Adopted Chinese Daughter: Your great-grandfather worked in a monosodium glutamate mine in South Dakota in the mid-1800s.
The MSG mines were a covert operation for many years. At that time in history, MSG was still underground; no one could explain why the food in Chinese restaurants tasted more alive on the tongue. Much was made of the cook’s skills and the fantastic mysteries of “brown sauce.”
The Kitchen God Association, the leading industry group of Chinese restaurants across the country agreed to import labor from China to mine the MSG crystals. It was believed with illegal immigrant labor, it would be easier to preserve the secret.
Mining MSG was dangerous work. Many did not survive, never realizing as they swilled tea while dawn broke that it would be their last glimpse of natural light. The miners had a name for perishing in the mines: “A flavorful death.”
Breathing in excessive MSG crystals could produce respiratory ailments, throbbing headaches and an unquenchable thirst. This sickness the miners dubbed, “too much flavor.”
Your great-grandfather first entered the bowels of the mines at the tender age of 17. Like other men in his village, there was little holding him there except a stolen pull on another man’s crushed cigarette rehabilitated from the gutter. You can imagine how the posters advertising prosperity in the Beautiful Country must have appeared to him, like dispatches from his own personal and fearless future.
When he got there, of course, it was nothing as he imagined. The men worked back-breaking shifts. When they emerged from the mines, their faces were so blackened, your great-grandfather did not recognize an older boy from his village except by the glint of his gold teeth.
At night he missed his family and friends back home so much that, to disguise his sobbing, he groaned loudly, clutched his stomach, and cursed the cook at the canteen for using rancid meat.
You should know that he fell in with a whore, and being a boy, confused the warmth of her body and the peculiar indulgence she afforded him out of a volatile mixture of pity and cash, as proof of love. When she became pregnant, he insisted the baby was his. Your great-grandfather and the prostitute’s pimp brawled and your great-grandfather was stabbed twice in the stomach in quick, brutal succession. He later died from his wounds.
By the time of his death, the rumors about MSG as the secret ingredient in Chinese food had begun to emerge. One particular worrisome rumor claimed that eating dishes flavored with MSG would make your children’s eyes funny. Within five years the mines would be shut down for good, replaced by a man-made combination of molecules that reproduced MSG's natural chemical lattice without the potential for undesirable side-effects.
