@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Last night we had dinner at China Tang in the Dorchester. This time we opted for some classic Cantonese dishes we hadn’t tried before, including:

* stir-fried scallops with vegetables (notably asparagus)

* braised beancurd with vegetables

* beansprout noodles

Plus one of my favorite starters which is salt+pepper squid:

Usually we go straight for their infamous duck and roast pig or steamed fish options and eat these with rice, but we thought we should explore the menu more yesterday.

China Tang is the only Chinese restaurant I’ve been to more than three times which says something about the quality of the food. The flavors tend to be fresh, authentic and more-ish. I’d mark it 8.5 out of 10 so far.

Obviously, few Chinese restaurants will ever be as good as my mother’s homecooking — no one makes spring rolls or fluffy dai bao or steamed sea bass or a whole constellation of culinary delights quite like her — but China Tang is a good place to visit if you do want to have a quality Cantonese meal out with friends and/or it’s a special occasion.

Now, since my father passed away two years’ ago, I’ve tried to be a bit more health-conscious so I asked them to cook everything with a lot less salt. It’s part of my new “LESS SALT, MORE LIFE” philosophy.

Most diners are often self-conscious about asking the kitchen to tweak dishes to suit their taste buds and whilst it would be a complete challenge for any restaurant to please particular customers (like the character Meg Ryan played in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ or people who request gluten-peanut-yeast-dairy-salt-MSG-meat-onion free halal dishes when the restaurant is famous for its gluten-peanut-yeast-dairy-salt-MSG-meat-onion rich dishes…..LOL), asking for less salt is perfectly reasonable because with Chinese dishes the salt balance can really affect how the natural sweetness and tastiness of a dish is brought out. Too much salt and the dish becomes dull with a bitter aftertaste. Too little and it’s bland.

In any case, China Tang was great and cooked everything with virtually no salt and provided us with small dishes of fine sea salt, a Worcester/soy sauce mix, hoisin sauce and two different chili sauces to add as we liked.

I’m being more careful with salt, especially the version hidden in processed foods, because it’s notorious for making our bodies retain water which results in us looking bloated and feeling heavier on our feet which then makes us less physically active. It’s a negative cycle: we feel bloated so we just don’t want to see ourselves in gym gear which means we don’t drag ourselves out to exercise.

Most importantly, salt’s not great for blood pressure or the heart when it’s consumed in excessive quantities. My father had heart disease and high blood pressure compounded with diabetes, so I’m simply being sensible by trying to reduce my salt intake now whilst I’m still young and the reduction can make a genuine positive difference.

Generally speaking, I’m in reasonable shape. Here are a few photos to show that I still look broadly the same as I did when I was younger. The first photo shows me in Rome circa 2000 whilst the second shows me in London now:

Yes that pink cardigan has been with me for over nine years and I still fit into it. This summer I’ll be wearing that hot pink top with flowers and that white skirt too. Only the pointy red shoes have been consigned to the dumpster because one of the heels got caught in a cobblestone and it snapped off. I’m not the type of woman who buys fashion magazines and/or obsesses about copying Celebrity X’s style. I wear what I feel comfortable and feminine in and I don’t have a stylist.

No, if you saw me out and about as per the photos you’d never guess I’ve worked in Strategic Investments for a big bank and know something about technology. Know it to code it and apply it. This gap between how I look and what I can do may explain why people usually (wrongly) assume I’m either an artist or a “lady who lunches and lives off her husband’s earnings”.

The reality is I’ve worked since I was 15 and all the roles I’ve had have been about the application of my smarts, i.e. intellectually complex and challenging ones.

Obviously, in a professional environment I wear either my Bella Freud suit or my pinstripe Enzo Fusco or Burberrys ones. Bella Freud is the great grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud, btw — yes, THAT Sigmund Freud of the Oedipus complex — and her website has a design by Lucian Freud on it:

Apart from the cropping, the photos of me haven’t been airbrushed / stretched / altered in any way to enhance me. I cut out the facial features because over the years I’ve found people focussing on my looks instead of my intelligence to be unproductive since the latter matters more to me.

In addition to my brain, I like my hands which are apparently the classic shape of creatives and pianists (and which do do the dishes, scrub the pans, take the rubbish out and cook the meals) and my ears because they have Buddha lobes which are considered lucky in Chinese culture.

My mother insists I have nice lips since they’re naturally full, plump and a good color which means I don’t need any plastic surgery, collagen injections or to spend money on lipsticks — only some Vaseline for protection against the elements — but actually I care less about my lips than my grasp of languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian and some Spanish and German).

Yes, and probably people do make assumptions about me based on how I look and carry myself.

I simply LOL about it all because my parents never brought me up to believe my looks matter more than my brains, my sense of identity or how I can collaborate with others to make projects/Life better. The way the media and our society focusses on women’s looks instead of our intellectual talents and creative skills does us all a great disservice, imo. How I look and what I wear doesn’t determine whether I can produce the materials I can (strategy presentations, balance sheets, complex newsletters, philosophical constructs, translations into several languages, etc.) and have provided tasters of here on this blog.

On rare occasions, people (particularly men) who want to be spiteful because they feel some sense of insecurity or inadequacy have tried to portray me as being physically ugly — despite having never seen a photo of me in their lives or meeting me. Quite apart from being defamatory and downright untruthful, it is just ungentlemanly. Typically, they’ve done this in response to me showing their arguments up online to be intellectually unsound or them spouting unsubstantiated nonsense. Their way of dealing with this has been to resort to personal attacks instead of objective proofs of the issue. They then try to push and peddle an old untruth: a woman cleverer than them must be ugly or somehow deformed.

Their egos cannot accept that a woman who is reasonably okay looks-wise can reject their view(s) of the world and, by extension, their appeal and masculinity.

I LOL when people like that try to twist realities and objective sense to make it into a “You must be physically ugly if you disagree with me” argument. I don’t have any looks or intelligence insecurities for a good reason. It’s not the way my parents, our family friends or my schooling brought me up.

Those values and sense of confident purpose count a lot more than ignorant spite or trivial spin about someone else’s looks.