1992: Cultural Brokerage

David Chang's China Club, Drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph in March, 1992 Gourmet.

     Gourmet is an aggregate of culture brokers.   A culture broker bridges, links, mediates or interprets one culture to another.   Writers like Fred Ferretti and Madhur Jaffrey employ their knowledge of Asian cultures and journalistic skills to explain, respectively, Hong Kong, and Indian food, to the upper middle-class reader of Gourmet.  Restaurant reviewers like Carolyn Bates perform the same function for multiple Asian cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Viet-namese and so-on.  Restaurant proprietors are also culture brokers, albeit with a different set of skills.  They must perform their cooking and present their food in a manner palatable to those in search of continuity with the food from "back home," and those in search of "but not too hot."   Culture brokers are sometimes demeaned by one or both of the cultures they mediate.  The term "marginal man" emphasizes their position at the edges, away from the center.
     How does one become a culture broker?  Immigration and marriage are two foundational steps.  Many proprietors found themselves opening a restaurant to feed fellow immigrants, and gradually evolved their food and decor to attract a wider audience.  Living on three continents, Madhur Jaffrey, author and actress,  represented Indian culture in the food at Dawat.  Fred Ferretti's wife was Chinese, as was Cafe Kati owner Kirk Webber's.
     Ferretti's "Rediscovering Hong Kong," (There's that nostalgia again.)  alerted me to other culture brokers, lurking just offstage.   He wrote And atop the Old Bank of China Building in the patch of Hong Island known as Central, The China Club has just opened its doors to its re-creation of an Art Deco restaurant of Shanghai: a perfect pastiche of antique Ching Dynasty furniture with 1920s fans and stuffed sofas.  The photographs accompanying the essay illustrated The China Club's dining room.  The China Club was the creation of David Tang, a culture broker of the highest order.  Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Tang was educated in England.  Fluent in both Cantonese and the King's English, he created the luxury lifestyle brand Shanghai Tang.  An ardent patron, collector and dealer in contemporary Asian art, he's described as part scholar-poet-philosopher and part British dandy, almost a Falstaff.  He describes himself as having had to relearn his Chinese-ness after returning from England. Created well before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997,  Tang's China Club became the haunt of movers and shakers of old Hong Kong, the mainland and the international community.  So Tang is a triple-culture broker.
     I visited the China Club in 2010.  I was the guest of a Hong Kong born college classmate,  a member of both the club and "Old Hong Kong."  She, too, was a culture broker, attending college in the United States where she was the first Chinese person with whom I'd ever inter-acted.  While raising her sons to be equally comfortable in China and the U.S, she, as did David Tang, changed her focus from the West back to China.  Like Tang, she thought we, as American visitors, would find the China Club appealing.  We sat at the table in the center of the photograph in the article, reproduced in my sketch above.  Did the ghost of Irene Corbally Kuhn murmur that Shanghai of the 1920's had come back to life?  But wait, there on the wall is that portrait of Mao on a motorcycle.  Not all culture brokers have an ironic sense of humor.

     But that was in the unseeable future.  In 1992 I had become rather like a Chinese scholar-painter.  Hadn't I withdrawn from the hurly-burly of the working life?  While the children were at kindergarten and pre-school, I took classes at the Worcester Art Museum School, and made a run at finishing my dissertation.
     We took the children to Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod, home to generations of my mother's ancestors.
     Thanks to Dick's parents who babysat the children, we spent some of April in Paris.  Here Gourmet's Paris Journal was indispensible, sending us to Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet and other hidden treasures of Paris.
      The Pig Roast and Christmas Open House were well established, even as hamburgers and hot dogs were added for the addition of our children and their friends.
   
New York

Honmura An at 170 Mercer Street is now Niko.

Shaliga Thai Cuisine at 834 Second Avenue is now SUBWAY.

Dawat at 210 East 58th Street is still Dawat.

Tse Yang at 34 East 51st Street is closed.

San Francisco

Cafe Kati at 1963 Sutter Street became Roostertail in 2011.

Los Angeles

Ocean Seafood Restaurant at 747 North Broadway is still Ocean Seafood.

Mandalay at 611 North La Brea Avenue is now Cube Cafe and Marketplace.

Note: The China Club now has a branch in Beijing.