每一盤番茄炒雞蛋都是一個華裔移民的懷鄉(xiāng)故事

Over the past two years of writing this column about immigrants and their food, I’ve cooked with a Filipina nurse who used scalpels to debone chicken; a Senegalese family that eats out of the same dish to emphasize everyone’s responsibility to one another; a Mexican Popsicle maker who tried to heal the ache of her divorce by sharing literal sweetness. There was a Slovakian pierogi master whose last act before leaving for the United States was opening the barn doors to set her animals free; a Polish vegetarian who learned to make bigos, a meatfest of a stew, just so she could share her mother’s recipe; and a Palestinian family that lives the American dream by hosting a Thanksgiving every night.

過去兩年，我一直在撰寫這個有關(guān)移民及其食物的專欄。在此期間，我和許多人一起做過飯，有用解剖刀給雞肉去骨的菲律賓護士;在同一個盤子里吃飯、以強調(diào)對彼此責任的一家塞內(nèi)加爾人;一位試圖通過分享實打?qū)嵉奶鹈雷涛秮頊p輕離婚痛苦的墨西哥冰棒制造商。還有一位制作pierogi(一種類似餃子的半圓餡餅——譯注)的斯洛伐克大師，在動身去美國前所做的最后一件事是打開畜欄的大門，將她的動物放生;一名波蘭素食主義者學習如何做bigos燉肉，只為分享母親的菜譜;一個巴勒斯坦家庭通過每晚吃感恩節(jié)食物實現(xiàn)自己的美國夢。

As a writer, I wrote this column feeling honored to be entrusted with their stories. And as the child of Chinese immigrants, I wrote this column looking up to my subjects — as I do to my own parents — for carrying the burden of living between two worlds. For finding their footing while having to bridge where they’re from with where they are.

作為一名作者，在撰寫這些專欄時，我為他們能將這些故事托付給我而感到榮幸。而作為中國移民的后代，我寫這個專欄也是在向自己的寫作對象致敬——就像我對自己的父母那樣——因為他們承受著在兩個世界之間生活的負累，在找到立足點的同時，還不得不在自己的過去和現(xiàn)在之間搭起橋梁。

I’ve been thinking about this because this is my last column for the magazine — another dream project beckons, which I hope you’ll hear more about soon — but also because of tomatoes and eggs.

我一直在思考這點，因為這將是我為這個雜志撰寫的最后一篇專欄文章——另一個夢想計劃在向我招手，我希望你們會很快聽到它的更多消息——同時也和番茄雞蛋有關(guān)。

A few weeks ago, I felt a sudden, irresistible craving for Chinese stir-fried tomatoes and eggs. A dish of savory, sweet-tart tomato sauce folded around soft-scrambled eggs, it hits every pleasure center in the brain and makes it easy to scarf down a lot of rice, fast. When I worked in Chinatown, it was a staple of every $4 buffet in the neighborhood. A version of it with beef was my younger brother’s favorite food when we were growing up, and by “favorite food,” I mean it was basically the only thing he would eat for the first eight years of his life. (So much so that once, for some reason clear only to jerk older brothers, I squirted ketchup into his apple juice to make fun of him. We fought, he won, I drank the juice.)

幾周前，我突然特別想吃中餐里的番茄炒蛋。這道菜肴有酸甜美味的番茄汁液裹著輕炒的雞蛋，會激發(fā)全身的愉悅感，讓你很容易就快速吞咽下許多米飯。我在唐人街工作的時候，這是那個社區(qū)的4美元餐車售賣的主打產(chǎn)品。再往里面加入牛肉，就是小時候我弟弟最喜歡的一道菜。這里的“最喜歡的一道菜”是指在他在人生的頭八年里，這基本是他唯一會吃的食物。(以至于有一次，為了某種顯然只有混蛋哥哥們才會知道的原因，我把番茄醬擠到了他的蘋果汁里，就為捉弄他。我們打了一架，他贏了，我喝了那杯果汁。)

It’s the kind of dish that people say is the first thing they learned to cook, that fed them when they left home, that inspires sudden and irresistible cravings. But when my hunger struck, I had no idea how to make it. I looked in my Chinese cookbooks, but it appeared in exactly none of them. Calling up my mother to ask her, I knew, would be like asking her to describe how to tie shoelaces: almost impossible to articulate, buried so deep in her muscle memory. In Chinese cooking, this dish is like air, present and invisible.

人們提起它的時候，會說那是自己學會的第一道菜，在他們離家以后讓自己填飽肚子的菜，會激發(fā)突如其來又不可抗拒的渴望的菜。但是當我突然想吃這道菜時，卻不知道怎么做。我查閱了自己的中文烹飪書，發(fā)現(xiàn)沒有一本收有這個菜譜。我知道如果打電話給我母親詢問這道菜，就跟讓她描述如何系鞋帶一樣：幾乎是不可能講清楚的，這東西已經(jīng)完全變成了她的肌肉記憶。在中餐里，這道菜就像是空氣，時刻存在，卻不可見。

I knew that I wasn’t going to figure out a recipe for it, because I realized that my not knowing how to make this dish was akin to my Cantonese getting rusty, to not knowing when Chinese New Year is every year. It’s because I’m not an immigrant, only a son of immigrants, and so I know only the frayed facsimile of the world that my parents grew up in. Being part of a culture without living in it is like being in a long-distance relationship. You can make it work with grand displays of affection and splendid visits, but you don’t get to have coffee together on a Sunday morning — the little things, the stuff daily life is built on. I knew that if I were to have this recipe, it would have to come to me through my people or not at all.

我知道我自己整不出這個菜譜，因為我意識到我不知道怎么做這道菜，就跟我的廣東話越來越生，跟我每年都不知道什么時候是農(nóng)歷新年是一樣的。那是因為我本身不是一個移民，只是兩個移民的兒子，所以我對父母長大的那個世界只有已經(jīng)磨損的二道傳輸?shù)恼J知。作為一種文化的一部分卻不生活在其中，就像是處在一段異地戀情里。通過大肆表白感情和偶爾華麗現(xiàn)身，它也能維持，但你無法在周日早上一起喝杯咖啡——做那些小事，那些讓日常生活得以建立的事。我知道我要想知道這個菜譜，就得從我的同胞那里獲取它，沒有其他方法。

So I went online and found recipe after recipe, with an eye toward cobbling together my own. I read the cookbook author Genevieve Ko’s version and took from it the idea of just lightly cooking the eggs before finishing them in the tomatoes. I read Chichi Wang’s version, on Serious Eats, and lifted her brilliant use of fragrant rice wine in the eggs and ketchup in the sauce. I read dozens of blog posts, mostly relating the same story over and over again — a story of nostalgia, of Mom’s cooking, of home. I read the comments, also telling the same: Thank you, thank you, I’ve missed this dish, thank you, thank you. And after all this reading, I started to realize what I was really seeing: people, just like me, missing a knowledge that they felt should be in their bones, coming to someone else’s recipes to connect them to where they came from while being rooted in where they are.

所以我上網(wǎng)一個接一個地找，同時也留心拼湊自己的版本。我看到了烹飪書作者吉納維芙·柯(Genevieve Ko)的做法，從中學到在把雞蛋倒入番茄里之前，只需輕輕翻炒一下雞蛋。我還看了希希·王(Chichi Wang)在“嚴肅飲食”(Serious Eats)網(wǎng)站上的版本，也從里面學到了一些很棒的點子，比如在雞蛋中加入米酒，在醬汁中加入番茄醬。我讀了幾十篇博客文章，它們大多數(shù)都是在一遍遍講述著同樣的故事——一個懷鄉(xiāng)的故事，想念母親做的飯，想家。我讀了下面的評論，也是一樣的調(diào)調(diào)：謝謝你，謝謝你，我很懷念這道菜，謝謝，謝謝。讀完所有這些后，我開始意識到自己究竟看到了什么：我看到了和我一樣的人，他們想念一種自覺應(yīng)該深入自身骨髓的知識，于是找到別人的菜譜，以便在植根于如今所在之地的同時，將自己和自己的來處建立起連接。

Recipe: Chinese Stir-Fried Tomatoes and Eggs

菜譜：中式番茄炒蛋