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The Indiana Daily Student

student life

Family moves from Shanghai to find restaurant, bike team

cagarden

He was familiar with the tolls of space and time: in 2012 it was 7,200 miles, the distance his daughter Bingbing had traveled to arrive at the Kelley School of Business.

It was as many time zones away as one can get and by longitude nearly the exact opposite side of the earth.

Multiply distance by the months apart.

The disconnect had frayed them. Hongjin and his wife, Fuxia Zhao, had never been to the United States. He had seen stories on social media of Americans beating Chinese. He worried about sexual assault but couldn’t bear to mention it by name.

They called every day.

After a year of this, his wife demanded to go see things for herself.

Another year, and Bingbing pitched them a crazy idea. It would take $200,000.

By 2015, they had uprooted their lives in China, and that crazy idea became brick and mortar, spice and oil.

***

Bingbing had arrived three years before with little English and less direction. When she wandered into her professor’s office to ask for a reference letter, he asked her what she’d accomplished.

She couldn’t think of 
anything.

“I was doing what everyone else was doing,” she said.

Verbalizing it flared her ambition. Newly arrived, still unsure of her language abilities or place at school, she threw herself into Bloomington’s flagship tradition — the annual Little 500 bike race. She laid the groundwork to found an all-Chinese cycling team, the Young Pioneers, but it needed money badly.

Meanwhile, in China, Hongjin and his wife were bored and anxious.

As a father, he said he felt it was his job to secure his children’s futures — but he also wondered what was left for him and his wife.

He heard his daughter’s dream. He and his wife missed her terribly.

Therefore, he gave his Shanghai noodle shop to his little brother, and he and his wife made the move.

For years, the building on Third Street, half-buried, had drawn beatniks to coffee and spoken word. On Aug. 20, 2015, what had been Rachael’s Café opened as 
Gourmet Garden.

***

Hongjin talking about food is like Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about comets. He babbles about boneless fish, rails against General Tso’s, zips between topics and repeats himself. If he could, he would send United States’ peddlers of strip mall Chinese food to the Hague.

“We want to create a platform for you to taste real, regional Chinese food,” he said.

When explaining all this to an American, he uses “you” like a priest sniffing out a convert, square glasses bobbing up and down.

“We don’t want you eating General Tso’s,” he said, again. “You don’t understand what spicy is, what not spicy is,” he said. His wiry hands 
punctuate it.

Fuxia agrees. One evening, she waits on two locals. When she realizes they speak Chinese, a grin splits her face and she recommends the best things on the menu.

“You like spicy?”

“Yeah.”

“Do 44. Much spicier.”

They’re not exaggerating. Chilis hide in the shredded pork like triggerfish in coral, waiting to strike. The menu boasts ox blood and lamb testicle, pork knuckle and duck intestine. The prices are unapologetic — if you want $7 plates, head to Longfei across the street, with its 24-item menu all in English.

Their first chef, in fact, was considered a culinary prince. He was the son of a cook who they say had served Premier Zhou Enlai, the second most powerful man in Mao’s China. He wasn’t good enough, so they replaced him six months in.

Hongjin relates the depth of food to the depth of the challenge he and his wife face every day. “The biggest trouble is language,” he said.

Cooking for him is a type of translation, the chasm standing between the U.S. understanding of Chinese food — lo mein, sugar-crusted donut balls, a buffet with jello — and the cuisine’s true soul.

“When you translate Chinese to English, you lose things,” Hongjin said. “A lot of meaning is lost.”

Chinese cuisine is one of the oldest on earth. It has evolved through ages through billions of cooks. This tradition plays about the corners of Hongjin’s mouth when he talks about king crab or Sichuan spice.

Only one other topic makes him smile the way food does. Only one other thing makes him as proud.

***

Bingbing is now 2,000 miles away in California. She translated her entrepreneurial spirit to an internship at Disney. Her English is now nearly flawless. Her parents still feel her distance.

“When they were in China, I relied on them every day,” Bingbing says. “Ever since they came to the United States, they rely 
on me.”

They call her nearly every day. She flies back almost once a month.

To get an idea of her parents’ concern, which they express only in Chinese and the lines of their faces, for her, one can listen to her concern for her parents.

“They don’t get to rest,” she said. “I want them to take a break and do something else, but my mom worries too much about the business. Their health is the most thing I worry about.”

Hongjin and Fuxia have a new sort of home now. Chinese students are a constant feature at the restaurant. The staff comprises skinny, middle-aged men and women in neutral polo shirts with sleeves twice the size of their biceps.

The last guests leave, but new plates come from the kitchen. Fuxia conveys them with vast boats of soup and sauce to the table. Steam whirls around her arms.

The sinks in the back hush, the stoves die down. Within seconds the mother and six men and women have converged around the table. Almost nothing is said. The only language is the tap of chopsticks and the slurping of broth.

Hongjin, late to communion, is the only one sitting apart. His mind is elsewhere. His hands are still knit together.

It took $200,000 to open the restaurant. Perhaps $200,000 could also fund a bike team, but perhaps that wasn’t the only goal all along.

He smiles, remembers himself and grabs a bowl with the rest of the crew.

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