Christina in China

The first question students ask me in conversations is, “Do you like China?” The second is, “How do you like Chinese food?” I tell them that I love it. And I do.

There are enough bad Chinese restaurants in the U.S. for Chinese food to warrant its own post, if nothing else than to dispel the myths. I live in Sichuan province (sometimes horribly transliterated as “Szechwan”), the land of thick accents and spicy food. Spicy food. The two cooking ingredients Sichuan people can’t live without are both hot peppers: lajiao and huajiao. People refer to Sichuan food (or Szechwan food, as you may have seen it horribly spelled) as ma la, ma referring to the literally lip- and tongue-numbing spice of the huajiao, and la referring to the blazingly hot spice of the lajiao. These spices are in everything, from green vegetables to meat. Toto, we’re definitely not in America eating General Tso’s Chicken anymore.

Ah, but it’s so much better. One thing that Sichuan people (and Chinese in general) do particularly well is green vegetables. In the U.S., we butcher green vegetables, boiling them until they turn yellowish-green and then smothering them in some sort of butter or cheese sauce. Here in China, they take xiao bai cai (literally, “small white vegetable”–green, leafy cabbage), sijidou (literally, “four season beans”–green beans), and cong xin cai (literally, “empty heart vegetable”–spinach) and stir fry them with lajiao and oil. Wonderful. I also enjoy eating turnips, pumpkin and other squash, white sweet potatoes, bean sprouts, and other vegetables I never thought I’d like that much.

It’s a good thing I like the food, both because eating is kind of important in China and because basically, there’s no Western food to be had (other than the KFC, the Taiwan chain called Dicos that’s basically a KFC knockoff, and the “pizza” place, all of which are downtown, all of which are fairly expensive for here, and all of which I haven’t eaten at). Around mealtimes, instead of saying hello to your friends and acquaintances, you say, “Ni chi fan le ma?” (“Have you eaten?”) However, I can count the number of overweight people I’ve seen thus far on one hand, proving that if you don’t eat lots of sugar and French fries and you get lots of physical exercise, you won’t get fat even if you eat food that’s bathed in oil. Which the Chinese, at least in Jiangyou, definitely do.

Chi fan, the phrase that refers to eating, literally means “eating rice,” and rice is obviously the staple of Chinese food. Up north, in Beijing and thereabouts, they eat a lot of jiaozi, these dumpling-like things with meat and vegetables inside, and lots of noodles, but here in good ole Sichuan, it’s rice. I usually eat rice two meals a day, unless I do hun dun (wonton) soup, miantiao (pulled noodles), or jiaozi for dinner. The rice is stickier here, nice clumps that you pick up with your chopsticks and shovel into your mouth. Touching your mouth to the bowl is completely okay. Rice bowls are multipurpose, too–if you’re eating with friends, you will rarely all order separate dishes. You order a few dishes and share them, putting the dishes in the center of the table, picking out what you want piece by piece from the dishes, and putting some in your rice bowl on the way to your mouth. So everyone’s spit is in the communal bowl, but what the heck. It’s not great for hygiene, but it is good for variety and camraderie and all that good stuff.

The Chinese eat a ton of meat, too. For some reason, I wasn’t expecting this. I was expecting a nation of budding vegetarians, for some reason, not people who get half their calories from pork. Pork is the most common meat here, and the word for it, rou, just means “meat”. Chicken (ji rou or “chicken meat”) and beef (niu rou or “cow meat”) are also common, and occasionally you get something like lamb or fish. In the faculty and staff cafeteria where I eat, we have something called hui guo rou, which people translate as “twice-cooked pork,” every day–numbing peppers, spicy peppers, green peppers, and the fattiest pork I have ever seen in my life. It makes West Virginia bacon look like Weight Watchers cuisine. It’s pretty common to tear the meat off the fat with your teeth and discard the fat. Also, since a lot of times, the meat is chopped into small pieces with an enormous cleaver, there are still big pieces of bone, which you eat around and then drop (or spit) on the table. Good times.

Another thing I was a bit surprised about: the death of table manners! Along with the not-so-graceful-rice-to-mouth-shovel that I’m working on perfecting, people also feel free to drop food on the table, spit out bones on the floor or the table, drink from their bowls, slurp, blow their noses at the table, wipe their faces (because they’re sweating from all the spice), and occasionally do the classic hock-and-spit. I don’t mind it at all. I’ve always been chastised for my bad table manners, so (yay!) finally I don’t have to worry about it. It’s lovely.

Chopsticks are also quite fun to use. One of the few things from American Chinese restaurants that actually are Chinese. Some authentically Chinese foods: wonton soup, sweet and sour pork (but different), chao fan (fried rice), stir-fried vegetables…but there the recognizable foods end. When was the last time you had stir-fried spinach at a Chinese restaurant? Fried wontons don’t exist, and I haven’t even seen an egg roll. The deep fried meat smothered in sugar sauce just isn’t done here. It’s all spice, spice, spice in stir-frys. Or thick noodles. Or little hot-as-fire shish kebab skewers of chicken, pork, potato, pepper, green beans, small bird eggs, lotus root, doufu (tofu), and other things called shao kao (Sichuan barbeque).

Or huo guo, another Sichuan specialty, which they translate as “hotpot.” Hotpot is cool in the way going to Japanese steakhouses in the U.S. are cool–you get to see the food cooking at your table. There’s a little gas burner at every table where the waiters or waitresses put a large pot with broth. You can choose the real hotpot, with tons of lajiao, or the hotpot for wimps, which is not as spicy and has dried dates floating in it. The broth heats until it’s boiling, and then you (or the waitress, if she thinks that you, as an incompetent laowai, don’t know how to do it right) put in the meat and vegetables and let them cook. What do you put in hotpot? Anything. Chicken, pork, lamb, fish, potato, noodles, lettuce, carrot, lotus root…yes, even dog, I’ve heard. (Side note: Eunice has eaten dog and says it’s not actually that bad. Hmmm.) After the food’s sufficiently cooked, you take it out and swish it around in your little bowl (where, of course, you have more spices) and eat. Hotpot broth makes a good soup, too, with some spices added.

And then there are the specialty foods, the “wonderful” banquet foods that you are expected to try because they are delicacies. Somehow, at banquets or big meals that I think of as pseudo-banquets, sandwiched between 10-20 or so plates of absolutely amazing food, there are the one or two weird things that you would never touch of your own accord. However, these foods are delicacies, and you are the foreigner that they want to give the very best to, so of course, someone physically puts it on your plate. Or subtly (ahem) suggests, “You should try the pig ear.” Or the shark fin. Or the intestine. Or the bladder. Or the strange solidified animal blood (don’t know how they do it). Or the cow’s foot. All of which I have eaten, all of which were disgusting, none of which I have thrown up because of.

But for every time I had to eat something disgusting, I’ve had twenty chances to eat amazing food like gan bian sijidou (dry-fried, spicy green beans), yuxiang qiezi (fish-flavored, breaded, fried eggplant), spicy spareribs, hotpot, tang yuan (sticky rice-flour balls with sweet fillings in a soup), hu pi qing jiao (“tiger skin peppers”–stir-fried green peppers), and so on. Also, good snacks like sunflower seeds, peanuts, and sweet breads, which the Chinese do amazingly well. (The other day, a lady on the street was making small sweet bread bites on what looked to me like a waffle iron.) And light meals like pulled noodles, wonton soup, fried rice, jiaozi, shao kao, “across-the-bridge” noodle soup (with meat, veggies, and broth) from Yunnan Province, little flatbread pitas filled with spicy noodles and sprouts, a popcorn stand with sweet popcorn, and so on. There’s enough street food that I could try something new every day, and it would still take me a while to go through it all. And more keeps appearing, from large skewers of fresh pineapple to baked sweet potatoes that you buy and eat on the street.

So I’m eating well. Still losing weight, I think, because my sugar intake has gone way down, but eating marvelously well. Drinking lots of lu cha (loose-leaf green tea) and ju hua cha (chrysanthemum tea–my new favorite) for less than 50 American cents a cup. Eating lots of fresh fruit I buy–a pound for about 15 cents American.

This is the life.

It’s odd how I, a lover of people, sometimes feel scared of them here. I rely on people so much, for my energy, inspiration, and laughter. But somehow it feels threatening and fascinating all at once: hundreds of people chatting in a language I don’t know much of, in a dialect that would be hard to understand even if I spoke good Mandarin, good putonghua. Mandarin Chinese already has an astonishing number of what I (and the Lonely Planet) would call homophones, distinguished only by a different tone or sometimes only a different character.

Here, they call the dialect Sichuanhua, the language of Sichuan, where the “zh” sound becomes “z,” the “ch” sound becomes “c,” the “n” sometimes becomes an “l,” and the second tone or third tone (I can’t remember which) becomes the quick, falling fourth tone. I’ve heard someone say that Sichuan people often sound angry even when they’re not at all because of the sharp fourth tone and the way they speak furiously fast.

Or maybe it just seems furiously fast. During my first weekend in Jiangyou, I had dinner with Eunice and two of her friends and former students, whose English names are Janet and Anna. Janet is apparently very intelligent, at the top of her class, and recently got a job teaching in nearby Mianyang because she could teach an entire language in English. Anna is extremely bright, too, Eunice tells me, with very good English. We sat at the table after dinner, as Janet tried to eat her muffin with chopsticks (kuaizi). Eunice, Janet, and Anna switched back and forth between Chinese and English, almost like it was a secret language, sometimes saying three English words, then two Chinese words, then three English words again.

Anna wears blue-tinged glasses and has a longer, more angular face than many Chinese. She was recently baptized in the Christian church and has been a Christian for about six months. That night at dinner, she was talking about the creation account, an interpretation that ranged from the orthodox to the quirky and weird–like how ever since the Fall, women have never been able to resist eating. This, according to laughing Anna, was why pregnant women eat so much and eat so much junk food.

Halfway through her explanation, I stopped trying to pick out words that I know, as I normally do when listening to people speak Chinese. I just watched her, saw how her dark eyes flashed, listened to her foreign speech, observed her lips moving faster than I think I’ve ever seen lips move before. As Eunice and Janet nodded, I couldn’t help but think how odd and amazing language is: that a people can choose a set of sounds and somehow, over time, build up a system that conveys such complex meanings. Arbitrary and conventional (with an obligatory nod to Mr. Saussure). I’ve never given much thought to how much of a uniting or dividing factor language is. The simplest tasks suddenly seem daunting.

It’s a nice place to be, very good for my humility and for my spirit. I thank God for helping me buy apples, helping me pay the check at a restaurant, helping me ask the price at the internet bar, helping me have a short conversation in Chinese with some students who don’t speak much English, all of which I’ve done in the past weeks. There have been bad moments–one Chinese class I was put into, where the teacher spoke impossibly quick and then fired questions at me, which made me upset, so I sat there crying and, even better, trying to disguise the fact that I was crying. But then there have been little triumphs–when I successfully tell the yogurt man that I don’t want to buy yogurt; I want to get the refund for bringing my bottles back. Or when I ask someone’s name, order at a restaurant, pay for something, make some small talk, or tell a waitress that the food is delicious. Even when, at Jiuzhaigou, the national park, I make a friend and hang around with her for two days, using only very poor Chinese. (More later.)

But there are hilarious moments, too, usually seeing the English that’s on signs (even official-looking signs) and products for sale. The other day, I was at the supermarket looking for a towel. I am now the proud owner of one that has the phrase “INNOCENT CATS IN BOSTON” written on it, complete with a little semicoherent poem, two or three marching soldiers, a green and tan Union Jack, and, of course, the two innocent cats. The students here call the funny, sometimes nonsensical English “Chinglish.” I get a kick out of it, while at the same time realizing that the Chinese on signs in English-speaking countries is probably equally hilarious and awful.

It all reminds me of the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis, the story way back in chapter 11, even before Abraham sets off for the Promised Land, far back where history and myth and religion and our collective unconscious, if there is such a thing, all seem to intermingle. “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech,” the verses read. The people have an idea and say to each other, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

In the beginning, the Scripture says, God created the heavens and the earth, saying, “Come, let us,” just as the people at Babel say. Their language is the same. And language is powerful–God knows this. He scatters them throughout the earth, and the place is called Babel–“because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.”

It is humbling to be deaf and mute and illiterate in a different language, I think as I sit at my ancient computer, with Chinese characters labeling all the buttons and programs, with students in the dormitory behind my building laughing and shrieking and babbling in Chinese. Sometimes I feel like, with my pronunciation exercises and dialogues and role plays and English corners, that I’m helping to build the tower of Babel again. But I am not in Hong Kong, not in Shanghai, not in Beijing, not even in Chengdu. I am in Jiangyou, a town with only six foreigners and little English spoken. God scattered the people at Babel. And he scatters us still.

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