Shang High Life, #10

* * * Thanks to everyone for the flood of support you extended in response to SHL#9, about my friend, Chris. As several of you guessed, I wasn’t looking for comfort so much as for a place to grieve. I got both, and I’m very grateful. This mailing list is my community as much as any of the places I’ve lived---perhaps more, since it bridges them all---and I feel very lucky. My place to grieve may be a computer screen, and the strands of the net into which I fall may be distributed across continents, but I feel very loved, indeed. Thank you, again. * * * Shang High Life, #10 December 1, 2001 ________Eat first, ask questions later________ The bowl is set down, some kind of fluid mystery spilling over its rim. It is made of Chinese porcelain, and big enough to qualify in the urn division of the Bowl Olympics. This is the bowl after which American college football games were named. There are wading pools smaller than this bowl. I sit at a bachelor’s table for one. I can only see into the bowl when the waitress lowers it below my eye level. Across the top, covering whatever other contents like a quilt, are bisected chili peppers about the size of walnuts. It is a field of the Devil’s tulips floating like jammed bumper boats on a pond of obscenely red-orange chili oil. “Feess!” the waitress effuses. A mighty smile. The self-conscious, proud presentation is familiar. I get it a lot. It means, “We hope you’re impressed with what we chose for you.” Impressed or not, my reaction is practiced and sincere. “Xie xie. Duo xie.” It is thanks so sincere, in Chinese, that it is almost a prayer. Anything that shows up looking unlike some animal’s genitals is a relief. There are three kinds of restaurants in Shanghai. First are the restaurants meant for White Boy. These are fascinating recreations of other places. They seem almost to scream, “You are not in Shanghai! Ignore the city outside the window! And, if possible, consider it a fluke that the entire staff is Chinese. Notice, instead, how cute they look all dressed up like gondoliers.” Sometimes, in White Boy restaurants, there’s hardly a written Chinese character to be found. You can order a Foster’s or a Budweiser or a Heineken in your broadest Strine or Good ‘Ole Boy, and you’ll probably get something in the beer category. You are meant to feel at home. Not here, of course, but at HOME. The second type of restaurant we’ll call “the opportunist.” This is not a restaurant set up with White Boy in mind but, hey, if he happens to stumble in, they’re gonna be ready to grab his hunger-inspired largesse. The menus vary dramatically, from local fare to all manner of foreign foods. That comment, alone, should tip you off that these aren’t spots frequented exclusively by locals. White Boy knows the menus vary because he can read them. That makes a restaurant an opportunist: it has attempted to translate its menu for White Boy---or provide an album of snapshots of the popular dishes---just in case he comes in. They don’t rely on you for their livelihood, but they know what to do with you if you show up. The third type of restaurant is, as you’ll have surmised, the truly local eatery. These are the spots, most numerous by far, high-class and low-brow alike, that at first appear not to give a hoot about White Boy. No English menu. No English-speaking wait staff. Walking into one of these places in most countries, you’d get the feeling you weren’t supposed to be there, and that you weren’t particularly welcome. In Shanghai, however, people are so gracious and friendly, they act as though it’s their fault they aren’t prepared for your linguistic limitations. The waiters and waitresses are actually embarrassed not to be able to serve you better. I am in a local joint. There is no English menu. I am being served dangerous-looking food. The wait staff is fawning over me, trying desperately to communicate, extending long, slow, smiling sentences and making hand gestures intended, from what I can tell, to convey various foodstuffs. All I perceive, however, is this young woman performing a petroglyphic hula kind of like “itsy bitsy spider” on acid, as she says the same few phrases over and over again. I don’t understand a word, of course. My travails with the Chinese language will have to be left to another missive. You may surmise, however, that I ain’t doin’ so good. At least, with Chinese, I have the excuse of its widespread reputation as a bitch to learn, a face-saving luxury I didn’t have when I did a complete linguistic pratfall over Spanish. So, I cannot yet converse with waiters, and reading menus is, I’m afraid, years away. (“Don’t worry,” a White Boy friend, fluent in Mandarin, reassured me, “you only need a couple thousand characters to read a newspaper.”) Of the many worthy adventures in this life, one has got to be going into a Chinese restaurant, in China, randomly pointing at items on the menu, and seeing what emerges from the kitchen. It is a matter of honour---both yours and that of the restaurateur---that you be prepared to eat whatever arrives. In all seriousness, if a local joint isn’t frequented by foreigners, it is quite likely a big deal to the proprietor that you’re there. You will probably be seated at a window-side table, so people on the street can see that a westerner is dining at the establishment. You don’t have to make a big deal of being there. You *are* a big deal being there. Your failure to eat the food would likely be a loss of face for the host. . .not to mention making your fellow big-noses look bad by association. (Yes, that is the translated local slang for Westerners: “big noses.”) Random pointing is but one approach to ordering in the local eatery. You can also put yourself wholly in the hands of the waiters. The easy-to-smile, easy-to-embarrass Shanghainese waiters are quite likely to think this the strangest thing that has ever happened to them. And it may well be. Up until not long ago, Shanghai was a boring, tightly controlled, grey town with few foreigners. Now, here you are, in their restaurant, gesticulating madly that you haven’t a clue and you’d like them to choose for you. Comparatively, you’re rich and worldly. Yet, you’re completely in their hands. In my experience, they relish the challenge and, over their initial embarrassment, do their damndest to impress your socks off with the yummiest stuff on the menu. . . .even if the yummiest stuff on the menu is boiled frogs. (Been there. Done that.) The thing is, it might not matter all that much whether you go for random pointing or for trusting your waitress. You may end up with a plate full of I-have-no-fucking-idea-what-that-is. There are people in the world who can’t decide whether or not they like a dish without knowing what’s in it. China is their hell. Much of the potential for befuddlement is simply a matter of language. The language of food is famously complex. Plenty of fancy restaurants have menus supposedly written in English but requiring culino-linguistic anthropologists to decipher. In Chinese, however, the problems of figuring out what you’re eating multiply geometrically. First off, there’s the stuff that you’ve never thought was food, but gets eaten plenty, here. Snake entrails come to mind. Then, there’s stuff that you wouldn’t know what it was even if someone gave you the English name for it. And, of course, there’s all the stuff for which there is no English name. The problem doesn’t stop with translation, however. Chinese cuisine, like all the great cuisines of the world, has a language of its own that adds another layer of mystery on top of complex Chinese vocabulary. It stir fries food and culture in the great wok of Chinese culinary history, and delivers dishes with names that sound more like poetry than like labels for dinner. I asked a bi-lingual colleague, one evening, what I was eating. Turns out I had a plate of “Monk jumps over the wall as two virgins dance in moonlight”. It tasted sort of like chicken. This evening, I am not bothered that the bowl my waitress sets down looks like the wading pool of the damned. It doesn’t deter me that it is, like a Bond girl, beautiful but perhaps deadly. I am simply pleased that the mystery of what I’m about to eat is so easily decrypted. I know what’s in there, ‘cause I saw it flopping about ten minutes ago. And I heard it thrown against the ceramic tile floor of the kitchen about nine minutes ago, to be stunned on its way to the pot. Feess. Indeed. Sichuan style. * * * A fun note about my last few weeks. I got a call from a friend at Natural HealthLink, my previous company. They have launched a bunch of the products I was working on when I was there. He walked me through them, and they look hot! Indeed, they’ve changed mightily since I left and are so much better for it. I felt, again, after several months away, a small part of the magic that place generates. Nice when your past haunts you in such a great way.