The Plaid Bag Connection

Monthly Archives: March 2012


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Choose your adventure: an eating tour of the San Gabriel Valley ethnoburbs

Green tea shaved snow from Salju Dessert.

I’m back in the San Gabriel Valley for spring break and am eating up as much as I can. It might be a lot farther from the beach than I’d like, but the abundance of great, cheap food everywhere you go more than makes up for it. (If you haven’t seen the Fung Brothers’ ode to SGV food, watch it before continuing!)

Here are my suggestions for how to make the most out of a day of gluttony in the Asian parts of the SGV. Most of these recommendations are in the western part of the Valley, since I don’t spend much time on the eastern side (Rowland Heights, Walnut, etc.). If you have any suggestions, please let us know in the comments!

Breakfast*

If I could, I’d start every day with a big Taiwanese breakfast: thin, savory crepes topped with eggs (蛋餅; danbing), balls of glutinous rice stuffed with fried crullers and shredded pork (飯糰; fantuan), and huge bowls of soy milk, taken plain, sweet, or salted. Thankfully, I don’t have to fly all the way back to Taipei to get my fix, as there are Taiwanese breakfast joints all over the SGV. My favorite is the awkwardly-named Huge Tree Pastry (大樹豆漿點心坊) in Monterey Park, where you can fuel up for less than $5 a person.

Alternately, you could try some Teochew-style noodles for breakfast. People from Chaozhou in Guangdong province migrated all over Southeast Asia, and many of their descendants ended up in the US as a result of the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam. Some good choices for Teochew noodles include Kim Ky Noodle House (金記潮州粉麵) in San Gabriel and Mien Nghia Noodle Express (綿義餐室) in Rosemead.

Continue Reading →


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Links: Foreign yet familiar, wanted yet unwanted

Portrait at the first pride celebration in Shanghai in 2009. Photo: kris krüg (Flickr/Creative Commons).

Race-based attraction

Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law, writes about being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy in the Western gay marketplace of attraction:

Like some gay hybrid of a GPS, personals section and neighbourhood beat, Grindr pinpoints your location and presents you with photos of nearby men. Naturally, Grindr users all look for different things: hairy/smooth, slim/athletic. Many also state what they’re avoiding. “No femmes,” say some. “No fat, no old,” say others. “No Asians.” That last one – “No Asians” – comes up a lot. Which is to say, they’re avoiding guys like me.

“No Asians” would be a silly policy among Asians in Asia, of course, so personal understandings of hierarchy of attractiveness change dramatically according to the locale:

In the past, when I’ve been asked what guys I’ve found attractive, the answer was rarely Asian men. It wasn’t until I spent time travelling through Asia – in Japan and India, especially – that I found the men beautiful, even ruggedly handsome. Some­thing else changed, too. In Beijing, Tokyo and Delhi, I suddenly became a massive hit in gay clubs. For all these complicated questions about race and desire, perhaps the answer is quite simple: we all just need to get out more. Continue Reading →


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Vietnamese food t-shirts and prints from the Ravenous Couple

Image: The Ravenous Couple.

I am coveting the cute Vietnamese food-themed t-shirts and prints that Hong and Kim of The Ravenous Couple are selling for charity. Proceeds from the porkalicious shirt above go to Senhoa, an organization helping survivors of human trafficking in Cambodia.

If you buy the shirt Hong and Kim are wearing here, they will donate to the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation:

Photo: The Ravenous Couple.

Visit their store here.

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