Chinese Food / Zhōngguó cài / 中国菜

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There are three cafeterias at my university, at one of which you don't need to know Chinese and can just point. The food is pretty good as far as my non-Chinese tongue can tell, though the students understandably have higher standards than I do and complain that it's bland. The one where you can point has the same stuff everyday, but the other two have a huge selection, and I've slowly learned enough names of dishes (I write them down on a list I carry around) that I'm no longer dependent on a Chinese person to take me there and order for me.

There's also this gritty, cramped alley across the street from the campus known as Xiǎo Chī Jiē (literally "Little Eat Street"), an endless row of hole-in-the-wall restaurants, street food cooks, produce vendors, and bubble milk tea joints, as well as a few barber shops and electronics accessories shops. I took pride in having been eating the street food there since my first day (Neal took me for a breakfast of soup-filled dumplings and a white beverage in a plastic cup to be imbibed through a straw, which I assumed would be milk or at least milk-based and cold or at least cool, but which turned out to be not even a beverage but a warm, chicken soup type of thing -- a huge shock when your expectations are so different) yet not getting the "inevitable" traveler's digestive afflictions...until two weeks ago when I was out badly for 48 hours, afraid I'd be quarantined with H1N1, with what I now think was food poisoning. Still, there's no telling what it came from, and Xiǎo Chī Jiē is a culinary delight. Well, I shouldn't go that far...I'm sure I'll miss many Chinese dishes once I've been home from China for a while, but I don't see the cuisine as a whole ever reaching that elite tier of Italian, Japanese, pizza, and ice cream.

I definitely ate more rice in my first month here than I had in my entire life prior. I'm amazed how many people have asked whether I can use chopsticks or been surprised when they see that I can (though the most exceptionally perceptive, or perhaps anal, look closely and remark the opposite, since according to some I don't use technically perfect form); I always explain that there's lots of Chinese food all over the world, and that I and most people I know have been Asian food, with chopsticks, since we were babies! Most of the people I've met here have used a fork only on rare occasions.

As for missing other foods, there's still plenty of time left for the withdrawal symptoms to kick in, but I think the cold, hard reality that I will not be anywhere near a New York pizza or deli sandwich or Chipotle burrito for a very long time has kept me from missing and craving them too badly. One of the most popular expat hangouts is an Italian restaurant called Monkey King, which does not have the greatest Italian food (I'm spoiled), but it's still something, and the owner, a Jordanian guy who the JPU teachers are close with (we've played poker a few times after the restaurant closes), just opened a Middle Eastern restaurant, Arabian Nights. I got to go to the grand opening, where there was a buffet sampling of the chef's repertoire, and it was the best meal I've had in China.

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Comments

[Jessie]

Ben, to be fair, you also never had complaints about ACDC... :) But some of these pictures look really yummy.