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.

Four days and a bit less jet lag later, I got to board a plane from Beijing to Chengdu, the closest airport city to Jiangyou. This was my first experience with intra-China air travel, and it mostly went smoothly. Somehow I ended up with two bags and a carryon (what was allowed on my international flight), but the allowance for domestic flights is apparently less…40 whole kilograms less, so needless to say, I had oversize baggage charges. Kathi graciously helped me through the line, and I found my gate, only to discover that that gate was not the gate for Chengdu. In fact, I couldn’t see any gates that said Chengdu on them. This was 7:45, and my plane was set to leave at 8:00.

At about 7:53, I got up the nerve to talk to the man who was holding a ticket that looked like mine. “Ni qu Chengdu ma?” I asked. (“Are you going to Chengdu?”) “Yes,” he said back in English. “Your Chinese is very good.”

I will digress here. The Chinese are the most gracious people in the world to praise foreigners’ Chinese, no matter how awful it is. They are also the most modest people in the world, saying that their English is poor, despite the fact that their English is ten times better than my Chinese. End of digression.

The man, I learned, grew up in Jiangyou but was working in nearby Mianyang. He was carrying boxes of fruit, it looked like, and was trying to offer me a ride from Chengdu to Mianyang, where I could catch a bus to Jiangyou. Somehow, I couldn’t manage to make it clear that I had a ride. At 8:05, the word “CHENGDU” came up on one of the airport marquees. The nice man and I walked to the line and were told that this was the wrong Chengdu flight. At 8:07, another Chengdu flight appeared. We went through the gate and were shuttled via minibus to the plane. I think I actually got on the plane at about 8:20, and we took off at maybe 8:30 or so.

And thus begins my experience of being the only white girl in sight. The word for foreigner is laowai, which literally means “old foreigner.” Here I was, a laowai on a flight with maybe 200 Chinese, eating breakfast, which consisted of fruit, bread, and vegetables. During the flight, I watched the inflight movie, which basically looked like a Chinese tourism video, and read my Chinese book, trying to learn emergency phrases. One time in the flight, I got up the nerve to ask my neighbor, “Qing wen, ji dian zhong?” (“May I ask what time it is?”) He pointed at his watch.

It was a very odd experience, to say the least, to be sitting in a sea of voices speaking in a language I barely know. Occasionally, someone would say something funny, and everyone would laugh. I started to think that all these people were geniuses to be able to speak this language. For the uninitiated, Mandarin Chinese (putonghua) has four tones: the high tone, the rising tone, the rising and falling tone, and the falling tone. And if that wasn’t enough, of course, the Chinese use characters, which always make me think that you have to have a Ph.D. to read a newspaper. This is, of course, not true. It’s an amazing thing, though, language–how we can rattle off words without a thought, and these series of sounds, of stops, of voiced and unvoiced sounds, vowels and consonants and intonation, can carry almost any meaning that you want them to. On the plane to Chengdu, the fact that we can communicate with our vocal cords and our lips seemed like a miracle to me.

When we landed, Eunice was standing at the gate, waving. I had met Eunice once before, in Akron, PA, where I was doing MCC orientation. Eunice used to be a nurse in Lancaster, PA, before coming to China and staying for four years. She speaks good Chinese, sings, cooks, plays basketball, entertains student visitors practically every night of the week, and is basically a legend around here. But I digress again. Eunice, Dean Zhao (the dean of the foreign language department), and a driver were here to pick me up. Eunice was the only one who spoke English, so she was relegated to the job of being go-between/translator, which she didn’t seem to mind. We ate a big meal–fish and vegetables and lots of Sichuan spice. Sichuan cuisine is famous for being super-spicy. They grow a pepper here that they call lajiao and a pepper that they call huajiao. They’re by far the hottest peppers I’ve ever tasted. You don’t eat them, but they make everything you eat hot, so hot that your eyes water and your lips start to tingle and lose feeling. You eat rice to counteract the spiciness. I was still not good with my chopsticks, so Dean Zhao got me a fork, much to my sadness. But the food was wonderful: something that’s called xiao bai cai (a leafy green vegetable that literally means “little cabbages” but isn’t much like cabbages), soft doufu (tofu) and peanut soup, fish, some other meat. And then we did a little of the favorite Sichuan pastime of playing cards and drinking green tea during the after lunch nap hour, kind of a Chinese siesta. I forget the word.

During the three-hour car ride to Jiangyou, I talked to Eunice about the school, the students, things here in general. And I stared out the window, looking at the houses, at the farmers working in the rice fields, at the billboards, at the expressway. Such a contrast, to be driving on a modern road that would rival any interstate highway but beside brick houses with baked clay tile roofs, with farmers drying the rice for harvest a few hundred yards away from the expressway.

They had no host family yet, Eunice informed me. They were looking for a good family, a family that spoke pretty good putonghua. I could go ahead and stay in a teacher’s apartment at the school until they did, which was fine. The little apartment I’m living in has the CEE library in Jiangyou: three bookcases full of books about China, and Christian books, and classic & literary fiction, and young adult/kids books. Oh, there’s also a bedroom and a bathroom and a shower, but that’s less important. 🙂

So it was a long day, a strange day, but a good one. A day that finished with noodles at a noodle shop right outside the school gate, good noodles in a spicy soup, noodles that I watched the man pull and slice right beside our table.

It’s nice to be in home sweet home, even at a home I’ve never been to before.