Artwork at Blue Asia - Photographed by Suhas Etigunta ↑
First Impressions
Blue Asia sits in the corner of University Commons - a mall strip center with a Sprint store, T.J. Maxx and UPS. The glass storefront is adorned with the text “CHINESE - THAI - SUSHI - HIBACHI” and the glass doors open up into a beautifully modernized, fine-dining establishment.
The restaurant has a yellow hue from the rows of dimmed ceiling lights that illuminate the walnut floors. Aesthetic pieces are scattered throughout the restaurant - an aisle of bamboo stalks, art pieces bearing reflective Chinese characters, and blue and white pendant lights.
Blue Asia elegance is explained by the fact that it is Mr. Ping Lin's eighth restaurant. While Mr. Ping is from China, the restaurant offers a wide range of Asian cuisines including Chinese, Japanese and Thai.
Mr. Ping was gracious enough to participate in an interview despite his plans to travel to China the next morning. He and his wife, who works as a hostess in the restaurant, were going to Fujian, the southeastern area of China where he spent the first two decades of his life.
Mr. Ping's narrative does one thing above all - it depicts the fruits of consistent hard work and dedication to the promise of a better life.
Google Maps Aerial View →
Fujian
Mr. Ping is from a small Fujianese town with a total population of less than 60,000 people, more than 90% of whom are farmers. His parents worked in construction their whole lives and were able to make just enough money to sustain their small family.
The town was surrounded by mountains that limited the fruits and vegetables that farmers could grow, and there were tens of thousands of people living in an area meant to sustain about half of them. The overwhelming population accompanied by the limited rice and grain fields resulted in a harsh food shortage.
"[Imagine] your grandfather owned only like probably 5 acres or 10 acres of land. Your father would have like about 5 or 7 kids and so every kid would not even have like one acre of land. One acre of land can’t grow enough food for the entire family, so some of the kids have to go to a different country and make a living."
People from this Fujianese town initially migrated further south to places such as Malaysia and Singapore before the waves of migration to the United States began. There was only one way to make a living and feed your family - look outward.
← Google Images Map of China Indicating Location of Fujian
Childhood Diet
Growing up, Mr. Ping often found himself eating rice, vegetables, and pork because they were relatively inexpensive and readily available. Because the town he lived in was so close to the ocean, seafood was also an abundant food source. On the other hand, beef and goat were not often consumed because they were more scarce and expensive meats.
Why North Carolina?
“If I knew people somewhere else, I probably would have gone there instead.”
When Mr. Ping came to the United States in 1992, he was just 20 years old. His grandfather and and a couple of his uncles lived in North Carolina. Coming to North Carolina was a decision simply attributed to Mr. Ping knowing people in the area. The Chinese immigrants he knew worked in restaurants and taught him how to do so as well. Because Mr. Ping didn’t know English, working in a restaurant was the best way that he could get a job and start to make some money.
Google Images Rice, Seafood Assortment and Map of North Carolina →
Chinese-American Food and the Question of Authenticity
“Since you work in the kitchen, you don’t have to talk to people and, you know, you just learn how to cook and so you don’t have to speak good English or anything.”
After hearing this, I thought he was maybe one of a small percentage of Chinese immigrants that had to learn how to cook after coming to the United States, but he informed me that most immigrants need to learn how to cook when they come to the United States because the food here is actually prepared with substantially different technique.
Mr. Ping talked about ‘real Chinese food’ being something truly different from what you find in restaurants in the United States. Mr. Ping’s view of authentic Chinese food is more than just about the person that prepares it. He described various aspects that contribute to the preparation of ‘authentic and real Chinese food' including where the vegetables are sourced from, the techniques used, and even what parts of the meat are included. He firmly advocated that I take a trip to China to experience such food if I get the opportunity to do so.
“Over there, people don’t waste any food. They eat the whole thing - whole fish, whole chicken, they don’t throw away anything whether it is skin, bones, or organs. They don’t waste anything. Not like here.”
Never before had I thought about the inclusion of certain animal parts as a criterion towards the authenticity of food. Throughout China’s history, the overwhelming population has created food shortages. For this reason, when food was prepared in China, there was a goal of maximizing the amount of product that can be obtained from any given resource. These practices have trickled down through generations of Chinese people, and Mr. Ping now considers them integral qualities of Chinese cuisine.
Blue Asia’s Menu: “The customer is most important”
Although over 80% of the menu remains constant, Mr. Ping makes small changes to the Blue Asia menu on a regular basis. When I ate there, I was rather surprised that the menus were printed on regular paper amidst the elegance that seemed to emanate from the rest of the restaurant. Mr. Ping explained that he opted for paper to facilitate the transience of the menu. If a certain dish added to the menu is only ordered a couple of times over a certain period of time, it is removed from the menu and replaced by a new dish.
“They [American customers] can order same thing years by years. If a customer is coming, I know their order, they don’t even have to tell me what they like, I know their order,” he said comically.
Mr. Ping dejectedly explained how his efforts to try and promote seasonal items in the past have lead to lackluster results.
“They don’t like to try new things. I tried to put something special, seasonal things on the menu - like in Wilmington, we are close to the ocean so sometimes when there are different seasons, there are different seafoods and I try to put something of those seafoods on the menu but people don’t try it. In China, in real Chinese food, people want to try a lot of new stuff, but right here, people want to stick to the same things.”
Mr. Ping designs the menu for his restaurant according to customer demographic. In his experience opening restaurants, he has noticed drastic changes in the popularity of dishes that result from the ethnic concentrations present in the surrounding neighborhood.
In places where there are a lot of white people, customers purchased a lot of what he described as ‘kitchen food’ - food like sesame chicken, stir-fry noodles, and chicken broccoli that would typically be prepared in a Chinese wok. On the other hand, if the restaurant is situated in an area with a large Black or Hispanic population, these people gravitated towards a lot more of the fried items at the restaurant.
Currently, Mr. Ping’s best selling dish is one of his specials called “Bang Bang Chicken.” The dish includes grilled white chicken served with steamed vegetables that are topped with spicy mayonnaise and eel sauce. He takes pride in his variant of the dish and asserted that he hadn’t seen the dish anywhere else in the restaurants that he visited.
Mr. Ping has formed close relationships with many of his customers - particularly the older individuals. These customers come to the restaurant regularly, confident that they will leave satiated with both food and company.
Blue Asia Menu Sourced from Restaurant Website →
Mr. Ping’s Appreciation
I asked Mr. Ping if he enjoyed the United States.
“I love this country, I really respect this country,” he affirmed. “America is fair. If you are working hard, you can make your dream come true. You can buy a house, bring your family to the United States, and there are people to help you learn how to work at a restaurant.”
Mr. Ping holds a genuine appreciation for the breadth of opportunities in the United States.
When he first moved to the United States, he really missed China. Now he’s gotten used to the new lifestyle and has made friends here. He dimly recalled that he has lost just about all of the friends that he had from back home, but he has been able to replace them with new family and friends.
← Blue Asia Interior - Photographed by Suhas Etigunta
"What is your favorite thing about your job?"
“Nothing - It’s just a job. Not many people like their job, they just keeping doing this for 20 years. They do it for a living. To pay the bills.”
Mr. Ping spends upwards of 70 hours a week in his restaurant, but evidently it isn’t because he loves his job or because he is passionate for cooking - he does it for sustenance. Perhaps that is what amazes me the most. When you love what you are doing, it makes it easy to work hard for it. But to relentlessly work hard with the sole purpose to feeding your family and putting your children through college takes a dedication found in few.
From working in his first restaurant in his early 20s to owning his eighth restaurant at 47 years old, Mr. Ping's journey is representative of the integral element to authentic Chinese cuisine that he described - taking the smallest resources and making the most out of them.