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Japanese Food


My love affair with Japanese food did not begin as a child. No. When I was very young, if we weren’t eating Jewish food at home, we were eating Chinese food in Chinatown. On these rare occasions we went as a troop of families, which meant we qualified for all the food selections on the menu. You know, with five people you get Lo Mein? We got everything. Jews eating at Chinese restaurants has been comedy fodder forever. All I know was in the beginning we either ate at home or we ate Chinese, except for the shellfish. We didn’t eat shellfish. Pork, yes, shellfish, no. Hypocrisy, yes, I get it. We sat at long tables where huge platters of strange foods were constantly being replaced with more platters of strange foods, none of which would I allow on my plate. I only ate the almond cookies and the pork spareribs. Before we could start eating, there had to be a long, complicated conversation about what to order and who would get what. This made no sense because we ordered the same thing every time. I didn’t care, as long as I got my spareribs and almond cookies. It was in Chinatown that I discovered the joy of drinking small cups of jasmine scented tea filled with small mountains of granulated sugar. It was a never-ending heaven. Better yet, as soon as we rolled out of the restaurant, we would stop at the tourist shops, where my father would buy me a fan, a finger puzzle, a plastic snake, whatever five cent toy struck my fancy. Then I would be allowed to toss a penny into the wishing pond and pray I would turn into a Chinese princess. I loved Chinatown. Right in the middle of Chinatown was an anomaly called Joe’s Little Italy. Ma liked going there. From her perspective, noodles fed the soul whether they were in chicken soup, Chinese stir fry, or covered with marinara sauce. The more noodles, the better. My father was happy because he could eat all the bread he wanted. My apologies to Italian relatives, but I would have rather been across the street where my tea, cookies, and spareribs lived. After Italian, the world was our…I can’t think of a replacement for oyster. We went to Olvera Street. I gazed at the colorful clothing in the windows and dreamed of being a Mexican princess. After the dinners I refused to eat, my father would buy me a five cent toy from a street vendor and cone-shaped candy on a stick. The more you sucked them, the sharper the cones became. I hear my mother, “Take that away from her; she’s going to hurt herself.” Soon, our world expanded to include hamburgers and pizza. All you really need in life to sustain body and spirit are hamburgers, dill pickle chips, Hershey’s chocolate, and cold pizza. I ate my way though my first twenty years with only a minimal sampling of Japanese food. Once I did, though, I decided it was time to become a Japanese princess. Japanese friends taught me how to prepare sticky rice balls and sew kimono-style bathrobes. We had Japanese paper lanterns in the living room, threw a slab of foam on the floor and called it a futon. It goes without saying that I bought Japanese dinnerware, tea sets, more tea pots, and saki sets, in case someone wanted saki in our teetotaler house. Then I got pregnant with my daughter, who was probably Japanese in her former life, because suddenly all I wanted to eat was sashimi and white rice drenched in soy sauce. Sushi was too much trouble. I went straight for the raw fish. There was a little Japanese restaurant a few blocks from our apartment. Every payday I’d waddle to the restaurant at noontime and waddle back with a private feast, which I’d wolf down in time to make a different dinner for my husband. He was not a fan of raw fish. To this day, my daughter can direct you to the best Japanese restaurants wherever you live. My son’s Japanese phases will take an entire blog to detail; I’ll get to them later. For now I’ll just tell you why I can’t be Japanese after all. We were living with our 8-month old daughter in a suburb of Los Angeles called Alhambra. Around the corner lived a sister-in-law who had an 8-month old son. Since we were stay-at-home moms, we tooled around together, toting our children here and there. They were such good little babies! We could take them anywhere without stress, especially restaurants, where they behaved like angels. One day we decided to have lunch at the only Japanese restaurant in town. We walked in and a very polite waiter explained that, sadly, they only had one highchair. Actually, what he did was explain about the chair and then simply left us standing there until we figured out he wanted us to leave. We left, but our hunger for Japanese food remained. Foolishly believing in the lack of high chair excuse for not being seated, we decided to return to the restaurant hauling one of our own highchairs. Two highchairs, two babies, and everyone would be happy. These were the days before nifty portable baby seats were invented. What we had were bulky, heavy metal things that folded up like step stools. Therefore, it was a bit of an effort to get the highchair into and out of the car, but we were on a quest. When we struggled into the restaurant, a child in one arm, purses and diaper bags slung over our shoulders, dragging a four-foot folding chair behind us, the waiter stared in disbelief. Not only had we returned, we’d timed it so the place was filled with very polite, very well dressed, very Japanese diners. The waiter hemmed and hawed, but was outwitted. We spotted an empty table at the far end of the room, told him we’d need their one highchair, and happily began our squeeze through the crowded room, unsuspecting of the disaster that awaited. Our first clue was when my nephew leaned out of his mother’s arms so he could snatch at the hair of a lady whose back was toward him. Before we could react, she screeched, grabbed at her skewed wig, and angrily shoved it back in place. Glares followed us. We tried to be as quiet as possible as we got ourselves and our children seated in the corner. That’s when our angels decided it was a good day to become raving percussionists. When they ran out of things to bang on their highchair trays, they started flinging food everywhere. Nothing we could do would silence or still them. Did we eat our own lunches? Did we even get served? I don’t recall. All I remember is a mutual desire to flee. We scrambled to pack our bags, our purses, our highchair and made a run for it, while our babies were reveling in newly found howls of hilarity. We almost got out safely but at the last minute my nephew, now carried lower on the hip to avoid hair mishaps, thrust out his arm and jammed it into the side of the wig woman, who let out an even louder screech. We escaped, never to return there, with or without children, for the rest of our lives. Two years later, I went next door to introduce myself to our new neighbors, who turned out to be Japanese. They explained they owned the only Japanese restaurant in town. I said, “Oh, I’ve been to that restaurant.” The husband looked at me straight-faced and replied, “I know. I remember you.” To this day, Japanese food, fashion, and cartoons remain an integral part of our lives. But being a Japanese princess? I think I flunked the test.


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