Hide the Stinky Tofu, Chapter 1

Jen's Midlife Chrysalis: 2020-21, the year of returning to my Chinese-ness.

Intro, April 16, 2025

I grew up outside Chicago in the 80s and 90s, the only Chinese kid in my grade through 7 years of elementary school, the only East Asian kid until third grade, and one of six Asian kids out of 50 in my grade. We had one Black kid in the grade, no Latin kids, and the ruling elite were white kids. Other kids made fun of my eyes, my food (the one time I ventured to bring pork floss for lunch), and of course spoke to me by saying “Ching chong.”

So of course I wanted to be white. (And I wanted to look like a girl, but that’s another story, one that I’ve hinted at much more in this Substack.) I remember deliberately breaking my mom’s rule of only speaking to her in Mandarin when we were out, so that strangers didn’t, heaven forbid, think I couldn’t speak English. At Yale, I prided myself on being friends with white people instead of “only being able to be friends with other Asians.” This finally changed when I went to visit Columbia Law, attended an Asian Law Students event, and met Asian women whom I felt I could relate to and aspire to become. (I am fully aware of the insanity and tragedy of not looking up to the many Asian women in my life up until then.)

But while I wanted to be white at school, I loved being Chinese at home, with my parents’ friends, and when my parents moved to Beijing when I was 14, whenever I was in Asia. (I was not into being Chinese enough to go with them, choosing to attend boarding school to stay in Illinois.) We spoke Mandarin at home, I took Mandarin in college, I spent my breaks in Beijing and Hong Kong, I dreamt of being the ambassador to China, I wrote my thesis on China and Taiwan.

I married a white man, one who embodied all the characteristics of attractiveness that I’d absorbed growing up. We moved to California, where I hoped my future children would have an easier time of being an Asian kid than I had. I tried, but not my hardest, to have them speak Mandarin; my fluency diminished the longer I was away from Asia. I’d grown up in the U.S., stories about being Chinese came far less frequently to my mind as a parent than they had for my immigrant parents.

During lockdown, I was inspired by my daughter to write to her about my—our— Chinese-ness. I meant it to be something pretty short, but it became hundreds of pages of a mishmash of memoir, family history, and Chinese-Taiwanese history.

What follows is the first chapter from that first book, and I’ll release it a chapter a time, with some revisions but remaining true to the intent at the time, to make it kid-friendly. Thank you so much for reading.

Hide the Stinky Tofu

Chapter 1 - August 2020

Flashback to Growing Up in the Suburbs…Mahjong Style

We have just^[1] moved to a house in the suburbs, a habitat foreign to you but familiar to me from 26 years ago, when I lived with my family in a house in the Illinois suburbs. I left that house in 1994 for a dorm room in the cornfields, choosing public boarding school over an imminent move with my parents to Beijing. From the cornfields I moved to cities, from New Haven to New York to San Francisco, from dorm rooms to apartments to slightly bigger apartments. But here I am, once again in a house in the suburbs, all plans and activities cancelled. Put me alone in one of our carpeted rooms with old letters, schoolwork and photographs, and I am effectively sent back to my childhood.

And a big part of my childhood was attending and hosting suburban mahjong parties with my parents’ friends and their kids. My childhood was filled with the sounds of mahjong tiles shuffling, Mandarin joking and gossiping, and loud laughter—almost always with jokes I didn’t hear or understand, but that served as a happy boisterous backdrop for whatever my friends and I were doing.

My parents played mahjong for hours every Friday and Saturday night, every holiday, and every time a friend or even a friend’s child had a birthday. Their mahjong crew was about ten couples strong, all fun-loving, loud couples who grew up in Taiwan but considered themselves Chinese.[2] Most of them were professionals—employed at AT&T, like my dad, or else in business. They dressed up for the parties much more than my generation does—women wore various shoulder-padded flowery blouses or dresses and heels; the men in primary colored polo t-shirts, khakis and leather loafers. Shoes always came off at the door, the rows growing as more and more people arrived.

If we were hosting the party, my mom cooked and cleaned our house all day in preparation. I helped with vacuuming, bringing hot water down to our basement for tea, and setting up the mahjong folding tables^[3] and chairs. Any stress my mom showed me during her furious preparations (party-hosting would often happen last minute, somehow) would disappear with the first doorbell, as she always showed a vivacious, happy face to friends during parties.^[4]

Everyone parked in the house du jour’s driveway, which for the first decade or so, would fill up with nearly identical cars. The rare friend who talked to their “American” neighbors told my mom that they referred to the crew as the “Volvo club.” In the first couple years—around 1985 to 1987—everyone drove Volvos because those were supposed to be safest for children. They were shaped like boxes, and commercials showed crash test dummies staying unscathed after the cars ran into walls. We had a particularly ugly Volvo, with an off-yellow beige-ish color. My dad bought my mom a gold Mercedes Benz in 1987, complete with a vanity plate that said “MARGE 98.” My brother teased them that this was not a proper shortening of “Marjorie,” her chosen English name, and he made fun of the randomness of “98.” (Of course, now you, California child, are familiar with why my parents picked the 8—it is considered an auspicious number because it rhymes with the word for “prosper” in Cantonese. Growing up in suburban Chicago without Cantonese influences, my brother probably thought my parents made up that Chinese superstition.) The “Benzes,” as my parents and their friends called them, filled up the driveways for the years to come. But even when everyone had the same car, we knew whose car was whose –vanity plate or not—and whom we could look forward to seeing once we got inside.

We walked up to what was always a grand wooden door in a two-story brick house in either Naperville or Oak Brook^[5], rang the doorbell. If we were early, the host would warmly greet us; otherwise, another guest—oftentimes one of the kids—would let us in. If we were really late and arriving during dinner, the door would be unlocked for us to let ourselves in.

Once inside, I was greeted with a well-lit, happy home—especially if others had already arrived—and the aroma of homemade Chinese food. We families always had dinner together, with the host making some dishes, and the guests each bringing a dish. My mom called this “pah-luh,” which I realized years later was “potluck”—not a Chinese word, as I had thought.

We always walked straight to the kitchen, where the aromas originated, and put down our dish to join the others that were on the countertops, buffet-style. I remember my mom’s Taiwanese-style stir-fried rice noodles (mifen 米粉), with thinly-chopped carrots, celery, mushrooms and meat. Oftentimes someone poached whole fish with green onions, ginger and soy sauce. Sometimes someone would make lion’s head meatballs— shizitou 獅子頭—which were giant pork meatballs. Oftentimes someone stir-fried shrimp. (I can’t remember if it was skin on or off—I never noticed such things until I found out, while dating your dad, that Westerners are put off by shrimp with skin, shrimp with heads, fish heads and fish skin.) Sometimes the host braised tipang (體胖), which I am only just now looking up to find out what it is—pork shank. As with almost all the Chinese food I inhaled my entire life, I didn’t think about what any particular item was—I just ate it. You would love tipang: it is cooked in the same sweet reddish soy sauce broth you love that NaiNai makes you with ribs when you visit. Tipang is tender like the ribs, but fattier and more decadent. Sometimes someone brought pig ears—sliced and served cold, with a delightful crunch. Another popular cold dish was drunken chicken, which is chicken poached and then marinated overnight with its broth and Chinese rice wine. NaiNai just made this for you for the first time last week. And there were assorted stir-fried vegetables, sometimes with meat, sometimes without—but always delicious, because Chinese-style vegetables are always delicious! I was confused how President Bush could dislike broccoli until I tried it at an American restaurant one time, and it was unrecognizable: a giant, limp and flavorless floret instead of carefully chopped small pieces that were crunchy, naturally flavorful, with a hint of salt and garlic. And of course each home had a giant rice cooker of rice ready for us to scoop onto our plates. I always filled my paper plate to the brim and went back for seconds.

The adults and kids always ate separately, even at Thanksgiving. The grownups sat in the fancy dining room, and sometimes overflowed into the kitchen. If there was room in the kitchen, the kids had a table there; otherwise we’d eat on the couches in the living room, where the TV oftentimes showed Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. We didn’t watch baseball as much, and while we all supported the Bears, the football team, those games were on Sundays.

Our intergenerational interactions were brief—a quick hello if we happened to run into a grown-up; I don’t remember being trained to say goodbye to the hosts, even. When I did speak to the adults, I spoke Mandarin and addressed them as “A-yi” (Aunt 阿姨) or “Shu-shu” (Uncle 叔叔), which are respectful but familiar terms. Most of the mahjong parents spoke English to their own kids and me, but I preferred for them to speak to me in Chinese—they seemed to be more their real selves then. When they spoke English, it seemed like they were acting the parts of friendly, cool American parents.

Most of the couples had two or three kids, and we played together for the many hours and years that our parents sat at mahjong and poker tables. The houses we played in were all big: 3500-4000 square feet, and we had our run of them, with only the master bedrooms off-limits. (Respect your elders!) Oftentimes we went to the house’s finished basements to play. Everyone rode couch cushions down someone’s basement stairs on a pretend train; we played paper towel football with one home’s Sam’s Club supply—a game never repeated again after our parents found out; we played “human burrito” and roll one of the kids around in one house’s school-gym-type mats. We concocted “perfume” from things we found in the bathroom; we played basketball and hide and seek. We played Nintendo, then Super Nintendo. We traded baseball and basketball cards. When J* was old enough to drive, we went to the arcade. Towards the end, the boys got into role playing games and Magic cards; I started to stay home by myself and watch TV instead.^[6]

For a couple of years in the early or mid-nineties, my parents and their friends got into the worldwide Asian karaoke obsession. My parents recorded the songs from the karaoke laser discs onto cassette tapes, and then played the tapes in our Benz as we drove around our “normal” lives, between school activities, grocery stores, fast food restaurants and parties. They did this in part because they liked these songs, but mostly so they could master them and show face to their friends at the mahjong-karaoke parties. My mom’s go-to song was “Kusha” (哭[7]沙) — “Weeping sand.” When we visited New Jersey, my mom’s friends there were singing karaoke too. My mom whipped out “Kusha” as I listened proudly. I was surprised that the other kids, who were older, acted embarrassed when their parents sang. I remember my mom’s mom visiting during this period, and singing a bit herself. She told me her voice had gone xi 細—thin—with old age.

Singing ran in the Hsia family.^[8] Two of my uncles sang a traditional Chinese song, “mölihua” (茉莉花), in harmony, off-the-cuff, at my cousin S’s wedding. When a non-Chinese guest asked what the song meant, they had my dad, whom they called Wang GeGe (王哥哥)—Wang Big Brother—translate. My dad explained that mölihua is a jasmine flower, beautiful and admired by all—and in the song, is being plucked and given to another family…just like S. Mölihua is one of two Chinese songs that I can still sing by heart, and I sang it to you and your siblings when putting you to bed; its tune is more soothing than the other song I know, Two Tigers.[9] I used to know many others—before the karaoke craze, my parents used to play songs by a singer named Deng LiJun (Teresa Teng). I loved the catchy songs, and my mom proudly had me sing to her friends in New Jersey and Canada. I can remember standing in their dining rooms with my hands behind my back—classic Chinese speech posture—belting out songs about my tragically broken four-year-old heart.[10] My mom laughingly told you about my singing when we were in the car with your little sister, who was proudly singing the Chinese songs she learned from preschool.

The karaoke craze eventually died down, with a few people splintering off to karaoke-only parties (Bye, Huangs), and new mahjong-only families (Hi, Weis) joining my mom’s crew.

Whenever there was a birthday, everyone gathered around the cake—usually store-bought,[11] and oftentimes an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins—in the house’s fancy dining room. We sang “Happy Birthday” in English first. Then the grown-ups sang a sort of jazzy Mandarin version of Happy Birthday, with a finish of slamming the table to “bum baduh bum-bum…bum-bum!” On Christmas, we usually went to the Cs’ neighborhood clubhouse. One of the men or big kids would dress up as Santa Claus. Nobody ever believed he or she was Santa—everyone knows Santa is white! It was really a sign of the passage of time when J, who started going to the parties when she was 4, was Santa one of the last years we had the party.

The parties went long into the night, usually ending around one or two in the morning. Mahjong takes many hours—even with women who were adept at chatting as they played, and could hear each other over the shuffling of tiles.[12]

For about a decade in the middle of my parents’ time in the Chicago suburbs, the men played poker instead of mahjong at a long table in each house, usually the kitchen. They drank beer, turning red and getting louder as the night went on, swearing in both English and Chinese. A couple of them would smoke outside, leaving their cigarette butts on makeshift ashtrays that we would discover later. None of the women drank beer or smoked; only Mrs. C drank wine, which we attributed to her time in France.^[13] Occasionally one man would rotate into mahjong when the women did not have the multiple of four necessary to play.[14]

Many of the couples began to move to China for business in the late nineties and early aughts. China was developing rapidly, after years of being closed off to the world, and was welcoming back its overseas children to help the economy grow rapidly. Most of the men stopped attending the parties, because there were no longer enough of them to play poker.

Even after the mahjong tables finished in the wee hours of the night, the party would still go on, as the person whose car blocked everyone else’s in the driveway might still be chatting. Or in the Chicagoland winters, we would walk out only to find that the cars needed to be scraped of snow and ice. Some thoughtful dads would turn on the heat in the cars in advance of their family’s actual exit.

While we waited for the cars to warm up, we had xiaoye（宵夜), our midnight meal. One of my favorite midnight meals was the rare appearance of Mrs. F’s cilantro soup, which I did not know was “cilantro” until I thought about it as an adult, thirty years later. To me, it was the soup with the green stuff that tasted different but good. Nor did I know until much later—upon seeing it in China in the aughts, I think—that the soup is called xihu niurou geng (西湖牛肉羹） “West Lake Beef Thick Soup.” I saw it, I added white pepper—which is delightfully spicy—and I devoured it. (P.S., In Chinese, you “drink” soup—hetang, you don’t “have” soup.)

Sometimes when my mom hosted the mahjong party, she made niuroumian (牛肉麵)—beef noodle soup—for our midnight meal. Niuroumian was a Taiwanese specialty—something I discovered when I left Illinois and went to Chinese restaurants in Connecticut and could not find it. The Chinese restaurants in Connecticut were Cantonese; we were lucky, in the 1980s, to be able to get niuroumian at two different locations in suburban Illinois: I could get it at a Chinese restaurant in Naperville owned by my mom’s friend—also a waishengren, who was born in Sichuan and grew up in Taiwan—as well as at the Chinese-Taiwanese food court we went to often. I don’t think I knew how rare it was to have a Chinese-Taiwanese food court, either—if I even realized the food court was Taiwanese. One stall was called “Formosa,” which is an old name for Taiwan, used by Westerners, but I don’t think I knew Formosa was a name for Taiwan until I researched for this book. And another stall served Taiwanese oily sticks, youtiao (油條), and soybean milk (doujiang 豆漿), but I don’t know think I knew those were Taiwanese. I just ate.

My mom made the beef broth hours in advance, with beef chuck and tendons if she could find them—I loved the chewy consistency, which are kind of like the ends of drumsticks that you and I both like—with soy sauce, star anise, a little sugar, ginger and tomato. She used spaghetti or linguini noodles—they had more jing (a better texture^[15])— and she added hot chili peppers at the end. Yum!^[16]

A more typical standby at the parties was xifan (稀飯)^[17][18]，which is cooked white rice that is re-cooked in hot water until it is mushy. Xifan has been around since 1000 B.C.,[19] and is eaten in different versions all over Asia, including India! You won’t see it on any menus as xifan, though—it is called “congee” at Chinese restaurants. I always assumed this was a Cantonese word, but it turns out that “congee” is actually from the Indian Tamil word “kanji,” which means the water in which the rice was cooked. And how did the Indian word come to be used at Chinese American restaurants? Because a Portuguese physician and botanist wrote the word as “canje” in his book on Indian medicinal plants in 1563, and then the English adopted the word from his book in the 1600s.

We each added our own toppings to our bowls of xifan; I always added rousong（肉鬆) —dried pork that is savory, a little bit sweet, and has the texture of…nothing I can think of besides fur, but it tasted great; Asian pickles, which are bite-sized and juicy but not sour; spicy pickled radishes; and mianjin (麵筋), which were small, brown, squishy, gluten things that looked like brains.[20] Oftentimes the host would also have a cold dish of soy sauce sliced beef (with the yummy tendons in the cut), boiled eggs, and tofu-gan^[21]—sort of the cold, drier version of the stew Nainai makes that you love.

Many grown-ups would also add some pidan (皮蛋, translated as “century eggs” but literally “skin egg”), which are preserved duck eggs with a funky taste. The “whites” are a shiny translucent dark brown and the yolks are a green-gray color, like a dark mold. I am just learning that the eggs start out white—not that duck eggs are black, as I assumed my whole life—and that they are traditionally made by coating the eggs with mud, tea, lime, wood ash, rice husks, and salt, and then letting the eggs sit for five weeks or longer. How did they ever come up with that? Well, legend has it that they didn’t come up with it—nature did. The stories vary, but they all stem back to the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644 A.D.), hundreds of years ago. One legend is that a restaurant owner found some ducks eggs that had been covered in stove ash for weeks, and tried eating them. Another is that a farmer found preserved duck eggs in a muddy pool of water and slaked lime (a building material)….and tried eating them. The lime and wood ash chemically^[22] “cook” the eggs, and bring out different flavors during the cooking process. We will have to try it some time!^[23]

In any event, even without the pidan, our hot warm soups and xifan were perfect for warming us up, right before heading outside into the Chicago cold.

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^[1] This chapter was written in August 2020. The Bay Area’s shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19 began March 13, 2020.

[2] We will talk more about why their friends were of this specific origin—waishengren— later on. It requires a bit of historical background…

^[3] Called “bridge” tables when you buy them in the U.S., I believe, after the Western card game. In the late 1990s, Mrs. Wei introduced the concept of a permanent Chinese mahjong table and room. The table had drawers for people’s chips and the mahjong tiles were never put away. My parents brought back a mahjong table and set up a mahjong room when they moved back to the U.S. in 2005, after a decade in Beijing.

^[4] Or perhaps just always. The Chinese concept of “face” that you have likely heard of is a real thing; we always had to show our best, most accomplished, confident selves.

^[5] In the first days, we sometimes went to Lisle, but that town—which was nice, but not as nice— was weeded out, with the Volvos, as careers grew more successful.

^[6] The things I remember staying home from the parties and doing were quite Westernized. I usually made a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese to eat, and I watched the same two British movies over and over again: “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, which starred Hugh Grant, with whom I was obsessed—I loved his accent and mannerisms—and the movie version of the Shakespeare play Much Ado about Nothing. I watched these on VHS tapes, the technology that preceded laser discs—which my parents did karaoke off of during a brief two-year obsessive affair…let me discuss this in bigger font.

[7] Note how this character looks like someone crying!

^[8] My mom and her siblings are Hsia (Xia in pinyin, the spelling used in China for the past 60-some years). The character is 夏 and it means “summer.” Her mom is Zhou (周, oftentimes spelled Chou or Chow by immigrants from Taiwan). Chinese women do not change their surnames after being married. But before you think Chinese people are historically feminist, you should know that women and girls did not get names until my grandma’s generation. Even Cixi, the empress we will talk about, did not get a name until she was chosen as a concubine by the Emperor in 1852.

[9] Liangzhilaohu ( 兩隻老虎) is sung to the tune of Fréres Jacques, which coincidentally, we will also mention in Chapter 3.

[10] I just found one of my go-to songs: Ba Wode Aiqing Huangei Wo: Return My Love to Me. It goes: “I have not forgotten you, you have forgotten me—you even say my name wrong. This means you were deceiving me the whole time, let’s see what you’ll say today. You said you’d see me in two days, and now I’ve waited more than a year. 365 days are not easy to live, your heart does not even have me in it. Return my love to me.” And it rhymes in Mandarin! #thankyouyoutube

[11] I don’t remember any of the women baking. Nowadays my mom uses her apartment’s oven to store pots and pans.

[12] I learned later on—my dad would not teach me when I was a kid, calling it an adult (daren 大人）game—that my parents and their friends usually played two quan “rounds”. Each round contained four rounds within it, named by the four cardinal directions, beginning with the “east wind round,” (dongfengquan 東風圈). Chinese people say “east, south, west, north” (dongnanxibei 東南西北) when reciting the directions, so the east wind round would be followed by the south wind round, and so on. Each person took a turn beginning the hand for each cardinal direction, and remained the “dealer” if they won the hand they started. So, at the very least, the mahjong crew played four times four times two (which is?) hands, with each hand taking as long as it took to gather five triples and one pair—the mahjong. This was Taiwanese Mahjong: 16 zhang (十六張). I look forward to teaching you how to play now, not as an adult. Update: you learned to play during the writing of this book—my parents came over one night, and your dad showed you how. My parents did not bat an eye. It’s like how I was not allowed to watch TV, but they turn on the TV for your sister as soon as she arrives at their apartment. Grandparents!

^[13] She and Mr. C met in Paris! They were part of a very small Chinese community there. When my family and I went to Paris when I was ten, we ate at their friend’s Chinese restaurant.

[14] I have always thought it funny that my parents organized groups of four for mahjong, and I organize groups of four for tennis.

^[15] I am searching unsuccessfully for the Chinese character for this word, but I accidentally found out why our favorite boba is called QQ Happy Family!! “QQ is the bounciness associated with fresh handmade fishballs, glutinous rice balls, and certain types of noodles. The term originated from Taiwan, where Q sounds similar to the local word for “chewy.”

^[16] The world has gotten smaller, and Taiwanese cuisine is a bit more prevalent now here in the Bay Area. I haven’t gone searching too much, but I still haven’t found niuriumian that I liked as much as I did growing up in the Chicago suburbs.

^[17] Xifan has been around since the Zhou Dynasty, around 1000 B.C. It is eaten in different versions all over Asia, including India!

^[18] Coincidentally, my mom made my dad some when we visited last week (Sept. 23, 2020). He had a tooth removed so it was softer for him to eat. My parents also consider it more digestible when somebody has a stomachache. The internet has lots of people saying it’s a traditional Chinese food when you’re sick. Just google “congee when sick.”

[19] During the Zhou Dynasty! We will talk more about China’s dynasties in Chapter 3.

[20] Mianjin, it turns out, translates as “dough tendons”—I would not have guessed this, since we usually say mian for “noodles,” not “dough.” But come to think of it, mian is short for miantiao, which I guess means “dough strips.”

^[21] Having shopped for groceries online for a year, I now think of this in my head as “baked tofu” if I’m thinking in English. It is doufugan (豆腐干) in Chinese. (Writing this on March 19, 2021.)

^[22] They are alkaline, which is the opposite of acid.

^[23] We have since tried it, at NaiNai’s house! I bought it from Chinatown after dropping off YeYe at his oral surgeon's office, and we had it with dinner. Super eggy taste, you said. For me, it was fun to try and to find out it wasn’t as gross as I remembered.