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Discovering an ancient Chinese secret
Published: 12/27/2011 1:25 PM
Last Modified: 12/27/2011 3:57 PM


Oh, bring us some sweet-and-sour....

Sunday was the first Christmas Day I have been able to spend with my parents in more years than I care to remember. So, in honor of this momentous occasion, we decided to observe for the first time what is obviously a long-standing Christmas Day tradition in other cultures.

We went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch.

Actually, this isn’t an odd thing for my family to do. My father is a great fan of the Chinese buffet, and we’ve often stopped for a communal meal at this particular establishment – as it is just a couple of blocks from the church we attend – many times since my parents moved back into the area.

However, I can’t recall us ever going out to eat on a Christmas day before. But it is something, obviously, that people do – especially people for whom Dec. 25 is just another date on the calendar.

The Food and Think blog at Smithsonian.com addresses this, in a recent post titled “Why Did Jewish Communities Take to Chinese Food?”

It cites a 1992 study by socialists that stated “No matter how different the cultures may be, they both enjoy similar foods: lots of chicken dishes, tea and slightly overcooked vegetables….Chinese food can be prepared so that it abides by kosher law, and it avoids the taboo mixing of meat and milk, a combination commonly found in other ethnic cuisines.

“In one of their more tongue-in-cheek arguments, (survey creators) Tuchman and Levine wrote that because forbidden foods like pork and shellfish are chopped and minced beyond recognition in egg rolls and other dishes, less-observant Jews can take an ‘ignorance is bliss’ philosophy and pretend those things aren’t even in the dish.”

But one of the conclusions drawn from the study was that, given the communal nature of Chinese food – sharing, whether from family-sized platters on the family’s home table or from the heated trays of a commercial buffet – the experience of eating at a Chinese restaurant is always something of a family affair.

Our fellow diners on Sunday covered a fairly wide range of social and ethnic groups. There was a large table of a half-dozen or so youngish, burly men, plowing enthusiastically through platters of things fried and slathered in candy-colored sauces; an extended family conversing rapidly and continually in Spanish; more than a few solitary diners in their Sunday best, trying not to stare hungrily at the tables populated by families and friends.

One such person was sitting at a table near ours, and whenever I wasn’t engaged in conversation, I would find myself looking directly at him. And each time that happened, he would smile – as if, for a moment, he was a part of one family, any family, on this particular day.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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