After living in Suzhou for four months and visiting places like Hangzhou and Yangzhou, I’ve reached the conclusion that the suffix ‘zhou’ must stand for a town near some significant body of water with a trinket shop occupying no less than 75% of dry land.
Last weekend, my friend Yimen invited me to come along on a visit to Yangzhou to see her high school roommate Qian Hong Juan. We toured some traditional gardens. All Chinese gardens have begun to look more or less the same to me, and I’ve no enthusiasm for them now, though there were some lovely smoky shades of red on the Japanese maples and a sad, pale winter sun setting behind the white tower at Thin West Lake.
On Friday night, we went to a dance with Qian Hong Juan and one of her friends. I, the only waiguoren in sight, made a spectacle of myself by dancing alone for a while unrestrainedly. The Chinese tend to think collectively even on the dance floor. For about half the songs, they all moved in unison to patterns that remained a mystery to me. There was also one hip Chinese guy with spiked hair, a penchant for striking poses stolen from fashion magazines, and a lone glove that hasn't been seen in America since Michael Jackson was at his pre-pedophilia peak in the mid 1980s. And then there was the Karaoke contest for which the dance would break up every few songs, though only one of the contestants could come close to holding a tune. If only I hadn’t lost my voice to a cold and could sing in Chinese, I might have taken that contest.
The food on this outing surely rivaled the worst that I’ve eaten in China, and it’s actually I wonder that I haven’t gotten sick. On our last day in Yangzhou, we ate in a small restaurant that would have earned a sanitation grade F in America. Filth covered the floor, and the owners—a tired-looking couple with no other customers in sight—had the lights shut down to save power and add to the dismal mood of the place on an overcast day. An orange tomcat wandered about at will and hopped up into the frame beneath the table and cried for us to feed him. We obliged and tossed our fish bones onto the floor and watched him greedily tear at the bits of meat that remained. After we finished eating, I saw the woman sitting on a stool outside wiping her child’s behind in broad daylight. This left me wondering if the news had reached her that it is wise to wash one’s hands before handling food. The sight filled me with a nausea that still remains more than a week later.
Though I had no appetite, Qian Hong Juan wanted us to eat some Yangzhou delicacies with her before we returned to the bus station. She bought some goose meat at a street stand that featured long plucked goosenecks fixed to the glass. A man hacked away at the body of a bird and tossed the pieces into a plastic bag for us. Then Qian Hong Juan stopped at another stand and picked up a bag of pig’s head meat. Finally, we took our street food into a small restaurant and ordered a couple of dishes, including one called “ants climbing a tree”—ants cooked up with cellophane noodles and with a sauce that reminded me of the scent of insecticide.
Qian Hong Juan insisted on picking up the tab for everything, even though she’s a cash-starved veterinary graduate student immersed in a thesis project that entails killing large numbers of rabbits for murky reasons and without pay. I appreciated her hospitality, but the culinary combination, along with the memory of the woman wiping the child in the street, was nearly too much for me. I ate very little and had to exert great willpower to refrain from vomiting on the table.
Sometimes I worry that I’m unable to read the cultural signs and commit faux pas in etiquette. But there are also opportunities to indulge freely in behavior that would drive my father into fits of rage were he here to see me. For example, in China, meat is often served with the bones still in place, and it’s perfectly appropriate to spit them out on the table. In this instance, however, I’m sure that restraint was the proper course, for table vomiting is surely frowned upon across cultures.
Last weekend, my friend Yimen invited me to come along on a visit to Yangzhou to see her high school roommate Qian Hong Juan. We toured some traditional gardens. All Chinese gardens have begun to look more or less the same to me, and I’ve no enthusiasm for them now, though there were some lovely smoky shades of red on the Japanese maples and a sad, pale winter sun setting behind the white tower at Thin West Lake.
On Friday night, we went to a dance with Qian Hong Juan and one of her friends. I, the only waiguoren in sight, made a spectacle of myself by dancing alone for a while unrestrainedly. The Chinese tend to think collectively even on the dance floor. For about half the songs, they all moved in unison to patterns that remained a mystery to me. There was also one hip Chinese guy with spiked hair, a penchant for striking poses stolen from fashion magazines, and a lone glove that hasn't been seen in America since Michael Jackson was at his pre-pedophilia peak in the mid 1980s. And then there was the Karaoke contest for which the dance would break up every few songs, though only one of the contestants could come close to holding a tune. If only I hadn’t lost my voice to a cold and could sing in Chinese, I might have taken that contest.
The food on this outing surely rivaled the worst that I’ve eaten in China, and it’s actually I wonder that I haven’t gotten sick. On our last day in Yangzhou, we ate in a small restaurant that would have earned a sanitation grade F in America. Filth covered the floor, and the owners—a tired-looking couple with no other customers in sight—had the lights shut down to save power and add to the dismal mood of the place on an overcast day. An orange tomcat wandered about at will and hopped up into the frame beneath the table and cried for us to feed him. We obliged and tossed our fish bones onto the floor and watched him greedily tear at the bits of meat that remained. After we finished eating, I saw the woman sitting on a stool outside wiping her child’s behind in broad daylight. This left me wondering if the news had reached her that it is wise to wash one’s hands before handling food. The sight filled me with a nausea that still remains more than a week later.
Though I had no appetite, Qian Hong Juan wanted us to eat some Yangzhou delicacies with her before we returned to the bus station. She bought some goose meat at a street stand that featured long plucked goosenecks fixed to the glass. A man hacked away at the body of a bird and tossed the pieces into a plastic bag for us. Then Qian Hong Juan stopped at another stand and picked up a bag of pig’s head meat. Finally, we took our street food into a small restaurant and ordered a couple of dishes, including one called “ants climbing a tree”—ants cooked up with cellophane noodles and with a sauce that reminded me of the scent of insecticide.
Qian Hong Juan insisted on picking up the tab for everything, even though she’s a cash-starved veterinary graduate student immersed in a thesis project that entails killing large numbers of rabbits for murky reasons and without pay. I appreciated her hospitality, but the culinary combination, along with the memory of the woman wiping the child in the street, was nearly too much for me. I ate very little and had to exert great willpower to refrain from vomiting on the table.
Sometimes I worry that I’m unable to read the cultural signs and commit faux pas in etiquette. But there are also opportunities to indulge freely in behavior that would drive my father into fits of rage were he here to see me. For example, in China, meat is often served with the bones still in place, and it’s perfectly appropriate to spit them out on the table. In this instance, however, I’m sure that restraint was the proper course, for table vomiting is surely frowned upon across cultures.
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