Paul Alper writes:

In your blog of yesterday, when I brought up chow mein and egg foo young as proof of Chinese interference in the Maricopa recount, you replied, “Do they still serve those things in Chinese restaurants or is that something from decades ago?”

Here is my [Alper’s] chow mein and egg foo young story from the late 1960s. My wife and I were living in Mexico City and the 1968 Olympics were about to take place there. There was a need for translators for the many different national teams who were participating. Because Deb is an American and fluent in French, she was naturally assigned to the delegation from North Korea! God works in mysterious ways.

South Korea was called (plain-old) Korea, and North Korea did not really care about having athletes but only wanted its name to be changed to The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. Many in the North Korean delegation had never been out of the country and its deprivation so some of the group went on a shopping spree for luxury goods—wait for this—ball point pens. They also wanted food and language they recognized so Deb arranged a visit for them to a Chinese restaurant in the heart of Mexico City. Unfortunately, the restaurant was run by Cantonese immigrants and the delegation could not communicate with the staff and had to eat chow mein and egg foo young.