She Pulverized Me Two

We all miss “Chinese” food.  There are certain dishes that are impossible to find here.  Good luck finding real jiaozi, or roujiamou.  My wife has been remarkable about trying to figure out how to make various dishes and then experimenting, repeatedly to get it right.  We’ve been through dumplings.  We must have eaten thirty batches, where she attempted different pi and different xianr.  We went through youtiao experiments, as well as Jiajiangmian.

This morning I learned, that after I went to bed last night, I’m the Ben Franklin type that’s early to bed and early up the next day, she experimented with jianbingguozi.  Jianbing are the time honored breakfast treat in northern China that people prepare on little sanlunche for a few kuai.  Dough, spun in a circle atop a griddle.  Crack an egg.  Add a crackly piece of fried dough and some spicy sauce, leeks.  She got ahold of some of that “special sauce” and this afternoon, wow, I was impressed:  She’s nailed the taste though the pi is still a little thick.  We all ate a second lunch of them and now no one is concerned with eating any dinner.

Was beaten in chess twice today by my little one.  I play to win.  I have no great strategy other than to keep the other person on the defensive for as long as I can.  She pulverized me two games in a row.  Probably the most fun losing I’ve had in a while.  It’s is wonderful to watch her intellect mature.  Sometimes this fifteen year-old flashes five-years old before my eyes, and other times she's twenty-five. 

I had a lesson today about the opening of California and the Kansas Nebraska Act.  So hard to watch the slow-moving train wreck of the late antebellum America.  The odious stench of slavery can’t be wished away.  And the southerners are not being “convinced” by all this moral insistence.  They pull further away, grow more convinced of the certitude of their position.   It won’t be next chapter.  This was only the penultimate period.  But tomorrow we will arrive at fateful moment where swords are drawn and Fort Sumter is fired on. 

Tuesday 04/07/20