Tasting Chinese (and Hakka) Food Around the World

Kwan traveled the world seeking out Chinese restaurants 

This evening I went to a talk called "Food and the Chinese Diaspora" at the Vancouver Public Library, featuring two guests: Cheuk Kwan, who is a Hong Kong-born, Canadian filmmaker who in 2005 did a 15-part series, going around the world documenting Chinese restaurants, and Linda Lau Anusasananan, who wrote The Hakka Cookbook: Chinese Soul Food from Around the World.

Kwan and Anusasananan were moderated by author Kevin Chong, who wanted to keep the discussion more contemporary by mentioning Uncle Roger several times, which might have been a generation or culture gap for many in the audience!

What's interesting about Kwan is that he seems to have two separate lives: the documentarian and author of Have You Eaten Yet? And also a passionate political activist with the Toronto Association for Democracy in China.

Kwan, Anusananan and Chong in discussion

A summary of Kwan's documentary was shown, with scenes of him traveling to far-flung places like Peru, India, Madagascar, Israel, and Brazil, and meeting the Chinese people there, and seeing what they eat.

When Chong asked him which place impressed him the most, Kwan immediately said Madagascar. He discovered a lot of Malagasy-Chinese immigrated to Montreal, so there is a big community there, and in Madagascar, even an eighth-generation Chinese-Malagasy child could write better Chinese than him! 

In the video they proudly say that soupe Chinoise is the national dish. What is it? Wonton soup. "They have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so it really is a national dish," explains Kwan.

Meanwhile Anusasananan explained what Hakka food is -- it has bolder, richer flavours than Cantonese cuisine, though they do borrow from each other, and uses a lot of preserved and pickled vegetables, and salted fish. Some well-known Hakka dishes are braised pork belly with preserved vegetables, stuffed tofu, and salt-baked chicken. 

She didn't know much about her Hakka heritage, and decided to learn more by going around the world and asking other Hakka how they cook their food, and compiled her cookbook.

When Anusasananan traveled to different places, they gave her different variations of dishes, or new ones, like one featuring tea leaves that are pounded with seeds and nuts and then mixed with water and poured over rice!

Anusananan talked about Hakka cuisine

In one of the final questions, Chong asked both what their final meal would be, and Kwan immediately replied he had been asked this many times. The answer? Steamed grouper with ginger and scallions. Anusausanan agreed.

An audience member asked Chong what his meal would be and he said his mom's oxtail soup. Anusananan agreed too which was funny.

There was discussion about how to elevate Chinese food from being one served in white boxes and for cheap, and how younger chefs did more "fusion", and was there concern that they were moving away from tradition. There were mentions of people I had interviewed, like Craig Wong of Patois who does Chinese-Jamaican cuisine, and Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu's in San Francisco, how they have elevated the cuisine.

But back at the beginning of the discussion, Kwan talked about authenticity. He said authentic was whatever your mother or grandmother made for you to eat. That to you is the original flavour. How to replicate it? Anusananan suggested making videos of your mother or father cooking and tasting them at each step so that you would have a better chance of replicating it. Good pro-tip!

Turbulent Times with Air Canada Strike

Flight attendants want to be paid for ground services

The Air Canada strike was barely 12 hours old when the Canadian government shut it down. Flight attendants with the nation's largest airline are fighting to be paid for all the work they do on the ground before the plane pushes off from the gate.

It's an issue they have repeated all over the media, gaining a lot of sympathy from the public, though others are annoyed the strike has severely impacted their travel plans, including my brother and nephew. 

They were supposed to fly on AC Saturday, but earlier this week I warned him about the impending strike and he made a backup plan to fly on American Airlines.

Air Canada turned to government for intervention

However, this morning when they arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the flight was cancelled. He literally scrambled to get another flight leaving nine hours later to Seattle, and a train ticket to Vancouver. It was the cheaper option than to shell out around US$4,000 for two tickets on an alternative airline.

The plane left late, but managed to cut its flight time thanks to tail wind and it looked promising for him and my nephew to arrive with enough time to get to the train station.

But alas -- the bridge to connect to the plane in order to de-plane was broken! It took over an hour for the plane to be towed to another gate, and so they did not make the last Amtrak train at 9pm.

This afternoon CBC Radio's national call-in show Cross Country Checkup asked people how the Air Canada strike was affecting them. People phoned in from Dublin and Brazil to say they were stranded there, while others were upset their loved ones would not be able to make their wedding in a few days, or that the bride wouldn't make it on time, a father said he was traveling through Texas to get to his son in another part of Canada who was having cancer treatment.

A flight attendant disrupts an AC press conference

Others complained they tried to get through to Air Canada many times on the phone and got no where, and one person said the phone message told people to go to the website, while the website instructed people to call.

Despite the headaches and stress, most of the callers supported the flight attendants.

At the same time academics who study labour or airlines said Air Canada should have bargained in good faith with the flight attendants, that they should not have turned to the government to invoke Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, forcing the flight attendants back to work and binding arbitration. 

Experts also blamed the government for siding with management so quickly.

"It really is a troubling development," said Barry Eidlin, who studies labour and social movements at McGill University.

"Section 107 basically just allows the labour minister this unilateral power to intervene to order workers back to work against their will. Ant that is extremely concerning."

In retaliation to the government forcing them to go back to work, the flight attendants are refusing to do so and are continuing their strike.

So while Air Canada says it will get flights up and running by Monday evening, that probably won't be happening. It's just creating bad blood between the flight attendants and Air Canada, with the passengers held hostage during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

Review: They Shot the Piano Player

The documentary delves into what happened to Tenorio

This afternoon I watched an animated documentary called They Shot the Piano Player directed by Fernando Trueba, who co-wrote the script with Javier Mariscal at VIFF. 

However the film starts off with a made-up journalist by the name of Jeff Harris (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), who has a book deal to write about the bossa nova wave in the late 1950s and 1960s that influenced the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra.

Harris is conjured up by the the director as a vehicle to find out more about what happened to Brazilian pianist Francisco Tenorio Junior, who was very much a real person. While he was not very famous, Tenorio was well liked by his fellow musicians, which is reiterated over and over in the film.

Harris is a made-up writer into bossa nova

But when he was visiting Argentina in March1976, he went out to get medicine and sandwiches in the middle of the night and then disappeared and no one knew what happened to him. And so They Shot the Piano Player is an attempt to figure out where he went.

The animation makes the story come alive with the vibrant colours and of course the catchy music that was revolutionary at the time. Trueba conducted numerous interviews that were filmed and then animated, which kind of begs the question, why?

It would be understandable to go back in time by animating them, but was there a need to animate actual people giving their side of the story in the present day? A mix of live action and animation might have been a better way to go -- it just seemed superfluous to animate the interview subjects, and see their true facial expressions, though some includes Harris in the scenes, others don't.

Nevertheless, the story is fascinating in itself to keep viewers interested in finding out what happened to Tenorio.

While he had a wife named Carmen and five children, he also was in love with a woman named Malena -- who he was with the night he disappeared. Harris points out that Carmen did not have a chance to confront Tenorio or divorce him regarding the extramarital affair, but probably worse, because he was not found, Tenorio was not declared dead, Carmen was not a widow and could not access her husband's pension.

Actual interview subjects animated in the film

The film gets darker when the documentary interviews a journalist who wrote about Operation Condor, where the United States was involved in propping up dictatorships in several South American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, and how Tenorio was nabbed despite not being known to be politically active.

They Shot the Piano Player ends somewhat abruptly, with Harris hoping that his "book" will allow Tenorio to remain in people's memories, that he was not forgotten.

We appreciate the effort that went into making this animated documentary, but wonder maybe some parts could have been streamlined. Harris goes to Rio de Janeiro at first to write about bossa nova, and then because he becomes obsessed with Tenorio, the subject of his book changes... couldn't it have just have been about Harris writing the Tenorio book all along?

It still would have covered the music scene at the time, but through Tenorio's life, or perhaps there wasn't enough information about him? Also his voice is never heard throughout the film, so while he is seen in the film, he is not heard which is kind of ironic.

Despite it going into tangents, They Shot the Piano Player is still a marvel to watch, transporting viewers to a bright and glorious time that sadly turned dark and tragic...

They Shot the Piano Player

2023

104 minutes

Directed by Fernando Trueba

Written by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal