I recently read Norwegian Wood and was plagued with a sense of nostalgia. Others have remarked that Murakami’s a master at nostalgic scenes, and while that may be true, it turned out that it wasn’t the cause of my particular case of it. I had actually read the novel a few years before! I could tell that I read certain passages before, but I couldn’t pin down how the story ended. Maybe it’s because nothing really happens.

No wait, something happens. A few things happen. But I still think nothing happens because the characters living in Norwegian Wood never mature or change. Naoko and Toru both are so meandering and so damned introspective that I found them to be total bores, which is unfortunate because they and their relationship is what the novel is about.

I have no doubt that Murakami is an excellent storyteller and his prose (at least, what gets across through the translation) does have a certain poetic quality to it. The descriptions of scenes painted a very vivid picture of Japan. The problem was, I kept getting tripped up by the dialogue.

The characters are painfully self-aware to the point that the dialogue feels too artificial. No one is brutally honest about their feelings in dialogue like they are. The frustrating part is that while the characters love talking about their emotions and their deepest doubts, none of them actually take any action regarding those feelings. Maybe if they stopped obsessing and talking about their feelings and actually did something about them, they wouldn’t be in the rut they’re in.

Even if the dialogue were more natural, I’d still dislike the novel because of one thing: Naoko. It’s a crucial point since the novel revolves around her and her inability to cope with the ups and downs, (okay, mostly the downs) of life. She comes off as neurotic, unpleasant, and useless, which is why I had such a hard time dealing with the fact that Toru was in love with her. I guess I don’t care for helpless female characters. I was relieved when she finally took matters into her own hands instead of just hanging around and bringing everyone down.

On the other hand, I really liked Midori, who seems to be one of the few characters in Norwegian Wood that has her shit together. The contrast between her personality and that of Toru or Naoko was so great that the more I read about her, the more I got frustrated with Toru and Naoko’s pathetic one-sided relationship. I guess in that way, Murakami wrote a splendid recount of the turmoil of a love triangle.

After reading Norwegian Wood for the second time, I’m still ambivalent about Murakami’s writing. On the one hand, he’s a decent writer and I can see people liking his style. On the other hand, the actual subjects he writes about are so flawed that I end up despising them. I guess I can’t really deal with aimless characters who fall for aimless girls for no reason. I just don’t feel the same sense of satisfaction I get after reading a book I genuinely enjoyed reading.

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Now that I think of it, this post doesn’t do much good. People who have lost the ability to seed my site in their feed since the move probably won’t see this update in their feed anyway. Oops!

Despite its name, a Blue Moon is not blue. Instead, at least the way it’s made in the picture above, it’s a pleasant pink color that’s not at all garish. The cocktail is delicate with a soft touch of sweetness. It makes me think of flower petals even though it’s not all that floral tasting. The Blue Moon is going to be a joy to drink this in the spring when the weather starts to get warmer. The Blue Moon is a gin cocktail that only tastes like a hint of gin — good for non-gin drinkers.

Via Washington Post

2 ounces dry gin, such as Tanqueray
1/2 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 ounce creme de violette

Shake it like you mean it with ice. Strain. Serve in a cocktail glass

When BF and I placed our orders, the waiter brought out a free appetizer plate of bean sprout salad. The sprouts were savory, sweet, and did their job whetting my appetite, but I couldn’t help wondering just how much MSG one would have to put in the sprouts to make them taste so delicious.

After seeing a recommendation for the Chinese gourd (literally ’shred melon’) with salted duck egg yolk on ExileKiss, I couldn’t stop thinking about the combination, so I ordered it. The usually bland but fresh tasting gourd was perfect with the creamy, salted duck egg yolk mixed in. Each bite was perfectly rich and soft, but never mushy. Since tasting this dish, I have to wonder, why would anyone eat this vegetable any other way?

The BF ordered his usual rice ovals (nien gao) with Chinese spinach. The version on the menu, despite just listing the vegetable, also comes with slivers of ground pork, so if you want to order a vegetarian version, make sure to specify that. The nien gao was satisfying and chewy without being too hard nor too mushy. On our second visit, we ordered a different nien gao dish, the Shanghai style nien gao (but also vegetarian) and the only difference was that it came with slices of fresh shiitake.

Also worth ordering if there are vegetarians at the table is the braised tofu. The braising liquid is a bit sweet, typical of Shanghainese cuisine, but does a fine work of penetrating the custard-like soft tofu. On a subsequent visit, I ordered the braised wheat gluten puffs, which had a more solid texture than the airy, light puffs I was used to. If those puffs could be soaked in the tofu’s braising liquid, I’d call that dish a success.

My modus operandi is to order a kau fu appetizer at a Shanghainese restaurant, but I decided to switch it up. Thanks to the suggestion from my dad, I ordered the baked tofu and Shanghainese wild greens which were both chopped finely and put onto a palte. The greens (ma lan tou) had an herbal taste that brought out the savory flavor of baked tofu. I also ordered a julienned chaoyte dish which was crispy, simple, and tasty.

Maybe it’s because on my first visit, I ordered all vegetarian dishes and the waiter thought I was vegetarian, but I wasn’t offered the free plate of stir fried shrimp. They did bring out a plate on my second visit and it was fantastic. Even my picky-about-seafood mother enjoyed it. Each unshelled, head-on shrimp was coated lightly with a salty, sweet, sauce that left me licking my fingers after pulling the head off each shrimp and sucking the shrimpy goodness out.

The shrimp was so good that the seafood dish I actually ordered, fish slices in a Chinese wine broth fell short. The broth was so delicate that I could barely taste any hint of the wine, which was unfortunate because a stronger tasting broth would have masked the fishy taste of the fish better. Yeah, yeah, don’t eat fish if you don’t like a fishy taste, but fish isn’t supposed to taste fishy if it’s fresh.

Having one dish I disliked out of the many that I ordered isn’t that bad of a start for a restaurant. Considering it’s still their first month of opening and they probably have a few kinks to work out in the kitchen, it’s not bad at all. It certainly seems like the kitchen staff hit the ground running. I think I may have just found my new favorite Shanghainese restaurant.

I also like the waiters. They’re accommodating, pleasant, and speak Shanghainese to each other. It’s great that they’re brutally honest about MSG. There’s no stigma against it in the kitchen, that’s for sure. When the waiter realized that the BF could eat regular MSG and not chicken flavored MSG (chicken bouillon cubes), he offered to take a dish he just brought out back into the kitchen to add some MSG for flavor. Another time, my mother asked if there was a lot of MSG in some dish before ordering and the waiter remarked, “That’s where all the flavor comes from!” That’s not to say that everything is laden with artificial flavor enhancers. Most of my dishes tasted great, but I wasn’t excessively thirsty afterward like some other restaurants which use a lot more MSG.

I’m glad that there’s yet another Shanghainese restaurant on Valley Blvd. I’m even more glad that it’s one that has decent dishes. I may also be biased because the restaurant is named after one of my favorite (albeit touristy) areas of Shanghai. I’m definitely going to have to go back to try some of their xiao long baos next time. I can’t believe I went twice without ordering them.

Yu Garden (Shanghai Yu Yuan)
107 E. Valley Blvd.
San Gabriel, CA 91776
Tel: (626) 569-0855

I’ve successfully changed hosting providers from the awful and overpriced Powweb to the fairly priced and not too shabby NearlyFreeSpeech.net thanks to a recommendation by my dear friend Berklee. They’re a small hosting company that offers web hosting services on a ‘pay as you go’ system. With no early contracts, I figured I would try them out, see if I like them, and then see where I go from there.

If my traffic stays the same, I estimate that a year of hosting from them would cost me roughly $20. What a steal!

You can still get to my site from both runawaysquirrels.com and nakedsushi.net. It’s probably confusing having two URLs and two ’site names’ whatever that means, but I still can’t decide on keeping just one.

iphone stuff

My work came out with their new, spiffy, iPhone app! If you like reading and you like keeping track of your books and seeing what other people are reading and you have an iPhone, give it a go. It’s free.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Plants vs. Zombies on the iPhone. Even though the slowdown gets pretty bad in the later levels when there are tons of zombies and projectiles on screen, it’s still playable and the game is still a blast to play. I just wish it didn’t take so long to load.

The BF’s recipe:

2 oz Sweet Vermouth (I used Vya)
1 oz Old Tom Gin (I used the Ransom one, which is great) – if you don’t have the Old Tom, might want to add some symple syrup
1/2 oz Cynar
4 dashes Boker’s bitters (maybe unnecessary with the Cynar, but I used them anyway)

Stir and strain into chilled coupe or cocktail glass; flame orange peel on top, and serve with orange twist and / or brandied cherry.
The resulting drink is moderately bitter, though I think pretty balanced because of the sweet vermouth and the Old Tom; you could reduce the Cynar if you prefer. I make my Martinezes with the older style proportions (more vermouth than gin), but you could flip those too, or do a mix of dry and sweet.

This came about when I asked the BF to make me a Martinez, and then he said, “With Cynar?” as a joke, and I said, “Why not?!” I like Cynar. I like the Martinez. Why not have my cake and eat it too? It has a pleasantly bitter aftertaste which goes surprisingly well with gin. Surprisingly well because who knew that the Pine-Sol taste of gin could be improved by adding some bitterness.

As for the name, it also started as a joke, but also fits the drink the more I think about it. Not that I’ve personally experienced a real Dirty Sanchez (NSFW if you’re thinking of googling it at work), but this drink is brown, bitter, but still pleasant for those who like that type of thing.

4 of 5 stars
I need to not have pre-conceived notions about books before I read them. For some reason, I thought this was a more contemporary book. I knew that this book was what a lot of dystopian books are influenced by, but I didn’t realize it was written in the 16th century!

The framing device More employed confused me for the first part of the book, but when once I got into the meat of the argument, I promptly forgot the outer frame.

Like most people who have read a lot of science fiction, I was at first mistrusting of the claims Raphael made of the island. But as I read more and more, the island sounds like a fantastic place to live. Only 6 hours of work a day, lots of time to pursuit intellectual pleasures, never going hungry, and religious toleration? Sign me up!

There were only two bits about the book that I had trouble with. The Utopians regard killing animals and butchering animals dirty, beneath them, and dehumanizing — which is why they get slaves to do it for them. With their capacity for reasoning and their penchant for farming and hard work, I’d think that the whole society would decide to become vegetarians.

The second part was how easily and quickly the Utopians adopted Christianity. For the most part, they seem to be self sufficient and pleased with their own thinking, which was why I was surprised how quickly they embraced Christianity. More explains it was because the core beliefs of Christianity so closely resembled Utopian religions, but I was still skeptical that it was More asserting his belief or placating his readers. In the 16th century, maybe people felt more nervous reading a book about distant men who were so superior but not Christian. At least he put in the bit about religious toleration.

For someone who likes dystopian novels, I’m glad I finally sat down and read Utopia. It certainly gives a different perspective to not having private property and living in a somewhat communist society. Sure, it’s very idealized, but at the end of the book, I was convinced if I could find a country like that, I’d be pretty happy living there.

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Noodler’s Ink Red Black in Lamy Safari on Quattro artist pad

If you can’t read my writing:

This ink is such a chameleon. On first glance, it’s just brown. Then I start to notice its subtle shading. (It’s more apparent on less toothy paper.)  It’s less red and less black than I had hoped. I wanted a nice, dark red that shades into black. This reminds me more of sepia — good for those who like the old-timey color.  In some lights, it looks a little purple.

Flow is great in the Lamy Safari and drying time is a few seconds. <– I smeared it right after the words we(re) written.  Not bad.

I’m not buying a full bottle of this because I’m not that excited by brown.

I picked this ink as one of the sampler inks from Pear Tree Pens, which lets you choose 4 samples of inks from their huge inventory of inks to try out for about $4 + shipping. I wanted to look for a red ink that wasn’t so bright red that it looked like a corrections ink, so on paper, Noodler’s Ink Red Black sounded like a great idea.

The ink is definitely more brown than I expected in most lights, but under ideal lighting, it takes on a dark purple tint, kind of like the old Chinese purple clay teapots. Unfortunately, most of the time I’m writing, it’s not under perfect lighting, so it just looks brown with some excellent shading.

It’s a good thing I ordered a sample of this before buying the whole bottle or else I’d be stuck with a whole bottle of ink that I wouldn’t use. I wanted so much to like this ink since it behaved so well in my fountain pen and dried at a decent speed, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that there are still a dozen or so Noodler’s inks that I want to try out that might be a color that suits me better.

What do Chinese people do in a funeral? I don’t know what other Chinese do, but my family recently had a funeral for my grandpa and it was nice and low key.

Since we’re not that religious and no one knew what Buddhist sutras were appropriate or even how to chant them, we outsourced that part and hired monks from a nearby temple.  It may seem strange that even though we’re not religious, we hired Buddhist monks, but it makes sense to Chinese people who by default believe at least in some parts of Buddhism.

Hiring monks turned out to be a good idea because not only did they come and chant for us, but they also instructed us about all the traditions that go with a funeral: what food offerings to make, what food to eat during the wake, what offerings to make for dinner, etc.  They met us at the chapel and passed around sutra books and started the chanting.  Afterward, we did the incense burning and walking once around the coffin.  Even though traditionally, everyone has to burn three sticks of incense, it was okay to take shortcuts and just have each person burn one stick because my extended family was so large.

Although it’s not a Buddhist belief at all, my family also burned paper sacrifices to send to the afterlife.  There was a large two story house made out of paper, a paper BMW, paper gold and silver mountains, and of course, paper money.  Some of the paper money said “Hell bank note” on them, which I thought was weird. I guess hell isn’t such a bad place to be for the Chinese.

After the funeral, the whole family went to a vegetarian restaurant for lunch.  The vegetarian food is supposed to be an offering or sacrifice to Buddha to make him happy.  According to my dad, there must be a tofu dish at lunch.

The dinner following the funeral was almost the complete opposite of lunch. It was full of chicken, pork, and fish because it’s an offering to my grandpa, who happens to enjoy his meat.  We cooked some of his favorite dishes: roasted suckling pig with the crackly skin, steamed fish, fried fish, and various meat-filled dim sum (we bought those).

Before the family could eat, an altar was set up outside with plates of the food, dessert, fruit, cups of tea, and cups of alcohol for grandpa to eat.  Then, candles and incense were lit.  The adults of my parents’ generation couldn’t eat until the incense burned down because that was when grandpa was done eating. The kids just dug in at the kids’ table.

It seemed strange for a not-so-religious or superstitious family like mine to perform these funeral rites, but most of them were tradition and passed from one generation to the next.  I think at least for that day, everyone believed in them.

I came across this recipe for sweet and spicy tempeh and passed it on to the BF. He liked it so much that he made it twice! I was always neutral about tempeh, but then I had this dish and now I love it! The funky armpit smell that fills the kitchen when the tempeh is being fried is mouthwatering. The sweet and spicy sauce with shallots and chili pepper is addictive. The tempeh is filling. What’s not to like about this?

First, the tempeh is shallow-fried.  I don’t know what it is about the frying, but it makes the fermented smell of tempeh waft through the whole house. It may not be pleasant if you’re not a fan of the savory armpit smell, but I relish a bit of pungency in the air around dinnertime.

After the tempeh is all fried and it’s time to do the sauce, be liberal with the peppers, shallots, and garlic.  They’re so good in this when they’re covered in the sweet, sticky sauce.

Something about this dish reminds me of Chinese American fast food, but in a good way.