My Mother's Wok

I wish I could tell you a heart-warming story about my mother's wok.

Something like .... my mom inherited her wok from her mother, who bought it in San Francisco's Chinatown as a young, wide-eyed immigrant looking for some connection to her home. Or ... my mother's wok was a wedding gift from her culinarily gifted ayi (auntie), who included with it the secret to her famous red-cooked pork. Or perhaps I'd reminisce about the day my mother used her wok to teach me how to prepare my dad's favorite stir-fried beef with ginger.

But I'm Whitebread American, not Asian American. And so the tale of my mother's wok goes like this: she bought it in Housewares, on the 4th floor of Hudson's Department Store on Detroit's Eight Mile Drive. It was part of a boxed set that included a long-handled spatula and ladle and a Chinese cookbook by Kenneth Lo. My mother used her wok two or three times (I remember a fabulous pork stir-fry that, in a wonderful way, left our house smelling like a foreign country) before banishing it to the rear corner of a cupboard.

"Too much grease. It's a mess to clean up," my mother said, wrinkling her nose, when I asked why she'd stopped experimenting with Chinese food after such wild success.

Years later, as I was packing up my car one Sunday afternoon after a weekend break from college, she unearthed the wok. "You might as well take this," she sighed, handing it over. "I'll certainly never use it." I got Kenneth Lo too.

Back at school, in my tiny kitchen with its ugly gold formica countertops and a rather lewd poster of Prince tacked over the breakfast table, I took baby steps with the wok, tentatively cooking from the Lo book! . With s ome friends, graduate exchange students from Sichuan, I prowled the aisles of East Lansing's Asian markets. And slowly, slowly, slowly, as unweildy techniques began to feel comfortable and alien ingredents became familiar, I started to handle the wok as proficiently as a fry pan.

A little less than a year later I boxed up my mother's wok with a few other kitchen items and stored it in her attic. A few weeks after that I left for a year in China.

***

In the kitchen, I'm nothing like my mother.

My mom is a solid American cook. When I was a kid dinner plates were clockfaces of meat, vegetables, and starch, salad on the side. My mother swears that if a meal doesn't include some form of animal protein it can't be dinner. Her repertoire doesn't extend much beyond America, a tiny sliver of Europe, and enchiladas-and-tacos Mexico. And although when I was a kid my mom cooked with enough garlic to cause a minor scandal in our suburban Detroit neighborhood, she has always nursed an aversion to any ingredient that might be described as "stinky".

The way I cook and eat would be hard for my mom to stomach. I lack her talent for the perfectly-timed plating required to deliver a hot meat-veg-starch trilogy; no clockface dinner plates in our house. Although I'm not a vegetarian I often go meat and fish-less for days on end. I eat "dinner foods" for breakfast, big salads for supper, and might follow a southern Indian morning meal with Sichuanese for lunch and Turkish for dinner. Unlike my mom, who plied us every weekend with pies and cakes and crisps, I never bake.

Pungent ingredients are my pantry staples: fish sauce is a best friend and fermented tofu has a permanent place in my refrigerator. Shrimp paste, asofetida, cumin, dried chilies, pan-seared oily fish -- these are just some of the foods that might scent the air in my house the morning after an inspired evening at the stove. As I write that, I can visualize my mother wrinkling her! nose.

When it comes to food I'm my mother's opposite. But I believe that that's so because, growing up, I watched her be herself -- a joyous cook who did what she did so well and derived so much obvious pleasure from it that dinner was the highlight of most every single one of my childhood days.

My mother made food important to me -- not in a dysfunctional, eating-is-a-substitute-for-what's-lacking-in-my-life sort of way, but in a this-is-good sort of way. She made eating well and cooking well seem not a choice, but a necessity. I began cooking as soon as I had my own kitchen. Thanks to my mom, there was never a chance that I wouldn't.

***

When I was 22 I had a horrible argument with my mother, what you might call a knock-down, drag-out fight. It was early August; in a month I'd be flying off to China. The plan -- or the bargain I suppose, that I'd made with my parents -- was that before I left the USA I'd send out graduate school applications so that I would have "something to do" when I returned.

But a few months earlier I'd met a guy and fallen in love. I felt down to the deepest pit of my stomach, in my bones and in my heart, that this was "it", that this was the man I would marry. I wanted time to see if my intuition was true. So all summer long I play-acted at writing those applications, until finally one morning I worked up the nerve to tell my mom about my New Plan, which was to delay grad school for a year.

She was outraged, livid. She exploded and my me-me-me 22-year-old self honestly couldn't see what the big deal was. What difference did it make if I started grad school in 1986 instead of 1985? But with distance I understand that from where she stood I was throwing away my chances at an advanced degree (the first in our family) and a secure future ... for a man. A man I'd known for only 4 months. A man she and my dad didn't know very well at all. My mother saw me, I think, married, barefo! ot and p regnant.

At one point she hurled at me what I took to be the ultimate vote of no-confidence: "Maybe you should forget about grad school. Maybe you should just go to cooking school."

This was the early eighties -- before the era of celebrity chefs, food TV, and food writing as a respected profession. In my world cooking school was akin to community college. What my mother was suggesting, then, was that I didn't have what it took to get into grad school, that I might as well be flunkie cook. It was like a slap in the face.

Ah, well. My mother knew me better than I knew myself. I thought about that, two graduate degrees and a completed dissertation short of a PhD later, when I finally decided to do what I suppose I'd really wanted to do all along: make a career in food.

***

Every once in a while my mother took a break from meat-veg-starch, dipping into one of her Time-Life "Foods of the World" or American series cookbooks to try more unusual fare like vegetable soup au pistou, Marsala-redolent veal scallopini, or moussaka. Most of these experiments turned out fantastically but, deemed too messy or troublesome or not to my parents' taste, never appeared on our table again. That didn't discourage my mother. I'd come home from school and she'd be at the breakfast table flipping through cookbooks, making notes, folding over the corners of pages. Planning the next delicious meal.

My mother hasn't travelled much -- a few spots in the Carribean, Bermuda, Antigua. When my father's work took him to Brazil, France, Italy, Germany and other places I've forgotten she stayed home with me, bitching about it a bit but without much real enthusiasm. My mom's first, and last, major jaunt overseas was to Hong Kong, China, and Japan during the year I spent in Chengdu.

Imagine how far out Chengdu, Sichuan province in 1985 seemed to a 50-something American mom from Michigan. But she hit the ground running, eating smoked! duck an d spicy noodles and mapo dofu and everything else I put in front of her with relish.

"Like eating in a garage," she said months later, shaking her head while describing the hole-in-the-wall Chengdu eatery that I took she and my dad to one night."But those were the best damned tomatoes I've ever eaten!" She still talks about those tomatoes.

My mom never told me to go out and "see the world". She never told me I should learn a foreign language, or that travel would broaden my mind and make me a better person. She never suggested that there would be better places to live -- or eat -- than the USA. But she was always hungry for new experiences, and to my mother a good meal has always been a worthy experience to aspire to. And in a way, the search for the next great meal might be what has led me to do what and live where I do.

***

My mother's wok hangs on the wall next to my stove. When she gave it to me it was practically brand-new. Now it's the most worn item in my kitchen.

Tonight in my mother's wok, I'll stir-fry pork with cucumbers for a dish my mom ate at that garage of a restaurant in Chengdu. She loved it, but she'd never make it herself -- too much oil, too many chilies, too much garlic, such a mess. And besides, who cooks cucumbers?!

In the kitchen and out of it, I'm nothing like my mother. And so very much like her too.

Thanks Mom. Happy Mother's Day!