Category: Uncategorized

Gladiator was released in 2000 and won Best Picture.  I remember seeing it in the theatre with two friends I first met when I began working in politics.  

24 years later, Gladiator II was released, and I drove down to San Jose to see it with the same two friends I met when I began working in politics.  

What can I say about the film?  I like it. It’s a good sequel; it ties up many of the loose ends from the first film and leaves one loose end dangling at the end of the film. It’s a Ridley Scott film and I’ve been a big fan of his films since before my USC days.  These are my faves, all for different reasons that could come up in future posts.

• Blade Runner (1982)
• Apple Commerical (1984) 
• Aliens (1986)
• Black Rain (1988)
• Thelma & Louise (1991)
• Gladiator (2000)
• Black Hawk Down (2001)
• The Martian (2015)
• Blade Runner 2049 (20`17)
• Gladiator II (2024)

Guess why I like these!

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It’s really sad that to get much of the Chinese/Asian food I like, I have to leave San Francisco. Why? Because the experience and quality of the food in San Francisco is generally lacking.  Why? Because more often than not, it’s overpriced and underwhelming.

(Stands on soapbox) San Francisco, THE home of the Chinese America diaspora, should do better with its Chinese food. I understand the difficulties of running a restaurant here, with all its bureaucratic nonsense, taxes, hostile business environment and lack of parking. Still, that should be incentive to do better. Despite this, I will continue to endeavor to find good places to eat here. (Steps down from soapbox) Amen.

So that’s why a lot of the good food has migrated to the South Bay and dinner often requires a drive and an entire evening. Anyway, enough about work.  Let’s look at Duan Chun Zhen (AKA, that “Taiwanese noodle place in Cupertino”).  

It’s newish, clean and modern.  It wouldn’t look out of place in Taipei, except for the size (It’s too roomy for Taipei).  It’s located in one of the many ubiquitous mini malls that populate De Anza Boulevard from end to end and its next door to a Pacific Market with good parking.  There was a good mix of customers, us and families out for Saturday night dinner.  

You get different degrees of spicy beef noodle soup.  Regular, (one hot pepper), Mala (two hot peppers) and Sichuan (three hot peppers).  You can also have thin, thick or housemade (wide) noodles.  Naturally, I went with the housemade.  

The noodles came out with steaming hot broth and an acceptable amount of noodles and beef stew.  The beef was a good in-between; more tender than Hon’s and not quite as scrumptious as Yin Du (see post here to get what I’m going on about).  

We also ordered two appetizers; xiaolongbao and red oil wontons.  The xiaolongbao isn’t the usual ones like you would get at Din Tai Fung or Paradise Dynast with soup inside the wrapper; these are instead standard dumplings that have soup soaked steamed pork inside.  Tasty, but not a XLB.  The red oil wontons are a home run.  They came out hot and the red oil that they soaked in had several different kinds of heat, including some numbing.  Yum.  The wontons were devoured so quickly that I wasn’t fast enough to get a picture…cos my mouth was full.

Definitely worth eating here if you’re in San Jose.

Duan Chun Zhen
10118 Bandley Drive, Suite H,
Cupertino, CA 95014

From the Sacramento Delta. Almost worth being up this early.

1-7 Amazing. If soccer was this exciting all the time, I’d consider being a fan…

While on an expedition on Kappabashidori for rubber nigiri and beer (not for me, I’m on a diet), I came across this Skyline GT-R parked on the street.

This is the color scheme I would get for this car if I were to get one
Unlike practically everything else on this street, it was not rubber or kitchen related.

You know you’ve left Japan when the showers and baths don’t seem as hot, efficiency is a lost concept, the people aren’t as nice (in all ways) and rudeness and stupidity rule the day.
On the plus side, my iPhone works, I can drive here and my broadband connection is stable.
(sigh) welcome home…

When you talk to an ABC about where their family is from, you will either get a blank and defensive “I dunno” or “I dun care” or you will hear the generic “Toi-shan”.
Toi-shan is actually one of four towns in an area of the Pearl River delta where the first generation ABCs (and CBCs, etc etc) come from. Many of the Chinese in San Francisco and Hong Kong have roots here. My father’s family hails from Hoiping in Chinese. The modern (and Putonghua) name of this city is Kaiping. The actual village that my family actually hails from is 30 minutes or so outside Kaiping. That meant hiring a taxi for a few hours. 4 hours of taxi = Y250. Not a bad deal.

This is how it looks like outside Kaiping City. A lot.
After driving on dirt roads and missing two turns, we pull into this nondescript road with a field and a handful of abandoned buildings on it. Welcome home.

This is the only occupied house on the compound…
Using my Uncle Bill’s photos, we find the houses where he took his photos. Naturally, I’m unable to do this quietly and we attract some attention.

Distant relatives…
Turns out they’re distant relatives who proceed to show us around and open up the buildings including my Grandpa’s old house.

The buildings of the Kaiping compound
They know my grandfather’s name and his brothers. They know of my father and my aunt & uncle (who both came through here two years ago). I ask them some leading questions and they answer correctly. Then they hit me up for money. Yeah, they’re related.

Hmm, can use a new door. And roof. And heating…
These buildings (and the others scattered about the area) are known as the Kaiping Diaolou. The Kaiping Diaolou are also Guangdong’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of these villages (Zili village) survived the years relatively intact, so the local government made it into a museum with the better examples of the houses open so you could explore the house on your own.
Generally they follow a similar blueprint. The kitchen is on the ground floor, the bedrooms are on the middle floors and the top floor is for the altar. All of these houses have roof access so you can keep an eye out for bandits (as was the norm back in the day).
There is also the town of Chikan nearby the village that was built primarily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of the town exists today as it was before with multilevel shophouses built along the Tanjiang River which divides the town.

Old shophouses that would be right at home in Malacca or old Hong Kong

Here’s the river and the other side of the bank
If this were in any other city of interest (and beside a clean river) this would be interesting. Think Clarke Quay; something like that. Instead, this is in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing happening here except a metalsmith working in his workshop.

You can see the metalsmith at the very bottom center of the pic. And that was it!

The detail on the buildings is nice. Darn quality workmanship back in the day…
They make it look really good in the brochure.

Beware brochures here. Copious use of Photoshop!
After we returned to Kaiping, we were amazed at the lack of action here on a Friday night. Nothing. Lots of pollution, so thick you could see it under the headlights. But nothing happening. Wound up going for reflexology and dinner and packing it in early since A: there’s nothing happening anyway and B: the basi back to civilization AKA Hong Kong leaves at 0900 the next morning.

Well, you have to go this way first before you hit Hong Kong!

Is filled with gas stations and lots of toll booths.
The joke goes: An ABC goes back to visit the village with his family. He sees the squlid conditions and meets the distant relatives, staying overnight in the town for one night because the buses leave twice a day for Hong Kong where you really want to be. When he gets back to the Ewe-ess of aay, he kowtows to grandpa and dad, thanking them for fleeing to America and a better life for the generations that follow. In short, glad I didn’t grow up and have to live there!
That’s the joke anyway. The reality is always a touch more complex. Grandpa passed away in 1995 and Dad passed in 2005. Before he died, he spoke of wanting to visit the village, making it a “family trip” of some kind. It was the few times that he would ask me for advice and took what I had to say seriously. So I began to plan out a rough idea of how a trip back to Hoiping would take place and what kind of logistics were involved.
When my dad passed, I had a brief chat with my Uncle Bill. He gave me some pictures of his visit to the village in 1999 and gave me the address of the family “estate”. Two years pass with lots of issues. Eventually, I passed this info to my friend (and fellow backpacker) April (native HKer and VERY multi-lingual), who was able to determine exactly where in Guangzhou it was, how to get there (basi!!) and had it mapped out on Google Maps. Amazing! And suddenly looks so “do-able”. We decide to leave on Thursday AM after both of us arrive in HKG on the previous night.
After a brief hiccup involving a delayed flight to HKG (her) and some total blurness about basi tickets (me), we set out for Kaiping City from Tsuen Wan on the 0740 basi on Friday AM.

The basi to Kaiping
When we arrived 3.5 hours later, it was just like taking Greyhound in the states. It was all freeway travel, we had one rest stop at a gas station with gross bathrooms and we got stuck in traffic briefly in Dongguan. Might as well call that Fresno.

Looks just like a I-5 rest stop except it’s bigger…

This was the view for 3.5 hours
There are only two hotels that come up on search engines when you type in “Kaiping” and “hotel” into your favorite search engine. There’s the Everjoint and the Sanya.

View of Kaiping, includes free pollution!
The Everjoint (now called the Pan Tower, sounds like a video game) is a tall “5 star” hotel that’s about 15 years old And boy is it showing its age. Decent lodgings though.
About that rating. Hotels in the PRC are ranked by the government (!!) Officially, the ranking is based on the amount of services that are offered by said hotel. Everjoint has a lot of services including: Bowling alley. “Chess” rooms. Beauty Salon. Western and Chinese restaurant. And bellboys that can help arrange hiring a taxi for a few hours. In reality, any hotel that’s clean and in an area where foreigners go magically become “5 star”. When I stayed at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai a few years back, it had a “7 star” rating. I’m sure its gotten some more over the years.
What is Kaiping’s claim to fame besides being the ancestral homeland for so many Overseas Chinese? Well, they make pipes. And fixtures. Anything related to plumbing, they make it here.

The Kaiping Convention Center. What do they use it for? Note the sky and the stuff in it
The actual village is about 30 minutes away from Kaiping City. In the country. Where there’s mud and chickens and fields that get plowed. More on that later…

Today was a good day. It was full of wontonmein, daan taat, beautiful women and good food.
Also full of free coffee, refrigerators and the Doremon spotting game.
Back in civilization AKA Hong Kong and a stable wireless connection. Updates (backdated) forthcoming…