Pizza Hut in China

I was in Xi'an during the last few days, and for me personally one of the highlights of visiting a big city is the chance to eat real pizza. One would think eating at Pizza Hut would be a pretty cut and dry experience, but it's actually kind of interesting to see how it differs from going to an American Pizza Hut.

For one thing, it's "classy." The servers are well-dressed, the place looks really nice, and there are no groups of screaming children. Western restaurants are more of a fine-dining experience in China, even the ones that would never be considered as such at home. I'm reminded of a short story I once read by a Chinese author. A boy from a poor family was given some holiday money to spend on necessities, but decided to use it impress his girlfriend and take her out to an extravagant meal--at McDonald's. Awkwardness ensues when it turns out his mom is secretly working at the McDonald's to make some extra money for the family.

Pizza Hut also pretty expensive in comparison to Chinese food, so it caters to China's growing middle class, and a lot of the customers seemed to be working couples on a date. Despite the cost, Chinese spending habits were in full force around us. A nearby couple ordered fruit smoothies, salad, an appetizer, a desert, and a pizza, much more than they intended to eat. The other nearby table ordered drinks, chicken wings, meatballs, and three pizzas. With simply a large pizza to split, Nissa and I were the cheapskates of the place.

But my favorite image of pizza places in China, and unfortunately I don't have a picture (but try searching for "China salad bar" on flickr.com), is the salad bar. You are only allowed one trip, so there is usually one crafty young Chinese person making a salad skyscraper on their plate. By this I mean they load an enormous amount of vegetables on their plate in an attractive pattern that is painstakingly constructed over 10 minutes or more. The dedication and attention to detail is truly inspiring.

And finally, I leave you with this:

Chinese Food: Dumplings 饺子

I love being invited to a Chinese home, because the invitation usually revolves around a home-cooked meal. One of my favorite home-cooked Chinese foods is dumplings, or jiaozi, which are made by wrapping amounts of meat and/or vegetables in little dough wrappings and then boiling them. Wrapping the dumplings is a fun, easy cooking activity that even the most culinary challenged can help out with, but there is a bit of an art to it and mine are inevitably very nankan (ugly). Unlike with most Chinese foods, dumplings can make up a meal by themselves and are usually not accompanied by rice or noodles. Everyone is given a small plate for vinegar and hot sauce in which to dip the dumplings.

The Chinese sense of hospitality is very strong, sometimes even a little overwhelming. When you are a guest in a Chinese home they will attend to your every need and you are unlikely to leave without being utterly stuffed with food. I can even find it a little too aggressive sometimes, such as when the host demands that I "eat! eat!" every time I put down my chopsticks. The above picture is from a recent meal Nissa and I ate with four Chinese friends. The plates of dumplings (the light-colored ones in the middle) were replaced numerous times as they were finished by plates of freshly boiled dumplings prepared by the woman of the home. Gender relations are much more old-fashioned around here, and generally the wife continues to cook while the guests enjoy the meal and the men drink and smoke. There was of course a large amount of food left over after the meal, and the hosts wouldn't have wanted it any other way, or they would feel that they appeared cheap. This also carries over into eating out, and with the exception of casual meals among good friends a Chinese person might order twice the amount of food necessary. A man with a job in business or politics especially might spend a good portion of his salary treating people to dinner. It honestly amazes me that the Chinese are so successful at saving money.

Chinese Food: Sweet and Sour Pork 糖醋里脊 and Home-style Tofu 家常豆腐

A nearly unanimous favorite dish among foreigners in China is sweet and sour pork, known as tangcu liji around here. It goes by other names in other parts of China, probably with variations. It is one of the few dishes in northern China that resembles American Chinese food (though it reminds me more of the "General Tso's chicken" than the "sweet and sour pork" at home), and is also simply delicious. It is a little unusual for a Chinese dish as it is all meat and has a very sweet taste. Most Chinese meat dishes actually have quite a bit of vegetables. And the meat is always in small bite-size chunks because, of course, you must eat it with chopsticks. You never cut anything in a Chinese meal and generally don't eat anything with your hands.

I can't remember ever eating tofu in America, and it definitely never tempted me. It sounded like something you would only eat out of vegetarianism and/or desperation. But the tofu dishes in China are great, so I've come around on eating it. I also never realized the word "tofu" comes from the Chinese word doufu, meaning "bean curd." My favorite is probably the jiachang doufu, or "home-style tofu." It's more solid and has a milder taste compared to other tofu dishes.


Eating out in a restaurant in China is a little different than in a Western country. We often eat at simple and cheap family-run restaurants like the one pictured above. The street in front of our school is full of them. The meal for two pictured above was probably around 15 yuan, or about US$2. Unlike in the West, where everyone orders an individual meal, in China you order for the table. We typically order one dish per person eating, but we might get a little more or less depending on our hunger.

The dishes come out one at a time, whenever they are finished cooking. Because they are stir-fried it only takes about five minutes for the food to start coming out, so there are no appetizers or bread, and salad is rare in China. There is also no dessert. The dishes are all placed in the middle of the table, and everyone at the table shares all the dishes. Everyone has an individual bowl of rice (or sometimes noodles), and grabs some food from one of the dishes with their chopsticks and brings it to their bowl to eat it with the rice. Germ-conscious Westerners are sometimes uneasy with this at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to it and actually prefer it when eating Chinese dishes.

Instead of water, the default drink is tea, which is usually free and served automatically. Soft drinks are usually unavailable and if they are will be unrefrigerated, so I always stick with the tea. Beer (also unrefrigerated) is always available, in extra-large bottles that are meant to be shared.

I like the small, family-owned restaurants. Besides being cheap the food is excellent, and the small staff is usually quite friendly and happy to see you. Nissa and I have learned to cook a small number of Chinese dishes, but it really isn't much cheaper than eating out so it is difficult to work up the motivation to cook for yourself. Many aspects of life in China that were once novelty now seem routine, but eating out is one thing I can always get excited about.

Chinese Food: Beef Noodles 牛肉面

Whenever I am asked "why do you like China?", there are two things I never fail to mention: the people, and the food. I haven't done quite enough traveling to know for certain, but surely China has one of the world's finest cuisines. But "Chinese food" encompasses a huge variety of foods. Each region in China has its own particular cuisine, and even particular cities usually have their own specialties. If I go to a nice restaurant in town, the menu will have dozens or possibly hundreds of dishes, some unique just to that restaurant. Though we undoubtedly have the occasional craving for Western dishes not available in such a remote place, I feel that we are pretty spoiled in the food category in Zhangye. In Shanghai for example, I'm not alone in thinking the Chinese food is at best mediocre, though of course they have the advantage of a fantastic international selection. At any rate, food being as important as it has been in my life in China, I thought I might write a few posts describing some of our favorite dishes, starting with niuroumian, or "beef noodles."

This is a local favorite with students, as it originated in this province (the city of Lanzhou) and is one of the cheapest meals you can get, usually going for around 2.5 yuan (or around 30 cents US). I didn't care for it at first as it is pretty spicy by American standards (note the red hot sauce in the picture), but I got used to it and it eventually grew on me. It's also not particularly filling, consisting mostly of some thin noodles and small scraps of beef in a soup, but it makes a great late lunch. Below is an old video I took at a small beef noodle shop during my first year in China. My friend Andrew and I befriended the owner, so he was happy to oblige my filming of some noodle making. Towards the end he can be heard announcing excitedly, "Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles!"

Beef Noodles and Hot Pot: A Very Chinese Evening

On Tuesday night a man that me and Andrew have befriended invited us to come down to his noodle shop, and I will describe the night to give an idea of a typical evening of hanging out with Andrew and his Chinese friends (who, due to his previously mentioned conversation skills and friendliness, are numerous). We started off with a couple of bowls of Beef Noodles, the specialty of his and many other small noodle shops. Beef Noodles originally come from the capital of this province, so our students are proud of them and easily excited by their mere mention. Andrew had the idea of us watching him make the noodles and taking pictures and video of the process with my camera, which more than pleased him. When asked if that would be ok, he loudly said something very similar to "Of course you can take pictures! I am very happy!" I've always wanted to get a better view of the noodle-making, and it turned out to be picture-worthy in all its noodle-wacking and cauldron-bubbling glory.

After cleaning up (I decided against documenting the dish "washing" process) with his wife, he took us out for a second meal further down the road. His mother-in-law also came, a jovial and meddling woman who I found amusing. She spent much of the evening trying to talk us into letting her fix us up with a wife or two, possibly her unmarried daughter. Despite our protests and excuses, our friend (who I'll call Little Liu, as in the Chinese habit of putting xiao, little, in front of a friend's surname) insisted on taking us for hot pot. However, it was a simple place with a hot plate for every table and not the usual two-hour extravaganza in a fancy restaurant. The owner of the place, who had a used-car salesman cheesyness I kind of liked, was delighted to see two foreign and Chinese-speaking customers. He soon requested a picture with us, and jetted off to borrow a camera. He presented us with a plate of fruit (gifts are not unusual, but in all cases previous have been something I don't want), and tried very hard to treat us to some beers with him. But it was a school night, and we are, of course, responsible teachers.

After saying goodbye to our Chinese friends Andrew suggested a quick stop for naicha, "milk tea", at a place we like in front of the school. I had been fairly quiet during the evening, because Andrew's Chinese ability is well ahead of mine and I think and speak too slowly even when I do understand the conversation, and liked the idea of ending things in English. It's actually Andrew who usually carries the Chinese conversations, and there are few pauses. This didn't last long, however, as a man who was obviously drinking with his friends got wind of Andrew's Chinese, and was especially amused by a few words of Zhangyehua (Zhangye dialect) we could muster. He invited himself to sit down with us, and this time we didn't get out of drinking, as he had bottles ordered and glasses poured before we had time to protest. We insisted on leaving after just a few glasses (and mind you, in China they drink beer out of shot glasses), but he managed to exchange numbers with Andrew and promise to invite him out to eat sometime. Luckily he didn't take to me, mostly asking me what I was thinking about so quietly and why I insisted on saying things to Andrew in English. In those four hours, me and Andrew paid exactly 4 yuan, for the milk tea, which is the equivalent of 50 cents US. On the walk back home, Andrew complained about the hassle of having given this stranger his telephone number. And then we thought about that for a second, and marvelled at having a life in which the big annoyance of the day was agreeing to being taken out for a free meal.

A Night at the (Chinese) Opera

I just had my first viewing of Chinese Opera, which seems to get mixed reviews from foreigners and young Chinese. I went with Danielle and Stephen, the two Peace Corps volunteers, and we weren't quite sure if we'd enjoy it or stay the whole time. Obviously, we weren't going to understand anything that was going on, and Chinese Opera is notorious for its high-pitched, grating style of singing.

We arrived at the music hall no more than 10 minutes before the performance started, which meant there were no seats left and there were many students standing in the aisles. So we were prepared to stand quietly in the back for the opera, but the school would of course be having none of that. A man apparently in charge of seating arrangements immediately spotted us and ushered us right up to the front row, into a set of empty seats that were obviously reserved and were equipped with programs and water bottles. In fact the front row was clearly marked with a sign that read "Seats for Leaders", and thus we spent the duration of the performance next to humorless Communist Party leaders in suits.

As it turned out, the performance was a lot of fun to watch. The singing was tolerable and the accompanying live music was genuinely enjoyable, and watching the performance was still entertaining even when understanding every 20th word or so. Besides the singing and music there was a lot of choreography with impressive acrobatic moves, comedy of some sort, and a fight with a fire-wielding demon. At the end there was an act of modern opera, which involved the same style of music but with drab People's Liberation Army uniforms replacing the colorful costumes of classical opera. At several points during the opera an old man with a cane behind me, who was by my guess 112 years old, tried to give me explanations in English about what was going on. The best of these was when he tried to explain a character who he said was like Venus, and having some kind of affair with humankind, ending simply with the words "make love!" and chuckling softly to himself.

For no other reason than our being foreign, relatively friendly, and unmarried, rumors seem to be flying about me and Danielle. An old guard at one of the school gates who loves to talk to us despite the difficulties of doing so (I've discovered a strong relationship between how friendly someone is and how thick their Zhangye accent is) beckoned me and Danielle into his security room this afternoon after we returned to school together because we ran into each other on the street. I watched him flip through a book with English phrases and then close it quickly, after which he spewed out some sounds at me that, I take it, were a form of language. I had a guess at what he was saying from his gestures and what I thought he was asking me earlier that day, and he shook his head "yes" when I said "are you asking if we're married?". We get a kick out of this, and it's tempting to play with our students' minds.

For this week's lesson, I was definitely playing to my audience. Food being one of the prime obsessions of Chinese people, our in-class "reading" was English recipes. I then had them write out recipes for food they knew how to cook in English, which I think was genuinely good in that it required giving specific directions, involved new vocabulary, and got them motivated, but it certainly didn't hurt that in the end I now have a large collection of Chinese recipes written in English. Have I mentioned that I really like my job?

Ping Pong and Paper, Rock, Scissors

Had a very decent weekend, and the most Chinese so far. On Friday me and four of the other foreign teachers (Andrew, Mohammed, Cynthia, and Gary) met for dinner and had some good conversation, mostly at the expense of our students. The main dish was a local favorite that would translate literally as "big plate of chicken", which is exactly what it was. I was excited to find not only the chicken's claws but the head within the mess; the Chinese are not a people to waste anything. I tried my best to eat the claw, but there wasn't too much meat and it was a little disturbing anyway. We took turns playing with the chicken parts and taking pictures, which I thought might be a little rude until I remembered just how much we are stared at and generally made a spectacle of. Towards the end of the meal we were all shocked into silence as we watched an unknown foreigner walk into the restaurant, an older man and the only non-teacher I have seen so far. It was our turn to stare at the foreigner, who pretended not to see us and sat far away. Like proper Chinese spectators, we all wanted to know where he was from and why he was here but no one wanted to ask.

On Saturday I went down to Xiao Ma's guitar shop again, this time with Gary, the Canadian foreign teacher who's been in China 14 years and knows Xiao Ma. My friend Wang Ya Mo, the primary school teacher and "translator" between me and Xiao Ma was there again as well, although Gary sometimes had to actually translate between me and her. As always there were a lot of students hanging out there, and I ended up performing "Hey Jude" against my will twice, the first time with Gary at least. Two high school girls kept giving requests and were mystified that I didn't know anything by Shakira, Mariah Carey, or China's all-time favorite Western pop group, The Carpenters. Xiao Ma's girlfriend cooked dinner for about 10 of us in the back room (this is where the picture above is from), a spectacular meal with 13 dishes besides the rice. The Chinese often play games during dinner, and this time it was rock, paper, scissors. I'm not sure how our hosts were able to destroy us at a game that doesn't involve skill, but they did. It's easy to get the impression that the Chinese don't have as much fun as us because they work long hours and don't do much of what I think of as "entertainment" (movies, bars, rock shows etc.), but I'm starting to notice how much they enjoy each other's company. I can only picture a group of Westerners getting that excited about rock, paper, scissors if they hadn't seen each other in 8 years or were on drugs, which I think is a compliment to the Chinese. During some of the rounds the losers had to sing a song, which few Chinese have any reservations about. Me and Gary, on the other hand, were struggling to think of something when we lost, and of all the songs we knew we ended up singing a rousing rendition of "Oh My Darlin' Clemetine" (not my pick). On the walk home (at about 11pm, after about 7 hours at the shop) there was a man from Xinjiang Autonomous Region (the large, Muslim, northwestern-most part of China) out in front of his restaurant playing a Xinjiang two-stringed sitar-like instrument. He was happy to sing us a few traditional songs, and seeing my guitar, let me play the instrument for a minute, which made for a memorable end to the night.

On Sunday I socialized only with Chinese people for the first time. I spent the morning and early afternoon with Wang Ya Mo, who called me at 9:30am to invite me to fly kites in the city square, which is such a wonderfully innocent thing for one 22-year old to ask another that I couldn't possibly say no. Her "little brother" (cousin) was there flying his kite, but I don't think he said a word, certainly not to me. Ya Mo's kite was broken as it turned out, so I bought one and made pitiful attempts at getting it to fly in the slight wind. Going back to what I said about the Chinese enjoying each other's company, I was amused to see a middle-aged couple in the square sharing one jump-rope and obviously having a blast. Of all the things to be going on in Zhangye there was what looked like a small pop concert going on on the other side of the square, so we went to investigate. A crowd of mostly straight-faced middle-aged men in suits was watching a girl singing on a stage that was set up, with a giant pink banner behind her and suspicious-looking pink umbrellas set up all around. At the end of each song, there was an eerie silence, and I didn't know whether to take that as a sign that they hated the music or pop concerts are so new that they didn't know they were supposed to clap. Ya Mo explained to me what the elaborate set-up was for: to advertise a brand of milk. The People's Republic your parents knew and feared is gone indeed.

Once the entertainment potential of flying a kite with someone you have trouble communicating with was exhausted, we wandered around town for a bit, highlighted by the sight of two ridiculous costumed cartoon characters walking around to advertise something or other. Ya Mo invited me to have lunch with her mother in her apartment, my first invite into a Chinese home. I think her mother was a bit surprised to see me, and the first thing she said was "I don't speak English" in Chinese, as if I were accustomed to English speakers in Zhangye and this would come as a shock. Lunch was quite good and more than adequate, as can be expected. I will not be cooking for any Chinese until I become a master chef, which is not in my foreseeable future. Typically when I eat with Chinese people they will eat little while insisting I have more and more, which I don't object to but feels a little strange to my Western concepts of politeness. After lunch Ya Mo played some music for me that she likes on the computer. The Chinese love their sentimental music (meaning, all of it) to come with slow video montages of mountains and river valleys, and the traditional-style music was pretty good if you ignored the "fashionable" drum samples and guitar riffs layered on top of it. She wants to work on her English and I am obviously in need of learning more Chinese, so I'm glad that we will "make good friends".

Even earlier than Wang Ya Mo, a few of my students had called me in the morning to see if I wanted to play badminton in the gym with them. They suggested 3:30 for a time, and said they would call again at 3. At precisely 3:00 my phone rang, and it was "Sonya", one of my students. She had obviously been running and was completely out of breath, and wanted to know if I wanted to meet with her and her friends. I said sure and wanted to know when to meet, so she replied "oh, right now. I am waiting for you outside of your building". I had only just gotten home and intended to relax for 10 minutes, but instead had to rush out the door to meet my students. She was in fact not standing outside of my building, and I correctly guessed she thought I lived in the same building as Andrew and some of the other teachers. She was still out of breath when I found her, and we met some of her classmates and went to the gym.

For the next hour or so I faced an unending series of my students on a ping-pong table, a match-up I have long awaited. They were almost all better than me but not by too much, which made for some good matches, though the only person interested in keeping score was a very serious and very random man who took over for 10 minutes and was definitely not my student. I finally quit the ping-pong for the basketball court, where a pick-up game was started and I realized how woefully out of shape I am. However, on this side of the world I am definitely a better basketball player than at home. The gym also had badminton, which I tried briefly, and Chinese chess, which I did not.

After exhausting myself, the students invited me to eat at the canteen with them, and refused to let me pay for my meal. I hadn't been there before, and the large cafeteria atmosphere won't be drawing me back too often. After this I invited the three students who were left, some of my most outgoing and talented at English, to see my apartment. Or rather, they invited themselves, but I was happy to accomodate. They thought it was too big and lonely, and not homely enough for their tastes. I was told by "Vivien" that when she heard they would have a new American teacher this term, she thought I would wear very fashionable clothes. Obviously, I am a poor representative of my country in that department. I was also asked why I don't dress "very open" like the American pop stars they see on TV, and they are convinced that most Americans must be completely different than me. They played me music they like, typical Chinese pop which I tactfully described as "not my style", and I was surprised when they took to the Pavement and Morrissey I played for them, and more surprised when they claimed to know Chinese singers who sounded similar. I will likely spend more time with students in the future, which should be interesting, or at the very least sharpen my ping-pong skills.