Henry Kissinger (1923-2023)

Henry Kissinger dated glamorous
celebrities like Jill St. John (NY Post)

When there were only three channels on TV, when every city had two newspapers, when print magazines (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, Life, Look, etc.) each had millions of subscribers, Henry Kissinger headlined all of them. He was the rock star of the Nixon Administration long before "rock star" became a term of approbation in fields other than music.

Henry Kissinger's Harvard professorship lent an aura of intellectual respectability to Nixon's foreign policy, defusing some of the critics' attacks. His "shuttle diplomacy" brokered the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, peace between Israel and Egypt during the Yom Kippur war, and the historic opening of ties with Mao Tse-Tung's China.

It only added to his stature when he dated some of the most glamorous women in the world.

Henry Kissinger has his detractors from the left (bombing of Cambodia) and the right (detente with the Soviet Union). Nevertheless, it is clear that much of today's geopolitical landscape is the result of actions he took 50 years ago. R.I.P.

Yellow Flakes, and Not Just the Tuna

(Chron photo)

The Swan Oyster Depot is a San Francisco institution. It's over a hundred years old and has changed ownership once, when it was sold from a Danish family to the Sancimino family in 1946.

SOD is small, hard to get into, and has street parking only. My brother and I had a pleasant dining experience in 2012.

Now it's the center of a social-media contretemps because of allegedly racist remarks. [bold added]

In his posts on Instagram on Friday, Tin Dinh said he and his sister, Tu Dinh, who are Vietnamese, were called “dim sum” several times by a Swan Oyster Depot staffer after placing their order at the popular Polk Street restaurant on Aug. 20. His posts spread across social media over the weekend and into Monday.

Tin Dinh also shared Yelp reviews from several years ago that also called out Swan Oyster employees for reportedly racist behavior. He said he hopes the attention brought by his posts will pressure the restaurant to acknowledge its “racist language” and issue a public apology...

Jimmy Sancimino, whose family has run the Polk Street institution for decades, confirmed that he used the phrase “dim sum” in his interactions with the Dinhs last Friday, but denied that doing so was racist. Swan Oyster uses the term, he told The Chronicle, to refer to customers who order from more than one staff member, as is common at a dim sum restaurant.

Tin Dinh said he started ordering food from Sancimino. He said Sancimino walked away during the process, so his sister finished ordering from another employee. When they told Sancimino that when he returned, he walked away, pointed to them and yelled “dim sum.”

“We have a little saying in here when people want more than one person to wait on them at once. We say it’s like a dim sum restaurant (where) you can have 10 different waitresses come by and drop off food at your table. But that’s not the way it works here,” Sancimino said. “Unfortunately this man (and) young lady took it the wrong way. I’m terribly sorry about it. But they obviously were in more of a rush and they wanted better service than I could provide.”

Comments:

The definition of racist language has expanded far beyond the use of obvious pejoratives. Once-innocuous phrases are taken as racist because the listener assumes what is in the speaker's heart. In this vast gray area listeners should do a little investigation before casting aspersions.

Double ordering costs the restaurant time and possibly money if expensive product has to be thrown out. "Dim sum" was the restaurant's internal alert, a choice of words that everyone would have ignored back in my day but today's Asian snowflakes (yellow flakes?) take umbrage at.

Going further, even if one is called a racial epithet, ignore it. As a boomer Asian-American, I've been called racist names, which indeed were hurtful at first, but after a while I came to realize that the use of such language reflects very poorly on the speaker, and I actually felt sorry for the person.

Our parents and grandparents, who fought in wars and experienced much more physical violence than we ever did, would have laughed at what pains the kids today.

What to Eat on Thanksgiving Eve

Pho and accompaniments from Little Saigon  (Yelp photo)

Despite going to the local pho restaurant twice a month, this article revealed that I don't know much about the savory Vietnamese noodle dish:

The North/South distinction:

Northern pho is delicate and elegant, the broth more savory than sweet. It is not eaten with basil or bean sprouts or other herbs. Plainness is a virtue. The broth is the thing.

The south evolved its own style, one rooted in its very different cooking traditions....Southerners love their accoutrements: basil, bean sprouts, sawtooth herb, a squeeze of lime, a shot of hoisin, a splash of Sriracha.

American broth is superior to the broth in Vietnam

because meat is more widely available, and that meat is also of a higher quality. More and better meat in the broth....means a more substantial, fuller-bodied soup.

Onion and ginger yes, star anise no:

what [some enthusiasts] love most in a broth are the hits of star anise and cinnamon. According to the experts, they most likely have been weaned on bad pho....charring the onion and grilling the ginger gives the broth both flavor and fragrance.

"Never add a handful of beansprouts before tasting, the experts say."

The sprouts are cold, and the temperature of the soup will drop precipitously.

Blithely ignoring the experts, I slurped up a bowl of beef pho, with bean sprouts, on Wednesday night.

Tomorrow's meal would be heavier, but I doubt it would be tastier.

"The men do a very good job. But the women are better. They have the magic hands."

The ear-gasm. But you have to go to Vietnam to get it.

Landmark Quotation

Perhaps the most famous quote to come out of the Vietnam War was “we had to destroy the village in order to save it". These few darkly comic words captured the absurdity of the position in which the United States found itself in 1968. America’s intentions—to stop the spread of communism and to confer the blessings of democracy on the Vietnamese people—were noble, but as it poured ever more lives and treasure into Vietnam, these goals seemed not only elusive but impossible. The only way to win in Vietnam was to destroy it.

With the carnage headlining the nightly news in 1968 CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” turned against the war. Although there were many battles and deaths to come, we didn’t know it at the time but the war was lost. But enough reminiscing.

The landmark quotation that defines this era may have been spoken by none other than Joseph Biden:

We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.

Walter Cronkite has yet to weigh in.

[Update - 5/17/09: Walter Cronkite has died. The above post is in bad taste post facto. I apologize. Thank you, Walter. Many tried to fill your shoes, but no one did. Pax.]