A History of Mao and Yao
Yao Zhisui (pronounced Zee-Swee) originally named his Chinese restaurant after its best dish. The year was 1965. Moo Shu pork was making a name for itself in America. Food and Wine Magazine in fact named Moo Shu “the dish of the year.”
Bouillabaisse came in second.
Yao’s Moo Shu’s, located on the upper Upper West Side, on Broadway and 99th, did not bring in the customers. The reasons are not known for the lack of traffic. The restaurant business is a tricky one. If it’s too sunny, customers don’t come in. If it rains, customers don’t come in. If it’s one block removed from a good location, customers don’t come in. If it’s called something unremarkable, customers don’t come in.
In the 1960s Broadway and 99th wasn’t such a good location. Back then Broadway and 99th was a heroin den.
Yao had to do something he hadn’t planned on: he had to open for breakfast. He didn’t want to serve eggs and bacon and toast, however. That was diner food. Yao wanted to have a Chinese character. He served donuts and coffee and lychees. Moo Shu’s became known for its apple fritters. Maybe that’s not exactly the dish a Chinese restaurant wants to be known for, but there could be worse things. Like not making the rent, for instance.
Even with the famed apple fritter, Moo Shu’s barely made the rent. Through the turbulent 60s and the economic downturn of the 70s and the cocaine warzone of the 80s and the police state of the 90s, Moo Shu’s stayed afloat. Narrowly.
When gentrification came to the upper Upper West Side in the early 21st century and rents skyrocketed, Moo Shu’s had to do something drastic to remain in business. Yao Zhisui decided on one last-ditch effort, one last attention-grabbing, unconventional ploy.
He renamed his restaurant. He chose one of the top three tyrants of the 20th century, a tyrant, unlike the other two, whose genocidal exploits have been shoved under the carpet. The Chinese themselves have refused to unearth the internal demolitions of Chairman Mao’s reign. And besides, nobody on the upper Upper West Side, with a Jewish orthodox community equivalent to Crown Heights, would have frequented a restaurant called Hitler’s or Stalin’s.
Turning Moo Shu’s into Mao’s proved to be a brilliant stroke. The residents on Broadway (and Columbus and Amsterdam and Riverside and even up to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Lenox Ave) ate it up. Business shot through the roof. In the months following the name change Yao Zhisui sold more rice than he had in the previous ten years of business combined. And more apple fritters too. New York Magazine named Mao Tse-tung’s as “the best Moo Shu/apple fritter establishment in the five boroughs.”
Yao Zhisui had himself a success story, nearly 45 years after opening. But this isn’t the story of Yao’s success. Rather, this is the preamble to the success. This is a story of desperation. If the policies of your leader, and your government, wipe out millions of citizens, including your own young family, what would make you name your business establishment in that leader’s honor? Delving into that question, with the world’s attention focused on Beijing and the XXIX Olympiad beginning this weekend, and with Chairman Mao’s body lying in state in the Hall of Reverence at Tiananmen Square, seems appropriate.
Yao Zhisui was born in Anhui Province in the lower Yangtze River region in the early 1930s. Yao, like the generations before him, was a subsistence farmer. He had a wife and a young family and a small plot of arable land. He had enough rice to feed his dependents. He was illiterate. As the decade of the 1950s began, he was over halfway to his life expectancy.
All of that would change.
In the mid-1950s a revolutionary who had led the communists through a decade of war with the Japanese came to power. His name was Mao Tse-tung. Chairman Mao made his name on the backs of his class, the peasant class. One of his first campaigns as Chairman was to eradicate his own class. He did this through two Five-Year plans. The second plan had a spruced up name: the Great Leap Forward. “The Leap,” historian Jeb Barlow wrote in The Chinese Century: The Evolution of a Modern Nation, “had its basis in land reform and industrial advance. All private food production was banned. All farms fell under the jurisdiction of the collective. To push the peasantry to the cities and the massive infrastructure projects there, Chairman Mao ordered his soldiers to confiscate the country’s grain production.”
In the rural provinces, nothing replaced the lost grain. Starvation took hold. The death toll soared. Over a two-year period tens of millions of people died. In Anhui Province an estimated eight million people perished. Eight million people represented a quarter of Anhui’s population.
Yao Zhisui couldn’t keep his family alive. The soldiers had confiscated his grain. In the starvation he lost his wife, his young children, his parents, his wife’s parents. To make matters worse, he watched the suffering. He saw muscles shrivel (his included) and kidneys distend and entire bodies shut down. Worse yet, he was helpless to reverse the effects.
Meanwhile, Chairman Mao made a public announcement. In recognition of the suffering of his people, Mao temporarily gave up meat. That was his solution. Six months of vegetarianism.
As Mao returned to meat, Yao began a long walk. The year was 1959. Yao joined the remaining peasants of Anhui and walked to the nearest city. The nearest city was Nanjing, in the province of Jiangsu.
As luck would have it, Mao crossed the province by rail simultaneously. Yao couldn’t have known it but when Mao traveled by train, he shut down the entire grid in that province. So if he was traveling from the city of Yangzhou to the city of Nanjing, no other trains traveled in Jiangsu Province.
That didn’t stop the masses from walking, of course.
As his traditions dictated, Mao kept company with young girls during the crossing of Jiangsu Province. Chairman Mao was a pedophile. According to historian Jeb Barlow, the number of young girls Mao slept with “must have been in the tens of thousands.” The parents of these girls were “only happy to assist.” “Think about it,” Barlow continued, “their daughters were screwing the Chairman.” Screwing the Chairman became a status symbol.
As his traditions dictated, Chairman Mao rarely bathed and he never brushed his teeth. Instead he rinsed his mouth with tea, in the tradition of his peasant upbringing. Screwing the Chairman must not have been too tasty.
Yao, by the way, had just lost his young daughter to starvation. What would he have thought had he known about the company kept in Chairman Mao’s train?
Yao and Mao arrived in Nanjing simultaneously. In Nanjing Mao did something he rarely did. He boarded an airplane. Mao hated to fly and in those few instances when he did, he shut down Chinese airspace. Alone over China, Chairman Mao flew to Shanghai.
Yao walked to Shanghai. When he arrived in Nanjing, he found a city unable to accommodate the massive peasant immigration. Nanjing, in one year, had doubled in size. There was no work to be found.
Yao followed the procession of other peasants. Shanghai, in the words of historian Jeb Barlow, was “the Shangri La of mainland China.” In Shanghai one could find work (in the fishing industry) and a place to live (shanty towns mainly) and enough food to exist (rice predominantly).
Shanghai was also a major embarkation point. Chairman Mao, in a stunning proclamation, announced that for the right price he would allow his peasants to leave the country. The right price was fifty dollars per head. In time, Yao saved enough money to leave. In 1962 Yao boarded a boat bound for San Francisco.
Eventually Yao made his way to his distant cousins living in New York City. Eventually he opened up a restaurant on the upper Upper West Side. When the customers didn’t line up for Yao’s Moo Shu, he opened for breakfast. He served apple fritters and lychees.
I met Yao Zhisui over apple fritters. I walked into his restaurant one morning because of Mao Tse-tung. A photograph of the Chairman gazed out on the pedestrians on Broadway. I wanted to see what a restaurant named Mao’s looked like.
I walked into a crowded restaurant. A waiter told me that it was always busy, from morning to night, from fritters to Moo Shu. In one corner of the restaurant sat the proprietor. When I met Yao, he was 83-years-old. We talked about his business. We talked about a restaurant named Mao’s. He shared his family history.
I asked Yao Zhisui a question, “How does a man with your history name your restaurant after Mao Tse-tung?”
Yao smiled. Yao had outlived his teeth and his smile was all gums. Like Mao, Yao had never brushed his teeth. Instead he rinsed his mouth with tea, in the tradition of his peasant upbringing.
“Mao and Yao,” Yao answered, “a yin and yang.” He then gummed into an apple fritter.
This Chinese philosophy is interesting. In the history of Mao and Yao there is opposition. There is also complementation. The two must be in harmony for the story to be complete. |
