I Went Bowling to Honor My Chinese Food Hero

It's Qingming but I don't have a tomb to sweep. So this year, I decided to honor Yuan Mei, an 18th century poet and gourmet, by visiting the old site of his pleasure gardens and tomb in Nanjing. Yuan wrote about food (once), in his classic Sui Yuan Shi Dan (随园食单); I write about food. Yuan was rigid in his beliefs about cooking; I am a stubborn, demanding bastard. Yuan was a hedonist; I am a hedonist. It seemed obvious. Except for the fact that he is a Chinese poet from Qing-era China who has been dead for more than two centuries and I am an American ex-chef in modern China, and so far, still alive, we are almost twins.

In order to beat the crowds, I dropped into Nanjing last month for a day, chasing his legacy around the city: a rundown office tower and neighborhood, a restaurant inspired by his writing, a bowling alley. I bowed to his statue and lit incense and candles at his tomb. I hoped he was listening.

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Yuan Mei was born in Hangzhou in the early 1700s and was a smart kid. In his 20s, he passed the national imperial examination and earned the jinshi (进士) rank. Instead of staying in the capital and having to study Manchu, he took posts as a county-level government official around Jiangnan, and wrote poetry on the side. By his late 30s, he'd had enough of government. With the money he earned from his poetry, he bought a dilapidated garden outside the Nanjing city walls, and named it Sui Yuan (随园), the Garden of Contentment. The only thing left on the huge property was a former tavern.

Yuan devoted the rest of his life to fixing the place up, building more than 20 pavilions over the next four decades. He spent his time teaching, writing poetry, entertaining and being entertained in the houses of the region's elite. He caused scandal when he dared to invite young, single women into his home to teach them, instead of going to their homes, where things could be more "supervised". He was a champion of women (and also, perhaps, a collector, with five wives and a number of concubines) and an unabashed pleasure-seeker. His poetry made him famous (it's in today's Nanjing Museum) and wealthy, but what interests me is his food writing.

There were restaurants at the time Yuan was around but the real fine dining, the good stuff, happened in the homes of the elite, where families employed high-level private chefs. Yuan toured many of them as a guest. When he found dishes he liked, he'd send his own private chef to his host's house, to study and record the details. After obsessing like this for most of his adult life, he finally compiled and published Suiyuan Shidan in 1792.

Food was still a "low" topic to write about in Yuan's world, and in discussions of his legacy, it always comes second to his verse. But as a record of what the region's most talented chefs made, and the food wisdom of the day, the Suiyuan Shidan is unparalleled. Much of it still holds true more than two centuries later. His poetry may be brilliant but I'd rather read his observations on bamboo shoots. That's just me.

For one, Yuan's book is a very detailed snapshot of how a certain class of people in Jiangnan ate hundreds of years ago. He captures a moment in China's food history when food was seasonal and regional, and expressed more about its nearby geography and habits than modern menus do. We may not eat this way completely, hundreds of years later, when our supply networks span the entire country, or even the world, and greenhouses grow fruits and vegetables in previously off-limits seasons. To have a record of who produced what, where and when, is invaluable. His admiration for mother nature is still instructive today, like his 60/40 rule: 60% of a great meal comes from chef; 40% belongs to the ingredients.

Here was a man of impeccable social standing, championing the lowest class of workers, and holding them up for praise and respect. The Suiyuan Shidan was like a pat on the back to chefs everywhere

Yuan was not the first person in China to write about food. But he was perhaps the most respected, through his poetry, and that reputation made Suiyuan Shidan into what many consider the first great book pulling together Chinese cooking knowledge.

On a deeper level, "the veneration of earthly pleasures is the closest thing Yuan Mei had to a religion," author Nicole Mones wrote in her forward to a 2019 English translation of the Suiyuan Shidan. "Without doubt, he had little time for Buddhism, which taught that sensual joys were dissolute; neither did he respond to Confucianism, which dictated that poetry should be for moral instruction, not personal expression — the opposite of his own ideas."

Three hundred years later, this rings true to me.

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I can't say Yuan would be happy at the current site of his beloved garden, but he would at least recognize its dilapidated state. What once was a 120 hectare estate beyond the city walls is now an address in downtown Nanjing: 140 Guangzhou Lu.

Or at least that's where I started on my Yuan Mei journey, at a grim office tower named Suiyan Dasha (随园大厦). Gold lions sit out front of the entrance but there is little worth guarding. A restaurant, motel and bar all sit abandoned on the lower floors, the shuttered Suiyuan Bar at least sort of in line with Yuan's abandoned tavern building. (Though, like me, Yuan was a sober hedonist, and did not drink alcohol.)

In the lobby, the management waved off my questions about the site's glorious past. "This place doesn't have any history," they said. Outside, car horns blared from a traffic jam. Temporary walls and worker dormitories lined the intersection, the site of a metro station under construction. The past might have been illustrious, and the future will definitely be more convenient, but the present is far from peaceful.

Buying into the Suiyuan these days costs about 40,000 rmb a square meter, according to a resident who has lived in the neighborhood next to the big tower for more than 50 years. The address is envious — 9 Suiyuan, for example — but the reality is rundown. Low-rise, walk-up apartment buildings are woven together with thick electrical cables, and the working-class neighborhood has seen better days. I search Dianping for nearby restaurants. The grandly named "随园食府" restaurant turns out to be a ghost kitchen doing cheap delivery. The KFC on the corner is busy. Fried chicken sandwiches at Yuan Mei's house — is there no God?

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A short drive away and an unmarked gate leads into the landscaped grounds of a Republican-era house. Signs with Yuan Mei's poetry line the walkway into Wu Ji Suiyuan (五季随园). Many restaurants in Nanjing borrow the Suiyuan name, some even cooking dishes inspired by his book, but only one has intangible cultural heritage status, and that's what's for lunch.

Ni Zhaoli (倪兆利) started the restaurant on Yuan Mei's 300th birthday, and now, several years later, she is touring us around the rooms. Yuan's poetry is all over the place, blown up into huge characters on the walls of private rooms, decorating fans, and on fabric couplets at the door of the kitchen. A painting of the original layout of Suiyuan sits at the entrance; framed pages from the first edition of Suiyuan Shidan hang on the walls. Everything seems to have a connection to Yuan or be part of Nanjing's intangible cultural heritage. It is elegant, historical, thoughtful, a fitting tribute to the old man.

Over lunch, Boss Ni tells us how a charter from the adjoining university to promote traditional Chinese medicine turned into a restaurant themed on health. Ni, a Beijinger, was tasked with the job, and remembering her university reading of the Suiyuan Shidan, decided to incorporate the longtime Nanjing resident's food philosophy into a health framework. After all, Yuan lived until he was 82 — he must have been on to something, right?

The restaurant is based on an ancient text's (the 黄帝内经) idea of five seasons in a year — an extra one squeezed between summer and autumn — and themes its set menus around seasonality and the number five: five menus per year, five types of fruit on a fruit plate, five colors of noodles, five small bites as appetizers.

Ni, like Yuan, is not a chef herself but has had a hand in developing the restaurant's signature dishes, like a finely diced eight-treasure tofu or young jiucai shoots stir-fried with snails and crunchy luhao.

But Ni is not a traditionalist, pulling recipes straight from Yuan's book and serving them as-is. She believes that without innovation, cultural heritage loses its relevance and dies — it needs to stay modern to be alive. That explains why, on set menus that start at 500rmb per person and go up from there, there is a cold bite of foie gras on toast, or braised beef served kind of a like a steak, with jus and a single marinated tomato. It's why one course was a kung pao prawn, why a separate poached abalone was dressed with Sichuan chili oil, and why she has a Cantonese soup chef from Jiangmen in the kitchen.

After lunch, Ni sends us off to a large statue of Yuan Mei not far away, facing Guangzhou Lu.

As we walk from the restaurant to the statue, I wonder what Yuan would make of this mixing of regions and cuisines. Ni is careful not to say that what she serves is Suiyuan cuisine, a category she thinks is too broad to have much meaning. Instead, it's Wu Ji's take on Suiyuan cuisine, their interpretation, their attempt to balance Yuan's philosophies with their own health mandate, and then balance that with what they think customers in Nanjing will accept. Updating Yuan Mei for the 21st century, while still trying to honor his memory, is hard.

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Before he died in 1798, Yuan asked his family (including his first son, born when Yuan was 62, and named 阿迟）to keep the garden intact for thirty years, with the huge inheritance of silver he left. They succeeded, well beyond the thirty years, but in the 1850s the Taiping Rebellion came to Nanjing. Yuan described the garden as being next to a small mountain, and the Taiping were so thorough in destroying Yuan's legacy that not only did they tear down his house and pavilions, but they flattened the mountain and turned it into fields, according to historical sources.

They didn't get his tomb.

The tomb survived for the next 100 years but the turbulence in the 1960s was not friendly to the memory of a historical, imperial hedonist. Yuan's tomb was pulled down, and, eventually, built over. Today it is the Wutaishan Bowling Alley, 9 Lasa Lu, home to the Jiangsu Province Bowling Association, and my final stop on my tour de Yuan.

It's a Saturday afternoon and the lanes are busy. Couples on dates, old dudes practicing their roll, and families are all throwing balls down the lanes when I arrive. I squeeze into my bowling shoes, grab a 10-pound ball and do a little stretch. This game is for Yuan.

My muscles are tight and the first balls pull left, into the gutter. This is not how I wanted it to go. I need to make Yuan proud. I take a few deep breaths and find a rhythm, leaning deep into the release. The ball travels down the center of the lane. Nine pins fall. I clean up the last one, recording a spare. I do it once, twice, three times. My score climbs higher but there's not enough time in the game. I finish with an 87. Yuan will have to understand. I was rushed, I was nervous, it's been a while since I bowled. Please, dear Yuan, accept my excuse.

I give the shoes back and head outside. Two chairs and an ashtray mark the smoking area. An old bald man is pulling on his cigarette. I've brought something for Yuan and I reach into my backpack to retrieve it. The two candles are small and red. I put them in the ashtray and light them first. The bald guy looks over. I pull out a bundle of incense and light it with the flame from the candles. The bald guy looks away.

"Yuan Mei. Do you know him?"

The old man glances at me but doesn't speak.

"This used to be his tomb, right here, the bowling alley," I say.

The incense is starting to smoke.

"En," he says. He puts out his cigarette and walks away.

The woman who rented me the bowling shoes comes out next and asks what I'm doing.

"This used to be Yuan Mei's tomb! Suiyan, Yuan Mei, the Suiyuan Shidan!" I say.

"Right... Who?", she asks.

The photographer is taking pictures. I'm worried we are going to be kicked out.

"Just don't include the bowling association's sign in the pictures," she says, and goes back inside.

A minute later she comes out with her phone in her hand. She has found Yuan Mei on the internet.

"This guy?", she asks. "You are commemorating him?"

She is friendly, more curious than annoyed.

"Yes," I say. "We're almost done and then we'll go."

Satisfied, she leaves us alone on the steps. I came to honor Yuan Mei, and if I can't find a grave to sweep, or a garden to sit in, then this square ashtray outside the bowling alley on the site of his tomb will have to do. But the smell of incense is getting stronger and the smoke thicker.

I don't want to cause an international incident.

I blow out the candles and smush out the incense. I hope it's reached Yuan, wherever he is, this little tribute from one hedonist to another. His garden might exist in name only, but, for me, at least, for a few smoky moments, Yuan Mei is not gone.

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Photos: Graeme Kennedy