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The Real China: “A Handsome American Guy Studies Kung Fu”

March 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Television is a fun gauge of a nation’s psyche. A look into how a people entertain themselves speaks volumes about who the people are. In America, football, zombies, gritty cop dramas, and sophomoric, snarky sitcoms reign supreme. Chinese TV is dominated by historical fantasies of slaughtering Japan’s invading soldiers, romantic melodramas, singing showcases, dry news reports, and sports (basketball, volleyball, and ping pong- what else).

I didn’t watch much television in China. While it was an entertaining spectacle to flip through when I was home alone and bored, which was quite often, I instead spent most of my free time on the slow-as-molasses and “Great Firewall” blocked internet, or out exercising and exploring around my college campus. When I did watch TV, I would spend a minute on the (mostly) ping-pong and volleyball channel, then click up through several song and dance channels, some serials, and one movie channel that would occasionally play something spoken in English or subtitled. I was at times so desperate for an English-language movie that I’d stay up late to watch whatever forgotten American garbage was airing, like Cheaper by the Dozen 2 until I couldn’t take it any more and went to bed.

Mostly I turned on the television to watch the English language news channel and try to feel somewhat connected to the outside world from my surreal hinterland outpost. The news channels were state-controlled, like all the rest, so it was interesting to note the edge in Chinese reporters’ voices when discussing an issue related to U.S. actions and Chinese sovereignty (not so ironically, each channel is called “CCTV” followed by a number, which stands for China Central Television instead of closed-circuit television). On the surprising bright side, a typical newscast was a plain rundown of international headlines and summits, so the number of biased statements and gimmicks per minute was surprisingly fewer than a typical American broadcast.

Chinese newspapers were completely impenetrable by my illiterate eyes, so I never bothered with one. In my observation, daily newspaper reading was not all that common of a habit in the small (by Chinese standards) cities where I spent the majority of my time. I didn’t see anyone carrying them in hand while commuting through the subways and crowded streets of the Tier 1 cities, either. While I cannot comment on daily readership numbers, I can say from my perspective that I did not notice anyone carrying a newspaper with them, reading it over breakfast, or collecting piles of old papers in their living room or office. The first time I noticed the local newspaper was when I penetrated its sports page as a story. And as long as I am going to do a little boasting, I should add that this was after I was featured on the local television news channel.

So first: how I got on television. It began when Aunt Fong took me around to try and find a martial arts school.

Martial arts training can be very informal in China, and by that I mean I regularly saw tai chi and kung fu groups meeting in the park- perhaps as few as two or three friends practicing their techniques together, or one man sweeping a two-handed sword or pole-arm through the air. Aunt Fong introduced me to a colleague or friend of hers (someone connected to her gwan-shee network) who practiced his routines every morning in a riverside park, so I did get a taste of this do-it-yourself kung fu. About once a week during the spring, Aunt Fong would nag me to wake up extra early and take a taxi to meet “Big” Wei, or Da Wei, as we called him in Chinese, before he finished his 6 a.m. practice and headed back home. While I was thankful to Aunt Fong and Da Wei for the time he spent teaching me a lengthy kung fu routine, and I was open to learn and integrate kung fu techniques into my martial arts knowledge, my heart was just not into performing choreographed, fossilized routines. I wanted to continue the martial arts I had pursued in the United States and develop my skills to a competitive level.

There were no schools nearby for me to practice any wrestling or grappling like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu I studied back in America (those schools exist only in China’s major cities- it is still a nation obsessed with its ancient traditions over contemporary fascinations like mixed martial arts and BJJ), but Aunt Fong had a friend who practiced Sanda, or what might generically be called “kickboxing” in America. She knew I wanted to practice at a serious gym, so she took me there to meet the coach. Master Wei, not Big Wei, was a trim, middle-aged man with an army crew cut and a block-shaped head. His physique did not immediately tip me off that he was a former champion and coach, but when I felt the power of his right hook and watched as he used breath control to take my best punch to his stomach again and again without flinching, I sensed serious power in his modest size. Also, he amazing abilities like the way he could sit cross-legged and use his only his two pointer fingers and thumbs to elevate himself off the floor.

Master Wei’s school was on the second level of a small retail space, indistinct from all the other dingy, white-walled retail spaces lining the downtown city blocks. The gym upstairs was filled with weight-lifting machines, heavy punching bags, and floor mats. During class nights, young kids would come after school and horse around until Master Wei or his nephew would step in, blow the whistle, and start class. Then, all the kids and some adults would run in circles or perform the same leg-swinging exercises for what seemed like forever. Thirty minutes is a very brief time respective to most things, but it is an unendurably long time to repeat the same floor exercise or run in tight ovals without a break. Master Wei would just shout, “Come on!” or blast his whistle as we struggled. He was a strict taskmaster who had never been influenced by the American idea to keep all of the students engaged or entertained.

Sometimes, he would pair students up for sparring or a partner exercise, tell us to begin, then go downstairs to take a half-hour phone call, leaving us to continue the exercise indefinitely. Other times, he would sit and watch his nephew and I fight each other, chiming in “Very good!” if I did something right, or pulling his nephew to the side to scold and slap him with his whistle cord when he did something wrong. Not that I was the one getting the best of his nephew- more often it was just the opposite, but Master Wei wasn’t related to me so that meant I was spared these whistle cord whips.

Those punishment breaks were the only pause in the action. Normally, Master Wei’s nephew and I would fight each other until I saw parents arriving after dark to pick their children up from the gym. Then, I knew my reprieve was mercifully near. Aunt Fong would walk me home as I hobbled on ankles and shin bones that felt like crushed glass. (Here, I tell how a minor injury from fighting at the gym turned into a serious problem that made necessary my first hospital visit.)

My very minor television appearance occurred one afternoon after I finished my classes and took a taxi to meet Aunt Fong at her university before heading off to my normally scheduled Sanda practice. At her campus, I was surprised by a small group of her colleagues and student friends who were expecting me as my taxi arrived. One of her excited students told me that a television crew was coming to film me for the news. I wasn’t sure I could believe her; I did not see why they would be interested in filming me or how the local TV station would even know about me.

But in small city China, word of a young, tall foreigner gets around. Students in my English classes would tell me how their friends had seen me eating at the cafeteria, or shopping downtown- sometimes they would show me unnerving pictures that their friends had taken of me unaware in the middle of class or from across campus. Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) once forbid me to run outside the university campus after the school security guards (I assumed) told him or a link of the social grape vine that they saw me running along the street outside the school’s gate. So I was skeptical that I was newsworthy, but not completely surprised when I came to Aunt Fong’s office building and saw a camera crew waiting outside.

They filmed me walking around the campus, playing ping-pong with a ping-pong professor (they really have those in China) and play-fighting with another young man in front of a crowd of students. Then, the camera crew followed me to the Sanda gym and filmed me training on punching mitts with Master Wei. After the workout, one of Aunt Fong’s friends served as a translator so I could be interviewed. She relayed questions to me about my training and competition experience in America. I tried to explain to her that I had only fought a few fights, as an amateur, and my competition awards were not championships but awards for having finished two of my fights with the “Submission of the Night”. Good luck explaining what “Submission of the Night” meant to a provincial Chinese audience. I was afraid I was being set up as the great white hope of my college town, and as a foreign novelty I would be matched to fight some Chinese giant with bad intentions.

"No, no, I said I killed seven FLIES with one blow!"

“No, no, I said I killed seven FLIES with one blow!”

I never did get to see my segment on the news. It aired during a holiday week, while I was away in Shanghai, and Aunt Fong said she couldn’t record it.

Master Wei thought that I was good enough to audition, along with his nephew, for a spot on the national broadcast of kickboxing fights: Wu Lin Feng. The prospect of fighting professionally and being able to earn an income from martial arts became my incentive to return to the gym for my regular session of Thursday through Sunday beatings by the hands and feet of Master Wei’s nephew. I was always relieved when Master Wei told us to practice boxing- no knees or kicks- because it was less painful to be hit primarily in the head versus the legs and body, and I could use my long arms to outbox Master Wei’s much shorter nephew.

My newspaper appearance came a couple months later, also due to my training at Master Wei’s gym, and also reported by the same journalist who produced my TV story. In a Chinese martial arts school, students are accepted by their teacher in a formal ceremony where the student pays obeisance to the teacher, is accepted by him, and then they dine together with friends. The night of my ceremony, I knew something formal was about to take place, but I had only a foggy idea of what it was all about and could not fathom how formal and well-attended it would be.

I met two other students, also being officially accepted by Master Wei as students, in the lobby of a nice restaurant near the gym: Ma Cao, a colleague of Aunt Fong’s who taught exercise science and possessed the largest calves proportional to body mass I have ever seen on a human being, and a very skinny college student who I suspected was mostly into training Sanda so he could boast about it to girls. Ma Cao was wearing a mandarin suit; I only had on the khaki pants I wore to my classes that day and a black, wool jacket over my sweater. I felt shamefully underdressed in my normal teaching clothes and I began to get the sense that this ceremonial dinner was of much bigger import than I had assumed. I thought we would probably bow, shake hands, and sign a certificate before training at the gym, but the event at the restaurant was shaping up to become an all-night affair.

Ma Cao showing off his giant calves.

Ma Cao showing off his giant calves.

Before most of the guests arrived, we three students took out our billfolds and divided our “lucky money” into three red envelopes so we could present them as gifts to Master Wei. If you want to be someone’s student in China, you had better have a red envelope full of lucky money with their name on it. We had to count out the luckiest of numbers- 888 Chinese yuan- which had me smirking because this number in Chinese is said, “ba bai ba shi ba.” For a moment, as our small group counted and repeated the sum, we sounded like a small chorus of sheep. Then, minutes later, Master Wei, his family, and all of his old kung fu friends arrived. The journalist came with camera in hand to take pictures of our ceremony.

One after another, we three students stood in front of Master Wei and his wife, who were seated on a small couch in the dining room. Then, we poured them each a cup of tea, and bowed. My two friends did a full kowtow on a floor cushion, but Aunt Fong told me to do just a formal standing bow, hands held together. The newspaper reporter captured this scene and it ran under the headline “A Handsome American Guy/ Studies Kung Fu.” I am not making that up. The sub-heading read how I strived to conquer the competition arena “Wu Lin Feng” within one year. This translation was made for me by a Chinese friend with an English degree and excellent English skills, so skeptical, bilingual readers can check the translation for themselves. The original Chinese headlines are 美国帅小伙/ 珠城学功夫 and 力争一年内“武林风”擂台扬威.)

I'm featured in the story on the right, not the one above the women's curling team.

I’m featured in the story on the right, not the one above the women’s curling team.

After the bow, Master Wei, his kung fu colleagues, and I signed a red certificate that said something about how he would teach me and I would be a good student. I was afraid Master Wei would resent it if I ever trained at a different school and possibly track me down to challenge me to mortal combat, like in the movies, but Aunt Fong assured me our teacher-student agreement was not exclusive. I am still alive to this day, so it turns out she was right.

With the contracts signed, the kung fu teachers and students went out into the lobby to take commemorative pictures for a full hour. I stood in with every possible permutation of people involved with the ceremony. After eight o’clock, the picture-taking died down and I was able to join all the people in the dining room who had already been eating while I was in the lobby. It was typical in China to eat foods that had been sitting on the table for half an hour or longer, so coming in to find stacks of room-temperature food didn’t bother me. Master Wei’s new students footed the bill that night, so all the platters and excess amounts of rice liquor were partially funded on my honor. (More about Chinese dining and drinking customs in “Bottoms Up!”)

The wannabe heart throb on the left (I never learned his name), Master Wei sitting in front of me, and Ma Cao on the right.

The wannabe heart throb on the left (I never learned his name), Master Wei sitting in front of me, and Ma Cao on the right.

Joining the students of honor in this picture are Aunt Fong and, I think, a kung fu teacher or university professor in the red jacket.

Joining the students of honor in this picture are Aunt Fong and, I think, a kung fu teacher or university professor in the red jacket.

Master Wei's very tough nephew on the left.

Master Wei’s very tough nephew on the left.

So how did my training with Master Wei turn out? Did I realize my dream of competing as a professional martial artist? After my foot injury in the fall, I trained regularly at the (unheated) gym over the winter and got toughened up quite a bit by Master Wei’s Spartan practices. But, concurrently, China as a whole was dragging down my health and emotions. By the time the spring semester had wrapped up and I had open days to devote to training in the now sweltering gym, I felt so forlorn that I lost nearly all spirit to fight. It didn’t feel good to train anymore. Master Wei could tell that my emotions were poor and my heart was fading. He proposed that if I wanted to compete on the televised show, I would need to train full-time for two months and try out in August. I would need my visa extended for that, but I thought it might be worth it. Realizing a martial arts dream seemed worth it to try with all my might, even if that meant staying in China for another two months or a year.

Alas, I could not deny my flagging spirits and health, and at the end of June/early July I became so ill that I had to stay in the hospital for three days.
Training became unthinkable.

Looking out at the brownish-gray sky from my hospital bed, I only wanted to leave China for a clean country where I could convalesce in soul and body. At the end of July, I departed from the Hefei airport with a souvenir newspaper in my luggage.

My view from my top floor hospital window. The window pane itself was clean, it was the outside which was so dirty.

The Real China: Sing a Song for Me

November 18, 2015 / / 1 Comment
At school talent show. Most every student I met was part of a talent show or school holiday performance.

Most every student I met was part of a talent show or school holiday performance.

The last time I was asked by someone to sing a song, I was part of a Sunday School Christmas program. Of course, that was before China.

My impression of China, and much of Asia, had been formed by the formality of Japanese culture and its intricate social politesse. I knew the Japanese liked to sing, but only in karaoke bars, and often only with close friends or when drunk. (Maybe that sentence should read “and when drunk.”)

Like the Japanese, the Chinese, I knew, also thought in terms of group harmony and saving face. But what about bowing, avoiding eye contact, speaking indirectly, and other characteristic Oriental traditions?

Chinese people, I would come to find out, don’t bow anymore. They shake hands vigorously like exuberant salesmen. As I quickly grew out of my ignorance, I learned that Chinese hardly spoke in hushed, indirect formalities. No, they tended to speak loudly, without prefacing their meaning with polite phrases or mild hesitation. From the basic Chinese language I acquired during my stay, I could already tell that many of the exclamations I heard used the barest words possible with no trace of complicated grammar to modify tone or expression. Example: “Come! Come! Come!” instead of “Come over here, please.” (I write exclamations and not statements because it was so common to hear Chinese call and cry out). Basic commands were the name of the game. Like a whistle and whip-equipped animal trainer, their sentences sprung out like an interjection, brusquely.

How about public reserve and spectacle? Saving face versus seeking attention? Were the Chinese demure or eager to mingle, to show off? Well, that answer is a two-sided coin, as are most coins. The young students tended to be modest and routinely refused to take credit when praised. Also, just as Americans are all good-humored, smarter, and better-than-average drivers, all my Chinese students considered themselves shy and did not want to be the one to stand out from the group. But I found a glaring exception: give them a microphone or goad them to sing a song and then step back. Chinese people love singing. It is their pleasure to sing a song for you.

Peng Liyuan, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, is a popular icon known for her singing of super-patriotic military songs on TV.

Peng Liyuan, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, is a popular icon known for her singing of super-patriotic military songs on TV.

In America, it is always the attention sponge with the acoustic guitar seeking romantic influence at social gatherings. In China, practically any one of the party guests is willing to be singled out to share their favorite song. When the soloist steps forward, everyone eagerly claps and sits in delight until the final note, then thanks him with a round of applause. Variety shows, where one person after another takes the stage to sing or play their instrument, are very popular on Chinese television, and they follow an unpretentious and schmaltzy style in tune with a tamer era of American television.

I witnessed Chinese enthusiasts singing in the park, singing in the car, singing in their homes, singing in talent competitions, in English speech competitions, singing in the private rooms of restaurants, performing a solo at their own wedding, and of course, I heard dozens of people sing at the KTV rooms, which is the Chinese term for karaoke clubs. The filthy streets were alive with the sound of music.

After the glitzy wedding ceremony, the bride changed into an eye-catching skirt and worked the catwalk with her singing skills.

After the glitzy wedding ceremony, the bride changed into an eye-catching skirt and worked the catwalk with her singing skills.

In a nearby riverside park, early in the morning, when groups would gather to practice tai chi choreography and line dancing together, I would always see one old kung fu teacher expelling his lungs in a shrill bird call. My aunt explained to me that he was releasing his chi or building his chi power- I don’t know the difference, only that it sounded like an animal dying. I tried to imitate him: “AAAAAAIIIIIHHHAAAAAHHHEEEEEAAAA!”, but my aunt told me I was doing it wrong. not enough agony, I suppose.

At night, in the same riverside park, a few enterprising individuals would bring in speakers, a television, a microphone, and plastic lawn chairs so that anyone who found it too troublesome to walk or taxi to a KTV club could come to the park and sing pop songs in the open air, more conveniently and cheaply.

At almost any time, someone would be willing to break out in song to entertain the group. Whenever Aunt Fong and I were with her friends, she would prompt me during, say, the car ride, and ask me, “Would you like… sing a song for me?” I would bashfully decline repeatedly until she pouted or persistently begged me for several rounds. She didn’t understand that I came from a jaded American generation that eyed everything cynically with ironic detachment. Singing out of glee? Who does that? My culture only expected someone to sing if they were on stage with a microphone or if they were a very extroverted personality. Singing for delight to share happiness with others in the group was, to me, charming and refreshing, but to American eyes it seemed so simple-minded and naïve. If you’re going to sing with friends in America, at least have an acoustic guitar and make the song a rock standard.

All right, I admit, that generalization is a bit narrow. I’ve seen American girls singing favorite pop songs in high school hallways and joining in on Broadway musical choruses, and I think everyone has sung along to the radio in the privacy of their own car. But the pleasure is often a guilty one, a hidden treat, not a performance. When I rode in the car with Aunt Fong or Uncle Jiang (when I accompanied them anywhere), they would try and show me off to their friends, or Uncle Jiang would put in his mix CD of Celine Dion, Richard Marx, Lionel Richie, and Michael Jackson, and we would sing along together. He knew those songs from memory, and he had me teach him the lyrics to one of his new favorites, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair.”

After observing Uncle Jiang and the rest of China’s infatuation with song and Michael Jackson ballads (their favorite MJ song was “You are Not Alone;” pretty weak), I used their love of singing against them. My teaching arrangement at the local middle school required me to go in front of a class of 50 bored, uncommunicative students and humiliate myself 9 times per week. The students hardly understood me and hardly cared- except when I first walked into the classroom and they applauded at the sight of a young foreigner- so after wearing myself out trying to compel them to talk every week, I finally resorted to the winning strategy of writing song lyrics on the board. Most of the class would follow along, and those who didn’t were drowned out by the singing voices. All I had to do was be a ham and sing repetitively in front of a whole room of onlookers.

The only way to maintain order in this chaos was to lead them through "Over the River and Through the Woods."

The only way to maintain order in this chaos was to lead them through “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

In my university class, I never led a sing-along, but there were a couple times when a lone student stood up to showcase his singing abilities. The soloist might be shy at first, but after a wave of encouragement from his classmates, he would pipe out a few lyrics. Outside of the classroom was another story. When I invited students over to my apartment for a Christmas Party, several were more than willing to line up and have a turn serenading the party crowd.

Guests take turn singing at my Christmas Party to End All Chinese Christmas Parties. That's Aunt Fong in the Christmas colors sitting on the left.

Guests take turn singing at my Christmas Party to End All Chinese Christmas Parties. That’s Aunt Fong in the Christmas colors sitting on the left.

I think this performing instinct is why Aunt Fong was always urging me to sing for her friends. She wanted to entertain them, and what better way to show me off as a foreign novelty than to have me sing? I don’t mean to say I was only treated as a pet, though being made to sing for strangers by my aunt did make me feel, again, like a child. Aunt Fong genuinely enjoyed listening to me sing, and she would often request me to sing hymns that I had previously shared with her, and she even had me record a song so she could listen to it on her computer.

Aunt Fong insisted I record a song with her nephew, Ja Ja's help.

Aunt Fong insisted I record a song with her nephew, Ja Ja’s help.

Aunt Fong was very modest about her own singing abilities, but I thought she had no need to be so. She had a lovely, dulcet voice. I think her lack of confidence was from being around the operatic Uncle Jiang, her vocally talented nephew, Ja Ja, and other amateurs with well-honed voices. Ja Ja could rap and hit high notes for Backstreet Boys’ songs, and he even produced his own music. Uncle Jiang, when amplified through a KTV sound system, nearly blew out my ear drums as he bellowed Chinese patriotic and pop songs from yesteryear. Sometimes, he would hand me the second KTV microphone and we would sing “My Heart Will Go On” or one of the Chinese songs he taught me (e.g. “Dong Fang Hong,” which praises Chairman Mao for being as radiant as the sun and starving- excuse me- serving the people). Other times, Aunt Fong would encourage me to make selections from the KTV computer library of hits, and Uncle Jiang would impatiently delete my choices when they came in between his songs. The KTV experience could bring out the zeal in passionate crooners like that.

For those who have only experienced karaoke in an American setting- one brave (or shameless) soul singing from a monitor in front of an entire barroom- I will briefly describe the highlights of KTV. One thing to first understand is that the KTV clubs were everywhere. Every commercial district had several KTV buildings decorated with bright signs and elaborate, gaudy, multi-colored lighting. Even in my home base, which was considered tiny by Chinese standards, there were still three different KTV clubs to choose from.

Inside the clubs, more bright lights and mirrored walls decorated the lobby. A clerk at the front counter would book a room for guests as they shouted back and forth over the pumping music beats. After passing a snack bar with popcorn, candy, chicken feet, soft drinks, and beer, guests could walk upstairs or take the elevator to the their floor (there were no expansive, single-story structures in China besides the Forbidden City). Employees functioned as bellhops in the world’s loudest, brightest, and most kinetic, if not obnoxious, hotel, leading guests to their rooms. The KTV rooms were dark and loud, the volume left on max by the previous occupants. A large, vinyl couch hugged three of the walls, so a big group of about a dozen people could crowd into one room. There was a big screen on the opposite wall for music videos and scrolling lyrics, and a touch-screen monitor for selecting songs (sometimes Uncle Jiang would choose American songs for me and I would look at the screen, mute, and eventually communicate that I didn’t know this cross-cultural English language hit).

Karaoke-Harbin6303733

As the hours went by, the microphone would be passed around, everyone would sing their favorites and impress the rest with their voice, while fruit, nuts, snacks, and drinks would be consumed in a big mess on the table. KTV turned out to be a fun experience, most of the time. It brought out the performer in people, and it was a chance for friends to relax and have fun together. KTV was the go-to choice for an afternoon or evening outing, and it was also a way to cap off a night after an important business deal or special dinner.

So often in America, I have found myself after a dinner out with family or friends when, after an hour or ninety minutes tops, there is a palpable feeling that the affair is over and the restaurant, it is tacitly understood, would like you to move on to open up a table for the next diners. Even if Americans, contrary to custom, wanted to sit around a restaurant table for hours, the atmosphere would not make them feel at ease. The noise of the dining room, the servers constantly stepping in to ask if they can “get those plates there, for ya?”, the bare table, and the open floor plan with a busy crowd buzzing around impinge on people to leave. Then, with a few hours left before bedtime, the group is left to either go to a bar or part ways and go home to watch late-night TV, or scroll through their phones, alone.

In China, I found that big, private dining rooms for parties of six to ten people, followed by a couple hours of KTV together, was the time-filling solution to this social activity dilemma. It was one of the few treasures of Chinese life that I thought Americans should adapt, but knew never would.

The Real China: Pretend Culture

November 4, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Walking through a country, as opposed to skimming over it in a textbook or magazine, will reveal the little things- the things you had always assumed and never noticed in your home culture. The magazine version is great for a broad overview listing the distinctive parts that make China China, but the man-on-the-street view shows you the real points that locals would never give notice to in print, and even points that they are not even able to notice themselves.

Some things are just too embarrassing, or taken too much for granted.

The boasted value of China, the one they paraded before the world in Beijing’s international debut at its 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, is harmony. This is supposed to be the cement that holds the Confucian society together, and the highest ideal that people everywhere were supposed to maintain and strive for.

"Harmony" at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

“Harmony” at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But how observable is harmony? Could a foreign guest, like me, detect it? Would Chinese people typically show more politeness or deference to others than I would normally expect elsewhere? Would public order amaze me in China as it so often amazes outside visitors to Japan? Would the famous collectivist mindset wordlessly cue everyone in on how to fit into Confucius’ hierarchy and give their attention to the group welfare? When they sang in that howling cat voice along with their one-stringed guitar, would it be multi-part or just one melody?

Would China, chief among all preachers of harmony, stand out to me as the epitome of harmony?

In my experience, just the opposite.

Public order in China is about the worst I have ever seen. Even contrasting the grimiest places within American shores- say, a smelly, trash-lined New York City subway station- with an equivalent in China- a stop on the Shanghai metro, which looks so much whiter and more modern in its architecture- China comes out the obvious loser in the chaos contest. (Or would that be the dishonorable champion of the chaos contest?)

As wild as the crowds are on a given New York subway train, everyone is still expected to follow the flow of unwritten rules. When it is time to board, people stand to the side as the people exiting the train shuffle off first. And, crowded as it can be, riders are still expected to keep their own personal space as much as possible- no fully-opened newspapers, for example- and conspicuous things like cooked food and music speakers were frowned upon, though of course anyone with experience publicly commuting through New York knows how loudly, madly, and sometimes entertainingly these mores are violated. But, in the middle of all the madness, blocking the way or bumbling over the local manners would bring down a quick scolding in that bossy New Yawk! accent.

In Shanghai, while the modern fire doors prevent passengers from contemptuously throwing their garbage onto rat-infested tracks Big Apple style, I once shared a car with a man who had taken a giant bag of garbage onto the train itself. I reflexively pulled away in my posture to give him all the space he needed around the center pole in front of the car’s double doors. He was wearing drab-colored pants and a jacket, typical for all kinds of Chinese factory workers or laborers, only his outfit was blotted with dark stains, and his hands were covered from fingernail to wrist in brownish grease. With one hand he held onto the neck of his sagging plastic bag, and with the other he held onto the circular pole overhead. I leaned into a corner of the car and pitied anyone who would hang onto that pole next- they would retract their hand and find it covered in smelly garbage grease- but then again from the look of the dirty film-covered floors and surroundings, and from the sparse cleaning crews I had encountered in China, with their soggy, old, denim-colored mops that they would listlessly drag over the pitted concrete-colored flooring, anyone holding onto the rails in a crowded Chinese subway car should be pitied.

And, I think that this is not news to anyone familiar with scenes from a slum country, but when the subway car’s doors open, the people inside and out immediately stream into each other like two opposing fire hoses. The same goes for elevators in China. Every time I tried to get off an in-demand elevator, some old woman with flat, curly hair and a dusty cotton jacket would walk straight into my chest, without flinching, unless I circled around her like a slippery matador. Now, I don’t think it was the same bossy woman walking into me every time, but this is hard to confirm because I never got a good look at her face. She always had a downcast brow and avoided eye contact as if she were a dim-eyed beetle furiously crossing the sidewalk. Plus, I stand over six feet tall and the elevator raider barely cleared five feet, and as soon as the doors opened she was palm-first into my sternum, so the angle did not allow for a good view of her face.

Even though in every subway station there are helpful floor stickers reminding people to stand to the side to clear the lane so passengers getting off the train can file through quickly first, which opens up the space for incoming passengers, and even though in it is in a land dominated by iconography when you consider Chinese written symbols, no one cares about the obvious floor signs.

What we in the West call "arrows" is Chinese for "EVERYONE AT ONCE."

What we in the West call “arrows” is Chinese for “EVERYONE AT ONCE.”

In the passenger trains, where long-riding passengers had a chance to take their shoes off and kick their feet up, they did so. They would sprawl out on each other’s laps, across rows of seats, on the bags and buckets and blankets they brought in, and if the train was crowded enough then people would spend the ride standing or squatting in the space connecting the cars, in between the bathrooms and luggage racks. Consistently, from the cheapest, slowest, most crowded train I rode in China all the way up to the high-speed G Train, people would dump their trash and spit their seeds and leftover food out all over the floor- leaving a poor, wearied cleaning lady to walk through and collect the piles as she lagged behind the accumulating mess. Alternatively, a berserk woman would stomp through and screech at people to hand over their plastic wrappers and paper bins.

Also, more obnoxious than the trash on the train, it was universal for people to play their portable TVs, radios, computers, DVD players, and speakers at full volume. Few saw the necessity of using headphones when there was no concept of keeping one’s music to oneself. Or one’s voice- loud talking and boisterous behavior pervaded the moving cavern on rails, just as it did in every other public gathering place in China.

Which brings me to my point: harmony is not a real Chinese value. It is an imagined ideal. The real values that stood out in my eyes are those that scoffed at manners like keeping quiet in public, keeping one’s hands to oneself, and all the other things supposedly learned in kindergarten. While harmony is not observable, or only obliquely so, the constant boisterousness is definitely apparent.

Cute motivational posters, while possibly made in China, are not sold there.

Cute motivational posters, while possibly made in China, are not sold there.

Boisterousness is a value of the real China, as are the (actually expressed) saying “To get rich is glorious,” and the idea that self and self’s inner circle are all that matter. The true ethic underlying all the little things in China is “every man for himself and push the strangers out of the way.”

I started to see it everywhere, in details as small as the little tissue packets everyone carried with them.

In America, practically every restaurant has napkins on the table, either in a holder or wrapped around the silverware, and public bathrooms have toilet paper and an electronic hand dryer or paper towels, so living my whole life with these conveniences made me notice the glaring absence of napkins and even toilet paper. In China, you bring your own.

In restaurants and cafeterias, the tabletops were bare. Only in the nicest restaurants- those connected to a hotel- were there napkin holders. Even then, the napkins were thin squares folded up into a triangle, and the table is so large that diners have to wait for the napkins to make their way around the lazy Susan every few minutes. Thankfully, these hotel restaurants would provide a plastic-wrapped wet cloth napkin that was thick enough to last throughout a whole dinner. Having that made me feel like I was living in luxury compared to other napkin-free homes and businesses.

If you were lucky, a small café selling noodles or dumplings might have a roll of paper streamer sitting on the table (the kind of party streamers that are used to decorate a high school gym) for you to wipe your fingers with. Other restaurants might occasionally have napkins, too- it wasn’t forbidden- but customers were generally expected to bring their own.

It took me quite a while to catch on and plan for this; many of my meals were eaten with greasy hands. Often, I was spared from learning my lesson the hard way (that is, going without tissues). Friendly students would do the polite thing and offer me one of their own.

Eventually, I tired of being offered tissues or having to ask someone for assistance every time I had messy hands or a runny nose, so I went into the store on campus and picked up my own pack of tissues. A big pack held a dozen small pouches- the convenient size that are kept in purses or pockets. I would have liked to have set an example and defied their cultural norms if I could have found a large cardboard box of tissues to bring into the classroom, but no store had them for sale. The small pouches were all that was available for personal napkin and tissue needs; they were stocked in every department store and convenience shop.

These bulk-size packs go fast when you consider that they are your sole napkin, tissue, and toilet paper supply away from home.

These bulk-size packs go fast when you consider that they are your sole napkin, tissue, and toilet paper supply away from home.

People wanted the small tissue pouches because they knew they needed them. If they were stuck out and about and they had to use a public restroom, the communal paper dispenser at the bathroom entrance would likely be empty, and it would be left to them to provide their own tissues to use in the stall.

Bringing one’s own tissues to every situation, needing it daily like a billfold, phone, and keys, was, I believe, a small indicator of the cultural mindset. I heard Chinese people lament how selfish everyone was, how people in China only wanted to make money for themselves and didn’t care about the condition of anyone outside their family, and while bringing one’s own tissues was not a direct reflection of epidemic selfishness of callous proportions, it was a result of a culture where every individual was left to fend for himself.

In the land of the free and independent-minded, by contrast, Americans have a big reputation for generosity. Americans will give freely to relief efforts half a world away, and that is in addition to their charitable giving to local churches, clubs, and benefits. There is still much thought for the self, obviously, and America is just as famous for being a land of competition and pursuit of wealth. Like any country, those on the outskirts of society have a very difficult time finding employment and sustenance for themselves, and more than ever, this generation of Americans fear for their jobs and worry how they will provide for their families.

Still, before the growth of the American welfare state, before the widespread breakdown in society and public morality, the Protestant American ethic, while expecting everyone to pull their own weight, had very generous and charitable habits. There were and are, in a far-fetched sense, napkins on the table. Public bathrooms were, and are, expected to have toilet paper, hand soap, and hand towels, and there is a reasonable expectation that a fair number will be fairly clean, depending on the location (gas stations not included). When they are not clean it is accepted as a common fact of life, but not as an unchangeable rule of life, as it seemed in my experience in China.

America is a real country, with real problems, and I do not argue that it is a model of virtue or a utopia. No, while seeing Chinese society has predictably made me more thankful for the blessings of American life, it has more so made me perceptive to the problems of my home country. It is well known in America that public trust and consciousness can be pretty dismal depending on what part of the country you live in. Living in dog-eat-dog New York City for a short time was a shock to my easygoing Midwestern sensibilities. My point though is that the prevailing beliefs and practices in America are still very empathetic toward neighbors and strangers. I would argue this is because many in today’s generation have been trained by cultural precedent and the familiar words “Do unto others” and “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

These exemplary American attitudes I speak of were starkly different from the popular thinking I encountered in China. The Chinese believe in receiving good fortune and luck, and working with indefatigable diligence to earn a high salary for your family. Their precedent was: if you don’t work for it, if you don’t cultivate the rice crop, your family will starve. The fears and selfish drive for survival have carried over from the generations living under famine. Chinese people of the past didn’t expect others to feed them or provide for them. They didn’t expect public charity to provide for their food or housing (what charity is there when everyone is starving in communes?), and they didn’t and still don’t expect access to timely, quality medical treatment and government services unless they know the right people.

The positive side of China’s harrowing history is that an industrious, self-achieving work ethic has become practically universal. People take individual responsibility because they have to. Every area of life depends on personal diligence. They scrupulously watch their health, meaning they scrutinize their diet and get daily exercise. Every food ingredient is chosen for its health benefits (if you trust the folk wisdom). Many rely on diet, daily tai chi, and Traditional Chinese Medicine shops as their health care plan. They know they can’t fall back on the government’s system.

Trying out Traditional Chinese Medicine. I seriously recommend cupping for muscle aches.

Trying out Traditional Chinese Medicine. I seriously recommend cupping for muscle aches.

Aunt Fong's father-in-law leads me through his daily tai chi routine.

Aunt Fong’s father-in-law leads me through his daily tai chi routine.

The great downside of China’s universal work ethic is that managers, companies, and institutions often expect employees and underlings to live, eat, and even sleep on the job site, going all week without a day off. Also, the part that most often disgusted me about China’s selfish, starved-animal mindset: unruly crowds and near-sighted drivers and pedestrians. Whenever they encountered another person or a group, everyone had to be first. They had tunnel vision, and as a matter of course they would run into people and push them if they got in their way. No looking over the shoulder, no checking one’s blind spot. No yielding way, no stepping around. No “sorry’s” or “excuse me’s.” If this sounds like a trivial thing to live with, I challenge the reader to swap the manners of home for the law of the street in China.

In Communist China, right of way drives YOU!

In Communist China, right of way drives YOU!

Other examples of the selfish culture would be the bartering merchants who attempted to cheat people as their business model (not that this is rare among marketers elsewhere), and also the widespread littering. Roadside ditches and creek beds became reservoirs for stray trash, and any vacant or run-down property became a de facto dumping ground. The unspoken shrug was “Why worry about it? Trash is someone else’s problem, so drop your wrapper and let ‘someone’ clean it up.”

The culture of B.Y.O.N. (Bring Your Own Napkins)- and culture-wide ugly behavior are admittedly only tenuously connected. After experiencing life in China though, I started to connect the two, like a small twig connected to a branch of the selfishness tree. The twig itself is not significant, only a distant extension of the root, and if examined in isolation it would not attract special attention. However, if the root and trunk are known, then a trained eye can recognize any twig and identify its genus and species.

The question I am asking then: why do some countries provide public conveniences that are unavailable in other countries or which must be provided by the individual? I believe it is more than a case of developed versus developing countries. France is developed, but I was surprised to run into pay toilets there, and I heard of snippy store clerks getting snippy and telling foreign visitors that providing bathrooms is not their responsibility. Japan is developed, but their restaurants don’t give away the freebies of American restaurants like soda fountains and ketchup pumps (expect only one ketchup packet at a Tokyo McDonald’s).

My takeaway lesson from life in China: unlike the Confucian cultural value on everyone’s mind- harmony- B.Y.O.N. and “every man for himself” were real, actual cultural practices. Confucian harmony- the smooth, peaceful interworking of society- was an unrealized, imaginary ideal. Each individual person was on his own, and public behavior was anything but harmonious. Likewise, Mao and the communists of the 20th century said their revolutionary state was for the people, yet they could not teach the people to look out for each other, to love their neighbors as themselves.

How many other ideals, in China and elsewhere, are merely imagined? What real practices, like B.Y.O.N., are taken for granted and largely ignored? The ignored practice, and not the imagined, is what is most indicative of a culture.

Believe it or not, the comb is the tastiest part of the whole chicken.

The Real China: Bottoms Up! (Part 2)

October 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

And here’s the most incredible thing: over the course of a two-hour dinner, bai jiu (a clear distilled spirit of 40-60% alcohol) would be the only beverage. No water; you had to wash everything down with hard liquor. And more: if you wanted to quench your thirst, you needed to be part of a toast. As Sue explained in her mother hen voice, “Don’t you dahyr bring that glass to your lips unless you’ve given somebody cheers! That’s why I always sit next to someone I know, so I can go, ‘Ahram, cheers!’ when I need a drink.”

Yes, that was the truth. The entire table would refrain from touching their glasses until the top social-tier had begun toasting each other, then everyone would join in and take turns raising their glasses to each other or walking over to an honoree and standing to have a drink with him while he remained seated. Standing up to show deference was an added honor when making a toast, as were lowering one’s glass below the honoree’s when clinking them, and downing the glass completely and tipping it upside down to show it was empty. To signal this impressive feat (basically it was taking a tall shot of sake, vodka, or a similar clear alcohol), the toaster would call out “Gan bei!” which meant “Bottoms up!”

Everyone loved Grant and Sue, they were usually the life of the party, so they would each receive a lot of toasts, and Sue would always decline the gan bei in a funny way. Standing with an excitable (i.e. Chinese) man toasting her, Sue would say in a booming, Australian voice, “You gan bei. Me meiyou gan bei!” All the Chinese speakers would smile because meiyou (pronounced “mayo”) meant “there is no” or “not have” and Sue was using it to try and say “no” or “will not.” So, in effect she was saying “There is no bottoms up!”

The way the toasting would work out, the men in the most prestigious seats would generally remain seated and let people come to them as the toasts worked their way like social order dominoes around the table. Dinner guests spaced their drinks out over the course of the meal by taking many turns raising their glasses or standing to drink with each of their friends at the table. Toasting served as a way for people to introduce themselves to the host and his friends- who had significant gwan-shee, and it also broke the ice between strangers of equal social standing. And, obviously it was a happy way for old friends to show affection to each other.

Although it was necessary to wait for the toasts to refresh oneself, once the toasting began there was a chain reaction of opportunities to have a drink. It was actually quite awkward as I made and attempted a succession of toasts because I had to either try and repetitively slide my stubborn chair backward or stand straight up and try to avoid buckling with the seat cushion pressing into the back of my knees. All the standing for toasts, in a way, nullified the need for the extra-long chopsticks. As long as we were up to drink we could have reached out to scoop some food into our bowls.

The most movement was for the highest honor-giving: making a pass around the table to make a toast with every seat. This did not happen often, but there were a couple times I went out for a dinner with a new group of people and Aunt Fong had me stand up to pay tribute to my hosts. She led me around to initiate the standing toasts and introduce myself to each guest; I was equipped with my tall glass in one hand and a bottle of bai jiu in the other, so I could refill my glass after each bottoms up. I knew the bai jiu was volatile, mind you, I refused to drink it unless strongly socially obligated, and I was sneaky about refilling my glass with very conservative pours (I held my fingers tightly together and gripped the bottom half of the glass in a sleight-of-hand attempt at blocking my hosts’ vision of my drink level), but their eyes were watching me and they made sure I emptied my glass with every drink.

Circling the table, I thought after my first drink Wow. That was a little much. I need to sit for a mome… after the second That’s enough. This was a bad i… After the third drink my mouth was numb to the burning sensation of the alcohol, after the fourth I forgot whether I was going clockwise or counterclockwise around the table, the fifth How many people are at this dinner? And who are they? Whatever number was after fifth What’s going on? Is this- is this China? I’m sitting down.

All right, I’ve embellished, but there were a few times when I had to sit down and turn away from the table to steady myself after drinking too tall a glass of bai jiu. I missed American culture, where I could choose my own beverage or, if out with friends, call it quits after a drink or two. The peer pressure in a Chinese business dinner was not very unlike the atmosphere in a college fraternity house party. I hated being socially forced to drink, especially when it was the sweet, vengeful bai jiu. One time, I saw Ahram successfully wave it off and I assumed she got away with having tea either because she was a lady or there was something forceful about the way she chuckled and said, “Actuarry, I don’t want dat.” (Not mocking, that’s how she actually spoke.) Whenever it was offered to me, I gladly accepted light beer as a compromise.

Something you may already know about the Chinese is that it is very common for their face to become flushed whenever they drink alcohol. I don’t understand the genetic reason for this, nor do I much care, but I find it a peculiar trait, like the way they have dry, crumbly earwax as opposed to the waxy, liquid substance in the ears of every white person (go ahead, look it up). Anyway, it was not uncommon to see a group of men walking in dress shirts and black slacks, two or three with rose pink or puce faces, one perhaps stumbling, at one in the afternoon.

I remember, one spring afternoon, seeing some young college students helping their friend who was dragging the tops of his feet against the sidewalk as he struggled to keep pace with his designated hoisters, carrying him with his arms spread across their shoulders. It was still the lunch hour, so I stood perplexed, thinking Did he get into a car crash or something? He was wailing and tears were streaming down his red face- maybe he got into a fight over a girl? Noticing my stare, my Chinese friends told me he was just having a hard time handling his alcohol, best to ignore him.

Ever naïve, it dawned on me that the culture of drinking is nearly universal, it only changes forms between societies. American binge drinking is an atrocious menace responsible for thousands of traffic fatalities and yearly freshmen deaths at university campuses, but of course ours is not the only nation with a drinking problem. The Chinese, while seemingly very cautious not to mix alcohol and cars, loved to get carried away with friends and colleagues as a standard practice. In my observation, drivers declined to have any drinks and no one would goad them “Just one…” I don’t have the drunken driving numbers on the national level to corroborate this; it was always plain who the driver was and his teetotal status was strictly kept.

One young man I met told me he was thinking about going back to school to change careers because he couldn’t abide all the drinking required of him as a businessman, where every deal was sealed over dinner by a show of alcohol tolerance. It crossed my mind that without the regular opportunity to get loaded at dinners and expel emotions in the KTV (karaoke) clubs, the overworked Chinese would reflect on their lives, trapped in a gray, decrepit communist state, and become either crack-brained or suicidal. Problem drinking there, as often here, was society’s pleasurable stress-relief valve.

That night, eating with Grant and Sue, the Korean teacher Ahram, and the collection of officials from the university, I was thankfully given a large bottle of beer to drink from as I sampled new foods during our dinner’s many rounds. I mentioned before that the food in China was strange, usually lying in a pool of oil and prepared either boiled or stir-fried. When the serving girl brought out vegetables, they were either limp greens on an oily platter (no one eats salad in China) or crispy or steamed vegetables like lotus root and corn on the cob. The lotus root was a new favorite of mine, but the flavorless corn was well below par for the tastes of a native Iowan. With the many meat dishes, there were a large variety of kinds and spices, but a sameness connected them all. Nearly every meat dish was served chopped up, bones and all, and served spiced, oily, and often served barely above room temperature.

A meal of steamed corn, bean soup, various and mysterious limp vegetables, some kind of oily meats, and sliced melon.

A meal of steamed corn, bean soup, various and mysterious limp vegetables, some kind of oily meats, and sliced melon.

Being an American, I have never been that interested in the path the animal takes from farmyard to table, nor have I ever been subjected to witness the work of the butcher. Looking at beef and chicken cuts, shrink-wrapped in plastic white trays in the grocer’s refrigerated, brightly lit display, I have had convenience in choosing my meat and ease of mind in divorcing it from any breathing, bleeding creature. However, it has seemed to me that the conventional cuts of meat must be fairly obvious to a trained butcher. For example, in every bucket of fried chicken are the main parts of the bird: breast, wings, thighs, and legs. The Chinese would also eat the feet and head (not the beak or skull, mind you), but the rest of the bird would be chopped into unrecognizable bits. Considering that Chinese consumers can choose to pick out their bird live, as we do with lobster, and watch it killed and maybe cleaned in front of them (as we don’t), I expected that they would all be expert in cleanly dividing the meat into its standard portions. But no, they took that naked hen and chopped it up, I imagined with two cleavers like the Muppets’ Swedish chef or a drummer on a snare solo. The meat was truly that messy. Every bite, and I mean that- no exaggeration, had bone and tendon in it.

The Chinese prized the nutrition in the bones, and so I learned to chew around the big bones and grind up and swallow the little ones. My aunt Fong would offer me a straw when we had beef bone soup so that I could follow her lead and suck out the marrow. Me: “What? Shen me? (‘shun-muh’)” Aunt Fong: “Mm! Very good!” Sluuuuurp.

On my aunt's adamant insistence, I tried sucking out some beef marrow for myself. I rate it two thumbs down.

On my aunt’s adamant insistence, I tried sucking out some beef marrow for myself. I rate it two thumbs down.

Speaking of soup, I cannot get through a discussion of the cockamamie cooking methods of Chinese cuisine without mentioning one unbelievable dish, one meat that I could manage to eat without bones in every bite. At a home-cooked meal, the main course we once had was chicken soup. That is, a whole cleaned chicken sitting in a weak, yellow broth. The broth we sipped with our spoons had less flavor than a single bouillon cube. I have never tasted thinner soup. I think it was only water and oil. And the chicken itself we comically tried to peel apart with our chopsticks. No one brought out a knife to slice cuts off for each guest; we twisted the flesh from the bone and often partnered to hold the meat and strip off strands like pigeons struggling with a large bread loaf. Besides the impractical hassle, it tasted bad, too. I thought I had traveled around the earth to visit another world, where the people didn’t have the sense to know how to prepare and eat chicken, or even realize that the way they were doing it lacked sense altogether. It was as if the natives had never prepared or eaten a chicken before, but I knew they were far more acquainted with the tasty creature than I was. Some of them had chicks in their house and pet roosters that would stalk the sidewalks. Small city residents saw live chickens every day.

Chickens strutting outside someone's house.

Chickens strutting outside someone’s house.

This is not to say that China was without tasty meat dishes- or protein dishes. China was a tofu lover’s paradise with bean curd in every shape, texture, flavor, and smell. Grant and Sue’s favorite meat dish at the restaurant, and an internationally famous dish, was the roast duck. This was a meat that was at least shaved thin by a cook and served mostly free of bone. We ate it wrapped in a thin pancake with scallions and dipped it in a sweet bean sauce. Quickly assembling a wrap and dipping it while the automatic lazy Susan rotated by was a test of timing and chopstick dexterity.

My favorite dish was the braised pork (hong shao rou/ 红烧肉), served hot in a round, black stew pot. China has not only different varieties of pork than America, but they also serve it in a way contrary to American expectations. Meat, fat, and skin were served in one three-layered, bite-sized piece. Stewing the meat this way made the pork succulent, sweet, and tender. I have complained about a lot of things in China, but without reservation I will say that their pork was far better than American pork, and I come from America’s largest pork-producing state.

Do yourself a favor and find a Chinese restaurant than can prepare this. Tell them you want "hoang shao ro."

Do yourself a favor and find a Chinese restaurant than can prepare this. Tell them you want “hoang shao ro.”

I fully realize that eating skin, fat, bones, feet, and chicken heads (cheeks, eyes, and brains) is repulsive, a near abomination, to Americans raised on diets of white meat chicken, ground beef, and thick steaks; really, raised on a diet of processed foods- foods processed far from view or thought. Well, tastes are individual, and I am a man with a big appetite and an adventurous palate, so take my word on this for its relative worth when I say the comb was the tastiest part of the chicken, the feet and knees were the best parts of the pig, and pickled chicken feet were not that bad. I eventually grew to like them. I avoided the blood sausage completely and I am fairly confident I avoided dog, but like I said, most meat dishes were chopped up into unrecognizable bits, so it is possible that the “beef” wasn’t always beef. I will move on so readers with weak stomachs won’t get sick.

After many rounds of new dishes and over an hour’s worth of toasting, as bellies swelled to capacity, the tempo slowed down and the feeling became very relaxed. Diners leaned back in their chairs, some might smoke (smoking was common in China, but not as much as I expected, though I once caught a little farm girl with a cigarette in her mouth), then the serving girl would clear away the empty platters and combine dwindling remainders together, and guests could even sip their drinks at will.

The last round was signaled by a dessert platter: watermelon, orange slices, dragon fruit, and sometimes a mildly sweet pastry. I think I ate a record amount of watermelon in China, or at least a personal best. Once springtime arrived, local farmers would drive trucks full of the round fruits (not oblong) into town every day, and a crowd of shoppers (not a queue- remember, this was China) would bring one home as a daily staple. After the meal, the group would polish off the thin slices of watermelon and lethargically pick at the dragon fruit, pausing to let the large meal settle and finish off the last remaining bits of the evening’s conversations.

Then, when the pause lasted for too long a moment, the group implicitly shared the understanding that the long affair was over. Grant or Sue said, “Well, all right then” and the whole table heaved themselves to their feet, using the chair backs and table top for support. Any contents remaining in the bottles were poured into glasses, and we all held our glasses high in the air and gave one final “Gan bei!”

After that, the real entertainment began. If it wasn’t clear who was footing the bill, if payment had not already been arranged and settled beforehand, then dinner guests would fight (push and shove, but not punch) for the check. It was at the same time alarming and charming to see them insist, “No! No! No!” and reach over their friend’s shoulder to snatch the check away. They each had honed techniques to get the winning end of this aggressive ritual and earn the prestige of paying for the meal. In American, I was used to “going Dutch” with friends, or seeing little scenes that might go back and forth for a few verbal rounds, each person saying, “No, you paid for it last time” or offering other pleas before the eventual payer holds his ground with something firm and the others graciously say, “If you insist.”

In China, they do not acquiesce. Whoever has the bill might hold it above his head or at an arm’s length away from his opponent, like a playground game of keep-away. Or, if trying to thrust cash on his friend, he would jam it into his friend’s pants’ pockets, or if his friend were playing defense with his hands already in his pockets, then the money would be dropped in the shirt or jacket pocket.

I once witnessed a great battle between Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) and his sister. Family honor was on the line. They knew each other’s tricks. From the dining room to the hallway, riding down the elevator, and out of the lobby and into the parking lot, she thrust cash at Uncle Jiang and he blocked or riposted every advance, opening her hand and stuffing the bills right back in. They chattered at each other like two squirrels fighting on a tree trunk, and I watched silently from the sidelines. Uncle Jiang’s sister made a brilliant strategic choice and gave the money to me, the stunned third party. Uncle Jiang wasn’t having it, so he snatched it right out of my frozen palms and stuck the money in his sister’s purse as she tried to walk away. As persistent as the widow in Jesus’ parable, she clung to the door of the taxi cab as Uncle Jiang and I tried to make our departure. I was sitting in the front passenger’s seat, and the window was open a crack. She made the winning move, dropping the wad of cash into my lap as the driver took off. There was nothing Uncle Jiang could do. He would have to wait to repay his sister another time.

Two odds and ends related to meals and restaurants: like the two English teachers in New York had suggested, I tried to find a local restaurant on the food streets which I knew and trusted. This seemingly simple task was made difficult by the unintelligible signs and haphazard set-ups of Chinese shops and street-side restaurants. If you were not literate in the written language and culture, you were not going to be able to approach a restaurant counter and sound out “taco” the way you might to a Spanish speaker at a Mexican restaurant (which, unlike the average unmarked restaurant in China, would have traditional Mexican architecture or a Mexican flag to help distinguish it to passersby). The dishes in China were many, strange, and puzzling, and even if you knew the name of a favorite, the locals probably wouldn’t grasp your pronunciation attempts. So what I did was scan the open-door restaurants and street vendors, looking for anything familiar I could recognize and use as a stepping stone to boldly request an order from a stranger in a foreign language. Relying on my very limited vocabulary, I spotted the characters for “beef noodles,” stopped into the four table small restaurant, and said the name of the dish in a very plain sentence with a voice that was quiet but nonetheless clear in pronunciation. They brought me out a big bowl of beef noodles (mostly noodles with a couple tidbits of beef) that cost only one American dollar, and I ended up returning to this same restaurant for the same meal several times.

Some places advertised "California" beef noodles. Most of the beef noodle shops I visited were run by Hui people, a Muslim minority, not the majority Han Chinese.

Some places advertised “California” beef noodles. Most of the beef noodle shops I visited were run by Hui people, a Muslim minority, not the majority Han Chinese.

The other thing: the Chinese, like healthy eating advocates in America, were always stressing the importance of breakfast. As a typical morning greeting, they would ask, “Have you had your breakfast?” Growing up and going through school in America, I heard classmates say countless times that they never ate breakfast. It was a common thing to skip, and people seemed to take pride in nonchalantly boasting that they never ate breakfast. In China, the attitude was the opposite; casually forgetting breakfast would have been a shock. They made sure to be up early to fill up on noodles, fried pastry sticks, potato and egg pancakes, hard-boiled eggs, soup, steamed buns, and congee (rice porridge).

My school's P.E. teacher once got me breakfast when I told him I hadn't eaten. An English teacher, Miss Liu, heard about it and said, "Small Black bought you breakfast!? Small Black is our leader."

My school’s P.E. teacher once got me breakfast when I told him I hadn’t eaten. An English teacher, Miss Liu, heard about it and said, “Small Black bought you breakfast!? Small Black is our leader.”

Lunch was likewise a big meal. The lunch “hour” was around two hours long, so people could enjoy a big meal with family or colleagues and take a mid-day nap. Dinner could be big, but it didn’t have to be. It was usually only a large affair if friends were gathering together at a restaurant or entertaining guests at home.

Perhaps it was all the strange food in China- its unsanitary preparation from farm to street market to kitchen to table- that caused me weekly stomach sickness. I made sure to always boil my water or drink from a water cooler, so I didn’t suspect that. Of course, the ever-present crowds of people and filthy environmental conditions could have been the main culprits or contributors. All the large meals, doused in oil and red chili sauce, and the unwanted glasses of alcohol certainly never allowed my stomach a moment’s peace. The dinners were at times tasty and fun, but no moment in China was ever pure bliss. Every intriguing bite concealed the potential for pain.

The answer to why I got sick so much in China: I never saw any health department grades in any restaurant windows, but I did see places thawing out their squid in a side alley.

The answer to why I got sick so much in China: I never saw any health department grades in any restaurant windows, but I did see places thawing out their squid in a side alley.

The Real China: Bottoms Up! (Part 1)

October 8, 2015 / / 1 Comment

As unappetizing as the food was in China, as dreary and dilapidated was the landscape, I have to say that my spirits were brightened whenever there was a big group dinner. I’ve never had such fun at an American dinner party.

If all the extraneous, all the vanity, is removed from life, the simple pleasure of enjoying a good meal with friends is the only sure form of happiness a man has. (Don’t believe me? Look it up in Ecclesiastes.) China, and much of life, hadn’t turned out to satisfy my expectations. English classes, city life, and new friendships were not playing out according to fantasy. My time was going to pass in China as quickly as it ever had; I was going to feel dejected and trapped in a foul country. That was my lot. But the dinners were something I could depend on to lift up my mood and remind me to be thankful for all the good I did have. They were the best occasions for sociability, and without them I probably would have lost 10 or 15 pounds like the two English teachers in New York had predicted.

Most of my dinners out were hosted by the university or it’s Department of Foreign Affairs. Any holiday or any event (e.g. the foreign teachers’ arrival on campus, the end of the semester), the school would host the other foreign teachers and me for dinner. Besides me, there were Grant and Sue, the retired Australian couple spending their third year in China, and Lee Ahram, the Korean teacher from Seoul. We were all brought in as language specialists of a sort, native speakers who could demonstrate to the pupils how the language they learned rote from chalkboard and textbook was supposed to be spoken by live people.

On our first dinner out together, at the hotel restaurant on campus (hotel restaurants were the best in China, and they are where I had most of my big, round table group dinners), Grant and Sue explained that I should not sit down before anyone else. It was best to follow the hosts’ lead in everything, and in the case of the seating arrangement, each seat was assigned certain prominence and would be allocated by the senior members in the group’s hierarchy.

So I followed behind our Chinese hosts as we walked through the lobby with its cold fish, meats, and vegetables on display in the glass-faced cooler, past the small group of undersized ladies dressed in matching fuchsia uniforms who wished us welcome in unison, up the worn, carpet steps to the second floor, turned right to walk down the narrow corridor, past the pungent odor emitting from the bathrooms- several yards away- and waited for the servants in the hallway to direct us into our room.

Me, in the red, at another dinner with teachers from a different school.

Me, in the red, at another dinner with teachers from a different school. Typical of a dinner out in a private dining room.

Each dining room was private, accessed by a single door from the hallway just like a typical large hotel’s floor plan. The dining rooms had enough space for a dozen or more people, and usually they were furnished with one very large, heavy round table on the far side, and cushioned chairs, couches, a coffee table (should that be called a tea table?), a tall air conditioner unit, a coat hook, and a card table on the near side. It was a large, private space where a party of extended family, friends, or business contacts could camp out for hours and smoke, sip tea, and eat and drink to their stomach’s content. Once the door was shut, a silent serving girl would be the only outside disturbance into the room, and there was often a small window that would slide open to reveal new dishes for her to serve so that she did not need to constantly interrupt the atmosphere by walking in and out.

Compared to America, I preferred the dining service in China. The serving girls never introduced themselves, they didn’t ask me how my first few bites were and how my meal was (“How’s that tastin’ for ya’?” “Can I get those plates attayer way?”), they stood by and waited for the group’s order, served it in silence or maybe announced the name of the dish, then stood aside to let people eat and converse. The only bad part was that in a Chinese restaurant without private rooms, with an open floor plan, or even in a private room if the serving girl were absent, diners who needed something would call out at the top of their voice, “Fuwuyuan!” (“Server!” This word looks like a mess of vowels on paper, like a bad Scrabble tray, and its pronunciation sounded just as sloppy.) The diners shouted like hungry infants, but their voices were the hoarse, throaty calls of men who had been smoking and drinking for decades. There was hardly a moment’s peace in China; a call for service, a merchant’s shout, a grandmother’s shrill minding, the buzz of talking from crowds, roosters’ crowing, car horns, and those terrible large truck and bus air horns that still haunt my memory- but nearly never the chattering of a squirrel, the melody of a song bird, or even the caw of a crow- would interrupt and invade the tranquility of the mind.

Something else to be thankful for in all service industries in China, not only in restaurants: no tipping. I left a couple small bills behind at a sandwich and coffee shop once, and the busboy chased me down outside the door, as I was zipping up my coat, and surprised me by speaking in intelligible English, “You forgot this” and handed me back my tip money. The price on the menu was assumed to include all expenses, including service labor. A tip, even given in generous appreciation for exceptional service, could not be received except at the breach of honor, and could even be taken as an insult that basically said, “Here, you need a little help to improve your business.”

Another time, I went in for my first haircut in China and wordlessly followed along as I was given a head and shoulders massage, a shampoo, and another massage before my haircut (pre-haircut massages were obligatory). Then my haircut. Then there was a final shampoo after the haircut. At least 60 minutes of service split between two hairdressers. Total charge: around six dollars U.S. I tried to insist on a tip. I couldn’t conceive how a business could stay afloat by charging so little, but the head hairdresser (I don’t know if that’s a pun, but I apologize if so) stiffly thrust out his palm and shook his head in adamant refusal. It would have been a serious violation of their code, their honor to dutifully serve, to accept a tip.

My aunt liked taking pictures of me all the time, even while I was getting this haircut.

My aunt liked taking pictures of me all the time, even while I was getting this haircut.

Back to the restaurants, I have to mention the numbers on the private room doors. They weren’t numbered according to floor level or distance left or right from the main stairs (well, they followed these conventions a little). The main determiner for door numbers was luck. I’ll spare a full discussion on Chinese lucky numbers and superstitions, which can be found in bland detail elsewhere, but I will say that the Chinese prefer even numbers, except for four, which is pronounced very similarly to “death” in their language. I read that tall buildings would skip floors four and fourteen in China, which I never actually encountered there, though I thought the rationale would have made a lot more sense than the way most American buildings omit the thirteenth floor. Any Chinese person could tell you, “We don’t like four and fourteen because they sound like ‘to die,’” but it would take an internet search by the common man to figure out the foggy details of why thriteen is unlucky in Western culture, or a Ph.D. in something like folklore or obscure history could explain offhand why that is so. And is it even that unlucky? It’s certainly not offensive like four is in China. If someone gave me thirteen of something, I wouldn’t mind (hey, a baker’s dozen!), but giving a gift of four items in China was considered a serious taboo, tacitly wishing for someone’s death.

Anyway, the room numbers were usually, needlessly, three or four digits long (there were probably never more than twenty or so rooms in a single restaurant), and the deluxe room was always “888” or “8888,” even if the rooms before it were “242” and “240.” This was because everyone loved eight because it meant something like “fortune” in Chinese, or at least it rhymed with a phrase that meant “to make a fortune.” (Note: “eight” in Chinese rhymes with the “to make” part of the phrase, not even the “fortune” part of “to make a fortune.”) I can’t quite explain it, it has something to do with the quality of auspiciousness too, but I know the Chinese mind equated being blessed with having obscene amounts of money and so they loved eight. I never actually got to eat in the 888 room, but it was always full of a lively crowed when I got a peek inside; probably it was always reserved for big occasions.

On the evening of my first big dinner in China, with Grant and Sue, Ahram, the two officials from the university’s Foreign Affairs Office: Miss “Amy” Hu and Mr. “Oliver” Zhang, and some assorted vice presidents from the university, I didn’t even know to check for the door number. My mind was being overwhelmed by all the subtle differences in the foreign surroundings and the shockingly strong bathroom odor wafting down the relatively nice, yet nonetheless dingy hallway. I kept my bearings by following Grant and Sue and listening to their commentary as we waited in the cushioned chairs around the coffee- no, tea- table. The serving girls spent about ten minutes filling the dining table up with about a half-dozen dishes when the senior members of the group, the vice presidents, decided it was time to begin. Sometimes the meats and vegetables would sit for twenty minutes before the meal began; lukewarm and cold meat dishes were common. As the group dined, the serving girls would bring more and more dishes until plates had to be removed, combined, or stacked on top of each other.

This restaurant was unique. A wood-burning stove underneath the table heated the soup in the center. We're all wearing coats because this restaurant, like most buildings, was unheated.

This restaurant was unique. A wood-burning stove underneath the table heated the soup in the center. We’re all wearing coats because this restaurant, like most buildings, was unheated.

Grant and Sue explained that the most prestigious seat was the one furthest away, facing the door. Grant inferred this was because the kings and officials from years past would be able to scan all approaching guests and look out for danger that way. Maybe he was onto something. Anyway, it always seemed like the most important-looking seat if I had to pick one. So the vice presidents on the second tier of the hierarchy insisted that the man with the highest status, the most guanxi (easier if I just write it “gwan-shee,” which means basically face/ social status/ reputation), sit there first. After that, the second-tier group members would fuss and jostle each other over seating arrangements, with guests energetically declining and then reluctantly accepting the honor (sometimes when being shoved into the seat by two of their lower-tiered friends) until the seats were filled up all the way around; the more important or higher status people sitting closer to the prestigious seat at the far side of the table.

I was seated next to Grant, a little past midway on the counterclockwise side of the descending hierarchy. I noticed that this table had an automatic lazy Susan (How classy! How convenient!) with a digital number displayed in front of every seat. I asked Amy Hu, who spoke flawless, refined English in a mixture of educated British and American accents that made her sound dignified and lovely, if not like a movie character from a period piece, why our seats were numbered. She said she thought the numbers corresponded to the seats’ position around the table, which was obvious enough, so I had to deduce my own answer that the numbers served no practical purpose. The serving girls would never call into their headset, “I need another bottle of beer for Seat 6!” They would either hand the person another drink directly, or if they were serving a new dish, they would make space for the platter on the lazy Susan wherever they could find it and let it slowly rotate around for every seat to grab a piece. The seat numbers, like those on the door, I figured, were just another arbitrary status marker to let people know how auspicious there seat was.

So as people remained in their seats and the large variety of dishes slowly made their laps around the table’s circumference, we reached out with our chopsticks to eat a bite directly from the communal dish or gathered a small portion into our small bowls. Almost no one in China had large dinner plates; only small bowls and small plates. Meals were eaten family style and diners gathered a little at a time with their chopsticks. Only in some soups was there a serving spoon, otherwise (prepare yourselves, germ-conscious Americans) people would take food from platters with the chopstick that had just touched their mouths. I read that the proper etiquette was to pass food from the communal plate with the blunt, untouched end of the chopsticks, but I never saw this rule followed. It never bothered me to eat from shared dishes. In fact, it was a relief to be in a culture where people weren’t watching for me to slip up so they could be the one to sound the social alarm and call out, “Double dipper!”

I knew from eating at Japanese, Korean, and Chinese restaurants that each culture used a different style of chopsticks. The Japanese use what I consider the standard: slender, square, or circular sticks of medium length made of wood or ceramic. They feel balanced and proportional in one’s hand. Koreans use thin, flat metal chopsticks that easily slipped and turned sideways in my hand so that I had to frequently reset my grip. They also set the table with a long-handled metal spoon (that I would call an ice cream spoon) instead of the short, deep spoon used by Chinese diners (the white, plastic spoon served with egg drop or miso soup in American Chinese restaurants). Chinese chopsticks were the longest and most difficult for me to wield. Cut three or four inches off the end and you would have the standard Japanese chopsticks. This aside information is redundant to anyone familiar with these cultures, but the difference and the extra length of the Chinese chopsticks puzzled me until I sat down to my first big dinner in China.

From l to r: standard-sized Japanese chopsticks, Korean chopsticks and spoon set, souvenir chopsticks of the larger Chinese size, barbecue tongs.

From l to r: standard-sized Japanese chopsticks, Korean chopsticks and spoon set, souvenir chopsticks of the larger Chinese size, barbecue tongs.

As the dishes rotated around for everyone to select a sample, your choice dish might be an arm’s length away. Keep in mind that these round tables had a large circumference that could fit ten or more people around them, and the lazy Susan would be filling up with rows of plates as the meal went on. To get that chicken leg without standing up and leaning over the table and the dishes in between, you would need an extra-long pair of chopsticks. Hence, Chinese chopsticks. It was like having extremely long, delicate fingers to take pinches of food, one small bowl full at a time.

And those plates would stack up. Because the meal was served family style, ten different mouths might try a little of every dish; a large group could easily finish off more than two dozen plates of food. I was at a wedding where the serving girls filled up the table as everyone watched the ceremony, so by the time my table started eating, the plates had piled up into a mound that was three deep in the middle, with turtle soup, shell and all, on top. The craziest example was when I went with Aunt Fong to meet one of her friends at a restaurant that served coffee and international foods. To the Chinese, Western food is KFC and McDonald’s, so I was used to people telling me no when I asked them if they liked Western food, or saying, “I love Kun-duh-ji” (“Kentucky” or KFC in Chinese). So I was skeptical about the international menu at this restaurant, but I had been griping for months about wanting pizza and Aunt Fong had promised me this place had it.

Sitting on the long couches in our private dining room, with the menu laid out on the long, rectangular tabletop (another Western touch of this café), I watched as Aunt Fong flipped back and forth through the menu’s twenty or so pages (Chinese menus are thick). She said “pizza” at one point and then she was looking at bowls of soup, so I said, “Okay.” A pizza and some soup seemed like enough to feed our party of three. But she continued browsing through the menu, looking at different entrees; I assumed she had changed her mind about the soup and pizza.

After our waitress brought out two large bowls of soup for Aunt Fong and me, followed by two other main dishes, I realized that what I thought were her audible suggestions were actually her selections. She had tabulated a huge order of food, uneatable even with my voracious appetite. I was already full and plates already covered the table when the medium-sized pizza was served. I didn’t have the stomach for it at that point, but I ate a sympathy piece just because Aunt Fong had ordered it just for me and I would have felt bad if a whole pizza went uneaten. The pizza itself was decent for a Chinese restaurant that didn’t specialize in pizza. Even after it was on the table, a few more dishes were brought out. I counted so I would be able to report it to my American friends, and at one point there were eleven dishes on the table, balanced on top of each other and nestled together. For three people. All were main dishes, like a Thai curry chicken and rice; it was not eleven side dishes holding dinner rolls or a small iceberg lettuce salad.

The copious spread for my birthday dinner.

The copious spread for my birthday dinner.

That was not atypical. I don’t know if it was a matter of the host’s prestige or a desire to make sure everyone got fed well, but the amount of food on the table was beyond abundant. Sometimes there were left-overs to take home, but usually the guests brought their appetites and would eat up most everything.

Each restaurant varied what Chinese staple foods it served, though every big restaurant had a menu over a hundred items deep. A small restaurant on a shopping street might specialize in a certain kind of dumpling or noodles, but a hotel restaurant had virtually whatever its guests could think off; they made all kinds of meats and regional favorites.

The drinks, though, were fairly standard. Each restaurant would set the table with a large bottle of Sprite and a Minute Maid orange drink that they don’t sell in the States. Then, for everyone who wasn’t a kid, a student, a person far younger than the median age of the group, or a lady who insisted on tea, there was light beer- possibly– and a clear rice liquor called bai jiu (“by jee-oh”) that translates to “white wine/liquor.” I would usually protest and ask for tea and only tea. By no means had China turned me into a tea connoisseur, but I dreaded having to drink the foul bai jiu and I was desperate for an alternative. Bottled water was not an option and there was no water cooler available to fill up a glass. Being a man, I was expected to have some kind of alcohol, so my only alternative was light beer, which I had only occasionally when the restaurant had bottles in stock and my hosts were passively content to let me drink it. I hated the bai jiu, I thought it should have been taken off the dinner tables and relegated to garages as a solvent to clean lawnmowers with. Then again, Chinese people don’t have private garages, and I didn’t hear or see a single lawnmower throughout China- no one had a yard.

But the men hosting the dinner always insisted I be given a glass of their hard liquor, and they outnumbered me, had way more gwan-shee than me, had the mandate of Chinese society, behaved a lot like boys who were used to bossing people around and getting their way, and they were the ones paying for dinner after all, so they lined up my glass next to all the others, smashed the top of the bai jiu bottle (no openers necessary) and drained a bottle or two, glug-glug-glug, among the row of glasses. Some of the men could drink a bottle or more by themselves in one sitting (maybe that should read, “in one sitting, one passing out, and one falling”). I would try to pull my glass away from the downpour, but they would always insist, “A little!” and continue the stream till my glass was filled far past my comfort zone.

Continued tomorrow in Part 2.

Cheers! with my friend Ma Cao.

Cheers! with my friend Ma Cao.

The Real China: Questions I Could Not Answer

September 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Being an American in China (or just being a white-faced foreigner from an English-speaking country), attracted a lot of attention from the locals. I was one of a very small sample of non-Chinese people in an area of around 3 million people, and after months of living as the only white man in a small university town (small in Chinese terms, as the official count of the county was over 600,000 people), I too became shocked whenever I saw another laowai– foreigner. Most Chinese were too shy to approach me or come out and speak directly to me, but that didn’t prevent them from blurting out “Laowai!” as I walked past or surreptitiously peeking over their shoulder when I was near. I could always tell, while walking on campus, when one girl in a pair had spotted me walking behind them. Their voices would get suspiciously low, and a couple seconds later, her friend would slyly look back at me, and then they’d both giggle.

Occasionally, a few students would find me walking through the campus and ask to take a picture with me (most would just try to sneak a shot with their camera phone), and I would always oblige them with a pose. Other brave souls would walk straight up to me, in the middle of whatever I was doing- shopping, eating, jogging, exercising- and start firing off the frequently asked questions (e.g. “Can you speak Chinese?” “Are you America?”).

Because America has the most dominant popular culture and everyone knew about my homeland from movies and the news, I held a lot of appeal to most of the people I met. Countless times I heard from someone how they had always dreamed of going to America but couldn’t because of the expense. Many young people would stare at me awestruck with an open smile, not saying anything, their imaginations soaring with images of the fabled life they had seen on screen. It was tempting to assume their wonder was due to my presence, but really any foreigner would receive the same reaction as a representative of a far-off land the natives had previously only imagined. A young white man, in China, would have to have a horn growing out of his forehead not to be admired and called handsome. So, the Chinese, especially the younger generation, carried impressions of foreigners that would excite them to speak to me.

On the other hand, there were quite a few tense car rides and dull, uncomfortable moments at the dinner table where I sat in silence with a middle-aged man who either had no interest in American topics or lacked the English to step out and meet me in the middle ground between our cultures. Not to say that I expected my hosts to cater to me. As a guest in their country I did respect that Chinese was the language of the land. Mostly, I tagged along as a silent observer and conversation piece in social situations; getting to speak with a young Chinese man fluent in English, or a female student with exceptional English skills, was a rare treat.

But in most situations, I was not comfortable enough to ask conversational questions in Chinese, and the English questions my hosts felt socially obligated to ask would only underline the awkward gap between us. At a restaurant, it was only polite for my hosts to ask me what I wanted to eat, but I only knew the name of a handful of Chinese dishes. “What would you like to eat?” they would ask, expecting me to select a restaurant, or, if we were at the restaurant, a list of items (typically, a party at a restaurant will select enough items to cover the table with plates, not one entrée per person as is the norm in the US). This question was practically impossible for me to answer since the only restaurant names I knew were KFC and hot pot (not the name of a restaurant but a type of restaurant where meats, vegetables, and noodles are dipped into a broiling pot of spicy soup on your table). For dishes, I would select a certain kind of black mushroom (mu-er or 木耳/ “wood ear”) or I would try and get off the hook by saying, “Uh… chicken?”

I had no idea what was written on any of the menus, so the only way I could choose anything was by pointing at the pictures (if the menu had them) or by walking up front to the display coolers in the restaurant lobby and letting my pointer finger get to work. Living in a foreign country with abstruse written symbols meant almost always having adults choose my food for me when eating out, an experience that humbled me back to childhood.

It could also be frustrating, having to answer “What would you like to eat?” and thinking How should I know? This is your country’s food. You choose.

At the riverside park with Aunt Fong and Uncle Jiang.

At the riverside park with Aunt Fong and Uncle Jiang.

The dinner question I hated most was one of (Aunt Fong’s husband and therefore) “Uncle” Jiang’s favorites. I would reach out with my chopsticks to sample one of the many lukewarm meats from the pile of plates on the table (having so many dishes at one meal meant things often sat around while waiting for the rest to get cooked; I suppose that people had eventually gotten used to and preferred lukewarm platters- but they always drank hot water), and once I put the strange meat in my mouth Mr. Jiang would ask, “Dustin… what is that?”

I stopped chewing. “Beef?” I would venture, desperately hoping I was right. I knew it wasn’t chicken, or at least it looked nothing like chicken as I had seen it before.

“No,” Uncle Jiang spouted with a breathy Chinese accent.

It’s not beef, and it can’t be chicken- oh no- this had better be pork because it sure isn’t fish. “Is it pork?” I asked, stifling my voice from cracking.

“No.”

Oh no, it’s dog. I’m eating dog. That is the only other dark meat.

My throat stiffened. Maybe Uncle Jiang had misunderstood me or confused his vocabulary.

“No, I am wrong,” he said, “It is beef.”

I breathed easier and smiled. “Okay.”

Uncle Jiang played this mystery meat game with me on several occasions, usually following the same routine. I would begrudgingly guess wrong a couple times and then wait to hear from him that he was wrong and it was beef after all. He had no idea how nervous this made me. I never ate dog in China, as far as I know, but I did see it as butchered meat on a few occasions (as a skull with cheek meat or a whole red carcass), and the sight of a hanging, skinless dog was more difficult to see than I was prepared for.

Not very different from the “What restaurant do you like?” question was “What is your favorite tea?” As a tea culture, the Chinese can tell the subtle difference between red, white, green, and black teas and all their subtle varieties. When Americans say they prefer green over oo-long tea at a restaurant or coffee shop, I am skeptical they are faking it. To me, tea comes in two flavors: bitter and sugar-added. Asking someone their favorite kind of tea is a cultural assumption; it seemed a polite inquiry to my hosts but sounded baffling to me. They would bring their tea mugs and thermoses everywhere, and if there was tea in the mug it would be made obvious by the mass of loose green leaves soaking in the water. Tea bags weren’t used in China; the leaves were preserved whole for better appearance, smell, and flavor. The people scrupulously prized the different varieties, reserving the finest- those purchased at any of the abundant specialty tea shops- for gift-giving.

A cup of loose leaf tea. Better to use some kind of filter or leave the leaves in the tea pot, otherwise you have to constantly spit them out when you drink.

A cup of loose leaf tea. Better to use some kind of filter or leave the leaves in the tea pot, otherwise you have to constantly spit the leaves out when you drink.

One student gave me a bag of leaves (not from a tea plant) from her father’s garden that would sweeten a mug, so I added one of these leaves in with a few chrysanthemum blossoms for my morning beverage and started telling people “chrysanthemum” as my default “favorite tea” answer, which confused most of them because they had never heard the English word for, nor could they pronounce, chrysanthemum. This social defense worked for me until a Chinese English professor and tea connoisseur informed me that chrysanthemum is not actually a tea. I was thwarted. To move past this challenge, I would tell all future tea interrogators, “Um, green” and let that sink in with them as I thought to myself: Just give me some hot water. I don’t know anything about tea. Then my host, if I were a house guest, might counter with, “There is only red or black to drink.” Foiled again. Let it not be said that the Chinese are unschooled in the art of verbal ju-jitsu.

There were other categories of questions I struggled to politely dismiss. As the sole, exclusive American in the city, I was looked to as an expert or reservoir of knowledge on my home country. Students interested in graduate school abroad would ask me which schools had the best programs for music education, economics, language learning, or whatever it was they wanted to study. I had to think up ways to softly say, “I have no idea.” More than a few times someone asked me what the name of an American movie was by giving me the Chinese name and an unhelpful description of one detail they remembered about it. Conversely, many times I frustrated the Chinese and my interlocutor would grunt and complain, “Why don’t you know the Chinese name?”

I was expected to be familiar with any American city or state mentioned, which was fine because most Chinese only knew the major cities and tourist sites. The struggle came when they asked me about a specific university. The Ivy League schools are incredibly famous and revered in Chinese schools, and besides these, many students had looked into schools I had never heard of. They asked me how to get into Harvard or wherever it was they had their hopes set on, as if I had any idea or access.

More times than I cared to, I had to answer questions about my favorite NBA team or player, or what NBA team played in my hometown. I had no interest in basketball, which was a shock to them, so I flatly told them I never watched the NBA. Their reply: “But you’re so tall!” It would be like a child meeting an elf from the North Pole, getting a chance to excitedly ask it questions about Christmas, and hearing from the elf that it didn’t work for Santa and its family didn’t even celebrate Christmas. The NBA was the greatest thing in the world to them, and I came from the land of basketball, yet I didn’t share their love. “How could this be?” I’m sure they were thinking, if they ever thought in English. I explained to my Chinese friends that I did love to play basketball as a boy, ironically the only time in my life when I was not above average height.

The long defunct Waterloo Hawks, an NBA team from the city neighboring my hometown.

The long defunct Waterloo Hawks, an NBA team from the city neighboring my hometown.

At the middle school where I taught, the boys loved asking me about computer games. Note that what were called “TV Games” (Nintendo, Playstation, and X-Box) were considered too expensive in China, and almost no one owned them or played them. The students loved playing online games which were either cheap, free, or pirated. Their questions about computer games became so expected that I tried leading them on a few times. “Yes, I love CrossFire. Do you play CrossFire?” Before I told them I wasn’t serious, they were thrilled.

The most popular game among my male students, "CrossFire."

The most popular game among my male students, “CrossFire.”

One line of questioning I found humorous and also embarrassing was when a student would introduce himself and say, “I am from such and such a town. It is famous for pears. Do you know it?” Of course I never knew it, and the idea that foreigners would know of a Chinese town famous for pears made me smile on the inside. Related to this, the question would come up in conversations if I knew of some famous historical figure or Chinese emperor, and I had to plead ignorance. I imagined it must have felt like meeting someone who had never heard the name Thomas Jefferson or only faintly recognized George Washington. In a land where I had to struggle to explain to people who Elvis and the The Beatles were, I was often reminded that my own cultural knowledge or ignorance could be equally strange.

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