Ah Bon Quam

Reviews: Wing Chun, Bui's Natural Tofu, Earth Room

I’ve really enjoyed B.D. McClay’s “Capsule Reviews” in her Substack. She offers very brief reviews of books and movies she’s just watched (rather than her long-form reviews in places like The New Yorker and Paris Review!) I like them more, oddly, when I’ve seen the movie or read the book because it offers a really different take than I usually have, which can expand my opinion or cement it in place, similar to the ways conversations can orient/reorient me. These short reviews don’t feel like she’s taking herself or the task so seriously—there’s a casualness I appreciate.

In that vein, here are a few capsule reviews, in this case of things I’ve loved—an old Yuen Woo-Ping movie, my favorite place to get Vietnamese-style tofu in Portland, a conceptual art installation, and a new book of poetry! As always, please let me know what you think!

Michelle Yeoh, knife at the ready, in Wing Chun

Wing Chun

Dir. Yuen Woo-Ping (Hong Kong: Century Pacific, 1994), starring Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen

I’m fascinated by the way some of the eighties and nineties Hong Kong movies enact feminism through their very existence—women are superstars, women are superheroes, women are equal to or more powerful than men—even as the storyline or concluding moral undermines those very ideas. Case in point: the wonderfully entertaining Wing Chun from 1994, directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, one of the all-time great Hong Kong martial arts choreographers (ahem Crouching Tiger).¹

Wing Chun stars Michelle Yeoh, who is shining so brightly in our collective skies right now. I found it moving to watch something she made almost thirty years ago, given how many women are relegated to short careers. In it, she plays the daughter of a tofu shop owner. Before the movie begins, she’s transitioned from shop flirt and beauty, luring all the local men with her looks, into a kung fu student who’s trained to protect herself from men—specifically bandits, who want to kidnap and marry her. Although she has a sifu, or wise old teacher, she has become a master in her own right. In fact, no man around holds a candle to her.

This movie plays a lot with gender identity. It also takes as a given that Yeoh is better than all the men around her, who are bumblers, lusty fools, idiots really, who she can best mentally and physically. Her companions are her auntie, the shop manager, repeatedly ridiculed for her stinky tofu breath, played by a beautiful and wily Kingdom Yuen, and a young, gorgeous widow who these two take under their wings to protect from bandits, played by Catherine Hung. The wonderful (and incredibly young) Donnie Yen plays her suitor, who, in the film, also trained in kung fu for years, as Yeoh did, in order to return home and protect her, but never reaches anything like her abilities.²

There’s a bit of As You Like It and Midsummer Night’s Dream to this movie—confusions of love, confusions of gender, matchmaking gone wrong, intrigues under the cover of night. Among Yeoh’s triumphs in the film (spoiler alert): she hits a bandit in the groin with a fireball, burning his penis and rendering him impotent (yes, this movies has teenage humor), and she “pulls out” a man’s giant, erect spear from a wall, the challenge he set for her to save the young widow (yes, this movie is obsessed with phalluses in various forms and their removal/destruction).

The movie ends with most of the women heading towards marriage, and the implication of the script is that now they are finally fulfilled. And yet, that’s not what 99% of the film explored. It was, instead, about the attractiveness of a strong, independent woman; the perils of overconfident men who take women for granted; why a woman might choose to reject tradition gender roles, including garb; and the pleasures of women in each other’s companies—and by pleasures I mean both companionship and sexual gratification without men (there is a foot tickling/orgasm scene played for laughs). It’s all about the skills, intelligence, independence, and resourcefulness of women! So how ridiculous to end with Yeoh in a wedding dress on a horse being carried away and told to behave.

I, of course, loved all the scenes with tofu! It’s central to the movie in a way I wish food more often was: an avaricious, weak man trying to prove his physical prowess by grinding soybeans; desperate men lined up to eat bowls of fresh soft tofu from the arms of a “tofu beauty”; a hungry strapping young woman eating bowl after bowl before she can deliver her message. It makes tofu seem inseparable from life, which is, honestly, how I feel!

Also, this movie was made by Woo-Ping, so of course the fight scenes are magnificent! They’re riveting, entertaining, strange, creative, goofy, all around delightful! Wing Chun isn’t easy to access, but our Portland movie rental spot, Movie Madness, has a copy, so hop to it! And, you know, the internet is vast.

Photo from Katherine Chew Hamilton’s Love Letter to Bui’s in Portland Monthly.

Bui’s Natural Tofu

520 NE 76th Ave. Portland, OR 97213
9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday; 9 am to 3 pm, Sunday

Speaking of tofu… when I really want to treat myself on the weekends, I drive out to NE 76th and Glisan and line up among half a dozen others to order from this deli-style tofu shop. Bui’s is unassuming, but those in the know (and there are plenty of us—it’s a Portland institution) recognize the absolute mastery within these brick walls. Started by Thuha Bui in her family garage in the late nineties, Bui’s specializes in Vietnamese-style fried tofu cut into long rectangles, sometimes flavored delectably with green onion or glass noodles. Bui’s fried tofu is softer than say your grocery store “firm,” but firmer than soft! It’s got a nice bounce and heft, without feeling heavy. (You can also buy fresh tofu and soy milk from their fridge case.) As a home cook, Bui’s fried tofu is a dream because it tastes delicious on its own—a little greasy but also clean—and integrates into dishes easily: curries, stir fries, salad rolls. Sometimes I simply panfry it as is and serve it over rice with sautéed greens and chili oil. Whoever said tofu doesn’t have any flavor has a broken tongue.

I always get some fried tofu to take home when I visit Bui’s, but the real pleasure for me is the grab-and-go prepared foods. I always order salad rolls because they’re fresh, made right before your eyes, and better than any others I’ve had in town. I never skip an order of sticky rice either. My favorite has a filling of pureed mung beans seasoned with sautéed onion and black pepper surrounded by mochi and then surrounded again by perfectly cooked sticky rice like porcupine quills. It’s amazing! So is the sticky rice with shredded chicken and thin coins of fermented sausage. So are the bánh cuốn, made from fermented rice batter, rolled into deceptively thin tubes, filled with tiny bits of ground pork and wood ear mushrooms, and served with a bag of fried garlic, sprouts and herbs, and seasoned fish sauce.

It’s such a pleasure to order something new at Bui’s because everything tastes wonderful. It’s a hit parade! If you’re looking for a treat, check it out.

Earth Room and Earth Room

Art installation by Walter De Maria (installed in 1977, available to view at 141 Wooster Street, New York, NY) / book of poetry by Rachel Mannheimer (New York: Changes Press, 2022)

A few weeks ago I was in New York City for a friend’s baby shower, and on one of my free days I decided that at long last I wanted to visit Walter De Maria’s infamous Earth Room. Installed in 1977, the artwork is a loft in SoHo filled with thigh-high dirt. It has stood there for almost fifty years. You walk up an unassuming flight of stairs to arrive at the Earth Room. As you near, the temperature changes slightly—cooler when I went on a hot spring day—and the room smells, well, like it’s filled with earth, like a garden center. A man named Bill, who has tended this soil for decades, might be sitting at a table off to the side, unable to see you as the three-year-old you’re with digs in the earth and you wonder, is this ok? and decide, yes! Because this is just dirt.

My friend Rachael, her little son Hart, my friend Peter, and I visited the Earth Room and then walked a few blocks to another De Maria installation, from 1979, The Broken Kilometer. Upon arriving at the Broken Kilometer—again the only visitors in this hallowed space—little Hart started repeating “ah bon quam” — gibberish Peter and I each interpreted in our own way. For Peter, it meant: ah, the spring weather, so nice, ah bon quam. For me, I heard something like: ah, the experience of taking in this kind of abstract conceptual art, ah bon quam.³

I loved both the Earth Room and Broken Kilometer, not because I typically love conceptual art or even know enough about their contexts to place them within a framework that holds depth and intrigue for me, but because they transported me out of whack-ass SoHo into other spaces, outside of time, outside of logic. They affected me. The work is simple and deceptive. Part of the experience now, for better or worse, is about being in a beautiful old SoHo flat and all that entails and implies (the changing neighborhood, the people left behind, real estate value, who is paying rent, urban planning, what other things this could be, what other things those other places could be).

A day after I visited these two spots, I saw a college friend, Marina, at the baby shower, and she recommended a new book of poetry by Rachel Mannheimer called Earth Room. Marina loved it, but didn’t say much more. Instinctively, I ordered it right away and when it arrived, I dropped all my other books and read it over two nights. It’s highly accessible, personal, about trying to place yourself inside of a world that is full of misery (historical, contemporary) among artists and artworks manipulating dirt, salt, water, and the human body to try to discover something new.

I love the title—as I love the name for De Maria’s piece—because it makes me think about the earth as one big room, and conversely, a room as the whole earth. It makes me think about why dirt is called earth, and what dirt means in relationship to life. And I loved this book, which placed me alongside someone and their furtive thoughts as they encountered pieces like De Maria’s. Reading it felt not dissimilar from stepping outside of stinky, fashion-obsessed SoHo into a room filled with dirt. You take a deep breath. You feel confused but calm, maybe even relieved, definitely curious. You feel, well, Ah bon quam.

1. Woo-Ping also directed two of my favorite martial arts movies—and wildly enough, his first two as director and Jackie Chan’s first successes—Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, which were made in quick succession in 1978. I’m not joking, those two are masterworks!

2. I enjoyed the fact that Donnie Yen, who is one of the greatest martial arts film stars of all time, spends most of the movie watching Yeoh battle. Woo-Ping doesn’t seem to care that he has a male superstar in his cast. He doesn’t need him for his fighting—Yeoh has that taken care of.

3. Only later did I start to hear the name of one of my favorite Vietnamese dishes (referenced above - bánh cuốn), but as Hart isn’t Vietnamese, I think that was a fluke!