Grandfathered In

As a child, I often visited Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city of eight million people and the hometown of my Chinese family, during summer vacations. Several nights a week, I found myself sitting for dinner at an extravagant Chinese banquet restaurant, a large establishment filled with private dining rooms, big round tables, and endless waves of stoic waiters.

One evening, I dined at a particularly fancy banquet restaurant on the top floor of a hotel. Sitting in a large chair, my feet barely touching the floor, I peered over the table at the bounty before me: an entire fried fish covered in sweet sauce, whole roast squabs, Nanjing-style saltwater duck, cold sliced duck poached in an aromatic broth, and cold appetizers of sliced beef, jellyfish, bamboo shoots, and other delicacies laid out in white porcelain containers.

“America fears the rise of China,” said my grandfather, deep in conversation with the adults at the table. He reached to the steamed fish and, using his chopsticks, pulled a piece of meat from the fish’s head and set it on my plate. He turned and smiled at me. “The cheek is the best part. It’s better than any American hamburger.”

I stared skeptically at the shred of fish face. I picked up the cheek, took a cautious nibble and returned the rest to my plate. This is definitely not better than a burger, I thought. As an American kid, my love for burgers was absolute. At the age of seven, I once devoured two Big Macs, fries, and ten chicken nuggets, a binge that left me so bloated that my dad had to carry me out of McDonald’s.

My grandfather said, “America is the world’s bully, a young and ignorant country. They have no culture.” He sounded angry. 

Normally, my grandfather was cheerful. He liked to tell stories and pull funny faces when eating, contorting his features and making exaggerated noises of pleasure. As a kid, I found it hilarious to see an adult acting like a child. But speaking to his old comrades at these banquets, he was deadly serious.

Both my grandparents are ganbu, career Chinese Communist Party cadres. They were constantly being invited by their old compatriots to restaurants. These fancy dinners and business partnerships were the result of their lifelong dedication and connections to the Communist Party. For me, the lone child surrounded by adults with names and titles too complicated to remember, these dinners were stunningly boring.

One night when I was eight years old, I decided to make a stand. I refused to eat. Everyone panicked. Adult after adult pleaded with me, but I stubbornly resisted. Finally, my grandmother came up with a solution. Recognizing my simple American palate, she requested a fried pork chop from the kitchen. It arrived 15 minutes later, served unceremoniously on a white plate next to a bowl of plain rice. I ate quickly and silently. My grandparents shook their heads in embarrassment.

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It was in the US Army that I first started to crave Chinese food. For the first time in my life, I was away from my mom’s Chinese cooking. When I was growing up, she made food that combined Chinese and American cultures: fried rice with bacon and brown rice, and Americanized Chinese dishes like beef and broccoli. When she was feeling adventurous, she served her version of Italian lasagna: ground beef mixed with garlic and a dash of soy sauce, a small amount of mozzarella, and no ricotta, which my mom considered too strange to be edible.

In the Army’s dining halls, food was chili mac, biscuits and gravy, tuna casserole, and other classic Americana dishes that were as familiar to me as hot pot or thousand-year eggs would have been to the average Midwesterner. In basic training, when I tried grits for the first time, it tasted like xifan, Chinese rice porridge. “You never had grits before?” said a soldier from Kentucky in disbelief. One night, as my bunkmate from Georgia spoke wistfully about his mother’s pies, I mentioned my cravings for my mom’s braised tofu. He was baffled. “Tofu? Isn’t that just fake meat?”

Seeking culinary refuge, I dedicated myself to replicating the Chinese food of my childhood. Despite the lack of a kitchen and the confined space of my barracks room, I conjured miracles: frozen potstickers cooked in a George Foreman grill (complete with grill marks), stir-fries cooked in a fondue pot that functioned as a sauté pan, and instant ramen enhanced with eggs, seafood, and vegetables.

I had enlisted in the Army a few months after high school. I joined for many reasons: boredom, a strong distaste at the thought of another four years stuck in academia, and a terrible senior year in high school, which limited my college options. But I was also driven to prove myself as an American. In America, being a military veteran represented the ultimate trump card, a royal flush in any argument. If confronted with the accusation that I was anything less than a real American, I imagined myself answering: “Go back to China? I fought for this country. What have you done?”

My parents and I mutually agreed to limit my communication with my extended family while I was in the Army. There would be no more summer visits to China, no more extravagant Chinese banquets. The American government frowns on its soldiers having connections with foreign countries, especially China, a country it considers a rival. Regular contact with China would jeopardize the security clearance my job required.

My parents were especially concerned about my grandparents. My grandmother was a devout member of the Communist cause. As a Russian translator for the Chinese government, her career took her to the Soviet Union, where she translated for Chinese government officials – and Soviet dignitaries when they visited China.

“It’s an absurd idea to hide a war, but I understood why they did”

And my grandfather? He is a national hero. During the Chinese Civil War (1946-1950), he served as a member of the Communist underground resistance, albeit not as a soldier. His service was administrative, behind the scenes. He was a valuable cog in a complicated bureaucratic machine. On the early morning of April 24, 1949, he was the clerk in the telegram office who sent out the first message informing the world that the Communists had taken Nanjing, the capital of the rival Nationalist government.

As a member of the founding generation that established communism in China, my grandfather receives special privileges from the government. His bills for hospital stays or expensive medical procedures are covered completely. He receives a steady government pension, the privilege of being a hero of the revolution.

My grandfather never told me about his life as a revolutionary. I learned rather unceremoniously about his status as a Chinese patriot. One day, I passed my father on his computer. He motioned me to come over. “Yeye has been profiled on the front page of the Jinling Evening News as a national hero,” he said.

My grandparents avoided the topic of my military service. There were no questions about my job, daily life, training. To me, they seemed indifferent. But when I got older, I often overheard their voices cracking with emotion as they decried the evils of America and its oppression of China. Years after I left the Army, I asked my father, “How did Yeye react when I enlisted?”

My father paused. He rubbed his chin and looked at me. “Your grandfather was angry. He’s ashamed his own grandson joined the enemy.”

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I deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2007. For over a year, I lived everywhere, from massive sprawling bases filled with thousands of soldiers to small combat outposts, abandoned buildings commandeered by the military in the middle of an Iraqi city. Every few months, I would return to my base after a long mission, uniform soaked in sweat from the desert heat, to find a box sitting on my bed. Taking my Gerber utility knife, I would cut through the thick tape that covered the top of the cardboard box, cautious not to damage the contents. My parents shipped these packages thousands of miles from California. They were filled with Chinese and Asian snacks impossible to find in Iraq: dried squid, instant noodles, chocolate Panda cookies, wasabi peas, and crispy Hong Kong-style wafers filled with lemon cream.

I often shared these snacks with Iraqi soldiers. I spent most of my deployment on a small outpost with a platoon of Iraqi soldiers. We went on missions together. We spent hours planning operations and discussing strategies. When not working, we ate together. The Iraqi Army meals they shared with me were simple affairs – lentil stew with rice – although on special occasions there were elaborate feasts of lamb kebabs, stewed eggplant, roast chicken, salad, and fresh bread. To repay their generosity, I shared the snacks from my box. The Iraqis found my food fascinating. Chinese culture was completely alien to them. For most, I was the only Asian they had ever met. The Iraqi soldiers pestered me with questions: “What’s the difference between China and Japan?” “Why is this snack spicy?” “Do Chinese people eat halal?” Surrounded by Iraqi soldiers, I would place in each curious and outstretched hand a wasabi pea, or chocolate panda cookie, or another exotic goodie. Inevitably during these exchanges, an overeager Iraqi soldier would pop a wasabi pea into his mouth before I could warn him, and his face twisted in surprise and discomfort at the sharp taste.

I often patrolled a residential neighborhood filled with rows of houses and courtyards. In one front courtyard was a woman who always made saj, an unleavened flatbread. Taking small balls of dough, she flattened them with a rolling pin and placed them on an iron griddle. The dough crisped up instantly as it hit the hot metal, sending an intoxicating smell onto the street. One day, my patrol stopped in front of her house. It was the height of the summer heat, with temperatures reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, making the 50 pounds of gear we wore feel heavier than usual. The woman must have noticed our discomfort. She approached and offered each of us a piece of warm bread. We thanked her and ate it graciously.

“He asked in a concerned tone if Iraqis cooked lamb with soy sauce”

In that same neighborhood a few weeks later, I interrogated a young Iraqi man. My job in military intelligence was to root out the insurgency, to find and target a faceless enemy that festered like a disease among the population. The young man had been detained while running away from a bomb that had detonated on an American convoy. The soldiers that captured him suspected he was a triggerman, or a spotter that spied on American patrols. The young man was brought to me for questioning, his hands zip-tied behind his back. I took him into the back of an armored vehicle and closed the door behind us. He was a young, barely out of his teens, skinny with a thin wisp of a moustache. He was terrified. He stared at his feet the whole time, never looking up even when I spoke to him.

I thought of my grandfather, who would have been around the same age as this young Iraqi man when he was a member of the Communist resistance. I knew few details about my grandfather’s time as a Communist guerilla. But I did know his service was administrative. He had never picked up a gun. Maybe this young Iraqi was like my grandfather, a member of the insurgency who never picked up a gun. At any rate, I had no evidence to connect him to the bomb. So I cut off his zip ties and let him go.

I never told anyone about this young Iraqi man when I called home from Iraq. Instead, I spoke about mundane things: “It’s boring here. I watch a lot of DVDs. The weather is hot again.” I never talked about the war.

My parents decided to hide my deployment from my family in China. For my entire 14-month tour, they maintained the charade that I was home safe in America. Every time someone called from China asking about me, they made some excuse about why I couldn’t be reached. Sometimes, I daydreamed morbidly comic scenarios, alternative realities where I lost a limb or suffered burn injuries from a bomb blast. Would my parents still choose to hide everything until I showed up in China? “Hi Yeye. Oh yeah, I lost a leg to an IED in Iraq. Could someone pass the noodles?” Only when I returned home, alive and uninjured, did my parents finally announce I had been in a war zone the past year. Everyone was shocked.

It’s an absurd idea to hide a war, but I understood why my parents did it. They worried my Chinese family would be afraid or angry to learn I was fighting an American war. Fear would have gripped my aunts and uncles, concerned that the chaos of the Middle East – something foreign, something that only happened to laowai – had entered their lives.

Even after I came home, none of my family in China knew the details of my job in the military. Perhaps my grandfather would have found it ironic that his grandson captured insurgents for the West, which for most of his life he viewed as the enemy. Knowing him, he would likely have turned sullen and pounded his fist on the table, haranguing about his grandson who had become a tool of Western imperialism.

Years later, I showed my cousin in China a picture of me in Iraq posing with my black M4 carbine and tactical vest laden with ammunition and gear. My cousin liked the picture and posted it on his social media. Within minutes, my aunt rushed out of her room and forced him to take it down. “Be careful,” she said. “We don’t want any trouble from the government.”

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On a trip to China a few years after my deployment, I was watching a movie in my grandparent’s living room when my mother burst in with horrifying news: “Grandma wants to host a family dinner.”

My grandmother was notorious for her hapless cooking. She once famously presented us a plate of leftover fuqi feipian – a spicy chilled Sichuanese appetizer of beef slices and tripe – served steaming hot from the microwave. (The American equivalent would be to serve a boiling-hot Caesar salad.) Whereas other Chinese grannies toiled in the kitchen making homemade dumplings, my grandmother preferred to read Russian literature. Books on international relations are scattered throughout her house. Framed in the center of her bedroom wall is a picture of her in front of the Colosseum in Rome. Hanging right below it is a picture of her sky-diving at the age of 60.

Unable to bear the thought of an evening filled with my grandmother’s culinary misadventures, I decided to save the day. “Let me cook instead. I’ll make American food.” My mother quickly approved the plan. When news of my upcoming American dinner party was announced to the rest of the family, it caused quite a stir. My mother boasted often about my cooking, which everyone found amusing since no one else my age in the family had any interest in the kitchen. However, everyone in China expected the American to make stereotypical American food – hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, and essentially fast food, which they assumed was the only food Americans ate.

As they daydreamed about big American steaks and deep-fried cholesterol bombs, I was preoccupied with making something everyone would enjoy. I was particularly concerned about my grandfather, a picky eater whose pious devotion to Chinese food was as much a matter of national pride as a discerning palate. He prized the bouncy texture of a properly made Chinese beef ball. He relished the natural xianwei of steamed Chinese hairy crabs dipped in black vinegar. He adored the chewiness of hand pulled noodles, which he ate with chilli oil and chased with a bite of raw garlic. When I was in third grade, my grandfather visited the United States. He found American food bland and weird. Korean food was too red. And Japanese food, besides being the food of the enemy, was flavorless and raw. “Chinese food is the best in the world,” he would proudly announce after eating his favorite dishes.

My approach for the dinner was to make something safe, yet exotic. I eventually decided on chicken wings and spaghetti. Chinese generally like chicken wings. And spaghetti, being a noodle dish, was safe and exotic at the same time. When I told my grandmother about my spaghetti plan, she was pleased. Italy was one of her favorite countries.

The first step was obtaining the ingredients. Since I didn’t know Nanjing very well, someone needed to chaperone me. My grandfather volunteered. He took me to a Chinese wet market. “The meat is fresher,” he said. “Better than the supermarket." When I arrived, I understood why. The market was housed in a vast warehouse filled with meat vendors, each with their own table and display stands. Everything came straight from the slaughterhouse and was sold butchered directly from the whole animal. Unlike Western supermarkets, where meat is neatly packed and far removed from any carcasses, there was no denying that everything at the wet market came from an animal. My grandfather took me to a beef vendor. We watched as the butcher chopped everything into rustic chunks, worlds apart from the manicured cuts at American grocery stores.

As I struggled to make sense of the beef, my grandfather turned to me. “What kind of meat do Iraqis eat?” The question took me by surprise. It was the first time he had ever asked about my military experience. At first, I thought he was joking, but his face portrayed a look of genuine curiosity.

“Lamb is the most popular,” I said. “The Iraqis make lamb kebabs. They also stew it and eat it with rice, like Chinese people.”

My grandfather pondered the answer. He was surprised Iraqis also ate rice. Taking a moment, he lowered his voice and asked me in a concerned tone if Iraqis cooked lamb with soy sauce. When I said no, he gave a look of confusion and horror. How could anyone cook lamb without soy sauce?

“Iraqis don't use soy sauce,” I said. “They have their own seasonings.” He didn’t look convinced.

After a series of deliberations, I finally decided on a side of beef from the rump, because it was big and the only cut I recognized. Having completed the shopping, I returned home and began my preparations. I whipped up a tomato sauce with garlic and olive oil. (I wanted basil or oregano, but those proved impossible to find.) I baked the chicken wings before tossing them in a sauce containing chilies, garlic, rice vinegar, and sugar. I spent most of my time mincing beef and cooking it down. I wanted the meat as tender as possible.

By the time dinner was complete and everybody had arrived, I was more anxious than ever. I had visions of leftover spaghetti sitting on plates like red-sauced mountains and piles of chicken wings, each marked with a single polite bite and accompanied by comments like, “You tried your best, but this just didn’t suit our Chinese tastes.”

My worries proved unnecessary. Dinner was a hit. My grandmother devoured everything, especially the wings. She spent most of dinner nibbling on bones. My grandfather, the skeptical eater, heaped spaghetti on his plate, and took his fork and twirled the pasta around it. He announced, “This is how they eat spaghetti in Italy. It’s the authentic Italian way,” then proceeded to slurp them noisily – the authentic Chinese way.