by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a show that had sounded interesting on the KPBS Web
site listing of their schedule: Soul of a Banquet, a 2014 mini-documentary (imdb.com lists a running
time of 79 minutes but it was cut to 58 minutes for this TV showing) by
director Wayne Wang about Cecelia Chiang. Apparently Cecelia Chiang (no
relation, as far as I know, to those
Chiangs) fled the Chinese mainland in 1961, came to the U.S. and opened a
restaurant called The Mandarin in San Francisco. “So what?” you might ask.
“Someone flees China for the U.S., settles here and opens a restaurant.”
Apparently what made Chiang’s story interesting and worth filming was that hers
was the first Chinese restaurant
in America that wasn’t located in a Chinatown and served anything other than
Cantonese food. When Chinese were first brought to the U.S. in the 19th
century — mostly by unscrupulous employers who wanted a docile workforce that
would work for much less money than they had to pay people who were already in
America (plus ça change, plus ça même chose … and the reaction on the part of U.S.-born workers
was predictable: they formed labor unions and political parties aimed
specifically at keeping the Chinese out of the U.S. — the speeches of Denis
Kearney, founder of the Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco in the 1870’s,
sound like they could have been given by Bernie Sanders when he’s talking about
the power of corporate America … and like Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump when
he’s talking about the danger of immigrants in general and Chinese immigrants
in particular) — they were recruited almost exclusively from the province of
Canton in southeastern China. As a result, they brought Cantonese as their
language and Cantonese cuisine as their food — and virtually all “Chinese” food
in the U.S. was the relatively bland Cantonese instead of the spicier Mandarin,
Sichuan and Hunanese styles. (Hunanese is the most highly spiced of all Chinese
food, and when Mao Zhedong, or however his name is spelled these days, was head
of China he insisted on serving only Hunanese food at state dinners and got
sadistic kicks out of watching people from other parts of China try to get down
the highly spiced dishes.) Cecilia Chiang decided from the outset that her restaurant would not offer any of the familiar
Cantonese dishes — “no chop suey, no egg foo yung” (ironically chop suey is
usually believed to have been invented in the U.S. by Chinese immigrants,
though the Wikipedia page on it quotes an anthropologist E. N. Anderson who
argues that it was a dish from China’s Guangdong province and the original
Chinese name is “tsap seui,” meaning “miscellaneous leftovers”).
When she tried
to locate her restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Chiang found herself the
victim of regional discrimination; no landlord would rent to her because, as a
native of Shanghai, she did not speak Cantonese. So she opened the Mandarin
Restaurant (the name itself is a statement of cultural pride!) in 1961, about
the same time her friend Alice Waters opened the Chez Panisse restaurant in
Berkeley and became internationally known as founder of the so-called “slow
food” movement. Waters appears in Soul of a Banquet, as does Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, who is shown on screen but also narrates
the film. While Chez Panisse still exists under Waters’ management, the
Mandarin was sold by Chiang in 1991 and went out of business in 2006 (something
not made clear in the film itself; the film notes that the Mandarin no longer exists
but — unless this was explained in the first 10 minutes or so that I missed —
doesn’t make clear why not). The film is basically divided into two parts, the
first telling Chiang’s story (she was born c. 1920 to an aristocratic family
near Shanghai, escaped having her feet bound in the usual fashion of
upper-class Chinese girls because her parents were enlightened enough not to do
that to her, fled with her sister from the Japanese occupiers in 1942 and got
on the last plane out of Shanghai with her husband before Mao and the
Communists won the Chinese civil war and took power in 1949, settled in Japan —
ironically enough — and lived in Tokyo until she emigrated to the U.S. in 1960)
and the second showing a special “banquet” meal of mouth-watering delicacies,
including red braised pork (the item that was the one I’d most like to try),
beggar’s chicken (it’s wrapped in paper and then covered in clay that hardens
as it bakes, so you have to break it off with a mallet to serve it), and quite
a few dishes involving abalone (some of these are usually made with pork but
since they had an abalone they were determined to make the most use of it they
could) which she served at Chez Panisse as a tribute to Alice Waters and an
attempt to reproduce the experience of eating the multi-course Chinese banquets
Chiang had regularly eaten as a child in the home of her wealthy parents.
Most
of Chiang’s interviews were done in English, but there’s a long stretch of her
speaking in Mandarin about the experience she had returning to China in 1974,
just after the Cultural Revolution (though there were still young thugs running
around wearing the Red Guards hat, carrying the Quotations from
Chairman Mao book and literally whipping people whom they greeted if the people
didn’t respond with the proper revolutionary fervor) and just before Mao’s
death, when she found that her dad had died from malnutrition and a brother and
sister had committed suicide. She also found that there were no longer any
fancy restaurants in China because nobody left there could afford them; instead
there were eating places where there were three large pots, you served yourself
from one of them, and that was the menu. That was certainly the most moving and
tragic part of Chiang’s story, but there were others — and the final sequence
showing the preparation and serving of the great banquet is fascinating even
though it’s also frustrating because until the dishes are completed you’re not
given any information of what they are or what ingredients go into them. Soul
of a Banquet is the sort of movie that even
if you’re not ordinarily a food buff is nonetheless going to make you wonder
just what on earth all this gorgeous-looking cuisine tastes like and where you
can get it (or get the recipes to make it yourself), and as both a film about
food and a film about cultural traditions lost, found and in some cases hanging
by the skin of their teeth (Chiang complains during one of her interviews that
younger Chinese and Chinese-American chefs are trying exciting new things but
because they don’t have a thorough grounding in the traditions of Chinese
gourmet cooking they really don’t have a foundation to build on), it’s a pretty
typical movie for Wayne Wang to make.
