Living in Little Saigon but craving old-school Cantonese

Just give me a torn red-vinyl booth, a plastic lazy susan with sticky bottles of soy sauce, and a dim room full of hanging lanterns.

One of the very few downsides of living in an area that's been blessed with zillions of fairly recent Asian immigrants is the slow death of the old-school, Cantonese-inspired, inauthentic, risky Chinese restaurant. Gone (largely) is the day trip to Chinatown for a family lunch of won ton soup (sizzling rice soup $1.00 more per person; hot-and-sour soup $2.50 more per person), sweet-and-sour pork, cashew chicken, and all the rest of those interpreted dishes that end up being about as Chinese as I am. Honestly, the food our more recent immigrants have brought is better, while improved transportation has allowed the marketplace to accommodate them with things that are a lot closer to what they had at home. I'm grateful, for both the food itself and the opportunity to learn.

But still. Once in a while a craving comes up for a gaudily decorated restaurant with lazy Susans on the tables, sticky bottles of soy sauce, and SOMETHING on the menu that says "chop suey." Every now and then, the heart yearns to journey back, back to Grant Street and Broadway, back to Daddy and Uncle Mel arguing over the check, back to Aunt Lady helping a little girl figure out what the fortune in her cookie really meant. On such occasions, the food needs to reflect the nostalgia, and that's getting harder to find around here.

Enter Fu Wing Low, unobtrusively tucked away in a strip mall in Fountain Valley. It has everything I needed -- enormous round tables with lazy Susans and bottles of soy sauce, lucky bamboo plants in every corner, red vinyl chairs, and an old couple arguing loudly over whether or not she should care if the kids come home for Thanksgiving. (Spoiler: Yes, ma'am, you should. Your daughter-in-law can't be THAT bad. )

Herewith, vegetable egg foo young, cashew chicken, and of course, the obligatory almond and fortune cookies.

Every cliche in the book. I am happy.

Musings on photographing your own children

 Offering a thought here, or perhaps it's a counterpoint, that I wish younger parents would consider.

I see and hear so many of you urging your children to sit up straight, look at the camera and smile. And I'm here to encourage you not to. Please save yourselves and your kids a lot of stress and leave those posed, coldly perfect shots to the professionals. Yes, there are still photo studios where you can get them all dolled up with meticulously arranged hair and spotless faces while trained pros, who do this for a living, deal with the heavy burden of getting the "perfect" portrait. (Sure, you want a few formal portraits -- we all do -- but your child is a multi-dimensional human being, not a prop for Instagram.)

When you're out and about with your kids, or home doing something with your kids, or wrangling the carpool with your kids, and you want a picture, grab your camera/phone and shoot the thing. Shoot it immediately, as soon as you decide you want it. Try not to get caught, and for God's sake, don't call the child's attention to it.

Catch their goofy expressions, don't sweat their messy hair (and at the same time, don't deliberately mess it up because that kind of artificiality shows in every frame), don't holler at them to force a smile. Catch your real kids living their real lives.

On the one hand, you'll have a collection of pleasant, forgettable photos. Who doesn't. Snoooooze town. You'll also waste a ton of time and spend precious emotional currency fighting with your kids and trying to force them into artificial poses, artificial smiles, and artificial settings. You are just NEVER going to get a two-year-old to face the camera and smile flawlessly on command (and, if you have a hardheaded one, it won't work on a 17-year-old either). Trust me.

On the other, you'll have a visual reminder of a million precious stories -- stories of who your kids really are -- the first time little Timmy tasted ice cream, the expression on Sophia's face when Grandma complimented her first home-cooked meal, the sadness of knowing Jared didn't make the team. When your kids are interacting with their friends, catch them *interacting with their friends.* Don't make them stand shoulder to shoulder, all facing front, and smile at you. Nothing on earth is more boring than a line-'em-up'and-shoot-'em photo of a bunch of teenagers heading to the homecoming dance. (And yes, the sad moments are often worth preserving too -- you don't have to display them and make the poor kid relive every tantrum and every humiliation until she's old enough to serve as President. But you'll have them and someday your kiddo will have them and many of those bleak moments ARE worth remembering because they help to form us.)

You know what else forms us? EVERYDAY LIFE, with its awkward attempts at fashion, its teenaged facial breakouts, its sibling quarrels, its baseball practice, its burnt toast, its mismatched socks, and all its precious disorderliness. Very few of our days are Christmas Eve, graduation, someone's engagement. Far, FAR more numerous are the days of wrestling with the math homework, walking off the field defeated, triumphing over that impossible ice-skating move, getting completely lost in Little Women.

How do I know? Because I have the honor of having an only (biological) child, the most over-photographed, painstakingly documented species in the known world, and I tried both approaches.

I have all the formal portraits and all the candids. The formal portraits are nice, sure, but the ones that really warm my heart are the un-posed, unscripted, hey-that's-a-pretty-cool-moment shots that capture the essence of my real kid. When we go through old photos now, the formal portraits get a shrug and a turned page. The candids get us laughing, reminiscing, maybe shedding a tear or two -- but they're real. They're real life. They're who he was and they carry the seeds of who he is now and who he will be one day.

I hope you'll consider it. (PS: I offer this in a spirit of warmth and affection, not high-handed snarkiness. For a change.)

xoxoxoxoxo -- love, jillie