Chinese food

I love Chinese food. I love rice casserole with stinky dried fish. I love roasted duck. I love steamed fish with scallions and ginger. I love beef with sour melon. I love noodles with just about anything in it. I especially love dim sum(although I can do without the chicken feet, sorry...but I am starting to eat tripe).

However, I think I have some kind of weird mental block with cooking and eating Chinese food. I don't know what it is, but it's extremely difficult to motivate myself to make any kind of stir fry or soup or whatever. Occasionally I'll buy some greens from Chinatown, or frozen dumplings, but that doesn't really count. I like cooking. But I can't choose to make Chinese food in my house on a regular basis, and it's not like it's any more diffcult to make it than any other cuisine. If you asked me how to make stir-fried noodles, I'd just give you a blank stare.

Maybe it's the fear of messing it up - like I have my grandparents and parents invisibly watching me over my shoulder, and I have all that to live up to. You'd think that it would be easier to cook Chinese food, considering that my grandfather owned a Chinese restaurant and would chop up lobsters for us on Saturday nights when I was a kid. My parents fed Chinese food to me and my sisters while we were growing up - even when we complained about not getting pizza, and they made us black bean pork instead.

Maybe it's the nostalgia. It just doesn't feel right to eat Chinese food without my family. Even when I go out, I'll choose just about any other Asian cuisine over Chinese any day. I only have a vague idea of which restaurants are good in Chinatown, and I haven't done much exploring. And it seems like I only go for dim sum when another family member is present.

Maybe I don't appreciate it as much as I should. Although, as a child, I disliked most of the food that I listed at the beginning, so at least it's a step. Perhaps because I've been eating this food for all my life, it's hard to get perspective on it. Like I'm too close, and it's not something that I think I desire. I was introduced to other Asian cuisines (Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese) much later in life, in college. It was something new, exotic. So I think my relationship to those kinds of foods is different.

Or maybe it's that I'm afraid that whatever Chinese food I'll have will never live up to my expectations. It'll never compare to the memories from my childhood, of what those foods were like. Or maybe they just remind me too much of my childhood - that I rejected these foods in the first place, and I'm just feeling too much guilt.

Perhaps I'm analyzing this way too much.