The Second Skin of Great China
Savored memories of a Berkeley institution
Great China used to be just a block over, on that length of Kittredge between Shattuck and Oxford, right next to Landmark’s California Theatre and straight across from Touchless Car Wash. The theatre’s yellow and blue neons and the car wash’s fluorescents would kiss in the middle of the road in this dim, gentle gesture, soft and low. The narrow building that housed Great China had a front and a back, an up and a down. You would approach the entrance on the sloped, narrow sidewalk, feeling the distinct voyeurism of the diner-style views. The downfront offered two booth tables, and knee-to-ceiling windows at both sides of the entryway. Walking in, your feet hit red carpet, and the door would swing behind you. Immediately in front of you, a huge, wide fish tank would confront you like a bouncer (I was told it provided good feng shui). This is where hungry customers would grumble to servers about the queue as they crowded the corners of the tank and nudged into the dining space. Behind the tank was more red carpet and a short staircase that led up to the main tables. There was this Ming-style partition at the top of the stairs, a shallow, wooden arch that separated the downfront and the upback.
The restaurant came to us by way of recommendation from my piano teacher Eileen (not her real name). Eileen had been my piano teacher since I was six. Eileen was in her forties, with short black hair and a forgettable face. Her plump wrist bulged against the jade bangle that she wore. She had two children my age. Eileen believed that sugarcoating criticism was for weak American stock, so her pedagogy centered on screaming insults at children for their errors. For this reason, Chinese parents flocked to her far and wide, begging her to take their children in. Abuse is a tricky word to use when you’re paying someone to do it, and trickier still when my parents saw those piano lessons as therapy. Eileen was popular because she could teach your child how to handle the real world, how to be hard and strong. Eileen would teach your six-year-old emotional self-defense. You’re useless, she’d say to me, as my parents sat on piano-facing couch. My mom would look away, expressionless, silent. My stepdad, playing solitaire on his phone. I fumble a note on the Mozart. Don’t go to the competition if you’re going to embarrass me. I ask a question about the meter. Are you stupid? My grandmother found early on that she could not watch this weekly flogging, so she would walk laps around Eileen’s neighborhood. Every Saturday, I was driven to Eileen’s house in the hills north of Berkeley, berated to sticky tears, and then treated to a celebratory dinner at Great China. It was an apologetic gesture by my parents, and my grandma would endure the whole excursion to eat at Great China. As my mom looked for parking along Shattuck, I’d wait by the theater, face still salty, heart still ashamed.
Great China serves a big menu, one that integrates classic Northern Chinese dishes and elegant renditions of what I can only describe as ‘the orange chicken genre.’ We order, faithfully, the same four dishes: double skin, peking duck, race with crab, and walnut prawns. If it’s spring, we’d order the pea shoots. If you paid in cash for an order of more than $100, a complimentary garlic fried rice was in order.
The double skin would be served first, its rainbow components distinguished from one another. Sections of julienned cucumber, carrot, black sea cucumber, wood ear fungus, pork, omelette, and steamed shrimp encircle a mound of clear mung bean noodles. Two noodles, to be exact. Noodle is a casual term here — these noodles fall in sheets, sliced loosely into a puddle. The double skin is always presented with an informal performance. The server would offer the separate dishes of soy sauce and fresh liquid mustard. There would be a pause, where someone of authority at the table (my mom) would nod, and the sauces would be ceremoniously poured onto the double skin with a wrist flourish, and the big forks would toss the separate sections, the sauces and the solids, into its true form. It was a dish that waited with its very last breath to be finished on the table.
Then, the Peking duck, which drew admirers for its cleanliness. It was devoid of fat and bone, a mountain of slivered meat covered with squares of crispy ochre skin. Alongside the duck was a platter of crepe-like pancakes folded in half-moons, a small dish of plum sauce, and julienned scallions that curled at their fresh edges. To assemble: I’d peel a pancake from the stack, open it, glaze its center with plum sauce with the back of the serving spoon, crispy skin with skin-side down, three or four pieces of duck meat, scallions, wrap, and hand to my grandmother. (Then, one for myself). It was a rhythmic pattern. Insiders know — you can ask for the carcass of your carved duck, the sinewed skeleton. They’d give it to my mom in a brown paper bag, she’d hand it to me to carry in the crook of my arm all the way home, and on Sunday morning, she’d make duck broth with it.
The ‘race with crab’ would follow. The traditional rendition of this Shanghainese dish is made of egg whites that sought to texturally imitate crab (and so, compete or race with it). Great China just used real crab, and there was some sort of cocaine in it, I think. The flesh was snowy and sweet, and came in a pillow surrounded by six white mantou buns. Atop the crab pillow was a singular egg yolk, and like the double skin it anticipated your permission for its inclusion and conclusion. The idea here was a sort of crab slider — split open the buns, spoon crab into the center, eat with eyes closed and both hands.
The finale is a sort of doozy from the ‘orange chicken genre’ — walnut prawns. Deep fried prawns, more aggressively battered than tempura, are glazed in a pearly sauce and garnished with walnuts and orange slices. On the palate, it reads more like dessert than seafood, and it was conceptually insane, especially given that my grandmother has diabetes and is morally opposed to American caricatures of Chinese food. But we order it mostly for my stepdad, whose Canadian (read: Caucasian) palate insists on the prawns. The rest comes quickly. The check. Fortune cookies. The conversation with Linda, the head waitress who always accessorized her all-black ensemble with a poplin collar. Her starchy, collar was laced with a scalloped edge, and the effect always made me happy to see. It was one more constancy of Great China, and of Saturdays. I could expect the anguish and feelings of worthlessness at Eileen’s house, I could expect Linda’s smiling face and pretty fairytale collar. I’d talk to everyone on staff in Chinese. Linda always joked to me, with the obligatory cheek pinch, that I could waitress for pocket money if I went to Cal. Bilingualism is a plus! she’d say. And I had beamed at the idea, every time she said it. I was learning English at the time, and Berkeley was hard to get into — I knew that, even at age six. It seemed like a far-fetched fantasy, and we would all laugh. But I really wanted to be someone else’s Linda.
The restaurant’s kitchen caught on fire in late January of 2012. It was routine stuff — a chef was heating oil on a wok, and stepped away from the burner for only a moment when a prep cook asked him a question. It was a two-alarm fire, one that enveloped the ceiling and the roof joists. The firefighters thought they had extinguished it, but then telltale furls of smoke continued to pour and hiss within the building. They hacked through the wooden walls to put it out for good. The fire devoured through the restaurant’s extensive wine collection, which we never even knew existed. The total damages were assessed at $700,000. After the fire, we switched piano teachers.
Two years later, the restaurant rose from its ashes, a block south, on the corner of Oxford and Bancroft. We refused to go at first. There’s a sterile cleanliness to the new Great China. The food tastes exactly the same, but the menus are beautifully bound and the interior has a modern, sleek, grandeur to it. It’s an interior for celebrations — roaring conversations bounce off the slabs of concrete, fireproof walls. They kept the same logo, the yin-yang koi fish. They kept the same serviceware, the traditional cerulean and white porcelain sets. Linda still works there. I’m as tall as her now, and she has crow’s feet, but it’s still the same smile and same collar. My non-Chinese friends have not only heard of Great China, they might even categorize it as fancy. The window seating is still knee to ceiling, but at the new Great China there is a bar. The dim lighting at this bar might even categorize the restaurant as sexy.
When I interviewed there for a waitressing job, a decade later as an undergrad at Cal, the hostess interviewing me asked if I spoke French. I’ve never seen you before, I thought. Un petit peu, I said nervously. Mandarin too. I looked at her, half-expecting for her to respond in either Mandarin or French. The restaurant was empty — I was asked to come in before they opened for dinner. I noticed the lack of poplin collar, and felt the hostility of the overcast afternoon light against the cold tables. Good accent, she said, and scribbled a note on my flimsy résumé. We have a lot of French clientele, for the wine list. A few more questions, a few more thin-lipped smiles, and the hard part of the interview was over. She asked me about my hobbies. I like to swim, I tell her. And I play the piano, just to keep it up, but it makes me happy. I ask her why there’s a wine list instead of just beer and sorghum liquor, and her answer is unsatisfactory. She boasts about the awards the wine list has won, and I resent her, because I do not think she would ask for a duck carcass. My face probably says everything.
I go home and mope, and try not to think about the Tasty Pot that occupies the husk that was Great China. I do not waitress at Great China, because I do not get a call back. I consider a boycott, but order to-go a week later when a friend showed up to my apartment crying. I mix the double skin at home, soy and mustard with the wrist flourish, and my friend tells me she’s never had anything like it, that she likes it, that it makes her happy to eat it. Linda is not in my apartment to smile at her and my face isn’t salty. I go to my fridge and ask her what she wants to drink. I tell her her options: there’s Brita water, IPAs, and a bottle of cheap white wine that I opened the day before to cook with. We pair the double skin with the leftover wine.
