In Pursuit of Chicken Rice
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern The bloodletting began, in its way, one thinly cold and sunny morning last spring, at the HmongTown Marketplace in the Frogtown section of Saint Paul, Minnesota. There are more than sixty-six thousand Hmong people in the Twin Cities area, the largest such population in the country. Most are members or descendants of a refugee wave from Southeast Asia that reached the state starting in 1975, with the end of the Vietnam War. Frogtown is also the largest Asian American neighborhood in Minneapolis–Saint Paul.
I had lived in Vietnam in the mid-1990s, and I have traveled widely in the region. What struck me as I walked around HmongTown with my brother, Jason, a chef who lives in Saint Paul, was how well it managed to reproduce the sweep, bustle, and claustrophobia of a central market in a Southeast Asian city. The weather was different, obviously, and the traffic to get here more subdued, which was probably to the good in America’s litigious society. But I was transported.
HmongTown had many things my former in-laws, who were Vietnamese American refugees, would have liked — water spinach or bitter melon in season, rambutan or longan when it was not. While we were married, my first wife and I had lived next door to her parents and her oldest sister’s family in Brooklyn, New York, in a tight-knit, three-generation extended household. Her mother cooked big Vietnamese dinners for us most Sundays, and although she shopped for food in New York’s different Chinatowns, the ingredients were often not as tailored to Southeast Asian tastes as HmongTown. I think she would have liked it, but maybe only for the ingredients. That special “sense of place” I felt might have hit her differently; she had not been back to Vietnam since fleeing by boat in the 1980s.
Jason had taken me to HmongTown to buy ingredients for a project I was undertaking: cooking a traditional and authentic Hainanese chicken rice. Our plan was to use the freshest poultry available, and it was hard to get fresher than breathing. We would choose from a stand in the parking lot with about fifty brown-feathered chickens huddled together in small wire cages.
This classic meal of poached chicken with rice that has been cooked in its liquid, served with three pungent sauces, had become my pandemic dining obsession. It might seem like a small thing, but the grind of pandemic life back in Brooklyn had heightened the importance of cooking to me. I had lost my job, which left me alone in charge of online school, the dog, and feeding my wife and three children. Remote education was a bust, and while the dog and I are tighter than ever, food became a lifeline, a way to tamp down the chest-seizing, sky-falling sensation that threatened each day to overcome me.
Unlike a lot of other people, who during this period had gravitated toward esoteric sourdoughs or “heirloom” beans, I cooked dishes I knew from Vietnam, or from my ex-wife’s mother. I also experimented with Taiwanese three-cup chicken, Japanese oyakodon, and Sichuanese stir-fried tomato and egg. But I had become truly fixated on chicken rice.
I have never been to Singapore, where Hainanese chicken is a national passion. Nor have I been to Hainan, the province in southern China after which it is named. I did not eat it in Vietnam, either, or in Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia, countries I have spent time in. The pandemic had pushed a lot of folks toward a kind of culinary nostalgia; this was a comfort food of a place and people not my own.
But it made sense for me. I have spent more than twenty-five years in intimate settings with Asian and Asian American people: in Vietnam, as part of my ex-wife’s family; with my wife, Tomoko, who is Japanese; and among our friends, many of whom are Asian or Asian American. Make no mistake: I am a Jew from New York. I am not confused about that. I have not “turned Asian,” nor do “I feel Asian.” Yet it would be foolish to think that those years have not changed me. Chopped liver on rye, much as I love it, was not going to be the chicken soup for my COVID soul.
A Hmong man and woman were unloading birds from the flatbed of a battered pickup truck. Like many of the Hmong people at the market, they were dressed in both traditional and Western clothes. The woman wore a conical hat and a North Face fleece, and the man had on an embroidered Hmong shirt and a baseball cap. I had visited Hmong villages in Central Vietnam when I lived there, and my strongest memory of those trips was of grinding poverty and political suppression by the Vietnamese government. The people I met there were warm, although, not surprisingly, many of them were reluctant to engage with foreigners. That seemed to be the case at HmongTown when we asked for help. The couple smiled and did a jazz hands thing that I recognized from Vietnam, which could mean anything from “I’m busy” to “fuck off.”
Jason had moved to the Twin Cities nearly thirty years ago. He had, over time, internalized a bit of “Minnesota nice,” with its pleasant, impenetrable manners. But he was still much like me: short and dark-haired, with a way of holding himself and reacting to people that could read as confident or abrasive depending on the situation, and which people like his wife, whose family had been in Minnesota for generations, would call “East Coast,” and which I would call “Jew.”
He was a chef and cooking instructor at a local community college. Most of his students were non-white or immigrants, many of them Hmong or Vietnamese. But he did not know the gesture. For a moment, he seemed to bristle, the grousing core of his inner Jew burning through the Great Northern geniality. He recovered when a
