Tat, Alex and Justin Kwan atop the Great Wall of China at Mu Tian Yu, February 2010.

I guess there’s some saying that a Chinaman isn’t really a man until he’s stood atop the Great Wall.  For those interested in my dad’s exploits… here is proof that Tin Tat is really a man!  Haha.  Just the latest among dispatches from China — a photo of Tat, Alex and Justin Kwan on the Great Wall of China @ Mu Tian Yu.

I heard all about my dad and brothers’ trip just now via Skype.  Justin and Alex connected to Skype via wi-fi at a coffee shop (where they garnish drinks with really nice whipped cream, odd for off-the-beaten-path China?) in what used to be my dad’s mud-hut-and-rice-paddy village on Three Stoves Island.  It’s interesting to hear about the growth of China in the news — but to realize it through things like a casual Skype call is really quite amazing.

Happy Lunar New Year!  Today we ring in the Year of the Tiger.  We don’t really have much going on at the restaurant in honor of the holiday, however, I did buy a couple of lobsters for our employees to enjoy after work tonight.

Tin Tat Kwan cooks Chinese in China.

As for the “dispatch from China,” I am referring to a few photos from my brother Justin — and not actually a posting from China.  My dad is currently there with my brother Alex, too — and the three of them are spending Chinese New Year together in my dad’s hometown.  I’m doing what an oldest son does best — keeping things in line back here at the restaurant.  Normally, I’d be really jealous.  But I’m not this time — as my dad deserved a break and I volunteered to watch the restaurant.  It just so happened that Justin lives in China and Alex has the time (and apparently the money?) to travel for a couple weeks.

Here’s the funny part of the story:  Who goes all the way to China to cook his own Chinese food?  That would be my dad.

“Its funny, dad is so picky about eating,” wrote my brother Justin in an email.  ”I thought it was just about pizza and Mexican but he is fussy. It’s understandable though, he is a damn good chef.”

Justin flew in his own personal chef for some Chinese New Year entertainment.

Apparently the week my dad spent in Beijing didn’t do too much to satisfy his palate.  Justin reports that they went to a market one day and came back to Justin’s flat to cook, among other things, Cantonese-American “Shrimp in Lobster Sauce.”  Haha.

“He liked Peking duck and the mao tai white wine but wasn’t impressed by the kao yu or Sichuan-style bbq fish, said it was a failure!” Justin wrote.  ”So last night dad cooked! We went to the restaurant market and got a bunch of stuff for shrimp and lobster sauce (heaven), tomato chicken wings, choi sum, fish, black mushroom and bean curd, and lotus root. It was amazing and of course impressive. I guess it’s the best Chinese food I’ve had in China, haha.”

Yes, each story has its largely-untold face.  Even this short story will no doubt have a set of truths that dip past the willingness of my fingers to move along the keyboard.

This post is about my mom.  She’s a really nice and generous lady who has become a friend to me more and more over the years.  I go to her for advice and comfort, as any child should.  Sadly, she and my dad are no longer married.  By the same token, happily, she and my father are no longer married.  Thankfully, they are still friends and our family — though not picture-perfect — is still a cohesive family (as cohesive families tend to go these days).

Often times she doesn’t factor into my stories about the restaurant because she left the business when she and my dad separated in 2001.  But she works at Red Moon on Fridays, which is actually fun for all of us.  It’s kind of nice to indulge ourselves in “something for old time’s sake” once in awhile.  I think it shows us that our resilience as individuals permit us to hold on to things that are good… no matter what has transpired between now and then.

So in honor of that spirit, I present to you faithful blog readers grainy photographs of my parents in their early days of being restaurateurs (grainy because I snatched them via BlackBerry from a photo album at my grandma’s house today):

My dad, Tin Tat Kwan, tending to the stock pot at Kwan's Chinese Cuisine in 1982 shortly after he and Jennifer Kwan opened for business.

Kwan's Chinese Cuisine on 54th and Penn Avenue in Minneapolis in 1982 -- Jennifer Kwan pictured.

Jennifer Kwan getting some rice from the smallest rice cooker in Chinese restaurant history. Makes it seem like they were the first people in Minnesota to serve the stuff.

Shortly after opening Kwan's Chinese Cuisine in 1982, my parents discovered they were pregnant. Oh my.

That’s what it will take to hold this narrative together.

In the nearly two months I’ve been home — I’ve occasionally tried to start piecing together little bits and pieces of my dad’s story.  Details are scant and he’s going off on tangents like any other verbose middle-aged man typically does.

All my life, I’ve had the basics of the story down.  And many of you readers have heard the details from me…  How my dad and other village kids built oars and hid them in the sand, stole a fisherman’s boat, sailed to sea at the perfect time (as a storm rolled in), washed up back on shore, ran then swam for their lives, took shelter in someone’s hut in Portuguese Macaau, etc.

But now that I’m older, and my dad and I should supposedly be able to speak man-to-man, I want more.  The grittier stuff.  The emotional stuff.  But it’s hard for my old man to go there, I think.  Every time a subject goes beyond either his comfort zone or his ability to describe it in English (or at all) — a new tangent sprouts.

When my brother Justin was home for Thanksgiving, I asked dad about the little he knew of his own father.  There was just one meeting, after all.

“How old are me?”

Dad was 13, and seeing his dad appear in his home was not too different from seeing “just another stranger in here.”  A close relationship never formed — and it wouldn’t that day.

Dad said his father was imprisoned in a labor camp — that grandpa had been rounded up in connection with a larger crackdown on village folks who may have been involved in anti-Communist or anti-”Village King” dealings.

Grandpa had been released from the labor camp but still barred from returning home to the village.  But he fell ill (gravely, apparently).  He then petitioned to return home and the authorities granted him permission, though only for a short time.  That was the one time my dad met his dad.  To my dad, his own father is almost like a random, distant uncle who stopped by once.  My dad does not have a dad.  Never has.

The nemesis in many of my dad’s village tales is this so-called “Village King.”  I can’t tell so far whether this is someone who enacted Mao’s grand plan on the local level. (Today, Chinese political structure is built like those stacking dolls with the big outside one the ruling party of  eight, I think, in Beijing.)

In asking about my dad’s dad… the story veered off to a few different things including a mentally ill cousin in Hong Kong, the Village King and his way of dolling out daily slave labor and how my dad admits to being a thief in a gigantic Hong Kong kitchen who avoided firing because he was the best cook there.

See?  It’s going to take some strong adhesive to piece this story together.  Because I need to get back to the part about my grandpa.  Who the hell was this guy?  And why doesn’t my dad know more?  More to come… I hope.

Tin Tat Kwan in the kitchen of Kwan's Chinese Cuisine in the summer of 1982.

Today, I rediscovered this fun photo of my dad and scanned it so I could share it with my blog readers and on the “About Us” page of redmoonchinesecafe.com.  What I like about it is the smile, the optimism that shines through.  My dad is 27-years-old in the photo.  I am 27 right now.  Twenty-seven years prior to that photo being taken, dad was born in a fishing and rice-cultivating village in southern China where things would only go downhill as he grew under Communism’s grip.  Twenty-seven years after the photo brings us to today… when I couldn’t imagine having the courage to open up my own little restaurant — and the wherewithal to keep it running day after day.  My mom and dad are great successes because they made it work.  That’s pretty cool.

Tonight, I got a neat little story about our first restaurant, Kwan’s Chinese Cuisine (54th and Penn Ave. S., Minneapolis), because the person who took that photo was in the restaurant tonight.  My dad’s good, good friend, Warren and his wife Andrea are in every Saturday.  Warren was one of my dad’s first customers and pretty much instantly became a good friend.

How good a friend?  Well, shortly after my mom and dad opened their little chop suey joint (and Kwan’s really was a chop suey joint — with five booths, five tables and a ‘chow mein to take home’ neon sign in the window), the friendly Minneapolis health inspector came by to tell them their place was a dump.  And what did they know?  They just plunked money down to buy it!  It had to look perfect to them!  Turns out, they had ten thousand dollars in work that needed to be done… new tile floor, wall issues that needed to meet code, etc.  So what did they do?  Not much.  But Warren and his friend John came to the rescue.  They fixed the place up — working around my dad, who I believe refused to close for the two days they asked so they could get the job done.

Tin Tat, Warren and Andrea at Red Moon in 2009. A lot has changed. Thankfully, many things have not.

So much can change in 27 years.  But I’m glad some things do not, like great friendships with people like Warren.  There are a number of instances I do not know what my dad would have done without Warren’s friendship, compassion and advice.  For that, I’ll always be grateful.

In the weeks prior to my LSAT exam this summer, I broke the monotony of analyzing logical arguments to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  For those who haven’t read, it’s a fascinating look at what drives success — the kind achieved by those we’d call society’s standouts.  Gladwell wrote that he became frustrated with simplistic explanations of successful people like “he’s smart” or “he’s ambitious.”

Anyway, he says a lot of achievement has to do with things beyond the individual — as you’d imagine — and I found chapter eight particularly fascinating.  It was about the culture of education in Asian societies where rice cultivation is prominent.  Without blowing a really great read that you ought to consider… he shows how various societies’ agrarian roots tend to influence how school is scheduled for kids.  Wheat can be planted in the spring, harvested in the fall and the farmers can sit around all summer in some countries… hence the American three-month summer break. (I know, that’s very simplistic, but think about it.)  But rice is tended daily — a constant battle.  Gladwell quotes this old saying: “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”  Asian countries tend to keep their kids in school more days a year.

I thought at the time, “a-ha!”  There’s an advantage that I’m sure has helped my dad rise above various challenges.  Anecdotally, it rings true, too.  My dad has incredible work ethic (workaholism?) and it must come from his youth spent in and around the rice paddies of old Yulong.

But then again — my dad didn’t complete much school growing up in China.  Only about three years’ worth, he says.  And that wasn’t his choice.  So that whole rice paddy thing only applies to my dad to a point.  He works incredibly hard.  But someone or some people short-changed him on the true advantage that phenomenon is supposed to foster: a stronger education.

And an education is something I know my dad is heart-broken over never getting.  Last night, we must have talked about a hundred different things ranging from business to health care reform to President Obama to the American way.  My dad is curious and he knows a good deal about a lot of things despite not reading English.  And I think he’s proud of his curiosity and the knowledge he has managed to acquire over the 30-plus years he’s been here.

But he said, “I’ve stayed in this country long enough to know a teeny little bit more and more [about a lot of things], but I don’t know how to manage it.”

I asked him what he meant by that.  He held up an envelope and said, “Daily life, I don’t know what [this] is.”  He told me the world is seen in two completely different ways:  the way educated people see things and the way the uneducated see things.  Yes, he’s been able to pull himself up in many ways.  But he can’t “manage” what he knows — or, connect the dots, so to speak.

Isn’t that sad?  It’s a crime.  And that’s why education is so important.  I loathe to think that there are people in this world (this country!) who still have to endure this sort of blaspheme against humanity.  My dad — with so much curiosity and interest in the affairs of the world around him — is constantly bedeviled by a limitation right before his eyes.  An inability to fully understand.  Dad says it’s enough to cause nightmares.

I’ve always asked my dad why he’s never pursued English classes — the answer is justification enough: he’s always worked too many hours.  Maybe when he retires.  Someone tell me how to help him understand it’s never too late.

Luckily this doesn’t have to end as some sort of sob story.  My dad doesn’t go around feeling sorry for himself.  And everyone I know who’s ever met my dad sees him as a huge success.  And he certainly is.  Look at me, my brothers, the restaurant’s long list of happy and grateful customers.  In my eyes — my old man will always be an outlier.

The three-story ascent seemed just about right for a Chinese, village-style new construction. As my brothers and I grasped the bamboo scaffolding (which appeared to be holding the whole joint together during construction) to turn and head up the next flight of stairs, our shoes sounded like sandpaper as they pivoted and pried away bits of the clay steps. It felt more mountainside-trek than new family homestead. While we climbed with a new, quiet appreciation for our Scandinavian, Minnesota-born mom’s accusation of doing something “Chinese-style,” our dad’s cacophonous Cantonese filled the space with a glee that is just so typical of the man. He was happy to be back in Yulong Village on the west side of the Pearl River Delta near Macau that August afternoon in 2007 — happy to show his three sons what had become of the little village he called home up until his 1972 escape from China.

Ben, Justin and Alex Kwan in Yulong Village (SanZhou near Zhuhai, China), August 2007

We emerged from the dim and dirty stairwell atop the roof, one of the tallest in the village (a misnomer, if you will, the place bore zero resemblance to the rice paddy hamlet of our dad’s bedtime stories.) A lush, dense green hillside our dad called his childhood “playground” rose behind us and a distant slate of South China Sea and cloudy sky lay in the distance before us — looking as though it could swallow the equally-gray expanse of similar village buildings.

Tin Tat Kwan explains the dynamics of his old village (which isn't really a village any more), August 2007

And then the tirade began. Our dad unleashed a dissonant duet of Cantonese and English that dabbles in the occasional dirty word as he peered over the edge of the roof, looking down at the alley that snakes up the hillside between addresses that bear names like Kwan, Lo, Wong and Chin. Apparently old Yulong had become a bad neighborhood (or bad nay bo hood as dad relayed with equally stilted gestures.) We all leaned over the bricks to look down to discover how the new building, which sat right where the old, shoddy one did, jutted out into the alley about four or six feet farther than any of the other homes. In such a “bad neighborhood,” as dad told us, one had to fight back against a neighbor’s bad construction and subsequent wayward sewage flow by building out, blocking the filth and perhaps even creating a problem for the next person down the line. Continue Reading…