A Kwong connection

The building's mudbrick walls are black with mould and, in the kitchen, a primitive stove is covered in chalky dust. Several generations of poultry have moved in, but they are the only signs of life. It's been this way for more than a century, since its owner packed up his medicinal brews and bought his passage to Australia during the Gold Rush.
His name was Kwong Sue Duk. He arrived in Darwin in 1875 and rapidly created a dynasty of 24 children with four concurrent wives. And now there are 1200 Kwongs, including Kylie.
By dint of her trade as a superstar chef, Kylie Kwong is one of only a few famous Chinese Australians. With her brothers Paul and Jamie, she grew up in North Epping unbothered by any cultural difference from her friends.
Her father, Maurice, talked like Paul Hogan. The family was outwardly Anglo but Chinese at home. Her mother, Pauline, is a superb Cantonese cook. Both parents had 10 siblings. Her two grandmothers lived in at various times and tried to teach them all Cantonese, although no one was very interested.
Growing up, Kwong didn't think much about having a foot in two cultural camps but as time passed, a niggling identity crisis grew within her. Was she more Kylie or more Kwong? It was the launching point for her new book, My China: A Feast for all the Senses, an account of her travels, revelations and meals (with recipes) during her pilgrimage from her ancestral village in China's south to her adoptive Buddhist heartland of Tibet. ("Yak butter tea, yak dumplings, yak soup. Tibet is not about food," she says.)
There was not just one trip. By the end of the year, Kwong will have returned 15 times in three years, sometimes as a guide for World Expeditions culinary tours but mostly to work on the book and its spin-off television series, which she is still filming and plans to screen in the new year.
Last year, as she prepared to visit her great-grandfather's village, her father was diagnosed with cancer and given months to live. "It was a great shock. I didn't know what to do, it was so difficult. But he just said, 'You've got to go - don't worry, I'll wait for you,"' Kwong says.
It had taken a contact in China nearly a year to locate the village for her. Wong Nai Hang (also known as Good Luck and Peace Village) is a tiny outpost three hours from Guangzhou, where 50 souls tend rice paddies and pigs without running water or electricity. Kwong had already made her first quick sortie with a tour group. "It's very intense, going back to your roots and where you come from, knowing where it all began," she says. She pressed ahead with the trip.

Her return visit is met with much greater fanfare. Kwong's fame hasn't quite spread to Guangdong province but the villagers have learned she is long-lost kin and prepared a suitable homecoming. A path of white pebbles is laid through the village in her honour. On the porch of her ancestor's house, a table is saddled with offerings: a white-cooked chicken with its head, neck and feet still on, an unpeeled orange, roasted pork, tomatoes, potatoes, salted radish. In the crowd, she notices the man she will call Uncle, who looks like her brother, Paul.
A "beautiful, serene woman" introduces herself, via an interpreter, as a relative - her grandfather was the brother of Kwong's great-grandfather. "I came out of there that day feeling very happy," she says. Another surprise was that her mother's father's village was only 20 minutes away. "It was incredible but we realised a lot of people from that area came to Australia." Later, she will find her maternal grandfather's house, also untouched.
But first, there is food. Kwong is prepared. She asks Uncle to fire up an almighty wok, unpacks the groceries she picked up earlier at a local market and starts frying up yellow garlic chives, crunchy lotus roots, shiny purple eggplants, fish, crabs and chillies. At a lunch at her hotel the following day, her efforts are reciprocated. "We bought several beautiful big pumpkins from the market to maybe use as props and one of the villagers saw me playing with one and she just sort of grabbed it out of my hand and cut it up and the next thing we know she was saying to me to put it in the wok with some black bean and ginger." Kwong knows a winner and the dish is already on the menu at her Surry Hills restaurant, Billy Kwong.

"I tell you, all we Chinese do is eat!," she writes in her book. True to her word, Kwong devours her way through the republic, from crispy-skin pigeon and braised fish head in Xi'an to "urinating shrimp" - crayfish whose juices spurt out on contact with a hot wok - in Hong Kong. Kwong and her companions encounter "strange-flavour chicken", made with a sour, hot and sweet sesame sauce, and "ants climbing a tree", a Szechuan delicacy of vermicelli with pork mince and vegetables. Her sentimental favourites, however, are the stir-fried potatoes and duck sausage made by the women of Wong Nai Hang and neighbouring Toishan.

In Yangshuo, a tourist outpost below treacherous grey mountains beside the scenic Li River, Kwong discovers Cloud 9, a restaurant owned by Linda, a local cooking teacher, who serves a meal of spicy cucumber salad, beer-braised carp and a dish of stir-fried eggplant in a homemade chilli sauce so heavenly Kwong stashes a bottle in her daypack and solicits the recipe.

In return, Kwong offers to cook for her host the following day. Linda is honoured and arrives in the kitchen as dinner is being prepared with a gift of a live river carp, which she swiftly begins to fillet while the sorry creature's heart is still beating. Kwong is stunned into rare silence. She is mortified but does not want to offend Linda. Collecting herself, she politely picks up a sharp knife, takes charge of the fish and demonstrates the time-honoured and apparently painless Japanese technique of a deft stab behind the eyes. No one gets hurt, save the fish.

It was a defining moment for the Australian chef. When it comes to gutting live animals, "I'm not Chinese", she says. "They don't have a romantic notion of food like we do. Food is there to fill the stomach. So there's none of this sustainable seafood or being humane. What Linda was saying was, 'Kylie, you are my great friend, I want to give you the freshest fish; look at it, it's so fresh it's alive.' She wanted to give me the best. And there I am sitting there, this Westerner, quietly in horror."

Settled into a comfortable chair by the window at Billy Kwong, surrounded by beautiful polished timber and juicy bromeliads, Kwong feels the cultural divide strongly. She is an advocate of organic and biodynamic food, which she serves exclusively at her restaurant. But in China, even if a fish is so fresh it is breathing, its quality is questionable. "Because of the nature of their environment, which is very polluted, as we all know, it's very hard. The rivers are dirty, so you can taste the muddiness in the fish. The lettuce, the bok choy, everything is tainted." She won't even use Chinese soys. "Japanese brands are more refined," she says.
After three weeks, Kwong returns to Sydney. Her father has waited and dies two days later. But that gnarly, venerable Kwong family tree continues to take root. At Good Luck and Peace Village, as Kylie is leaving, someone asks, "When are you coming back? This house is yours."

My China: A Feast for All the Senses by Kylie Kwong.
Photography by Simon Griffiths, Penguin, $79.95.

Steamed chicken with hot and sour dressing
400g chicken thigh fillets
Dressing2 tbsp coriander stems, finely chopped5cm piece ginger, cut into thin strips2 tbsp spring onions, trimmed and finely sliced2 garlic cloves, finely chopped1 large red chilli, finely sliced2 1/2 tbsp light soy sauce1 tbsp brown rice vinegar1 tsp brown sugar1 tsp sesame oil2 tbsp peanut oil
First, make the dressing. Combine all ingredients except peanut oil in a heatproof bowl. Heat peanut oil in a small heavy-based pan until surface shimmers slightly, then carefully pour over ingredients in bowl. Stir to combine and set aside, uncovered.
Arrange chicken in a single layer on a heatproof plate that will fit inside a steamer basket. Place plate inside steamer, position over a deep saucepan or wok of boiling water and steam, covered, for about 14 minutes or until chicken is just tender.
Remove plate from steamer basket and allow chicken to rest for 5 minutes.
Drain off excess liquid and transfer chicken to a chopping board. Cut chicken on the diagonal into 1 cm slices and arrange on a platter. Spoon over dressing and serve at room temperature.
Serves 4-6 as part of a shared meal.