From Berkeley to Bangkok, Bali, Katmandu, Seoul, Tokyo, Kaohsiung, and Taipei, in order to record vegetarian recipes that she has been seeking, she has gone to monasteries in city after city. She has recorded hundreds of previously-unwritten vegetarian recipes from monasteries. And she has discovered that the vegetarian cultures of Asia come in many forms. . . .
It was the afternoon of a day at the end of summer ten years ago. Betty Jung was working as a lab medical technologist at UC Berkeley. She looked around at the room filled with beakers and blasted with air conditioning, undisturbed by the summer heat. But Jung was feeling restless. Sure, she had a steady job, one where she could put to use what she had studied; she had plenty of good food and clothes. She went to work every day, and on the weekends she would get together with the other single girls to go out on the town. It was a life to be content with.
But recently she had been feeling lethargic. In a few years she would be 40, entering "middle age." Was this going to be her life?
"NO!" She couldn't stop herself from shouting out loud, startling herself. Her colleagues looked at her, wondering "What's wrong?" She thought up some quick excuse to get through the moment, but in her heart she had made a lasting decision: She would prepare well, and then live the kind of life she wanted to live, doing something about which she could say, "that's me."
Go East, young woman
Jung doesn't like to wait around. She is straight-ahead and very practical. That day upon returning home the first thing she did was to check her bank account to see if she had enough money to "go on an adventure." As she calculated, the confusion in her mind steadily subsided, to be replaced by a powerful notion-to go to Asia. That was the land of her ancestry, as well as the land where vegetarianism-an idea she had recently decided to try out-originated.
In fact she knew pitifully little about Asia. Except for being Asian in appearance, like most everyone born and bred in California, she was thoroughly American. All she knew of the Orient were a few vague stereotypes.
Jung grew up in a small town in northern California. Her parents had emigrated to the US from Guangdong back in the 1940s; they opened a little grocery in the town, and were the only Asian family around. Jung was the youngest of seven siblings, nearly ten years younger than her next oldest sister. So she had long been accustomed to making decisions and acting on her own.
She had less than US$10,000 in the bank, but it would be enough for her to "rough it" on a backpack trip through Asia. She wasn't worried about her future. She was young and healthy, and had heard that it would be easy to find a job teaching English. With her Berkeley degree and pleasant appearance, she figured it would not be difficult to find such a job. The more she thought about it the happier she felt, and within two months all was ready. She spent a thousand on the airplane ticket, and left two thousand in the bank, so she would have something to live on when she returned after exhausting her travel money. With US$5000 on her, she headed to Asia, first stop Thailand.
A different kind of laboratory
Ever since she was small, Jung enjoyed puttering around the kitchen. In the kitchen, Betty could follow her mom and be her helper. Jung always liked to watch her Mom flying around the kitchen, slicing up meat and vegetables, and then with a spatula in one hand and throwing in this and that with the other, filling the kitchen with different aromas, permeating the air with sweetness and a feeling of satisfaction. Jung has often wondered if spending so much time in the laboratory, filling and emptying beakers and bottles, wasn't in fact a way of going back to the kitchen. Anyway, her practice at precise measuring from the laboratory certainly helped her in recording detailed recipes without any formal training.
At one point prior to her decision to travel, Jung had signed up to study with Martin Yan, a famous Chinese chef in California. Quickly she grasped the essentials, and was able to jot everything down. Chef Yan was both surprised and impressed, so much so that he later asked her to write up the recipes from that semester. With that experience she became confident with cooking.
Her trip to Asia in 1988 was undoubtedly the turning point. She was deeply entranced by this place, where things were so cheap and the people were warm and friendly. Even more amazingly, within three months after arriving, she had become an entrepreneur, starting up a class in Thai cooking with a local friend she made in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.
It was all just fate. One day she was just wandering about in Chiang Mai, when she went into a small shop and began chatting with the owner, a widow named Virginia Silpakat. After talk turned to cooking, she asked Silpakat where she might find some good Thai cookbooks. Surprisingly, Silpakat offered to teach her. Jung studied with Silpakat for six weeks, during which time she organized a thick book of the recipes she learned, which she presented to Silpakat as a commemorative gift.
Because the food was so good, by their second week, Jung suggested to Silpakat that she offer classes for Western tourists, with the boss demonstrating while Jung did the explanations and wrote out the recipes. Business was pretty good, further deepening her interest in recipes.
Jung's next stop on her travels was Nepal, a paradise in the eyes of Western backpackers. In the 1970s, with Eastern philosophy gaining ground in the West, many young people traveled to India or Nepal to learn. Through word of mouth, Nepal, this Buddhist land of simple people and towering mountains, also attracted mountain climbers and trekkers. Naturally Jung had no intention of missing out, and she followed the wave of people to Katmandu.
Shortly thereafter, she found herself in a small cafe where mountain trekkers could pause for a rest; she saw a sign stating that a nearby temple was accepting students to study Buddhism. A two-week session was being offered, with the only cost being about one hundred dollars for room and board. She had long been seeking something to believe in, and felt that this sign was speaking directly to her. She decided then and there to enroll.
A new world of tasty vegetarian food
Like most Chinese, Jung's parents' home had had an altar for paying respects to ancestors and Buddhist and Taoist deities. She felt that she was religious by nature, though she never could accept Christianity with its belief that there is only one God. When she arrived at the Kopan Monastery in Katmandu, she felt that she had finally found something to fill the emptiness in her heart, and she began to follow Buddhism. She was also pleased with the vegetarian cuisine in the temple. It was delicious and varied, with potato dumplings, mixed vegetable spring rolls, assorted vegetarian dishes, cashew rice, and other treats she had never even seen before. She had long wanted to be a practicing vegetarian, and this type of food made that aspiration feasible.
People in California put great emphasis on healthy eating. There are always stories in the media about the environment, ecology, good food, and so on. Growing up in that kind of environment, Jung had long wanted to be a vegetarian. But it seemed so hard to do so in America. Vegetarian food in the US is less than exemplary. Besides salad bars, the most common offerings are tasteless, squishy boiled vegetables. And canned foods are even less appetizing. No wonder the only way they could persuade kids to consume veggies was to show Popeye saving the damsel-in-distress by eating spinach.
Jung was ecstatic about her discovery. She thought that if Americans knew that there was this kind of vegetarian cooking, everybody would be much more willing to eat vegetarian. It's cheap and healthy, and doesn't require slaughtering of animals or environmental pollution; it doesn't waste resources nor does it contradict the spirit of compassion.
Struck by this idea, she began to think how she could collect together recipes from the Kopan Monastery. She finally persuaded the gentle and dedicated Kancha, the cook, to allow her to observe and work in the kitchen. Along the way she recorded, a bit at a time, lamaist monastery recipes that had been handed down by word of mouth-but never recorded-for centuries.
Though conditions in the kitchen were primitive and demanding-the fire was wood-fueled; the cooking pots were giant (including a wok of four feet in diameter); everything was made from scratch; and enough had to be made for at least 150 people each meal, so they began work in the pitch black before sunrise-Jung feels that those six weeks were the most fulfilling in her entire life.
After her period of study, she collected 40 recipes for everything from appetizers and soups to rice and noodle dishes and teas. She turned these over to an Australian Buddhist nun, Robina Courtin, who had experience in publishing, to help her get the book to print. Then Jung headed off on the next leg of her journey.
Groping her way through to a purpose for the second half of her life, Jung decided she wanted to see if other Asian countries had so rich a heritage of vegetarian cooking. She first went to India, but was somewhat disappointed. Buddhism has long declined in India, and Hindus are not strict vegetarians. Having found no vegetarian recipes, she then proceeded to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, but here too the harvest was not a rich one. She heard that Buddhism was flourishing in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, so she decided to go to Korea to try her luck.
To every monastery far and wide
Thinking back on it later, Jung says she was a little bit naive to think that all she had to do was be sincere and knock on the monastery doors to be admitted to their kitchen secrets. She ran into a lot of closed portals! But she was still pretty lucky, because when she went to Korea, though she was unable to gain admission to any monastery right away, she found a job teaching English that allowed her to remain in the country. Finally her opportunity came: Through an introduction from a friend, she went to a famous Seoul monastery-Anshin Temple-every weekend for cooking instruction.
Anyone who has eaten kimche before might have an idea what to expect in Korean vegetarian cooking. The variety of vegetables is simple; and steaming, boiling, and scalding are the most common cooking techniques. Oil is not often used, with sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, hot peppers, and garlic-all (save sugar) powerful acrid flavorings-being preferred. Jung really enjoys this style, and feels that these are simple vegetarian recipes that people can use for a long time without getting tired of them.
In contrast, Chinese vegetarian cooking is far more colorful and diverse, with highly developed cooking techniques that are certainly no disgrace to the esteemed reputation Chinese cuisine holds worldwide. But over a long period of time one can tire of the complexity and precision required; the food is also quite greasy. Jung discovered that the most unique thing about Chinese vegetarian cuisine is that it uses substitutes-fake fish, fake pork, even fake sparrow's nests, shark fin, and other delicacies and tonic foods that used to be exclusively for the wealthy. The trick is in that uniquely Chinese ingredient of wheat gluten. The gluten is protein extracted from wheat. It can be molded into any shape, so in form and texture can mimic meat. This means that Chinese vegetarian cooking also includes a full helping of "poultry," "red meat," and "fish" dishes.
Among Asian monasteries, the most surprising to Jung were in Japan. She found Japanese temple food very simple. However, for special occasions they may offer exquisite dishes, served with the utmost solemnity-at a heavenly price.
Jung is, after all, of Chinese ancestry, and her greatest fondness is for Taiwan. She has come to Taiwan three times, with the most fruitful trip being that of Summer, 1993. Through an introduction, she studied cooking and recorded recipes in the kitchen of the Fokuangshan Temple. Fokuangshan's vegetarian cuisine is renowned in Taiwan, and is said to be better tasting than most commercial establishments, despite not using any heavy spicing. Regrettably for Jung, however, though she really likes the 40-plus dishes she learned there, the temple has asked that its name not be used with the recipes, for fear people will accuse them of self-glorification or commercialization. Jung, on the other hand, feels that it would be deceptive not to clearly state that the recipes come from Fokuangshan. Therefore, the recipes have yet to be published.
Whether published or not, thus far Jung has collected over 100 vegetarian recipes, from Nepalese lamaist cooking with its onions, curry, raw ginger, and yak butter; to powerful Korean convent cuisine; to everyday street vegetarian cuisine picked up in Japan; to the delicacies of Taiwan's Fokuang-shan Temple. She has gathered enough to open a restaurant! This thought has occurred to her, but right now she doesn't have the money for start-up costs.
In any case, she would rather teach vegetarian cooking, make vegetarian meals, and promote a vegetarian outlook. Besides writing recipes, she often prepares meals for friends, wherever she may be. She takes no money for these, but only asks that the host accompany her to the market and pay for the ingredients. Her reason is very simple: She hopes that everyone can come to know the beauty of vegetarian cuisine, and, sooner or later, to practice vegetarianism.
Is that silly? She doesn't think so. As she wrote in The Kopan Cookbook, "my wish is that putting together these vegetarian recipes will perhaps help me to practice Dharma and be of benefit to others as well." It seems like she is already beyond "practicing"!
p.28
Chapatis (flat bread) are a staple at the Kopan Monastery in Nepal; they can be eaten alone or used to wrap vegetables. While studying at the monastery, each morning Betty Jung rolled out 150 chapatis in the cold kitchen, which was no easy task. (photo courtesy of Betty Jung)
p.30
Jung often accepts friends' invitations to demonstrate vegetarian cooking, hoping more people will become vegetarians. (photo by Chen Mei-ling)
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