Godfather's Chinese Take out

Grace decided to submit a piece for a food blog about Chinese Take Out in the Godfather. But a lot of our discussing points were edited out. So I felt I should write them here in this blog.
Basically the question is, "Why did Michael and Sonny and Tom Hagen and Clemenza and other assassin plotters eat Chinese Take out right before the dinner that Michael was going to go to and shoot Sollozzo and the Police Chief in order to protect Vito Corleone (Michael's Father)."

He was what Grace thought were reasons not to order Chinese food during this very important point of the movie.

1) Michael has a broken jaw from the Police Captain McCkluckey's fist. Kung Pao Chicken and egg rolls would have been very difficult to chew. Why didn't they just make him Spaghetti?

2) Where are all the Italian women to cook for them? This is going to be his last meal before going into hiding. Perhaps even his last meal period. Shouldn't it be more important and symbolic?

3)Does he really want to go kill someone and be all stressed out while also feeling the effects of the grease and the MSG?


So we talked about this and I argued that Chinese food was actually the perfect choice.

1) It is convenient. Chinatown is right next to Little Italy. This is 1946. in the 1990's the Fujianese will actually battle the Italians for a couple of streets. But in 1946 there are quiet neighbors outside of the Italian Community. They will not ask any questions about why these Italian guys from the Corleone family are ordering Chinese Take Out when supposedly they are may be a meeting with these other gangster people for dinner. They are less likely to know about all that. Or at least can feign ignorance more convincingly. When asked who picked up food (if it would even matter) one Gwai lo is the same as another. But at the same time, they are right down the street. Convenient for everyone with a healthy jaw. As for Michael, maybe he just ahd lo mein and egg drop soup. Protein and watery for the latter. The former is pretty much the same consistency as Spaghetti. I doubt that Jook was on the menu back then.

2) The Italian women are not part of the business side of things in this Family. They don;t want them around. They don;t want them to know anything about it. All the men present do not have time to be cooking. (Though Clemenza can cook) They need to focus their energy on strategy and supporting Michael, who has combat experience. But has never assassinated someone sitting at the same dinner table before. Everyone who is outside the immediate circle for this business is not present. Even Fredo, the second son, who was useless when trying to defend his father both in his lack of thinking and his lack of action, is not there.

3) One would not tend to have an appetite in a situation like this. But fueling your body with something is important. The flavor and MSG in Chinese food will help you to just gulp some stuff down even though you don't feel like eating, and then head out to go blow your enemies heads off. The two men who were behind the gunning down of your Father.

Baseball male bonding

Grace bought this toy baseball and bat and tee yesterday. It uses batteries and will shoot the soft baseballs at your kid. But we don;t have those batteries yet. And frankly, Noah really wants me to throw the ball at him. It's a social thing.

We tried it in the house and realized our folly pretty quickly. So we headed over to the park. (This was after dinner.)

Baseball is great. I don't mean the real game. I could care less about that. Yeah I know I'm from Boston and I don't care about baseball. The truth is I don't care about sports.

But I do care about Kung Fu skills.

Basically I throw the ball at Noah, he hits it and runs imaginary bases. That means he is sprinting and I don't have to sprint with him. I don't have to race him and also at the last second lose to avoid melt downs. There were some issues when he couldn't hit the ball. But thanks to the softness of the ball I could stand really close to him and it wouldn't hurt if the ball hit me.

This is a really good after dinner activity. Maybe we will try to keep this up every day. Although I'm pretty sure we are going to go over to the playground right now and play baseball too.

On the way back home, Noah had a lot of questions, about what an apartment was are we in an apartment. all these sorts of things.

And then suddenly he says, "Baba, I can't wait to shoot sperms but I don't know HOW to shoot sperms."

"Uhhh. you'll know about that when you are an adult and when you shoot sperms that's for making children. So if you shoot sperms you have to be ready to take care of children."

Of course this is not all exactly true but I think it's true for what he is talking about. I guess this is called manly father son bonding. Sports and sex and maybe beers.  Walking back home like Leave it to Beaver or some other show where Father and son walk together doing some sort of Father son activity. A world that as a child I was not really privy too and which my mother sort of tried to fill in for me. Well I guess my dad took me gambling and practiced stacking dominoes. I wanted to get in on that activity but I was not to touch them, on orders from both my father and my mother.

 I guess Noah is a real mans man. Because I'm not sure I'm going to get talk like this from Jonah. But then he will probably just ask Noah.
Jonah's questions are different and less direct and more about spelling things. Actually I think because of Noah's questioning about testicles, Jonah had questions for me in the tub last night as well.

But he said, "Why do my balls make sounds?"
"You can hear your balls making sounds?" I asked. Because I have know idea what he was talking about.
"Yes."

So I think he was just asking something for the sake of asking it. Because Noah asked. So he should ask a question too. I have to say I had no answer for his question. So if his goal was to stump me, it worked.

Yummy Pie

Yesterday we went Apple picking.
We drove as a family to Natick.
To A farm that has been a farm since before this country has been a country.

We went by magical train ride to pick apples as a family.
We picked some, we ate some, we played in the playground.

After we got home the children ate some more apples.
Some apples Grace set aside to make a pie with.
She researched online how to do it.
She set aside time to do it while I bathed the children.

She added delicious ingredients like walnuts and goat cheese.

It baked in the toaster oven filling the house with it's wonderful smells.

Homemade, American Apple pie.

I didn't eat any fresh out of the oven because I had brushed my teeth.

But this morning we ate it for breakfast.

That pie is the best pie of it's type, that I have ever tasted.

Pie is about love and family and togetherness.

It is about something that tastes good and is sweet and fills you up not just with cheap imitations of ingredients, but with wholesome ingredients you picked as a family and with a filling feeling that sticks to your ribs.

It's good. It's yummy. It's American.

It's American as Apple Pie.

Noah's basics

I actually made Noah do all of his basics this morning. Only ten each. And we still took a a break in between every two types of basics. Instead of walking around with our hands behind us like I did as a student, we "ran" inside. The break was more mental than physical.

But it was still torturous at the end and it seemed like we barely made.

To warm up we did silly crane dancing and then did lion dancing moves. Then sit ups, tiger crawls (instead of pushups (and wheelbarrows)  Then a little bit of stretching, which was really hard for Noah. He is not very flexible and so, he doesn't really even want to try stretching.

Then before basics Noah said he wanted to do his own Kung Fu. So we did. All this for the promise of angry birds. But his technique is clearing up. I don't want to lose the creative aspect of the system we have been creating. But I also want to center his Kung Fu with the system I was trained in.

Helicopter hit in Star Trek and Godfather III

Grace and I had been talking about the Godfather because of Peggy Noonan pointing out that Roth's speech to Michael was the best speech ever written and this and that when I mentioned that not much has really come out of Godfather III.

"Every time I think I'm out.. they keep pulling me back IN" Grace retorted.

"Oh yeah okay there's that," I said, "and I guess the copied that helicopter hit scene in Star Trek into darkness."

"That's not the same scene." said Grace. "I don't think they ripped that off."

Well if Grace doesn't think that's the same scene, then that means there are others out there that must think the same way. And I'm sure someone else has put these two scenes side by side somewhere. But then maybe they haven't. And even if they have, here it is. The latter scene definitely has drawn an influence from the former. Right?

Birthday performance

Yesterday the children and I went to perform at a private birthday party. Basically this woman who has terminal cancer had always wanted to go to China, and so the nurses threw a party for her which was Chinese Culture themed. There was Noah and Jonah doing lion head, and then I did Kung Fu and then there were two 11 year old girls who played dulcimer. Noah was very impressed by them I think, as was the audience. There was a Chinese folk dancer, an older girl who played dulcimer and Mr. Luo who played Gaohu and then two Karaoke songs. All of the performers were somehow associated with the CCBA.

It was fun being part of a performance group that was super Chinese, travelling into an environment that was super not Chinese. It was also fun doing this only as a performer, and not the main performer, and not the organizer or anything like that. No stress.

Plus it was kind of like being part of a pirate crew, or travelling opera troupe, out on the road having little adventures, except without the hardship and inconvenience. Anyway, my kids might have preferred the playground but I think they took something away from the experience.

Because I had explained why we were going there to Noah ahead of time Noah started asking me rather loudly, while we were there why this woman was dying. I tried to shut him up but he got real pissed off at me for just having the notion that maybe we should talk about this later.

Of course we have had discussions like this before, about why my mom is not around. And recently one of my great aunts also died of cancer.

In fact, that's probably one of the reasons why I decided to go to this performance. I didn't get a chance to visit my aunt. And though I was sort of around for my mom, there were other people who were there even more so during the end of her life. People I didn't really even know.

And so I feel like even with strangers, we share in these sorts of things. The word in my head is burden. But I don't think this shared responsibility or emotion should be thought of only as a burden. It's something else.

But anyway we share this, even with strangers. The world is round (as in someone helps you so you help others.) What goes around comes around.. all that. But those sayings are so cliche that it's really more than that.

Strangers are like family sometimes. And even more so because they are strangers and because you will never know all the details and ups and downs and positives and negatives. And in another way, in a glance, you do know everything. Because they are human, just like you and the people you do know all the ups and downs and ins and outs about.

Noah's Suzuki Lesson #1

Noah has started the Suzuki method of violin. He was really excited about getting a violin his size and really excited about playing with me, but Grace wants to only do it the way the teacher said it and so I have sort of removed myself from the process and am only observing.

So far what I saw Grace and Noah practice was holding the violin with the chin and your left arm on your shoulder right shoulder. Noah is going to have to work on this alone for about week before he does anything else. Basically holding your violin with your chin is the horse stance of violin.

The next exercise was a game where you tap out the beat  on your things and sing the melody of Twinkle Twinkle little star, to the lyrics of multi-syllabic words like Mississippi, Tennessee. Mississippi Tennessee.....
or Blueberries, strawberries, blueberries strawberries...


Jonah had fallen asleep already.But I have a feeling that Jonah would pickthis little exercise up faster than Noah.

Noah couldn't get it and just started cracking up.

The point of this exercise, I could see right away. You are playing violin in your mind. You are learning that your fingers can move to one bow stroke or your bow and move to one note and then both of these things. That was very clever.

Then Noah wanted to use his bow.

 But was not allowed to.

 He flipped out. Real bad.


Well, I can completely see the point of all this, because although I didn't learn violin or Kung Fu this way, I can see the benefits of learning violin or Kung Fu this way.

A lot of people talk about learning martial arts similarly. i.e. doing horse stance for a week, or in my Sifu's case three months. But most of the old people that tell me these stories, quit. Or went on to do Kung Fu their own way outside of a particular school I.e. even though I didn't do three months of horse stance to begin with, but instead started with basics,  I can see right away that my stance is better than theirs, because I did hours of horse stance later.

Although as I right this, I do realize I did the Wushu version of stance work as a child with Bo Sim Mark. And as a child I used to do minutes of Horse Stance by myself a la TVB Kung Fu training sequences. So I guess I did go through this initial stage. But by choice rather than by force. But only superficially.

I suppose somewhere in Japan or China there could very well be 1,000 four year olds lined up holding violins with their shoulder and chin right now for two hours at a time. I mean if you wanted to teach 1,000 kids to play violin how else would you do it?

Then again, when folk music was more popular, thousands of poor farmer Americans used to come in out of the fields and play music together. They probably had a similar beginning stance exercise type thing. But maybe the approach was different. I wouldn't know. I do know that in Irish fiddle you hold the violin against your side. It would b cool to learn that style too. But I have only seen teachers and students of that style on Youtube.

Well I think I might just start practicing Suzuki method with Noah. I.e. I will only work on what he is working on too. And create Kung Fu Violin. Why not?
So there will be more Suzuki posts for sure.