every flaw and made sure she stayed hydrated and ate fruits and vegetables. Miss Cheapist even entertained the fantasy of moving closer to her mother, for good. But after days of zipping through long highways, dry canyons, palm-lined boulevards and broad coastlines, she unconsciously began to regress into her 15-year old self. The car walls folded in on her, and she wanted to argue, sulk, and respond defensively, even without provocation. Not even an “In-and-Out” burger along Highway 101 took the edge off as she struggled with the contradictory impulses to draw her family closer, and at the same time, pull away. All this made her wonder, is it an asset or a liability to live near those who reared us? What is our obligation to our parents as adults, and can we afford to be cheap?

According to H., a childhood friend who moved to Manhattan immediately after graduating from an unnamed Northeastern women’s college, the city is divided into two groups: A) those who stayed/moved back into the city and remain close to their parent(s) and B) those who left their hometowns with many dreams, uncertain of when they would return home and reestablish those bonds. On this same topic, H. also offered an observation about “Sex and the City,” commenting that although the show thoroughly reviewed many topics, rarely were parents and their influence on urban life explored. Why? Is family too complicated to be sexy?

Western psychoanalytic theory argues that in order to fully thrive, one must separate herself from her parents and develop an independent identity. Yet many native New Yorkers, even those who worship at the altar of analysis, still cherish those ties that bind, living in their parents’ homes (or next door), having weekly dinners, seeking advice on all major decisions, relying on familiar networks for employment, and frequenting the establishments they grew up with. To a certain extent, this loyalty and closeness is enviable; in a city that is based upon relationships and insular communities, who wants to start from ground zero all the time? The benefits of maintaining a commitment to ones family are innumerable, and those who weather the highs and lows seem to be well rewarded. On the outside, it appears that tolerating the low level buzz of dysfunction is a cost worth taking on. After all, we were probably far more annoying as teenagers.

But for many, such closeness makes it difficult to break from the conventions and expectations of childhood. Even if we experienced periods of rebellion, it becomes so easy to reinforce the past. Deep into our thirties, we wonder if we can even recognize ourselves in the thick of our own inherited prejudices and idiosyncrasies. For this reason just as many New Yorkers have left for other cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Shanghai and Buenos Aires, looking to gain space, find themselves, and put down new roots. However, is it so easy to just pick up and leave? As the years pass, there is increased responsibility to care for parents who, may become frail or just yearn for a closer connection to their children. Although many see this as a burden, there is nothing more satisfying that being able to provide for them as adults, and to have few regrets about abandonment or fears that our own children will do the same to us.

But what about Miss Cheapist? She moved away from home years ago filled with possibility of gaining greater opportunity in New York, wanting to make everyone proud of her accomplishments. With time and many transitions, Miss Cheapist discovered that one can live a morally sound, fun, and rather unexceptional life in New York, and dreams don’t easily transpire into reality. And worse, many of her native New Yorker friends do inaccurately view her as indulged in her autonomy, and belonging to a tribe of people who have temporarily settled here. Although the city, her relationship to a lifelong mate and the mission of her profession still holds great meaning for her, Miss Cheapist is always haunted by the possibility that she may be making a terrible mistake. Is she being emotionally cheap by maintaining this distance, or is she waiting to mature into someone with greater resilience, and perhaps even more needed? As she wrestles with this matter, she can’t take for granted that it is a luxury to have a happy and healthy parent. She can afford a bit of freedom, but not ingratitude. For the time being, she will remain a child.

Sweet, Sweet Fantasy (with apologies to M. Carey)

(the popular fantasy of an apartment in Harlem overlooking Central Park)

Several years ago, Miss Cheapist tried therapy as a way to navigate different transitions that she faced. At the time, it was productive, primarily because she realized how little she really understood about herself. One memorable evening on the couch, she shared a feeling of suffocation from the desires and expectations of those closest to her. With fatigue, she sighed, “I’m just so overwhelmed with everyone else’s fantasies!” Her therapist, a woman who never changed the register of her voice, and colored her office with photographs from travels in the Himalayas, responded, “And what is your fantasy?” Her question gave Miss Cheapist pause. She wondered, when it seemed easier to respond to others, rather than barrel forward with her own dreams, did she really dare to fantasize? Or by doing so, was she only setting herself up for failure? Even after using the word so glibly to describe the predicament of others, when she had to look inward, the concept of “fantasy” really seemed so difficult to define.

In the holiday season when everyone is determined to articulate their wishes, and for the less cheap, make the wishes of others actually come true, it seems appropriate to determine the value of fantasies. Who can even afford them? At first blush, it seems that fantasy comes easy, especially through television. Miss Cheapist, most recently, has thrown herself into the unexpectedly enthralling Gossip Girl: a constructed TV world of earnest, class-conscious teen love, self-congratulatory WASPdom, unfettered bitchiness, and photogenic NYC streetscapes. The unapologetic Whiteness of the show was potentially alienating, and yet Miss Cheapist found herself emotionally drawn to the characters (who doesn’t want to be Serena Van der Woodsen). This show has become a panacea for the seasonal affective disorder that inevitably arrives with late autumn. Can we call that appeal anything other than the power of fantasy? Yes, television, with its porn aesthetic and ability to take ordinary people and transform them into 21^st century beauty queens, definitely provides fantasy.

However, underlying our fantasies is the belief that we can access them, making them another type of aspiration. Are fantasies our generation’s way of setting goals? The fantasies of Miss Cheapist’s peer group are diverse. Some revolve around getting out of work for the rest of our healthy, able years: spending ones days trying to catch the largest fish imaginable on a fly rod, becoming a trucker and traveling the highways of America with ones spouse in the passenger seat, moving to rural America and owning a gun, or having a baby and becoming a stay-at-home mom. And other fantasies seem more pragmatic, a way to cope with everyday anxieties: having one extra bedroom, buying a brownstone in Bed-Stuy only to have the market immediately take off, renovating a kitchen in the Provencal style, affording an original Eames chair, and of course, marrying rich. Other fantasies involve wealth achieved by artistic impulse: producing the next home design trend from ones Bushwick studio based on an art school thesis, going to architecture school and becoming the next Maya Lin, establishing a homemade jewelry business, selling restored vintage clothes on E-bay, moving to China and capitalizing on the new contemporary art scene…and of course, the fantasy of having ones blog discovered by an book agent and becoming the next Bridget Jones! Miss Cheapist is even willing to admit that she recently wished for unnamed forces to catapult her small, episodic blog about an whiny, cheap, Asian girl into a cable television show that rivaled “Sex and the City” in its scope and impact.

Will these fantasies be mocked years later as mere indulgence? Will they be seen as suffocating the less fortunate of this post-Gilded Age? Or will the residue of Internet millionaires (hello, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, et. al) and Myspace-created celebrities actually mark this decade as a revial of the American dream? Are fantasies heightened because people believe now, more than ever, that they can be realized? Or perhaps we are craving fantasy in the face of an impeding national crisis: economic recession, environmental catastrophe, recognition of the limitations of democracy, heightened nativism, and a loss of faith in the ability of public institutions to lead and provide a safety net for the neediest. Oh Miss Cheapist, really, what is your fantasy?