memories

[calimac]

Having spent Friday evening at a concert recital of emotionally intense contemporary musical theater songs for female voice, and part of Saturday looking up other performances on YouTube, I shouldn't have been surprised when another such song floated into my mental ear. But I don't have a lot of such songs in my regular listening, so I was startled by having another showing up. At first I could just hear tiny fragments, and it wasn't for a while that they coalesced enough that I could identify the song. It was Mirabel's song from Encanto, "Waiting on a Miracle."

Walking through SF's Chinatown, where I've taken to having my pre-concert meals, I saw a sign for a restaurant which I suddenly realized must have been the one where my class had lunch on a school expedition to Chinatown when I was about ten. We visited a fortune cookie factory (not the one you'll see if you go to Chinatown today) and had a dim sum lunch, table-served on a lazy Susan. Perhaps my first experience with Chinese food, close to my first experience with chopsticks - I remember somebody showing me how to hold them, but I don't think that was the occasion - and my first experience drinking what I did not realize was tea. Years later in a conversation I said I'd never had tea, to which the reply was "You have it all the time in Chinese restaurants" and I said "That's tea?" I'd never known what it was.

How did I realize it must be the same restaurant? From the name. It's the Hang Ah Tea Room. I remember noting it at the time, and noting the name because it encodes how to get there: you go up Sacramento Street and then Hang Ah right.

From which I realize that my propensity for making puns predates my supposed introduction to the art form, by my high school science-fiction club, by about ten years.

Comments

[athenais]

I am genuinely amazed you didn't know you were drinking tea years after you'd been drinking it. What did you think the Chinese drink you had in restaurants was?

[calimac]

I dunno. Just some Chinese thing, I suppose.

[sturgeonslawyer]

"I lived in New York. If there's one thing I've learned, it's how people of the Hebrew persuasion eat. I'm gonna take Mrs Meir to a Chinese restaurant."
-- "Richard Nixon" (David Frye)

[calimac]

I must point out, as I have before, that my family never lived in New York, where this custom arose, and the association of Jews with Chinese food was completely unknown to me and not practiced by us or anybody else we knew. In any case there were virtually no Chinese restaurants in the deepest California suburbs, where we lived, in those days.

Even if there were, we probably wouldn't have eaten there. My brothers and I were very picky eaters and Denny's was about the only outside food vendor our parents felt sure of feeding us.