Fried Rice and Long Life

By Kenny Ng

The constant movement of a lazy susan spins in my mind on an image of my grandma turning a dish in the silent act of service to say: eat more, this is for you, so eat more. Fried rice felt like a treat, a fast-pass to bank when bowls of white rice were routine.

When the daze of being in a new place built often around a baseline of survival did not leave room for the language of dialed-in care, many Chinese immigrants over the decades still set aside time for one of the primal ways we spend our lives together: gathered around a table to eat. 

I had dinner with my grandparents every Sunday night when I was growing up in the suburbs of San Francisco. We ate almost exclusively at the same local Cantonese restaurant that became like a weekend home, comfortable enough that I would watch “Malcolm in the Middle” with my brothers in the back room before the meal was brought out. 

Staple memories came in clay pots, hot pots and on sizzling slabs. There were black bean clams, salt and pepper pork chops, garlic pea shoots and braised fried tofu in a brown sauce of some kind. 

The constant movement of a lazy susan spins in my mind on an image of my grandma—who next to my grandpa was effectively mute—turning a dish towards me in the silent act of service to say: eat more, this is for you, so eat more. I was the youngest grandchild so my grandpa would often ask me if we should order more as the second round of dirty plates began to clear. 

One of his first suggestions would always be minced beef and shredded lettuce fried rice—a dish I loved as a kid but would only sometimes get because fried rice felt like a treat, a fast-pass to bank when bowls of white rice were routine. But with decades of distance, I know the emblem of what he was offering really was his care. 

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Fried rice is thought to have originated in the city of Yangzhou in the eastern Jiangsu province of China, northwest of Shanghai. Situated between the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal, it’s a region known for its technique-driven and imperial-style Chinese cooking due to the frequency of lavish meals that accompanied the visits of ancient emperors, dignitaries and officials in the pivotal port between the north and south that acted as a political and economic center propped up by its salt trade. 

Seen now as more of a modernized ancient city than a portal into China’s past, Yangzhou became a hub for water transportation and the salt trade by the end of the 3rd century. That brought forth foreign chefs and their distinctive cooking styles which became part of Yangzhou food culture—a mix of flavors and ingredients focused on adaptability around fresh ingredients that represented the larger cornerstones of its cuisine. 

Besides technique, an emphasis on balance and harmony with an almost artful reverence for the poetry of food is centered here, explaining why the stories behind many of its signature dishes sustained the voyage of time. 

During the Sui Dynasty, fried rice is said to have been ushered in by Emperor Yang who loved the dish. It was then adopted by peasants and among the masses in the 6th century when China had become unified. It was a culinary solution to using up leftovers and avoiding waste amid economic inequality after nearly four centuries of division. 

And so, the spirit of fried rice was born out of what most immigrants do and have always done when faced with the slow fade of hope in the lived reality of settling in a new land: Turn the scraps of what they have into something notable enough to puncture through plastic of being unseen. The scraps in this case are day-old rice, eggs, scallions, and a throw of vegetables and proteins. Sometimes oyster sauce, or soy sauce, or more classic with just salt. Endless variations build on this from the simple—sesame oil, Shaoxing wine, garlic—to the luxury of XO sauce or cloud of fragrance basket-steamed inside a blanket of lotus leaves. 

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The Yangzhou Cuisine Association even has a standard rubric for a proper fried rice down to recommended colors of ingredients kissed through the wok—including shrimp, scallops, chicken, Chinese ham, sea cucumber, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and peas. In 2014, then-first lady Michelle Obama requested the dish specifically at a banquet held in her honor during a visit to China, still a staple on menus to welcome special guests. 

By the time Yangzhou (or Yangchow, as it’s often seen on menus) fried rice was popularized in the U.S. in the 20th century, Chinese food and the immigrants who came to this country and cooked it bent towards American palates as a means to get by in the kitchens where their work and the dreams they came with were quarantined. Fried rice was embraced in the cage of cheap comfort food, colonized under the fear of MSG that still curbs a perception of Chinese food as synonymous with takeout. But the commodified story of boxed-up fried rice as a background component to a combo meal betrays the depth in variety carried on the tongues of tradition for centuries. 

In large banquet dinners during celebrations like weddings, Chinese New Year, milestone birthdays and post-funeral feasts in Chinese families, fried rice is one of the last courses to come out alongside a platter of noodles, often served in progression to invoke longevity and the endurance that a long life requires. In function, they are the sweeping final bites to ensure that family and friends do not leave needing anything more in the moment, a failsafe of nourishment in the maze of what we cannot control in life beyond the present. 

Banquet fried rice is usually a version with dried scallops, gai lan stems, sometimes shrimp and just egg whites for a more elegant appearance. The lore goes that this style originated in the 1980s by a Hong Kong billionaire who asked his chef to prepare a fried rice with less oil and less salt on doctor’s orders, kicking off a Cantonese dining trend more in line with what was viewed as healthy at the time. 

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“Fried rice is always a wonderful story of how different flavors and different cultures and different cooking styles come together,” says chef Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen in New York City. Photo by Kenny Ng.

In many ways, fried rice is more of a method than a recipe. It can be regional or as specific as a household whose main approach flows from utilizing whatever you have to move things forward with the incremental possibilities in a bowl of rice. 

“Fried rice is always a wonderful story of how different flavors and different cultures and different cooking styles come together,” says chef Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen in New York City. “Because a lot of the way foodways works is: When people move from country to country or from region to region, they bring with them their ideas of how to cook and their techniques when they aren't able to bring their ingredients.”

Food reveals our history in clues of a country that often forgets it. Chinese immigrants took to operating and cooking in restaurants when other jobs were not available to them, in the years they were stranded after building the transcontinental railroad, forced to adapt the ingredients they couldn’t come with to appeal to American mouths. To survive in an economy that excluded them, in a country that no longer needed them, versions of fast food fried rice were served in a barter to get by. 

And what do we lose beyond culinary history when the lineage of a dish falls into the hyphenated details of a society in which it’s devoured? In the ongoing negotiation of what can be preserved in the freedom and brutality of migrating, in moving toward the horizon of an unfamiliar life, we hide what we cannot take with us in the gaps between the grains of rice. That act of burrowing the details of our identities in the knowledge of what we can make with our hands to sustain each other is so often, in diasporic cultures especially, what the provenance of food contains. 

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The last time I saw my grandpa before he passed was at the restaurant where I’d grown up eating those weekly meals. But this dinner during a trip home at Thanksgiving, it was just me, my parents, my grandma and my grandpa. He had developed a habit by this point of falling asleep at the table toward the end of a meal. He wasn't out cold, but his eyes would shutter closed, his head dipped low, and lips went limp like his body had pulled into low power mode to conserve what energy was left after just nearly a century of living. 

During that last supper, my grandma told me in a lull while he rested to her right that grandpa had been talking about how the fried rice I make is really good. I had, at that point, never made fried rice before. I had made him a chicken curry that he liked, I’d made various sides at Thanksgiving he enjoyed, but not fried rice. My grandpa was a stubborn man whose headstrong nature and openness in expression could upend a meal, and I knew better than to contradict him. If he said I made great fried rice, let me give you the recipe. I imagined in the fog of his memories at 98, it was just the mixed-up consciousness of my requests for minced beef fried rice on those Sunday evenings as a kid. As we waited for dessert that night, he asked me to come home more often, and I told him I'd be back for Christmas in a few weeks. 

The next time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed, alive but unresponsive. When I showed up from Los Angeles, my dad told him I'd arrived in his ear. He wasn’t awake. He was on a lot of morphine to ease the pain. Eyes sealed shut, his arm raised up like a reflex, sprung from the stores of what our bodies remember even in the suffocation of sterile white rooms. I stood next to his bed and put my hand on his head. I thought about how I never got to make him that fried rice he manifested in a vision the last time we ate together. He died the next morning. 

The following week was a parade of extended relatives who'd come to pay their respects. Large family meals followed every day, gatherings equal part in honor and celebration of a full life just passed. And there was fried rice. Each table was circled by the spirit of a man who had left behind more than just stale memories, more than just leftovers. It was a fitting farewell for the figurehead at the dinner table over all those years.

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In the past year during a pandemic, I’ve learned to make a pretty good fried rice. I think of my grandpa whenever I am taking out the cooked rice from the fridge, scrambling the eggs over high heat, and tossing scallions and shrimp or sliced leeks and diced duck around the wok. In the motions of assembling the components, I layer visions of how he folded his life into a pocket of Chinatown in San Francisco. And I think about how those Sunday night dinners were a weekly practice to hold down a strange world with at least familiar food. 

When I think about how most memories of my family situate themselves in the archive of a feast, I realize what we really gave each other was our time. That in the chaos of the sprint to create something from nothing in this lifetime, sitting down to eat together is an offering of time, and that the food we feed our bodies is where our ancestors might still linger once they run out of it too. 

It wasn’t anything fancy but the ritual of how we ate stacked up to much more than what could be captured by a lens and good lighting in the reverie of how we come to be. In the absence of language, the vernacular of showing up to the table week after week was a visible manner of communicating care in the osmosis of what we share around a meal. And by the time the fried rice came to the table, we were always getting to the bottom of the bowl, asking each other if we’d had enough to eat.