We bought a nice little map in China to point out counties when we talked about them in class. I remember being a bit skeptical when they talked about how Americentric our maps are in middle school, with our country in the middle of everything and eurasia just squished off to the right side.
Of course the maps in China don't have that stereotype--China is perfectly centered. It made it hard for me to trace the Pilgrims' voyage off to the new world... they just sailed off the map and onto the other side.
In case you wondered, on my map Taiwan is (and likely always will be) the same color as the mainland.
So now that I am back in the States I am reflecting upon my favorite and least favorite things about China. And one of my favorites, despite some of the reports, is breakfast.
Chinese food, despite its popularity worldwide, is not famous for its deserts nor its breakfasts. There is a reason. When your cuisine eschews dairy products completely, these dishes will suffer. Cream and butter are critical to maintaining a solid base for breakfast and dessert! The most popular breakfast in China may be a deep-fried dough stick and some soymilk. Or it may be a bowl of watery rice gruel served with pickled mustard root and super-pungent tofu. Neither of these are anything to write home about (though I suppose I just did). I ate both occasionally, and came to appreciate them, though not to prefer them. Many people also eat dumplings for breakfast, which I wholeheartedly approve of. Dumplings are great because they can be eaten for any meal, but they seem best for breakfast, perhaps because you are avoiding consuming the previous two options that I just mentioned.
However, dumplings were not my favorite breakfast, not at all. My favorite breakfast was called dan bing. It isn't served in any restaurants (not that I found); it is only available from people on the street, who have charcoal-fueled griddles during the morning hours (and sometimes for an after-school snack). Onto these griddles, the chef pours a ladleful of watery batter. This batter is spread out into a thin pancake, like a crepe. Immediately, an egg (or two, for an extra 6 cents) is broken onto the crepe and scrambled with a squirt of oil, then pushed to the edges of the pancake. A small handful of scallions is added and then, if you are lucky, so are a few sprinkles of sesame seeds.
The crepe is then deftly flipped, and then a brushful of a mystery oily sauce is applied. Next comes the question, 'yao bu yao la?' (do you want it hot). I recommend the reply of 'yao' (I sure do!). If you answer affirmatively, some hot stuff is brushed on, and either way you get a sprinkle of some pickled vegetable that gives it a great crunch. For 6 cents more, you can have it filled with one of the previously mentioned dough sticks or a hot dog. I never ventured into hot dog territory (I suppose now, too late, that I should have, in the name of research), but the dough stick is pretty good if you want a little more greasiness in your breakfast than this already provides. I will miss these as much as any other food in China. Honestly.
We took a Chinese tour to Jiuzhaigou right before we left. We had been hoping to visit this remote national park that has bright turquoise lakes and mineral-laden waterfalls and is dotted with a few Tibetan villages, but it was expensive and hard to get to. Someone in marketing had decided that this was a fairyland, and every piece of literature we found written about it referred to Juizhaigou as such.
This is a very remote park. You can take an 11-hour bus from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, or you can fly into the brand new airport constructed among the villages two hours away from the main gate of the park. On a whim we checked out how much a tour there would cost. A tour was cheaper than buying the plane tickets and park entrance ourselves, and it included hotels, buses to the park entrance, and meals. So we took the tour.
The park was very beautiful, but it was like a preserve, with miles and miles of plank paths that no one seemed to ever use (most of them, though visible across the lake or street, were closed for the winter) and a new park road that was frequented by park buses that dropped you off at various scenic spots so you could snap your photos and get back on. These buses were equipped with decidedly non-Tibetan tour guides wearing Tibetan clothes. The real Tibetans waited at the major stops to try to sell you a trinket or take your photo for a dollar or two. There were many beautiful views, waterfalls, mountains, and streams, many of them with a glazing of ice that made it extra pretty. However, it was very cold.
We did a little walking, but the park wasn’t set up so that you could walk so easily. It was somewhat confining to be on the tour, but it was also cheap. We kept bracing for the time when we would have our shopping opportunities, and finally, on the way to the airport, we got them. We stopped at a semi-precious stones marketplace, then at a Chinese medicine demonstration and pharmacy, and finally at a food emporium. The tour guides inevitably take you to these places on all tours so that you can buy your souvenirs, and they get a kickback from the overpriced goods. We bought some dried yak meat.
I'm back in the States, but I won't run out of things to write for awhile yet. So I will keep pounding out thoughts/ideas/revelations/anecdotes until I get bored and then I will let you know. Hopefully I will do this more consistently now. This post won’t be too much about China itself, but for those of you who would wonder how one could/would celebrate America’s best holiday (my opinion) in China, I wanted to give the blow by blow of Thanksgiving weekend.
We spent a fair amount of time with an Australian couple, David and Anissa. David is in China for work, he’s an engineer and in charge of a zinc processing plant outside Ningbo. Anissa taught with us as something to do while she lived in Ningbo with him. They have an apartment which is much nicer than ours, and David is an amateur mixologist when it comes to their living room bar. Both David and Anissa were very excited about celebrating Thanksgiving with us.
We were extra blessed by the appearance of Bryce, an old friend and my former rugby captain back in college, and his girlfriend, Missy. If you don’t know Bryce, many of the stereotypes you may hold of what the captain of a rugby team would look and act like hold true, though the fact that he is just a few months from getting his Ph.D in Classics perhaps will mitigate that view.
Also attending were Walter and Allison, Walter being our former co-worker. They are also fellow Americans and therefore have experienced the holiday before, though Walter can’t cook a thing. Lastly Kristin joined us. Kristin is the newest Native English Teacher at our school. She is from Singapore and of Chinese heritage. This can cause some problems in China, where the Chinese assume White = native English speaker and Chinese looking = Chinese speaker. Most schools would rather have a Dutch guy who learned some English in high school than a fourth-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the Ohio valley as their English teacher. But, I digress.
Back to Dinner. We were able to procure a turkey at Metro, the only store in the province that stocks them, and then only seasonally. We didn’t have an oven, which was a bit of a problem, but David and Anissa bought the largest toaster oven they could find, which was about a foot tall and two feet wide and deep. This just fit our 7-kilo turkey.
We added to our feast most of the usual sides: cranberry sauce can also be found at Metro so we ate that, potatoes are easy to find, and guys actually walk the streets here with carts fitted with some sort of a barrel sweet potato oven, from which they sell well-cooked sweet potatoes. We made a big salad, Anissa made two types of stuffing, and I boned and brined the turkey, stuffing it and then slicing it crossways to serve. Kind of like the turducken I made last year but a quarter of the work.
Perhaps a major difference between this and the typical Thanksgiving was that we had a fair amount of drinking—more than I’d ever done at this holiday at home. David had been planning the drinks for weeks and we had one that was like a long island iced tea, then something with cranberry juice, and then, of course, wine with the meal. And then I had to show Bryce and Missy some of the Chinese drinking games afterwards with beer. It was, all in all, a good time.
I'm back. A year abroad, and with a mixture of relief and sadness, I left China to the great white North of the US. After two consecutive red-eyes, my semi-delerious 7:10 a.m. flight from Indianopolis to Milwaukee (strange, but the cheapest way home by a lot) left me with one vivid epiphany: these Midwesterners are fat! There was something strange about that particular commuter flight--many of the passengers knew eachother and they were remarkably chipper for that early time. And about half of them were morbidly obese. Not that 60%-of-Americans-are-overweight obese, that "Wow, that guy is obese" obese.
This is in serious contrast with yours truly, who returned from China feeling healthy and 15 pounds, yes, 15 pounds, lighter. I was as shocked as you were. I am not a huge guy, and I used to hang 165 pounts on my (almost) 5' 10" frame, far from 'obese,' according to the body mass index calculation (see, now that I am home I can link to stuff again!) . Anyway, I did not honestly think I had 15 pounds to lose. In college, at that same weight, I had a nickname of "bony hips," coined by my rugby second row when I was a hooker.
So the question then became, "Why did I lose this weight?" I certainly did not watch what I ate in China. I never once thought, "I will eat this because it is more heathy." Ningbo food is almost invariably laden with salt and oil. We had plenty of lavish banquets where you ate for hours. I didn't try to eat less.
On the other hand, they don't eat a lot of meat. And neither did I, while there. But I think there is a different reason, one that I have taken too long to get into. Chopsticks. You may remember way back when I wrote about eating burritos in China (incidentally, they were the first food I sought out upon returning to the US. The story was that I ate so much I thought I would strain a muscle in my diaphram or at least throw up.
Therein lies the secret. There is a limit to how fast you can shovel food into your mouth with chopsticks. They force you to eat more slowly. And when you do that, you feel full faster and don't eat so much! So though I didn't try to eat less, I did nevertheless. I think it is perhaps interesting that the three foods I was most excited to eat upon coming home were burritos, Italian hoagies, and hamburgers, three decidedly non-chopsticks foods, that in fact don't provide any limitation to how much your can take with one bite.
Try it for a few weeks. Eat whatever you want, but only using chopsticks. I guarantee you will eat less. You can still eat steak, but you need to cut it into small pieces that you can easily pick up with chopsticks. If you are bad with them, even better! You'll lose even more weight!
Now if only I can figure out how to write a best-selling diet book on this brilliant idea.
I wrote some time ago (okay, I wrote everything some time ago) that on a little venture into the mountains outside Yiwu, our companions looked at their cell phones with amazement when they didn't have any reception. At the time, I thought it was just a symbol of their absurd urbanness--these folks had never been out into the countryside before! What I learned over the following months was that, indeed, it is an incredibly rare thing to not have cell phone reception in China. We never wound up getting one ourselves (a decision that we regrettedonly a few times, though when we did, it seemed like a really big deal), but no matter where we were, it seemed that others were talking away.
On a 24-hour train across the Gobi desert in far western China, hundreds of miles from any settlement or source of water, we had service. Floating down a river, atop a mountain, or on a ferry to an island, people were inevitably on their cell phones. China Telcom has done a remarkable job of covering the country. There are still some spots they haven't covered like that one village deep in the mountains, but not that many.
We visited some caves, miles from the nearest village, in sparsely settled and very poor Anhui province, (granted not too far from the Yellow Mountains, one of China's great tourist attractions), there was a sign, also in English for our benefit: "Mobile Phone access inside cave sponsored by China Telcom."
(So, as you can see, I wrote this a week ago, but just pretend I haven't come home yet)
Goodness, I stop writing in my blog for a month or so and this is what happens. I get so lost and far behind that I can’t possibly write about everything. So, briefly, our current situation: we are leaving in one week for the States! I am of quite mixed emotions regarding this. It will be very nice to be closer to my friends and family, and live somewhere that it isn’t a challenge to do almost everything, but I am rather sad about the prospect of losing the community we are in. The little shops across the street where I can get photos developed, have noodles, buy beer, get my egg-scallion crepe breakfasts made to order, have dry cleaning done, buy a fried-chicken sandwich, by people who know me. It is really easy for people to know you because you are the only foreigner patronizing their stores. So there is this neat ability to have an instant relationship/connection with each person you interact with. They will remember you, and since most shops in our neighborhood are basically the living room of the family who lives in the back or upstairs, the same people are always working there.
We also live half a block from a supermarket that is like a department and a grocery store mixed together. I’m not looking forward to needing to drive to Walgreen’s for stupid little things I need.
And many of our personal relationships with Chinese here are, sadly, at the time when they could really blossom into something legitimate, but they are going to wither because we are leaving. Our language skills are getting better and we can communicate a bit more with people. Since we’ve been split between two different schools for our time here and because we come as a pair, it has been more difficult to connect with people. It’s interesting how when I take a taxi with Erica (which is about 90% of the time), the cabbie rarely says anything. But on those rare opportunities where I am taking one alone, inevitably we at least engage in some small talk.
Oh, right, I was going to talk about the holidays. David and Anissa are the only people who we truly feel close to, here, and it was assumed that we would spend Christmas together. Anissa bought another turkey at Thanksgiving to stow until the end of December in anticipation of a Thanksgiving redux-type evening, except with a big plastic Christmas tree.
Ye gods! There is a lot of stuff to write. Should I mention that China is, in most places, a welcome respite from the holly-and pine bejeweled, Christmas music overload, buy! buy! buy! America that we avoided this year? But how, sometimes, you stumble into what is only describable as Xmas squared (sorry, I don’t know how to do exponents on this computer)? Where the music is four clicks two loud (as compared to the usual two) and blasting the most saccharine versions of our Christmas songs, with a few unorthodox additions (good tidings we bring, for you and your king?)? Where, in certain stores and homes, there are more Christmas decorations than you thought imaginable for a country who’s population contains only a small fraction who consider themselves Christian. Somehow, every store or restaurant with more then five front room employees seem to have decided that this year, all employees would be required to wear Santa hats. If they were extra trendy, it was reindeer antlers. Amazing.
Yesterday, we were invited at the last second (which is almost always the case) to a little event in one of the eighth grade classes we teach. They were having a little performance in honor of a Singaporean exchange student who had spent the past month with them. We went down to the class where they had managed to move their 56 desks off to the sides and created a decent runway for performances. The students were very excited about having us there, for in China, we foreigners are treated somewhat like I imagine small-time celebrities are treated back home. Most people are really nice to us even if there is no good reason, we are pointed at a lot, and people are just excited to see us. It has its pros and cons.
Anyway, we loitered in the back of the room and (I should have seen this coming) were asked if we could perform something.
Erica noticed it first: Everyone in China has a talent. Variety shows are huge, and people just enjoy sitting around watching others show off their talent. We went to a more formal performance a few weeks ago and watched students play traditional and modern instruments, sing, dance, do martial arts, and one strange performance where a student created a watercolor in five minutes while a two students ballet dances in the background.
And of course, a foreigner performing is something to get excited about! "Can you perform for us?" on of our top students asked. "Sorry," I said, shaking my head. "Are you sure? Can you sing for us" (they always want us to sing)? Nope. I’m fairly tone deaf, and no songs just come to me when I’m put on the spot (and sober). "Can you play an instrument?" Sadly, my violin lessons ended in fifth grade. "Can you tell a joke?" Not in mixed company, to minors! She sadly left. I felt bad. A few minutes later, she ran back to me and asked, quite hopefully, "Can you play the guitar?" I just smiled and shook my head.
The performances were nice. We saw a boy play the bamboo flute, then a boy played a far-from-perfect version of Edelweiss. Next, the Singaporean student was put on the spot. He looked panicked; perhaps he hadn’t been warned of this custom beforehand. He got up in front of the 60 of us and stood silently. Then he whispered something to the lead students, and they let him go outside the classroom. He hadn’t prepared anything! But he was quite nice about it, a few minutes later (after a comedy skit and a recorder performance) he came back and sang two quick songs about Singapore, one in English and one in Malay.
I still have no talent. I was brainstorming ideas in case they absolutely insisted, and all I could come up with was juggling pencil cases while I sang La Cucaracha. They probably would have been impressed. But I am so out of practice!
Two months ago, for Teachers’ Day, they did absolutely insist we perform. And though we were at a large banquet with 120 or so teachers, I had been fortified with several glasses of wine and they had a karaoke machine. Okay, we’ll do karaoke. The Chinese love karaoke. It was announced we would sing, and we went through the booklet. The English songs offered were either Kenny G instrumentals or songs we didn’t know. But we had to go through with it.
Finally, we found two songs we thought we could perform, songs that I knew some of the words to and figured we could read the rest.
We waited for the CD to start, and I was confused. This was a disco, dance version! Where are the power chords and sappy sentimentalism? Maybe they’d queued up the wrong song for us? Nope, there was the title screen, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." But to a dance beat! We thought we could maybe we could change the rhythm but then we realized there were no words on the screen. How were we going to do that? I tried making up some rhymes on the spot (they wouldn’t know the difference), but I am no free-styling MC. We gave up. I was really looking forward to the "And I need you now tonight/And I need you more than ever" bit… sigh.
We had the same problem (no lyrics) when we tried the glorious An American Tail theme song, "Somewhere out There." It always makes me think of animated mice, even in China.
Last week was a school-wide track meet, and two days of classes were cancelled so we could watch and participate in the event. I, on one evening’s practice, competed in the 100- and 200-meter dash, embarrassing myself in the former but winning the latter. I also competed with the English department in the 4x100m relay, which w as fun.
The event itself is an annual competition, and each class marched out together and carried a banner or did a short routine or repeated a chant before filing into the bleachers, where they sat for two days. Students ran by class, and track shoes were provided to the students (they didn’t have any large enough for my giant size 10 feet, though).
A week later, one of the staff members caught us in the wall and waived us into a supply room. We were handed a big bag of snacks each, a bag that for some reason they gave each teacher for the sports meet. Perhaps it was for sustenance to survive the ordeal, I don’t know. But if you are curious what Chinese people eat for snacks, I will list the contents of this bag below.
A bag of lemon flavored Frito-Lay potato chips
A bag of granola bar-sized puffed, sweetened ricecakes
Numerous little containers of peach gelatin/jelly with a small piece of canned peach inside
A bag of what looks like hard candy, individually wrapped, but it instead contains slightly sweetened beef jerky
A bag of Life Saver-sized candy that prominently features a Swiss chalet and milk on the front, and tastes somewhat like caramel
"Ming Zhu roast fish fillet": dried, salted, pale, fish, in a sealed bag
Peanuts: English ingredient list consists of "high quality peanut kernel, slat, anise, clove, sodium cyclamate, saccharine sodium
Walnuts with a sort of caramel coating
Pressed, preserved tofu in bite-sized chunks, slightly seasoned and preserved. Rather tasty.
Good*Vita Wheat Digestive Crackers. They are round and also advertise the inclusion of milk.
You can buy Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Ritz, Saltines, Snickers, and some other familiar brands here, though of course they are more expensive, and are not as popular as these local foods, I believe.
