When All Those Afghan Refugees Finally Get Here, The Better We’ll Eat.
Back in the 1950’s, when I was a kid growing up in New York, you had your choice of three cuisines. You could eat American, where the sauce was ketchup (and it’s the sauce that makes the cuisine) or you could ‘take out’ what we called ‘chinks,’ which was some glutinous glop on top of ‘flied lice.’ For 15 cents you could get a ‘slice,’ which was some rolled dough with some melted tomato sauce and a splotch of white cheese. Add a nickel and they added some meat.
The guys who came back from Europe after the war all liked a slice, because they first ate it in Italy, even though we invented it here and sent it over there.
I don’t think the word ‘cuisine’ even existed in my neighborhood. But this changed after 1960 when some families showed up who had been run out of Cuba by the Castro regime. All of a sudden, one of the Chinese take-outs became a ‘Cubano-Chino’ restaurant, with tasty, fried chicken along with fresh veggies and rice.
The pizza joints had no choice but to compete, so some of them even had some tables for sit-down meals and served noodles with ground hamburger and tomato sauce which they called lasagna. What you didn’t eat you took home and warmed it up for breakfast the next day.
Things really took off cuisine-wise after the fall of Saigon. All of a sudden, many neighborhoods now had restaurants that were offering Asian, not Chinese food. What was called Cantonese, which had been the traditional glutinous slop, was now tastier and presented in a nicer-looking way, replaced by something called Szechuan (we couldn’t even pronounce the word) or Hunan. And the word ‘cuisine’ was now added to the neighborhood lexicon, as if it had been there all along.
It’s really amazing how quickly we accept new populations who show up every time some country’s government that we propped up collapses and people who depended on that government have to take off and get away. Where else are they going to go?
It’s also amazing how quickly new immigrants adapt to America. Give immigrants one generation and all of a sudden, they own all the retail stores wherever they settle, send their kids to college, and start driving out to the burbs to shop in the malls. Next time you’re in the Danbury Fair mall which is more than 50 miles from immigrant neighborhoods in Queens, notice how many burka-clad women you see walking around.
And how do the Republicans respond every time we let ‘them’ in? The way they always respond since the GOP passed the first immigration restriction law back in the 1890’s. They welcome the new immigrants with a combination of racism and some warnings about how these newcomers pose a threat to the American ‘way of life.’
So we are treated to a rant by Steven Miller, who crafted the anti-immigration laws for Trump that the courts threw out, and says that Biden wants to bring ‘hundreds of thousands’ of refugees over here so that White America will eventually disappear. And the threat isn’t some kind of theoretical one because, as Tucker Carlson said the other night, those refugees are going to be living in your neighborhood — right next door to you!
This guy Miller is what Grandpa would call a ‘shonda fin dem goyim.’ The polite translation means someone who is Jewish and behaves in a way to bring discredit on the Jews from non-Jews. The less-polite translation is that he’s simply an asshole.
Miller is a kid from the West Coast, one-generation removed from the five million Jews who got away from Eastern Europe or otherwise would have been ground or burned into dust by the Nazi war machine. Miller should know better than to be involved in efforts to keep anyone from getting into the United States. With all due respect to Grandpa, Miller’s not an asshole. He’s a piece of sh*t.
Meanwhile, back in the nabes, I just hope the Afghan refugees who come here bring their great cuisine. Their basic rice dish, called palaw, is cooked with all kinds of tasty herbs and spices. Smells great and tastes even better. I ate palaw in Eastern Turkey and I’m looking forward to when there are enough Afghan immigrants living in New York so that Afghan restaurants have to compete with each other to get a crowd.
Recall I said above that cuisines are defined by the sauces they use. That’s because the sauce is how you add the spice. And if you look at the map of the old ‘silk route’ which linked East with West and brought all those wonderful spices from China and India into Europe and beyond, you’ll notice that the route runs along the edge of Afghanistan:
It’s estimated that somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 persons of Afghan descent live in and around metro New York. I don’t know how many people of a particular nationality have to settle in one neighborhood in order to see the appearance of some restaurants and some signage of that nationality’s native language hanging in storefront windows.
But I don’t want to have to shlep back to Eastern Turkey to eat wonderful Afghan food. I’d much rather just hop on the E or F train in Manhattan and go out to Queens. When there’s a lunch break I’ll walk out of some stupid meeting in midtown, ride out to Flushing or Jackson Heights and have a great meal.
That’s what America will always mean to me.
