IN Toronto magazine

TRADITION:

A Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist Christmas at a Chinese restaurant is a joyous affirmation of peace on earth

As Christmas carols take over the airwaves, I start thinking about holiday meals. Where will our family eat together this year? What traditional dishes will pass from hand to hand, what new flavours will update our rituals?

It just wouldn’t be Christmas without the hum of Cantonese and Mandarin as servers move from table to table. Find me a Chinese restaurant on Christmas and I’ll find you a Jewish family — and probably a Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist cohort to boot, all wielding their chopsticks and pouring more tea amidst a sea of dark hair. Well-rested from weeks of buying no presents, (or just eight small ones for the Jews who celebrate every day of Chanukah), families banter and debate lemon chicken or crispy beef while catching up on Bubi’s week and putting toddlers in high seats.

I didn’t have to wait until I came out as a dyke to know what it meant to be an outsider.

Every respectable Jewish Christmas also includes a trip to the cinema — no lines, lots of room to spread out, and plenty of popcorn for that hungry-20-minutes-after-eating-Chinese-food phenomenon.

Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist Christmas at a Chinese restaurant and the cinema is fun. It’s stress-free and feels a bit like playing hooky when everyone else is in school — despite the Christmas and Christmas tree envy that plays a role at some point in almost every non-Christian child’s life in a Christmas-focussed society.

But there’s something else, something of great consequence, going on around those round tables covered in soy and mustard sauce by the end of the evening. Something we as LGBT adults have significant occasion to contemplate as we reel from reading of yet another loss of one of our little brothers or sisters every week or so this fall. Losses we know we have incurred for years, when the newspapers didn’t cover our news or the impact of homophobia and heterosexism on our communities.

As a little girl growing up in a neighbourhood where every lawn sported a Christmas tree except ours, the Steins down the road, and the Millers on the next street, I didn’t have to wait until I came out as a dyke to know what it meant to be an outsider. My three siblings and I all experienced anti-Semitic slurs before we were 10 — mine courtesy of Ted Sanka, a skinny nine-year-old classmate with a shock of white blond hair who, without warning one sunny day in fourth grade, opened his mouth, looked right at me and let slip, “Dirty Jew.” The cascading loss of innocence in the next few seconds served me well as I became a teenager who didn’t fit the gender or sexuality mold of the heterosexual world I tried to puzzle out while making my way through the shoals of high school.

Early on, I figured out that pride felt better than shame as a response to exclusion and invisibility. Acts of exclusion are often small, though their impact is significant, as most of us are all unfortunately aware. As the “dirty Jew” in those classrooms of children singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” I learned to step up and speak out in response to the small acts instead of waiting to fight the larger ones.

It turned out to be easier to fight the big battles if you had a practice of call and response on the smaller ones.

I refused to sing Christmas carols in junior high school, for which I was sent to the principal’s office. And each year I made a point of requesting Chanukah stamps at the post office when I was handed Christmas stamps without a question — or an option.

Just so someone had to say, and think about it, “We don’t have Chanukah stamps.” Small, but big when it came to knowing who I was and refusing to be erased.

At the end of a season of being worn down by the accumulation of small acts of invisibility and exclusion, going somewhere I can enjoy food and communion with others in a similar position, being surrounded by my people, not needing to speak our experience of small and larger acts, and then being together in the dark at the movies provides me with succour, a sense of family and community, and the strength to go back to another year of class with Ted Sanka (or whatever the adult corollary might be).

Maybe, in addition to the predictably critiqued but life-saving It Gets Better viral explosion, we all need an LGBT Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist Christmas at a Chinese restaurant and the cinema once a year. A place where we gather with our little ones.

Not a bar or a march, but a meal and a movie that we share without having to say a word, so that next year all our young folk are back at the table, another year older, knowing it does get better and this night together is part of how that happens sooner rather than later.

A touchstone, an evening when we can together just indulge in and marvel at life’s small pleasures and then head off to the movies with our young people in tow, very much alive.

Ambassador of flavour

I spent most of my childhood Christmases dining with the tribe on Spadina Ave, but these days it’s Richmond Hill or bust. This Christmas, beat a path to the door of Ambassador Chinese Cuisine, just off Highway 7, east of Bayview. They serve their famous dim sum from 11am to 4pm every day, which leaves time for a double bill at the movies.

I can’t think of a better Chinese Christmas dish for Jews in the New World than braised pork knuckle, egg and ginger in Chinese vinaigrette.

I can’t think of a better Chinese Christmas dish for Jews in the New World than braised pork knuckle, egg and ginger in Chinese vinaigrette. Despite multiple attempts, it’s in vain that I’ve cajoled the chefs to share their secret recipe. The sweet and sour delicacy is traditionally served to new mothers within the first two weeks after they give birth, to replenish their energy and rebuild their bodies.  I recommend it for replenishment after weeks of Christmas build-up — the sweet and sour vinaigrette is delicious and breaking bread with and among others who share your experience of the Christmas season is just the (Chinese?) medicine the doctor ordered.

And, as with so many of the dishes on the chef’s special menu at the Ambassador, you just won’t find this food downtown. In general, be adventurous here. It pays off. Solicitous waitstaff will warn you away from the chef’s specials if you are not Chinese — ignore these cautions. An example: You won’t want to go back to French fries after tasting the fantastic bitter melon coated with salty duck egg yolk — trust me on this. Leave room for the Ambassador’s yummy desserts. Recommended: the deep-fried red bean patties.

The Ambassador is upscale — perfect for the celebratory mood of a Jewish-Hindu-Muslim-Buddhist Christmas. Crisp white tablecloths, wood panelling, nifty ’70s deco lighting by the east windows and a carpet alight with orange, yellow and green fireworks set the tone for this ritual of the season.

Ambassador Chinese Cuisine 280 West Beaver Creek Rd. Richmond Hill. (905) 731-5570. ambassadorcc.com.