I met Delphine at Namu, a coffee shop two miles away from Neo-China Restaurant. Holding a cup of coffee in her hands, Delphine greeted me and showed me the way around the coffee shop. In an outfit of dark red shirt and blue jeans, she looked quiet and intelligent. It was 3:45 in the afternoon. Every day at 2:30, Delphine gets off work and enjoy her free time before heading back to her restaurant at 4:30. “I often come here during my break,” Delphine told me, “I quite like the back garden here.”
The garden is indeed a place to like. Small and delicate, it had benches and tables thoughtfully arranged on the sides of walkways. We sat on one of the benches, but almost immediately needed to get back inside as it started to rain. Nevertheless, Namu was a lovely coffee shop to be in. It was a little busy on the rainy afternoon, but it wasn’t loud. The lighting was dim, and the wooden furniture and decorations in the space felt warm. Once we finally settled down, Delphine was ready to tell me her stories.
A love for food: “I want to turn my love for food, especially fermentation, into a small business revolving it and sell my products to a broader market.”
Delphine Wang is a second-generation Chinese immigrant. Born and raised in Durham, she has been working as a server for her family restaurant—Neo-China Restaurant—since she was in high school. The restaurant has been around for quite a while. Opened in the 1990s by her parents, the restaurant is older than herself.
“I grew up in the restaurant. It’s my childhood and memory." Delphine recalls that although she didn’t help the family restaurant until she went to high school, she would play, do school work, or just stay with her family at the restaurant. "I’ll come to the restaurant and stay with my family until they finish work in the night. So I have had a lot of memories there."
Growing up in a family where almost everyone works in the restaurant business means she tried a lot of different food. Contrary to the common belief that Chinese people often despise the “Americanized Chinese food,” Delphine told me that she likes them a lot as a kid. “You know, as a kid,” she says, “you like sweet things. So I was like ‘Oh I want General Zuo’s chicken!’ and my dad would say: ‘Why do you eat that? That’s American food.’”
Interestingly, although her childhood favorites were dishes like General Zuo’s Chicken and Sweet and Sour Chicken, Delphine said she likes traditional dishes more now. One of her favorite food is Jiuniang (酒酿), a type of fermented, sweet and sour, soup-like dish in Chinese cuisine. This is something that I’ve noticed to be almost non-present the US, probably due to its bizarre taste and texture. “These were things that my grandmother made,” she said, “and I want to be able to pass down those kinds of recipes through the generations and hold on to those ancient ways of cooking and eating. And I think fermentation and stuff like that are a great way to do that.”
The love for food is a heritage her family gave her. Some people grow up in a restaurant and hate it, but the food is important to Delphine. When I asked what the ideal work for her in ten years would be, she replied that she would love to keep working with food. “I wouldn’t want to still be a server at my family’s restaurant, of course,” she says, “but I want to turn my love for food, especially fermentation, into a small business revolving it and sell my products to a broader market [than my family’s restaurant].”
The challenge of being Chinese American: “I hope that people don’t view me differently just because of my ethnicity. I’m just as American as everyone else.”
Delphine’s father came from Taiwan, and her mother came from Beijing. Her parents met here, in Durham, before they got married. She has an older brother, Jordan Wang, who has been helping the restaurant since he was very young.
“My dad and his whole family came one-by-one to the US mainly for economic reasons. They pursued better life quality and peace away from the turbulent political environment in Taiwan.” She said. “My mom came here by herself. I think she is more of a city girl, and I think she had a pretty good life, it seems, over there in Beijing. But she probably just wanted to see something new, and possibly to have a better life, in a different way, in America.”
Growing up in the US in a first-generation immigrant family is challenging. For Delphine, these are especially true when it comes to identity. “Growing up here in America, I’m ‘the Chinese person’; and whenever I go to China, I’m ‘the American person.’ It was kind of a weird identity crisis, almost, but I’ve kind of learned to deal with that.”
Being a Chinese means sometimes not accepted by the community, even people don’t realize it. Sometimes people just assume she is from China and say things like “your English is so good!” Delphine found these types of comments ignorant and rude, “I was born here,” she explained, “why shouldn’t my English be good?”
This was what Delphine believed to be a “systemic but subtle” way of racism, which is largely specific to Asian Americans. One prominent example is that people often automatically think she is good at math just because she is Asian. “You are taking away my achievement by saying that I’m good at math because I’m Asian, not because I worked hard to be good at math.”
The race issue in the South is especially tricky for Asians because of the black/white binary approach to racial problems. Asians are often left out in discussions, being referred only as “other people of color” with many different ethnic groups without attention to their voices, histories, and real presence. While Delphine pointed out that she identifies with many black problems, and at the same time with some “white privileges” such as not being pulled over by police very often, she also believed that “we have a world of problems specific to ourselves, and they should be talked about in their own space, not just put together with the black/white problems.”
Nevertheless, Delphine identifies more as American than Chinese. She felt more comfortable and at home here at Durham than the few times she visited China. Furthermore, she hasn’t visited Taiwan, where her father’s family come from. That’s why she hoped that people don’t view her differently just because of her ethnicity. “I’m just as American as everyone else,” she said.
The restaurant and the pride: “I wish that we could take more pride in what we are making, in producing food that has good quality, and be able to charge the right price for it.”
Chinese cuisine has had a long history of presence in the US. From Chop suey to General Zuo’s chicken, it is not just the evolution of food, but also the history of people. Opened in the 1990s, Neo-China Restaurant itself captures a decent part of this history. “I don’t think our restaurant’s menu has changed a lot over the years,” she recalled, “not much other than bumping up the price over time.”
Neo-China Restaurant is, in some sense, just another typical Chinese restaurant. The most popular items are the Americanized ones: Sweet and Sour Chicken, General Zuo’s Chicken, fried rice, and Lo Mein. Most customers are either black or white, and not many Asians eat in there. The menu is more of a mixed style, rather than a specific, regional cuisine. “Sometimes I get customers who ask: ‘What region from China is this dish from?’” Delphine explained, “and I can’t really say because it’s not really from any region. Not that I can pinpoint at least, because it’s been so Americanized.”
But there is one point that Neo-China Restaurant is different from many others: it is not take-out, fast food. “A lot of people have the idea that Chinese food is fast food and take out, and that seems like the cultural icon Chinese food has taken in America.” She said. “Sometimes you watch a movie, and you see people watching TV in the movie and eating Chinese takeout or something, and that’s how Chinese food referenced. I think that a lot of Americans expect that, and don’t want to change.” Neo-China apparently does not fit into this category. “Some customers would come in, look at the menu, and say: ‘your food is so expensive.’ But that’s because our restaurant is not fast food. They expect the food to be cheap just because there is a lot of Americanized Chinese food that is cheap.”
Like many other Chinese restaurants, Delphine’s restaurant has “secret dishes” that are not on the regular menu. And her favorite, Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐), is one of those secret dishes. “It’s usually older stuff that the restaurant has taken off the menu, but we can still make it.” Chinese menu, or “secret menu”, is often a menu that is more authentic and tailored towards Chinese customers. It is ironic though, that real Chinese food only lives on a secret menu and has to be requested explicitly, at a Chinese restaurant.
The issue is complicated, and not only caused by customers. Chinese restaurants themselves play an essential role in the way Americans view Chinese cuisine. Delphine said she wished that we could take more pride in what we are making, in producing food that has good quality and be able to charge the right price for it.
Delphine and her brother both wanted to change the course of the restaurant to make it more innovative and more modern. “My brother had tried once before but “failed” in a way, since my family wasn’t ready yet to hand all the control over to him.” But she and her brother both have very similar views about the direction they want the restaurant to go: Making it trendier and more popular among younger people, and making it attract new customers as well as the old. “Whenever I am traveling, I always like to look for the weird and unique places to eat, not something I can see at my hometown.” She wanted her restaurant to be that unique special place. “But since my family was a bit more traditional-minded and they want to keep things simple and familiar, the restaurant is not going in that direction yet.”
“I’m really proud of tradition or ancient history and the roots of China, and I’d love to showcase it.” Delphine told me that if she has her own restaurant, she would like to focus a lot more on traditional Chinese dishes. She also wanted to emphasize more on her origin by having more dishes specific to the regional cuisines from where her family came. One thing is certain, though, that she wanted to move away from more Americanized Chinese dishes.
“When it comes to Asian food nowadays, especially in Durham area, Korean food and Japanese food are very ‘trendy’ now. Even like Vietnamese iced coffee or Thai iced coffee. There’s no such thing like a ‘Chinese iced coffee.’ and when you think about it, there’s not a lot of trendy food when you think about Chinese food or even just Chinese concept, and I’d like to change that. Especially here in America, I’d like to change the perception of Chinese food being just fast food or something like that.” And although now I realize that we both forgot the immensely popular Boba Tea from Taiwan, it takes a lot more than just one item or a few items to promote culture. Many Japanese and Korean restaurants sell their culture as proudly as they sell their food. In that regard, we still have a long way to go.
The closing remarks: “I’m always supportive of something new, something different, and something unique that will change the typical American perception towards Chinese cuisine.”
“If someone is going to open a new restaurant and ask you for some advice, what would you suggest them?” I asked Delphine. She answered that it would depend on a lot of things, like the experience they want to offer, the location they’d like to open it, and so on. “But I’m always supportive of something new, something different, and something unique that will change the typical American perception towards Chinese cuisine. So I would say don’t open another ‘Golden Dragon’ or something like that. I think there has to be a certain level of desire to use the restaurant as like a wheel for social change, and I’ll really like to see a restaurant that showcases more traditional food and especially things that I might even don’t know, just being creative about it. So create something new that still has Chinese root, but make it modern. We see that in French cuisine all the time, but it’s something that we don’t often see in Chinese cuisine.”