Post-Birthday Challenge 1: I Took the Food Leap

After leaving a jazz show with a new friend - story for another post - I had a chance to finish what I started in Queens. My friend and I wandered from the Lower East Side to Chinatown for dinner. At this stage in my New York residence, I'm fairly comfortable and confident with dim sum, and I wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary from the restaurant we chose. I was wrong.

First, hundred-year eggs were on the menu. I'd read about them in a novel and seen them in 6-packs at an Asian grocery but never tried them, and, truth be told, was scared to. I don't like fresh eggs, let alone eggs fermented in some kind of mineral compound and buried underground for months. But I was still curious, and in the spirit of the Birthday Exercises, decided to push my limits. I ordered them. While the waiter was at our table, I asked him about a fish dish that piqued my curiosity. He recommended another dish and I accepted.

When my fish and eggs arrived, they were utterly different from my expectations. (Although I was pretty free from expectations, anyway.) The fish casserole was two whole fish, sliced in thirds, baked into white rice in a stone dish. Well, I think it was two whole fish — I found two heads, two flanks, and three tails. My dining companion and I made the requisite joke about radioactivity, and I began eating. The fish had a delicate flavor, with just the right amount of saltiness and an earthy roasted-ness. My friend challenged me to eat the eye, which he had done before. It felt like eating a sequin.

The eggs were a discovery of a higher order. They were quartered open; swirled like agate, transluscent and smokey. I stared at them like I'd found a geode, and then I ate them: dark-tasting and creamy, a delicacy.


How I Left My Comfort Zone:
For the most part, I was thrilled to be trying new dishes. But trying new things in front of someone who'd stuck to the safe side for his own meal made me self conscious. He seemed glad he hadn't ordered a two-headed, three-tailed fish, and seemed to be trying not to think about the eggs.

What I Learned:
Who cares about what anyone thinks? Hundred Year Eggs are off the chain! But if you're eating with someone you don't know well, perhaps go with a less polarizing palate.

Day 21: I Went on a Pilgrimage

On Day 20, I went to see Argo, and it unexpectedly prepared me for the next day's challenge, going on a pilgrimage. The film, about the Iranian hostage crisis, opened with an animated sequence attempting to put the events of the film in historical context. The cartoon sequence depicted a just, beloved Prime Minister who tried to nationalize the energy sector; displeased, U.S. operatives worked to depose the leader and reinstate the Shah, who was greedy and tyrannical. The oppression of the Shah's regime led to the eventual Islamist uprising of which the hostage crisis was a part. The tone of the animated sequence was apologetic and sympathetic to the Iranian perspective; then the live action movie switched gears. It showed Americans using their wits and finesse to outsmart and defeat single-minded packs of Iranian wolves driven by blood lust. If the animated sequence was heavy-handed in its moralizing, the live action sequence was equally so in its characterizations.

The next day, with these thoughts percolating in my mind, I went to Auriesville, NY to the shrine of the Jesuit martyrs. Fr. Isaac Jogues and his companions, René Goupil and Jean de Lalande, were martyred in this spot when it was a Mohawk village. My companions and I walked a trail along a glistening creek-bed, reading sign-posts that told the story of Goupil's martyrdom. After he was tomahawked, Isaac Jogues hid his body in the stream in order to bury it later when the tension had died down. A storm came up and, while Jogues was rainbound indoors, someone removed the body. He spent the next several months searching the woods for Goupil's body in order to bury him properly. After burying Goupil's remains and returning to France, Jogues grew restless and returned to America with Lalande. During an unsteady peace between the Huron, who were France's allies, and the Iroquois, Jogues and Lalande returned to Auriesville. When peace between the Huron and the Iroquois fell apart, Jogues and Lalande were martyred in the same place Goupil had been.

Throughout the trail and the exhibit, I sensed the ways the French, Huron, English, and Iroquois were depicted as opposing forces. In some parts, I got the sense I was meant to root for the French against the brutal Mohawk, just as Argo had wanted me to root against the Iranians. But, despite the many contemporaries who disagreed with them, Jogues and his companions believed that the Mohawks they met were human and made in God's image, or they wouldn't have wanted them to be Christian. They put their lives at risk — and they gave their lives — out of love for the Mohawk people. 

This pilgrimage encouraged me to reflect on courage (when Lalande accompanied Jogues to America, he expected the same fate as Goupil) and friendship (Goupil spent months scouring the woods for what remained of his friend's body). But it also encouraged me to examine my own relationship to parochialism and nationalism.

Since I've moved to New York, I've thrown myself into being Irish-American. Sometimes I've asked myself why it's so important to me that I call myself Irish. I get excited when I get to hang out with Irish people; I speak a language many insist is dying, beyond hope; I read the Irish news and go to trad sessions. And why? Because these things are ours; they set us apart. I want to preserve and reclaim them, but there's a danger that that desire leads straight to "because the British took them from us." Many have studied Irish language and music for these more political reasons. There's a danger in taking too much pride in what sets us apart. 

  My Irish fantasy 

I think what keeps me grounded is my genuine appreciation of and curiosity in other cultures and experiences. Intentionally seeking out opportunities to learn about them helps me to avoid parochialism. It helps me keep my love for my own family's culture from getting stuck in an us-v-them attitude.

How I Left My Comfort Zone:
Pilgrimage sounds so old-school, doesn't it? This modern city-girl had to admit she could get something from that!

What I Learned:
This pilgrimage was a genuine spiritual experience for me. It called me to recognize and celebrate the unity of the human family and the ways God is present to us through others: God works in our intimate friendships and our most challenging relationships.