Chinese Food Karma

The house we are staying in is the house my mother had the second part of her childhood in. When she arrived there were no other houses around. there were no streets, just a dirt road, and the part in the back where there is now a bank was just woods.
My mother was always interested in Asian Culture and when she got older she traveled the world,  crossing the Sahara desert twice in camel going up through the middle east and India and even Tibet (back when people were not allowed in China but there weren't real borders there.) and Laos (during the Vietnam war.) She lived in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Japan. She came back to the States and met my Father in Cape Cod.

My childhood was the dichotomy of Chinese (Boston's Chinatown) and my white side (Philadelphia, the house we slept in. I have memories spending Christmas and Summer in this house with extended family. This was the whitest neighborhood I had ever been in.

Last year, while leaving we noticed a cluster of Chinese stores about a mile from the house. This year we noticed it wasn't just businesses but there was a Wu Yi association as well.

Grace decided to go out for Chinese Food. How good could the place be? I was cautiously optimistic because of the presence of an Association.

I stayed home because Jonah had clonked out and Noah and I were playing chess.

Grace arrived at the cluster where all the parking spaces for a block were taken up. There was a line of Chinese people waiting outside one of the restarunts. "Hmm that's weird." She thought.

She chose that one.

Inside, Cantonese was being yelled rapid fire and the waiters were RUNNING around on Monday at 7pm. The place was packed. She said if I went with her, I would have been the only white person there. She thought she saw a black guy but then realized he was actually just a dark Chinese man. Everyone looked like restaurant people. In fact, it even had a gambling hall vibe. It seemed to be as yet undiscovered by non-Chinese customers. There was nothing on the menu like "chicken Fingers." This was bold. This was not Chinese American food. Even the Chinese people in there did not look Jook Sing.

Grace doesn't speak Chinese.

She started to order in English and the manager said, "Don't worry, I know what you want."

We had shrimp and snap peas, rib eye steak and onions and peppers, and pea pod stems. Which is hard for Grace to order. Like the manager said, he knew what she wanted. Rice was free, Desert was free (not fortune cookies but Tong sui, sai mai lo to be exact,  and you could taste the taro and the feel the thickness of the soup.) The price was 20% less than in Boston, no skimping on ingredients and for real it beat the hell out of anything in Boston. How could this be? What Twilight Zone am I living in? I looked outside to make sure I was in the same house.

You could equate this to the phenomenon of Quincy and Kam Man popping up near Boston. But Quincy's food is still not as good as Chinatown. And I didn't see any Associations.

This food was on par with New York Chinatown. A mile from the house where I spent my summers and where my mother brought Chinese cooking she had learned from my father into the house as a foreign thing to be tasted. These two blocks, which will only grow, are more Chinese than the shrinking Chinatown in Boston.

When we first arrived in the house, a rabbit ran across the street as if it had been waiting for us. Grace turned to me and pointed out that Rabbits are  usually a symbol for my mother and that she knew she would see one.

I could not get over, that my mother would have found that two block neighborhood a mile away fascinating. That she would have wanted it. That Philadelphia's Chinatown used to be not as good as Boston's and when we had gone there once when I was a baby, my dad kept on bumping into people from Boston, but that Boston was the area where it was safer and more comfortable for my Dad. That we sort of stayed in Boston for the schools, but also for the Chinese Community, for Kwong Kow, and later, I stayed there to be with the Kung Fu School.

This is just a good kind of bizarre.

There is a dollar store down there called "Grace's Dollar Store." I think we will check that out before we leave too.