<"China Paradise, Take Me Away!"
The Reckoner>
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Chinese takeout food is one of our favorite small pleasures lately, for the Squawker and myself. Our humble little town offers two major Chinese restaurants, both of which are equally comparable in offerings and service, though we gravitate more often to the one that's less than a mile or so from where we live.
Squawker, who's also deeply fond of Eastern culture, loves their Mei Fun dish, and won ton soup, while I'm partial toward the pepper steak, and General Tso's chicken. (Ironically, a quick peek at Wikipedia tells me that while the dish is named after Zuo Zongtang, a Qing Dynasty statesman and leader, it's not known in his home province, Hunan, nor is there any recorded reason for the connection. Ah well, must be a marketing hook, I guess.)
The other week, Squawker dispatched me to get a takeout from our favorite restaurant, China Paradise, after deciding that the kitchen had blown up one time too many. So we loaded up on General Tso, as well as egg rolls, and won ton soup.
Like almost every restaurant staring down the COVID-19 barrel, China Paradise has notably raised its prices, but that's okay. I don't hold it against them, as you'll see shortly. When you generate 100 percent of your income, you do whatever's necessary to maintain it. I get that completely, as someone rowing the same boat, myself.
I came in at 9:30, half an hour before closing, properly masked up, having set aside the 30-odd bucks needed to take our food home. As always, it comes in a big brown grocery bag. Instead of sliding across a counter, the cashier pushes it through an opening in the giant Plexiglass barrier that now shields anyone at the register from potential contact, and/or COVID infection.
The owner's son was lounging in front of the counter, taking five minutes from the usual array of tasks that await prep cooks the world over.
"It's sure pretty quiet now," I said, "but I imagine it was wall to wall, only a couple hours ago, right?"
The owner's son nodded vigorously, and laughed. "Well, yeah, we were really busy. It's like that on Saturday night."
"Better than the alternative, I'm sure," I venture. "When the COVID-19 bomb first dropped."
He nodded, more thoughtfully this time. "Yeah. I mean..." He paused. "That first week in mid-March, nobody came out, nobody ordered anything. Nobody."
"Because people were too afraid, right?"
"Yeah. They were afraid to come out, because they didn't know what was gonna happen. But eventually, we decided to reopen. We figured, 'You can't stay closed forever.'"
"Hence, all this." I gestured at the Plexiglass barrier, and the tables and chairs, now pushed off to the side. Signs posted on the door say, "NO MASK, NO ENTRY," and remind customers to keep their social distance. "I'm really impressed with your setup, I have to say."
"Exactly. We got it up in a week or two, I think." The owner's son paused to reflect once more. "It's funny, because we'd just been to China. We heard about things that people just couldn't imagine."
"Oh, you mean all the drastic measures they took to contain the virus? Like, the bans on funerals, forced quarantines, mobile crematoriums, and all that?" I laughed. "Well, when you're a fascist regime, you can do stuff like that, right? No pesky protesters carrying signs to stop you."
"Yeah, well, you gotta go with the public good, I think." Now it was the son's turn to laugh, if only a bit nervously.
"For sure. Let's hope it happens at the box office in November, and I'm glad to see you're doing so well."
"Oh yeah. The support is still there, and we're still getting it, which is all you can ask."
"For sure," I said. "When all this first hit, I thought of you guys right away, because I knew you were in for some tough times. Glad to see you doing so well."
"Good to see you. Enjoy your food."
<http://www.fade2grey.com/others/red-rockers-2/>
<ii.>
I've been replaying that conversation over and over in my head, especially when you consider that only 30 years ago, Arabs were the villain of the piece in movies and TV - like Runaway (1984), which featured Kiss's fire-breathing bass monster, Gene Simmons, as a stereotypical sort of, "We'll drown you in your own blood" role, amid lots of cackling, and a sea of bad hairdos and jackets with oversized shoulder pass.
In contrast, anything Eastern-related seemed to exert a positive mental gravitational pull. Presumably, that's why a song like the Red Rockers' only major hit, "China" -- which peaked at #53 on Billboard's Top 100, and #19 on the Mainstream Rock Chart, in 1983 -- scored so heavily with the public, back when people waited at midnight for their favorite record store to open, so they could score their latest preferred piece of vinyl.
Funnily enough, those same buyers gave little thought to the raging B-side, "Voice Of America," a blistering critique of Reagan's Central American policy -- the last such blast that an increasingly smooth-sounding Red Rockers would record, as they lost their recorded soul in search of that ever-elusive piece of music industry trout, The Hit Single. But I digress.
All this official anti-Eastern mood feels stranger still, when you consider that only five minutes ago, it seems, the Trump administration was giddily cozying up to China's autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, and lauding him for his Orwellian-style repression of the Uighurs, one it's taken to terrifying heights (as documented in "China Undercover," aired on PBS this spring).
Now that Trump's fortunes have faded, however, he swears to become the toughest taskmaster that China has ever seen, though that remains to be seen, given how much of our national debt it holds ($1.08 trillion, or 4 percent of the total, $25.8 billion, as of April). This is the reality of Trumpworld, though, where all relationships are conditional. Today, you're talk of the town; tomorrow, you're shoved under the bus, with a shoe tread imprinted across your book.
I'm not anymore fond of Xi or his excesses than anybody else, but I really don't see many returns coming from all the overheated rhetoric spewing forth from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What's strange is seeing so many people still buying into it. In the end, though, the most relevant advice may well lie within the last two lines of the Red Rockers song: "Time, the shadow, sings your song/Don't lock it all inside and hide it all away."
I pull into our parking space, and prepare to heft that giant bag of Chinese food, into my grasp. For the Squawker and I, it'll surely hit the spot, and keep the demons of Eastern xenophobia, and the latest shrill blasts streaming from the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue dog whistle at bay, if only for a night. Sometimes, though, that's all you need. -- The Reckoner
<http://www.fade2grey.com/others/red-rockers-2/>
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