Food

I haven't eaten any dog yet, as far as I know. Or cat, or donkey. I have not had any cream cheese wantons, though I did have wanton soup the other day. There seems to be a lot of rice, and people talk about eating it, but I feel like I never actually see people eating it. Whenever I go out to someone's house or to a restaurant, they don't have rice, unless they order it for us Westerners because they know it's a food we can handle. Noodles are around sometimes, but not all that often. A lot of people don't know what sandwiches are.

So, you may very well be asking, what does one eat in Southern China? Meat, and vegetables, is the short answer.

There is meat in absolutely everything. It's a vegetarian's worst nightmare. If you order something like "green breans," it will come out with bits of pork in it, or the other day we had "bitter melon," which was accompanied by tiny fish, all their normal features intact and ready for eating. Everything either has meat in it, or was cooked in a meat broth. At any nice meal there will be a few meat dishes. There's a lot of pork, and beef, chicken, and fish are also common. You can get all kinds of really weird meats too, if you want them. At the markets they have freshly slaughtered animals, and will sell you any part, be it head or heart or foot. Chicken feet are really big here. If you buy fish, you pick a live fish out of a tank and the seller will chop it up in front of you. It's unnerving to see the gills still moving after the head's been chopped off, as the seller weighs it. Also, people love bones in their meat. They think the best meat is around the bone, and they don't cut the meat away from the bone, so sometime you will order chicken and get a whole cooked chicken, complete with head and feet. People will just put a whole piece of meat in their mouth, chew away the meat, and then spit the bone onto a plate. I haven't quite mastered this. Unfortunately, it's rude to touch your food with your hands, making the eating of meat all the more difficult.

Most fancier meals will involve a few meat dishes and some vegetable dishes. Green beans, boiled Bok Choy, celery, and brocolli are all pretty common. Fruit is also normal at the end of a meal, and sometimes some kind of roll. Then there will be some strange dishes in every meal that are hard to classify. Like sugar-coated corn and pea and nuts (which I have become really fond of), soups that don't really have anything in them, and some things with eggs. Rice is seen as a filler: if you are not full at the end of the meal, you order rice to fill up. A meal is always "family style" - they just bring out large plates of food, staggered and in some particular order that they seem to understand, and everything is set on a big Lazy Susan, or just in the middle of the table. The only things you get to eat with are the plate where you can only put bones and junk that you won't eat, a little bowl that you can throw some food in, a large spoon, and chopsticks. So, you must pick a very small amount of something up with your chopsticks, and throw it in your bowl, or just eat it directly. That same bowl is used for every dish, and everyone's chopsticks touch everything. There is always way more food than anyone could feasibly think they could finish. A lot of food gets wasted, and that's just seen as normal. Apparently they never got the "there are children starving in China" line when they were kids. The standard drink is, of course, tea.

The good news about all the weird food is that no one really cares if you don't like something. I don't have to try chicken feet if I don't want to. And, it is really fun to try all the random dishes. You never really have the same thing twice; every restaurant makes way different stuff. I haven't tried anything too appalling yet, but there's still a lot of time.

On a less interesting topic, as far as cooking for myself goes, I am becoming an excellent steamer. You can steam just about anything, it turns out. Rice, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dumplings can all be easily steamed and come out really tasty. I don't experiment with meat too much, but steamed rice mixed with some kind of vegetable and soy sauce, maybe some fruit on the side, is my staple lunch. All fruit and vegetables are super cheap and easy to get. I also steam a lot of freshly made dumplings, which are utterly delicious, and make eggs in various ways. A Chinese friend taught me how to make fried rice, which I make all the time and am becoming a little addicted to. The only other thing I make consistently is grilled cheese, and it is always delicious.

So, in sum, there is a lot to be eaten in China, some of it is weird, and a lot of it is really good.