Travel, Relationships, and The New Twenty

With Ethan’s “ordering” Chinese steadily improving and a rash of new restaurant discoveries here in Qingdao, the outlook for eating out gets better by the day. But we’ve already had some absolutely unforgettable experiences with Chinese food. Although these have included adventures like being led back into a tiny, filthy kitchen to see the dubious options firsthand before we ordered, the real goal of this post is to make you jealous. So here they are, Lacey and Ethan’s top five meals so far in China.

5. Sightseeing in Xi’an is exhausting, and after a couple days of trying to wrap our minds around thousands of Terracotta warriors and endless kilometers of ancient city walls, we needed to sit down to a serious meal without having to think too hard about it. But when your speaking and comprehension are limited and your reading and writing hopelessly out of practice, this is a lot harder than it sounds. Raise the curtain on Wuyi Restaurant, a crowded local favorite where dozens upon dozens of classic northern Chinese dishes are heaped in hot pots behind a counter that runs the entire length of the restaurant. To order, we just had to walk up with our trays, point and pay. The atmosphere was high school cafeteria, but the food was just what we needed.

What we ate: Fried dumplings, beef with green onions, fried noodles, ‘vegetarian’ dumplings, and rice.

Ethan’s favorite: Without question, the fried jiaozi. Northern China’s famous dumplings are delicious on their own, but frying adds a sweet, sausagy flavor that couldn’t have been more perfect for a winter evening.

Lacey’s favorite: This meal was all about quantity over quality, but it was the perfect, most satisfyingly greasy food to eat after a day of sightseeing. I think the fried chicken skewer I grabbed on the way out the door was my favorite, althoughI wasn’t brave enough that day to go for the squid.

4. Thailand doesn’t border China, but it’s just over a hundred miles away from the far southern Chinese city of Jinhong, separated only by the narrow tips of northern Myanmar and Laos. Happily for us, Jinhong’s “Thai Restaurant,” where the Thai waitresses barely even spoke Chinese, made the distance moot. In our four days in Jinhong, we tucked our napkins in at this place three times. Our first meal there, though simple, was absolutely unforgettable.

What we ate: Pad Thai, coconut curry chicken, rice and beer.

Lacey’s favorite: The Pad Thai!It was much more simply done than in the States. Just a plate of noodles, and a squirt of lime – and so delicious. We were instantly addicted.

Ethan’s favorite: Since it would be redundant to say the amazing food, I’ll go with the price. The best Pad Thai I’ve ever had for only $1.50, and a large bottle of beer to wash it down for $0.50?Yes, please!And while I’m writing about shamelessly low prices, the hour-long $7 massages we had in Jinhong weren’t bad, either.

3. The most unexpected of our top five meals also took place in Yunnan Province, in the small town of Menglun just outside the twilit gates of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens. We were about to spend the night in a tent on the enormous garden grounds, but first, on our way into town to forage some cheap street barbeque, we were collared by ten-year-old Qiansiyang and her seven-year-old cousin. It took little more than a smiling “ni hao” before we’d been invited to dinner with Qiansiyang’s entire extended family of over a dozen folks, all of whom were visiting the park on vacation. Like us, they were out to find their dinner. Two hours later, we had chopsticked an incredible amount of scrumptious food off the giant three-foot lazy susan that spun at the center of the table, Lacey had (unwittingly) demanded no less than five “ganbei’s” (bottom’s up toasts) from various uncles and grandparents, and even Qiansiyang had been given her own glass of beer. And thanks to this incredible meal, for which it was insisted that we pay exactly nothing, we had a new southern Chinese family to call our own.

What we ate: Fish stew, fried eggplant, broccoli rabe, beef with something, chicken and something, veggies of one kind and another, warm things, cold things, crunchy things, garlicky things, savory things, sweet things . . . if only we knew what it all was, eating out in China would have been so much easier ever since!

Lacey’s favorite: Everything was so good, but that night I really appreciated the half dozen veggie dishes in rotation on the lazy susan including broccoli rabe, fried eggplant, and a kind of squiggly, crunchy root that I have yet to identify. Ordering veggies on my own continues to be a mystery – I always end up with a plate of fried celery.

Ethan’s favorite: I think the beef thing and the garlicky thing were my favorites, although the beer foisted on me throughout the meal by Qiansiyang’s dad, who sat next to me, makes it hard to remember which of the universally delicious dishes was actually the most delicious. Playing intermittent card tricks with Qiansiyang and her cousin (when they ventured over from the ‘kids’ table) was another highlight.

2. A couple weeks ago we took our first weekend trip to Beijing, where we visited friends and a fascinating cross-section of Beijing’s diverse sights and scenes. On Friday night a friend took us out to a popular spot for Beijing Duck, a meal which ultimately included a mind-boggling array of other delicious food along with the famous headliner. We ate for hours sitting on a lantern-lit courtyard deck with goldfish swimming underfoot, an experience well-worth the near-immobility that followed.

What we ate: Peking Duck (with Mandarin Pancakes), whole fried fish, sweet and sour chicken (Canton style), eggplant, white mushrooms in a vegetable stew, aged duck egg soup, cold noodles with chicken and peanut, and sweet pumpkin puffs.

Ethan’s favorite: The key to Peking Duck is the skin. I’m not sure what they do to it, but the same organ that makes fried chicken so greasy peels right off the duck in thin, sweet, and divinely crispy bursts of flavor. The cold noodles with chicken and peanut were also light and delicious.

Lacey’s favorite: This meal was all about pigging out in style. Our sweet and sour fried whole fish looked like it had been prepared by Edward Scissorhands. It wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it was memorable and delicious. And one of the chefs treated us to a noodle making performance while we ate, tossing up enormous coils of fresh dough like buoyant cords of silk.

 

                         

 

1. We’ll call our number one meal the Qingdao Classic. A mere five-minute walk from our apartment, we almost missed the back-alley seafood restaurant that Ethan’s Chinese tutor had recommended, a well-kept local secret that people actually drive to eat at. But even after a warning about the dingy atmosphere, we were a little dismayed to see the bare, cavernous, brightly lit dining room. Fortunately, the waiter’s amazement at seating a pair of Westerners didn’t keep him from being extremely gracious as we were seated, and in a moment we got right back up again and were guided in to look at dinner. This was when the fun began; faced with a mind-boggling array of seafood in tanks and bins of all shapes and sizes, we finally chose a shellfish option (shoveled right out of a watery tray), a fish option (slapped directly on the scale for pricing before it was whisked away to be cooked for us), and a stew. The three words that best describe our number one dinner? Fresh, fresh, fresh.

What we ate: Fresh mussels, fresh flounder cooked in a curry-like sauce that made the meat both flakily tender and filling, fresh squid in a spicy broth of garlic and vegatables, and fresh Qingdao Beer (brewed, our waiter proudly told us, that same day).

Lacey’s favorite: I love picking my dinner out of a plastic tub, and the mussels were yum.

Ethan’s favorite: I’m tempted to say the beer, but the fact is that here in Qingdao, fresh beer is the standard. And the amazingly fresh seafood would be too obvious. So I have to go with the walk from home, which is probably the shortest I’ll ever have to take from my front door to get to the freshest seafood I may ever eat.

 

          

 

After returning from our travels, Lacey and I fixed our wandering attention to the business of teaching. Teaching at Ocean University of Qingdao’s “School of International Education” is, in many ways, a business: the small, rather expensive private school is run for-profit by the much larger public university. The six hundred or so students enrolled at the School of International Education did not pass the rigorous entrance exams required to enter China’s public universities, so instead their (mostly wealthy) parents pay a hefty enrollment fee for this alternative program. After three years of preparatory study, students will be sent off to England, Australia, or one of a handful of other countries, and will attempt to enroll at a university there for another three years. Most of the students Lacey and I teach will go to England.We found the logic of this system, initially at least, elusive. Why would students who were already unable to pass China’s own university entrance exams be sent to try their luck in a foreign country, with an entirely different language and culture to cope with? Our skepticism was reinforced by our handful of foreign coworkers, and sometimes even by our school’s own Chinese administrators, who fired off various warnings as the semester began: the students would never do homework, the classes were too big to get anything done, and the boys were bad students; coming to class was viewed as optional and staying awake even more so, while students’ language levels varied impossibly within each class. But even the better students wouldn’t participate because the Chinese system of lecture and memorization is all students have come to expect of their teachers. Further, thanks to China’s one-child policy and their parents’ wealth, our students were spoiled.

We began the semester braced for the worst. One student who seemed to exactly fit the warnings we’d been issued went by the English name of Shadow: hunched in the back below a shock of semi-spiked hair, he looked from the start like the archetypal glowering punk, ready to get up and walk out of the classroom at any moment. Of course, his alias added to this initial impression, as it did in different ways with many of my other students: the quartet of Cherry, Sunny, Lemon, and Smile, I thought, could be a little more cheery and helpful, but the mysterious Miggie and Hebe should be watched closely. King and Brain appeared cocky and unruly, and the boy-band trio of Sky, Gigi and Umbra must not be very bright. Dirk, Dwayne and Jay clearly thought they were too cool for school, while the poor quiet girl named Alan was clearly very confused. And finally there was Howl, an unmistakably dangerous prospect the moment I first read his name on the attendance sheet.

When, in these first six weeks, did the impressions start to break down? I don’t remember exactly, but most of them didn’t take long. In two of my classes, the first homework I assigned was to write one or two paragraphs about your best friend. Over the next week, about seventy-five percent of my students dispatched the conventional wisdom that homework would never be done. But even more remarkable was the undisguised affection that my students almost universally expressed in their writing; everyone seemed to think their best friend was, without question, the best person on the face of the earth. Maybe this shouldn’t have been a surprise; in China it is common for girlfriends to walk around holding hands or hugging, and even the guys will throw their arms around each other quite easily. Still, the immediacy with which they opened up about their friends was touching. My students were beginning to take shape for me.

My favorite thing about this first assignment, though, was my introduction to the mistakes that have also become one of my guiltiest pleasures. It’s hard to take your job too seriously when a student writes about his friend that “I like his funny very much.” Or even better, when another student describes cooking with a friend by saying that “if you taste our cock you must say delicious.” The “c” turned out to be a poorly scrawled “o,” but not before Lacey and I treated ourselves to a memorable bout of lung-draining laughter back at home. Another student referenced a favorite Tom Cruise movie, called “missing is possible.” But my favorite lines from the best friend assignment came from a student who clearly made a bad choice about what source to paraphrase: “Youth, once spent, will never come again. This is the most rosy time in our life, and the friend is the beautiful rosy. We need treasure them, because they are the treasure.”

There are other, simpler ways that the students have taught me to look beyond initial impressions. Howl, it turns out, sports a goofy smile and a genuine desire to please; Cherry is neither cheery nor helpful, while Miggie and Hebe both are. Brain pronounces his name “Brian” (although so far he has refused my hints about its spelling), and the girl named Alan and the boy named Gigi are two of my best students. A couple of the early predictions have, inevitably, held: generating class participation requires steady coaxing, and there are more boys who miss class or don’t do their homework than girls. Sometimes I wake up the odd student who has dozed off on his or her desk, and Dwayne and Jay do think they’re too cool for school. But the initial clench of anxiety that followed those repeated warnings and early impressions has been replaced by a job that is more relaxed, manageable, and most of all, more human than I could have predicted. A student who talks to his friend incessantly during class, despite my warnings, comes up to me afterwards to ask if he can have my phone number, so that we can go out for a drink sometime and practice English; three favorites invite me to play basketball; without exception a chance meeting with a student outside of class produces a gasp and then a huge smile. My students are becoming individuals before my sweeping teacher’s gaze, occupying forms I could never have predicted, least of all through outside warnings or their own English names.

A second, more recent assignment drove this home. I asked students in two business classes to write about their ideal jobs, not guessing that their responses would be far more personal and revealing (and yes, funny), than I ever could have expected. Extremely quiet and withdrawn, Tina wrote: “I am good at my job, because I am fascinated with any plant that grows! I am amazed at how the plants change from day to day!” Carol wants to be a pop star: “I think a pop star can bring much happiness to audience and can take out sadness . . . I want to be popular with people and would like to be respected and loved by people.” Jimmy, who likes to joke, wrote very sincerely: “working with animals would be very interesting because the animals can make you happy and you can make friends with them. They can make you happy when you are sad.” Amy’s enormous smiling eyes hide great ambitions: “My book shop should be special and different from others. It can not be big, but it must have it’s own feature. I will read every book in my shop before I sell it.” Libby’s passion is a total surprise: “In my heart, my ideal job is to create all kinds of delicious food.” And Claire is not as prim as she looks: “Candy can be a artwork that can bring happiness to people.” Sun Hao, who doesn’t have an English name, offers: “I think the best job is a F1 racer, I like the feeling of the speed.” And Sunny, who wants to be a journalist, goes for the heartstrings: “. . . there are some quite poor mountainous areas. Children wear worn-out shoes and clothes, they also have no lights and electricity, so that they have to use candles. We don’t know that, but as long as journalists visit them and report that we try us best to help them for theirs’ life level.”

But the fully intentional humor of the responses surprised me almost as much as the intimacy. Lance wrote: “I think the best job should have 2 days off every week, then I can relax myself and do what I like. And every 3 week I could have a big holiday for example 1 or 2 week. The salary is good, this is the most important. Because I have to use money on my holiday.” A very quiet girl named Wang Yan wrote: “In my opinion, I always think the best job is Boss.” And from short, goofy, and incredibly endearing Victor came the greatest gem of all: “. . . being a rockstar, I would have a lot of fans. My fans would love me and go crazy for me. Especially when I’m singing for 50,000 fans in a stadium and they shout crazily ‘Victor! I love you!’ What a great feeling!” Read Victor’s amazing essay in its entirety below.

Finally, there’s Shadow. Last weekend I accepted the invitation to play basketball with three of the guys in one of my classes. All three are friendly, helpful, and good students. They play every Saturday morning at 7 a.m. — so I inevitably arrived very late, and ran into the last two, Sun Hao and Sun Penggan, as they were just leaving the court. Not to be deterred, they ignored my protests and steered me back with them, calling the guys who had already returned to the dorm to make them come back and play with me, too. As we were warming up, who should appear but Shadow, tossing back his spiked bangs and slouching in his loafers, eyes red behind his glasses as if he’d been dragged back out of bed unwillingly. When our three-on-three began, however, Shadow uncoiled into one of the most enthusiastic basketball players I have every seen, making up in excitement for anything he lacked in skill. And when the game ended it was Shadow who wanted to stay, making us watch him drive to the hoop again and again, bricking layups as he shouted “Joo-oodan” at the top of his ecstatic lungs.

England will be lucky to have him.

Being a rockstar is my ideal job. I want to be a great influence rockstar, like Bono of U2. I would find persons who play guitar, bass, drum very well and have the same value with me. After that, I would join the EMI record company and launch my album.

There’s many reasons that why I want to be a rockstar and be good at this job. To begin with, I’m keen on rock music. For me, rock music gives me a feeling of freedom and I think it’s a way to release myself. On the other hand, being a rockstar, I would have a lot of fans. My fans would love me and go crazy for me. Especially when I’m singing for 50,000 fans in a stadium and they shout crazily “Victor! I love you!” What a great feeling! The last reason is the great influence of rockstar. For example, Bono, he is not only make a great influence on music but also on society, environment, peace etc. I want to be the second Bono. I wanna use the influence of a rockstar to appeal everyone love peace, protect our environment and help each other. In a word, being a rockstar is my ideal job. Although it is very difficult to achieve, but anyway I will try!