9 Quotes by Kirstin Chen

Haven't you learned by now that he's as powerless as the rest of us? We're at the Party's mercy. If only we'd accepted that from the start.

The mixture, Ahkong's creation, was sweet and tangy and savory- a comforting, full-bodied flavor like burnt sugar, or brown butter that contrasted sharply with the dancing bubbles on my tongue.

The wall by the main entrance was plastered with the usual propaganda images of rosy-cheeked peasants and brave soldiers waving their fists in the air. Passing over the slogans urging her to "Be a Sputnik, Not an Oxcart!" and to "Stop American Aggression, Liberate Taiwan!" she searched the news reports and found herself staring at her very own face, rendered in thick black brushstrokes below the words, "Missing Girl, Big Reward".

I described Ba's dream of making soy sauce a staple for Western cooks. "He makes a stellar boeuf bourguignon with light soy sauce in place of salt," I told the girl. The delicate flavors of our sauce enhanced the rich umami taste of the meat. Our sauce rounded out the stock, highlighting the bright, acidic tomatoes, preventing the red wine from overwhelming the dish.

Real soy sauce is as complex as a fine wine- fruity, earthy, floral also can, lah." Uncle Robert pointed out the lively acidity of the light soy sauce in comparison to the rich, mellow sweetness of the dark one. Light soy, he explained, was used for seasoning and dipping; dark soy was used for cooking because its flavors developed under heat.

Once people saw how a single teaspoon can bring out the fragrance of scallion and ginger and garlic, or how a light coating can amplify the smokiness of tender roast meat,"- here, he bunched up his fingertips and brought them to his lips-"how could they turn away?

The hawker center was a large, open-air hall that housed four dozen independently owned food stalls, each specializing in a single signature dish, from barbecued stingray coated in fiery, pungent shrimp paste to Hokkien mee, a mixture of yellow and rice noodles, fried with eggs and then braised in rich, savory prawn stock.

As we followed, she listed all the dishes Auntie Tina had ordered: crispy eel in sweet sauce, smoked duck two ways, hand-pulled noodles with crab roe- "luckily we had enough pregnant crabs on hand!"- and others I could not decipher from their poetic yet opaque Chinese names: squirrel-shaped Mandarin fish, eight treasure rice, four happiness pork.

Before long our entire table was covered in food: an earthenware ramekin of pearly-pink prawns bathed in garlic butter; translucent, paper-thin slices of cured ham fanned out on the plate; tortilla espanola with nuggets of potato and sweet onion; candy-stripe beets studded with goat cheese and almond slivers; slow-cooked short ribs almost silky in their tenderness; thick chorizo stew.