Leon Hua 340

  The Art of Red-Braising Red braising, also known as red cooking, red stewing, or Chinese stewing, is a traditional Chinese method of slow braising food to adequately flavor and tenderize it. The resulting dish has a reddish-brownish color, left by ingredients like soy sauce, dark soy sauce, sugar, and spices. It’s a staple of Chinese home cooking, and I have many positive memories associated with my grandmother’s long day of stewing meat just for me to come home from school to enjoy a hot meal. It’s a great way to prepare any kind of food, especially meat, and the flavor profile distinguishes itself heavily from Western methods of braising or slow-cooking. As someone who started cooking more seriously after the pandemic began, red braising has quickly become one of my favorite and most comfortable ways of cooking food, and I’m hoping that more people can be exposed to this amazingly delicious cooking technique! The most commonly associated ingredient to red braise is pork belly. ...

The memoir I chose for book 1 was Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang, now a managing partner at a law firm in Brooklyn, NY. I initially chose the book for a new perspective on the Asian-American experience; through my reading of the memoir, I gained that and so much more. The memoir unearths her childhood experiences, first her early childhood spent in China and later her move to New York, where her father moved first to escape a repressive Chinese Communist regime. Her and her mother moved shortly after to join him, and after their visas expired they became undocumented immigrants, living illegally in the United States of America. The memoir details her struggles with poverty, parental conflicts, education, racism, and a constant battle with her status as an illegal immigrant. There is so much more nuance that is captured in her writing, but fundamentally that’s what the memoir is about. Again, I initially chose the memoir for the new perspective on the Chinese-American experience. ...

Animal sounds. Machine gun sounds on the playground. Sounds of the wind and rain. Explosions. From a young age, we are constantly imitating inhuman and frankly inorganic sounds for play, for comedic effect, and for storytelling. Indeed, pretending to be in the jungle just doesn’t feel right unless your friends growl together loudly and obnoxiously like tigers. That is the essence of the art that may occasionally be considered a useless hobby: the art of beatboxing. A form of vocal percussion, beatboxing is the art of mimicking drum machines using the mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. Beginning with roots in hip-hop, beatboxing has expanded far beyond that and become a worldwide phenomenon, with tens of thousands of individuals practicing the art form across the planet. It’s an activity that anyone with a mouth and love of music can try, and I’m hoping that you’ll give it a shot after learning more about it. Boots n’ Cats - The First Steps to Beatboxing So you’ve heard about the hype aro...

  Book 1 Post 1 - Beautiful Country The book I chose for this assignment was Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been much of a reader, despite the numerous hints and nudges from both of my parents to do so, each for different reasons. My mom would always encourage me to read good literature, the classics that have withstood the tests of time, to understand the world and increase my writing ability and verbal capacity. My father, on the other hand, somewhat of a self-made businessman, would encourage me to read those “New York Times Best Seller” self-help books, the types that that successful millionaires would write and market on YouTube ads on how to become a millionaire, or habits and mindsets that create a successful entrepreneur. Ultimately, I read neither type of book, and mostly opted to play Pokemon on my Nintendo DS, clearly the most productive option. To this day, I still haven’t really touched too many books, especially if not assign...