Things are cuter in Asia. American comic books have gym rats in spandex slicing people up or shooting cosmic rays out of their eyes. Asian cartoons have characters who shudder with emotions and have eyes that glisten underneath blue hair that gently twirl in the air. They have larger eye-to-cranium ratios, which are amplified by larger cranium-to-body ratios. Take Hello Kitty, for example, Asia’s Mickey Mouse. She has a gigantic head perched on a soft condensed body. Though her eyes aren’t of the I-can-swim-in-them scale, those of many of her sidekicks are. And they’re all rather saccharine sweet and irresistibly adorable. Why they’re so adorable they even get me to use the word adorable and serial punctuation marks like a teenage schoolgirl. Who says adorable???? OMG!!!

Even the emoticons in Asia are cuter. Why it’s enough to make me >_<. American emoticons get the point across but they’re rather bare and abstract, aren’t they? Take the classic : ) for example. Yes, I can see that it’s a smile, like the one you see on a happy face but on its side and without the circular shape that indicates the silhouette of the head. The small eyes, however, are mysteriously blank, disconcertingly indifferent, even as the mouth curves up to indicate happiness. Isn’t ^_^ better? Can’t you just feel the smile, like peppermint hot chocolate flowing down your esophagus on a cold winter night? Are you sorry for having hurt your friend? Well don’t just : (. Why don’t you T_T instead; your friend is more likely to forgive you if they see tears streaming from those big puppy dog eyes of yours. Aw, who can stay mad at a face like that? Come here, you…

For a full comparison of Western and Asian emoticons, check out the Wikipedia article on emoticons.

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I never thought I’d enjoy a sunset so much while riding around in a bus. As we moved, the golden light of the setting sun splashed through the spaces between buildings and billboards like flares. Taking a bus, versus the subway, also has the added benefit of seeing people going about doing their daily things. I hope you catch some of the details in this short film.

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The Han River cuts through the center of Seoul. It’s a wide river that was important in Seoul’s development as the locus of power and commerce over the centuries. Crossing it today by train is a thrilling experience, especially at night when you might even get a little light show.

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It’s the great paradox of large metropolises: millions of people packed into a single place and nearly everyone is lonely. I sense it most when I have a hyperopic view of a city: driving over the hills towards the Los Angeles basin at night, or ferrying across Victoria Harbor to get the “million dollar view” of the Hong Kong skyline. On my last night in Seoul, my friend took me up to the observation deck of the N Seoul Tower for 360 degrees of unobstructed city viewing. We could see for miles, city roads and blocks of buildings pouring out as if from a bottomless bucket. The sun was setting, lights flickered on one by one, then two by two, and so on. Roads streaked white on one side and red on the other. The blue sky turned greenish yellow then orange for a moment before receding to a deep violet. It was a view spectacular enough to induce loneliness in a grown man.

Ever since I uprooted myself to get back on the boat, I’ve missed the sense of belonging, of being tethered to daily rituals and familiar faces. Everywhere I went – Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong – I asked myself if this could be the place to drop anchor. Seoul, however, I knew would be different. It is, after all, the heart of the land in which I was born. And it was different. I had an extended deja vu experience: everything was simultaneously new and familiar. People spoke words I didn’t understand in a language I’ve known all my life. I wondered if I was home. But there I was on my last night, with a sweeping view of the land. I’d be lonely in Seoul, I thought to myself, just like everyone else here. And everywhere, for that matter.

In every major city I visit, I encounter locals in their 20s and 30s who are amused by my enthusiasm for their city. They say their city is boring, polluted; they complain about the people – too shallow, too snobby, too unsophisticated, too fat. They complain about working conditions. And above all, they complain about how hard it is to meet people – people they really connect with. I’ve heard this in enough cities to know that it has little to do with the place and more to do with human nature. I don’t mean to sound like a Debbie Downer, but maybe loneliness is just part of our existence. Or maybe it has to do with young adults in this generation, having grown up in a world made small by the Internet, without any of the traumatic wars that shaped three generations before us. We have money to distract us, time to spend on idle rumination, education to delude us into thinking we know it all. And we’re desperately lonely, and therefore restless.

When I boarded the Cathay Pacific plane to return to Hong Kong, my head was clogged with confusion. Even now, I’m trying to make sense of what Seoul means to me. Of what it means to be home, and if such a thing really even exists. Deep thoughts that go nowhere. When I sat down, the elderly couple seated next to me asked me in Korean if I was also Korean. I said yes, and they seemed delighted. We talked, testing the limits of my Korean, about all sorts of things, but mostly about Korea. They told me about the famous traditional homes in their small town and its beautiful coastline. They boasted about the modernization of Korea, and how it’s opening up to foreigners and becoming an easier place to live. They talked about the food, the clean energy projects, the railways, the students. Korea is a good place to live, the man concluded with a mix of pride and affection. Then the woman, sitting at the window seat, looked out and exclaimed to her husband that a cloud looked like a horse. It does, he said with the enthusiasm of a young boy, it does look like a horse. He looked at me, pointed to the window. Look, he said, look at the cloud that looks like a horse. For a long time they stared out that window with the wonderment of children way up in the sky, though in fact they were anchored to a land they love, where they belong.
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Warning: the following post is rated PG-13.

In Seoul I’m always hungry and full at the same time. I walk around completely full from gorging all day, but I keep coming across such delicious foods that I continue to jam more food down my throat until the top nearly reaches my epiglottis. Any higher and I risk blocking my lungs. I feel like a crack-addict. I’ve hit bottom, but I need more. Just one more dduk; just a one more skewer of odeng; give me that fucking tong dak! Please. Just one more. I promise I’ll quit after this one. A promise I know I won’t – I can’t – keep.

The only hope is to remove the temptation. The only problem is that street food vendors (or “dealers” as I like to call them) are unavoidable. They’re scattered throughout the city, at the exits of every subway station, along every shopping promenade, sometimes by the hundreds, each nudging you to take one more hit. I’m so painfully full but one whiff of dduk bugki – rice cakes simmered in a spicy chili sauce that has just a touch of sweetness – and I submit. I don’t care if it burns me on the way out as I sit on the toilet the next morning – give it to me. Are those hoedduk – chewy rice flour pancakes with cinnamon, sugar, and nuts inside – I hear sizzling? I’ll take one. No… two. Give me two. One for me and… another for my… friend.

You can compose an entire meal as you stroll down a series of food vendors. I like to start with a little amuse bouche of roasted chest nuts – smoky, slightly sweet goodness. Then I dive into some classics: dduk bugki, and a skewer of odeng – fish cakes simmered in a clear broth. My appetite thus stimulated, I go for the fried stuff as my main course. On this trip, I discovered corn dogs with french fries embedded in the batter. It sounds funny, looks disgusting, and tastes like happiness. A meal just doesn’t feel complete without dessert so I find a stall that serves hoedduk, one of my favorite things on earth. Not foods, things. Most stalls serve the same foods and the variance in quality is low so you don’t need to tire yourself out looking for the best vendor. Just walk up to any stall, point to what you want, hand over the cash with a little wink, and take a hit. Feels good, don’t it?
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When I was a kid, my dad used to wake me up well before dawn on a Sunday morning to go fishing. We would drive to a pier in Long Beach while it was still dark outside and take a boat out to a barge where we’d fish for eight hours as the sun came up. We didn’t say much. We just stood there with our fishing poles on the gently bobbing barge. Mostly I imitated my dad: the way he grabbed a live sardine and stabbed it with a hook, the way he drew up the line with a rhythmic pull, the way he examined the fish before tossing it into a bucket. Occasionally he would fillet a fish right there and eat it with some Korean chili paste that he’d bring in a small tupperware, smoking as he ate. He would buy me chicken soup and a coke from the little snack shop on the barge. My dad loved father-son time. I’ll admit I was a little less enthusiastic. Especially at 4am.

The bonding would begin not at the barge, however, but at the breakfast table. Before every outing, my mom would wake up thirty minutes before I did to cook us a special boys-only breakfast. Sometimes it was a grease-pit breakfast sandwich: fried eggs, spam, and cheese between two white buttered toast smothered in mayonnaise and ketchup, downed with a tall cup of milk. On special days, however, she would begin simmering a big pot of Korean beef bone soup the night before. Seolleongtang is a hearty, simple stew made from boiling beef bones for up to 12 hours to produce a milky white broth that’s seasoned only with some salt, pepper, and fresh green onions and eaten with rice and kimchi. This is a man’s meal, my dad would say with a full mouth, promising me that it would keep us strong and satiated for half a day. I drank every last delicious drop of the broth as if the growth of my femurs depended on it.

I’m back in Korea for the first time in twenty six years, and more than anything I wanted to eat seolleongtang here. A friend’s sister recommended the original Inamjang, located on a small, unremarkable alley near downtown Seoul. When we arrived around noon, the place was packed with men in their 50s and 60s, their heads bent over the large clay pots, and four young women running around to satisfy requests for more kimchi or another bowl of rice. Requests were yelled out as men wiped their noses which would drip from the heat of the soup and the spice of the kimchi. We sat down and after one bite, I was hooked. The broth was milky and the meat tender. The rice was already inside, so all I had to do was add a teaspoon or so of coarse sea salt, a few dashes of black pepper, and a heap of sliced scallions. Of equal importance in judging a seolleongtang joint – and usually, they focus on just this one dish – is the kimchi. Inamjang didn’t disappoint.

In my short life, I’ve eaten too well: the French Laundry five times, sushi from Sukiyabashi Jiro, a twenty four course meal at Alinea, and visits to two of Joel Robuchon’s three star restaurants. And somehow, in some ways, this bowl of seolleongtang beats them all. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, a la Ratatouille, that gives an unfair advantage to the soup: a rapid sequence of memories of waking up in the dark, of holding up my bowl of seolleongtang to finish the last bit of the still warm broth, of driving on empty freeways to the beach before sunrise, of seeing my dad smile with his eyes on me and not the fish I’m unhooking. Perhaps it’s because, just like my dad said, this soup makes you grow strong as a man. At Inamjang, it was difficult not to wish my dad could see me all grown up but still eating like his son.
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Our first day in Yangshuo was cool and overcast. We read it as an invitation to bike around and photograph the picturesque countryside. Biking is the best way to avoid the tour buses and to go deeper into the soft silence of the hills and encounter villages that you might miss if you sneezed as you breezed by. So we biked and took photographs, and by the time we were cut off by the Li River we were painted with mud and starving. A persistent, almost desperate woman implored us to let her ferry us across the river on her bamboo raft for a dollar fifty (US) per person. Once on the other side, she insisted we follow her to a dusty private home in a village. Home cooking, she said. Wary of scams, I tried to steer my companions to a proper restaurant. But they’re going to kill a chicken for us, one of them said pointing to a beautiful maple hen being tied at the feet. And that settled the matter.

Now many Americans might think killing a chicken for dinner is a brutal act. But I bet you a good portion of them probably eat at KFC, which probably ships its chickens to processing plants in such miserable conditions that half of them suffer broken limbs, if not necks, by the time they arrive after a lifetime of hormone injections and suffocating cages. Our dinner, in contrast, was allowed to wander and stretch its wings as it ate off the land; the relatively thin breasts and lean thighs sufficient proof that it was raised without hormones; other chickens walking about sufficient proof that it was raised humanely. The woman who ran the household and single-handedly prepared our meal took a strong hold of the chicken, cut its neck with a swift stroke, and held it neck down to drain the blood which would later be used to prepare a soup. Little goes to waste on a small farm.

The woman asked us to cross the small dirt path to a small disheveled patch of foliage and pick whatever vegetables we wanted her to prepare. If there is a better way to get three city-dwellers non-plussed, I haven’t encountered it. Amused by our helplessness, she came and picked a bundle of vegetables that looked unfamiliar to us except for some red-green beans and a type of gourd. She chopped vegetables and meats over a single weathered cutting board and started a wood fire for the one wok in which she would prepare six dishes. And as she cooked, she fed us various stories, among others, about how she raises her chickens and her son whom she hopes will leave for school because life is difficult in the village. The chickens will have to stay, of course: there are travelers to feed.

We sat down on small wooden chairs to eat on an old table. It seemed appropriate in this setting, here in the yard of an unadorned farm house, off a dirt road that leads you into a row of dusty houses. The first course was the chicken, chopped into small pieces with bones and all, stir-fried together with its liver and feet, some garlic and chilis. It sends a pleasant shudder to think that what you’re about to eat was clucking next to you just thirty minutes ago. Then came a sublime dish of eggs with tomato – the finest rendition that any of us had ever had. Then came some sort of squash cooked with fermented soy beans, then the red-green beans with minced pork and ginger, followed by a soup that used the chicken blood and the gourd, and finally some sauteed leafy vegetable I had never seen before. It was a feast by any standard.

There’s a lot of talk these days about farm-to-table dining. Usually it’s among affluent foodies who have romantic visions of quaint farm houses and rustic meals. Here in Yangshuo I stumbled by chance upon just such a quaint farm house and ate a rustic meal, except it was a farm-to-table experience without the fantasy and theater. No candlelights, no scented washcloths or a polite bilingual waitstaff. This was a woman for whom laboring over the land is a way of life forced on her by circumstance. She toils to earn a living on a trickle of tourists (some days there are none), her crops subject to weather and her customers subject to the health of tourism, neither factors over which she has any control. It’s little wonder the children leave agrarian villages as soon as they can. My own romanticized vision of the country life came undone in our host’s dirt yard. Thus my gratitude to this woman is two-fold, for I ate well and learned much during what will stand as one of my most memorable meals.

To see more photos of Yangshu read my previous post, Yangshuo in black and white.
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But when the famous limestone hills of Yangshuo along the Li River leave you speechless, a priceless picture is worth no words at all. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Anyway, it’s little wonder that the old Chinese masters were inspired to create black and white ink paintings here. So rather than yammer on and on about how beautiful it was in Yangshuo, I offer a few photos in black and white, without descriptions or explanations, to lure you to Yangshuo if you haven’t visited before.

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Helpful tip: My friends and I stayed at the Yangshuo Village Inn, which I highly recommend, especially for Western tourists. It’s cozy, affordable, and the staff ensure your stay is stress free by arranging travel and activities including mud baths in a cave, hikes up to the top of a limestone hill, bike rides (the best way to get away from other tourists and view the landscape), and river boat rides. Sadly, they no longer offer hot air balloon rides in Yangshuo after two flying Dutchmen crashed to their tragic end two years ago.

Yangshuo Village Inn
139.7836.9849
www.yangshuoguesthouse.com
reservations@yangshuoguesthouse.com
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One of the inevitable things that happens when you have so many people living in a relatively small tract of land is you get some really tiny stores. Even along the main business centers of Hong Kong there are stand-alone outdoor stalls the size of phone booths where you can get keys made, shoes fixed, business cards printed, lunch served, and I bet if you looked hard enough you’d find a hair salon with a woman with curlers waiting outside while the hairdresser washes another customer’s hair in the one chair that fits inside. Slightly larger stores – though not by much – fill entire floors of buildings throughout the city that are grouped into themes. There’s a building full of electronic stores, another with several floors of CD and DVD sellers, and many that sell clothing and accessories. With thousands of these micro-businesses in existence, there’s very likely one that sells what you’re looking for. I was looking for Classical music CDs when I met OKCM.

OKCM (pronounced like Ockham of Ockham’s Razor fame) stands for Old Kooky Classical Man, a name I gave him myself because I never asked him what his real name is. He’s old, he’s kooky, and he knows his Classical music, so it just seemed to work. He’s also missing a few teeth and runs a great Classical music store in Mongkok the size of a small bathroom. OKCM sits on an old office chair in a corner where there would be a toilet if the store really was a bathroom and there’s usually a fellow fanatic sitting next to him on a bench as they listen to Furtwangler conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of a Beethoven symphony or Pogorelich bang out an idiosyncratic interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. The music pours out from hi fidelity speakers, channeled through vacuum tube amps. This guy’s old school.

So how passionate is this guy? He has sitting at the apex of the mound of stuff in the center of the sixty square foot space a copy of a special edition album that was created as soon as Karajan recorded his finest, and now legendary, version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The year was 1962, and they made just one. OKCM owns it, but he’ll give it to you in exchange for two thousand US dollars. But if that’s too steep for you, there is a surprisingly large number of other CDs to choose from. The walls of the store are jam packed with CDs, and they can be moved to reveal even more CDs, in effect, doubling the surface area of three walls. I spent a couple of hours poring over every album, and listening to dozens. He expounded in a rare combination of broken English, commendable Cantonese, and impeccable gesticulations. But we understood each other best when we sat there in complete silence, listening to a particular passage that seemed to touch us both. It’s hard to tell whether this is his livelihood or his hobby. Perhaps he’s one of the lucky few for whom there is no distinction.

Those of you familiar with Ockham’s razor know that it’s a principle that’s often stated as “the simplest explanation is usually the right explanation.” Perhaps OKCM is proof that the smallest CD store is usually the best CD store.
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A few years ago, I was dining alone at the counter at Gary Danko – easily the poshest dining experience in San Francisco – and I happened to sit next to a black gentleman who was also dining alone. Wearing a loose tan polo shirt and jeans, he stuck out in a room full of new dotcom wealth and old Nob Hill money. He didn’t say much, hardly looked around. Just sat there and looked at his plate while he scooped up food as if he was eating eggs at a diner. I found him curious enough to risk asking him if he dined here often. Without looking up, he said that every month he put some money aside and every month he treated himself to the nicest dinner he could afford. Even though he didn’t make much as a FedEx driver, he said he wanted to eat as well as he could, that eating well was living well, and that that’s exactly what he intended to do. Well shit – all I could do was agree and get back to shoveling my poached oysters with Osetra caviar.

I used to think there are two types of foodies. There are the foodies who go for breadth: they constantly seek new flavors, visit the latest restaurant openings, explore new cuisines. Then there are the foodies who go for depth: they may not keep up with the latest news or trends, but when they love something – fried chicken, let’s say – they go to the ends of the earth to find the finest example. But thanks to the FedEx driver, I found a third type. This type has probably never even heard the term foodie. All he knows is that when he bites into something really really good, he just feels alive. I think I sort of understand the guy. For years I would put on a dress shirt every several months and dine alone at Michelin starred restaurants, usually when I was acutely stressed or down but didn’t want to share my burden with friends who would if I asked. I’d sit there and eat and people watch. But mostly I would think. I’d think about the events of the day, about the role of delusion in maintaining our sanity, about friendships and Johannes Brahms and how restaurants get their stock reduction sauces so gooey and thick.

I’ve been in Hong Kong for a few months now and this week, for the first time, I felt the need for a fine-dining experience, aka therapy. I’ve been very good about controlling my food budget so far, so I felt OK splurging this once. I called up Robuchon a Galera, where you can get a reasonably priced, multi-course lunch on a weekday. Though not quite the bargain you get at Jean Georges in New York City, it’s still one of the best deals around. A last minute reservation secured, I hopped on a ferry to make the hour long trip to Macau, where I sat alone at a three-Michelin-star restaurant and thought about all sorts of things, but above all about how I’ve lived well. Thanks FedEx guy.

The point of this post isn’t to review Robuchon a Galera, so rather than talk about the food I simply share the photos. Hover your mouse over a photo to read a brief description.
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