Fifteen Years in America – Chapter 5: The Chef of the Student Cafeteria (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. If you can read Chinese you can read the original at my dad’s Yahoo blog. He has just finished Chapter 8. Enjoy!

Continued from Part 1 

On this day I finished my classes at noon and ran to the student cafeteria as quickly as I could.  When I stepped into the office, I looked for a director named Jane per the instructions of the advertisement.  When I walked in, I saw a white woman a bit over 40 sitting behind a desk and staring at a computer screen.

I asked her, “Who is Jane?”

She looked up and checked me out from head to toe and said, “I am, do you have a question?”

I said, “I saw your advertisement for a student worker at the cafeteria.  I am here for that job.”

She asked me, “Do you have any kitchen experience?”

At that time, I thought to myself,  America really requires experience for everything.  My readers might remember that when I went to Duke’s Lane   to find a sales job my boss Peter’s first question to me was a “do you have sales experience?”.   They don’t seem to realize that if everyone needs experience, then someone without experience must be given the chance to learn and gain experience.  If no one without experience is given an opportunity, then everyone without experience will never gain experience.

However, America is just a society that forces you to gain work and social experience from contact with the world starting at a young age.  It is commonly said that, “what you learn in school on books is rarely applied”.  In America, we need to add a line and say, “you can never have too much experience when you try to find a job.”

When it comes to the kitchen, I actually have many years of experience.  When the Cultural Revolution began, I was just eleven years old.  My dad was jailed in a cow pen since he  was accused as being a descendant of a landlord and later sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” and “recreated”.  He was sent to the cafeteria as an accountant.  I often went to that cafeteria and watched Chef Zhang cook.  At that time there wasn’t that much great food to eat.  However, my dad always tried to ask the chef to do the best he could.  Chef Zhang supposedly was the stable boy for General He Long during World War II, and did not have a lot of education, and so he received a job in the reeducation camp as a chef.  Later on, I don’t remember for what reason, he almost committed suicide and died, but my dad somehow saved him.  This happened a very very long time ago.

After I finish writing about these fifteen years, I may write about the previous forty years and slowly tell these tales.

Anyway, I was familiar with a kitchen in a cafeteria because I encountered it at a young age.  Truthfully, I really love the art of Chinese cuisine.

The reasons I love Chinese cuisine include the following:

First, “the people worship food as they worship the sky”.  I really love to eat.  When I was young, everything was rationed.  We could only cook food differently to satisfy the four values of Chinese food: “color, scent, taste, and shape”.

Second, I had two neighbors who were experts in Chinese cooking.  One was my dad’s old friend.  After the Cultural Revolution, he researched the history of Chinese cooking and published many books.  When I was teaching in the university he would always give me a free copy of his book whenever he publishes one.  I would follow the ancient recipes he collected and cook the Weiyang style of Chinese cuisine.  Another one of my cooking teachers is an experience chef.  He grew up with me and went to a famous cooking school at the age of fourteen, and later served as a chef at the banquet halls of the Central  government.  Later on he went to Japan as a chef in a great restaurant.  Every year he would come home for the Spring Festival and teach me a few techniques.  Some of the famous Weiyang dishes I have learned are “Yangzhou Lion’s Head“, “Great Boiled Tofu Strings”, “Yangzhou Fried Rice”, and “General Crossing the Bridge”.  Could you say that I have no cooking experience?

To be continued!

Share This

Related Posts