49 Years Later I DiscoverThe Location of the Chinese Restaurant I Ate At In Clarksville, Mississippi

As you may have read, the reason why anybody knows who I am goes back to the fact that I have eaten (now) at over 8,300 different Chinese restaurants, which are laid out in an Excel schedule showing the name and address of the restaurant, where it falls in the numerical sequence, and the year I first ate there.  My list goes all the way back to 1951 when I was 3 years old, but of course it's not like I started a contemporaneous listing at that point in time.  The list itself was first created in 1988, at a time where new Chinese restaurants were opening up so quickly in the San Gabriel Valley that I needed a list just to make sure I didn't inadvertently eat at a restaurant that I had already tried.  Of course, that meant I needed to populate my list with the Chinese restaurants I had eaten at in the past.  Fortunately I had saved business cards, takeout menus, and even credit card slips from many restaurants.  But there were also many other restaurants where I had no such evidence.

 

 

The main tool I had to fill the gap was historic telephone book information, particularly the microfiche files at the main Los Angeles Public Library.   Where I remembered the name of a particular Chinese restaurant, it was easy to pull the address from the white pages.  But especially helpful were the Yellow Pages, where I could go to the Restaurant section for various years and be reminded of restaurants I had eaten before.  Of course, while this worked well with Chinese restaurants in my hometown of Los Angeles, it was iffy when it came to out of town phone directories.  Fortunately the Los Angeles Public Library did have some historic and current out of town phone directories in their collection, but the coverage was spotty.

All of which comes to the saga of my lunch at Kim's Restaurant in Clarksdale, Mississippi.   I had visited Clarksdale in 1976 as part of my side trip to see the Mississippi Delta Chinese communities in Mississippi and Arkansas which I had read about in a book called the Mississippi Chinese, and also through a handful of peripheral relatives who had once been Mississippi and Arkansas residents.  This was my first solo out of state trip. Having begun to write on Chinese American historical topics, and being my first visit somewhere besides San Francisco or Houston, this led me to decide that I would partake in local Chinese restaurant food to the extent possible.  As things transpired, this turned out to be the starting point in my journey visiting thousands of Chinese restaurants across the United States.   

In fact my visit to Kim's Restaurant was one of my most memorable restaurant visits.  I even made a passing reference to it in my BBC World News interview.  That's because Kim's was the first place I ever ate chow mein cooked in a fairly thick gravy.  Hong Kong style chow mein, which is now ubiquitous with its thick meat and vegetables in gravy poured on a bed of crispy thin chow mein noodles, had yet to come to the United States.  I was so enthralled by the dish and the milieu, that I kept the cardboard tag from the teabag with the name of the restaurant in my wallet for many years.  (Alas, it disappeared somewhere along the way.)   So it was 12 years later when I was recreating my early dining years for my Chinese restaurant list and hunting for information on Kim's Restaurant to enter.  No historic phone books, but I did find a current listing in the Yellow Pages for a Chinese restaurant in downtown Clarksdale.  While Kim's was gone, perhaps it could have been another successor Chinese restaurant that took over the location.  But the address, 401 Madison, did not match my recollection of where the restaurant was.  So there has been a void in my Chinese restaurant list--until now.

While I sometimes bristle at internet content that is targeted to my preferences, since that means something has been watching me, it is good in that I am directed to content of interest that I had no knowledge of.  Facebook has figured out I'm interested in Chinese American topics, particularly on a geographic level, so they pointed me to the Mississippi Delta Chinese Facebook group.   I had been looking at their postings for a little while, but then at some point somebody said something about a Chinese restaurant in the Mississippi Delta.  While it wasn't Kim's Restaurant it got me thinking--what if I posted a comment asking for information on Kim's Restaurant.  

Sure enough, answers started coming in immediately.  Kim's Restaurant was run by a fellow named Kim Wong.  He converted the restaurant at some point in time into Kim's Snack Shop, which manufactured and sold pork and chicken cracklings, now widely distributed throughout the South.  Somebody mentioned that the snack shop was on Third Street, consistent with whatever recollection I had of where the restaurant was located.  And an internet search led to an article about the enterprise which included a picture of a letter of commendation given to Kim's Snack Shop at 417 Third Street.  Eureka!  I finally found it and a blank in my restaurant list has been filled.

And lastly, one piece of unfinished business remained with regard to Kim's Restaurant.  Deep in the bowels of the Chan family archives are over 10,000 Kodachrome slides, mostly of places I visited during my travels.  Did I possibly ever take a photograph of my visit to Kim's Restaurant in Clarksdale?  Indeed, I did!  And note the old style booths that were common in some of the Chinese restaurants in the 20th century.  Note also that the picture was shot in the era before cameras had automatic exposure, and you had to manually set the aperture to get the correct lighting.  Serious photographers carried a light meter with them, but I just went by seat of the pants guestimates, and as it turned out I was way off on this picture which turned out very extremely dark.  Back then there was no way to correct a mistake like that.  I actually wondered why after the fact corrections weren't possible, since every television had a brightness setting.  But I guess my thinking was right, and almost 50 years later, I'm able to finally correct that mistake!

 

 

Of course there are other blanks in my Chinese restaurant list.  Even contemporarily it is sometimes impossible to get a street address for the Chinese restaurant I ate at in a country which does not use the Latin alphabet.  But given that this is one of the earliest and most significant blanks in the list, one which I held little chance of ever solving, this has to be the best of all.