Sopa de Fideo Chino Mexicalense

This is a Mexicali dish. Baja California, on the border with Calexico, in the only neighborhood in Mexico called La Chinesca, the Chinatown that the Cantonese workers who came north to build the railroads and irrigate the Valle de Mexicali made their own a hundred years ago. The dish is fideo chino, sopa china, and it belongs to that neighborhood the way mole poblano belongs to Puebla.

Do not call it fusion. Fusion is a marketing word for cooks who borrow what they do not understand. Cocina chicalense is a tradition with its own century-long history: Cantonese cooks who learned to read a Mexican market, Mexican cooks who learned to keep a wok hot, and the second and third generation that grew up eating both at the same table. The broth is chicken bones, ginger, garlic, scallion, and soy. The noodle is thin egg or rice vermicelli, what you find at any tiendita in La Chinesca. The fried yellow chile in escabeche on the side is what makes it Mexicali and not Guangzhou.

My mother did not cook this. She was from Jalisco and her notebook had no fideo chino in it. I learned this dish from a senora named Dona Mercedes at a small lonchera off Avenida Reforma in Mexicali, who told me her grandfather came from Toishan in 1919 and her grandmother was from Sonora, and the soup was what they ate on weeknights for sixty years. She made me write it down twice. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and Mexicali has been living this way longer than most people outside Baja realize.