Take me down to Chinatown

On Saturday, my roommate Alex and I made our first trek to the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington. I was embarrassed to admit to my fellow Fellows that I had never visited a Chinatown before, and I was forced to By no means am I some uncouth brute, resistant to experiencing other cultures. In fact, when it comes to culinary matters, I consider myself something of a “strange food” connoisseur. I have a Bourdain-esque fearlessness when it comes to food, something that I think is necessary when you find yourself staring at balut, century eggs, and pig face. Unfortunately (or fortunately for Alex, I suppose) our experience in DC Chinatown did not live up to my Travel Channel expectations.

                Having never been to this area of the city before, we relied on a restaurant rating app to point us towards the highest quality-price ratio. That may or may not be the best method for exploring a new district, especially one as foreign as Chinatown, but we made it work. Our first choice, a small place simply called “Burma”, required a bit of work to locate. The address listed on the website was shared with an Asian hair salon, and our confused search allowed us to peak behind the tourist veil into what I assume was the reality of Asian immigrants living in the United States.

                 After we discovered that Burma was closed, we went to a small basement restaurant called Big Wong, where the $20+ price tag for the more adventurous dishes, such as Jelly Fish, forced me to settle for the hot and sour soup and chicken lo mein. The soup wasn’t as spicy as I know the locals prefer for themselves, and I have to wonder if the server died a little bit inside when she gave us our forks and sat us down in front of our Chinese Zodiac placemats, completely stripped of their deeply rooted mystic tradition. This was a manufactured culture.

To make one more random generalization, I imagine the food prices in Chinatown are highly inflated by high demand from (mostly white) out-of-towners for generic “Chinese food”.  I doubt the first or second generation immigrants in this area can afford to regularly pay such high prices for these cultural sterile meals, and I suspect another side of Chinatown exists outside of the reach of the tourist buses.  I would much rather spend a day there. 

- Cameron DeHart