Chicken and Rice
This essay first appeared in Scran Press on October 31, 2022. It is based on my travels to Hainan, China with my father’s family in April 2002.
We ate chicken and rice for every meal. Every meal for almost a whole week. By the end of the week, I was so sick of chicken, rice, and Ovaltine I begged for fast food, anything American, but all we could find in Haikou, the capital of Hainan, China’s largest island located in the South China Sea, was Kentucky Fried Chicken. My Hainanese relatives pronounced the restaurant’s name like “Kin-duck-ee,” but it was not duck. It was chicken.
I didn’t think much about what we’d eat before I made the trip. I was familiar with the style of Chinese chicken which is referred to as “Hainanese chicken,” popularized by modest food stalls in Singapore markets. It is slowly simmered, whole chicken combined with rice cooked in chicken stock. It doesn’t sound like much, but the tender meat paired with warm rice and a zippy ginger-chili relish is pure comfort food.
Thailand has its own version called khao man gai, and I had eaten both because my father’s parents immigrated from China to Thailand, where he was raised. He, in turn, immigrated to the United States, where I was born and still live, outside Chicago. Throughout my childhood, Apa, Mama, my younger brother Seth, and I would return to Thailand every few years to visit relatives, and we’d eat chicken for Chinese (Lunar) New Year, first setting it out for the ancestors alongside burning sticks of incense and fake paper money.
One year, when we were young, Seth and I rode with my father and uncle into Bangkok’s city center to an open store front where the men chose a chicken from under a bamboo cage, still alive and clucking. We watched in horror as the bird was seized with two hands, disappeared into the back room, and emerged wrapped in craft paper, defeathered and in pieces. We cried for the chicken on the ride home. The men didn’t bring us again after that.
Then when I was twenty-two, I returned to Thailand with Apa. The mission was to join my grandmother, uncle, aunt, and cousins and deliver my grandfather’s ashes to his native island, Hainan. Seven family members flew from Bangkok to Haikou. Right off the plane, we were transported by a previously unknown cousin of my father and uncle’s generation named Ma Kian to a restaurant in a town called Wenchang. We climbed to the second floor of an ancient-looking building to a private room with a circular table bearing a lazy Susan. Here were to eat the most famous dish of the region in its place of origin. Soon enough the pale yellow flesh, cut into crescents and arranged on an oval platter, appeared on the table, along with white rice and the maroon dipping sauce as fiery as its color suggested. I ate with vigor, trying to ignore the still-wet serving plates, the grime in the corners, the crumbled and charred buildings outside the tall windows. Was this China?
After a bumpy, dusty bus ride through a jungle-like thicket, we came to my relatives’ compound, a one-level, walled-in mass of rooms without doors where multiple families resided. One room had a boxy TV with antennas on top. Another had a canopy bed with mosquito nets around it. That is where we were to stay during the celebration of my grandfather’s life.
For dinner, they brought us chicken and rice. The chicken, Ma Kian boasted, was their own, slaughtered that morning for our benefit. We sat on pink plastic chairs in the courtyard and sipped lukewarm, chocolatey Ovaltine as beige silt billowed around us. Lush tropical plants waved from over the enclosure walls. I wondered when we would eat noodles or stir fries like I was used to in America when we ordered Chinese food.
The night we arrived, the entire village emerged to catch a glimpse of us foreign visitors and participate in the memorial services for my grandfather. At sunset, everyone snaked through a rice paddy field in a long procession, passing a farmer and two water buffalo, to a riverbed where the master of ceremonies beheaded a chicken on the bank. I watched the blood pool from its neck, the head moving independently from the body, and I understood the phrase.
Fire, song, and fireworks lasted from evening until dawn. At breakfast we were graced with chicken and rice. “Again?” I grimaced at Apa. He waved his hand, to say: Be respectful.
Ma Kian puffed out his chest like a rooster. “It is the most famous meal.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes and thought, You already told us that.
We left the village a few days later, my grandfather’s ashes scattered on a hill near a stone tablet carved with his and other ancestors’ names. Having fulfilled the journey’s true purpose, we were to spend the remainder of the trip exploring Hainan. We stopped at a restaurant in a small city.
Certainly here, I thought, we’ll eat something different.
Opal-inlay screens adorned the ornate room. Chandeliers sparkled from the ceiling. Ma Kian ordered in Hainanese. We chatted and laughed, three languages between family.
The waitstaff brought out chicken, rice, and the usual accompaniments.
By this time, the frustration that nagged at my tastebuds was apparent on the faces of my uncle, aunt, and Thai cousins, too. My uncle, an ever-polite businessman who arranged the trip, gently suggested to Ma Kian that we order some dishes for variety.
“No, no,” our host dismissed. “This is the famous food of Hainan. Celebrated all over the world.”
And we were his American and Thai relatives who traveled from faraway places, and we were to eat only the best.
We toured the island and stayed a few days in Sanya, a beach resort town for wealthy mainland Chinese and Japanese tourists. Surely, we were all thinking by that time, we could eat something besides chicken and rice. My uncle persuaded Ma Kian to take us to a Manchurian restaurant. We ordered noodles and thick soups, Northern Chinese cuisine, anything but chicken and rice. Our host and his wife refused to eat.
We returned to Haikou in preparation for our flight back to Thailand, which is where I made my final, futile plea for fast food burgers. Ultimately, I accepted my fate. On the last night, Ma Kian arranged for us to dine in a private room in a hotel. We ate chicken and rice, and this time none of us minded. The salty chicken was delicate and familiar, the floral rice soothing. We shared a bottle of Chinese wine and sang karaoke, and we knew many of the same songs.
Before we left, Ma Kian told me I would always have a home in Hainan.
Years later, my aunt taught me how to cook khao man gai, and I make it for my kids. They don’t complain, don’t ask for chicken nuggets instead. Along with spicy relish, I serve it with a side of, “Did I ever tell you about how I ate chicken and rice for a week straight?”
My grandfather’s spirit is back home in Hainan, China, but also lives on in Thailand and America. He always had a mischievous sense of humor, so I know he’s laughing at this story while he takes a bite of chicken and rice.
