Posted by mamster on Sunday, December 18, 2011
A quick note before we get started. I’m confident that when I write about Japanese, I will make occasional (probably frequent) errors of fact. Please let me know when I do, or if there’s a topic you’d especially like me to cover.
For a shallow person like me, part of the frustration of learning a language is knowing that there are millions of people—not especially smart people, just regular people—who are better at this than I will ever be.
A few years ago I taught myself to sharpen knives. Knife sharpening is a great skill to acquire if you’re a showoff. Anyone could learn to do it with a couple of months of study, but almost nobody knows how to do it already. So with a little time and money, you can become the amazing knife-sharpening neighborhood superhero. Complete with jumpsuit, if that’s your scene.
Language learning is so entirely the opposite. Even if I exceed my own wildest expectations for soaking up Japanese, I’ll still be lapped by throngs of children.
Oh, I had my chance to get an early start. In sixth grade, my best friend Alex, whose mother was Japanese and made exquisite homemade potstickers, taught me to say ohayō gozaimasu (good morning). That was 25 years ago.
Even before that, in fourth grade, my class spent several months studying Japan for Social Studies. Every student had to write a paper on some aspect of Japanese culture, and I somehow ended up saddled with textiles, probably because I had no idea what the word meant and figured it probably involved robots. We were also forced to taste sushi, which was disgusting, and threatened with the fact that Japanese has four different writing systems, and if we were Japanese kids we’d be learning all of them. (Plus, Japan had the gall to make better cars than America. The nerve, right?)
I came away from this believing that Japan was the world’s most annoying country. Since then, my relationship with Japan has followed the classic romantic comedy progression. That country is so annoying! Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Probably because it’s just so annoying. It’s not that I like Japan or anything.
So why am I studying Japanese? Yes, I enjoy the mental workout and the potential to read menus at places that don’t cater to foreigners. But on top of those good reasons, I think, is a more absurd reason.
Before Iris and I went to Japan in 2010, we had a draft list of future dream vacations: Thailand, Rome, Hawaii, Sweden (mainly because we might run into Robyn or Peter Bjorn & John). Japan just happened to be at the top of the list. Once we got back, however, all we wanted to do was turn around and go back to Japan. Those other places? Someday. Maybe. Who cares?
I think about Japan every day, especially about Tokyo and how the city seemed like a funhouse built just to delight us. If you’re in love with someone, or some country, of course you make an effort to learn their language. What kind of jerk wouldn’t make that commitment?
Next up: Let’s get our hands dirty with a bit of hiragana, writing system numero uno.
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Posted by mamster on Friday, December 16, 2011
Every time I’ve traveled to a non-Anglophone country, it’s been like pulling up to a fast-food drive-thru. You give your order and are rewarded with a barrage of incomprehensible static. Please drive forward!
I’ve walked into the same scenario in Japan, Thailand, and France. (At least the food was better than drive-thru quality.) My mouth is pretty good at producing sounds in other languages. I can say the French R and the Japanese R/L and the Spanish…why is it always the R, anyway?
It’s not that people take me for a suave native speaker. My American accent comes with me like I packed it in my suitcase. But they can tell I’m trying. My attempts to speak are proficient enough that they don’t come across as the usual foreigner’s cry for help: Please put me out of my misery so we can switch to English, already!
So I ask, confidently, “Where’s the bathroom?” But if the reply is anything more complicated than a pointed finger, I have to put on my linguistic dunce cap and say, “Sorry, I don’t understand.”
I’m ashamed of this. I love unraveling a mystery, and a language is a box of moving parts. How do they work together? What are the rules and the exceptions?
These puzzle-box aspects of language also, as it happens, had an intuitive appeal to the proto-geeks who invented modern computing. A geek’s got to eat, and as Steven Levy explains in his book Hackers, MIT computer scientists fueled their nocturnal coding sessions the same way their counterparts here and abroad do today: with Chinese food.
Chinese food was a system, too, and the hacker curiosity was applied to that system as assiduously as to a new LISP compiler…. They went back loaded with Chinese dictionaries and demanded a Chinese menu. The chef, a Mr. Wong, reluctantly complied, and Gosper, Samson, and the others pored over the menu as if it were an instruction set for a new machine. Samson supplied the translations, which were positively revelatory. What was called “Beef with Tomato” on the English menu had a literal meaning of Barbarian Eggplant Cowpork. “Wonton” had a Chinese equivalent of Cloud Gulp.
In the 70’s, Calvin Trillin wrote about his fantasy of eating in New York’s Chinatown accompanied by Mao Tse-Tung. Trillin had no sympathy for Mao’s politics (also, Mao was already dead at the time); he just wanted the Chairman’s help translating the specials written in Chinese and posted on restaurant walls. He should have just brought some hackers from NYU.
Well, I want to be my own Chairman. I want to walk in to an izakaya, a Japanese bar, ask about the day’s specials, and order off the wall. Reading, speaking, and listening. Oh, and I want to be ready to do it next summer, because I’m going to be in Japan for a month.
Nearly everything I’ve ever read about learning a language has come from either an expert or an idiot. The expert, found mostly in textbooks, is in the business of teaching you how to get your mouth and your brain around a bucket of new concepts. If you don’t fall asleep or accidentally swear at someone, the expert has done her job.
The idiot appears in books you might actually read for fun. The quintessential language idiot is David Sedaris, who struggled with French under a tyrannical professeur in Me Talk Pretty One Day:
“If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?”
The idiot is an underdog, and we all love rooting for those, so it’s no surprise that Sedaris would cast himself in the role. To Sedaris and to many travel writers, language is a necessary evil, a problem to be mined for jokes, at best. You slog through the language study so you can order the croissant or the gyōza without being reprimanded. And that’s how I saw Japanese before I began studying it: an obstacle between my mouth and the catch of the day.
Then, well, you know. I started liking Japanese. And I thought: how come nobody writes about language the way food writers write about the process of cooking? Lots of great food writing features neither experts nor idiots but talented amateurs who enjoy the process of cooking as much as the end product. Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue can be clownish, sure, but he’s an extremely smart guy and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. When you go down the rabbit hole with Steingarten, you are going to come out knowing the best way to skin, truss, and roast a rabbit.
Amateurs have a special power that experts and idiots lack. Becoming an expert means losing touch with how you do what you do. I know how to speak English. This doesn’t qualify me to teach English, because I’ve completely forgotten what it was like to Dick and Jane my way through a sentence, sounding words out letter by letter.
Admittedly, it’s possible nobody writes about the process of learning a language for the same reason they don’t write about the process of paint drying. So let’s find out!
One of the most frustrating parts of learning anything is seeing someone make it look easy. Well, the amateur knows where it hurts. So over the new few months, I’d like to check in periodically when I encounter something odd, puzzling, or thrilling about the Japanese language. I won’t assume that you have any prior knowledge of Japanese—or even any desire to learn it.
And I promise not to make it look easy.
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Posted by mamster on Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Aren’t low expectations grand? It always makes me nervous to step into a restaurant laden with five-star reviews (I know, I can’t help help peeking). Even a little disappointment is still disappointment. I’d rather go in expecting mediocrity and be pleasantly surprised.
Where am I going with this? Not into a restaurant at all. The other night, I warned Laurie that I would be making that thing she doesn’t like very much. She’s not a huge fan of ground meat other than in burger form, and that thing—moo pad bai grapao—is nothing more than a pile of stir-fried ground pork on a bed of rice, with a fried egg.
It’s a Thai dish, incredibly simple and made with ingredients you probably have lying around. If you don’t have holy basil, use regular basil. If you don’t have pork, use beef. Thai chiles? Serrano chiles. Fish sauce? Well, tough luck. In the end, every grain of rice becomes slick with egg yolk and saucy pork.
Here’s how you make it, courtesy of David Thompson’s Thai Street Food
, the best book of 2010. His version calls for beef, not a bad idea at all, but I’m much more likely to have leftover pork.
Laurie was pleasantly surprised.
STIR-FRIED MINCED PORK WITH CHILES AND HOLY BASIL
Adapted from Thai Street Food
Serves 2
The way this would be done in Thailand is to fry the eggs in the wok, either before or after cooking the rest of the dish. Whenever I fry an egg in a wok, however, I always break the yolk.
4 garlic cloves, chopped
4 to 10 Thai chiles, sliced
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons peanut oil
6 ounces ground pork
about 2 tablespoons fish sauce
pinch of sugar
1/4 cup chicken stock or water
2 large handfuls holy basil leaves
cooked jasmine rice
Stir together the garlic, chiles, and salt. Heat a wok or skillet over high heat, add 1 tablespoon oil, and add the garlic, chiles, and salt. Stir-fry for a few seconds until fragrant, then add the pork. Continue to cook until the pork is cooked and starting to brown. Season to taste with fish sauce and sugar. Add the basil and stock or water and stir just until the basil is wilted. Remove from the heat.
Meanwhile, fry the eggs in the other tablespoon oil in a skillet. The proper fried egg for this dish has a runny yolk but a browned and leathery underside. If you’re a white-bottom fried egg purist, too bad.
Top each bowl of rice with a scoop of pork and broth and a fried egg. Serve immediately. I like to squeeze a lime wedge over the top if I have one on hand. Oh, and please eat it with a spoon.
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Posted by mamster on Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Every week since the Broadway Farmers Market opened, on Mother’s Day, we’ve been buying a bunch of asparagus. And every week, it has met the same fate: roasted, topped with a fried egg, and sprinkled with an immoderate dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
I’m sure the idea didn’t originate in the book Cucina Simpatica, but its recipe can’t be improved upon. Make this, quick, before asparagus season is over.
ASPARAGUS IN BED
Adapted from Cucina Simpatica, by Johanne Killeen and George Germon
Serves 2
1 pound asparagus, trimmed
olive oil
salt
1 tablespoon butter
2 eggs
1 ounce grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Toss the asparagus with a light coating of olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet and roast until tender, about 10 minutes (check it at 8 minutes).
Meanwhile, melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Fry the eggs sunny-side up, sprinkling with salt. Divide the asparagus between two heated plates and top each with a fried egg. Pour a little of the remaining butter from the pan onto each egg. Sprinkle the asparagus and egg all over with the cheese and serve with rustic bread such as Columbia City Bakery’s Walnut Levain.
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Posted by mamster on Wednesday, April 6, 2011
This blog is not known for heart-laid-bare displays of emotion, and I doubt this post will change that, despite the fact that I want to write about how sad I am that my friend Scott died last week.
I’ve known Scott Simpson since 2001 or so, but the last time I wrote about him was when he opened his restaurant Fork in 2006 and I was sort of still writing about Seattle restaurants professionally. What I said then, comparing him to Dumbledore:
Scott Simpson is equal parts serious chef and funny chef. He’s serious in the sense that he can really cook: every mouthful at Fork was delicious and well thought out. But he also has an irrepressible sense of humor: there are lobster corn dogs on the menu.
“Fork seems to be doing well so far,” I added.
Like many irrepressibly creative people, however, Scott was also equal parts jolly guy and sad guy: he was bipolar. Fork was open for a couple of months before he hit a depressive episode, abruptly shuttered the place, and disappeared. There were rumors of his death. It was pretty theatrical.
Then I was walking around Capitol Hill one day and there he was, 200 pounds lighter and talking about opening a new place. Several new places, I think. The guy got wild ideas more often than most people go to the bathroom. Ah, I just remembered: he said he was going to open a molecular gastronomy breakfast joint called Unflappable Jack’s.
He didn’t. Instead, he opened a little burger shack in Ballard called Lunchbox Laboratory. There is no dearth of burger places in Seattle, but this one was always jammed. He made the best milkshakes in town (especially the Boston Cream), and the burgers were like a web page from 1995: constantly under construction. You couldn’t fall in love with any particular burger at Lunchbox, because next time your burger would be 404 and Scott would be on to the next experiment.
Naturally, you could choose from approximately fifty kajillion homemade toppings. He invented the Dork burger, a mixture of duck and pork, and kept playing around with the beef mixture for the regular burger. It really was a laboratory. Tater tots were also served. I think my favorite burger creation of his was the Bobcat Baby, with green chiles, lots of onions, and BBQ sauce.
I just googled the Bobcat Baby, because I couldn’t remember what was on it, and found this photo of the Shroomville USA burger by loyal customer and Flickr guy suomynona. Sample comment: “Also, call me a bad parent… but… I’d trade my first born for one of Scott’s burgers…” Hear that, Iris?
Scott was not the kind of tortured artist who is hard to be around. He was warm, charismatic, and drew people to wherever he was cooking. If he had opened a diner where every dish was served in flames, or a milkshake speakeasy, or a lobster corn dog cart, people would have flocked to it.
Last week, after Scott’s death, the Amster-Burtons went to the new location of Lunchbox Laboratory, which opened a few months ago in South Lake Union (and is still open for business). I didn’t enjoy eating there, even though the milkshakes are still excellent. Seeing Scott in his element was a big part of going to Lunchbox Lab, and it’s hard to imagine looking forward to going back if he’s not going to be there. Maybe (and this, I assure you, is the kind of joke Scott would want people to tell) they should stuff him and use him as a Big Boy-style mascot.
Update 4/8/11: Just in case it wasn’t clear here, I think the new Lunchbox Lab is a great restaurant and everyone who has the means should eat there. I meant that it made me sad to eat there after Scott’s death, not that there was anything wrong with the restaurant, and I hope and expect it will thrive for a long time.
What else can I say? I hate lessons and morals even more now than when I was a kid. Scott Simpson was a great cook and a sweet guy, haunted by fucked-up brain chemistry.
Last night I was listening to Elliott Smith’s Figure 8. Whenever I listen to Elliott Smith, which is often, I sing along with gusto, and I think, “You know what? It’s bullshit that this guy is dead.” That’s the word that comes to mind, every time. Elliott Smith, no longer writing songs? That’s bullshit. Scott Simpson, no longer flipping burgers and coming up with lunatic restaurant concepts? That’s bullshit.
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