Real Chinese Food

At the canteen with students.

“What’d you think of real Chinese food?” everyone asked when I returned home. “Is it better than American Chinese food?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “I never had any.” Not technically true, but it did express a truth: the vast majority of meals I ate with my students in the canteen, and they vehemently disowned the food as anything resembling Chinese.

For breakfast I bought staples from Wu Dao Kou: rice, beans, bananas, oatmeal, eggs, dumplings. The same peanut butter and jam brands tended to change recipe from jar to jar, lending a degree of variety in my otherwise monotonous diet. I drank a lot of powdered soy milk, even powdered goat and yak milk.

In the winter I frequented the teacher canteen, with its nicer meals drenched in oil. The Beijing climate was so dry, the radiator heat even drier, that my face was perpetually flaking – unless I ate the oily noodles. You do what works.

A handful of times I was invited to an official banquet with extravagant animal parts. It was pretty obvious that wasn’t real Chinese food, just something served up to impress.

By May I couldn’t stand the canteen any longer, so I bought take-out dinners from a Korean shack near Beijing Language Institute, a few blocks away. The shack had been erected around a tree growing right out the tin roof. If you’ve never tasted bi bim bop, a meat/veggie rice stir fry, stop by your local Korean restaurant and give it a try.

So really the only authentic Chinese food I ate the whole year was that first week of random menu pointing in restaurants, and later whenever students invited me out to a restaurant for dinner (about twice a month). By that count, some Americans eat more Chinese in a month than I did in actual China.

I can attest that there weren’t any fortune cookies. When I described them to my students, they thought I was being weird.

Also, the Chinese didn’t mix their meat or vegetable dishes with their rice. They saved the rice for last – it brushed the teeth, cleansed the palette and left a subtly sweet aftertaste. During that year I gained the ability to tell good rice from bad. To this day I’m astounded how many “good” Chinese restaurants in America serve bad rice.

Returning to the original question, then: the few times I ate authentic Chinese food, I loved it. It was oilier than I expected, and in Beijing a little bland; it also included some veggies we don’t have in North America. And yes, it was better than American Chinese food.

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