John Krich - A Fork in Asias Road

The articles in this book are newly revised versions of material originally published in The Wall Street Journal Asia, Saveur, Time Asia, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the South China Morning Post and Won Ton Lust (published by Kodansha America).

2012 John Krich & Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd

Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Krich, John, 1951
A fork in Asias road : best bites of an occidental glutton / John Krich.
Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2012.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-981-4382-93-9
1. Food Asia. 2. Food habits Asia. 3. Cooking, Asian. 4. Krich, John, 1951- Travel Asia. 5. Asia Description and travel. I. Title.
TX652.9
641.30095 -- dc22 OCN769384076

Cover design by OpalWorks
Printed in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd

The first of many

for my favorite good eater,

Amita

FOOD AS POLITICS

FOOD AS NOVELTY

FOOD AS HISTORY

FOOD AS IDENTITY

FOOD AS PROCESS

FOOD ENDANGERED

FOOD AS SCIENCE

FOOD AS CRUSADE

Th Accidental Glutton

Everybody on earth wants my job.

Even the old man in tattered muslin jacket and Mao cap who keeps following me, shoeshine box in hand, down a row of home-style restaurants in Sichuans peppery capital of Chengdu. This veteran of the Long March in flat ballet slippers has never seen anyone on a trek like mine. Hes waited patiently to try to nab a spendthrift travelers business outside one restaurant featuring all-bamboo cuisine, only to see me dash into a second narrow alley known for its noodles drenched in chili oil, prettified like the rest with incongruous Swiss Alpine scenes plastered floor-to-ceiling, finally to a third for helpings of fresh tofu custard and smoked duck. At last, the old man can no longer contain himself, barging in and up to the Chinese guides at my table to blurt out, What is wrong with this old foreigner? Can he be so hungry? Why does he have so many meals?

In Hong Kong, too, several of the worlds surliest waiters actually refused on principle to bring me a number of dishes I wished to sample, figuring me to be another part-mad or wholly misinformed white ghost. Only in gastro-hip Sydney would a pair of Aussies who spotted me scribbling notes between bites of Vietnamese egg rolls get the picture at once and ask, Food critic, eh? No, not exactly, for my bidding, mostly at the behest of the Asian Wall Street Journal, was to point out what was best while putting all into a larger context a reporter using every little bite into the worlds hungriest continent to make sense of historys swiftest and heftiest social transformation.

Call me the accidental glutton. For though I had already written a mythic quest for the worlds best Chinese restaurant more a travelogue with no MSG I had originally been hired by the Journals Weekend Section to cover a beat roughly defined by design and city life and jokingly described as sex and urban planning. But after dutifully revealing the fakery involved in Japans antique furniture trade, the regions edifice complex in erecting ever more skyscrapers, a guest appearance in the papers Food for Thought column daring to make light of a posh pan-Asian restaurant I convinced editors that they may not have been making the best use of my talents (or appetite). Later, I shared duties on a series selecting the ten best restaurants in 25 cities around the Pacific Rim, aimed at getting business travelers out of their hotels and into the heat of true food cultures by relying on word-of-mouth instead of misguided guide books. But my true task was digesting Asia, and its many pungent contradictions, to capture the larger flavor of the times. A western fork in Asias new road, I tried to stay attuned to the larger meanings of a continent where food seems to stand for all pursuits.

Or was it that Asia devoured me? A decade later, as I write this, I am quite used to removing my shoes before I enter the house, using maids to pack my undies, spending weekends at the latest shopping mall, and looking forward to the gooey seasonal succulence of durian, that famed stink fruit as cultural marker. Who, in the end, had been crazier the Malaysian zillionaire developer who took me in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes on a tour of ten-cent food-court lunches served on pink plastic, his ruling passion the search for a perfect bah kut teh rib stew and Ipoh hor fun noodle soup? His competing counterpart, an ABN-AMRO Singaporean banker whose weekend hobby was to forsake wife and kids and cruise in an SUV snackmobile for the char kway teow with the most charred flavor, the freshest cockles, served by the cockiest wok-stirring entrepreneurs? Or me, actually spending my working days charting two nations obsession with the humblest street vendors as highest proof of cultural supremacy?

What was a nice Jewish boy doing in eagerly sampling the worlds best pork brain porridge? Picking at a pork ear pancake in some Beijing back alley or an indoor yurt whose centerpiece is a whole lamb innards, Mongolian style? A puerco adobo seasoned by the scent of Manilas finest auto body shops? Or other non-kosher items like steamed tortoise in chili paste la Sichuan? Squid eggs in coconut soup? Tendons and toenails and fish ball galore? Rats, bats, boar and roaches on reconnaissance in the backwoods of Lao? Duck tongues with chilies, duck brains to top an all-Pekinese treat? Dancing shrimps with their tails still flapping on my lips? Fish head in shrimp paste plus grouper belly with beef cheeks in casserole served in a famed haunt known only as The Place Under the Big Tree?