The Desk Dispatch: China View Restaurant [Permanently Closed]

Christoph Tsang-Grosse writes of attempting to know his grandfather by visiting his closed restaurant.

Wanting to be one thing is a desire close to my heart; it’s a desire I knew especially well as a child. I’m a mixed person of fragmented ethnic identity: finding strength, beauty, and perspective in occupying liminal space, of not knowing what an ancestral homeland means if I have so many, has always meant understanding myself through food—the food I eat, the foodways of a world endlessly and irrevocably in contact in manners both violent and pleasurable. I never quite know what to claim, what I’m allowed, but rather than throw up my hands, I claim and attempt to clarify myself through it all. I used food and flavor to examine myself in a 2021 essay called “On Flavor.”

I always want to read about how others use food for the same. In the following essay, writer Tsang-Grosse—whose work centers around diasporic foods and the communities that form around them—pulls at so many threads that are parts of my personal fascinations: Long Island, mixed identity, gender, language. I hope you find it as stunning as I did. An archive of their work can be found on Substack. They are also one of the editors and writers of the book Made Here: Recipes and Reflections from New York City’s Asian Communities.

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“China View Restaurant [Permanently Closed]”

By Christoph Tsang-Grosse

The phone had been ringing on and off for the last several hours. Jimmy Tsang answered in English, scribbled down a takeout order, and shouted to the kitchen in Chinglish: beef chow mein, spare ribs, shrimp in lobster sauce, and two orders of egg rolls. His older brother, You Mon, sauntered about the low-lit dining room, taking orders from the Long Island families who came to China View Restaurant to celebrate life’s milestones. This was a white tablecloth restaurant. Pagoda lanterns accompanied each booth, which some staff thought were tacky, but playing into stereotypes was good for business. Tong Tsang, stirring a barrel full of duck sauce in the basement, relayed a message to his youngest son through one of the line cooks: “Aiyah… go remind Jimmy to add the free fried wonton noodles to the bag!”

A recipe for duck sauce: fill a 55-gallon drum with applesauce. Add an untenable amount of red food coloring. Sweeten to taste with saccharin tablets poured directly from their bottles. Serve with fried wonton strips. 

Jimmy and You Mon’s three sisters, Susie, Sui Ling, and Lucy, were behind the strip mall dumpster diving for unsold paperback books that the neighboring pharmacy often threw out. You Mon stifled a yawn—he and his brother had spent the night at the ngau se (牛舍), or cowhouse, the staff boarding hovel down the road. They had been kept up all night by the revelry of their bunkmates, some of them their distant uncles, bellies out, chain-smoking, drinking, and gambling after a long shift at the premiere Chinese restaurant in Plainview, Long Island. Tong would drive everyone back to Chinatown Sunday night in time for family dinner on Monday, his only day off; father, “shuttle bus” driver, and restaurant partner. 

For over 60 years, China View Restaurant served a robust menu of prototypical Cantonese-American dishes to the residents of Plainview, becoming a mainstay in the community’s Chinese food canon. I like to picture myself nursing a drink at the bar, staring at the prosperous idols and Chinatown bric-a-brac nestled between bottles. Tong was my grandfather. I never met him; he died in 1983 when my mother and her siblings were teenagers. The restaurant, of which he was part-owner, closed in 2015. I never got to visit. 

It’s Christmas and I’m languishing at my mother’s dining table after a third round of food, imagining my uncles working in the restaurant in their youth. Lucy and her siblings are regaling me with tales of their late father, my gung gung, and the place he worked during his life in America. Stories are the only way I’ve found to chip away at the proverbial wall that conceals my ancestry, and I am intent on listening. 

A recipe for ancestral ambiguity: mix Hakka and Han Chinese blood. Migrate to America. Survive for at least two generations. Add German blood and allow mixture to assimilate. 

To be mixed-race and third-culture is to hoard both treasure and discordance in spades. I have the boon of my Cantonese and Bavarian cultures, as well as the American one I grew up in, to chameleon between. It dawned on me young that my cousins, with their almond eyes and dark hair, didn’t have this particular—that is to say: white—privilege. Yet from all of these cultures, I am unmoored. My Cantonese knowledge is limited to swearing, and I can direct German tourists around town. The American “Dream” (myth that it is) manifested on my childhood dining table, a rather cacophonic menu of dad’s Spätzle, mom’s stir-fries, and Costco’s frozen egg rolls. 

A de-cultured childhood in suburban Philly saw me trading identity for peer palatability—oh, how I longed to be just one thing. I wanted an easy-to-digest background, one where I wouldn’t have to shirk my mother’s culture to escape jokes about eating people’s pets. I identified as German first, followed by the monolithic Asian when pressed, hoping the dilution might elicit less friction. When visiting family in Manhattan Chinatown, I’d ignore the yum cha options presented to me; I subsisted on white rice with soy sauce, scared that if I enjoyed this bounty I’d become irrevocably Chinese. Mealtime was cause for dissonance. In eating one thing, I thought I could control who I was. 

After moving to New York City, I lamented the time spent starving myself of my heritage. Reconstituting this part of my identity seemed simple now that I lived a short subway ride from my mother’s childhood home. I hung around Chinatown like a happy rat, gnawing on foods I once avoided, feeling adept at navigating the area and myself. Still, I felt out of my depth. Without assuredness of my family history, these attempts to reach through the veil felt superficial.

Around this time I began building a life around food, filling my apartment with the smells of Bavarian and Cantonese cooking, but primarily harnessing its potential for cross-generational exploration. I suppose that’s why I made the trek from Brooklyn to Plainview: to seek out the antecedents that comprise who I am. 

Still, I don’t know what I expected to feel standing in the parking lot of a Long Island strip mall. I’d hoped my ancestral ambiguity, sometimes a murky cloud hanging over my identity, other times a brick wall, would disperse or crumble into dust. My gung gung and late po po would appear, arbiters of the Chinese culture my adolescent self repressed. They’d scold me in a language I don’t understand, and I’d welcome it—after all, how better to connect with one’s forebears than immigrant guilt?

I stop trying to see ghosts in the suburbs. Thanks to a review by “Tracy K.” (until now, I never considered reading online reviews of a shuttered restaurant criteria for self-exploration), I have a recent photo of the facade. The snow mats my hair as I sheepishly hold up my phone, imposing it where China View used to be, now a Thai spot, sandwiched between an Italian joint and a Petco. 

I wonder what gung gung would think of his restaurant’s new neighbors—could he comprehend the concept of P.F. Chang’s? What would he think of his grandchild browsing the nearby Sephora for mascara, spending more time in line there than searching for his restaurant? Would he accept me for who I have become? Would he regale me with tales of his journey to America, and the adversity he faced? I don’t speak Cantonese—would we even understand each other? 

Everything I have learned about my Toisanese grandfather, I have learned through stories. How, as a Hong Kong merchant marine, he jumped ship (a common practice) in 1940s New York and was deported, only to craftily return to the States a few years later with my grandmother in tow. Or how he levied his influence to sponsor dozens of people to come to America through Chinatown’s community associations; at his funeral, the line of cars snaking down Mulberry Street numbered 50 to 100, depending on who you ask. An outpouring of community, to thank him for his guidance.

To support his family gung gung had to become a “link in the long chain of Chinese American resistance in twentieth-century New York City,” as Alvin Eng writes of his family’s laundry business. For Tong, this involved another venture common for immigrants of his standing: hospitality. 

During the Chinese Exclusion Act immigration ban, stateside Chinese could receive “merchant status” by opening businesses, allowing them to bring family over to work (albeit with onerous barriers to entry); one could only qualify as a “major investor” of a “high-grade” restaurant. Multiple immigrants would pool resources to fulfill these requirements, boring holes in anti-Asian sentiment-turned-law as a sort of resistance through entrepreneurship. Codified xenophobia is, of course, to be subverted and destroyed. My gung gung walked this path, and in the mid-1950s became a partner of China View Restaurant. 

To pedestal my grandfather in silent reverence for his “immigrant resilience” is to dilute the person he was and romanticize his labor, struggle, and personal shortcomings in a disenfranchised immigrant America. But for these same reasons, we, his progeny, are privileged to realize our own identities.

A recipe for cultural catharsis: Interview the prior generation. Open yourself to a flood of memories, good and bad, re-experienced in real-time. Go through boxes of old photos together. You might feel a sense of rooted belonging.

I wager gung gung would have frowned upon his grandchild embarking on his work commute just to prove their “Chinese-ness.” Maybe he would tell me that aimlessly wandering on Long Island in the snow was unnecessary, that I am enough. 

My brick wall, my murky cloud, born of the pervasive American need to label, dissipates as I examine sepia photographs, or listen to my mother speak about her father’s epic funeral. We often forget our ghosts, to quote poet Jane Wong; to know gung gung, even in spirit, is to better know myself. I can embody none of these identities separately because I am all of them at the same time.

This Friday, The Desk Book Club for paid subscribers will discuss the second half of Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen. Writing down my notes inspired thoughts on the word “spatter” as applied to both hot oil and blood; women’s appetites; and more. I’m looking forward to more discussion!

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