So, here’s the bonus question: our mah-jong game (a gift from my grandma, bought in Vietnam) came with 16 extra tiles. We have 152 normal tiles (4 copies of the three sets+dragons+winds, and 4 seasons and 4 flowers). From googling things up on the next, we think that the extra tiles we can’t identify are Vietnamese jokers (this site and this site both describe the Vietnamese mah jong variant as having 16 jokers, which can replace a variety of tiles, from the “Emperor” who can replace pretty much anything, to the “Dragon Lady” who can replace any dragon, and so on). However, to start with, those two websites don’t agree on which tile is which! Also, neither of them has the full set of our tiles…

On the off-chance that someone would know either Vietnamese mahjong, or how to read Chinese characters–do those tiles below mean anything to you? (bear in mind it’s a Vietnamese mah jong game, so the Chinese characters are approximative, to say the least…)

And bonus question: anyone have the Vietnamese rules of the game? Sloperama mentions that there are only 19 ways of “going out”, which should correspond to the special hands in Classical Chinese mah jong, but the Classical Chinese rules I can find on the net pretty much fail at having 19 special hands…

ETA: following the find of a Vietnamese set of rules (in Vietnamese *sob*) I am pretty reasonably sure that the two topmost ranks are as follows, from left to right:
Blue: tile which replaces any tile, tile which replaces circles, tile which replaces bamboos, tile which replaces cracks
Red: tile which replaces any ordinary tile (bamboo, circles, cracks), “Great Flower’ aka tile which replaces any flower, tile which replaces any Dragon, tile which replaces any Wind
I have no idea of their names in English.

You can now listen to the podcast of my pseudo-Chinese story “As the Wheel Turns” over at issue 9 of Dark Fiction Magazine (where I am in the stellar company of Juliet McKenna, James Barclay Andrew Reid and Kev Clark).

Click here for the podcast. Thanks to Sharon Ring, Kate Sherrod and the rest of the Dark Fiction Magazine team!

A bit late, as those were awarded in Shanghai on August 27th, but only just saw this. The Sky Awards are “fan/judge-voted awards for Chinese science fiction and fantasy literacy. These awards are initiated and administered by the Sky Award Organizing Committee composed of a number of senior SF/F fans, and the Judge Panel consists of writers, editors, critics, and professionals in the SF/F field in China.” (stole the definition from the World SF blog, on which it appears to have quotes, so I’m leaving them…)

Best Novel:
Three Body III: Dead End, Liu Cixin (Chonqing Publishing House)

Best Short Story
“Algorithm of Simhuman”, Chi Hui (Science Fiction World, May 2010)

Best Translated Novel
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman, translated by Hu Yaqian (Sichuan Science and Technology Publishing House)

Best Translated Short Story
“Turing’s Apples”, Stephen Baxter, translated by Cai Yu (Science Fiction World, May 2010)

Special Contribution Award:
Liu Cixin – science fiction writer, author of the Three Body trilogy

Here’s wishing some of those get translated in a language I speak… (speaking of which, Clarkesworld recently published “The Fish of Lijiang”, a Chen Quiufan short story translated by Ken Liu. Well worth a read)

(via Elbakin.net)

Ok, this is a slight cheat. Xá xíu isn’t, per se, a Vietnamese dish (it’s Cantonese), but it’s long been a childhood favourite, and you find it in a few Vietnamese dishes (with egg noodles, or in buns). Like my phở recipe, this is just an approximation: the best xá xíu is actually found in specialised shops (or in a Chinese restaurant if you’re in the West), which will have the actual resources to do the dry roasting. This is also not the traditional recipe for oven-baked xá xíu (which requires meat hooks, and lets the meat cook while suspended in the oven)–I don’t have that kind of equipment, and my oven is too small anyway. But it definitely tastes divine like the real thing. If you happen to have a craving…

I usually make this in big batches, because monitoring the cooking is the key bit, and I might as well do that for a lot of meat. It freezes wonderfully, so you can make a lot, and always have some on hand for those hunger pangs.

A word of warning: this is best done with a fatty part of the pork, because the cooking process I use dries the meat. Having tried it, I definitely advise against using filet mignon or leaner cuts of the pork.

This serves, a lot of people? 6-8 as part of a main dish.

(from Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. I kept the ingredients and the marinade but changed the cooking method)

You’ll need:
-2 lbs pork butt (1 kg “échine de porc” if you’re French, spare rib roast if you’re British. Any piece of the pork with reasonable fat content will do. NOT the belly though, too much fat in there)
-3 tblsp soy sauce
-2 tblsp fermented bean paste (the salty kind. You can substitute hoisin sauce, but it won’t taste quite the same)
-1 tblsp Shaoxing wine
-2 tblsp ketchup
-2 tblsp fruit juice (pref. orange or pineapple or something acidic, pref. without added sugar. I usually throw in our latest Tropicana purchase. This batch was made with pineapple, mango & lime juice)
-1 tblsp sugar
-1 tblsp. honey
-2 cloves garlic, chopped up coarsely and crushed
-1/2 teasp 5-spice mix

Cut the pork butt into small bits–I do mine by eye, they’re something like 15-20cm long, 5-7cm thick, and 5-7cm high? Doesn’t matter much, you just don’t want the meat to be too thin or too thick, and you want a decent length that you can later slice. Mix everything else into a marinade. Throw the pork in, and leave to marinate for 3-6 hours, either at room temp or in the fridge.

The pork in the marinade

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Take an oven dish, and line the cuts of pork: you want them in a single layer (they can touch each other, but they can’t be piled atop each other). Brush them with half the marinade, and put them in the oven for around 30-40 minutes. By now, the pork should be cooked (check this before moving on to phase 2).

Turn the oven to the grill setting at around 210°C (I think it’s grill? In my oven it’s the thing that turns on just the upper resistor. It looks like it’s broiling for a US oven?). Basically, you’re waiting for the sugar in the sauce to caramelise: when it does, the pork will go from being vaguely brownish to a brighter, deeper colour tinged with red (it won’t look as red as the picture, though, that’s just the flash playing tricks).

This is where you absolutely have to keep an eye on what’s going on in your oven: the margin between caramelised and burnt is very thin, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side… It’s a fairly fast process (5-10 minutes). When the bits of meat start being done, turn them over, brush the exposed side with the marinade, and wait again for the caramelisation process to happen. Depending on your oven, you might have to do this in several passes. Feel free to remove the bits of meat that look done as they look done–in my oven (which is very small), the caramelisation doesn’t happen at the same time for every chunk of meat, and I’d rather have the bits of meat a touch cold rather than charred black…

Et voilà! Serve with rice, sliced cucumber and dồ chua (pickled vegetables). It’s also wonderful in sandwiches; or, if you feel courageous, you can do xá xíu buns…

Electric Velocipede are revamping their website to prepare for their launch as a e-zine. In the runup to that, they’re republishing fiction from their previous issues online. Among which is “The Dragon’s Tears”. Probably the best description of this is that I wrote as a homage to the Chinese fairytales I read when I was a child–I wasn’t very up to date on historical research then, but I think I nailed the feeling I got when I was six or seven, and immersed in a big fat book of wonderful stories with dragons, immortal carpenters, and crabby Iron-Crutch Li, where everything and everyone could turn out to be magical (and possibly deadly. That’s part of the deal with magical people).
Also, as Anne S. Zanoni points out, she sent me one of the sweetest mails ever after she proofread this–I’m a big Patricia McKillip fan, so being compared to her while I still felt like a raw newbie was, well, pretty magical…

Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother.

Read more here, and do check out the rest of the cool stuff while you’re there.

Couple of links:
-Joyce Chng at the World SF blog on the Russ Pledge seen from outside the Western Anglophone world.
-Jonathan Dotse on why the future isn’t Western
-And two from Cheryl Morgan: one crunching data on SF anthologies, and the other on “Diversity is Hard”.

In other news, Irene Kuo is a genius. I’m down to 6 recipes picked out of her Key to Chinese Cooking (tea eggs, cha siu, white-cut chicken, two broccoli recipes, and the sweet-sour sauce), and they all worked out great. Also, the explanations are really clear on why you should do stuff, and it makes for way easier cooking.

While googling stuff on how to use cornstarch, I found this book: On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Science and cooking? I’m sold… (but broke)

Recipe of the day: creative carrot cake (didn’t have raisins, so chopped up prunes after removing the stones; didn’t have orange zest, so added Orange Blossom instead; didn’t have walnuts, so put in pecans. And not entirely sure I had the right quantity of carrots. This could be fun)

Right. Back to the %%% story.

So, I made tea eggs, a classical Chinese snack, mainly ‘cos I had two eggs, and a lot of time on my hands:

(Wikipedia picture, because my egg shells went into the trash, and the H just threw the trash out, before I thought of taking any pictures for posterity)

Basically, hard-boil eggs, crack them, and then steep them in a simmering mixture of soy sauce, spices, and tea leaves. The mixture seeps through the cracks, and into the eggs, giving them this marbled appearance. I used the fast version; normally you’re supposed to crack the shells, let the eggs simmer over low heat for a bit, and then let them brine in the sauce for a couple of days. The H came home as I was cracking the shells, revealing the beautiful network of tea marbling on the surface of the eggs. His first reaction was “what the heck is that?”

I am now trying to convince him to eat the other egg

(the sekrit baking project went fine–the criteria being that my husband, after tasting a bit, looked at the plate full of pastry, and said, “Surely you’re not bringing all of those to work?” If he wants leftovers to eat himself, we can take it the thing doesn’t taste horrendous…)

If you’re interested in Asian cooking at all, there is a fascinating link over at Malinda Lo’s website. (the article’s focused on China, but a lot of it applies to other Asian cookbooks, and probably other cultures as well)

It’s a bit of a mouthful (it’s an academic article, and it’s quite long), but it takes a look at the notion of authenticity over time, and how it’s mainly built to exclude certain people from the norm (whether the norm is the lost motherland, or later on, the “typical” Chinese American experience). It’s also a very highly detailed analysis of the social and cultural norms behind cookbooks, and it’s fascinating to see the amount of tropes and messages that lurk at the heart of the books. I’ll certainly never view a cookbook in the same way ever again….

Rereading A Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢) in a slightly different translation than my first read (first read was the Penguin edition, the new one is Foreign Press). It’s rather interesting to discover, erm, explicit passages: the fight in the clan’s school, for instance, appears to be because it’s a hotbed of hormones and boys are seeking to nab boys and/or girls, often both–which I totally missed in the first read. So either I wasn’t paying enough attention on the first read (which is possible, especially since we were in Spain at the time and I was rather under the weather); or the new translation is rather more explicit than the other one…
I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s entertaining, and I’m saving all my complaints-credits for sentences such as “By now, Jia Dairu had arrived with Jia Daixi, Jia Chi, Jia Xiao, Jia Dun, Jia She, Jia Zheng, Jia Cong, Jia Bin, Jia Heng, Jia Guang, Jia Chen, Jia Qiong, Jia Lin, Jia Qiang, Jia Chang, Jia Ling, Jia Yun, Jia Qin, Jia Zhen, Jia Pin, Jia Zao, Jia Heng, Jia Fen, Jia Fang, Jia Lan, Jia Jun, and Jia Zhi.” (it’s probably way easier in Mandarin because of the various characters, but in English or French all those syllables really look alike. Plus, I’ve got a rough idea of who some of those people are, and admit to utter cluelessness about 75% of them).

Also, it looks like they made a TV series–now if I could get my hands on a subtitled version…

So, not up to much that I can safely admit (sekrit projects, plus speaking about the novel in progress on this blog seems to curse me to a halt in the writing of the manuscript). To tide you over until the weekend, a few links:

-I’m guessing by now most people will have seen the Amy Chua piece on the Washington Post, about why Chinese mothers are superior. I don’t have much to say about it other than “batshit crazy Asian mother”–and yes, I have an Asian mother, so I can speak from my (admittedly limited) experience. I can see some of the points, and some things Amy Chua mentions are certainly familiar from my own childhood, though not pushed quite this far. My TV time was limited; so was my video game time; neither of my parents were particularly happy when I brought home bad grades, and yes, both of them always pushed me to go further because they believed I could do better. And I’m glad they did it; I’m glad they placed a higher value on education than on sparing my feelings, and nurtured my ambition and drive–to the point where I thought of doing something as crazy as writing in a second language and getting away with it.
But, seriously, not allowing your children to be in school plays, forcing them to play a musical instrument and tormenting your daughter until she gets the piano piece right? Wow. That’s some serious going south here.
Allow me to dig up quintessential Chinese wisdom here, in the person of Confucius: “To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.” Ie, balance and perspective. Something that seems to be missing from all the horror stories about Asian moms (there were quite a few flying around on the internet in the wake of that article).

-And, in a lighter vein: Mature people truths (via Cat Rambo). Some of these are oh-so-painfully true.

-Finally, I’ve posted (with permission) on the SFWA forums “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s awesome story about expatriation, identity and what it means to be an immigrant in a strange land. Recommended by Richard Horton in his year-end summary of Interzone, and generally quite made of awesome. (and I’m not only saying that because Rochita is my friend). Well worth a read if you have forum access.

EDIT: apparently, the Amy Chua thing is only an excerpt from a larger book, which is intended to deal with the problems of her education system as well. Mea culpa.
EDIT #2: and, apparently, the WJS just quoted the most controversial part of Chua’s book without bothering to add a corrective, because controversy makes for more readers. Great. As I said on LJ, I feel like hitting something, preferably a WJS editor.