After my troublesome first week in Beijing, I prided myself on my refined water system: boiling in a kettle, then using empty one-liter bottles to chill in the fridge. Before evening free talks I prepared plenty of water, and offered it to my students with pleasure.
One night they taught me a card game in which each round’s loser performed a silly punishment, like spinning around twenty times or singing a song. After one round, someone suggested the loser drink cold water.
“How is that punishment?” I asked.
It turned out the Chinese believed cold water was bad for the digestive system. As my students explained, “It feels uncomfortable.” They preferred hot (or at least warm) water, exemplified in their regular consumption of tea (boiling also killed off any microbes in the water.) The sensation of cold water sliding down the esophagus was, for my students, equivalent to the sensation of an ice cube sliding under the back of a shirt — great party mischief.
And all that time I’d been serving them ice water.
February 22, 2008 at 4:01 pm
It’s those little things about another culture which are so fascinating to me - the ones that you wouldn’t have even thought to ask about, because they are so ingrained into our own way of doing things.
This reminds me of a story I heard about some american missionary types taking a group of croatian students to a conference somewhere in western europe. They were at a dinner together and all the croats got upset because there was no bread with dinner. The americans thought it was a big fuss over nothing, until they realized that they would have raised the same fuss had the waiters brought their food before the drinks. heaven forbid you have a meal without drinks in america, right? But for croats (and other Balkan-ites) it’s quite easy to eat an entire meal without a drink. But without bread? Never!
March 28, 2008 at 1:15 pm
An apt comparison, thanks for sharing! I imagine many Chinese would feel the same way about a meal without rice or noodles.