Chow Mein at the D & A

In search of food in Oakland's Chinatown. So different from San Francisco's. No chinoiserie pagoda roofs, no narrow alleys filled with last century's opium dens. Chinatown Oakland is stripped down, all business. And a bit dingy, too, in a way that shows up less quaintly than it does across the Bay.

Looking for a story, for literary as well as physical nourishment, I scoured the streets for a restaurant with some life. A place from which I could hear yelling, drunken laughter, conflict, breaking glass, perhaps gunplay.

Nothing.

I strode down Webster Street, but the only noise was from cars on the nearby freeway. Occasionally a plaintive strain from the two-stringed erhu would waft out of a second-floor temple window, punctuated by the wooden clack of a muyu.

Avoiding places with one diner, or no patrons at all -- which promised little in the way of a story or a meal -- I walked into the D & A Cafe. There's a D & A near where I live in SF, and I have never, ever seen a person of European origin eating there. Nor was there one to be seen in their Oakland location. With every table filled with Chinese people, I knew it couldn't be bad, but when I walked in, I felt ready to be treated as if I had transgressed some unwritten law -- to be stared at, or even attacked! Some hopped-up, chisel-faced Joe Boy teaching me a lesson in front of everyone, slamming my head repeatedly into the table. But nothing happened. Nobody gave me a second glance. I was not beaten to a pulp, nor did I have to wait any longer than anyone else for my shrimp-and-vegetables chow mein.

I grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown, more or less, and shouldn't really have expected otherwise. And yet, perhaps because both D & A's are so bustlingly and exclusively Chinese, I felt for the first time in I don't know how long what it might be like if you were Asian, African-American, or Hispanic in this country. To walk into a place, your face different from everyone else's, not knowing if you'll be shown to the social Siberia table, taunted by other diners, or worse. Looking at life as a white person, it's easy to minimize the social discomfort people of other ethnic origins say they feel in this country -- "Hey, what's the problem? This is a heterogenous rainbow of a society, it's the enlightened 2000's!" But the reality must be very, very different in the trenches of diversity.

Still...damn if I didn't want a story. A snubbing, or perhaps some internecine conflict, juiced with semi-automatic weapons, or a Cessna flying into the second floor of the building, a herd of wildebeest thundering through the streets...something!

The chow mein was excellent, by the way. Tender shrimp, baby bok choy -- infant bok choy, really -- but the attraction was the noodles themselves, tinted golden orange with some soy-sesame treatment I couldn't decode.

A note on the menu: fulfilling its mission as a neighborhood cafe, the D & A offers along with chow mein and mongolian beef a full slate of corner diner favorites like French toast and eggs sunny side up. In fact, the kids at the next table ordered macaroni.

The macaroni arrived topped with white cheese, bok choy, and pork. I had to look away.