My China

There was no Chinatown in Cincinnati. Only Chinese restaurants. And these required quotation marks around their names: “Chinese” restaurants. They had round tables with lazy Susans and sticky jars of sweet-hot mustard. We’d order fried wontons and lemon chicken—sliced and fried cutlets cloaked in lemon sauce.

I can still picture that sauce: It’s glassy and tinted yellow, thicker than honey, a little gelatinous. It had no flavor other than sickly. The chicken suffocated under that sauce, and so did I. I’ve lived under it my entire adult life. I can’t think of Chinese food without sense memories of the way that chicken tasted, the way it burned the back of my throat with sugar.

How does somebody fix a food bias? How do you retrain yourself to appreciate a food when the only experiences you’ve had with it have been toxic? The logical solution is immersion: Eat Chinese buns for breakfast, dumplings for lunch. Eat it until you forget what you were afraid of.

I tried that once. I barely got past one meal. The chicken bun I bought for breakfast had a translucent gelatin in the center, and it tasted like chicken candy. When I swallowed it, the sugar burned the back of my throat.

What I needed, I decided, was a mentor. So I corralled Rebecca Wheeler. Wheeler leads food tours in Chinatown. I needed a tour, I told her. A private, intensive one.

We met at Saint Anna Bakery. We drank dark and tannic Hong Kong–style tea.

“So tell me about where you are with Chinese food,” Wheeler said.

“I’m nowhere,” I told her. “I’m at zero.”

She looked at me, waiting for me to continue, but I had nothing else to say.

“I understand,” she said, finally.

She, too, grew up in Ohio. She, too, had eaten far too many meals of fake Chinese food. The antipathy she felt toward the stuff was in her blood, just as it was in mine. But Wheeler had fought it and come around. Now, in addition to her tours, she teaches Chinese cooking at the Wooden Spoon. And just a couple of months ago, she was in China, studying more ways of cooking, and eating her way through as much of the country as she could.

She had been cured, in other words. And she thought she could cure me.

We made our way to Spring World. Wheeler wanted me to start with Yunnan cuisine. Later we’d do Szechuan. And we wouldn’t touch Cantonese, for fear of Ohio flashbacks.

At Spring World, Wheeler flipped quickly through the tome that is the menu. “I wish they’d make these things smaller,” she said. I wished the same thing. I’d faced menus like these before. They did not help my anxiety.

Wheeler took control. She wanted me to try the Yunnan Province’s famous mushrooms and prosciutto-like ham. We ordered a chicken dish as well, “spicy baby chicken with ginger and peppers.”

“In certain parts of China, the spice can be addicting,” Wheeler said. She was referring to the revered sensation of numbness and fire ingrained in Szechuan food. The numbing comes from the Szechuan peppercorn, the heat from dried chiles.

There wasn’t a lot of Szechuan peppercorn to be found in these Yunnan dishes. But there was plenty of dried chile. It was in the chicken dish, which sparkled with complexity—the chiles burning a gentle, steady fire, the ginger spicy but sweeter. I interspersed bites of chicken with bites of mushrooms. There must have been seven or eight varieties, all of differing textures, and all exhibiting meaty, earthy notes. They seemed to be dressed only with chive, and yet this was the type of complex flavor people labor to achieve.

Did it keep me away from the chicken? No. The mushrooms were a mere interlude. I went back to the chicken again and again, until I started sweating, and then again, until my tongue was burned.

And then again, hours later, when I stood before the open door of my refrigerator and piled the stuff in with a fork.

And then one more time, the next day. I couldn’t control myself. I thought: This is addiction. This is the addiction Wheeler had been talking about.

I thought: I’m cured.

It was wishful thinking. Thirty years of bias is no match for a single lunch. By the next week, when I was sitting with Wheeler at Lao Sze Chuan, I had almost forgotten what Szechuan peppercorn tasted like. And as I flipped through yet another huge menu, I wanted to go back to Spring World. Or maybe find a slice of pizza.

There was a small bowl of pickled cabbage on the table. Wheeler started picking at it as we debated what to order. I did, too. It had the sweet sting of vinegar, the dry heat of chile. I felt encouraged.

Then came the ma po tofu, the soft tofu simmering in hot chile oil. It scorched my taste buds. It was not addicting.

Then, there were don don noodles. Topped with crispy ground pork. Submerged in chile oil. So much flavor even my tofu-burned tongue could register it.

I dipped my chopsticks in it again and again.

“Are you feeling the numbness?” Wheeler wanted to know. “That’s the peppercorn.”

My entire mouth was indeed tingling. It was as if the muscles in my face had fallen asleep. But I was getting to the end of the bowl now. I could see there wouldn’t be any leftovers. And that made me nervous. I was sweating now. Trembling a little from all the chile. And eating as many noodles as I could put in my mouth.

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