Lost In Translation

Dumpling Diplomacy

Tim Wu has an interesting article about "why Americans must demand better dumplings" in Slate. I have become a fan of this Asian delicacy since moving to Japan, so it's not an issue for me. I expect that it is fairly easy to find good dumplings in a place like Seattle since it has such a large Asian population. Here's a sample of the manifesto:

Nasty American versions of otherwise dignified foods are something of a national tradition. The Parmesan-in-a-can, mentioned above, is perhaps the best example—the greatest cheese in the world, reduced to sawdust. But I am an optimist. Look at American wine, coffee, and sushi, all of which have slowly climbed to palatability after decades of abuse. The American variations may never be exactly like their originals, but they have slowly become great in their own way.

If dumplings are to follow this path to made-in-America greatness, we must understand what plagues our dumplings. Let's start with the skin. As any serious aficionado will tell you, the skin makes or breaks a dumpling. It must be sticky, thin, and chewy at the same time—no easy feat. It's similar to the challenge of making perfect sushi rice or pasta.

Unfortunately, American Chinese and pan-Asian outlets are lazy and suffer badly from a "thick-skin" epidemic, resulting in dumplings that are tough and greasy. A thick skin can also lead to a soggy dumpling, which is the worst fate—imagine eating a sandwich that's been soaked in water.

The real problem with overthickness is that it destroys what I like to call the "magic ratio"—the science behind the art of dumplings. The magic ratio—a factor in foods from sushi to sandwiches—is the perfect ratio of protein to carbohydrate. The right ratio seems to activate some kind of pleasure center in the brain, bringing about calm and quiet elation. Some dumpling devotees describe dumplings, done right, as mildly orgasmic.

Thick or thin, there is no dumpling magic unless the skins are fresh. Most American restaurants don't bother with fresh skins because it requires specialized labor, akin to a sushi counter. But any dumpling joint worth its salt needs a chain gang of workers who roll the skins and fold the dumplings on-site, nonstop, since repeated kneading yields better skins. Some places boil the dough before folding the dumpling, and if you know anything about bagels, you'll know that's also the secret to the New York bagel.

Preview: Murder In Amsterdam

Ian Buruma has been one of my favortie crtics on Japan and Asia in general with such books as God's Dust, Behind The Mask, The Missionary and the Libertine, and Inventing Japan. He has shown range by writing about Chinese dissidents in Bad Elelments, and postwar guilt in Japan and Germany in The Wages of Guilt, and the clash of the East with the West in Occidentalism. He is great writer who is excellent in his research and understanding of a situation, therefore I am looking forward to reading his new book that delves further into the divide of East and West when he looks at the murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gough by a Muslim extremist in his latest, Murder in Amsterdam, which is reveiwed in Salon:

Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance" places van Gogh's murder at the fulcrum of Dutch politics and society at the turn of the 21st century. A better book about the contemporary Netherlands has not been written. Like van Gogh, Buruma grew up well off in The Hague of the 1960s and '70s, and he brings to his portrait the deep understanding one can only have for those from one's native town and class. But Buruma has lived outside Holland since 1975, and has written extensively on the Far East and, more recently, the worldwide clash between political Islam and the secular West. These two perspectives, particular and global, interweave throughout "Murder in Amsterdam," in the classic fashion of the murder story as social investigation -- one thinks of "In Cold Blood," or the Dylan song "Who Killed Davey Moore?" As in the song, a lot of people turn out to bear some responsibility for van Gogh's death, and few of them are willing to own up to it.

Veronica Mars Season 2

Veronica Mars Season 2 continues to impress with the great writing, acting, and production values. The driving force of the show continues to be Kirsten Bell (Veronica Mars) and Enrico Colantani (Keith Mars), who exhibit great chemistry and comes across as a close daughter/father combo. However, there are some great supporting cast members who contribute to the overall acting excellence as well. The writers provide some great one-liners and all sorts of cultural references in the dialogue. The music for both seasons has been spot on-it’s great to hear cool new songs, as well as hearing music from my own collection on the show (Old 97s, Air, Paul Westerberg,etc..) I like how they created another major mystery, a bus crash in which 8 classmates were killed. Veronica feels guilty about it, because she avoided it by chance, when she was left behind at a gas station by accident. I also like the fact that they followed up the first season’s mystery with the trial of Aaron Eccles for the murder of Lily Kane. But there's more action as Veronica tries to negotiate the teen landscape with dating, school work, solving crimes, and trying to maintain something of a social life. She makes it look effortless, because that what all the great TV heros do (think female teenage Jack Bauer). I look forward to watching Season 3, which I expect will continue to make this one of the better written TV shows being made.

John Huges-Republican?

Slate's Michael Weiss weighs in on the career of "the first Balzac of homeroom" with a look at the recent special edition releases of Pretty In Pink and Some Kind of Wonderrful as well as oother less well-known aspects of his career:

Hughes grew up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and also in a small town just outside Chicago, the model for his fictive "Shermer, Ill.," where a lot of his teen flicks took place. As he tells Kevin Bacon on the Some Kind of Wonderful disc, it was the sense of entitlement of the neighborhood trust-funders that got him down: "I knew kids that in the third grade would say, 'When I'm 18, I'm getting $22 million dollars.' " We should be grateful that talk like this didn't turn him into the Michael Moore of the Stridex set. Rather, it was Ferris Bueller—a character Hughes claimed to strongly identify with—who mouths his creator's worldview early in the famous day off:

"-Ism's, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus but it still wouldn't change the fact that I don't own a car."

P.J. O'Rourke could have said it better himself, and did in fact when he co-edited the National Lampoon with Hughes in the mid-'70s. They were the two Midwestern conservatives, or "Pants-Down Republicans," on a masthead otherwise mostly comprised of vestigial Harvard hippies slouching their way out of the Me Decade. In O'Rourke's book, Republican Party Reptile, this GOP schismatic was eventually updated and defined for the '80s as a "disco Hobbes" into sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as much as guns, SDI, and the flat tax: Ted Nugent fused with Tom Wolfe, in other words. Enemies on the right included the stuffed shirts and old-money bores—parents of the Steffs and Hardys of the world—while the new and improved Reaganite gentry was seen as something to aspire to. (Some people have to work for that $22 million.)

Off The Eatin' Path

Most people find Singapore tame in comparison to places like Bangkok, Phnom Phen, Ho Chi Mihn, etc... But I really enjoyed my visit last year, for many of the same reasons that Anthony Bourdain states in his article on Singapore for the NY Times:

There’s a fever-dream quality to Singapore, particularly if you’re a foodie. Outdoors, the heat is smothering. In the ubiquitous megamalls, the air-conditioning could frost a bottle of beer. Everyone, it seems, when not shopping for Prada or Armani, is feeding their faces. Yet unlike in other modern centers of conspicuous consumption, in Singapore, the local obsession with food focuses on “hawker stands” and “eating houses,” which are clustered in open-to-the-street food courts. They offer a nearly unlimited variety of Malaysian, Chinese and Indian mom-and-pop operations, each of them specializing in one or two dishes.

Centuries ago, when Chinese merchants immigrated south and were encouraged to intermarry — and when Indian entrepreneurs and planters joined the mix — a fantastic process of natural fusion began. Not the fusion of trendy restaurants of the West, where after a trip to Thailand a chef begins to toss around lemongrass with abandon, but a long, slow process of culinary mutation, born of people from three distinct cultures living and eating together. It is not unusual for a Singaporean or a Malaysian to grow up cooking three cuisines.

Voice Of A Generation?

I thought I was the only one who found Zach Braff's film Garden State, precious and pretensious. Looks like Slate's Josh Levin agrees with me:

Zach Braff has said that his hit movie Garden State (2004) was "a big, life-affirming, state-of-the-union address for twentysomethings." I'm a twentysomething. His new feature, The Last Kiss, documents the mental anguish of a 29-year-old commitment-phobe. I'm at the age when commitment looms. If Braff maintains this pace, he'll be making facile observations about our voyage through life's milestones until he films an indie-rock-infused On Golden Pond. My only comfort is that one day, we'll both be dead. If Zach Braff is the voice of my generation, can't someone please crush his larynx?

Fukuoka: Design City

The NY Times has a great article about architecture in Fukuoka, which is just another reason to go there. I've already heard good things about the yatais (food stalls) and shochu (locally made potato liquor). I haven't been anywhere new in Japan this year and it's one of my goals to travel in Japan more. I don't see myself going any time soon, since I just got back from the Philippines and actually have to start to working tomorrow. But the article makes me want to go soon though:

In the early part of the last century, Frank Lloyd Wright traveled to Japan, where he designed a series of signature buildings: a regal Tokyo hotel as grand as an emperors palace; a remote hilltop villa in Kansai; and a girls school in a Tokyo suburb that seems monastic in its austere beauty.

Wright was perhaps the first superstar architect of the West to build in Japan, and one of many Western architects to have gone east to find fame and fortune. In the 80s and early 90s Japans boom period this stream of Western architects became a river. The countrys extraordinary prosperity meant that businessmen had enough cash to commission anyone in the world to build their dreams.

Perhaps nowhere in Japan was the fascination with Western architecture more pronounced than in Fukuoka, a provincial capital in remote Kyushu province. Nearly every time one of a core group of developers there broke ground, they hired a big gun of the architecture world. And so Fukuoka is now both a monument to Japans prosperous bubble period, and one of the best places in the world to see the works of world-class contemporary architects side by side.

From the futuristic Nexus World housing development with blocks by Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl to a bank designed by the Japanese luminary Kazuo Shinohara; from a stunning shopping complex by the mall specialist Jon Jerde to a seaside stadium development housing Cesar Pellis Sea Hawk Hotel, Fukuoka has so much interesting construction that it has quietly become a pilgrimage site for architecture students from all over Asia. The highest concentration of notable buildings is in an unlikely location outside the city, a dreary suburban district of ball fields and high-rise apartment complexes. A few minutes walk from a bus stop, still near enough to hear the din of the highway, lies Nexus World. The roster of names behind this development reads like an architecture hall of fame, with Koolhaas, Holl, Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Mark Mack, Christian de Portzamparc and Osamu Ishiyama all designing units.

Lunar Park

The opening of Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel, Lunar Park, really drew me in. Ellis is writing from a fictional vantage point with himself as the lead character, something which has been done by such diverse authors as Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Paul Theroux. However, not with this much aplomb-Bret Easton Ellis is a representation of all his critics and a manifestation of neurosis, addictive, boorish, and selfish behavior. He is a drunk, a drug addict, sexually ambivalent, distant, and barely able to function in society despite his success and the good will of his new wife and enabler the movie star Jayne Dennis, also the mother of his unacknowledged son from their earlier tryst. He has father issues as well, his father died and they had an unresolved relationship, not unlike his estranged relationship with his own progeny. It plays out like a horror story as the author tries to confront all of his issues, as well as dealing with an increasingly hostile world where young boys have gone missing. A murderer is re-creating the murders of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, and a graduate student writing a thesis on hi swork that he is tryng to bed has gone missing. All the while Ellis is taking drugs and drinking as if his life depended on it-this alter ego clearly has issues. I think the story builds and creates a tension that keeps the reader turning the pages. I think Eliis is misunderstood and is mostly amoral satirist, and in this one the biggest object of satire is himself. I really enjoyed the premise. I feel compelled to read Glamorama as well, since I’ve only read Less Than Zero and The Rules Of Attraction.

Manila Interrupted

I was planning on doing a couple more posts on Manila, when my hard drive on my two month old Macbook died. So I lost all of the photos I’ve taken in the last two months, on the positive side it was still under warranty, so it won’t cost me anything. I was going to do a post on Paco Park, which is a pleasant little enclosed park near the hotel, Oasis Park Hotel, we stayed at on our return to Manila. I also had a good photo of a sunset on Manila Bay. Furthermore, I won’t be able to put up a photo album of the Philippines.

Friends

I've noticed that Japanese people tend to establish friendships over time. Many of my Japanese freinds have friends who went to elementary school, junior high school, or high school. Whereas, I can meet soemone on the same wavelngth and become freinds quickly with my western friends, this doesn't seem to be as easy for most Japanese I know. Kate Elwood analyzes this discrepancy in her latest Cultural Conundrums column:

If I go to a social event at which there are Americans or Europeans or people from a variety of other countries, we may hit it off immediately and be laughing and cracking jokes and even baring our souls like we've known each other for years. Then there are Japanese people whom I have in fact known for years--but we are as comfortable with each other as if we had met five minutes ago.

Hmm. It seems to be more than a language thing, because my Japanese students also tell me that one reason they join clubs at university is that if they didn't they wouldn't have any friends. American students just seem to strike up friendships wherever, whenever, without needing to join any official group.

The researchers Eriko Maeda and L. David Ritchie asked Japanese college students to describe qualities and characteristics that would satisfy or dissatisfy them in a relationship with a close friend (shinyu). Much of what the students reported as desirable traits in friends was similar to what American students might also say, such as "on the same wavelength" or "concerned for me."

However, some of the things the respondents wrote seemed particularly relevant to Japanese friendships, like, "does not ask too much about my private life," or "aiming toward the same goal in a club."

These were qualities I had also heard Japanese people speak of when talking about good friends but had rarely heard mentioned by Americans. Maeda and Ritchie also note that "a rival in a good sense" and "treats everyone equally," which turned up in their data as well, had been previously revealed in other studies of Japanese friendship but had not appeared in studies of Western friendship.

Maeda and Ritchie further compared their categories with those found by researchers Tim Cole and James Bradac in an earlier study of qualities of American best friends. Maeda and Ritchie found that while Cole and Bradac had categories related to best friend characteristics such as "active," "energetic," "spontaneous," and "creative," the Japanese data had nothing that corresponded to these types of qualities. Rather, the Japanese respondents emphasized close friends as those whom you could feel comfortable with, which apparently does not involve a lot of spur-of-the-moment, whatever-will-she-do-next impulsive behavior. On top of that, the American responses included "not a whiner" which contrasted with the Japanese desirable characteristic "cheers me up."

Maeda and Ritchie make the additional point that even when qualities that are considered satisfying in a friendship sound similar, they can be quite different. For instance, one of the Japanese categories was "joyful to be with" which seems to be pretty close to the American category "fun to be with," but the authors suggest that the Japanese "joyful" quality is enacted in a self-controlled manner whereas the American "fun" tends to be impulsive, so that when friends of the different cultures get together the Americans may find the Japanese joyfulness boring and the Japanese students may feel the American spontaneity is too wacky.

Taking a slightly different tack, the researchers William Gudykunst and Tsukasa Nishida asked Japanese and American college students to answer questions about the relative intimacy of the six terms "lover," "best friend," "friend," "acquaintance," "classmate" and "stranger." There was no significant difference in the perceived intimacy of the term "friend." However, the Japanese respondents viewed "classmate," "acquaintance," "best friend," and "stranger" as notably more intimate than the American respondents did. Even more interestingly, the Americans ranked "lover" as the most intimate, while the Japanese gave first place to "best friend."