Relationships to food

This morning, I stopped by the new postdoc's office to offer some settling-in support. He just arrived from Germany, where he got his Ph. D., although he's Spanish. His wife is here in the chemistry department, so he wanted to come here, and my advisor is old friends with his advisor. I mentioned not bothering to eat American food, and he said they'd already reached that conclusion and are eating at home, just like me. I recently saw dealing with American food likened to shellshock. That's probably not far off the mark. It's definetly a shock when you first come here/come back here. It's almost like a caricature, with mountains of food served on serving-platter-sized plates and half of the menu fried. Supermarkets are huge, like the Americans themselves, and carry meter after shelf meter of processed and frozen food. You actually have to find the fresh foods among them. Then your eyes glaze over, and you only see the fruit and vegetable, bread, meat and dairy sections and consider the shelves between them transport stretches. But every so often, something happens to revive the original shock, like eating out at a restaurant and being faced with so much food that eating feels like a chore or you plain lose your appetite. Sometimes I feel like a child in a world where everything is adult-sized, because living here is like being a child again, where everything is too big for you, and you need special kid-sized versions of everything. Except I'm not going to 'grow up' and find everything sized just right this time. Whoever said that Chinese are obsessed with fresh food must have been an American, because I've never seen a country so uninterested in fresh food. (I thought Chinese supermarkets carry a lot of preserved and frozen food.)

I didn't have leftovers to bring for lunch today, and I forgot about it until this morning. After missing two buses, I was so hungry I went out to eat, albeit grudgingly, because I'm tired of American junk food and didn't want to pay a lot of money for something I don't like. I walked another route than I usually do, and walked past a Chinese restaurant called 萬家香, I guess roughly translated into English as 'The fragrance of ten thousand home kitchens', and had a look at the menu. I saw 黑椒牛肉 (black pepper beef), which I have been looking for here but haven't seen yet. I didn't see 魚香茄字 (I've seen it translated as fragrant eggplant, but the literal translation is fish-smelling eggplant - fish-smelling sauce doesn't really smell like fish to me, but it's one of those common fixed-recipe sauces you can put on all kinds of things), which is one of my favorite dishes, but I figured they can probably make it whether it's on the menu or not. It was in a small, unassuming strip-mall-like set of storefronts - the American version of a hole in the wall. So I went in and ordered black pepper beef. I got the usual compliments on my Chinese, and the usual "You speak like a Beijing person!" comment. (I add 兒 (like an American 'r') to many words that don't have them in pure putonghua (gong1 yuar2 公元兒 instead of gong1 yuan2 公元, mer 門兒 instead of men 門), and use forms of words that are Beijing dialect like zhar4 這兒 and nar3 哪兒 instead of zhe4 這 and na3 哪) I asked if there was tea, and there was. As I sat down, I noticed I was the only Westerner in the restaurant. And then I felt at home.

I got free soup and my food was called out in Chinese, not English. It was a distant proximity. America and China were mixed. It was an American hole in the wall where I was the 外国人 wai4guo2ren2 (foreigner - but its reference point in Chinese is always China for me, whereas in English it's not so clear, even though 'foreigner' in English has taken on some of the connotation of the Chinese word for me). Free soup for Chinese skills, and only the real foreigner - who walked in later - got their food called in English.

I realized while eating my food that a 外国人 is exactly what I was there. Not American, not Swedish, not European. My Chinese tells people I'm from Beijing, not where the genes for my pale face and tall height came from. I've thought about this in China as well. I broadcast my third-cultureness in being a foreigner who speaks putonghua with a Beijing accent. Everyone knows I'm not like them, but I'm not like other foreigners either. It's a very comfortable place to be.