Don't Trust a Fart

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Chinese food, appallingly familiar to most Americans, is a very different beast in its home country. Learning how to order food was always the slowest of my grudgingly accelerating language skills when I was in Beijing, mainly because all the restaurants we went to had pictures on the menu. Since I've been back, I've been trying to learn the names of some of my favorite common foods. Eggplant here is amazingly delicious, perhaps because anything would be delicious if it were soaked in gratuitous amount of oil before serving. I always thought bacon made everything a better dish, so lucky for me that about every cut of meat here is basically the "bacon" of whatever animal it's been extracted from. They also know what to do with cucumber: douse it in vinegar and hot peppers. And don't even mention the tofu; although no vegetarian could ever survive at a Chinese restaurant, since practically every dish has pork sneaked into it somehow, Chinese people have a knack for making tofu taste like something other than its usual American flavor of used dryer sheets.

Unfortunately, most dishes are not called by any combination of the names of their ingredients. When I go to a restaurant, I tend to point blindly, and write down the names of the 80% of the dishes I find appetizing in my notebook. Since I can't really read Chinese characters, I then take the names home and translate. They tend to be things like, "Village Traditional Flavor Pork Liver," or "Three Treasures of the Earth," or something as vague as "Fresh Meat and Vegetable Dumpling." So eating out is kind of like playing Russian roulette with your colon.

No matter how diligent foreigners are here with their eating habits, one inevitably gets a case of the "la duzi," or "spicy stomach." Perhaps it is the oily consistency of most food here; perhaps it is the unfamiliar bacteria; perhaps it is the lack of restaurant hygiene (although judging from my restaurant jobs at home, most American eateries aren't much cleaner). In any case, my boss Freddy gave me and my roommate some useful advice for those brief moments we're not sitting on (or squatting over) the porcelain: don't trust a fart. And here in China, I seldom do.

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Comments

[lunchbox]

Augh!
We called it Spicy Anus in Korea...must be a mistranslation.