Reflections on nearly a year in China, Part Two

Food:
I like almost any real food. By that I mean it should be recognizable as a plant or animal product (as opposed to some industrial substance), and prepared with some skill. I’m not especially fond of most seafood, but I’m not afraid of it either.

I guess you could say I’m a picky eater, but not in the usual sense of the word. I just want food to be good. Not fancy, not a “dining experience”, just quality stuff that feels like something that a good home cook would feed the family. However, I think even people like myself who like almost everything still really get to craving “comfort foods”. Perhaps it is whatever you grew up on. I can eat a whole lot of really, really good meals, and yet never have them scratch that deep itch that only certain foods can fill. For myself, the number one thing would be a proper plate of tacos and enchiladas, or a good bowl of chili with cornbread.

For that comfort food, pickings are pretty slim. We make some good things at home, but there are still a lot of the family favorites that we didn’t ever make this year. Some of the family comfort foods we have made are pinto bean soup, split pea soup, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pork roast, and a proper Thanksgiving dinner. There is a long list of other favorites that we haven’t yet tried to recreate here.

The local cuisine of Jiangsu Province is not to my liking. It is sweet and oily, and really doesn’t have much flavor. Fortunately, there is a great variety of other good food to be had. My favorites are the cuisines of western China, and Korean food. The western Chinese stuff is Arab/Islamic influenced. It has a lot of lamb, and good spicy flavors. I’ve written about it in detail before, so I will move on.

I had never had occasion to eat Korean food before I came here (other than Kimchi), but it really is good stuff. There are a lot of Korean companies in the area, and unlike the European and North American companies, which send few workers to China, there is a large Korean population (according to some sources, that is much to the consternation of the Chinese government, which wants those jobs for local citizens, but the Koreans keep putting them off).

Korean food emphasizes freshness, and there are a lot of good hot, spicy flavors. Barbecue is a popular favorite, but with the Korean variety, the meat is grilled in small strips, then dipped in sauces and wrapped in a piece of lettuce for eating. However, my very favorite is, in an approximate phonetic spelling, called Bi Bim Bap. It is a mix of rice, vegetables, sprouts, and sometimes meat. It comes cooked, but unmixed, in an extremely hot stone bowl. It will have a dollop of thick hot sauce, and sometimes a raw egg, on top of it. You then stir the whole concoction together yourself. The egg cooks from the heat of the bowl as you stir. A proper bowl of this stuff can literally serve as that “comfort food” that I was talking about above.

Street food is always an adventure, but you can find some real treasures. Kabobs of various sorts can be quite good, and there is a fried egg folded up into dough that isn’t too bad. There are various forms of steamed buns that are really good if you get the kinds with the right fillings (they are like chocolates that way… you never know what you are going to get, at least if you don’t speak Chinese). Dumplings can be good.

In the first weeks we were here, there was a certain smell that would assault us when we went downtown. I was convinced early on that it was a hideous smelling food of some kind. Lee, however, was convinced that no food could possibly be that rank, and she was sure that we were smelling an open sewer. We actually had arguments, although I occasionally lost the courage of my convictions and would become convinced that she must be right.

Eventually, we found out that this odor came from what was known as “stinky tofu”. It is a fermented tofu that is then deep fried and served on a stick. Given the delicate balance that this family sometimes has between adventurous and masochistic, we did finally try it. It is better than it sounds, but now by much. I was right in the end, but it was a hollow victory. Any smell that you can’t distinguish from food or offal, can’t be a good smell. Or a good food.

Most of the Western food here is pretty mediocre. There are three Mexican restaurants in town. We’ve eaten at two. They are okay, but not much more. The usual selections of Italian foods and whatnot are here, but not that exciting. There is one new European/American restaurant that is pretty good. There is some really good Western food in Shanghai, and we’d had some very proper French food there, but we really are too busy to get there very often.

As I said in the beginning, I’m not particularly snobbish. I can enjoy a typical fast food burger as much as the next guy. This winter, a new Burger King opened in town. In the U.S. probably eat at a one of those no more than once a year, and only on road trips. However, I can tell you that, if you have not experienced it for yourself, you have no concept of how good a Whopper can taste after seven months in China.

Shopping:
I don’t enjoy shopping here. At the street markets, you often feel like someone is trying to take advantage of you. Even in regular stores, it is really hard to find specific things sometimes. The largest store in town a grocery from the French chain Auchan, can get so crowded that you almost have to swim through the people.

In general, shopping is the prime example of how much China has changed. Two major shopping centers have come into Suzhou just this year, and the product variety is expanding and diversifying rapidly. One case in point, nine months ago I specifically cited one thing as being virtually un-findable in China. That was chocolate chips. Now, they are consistently stocked in all of the Western shops. There are more foreign products of other kinds as well. However, that in no way communicates the dramatic changes that have come in the past decade. For example, few people are aware that until the current generation, very few Chinese drank milk or ate dairy products. One British man living here tells that story that, a mere ten years ago, when he lived in another, somewhat less developed Chinese city, he could not purchase milk in stores at all. To keep a personal supply for his coffee and tea, he made a special deal with a local farm woman. Let me repeat… this was only ten years ago!

Nowadays, dairy products are well established. In fact, the Arizona-based and founded Cold Stone Creamery has two locations in Suzhou. The brochure, by the way, shows a picture of its original store next to Nello’s Pizza at the corner of Southern and McClintock in Tempe, less than one mile from our old house.

One more thing I thought of recently, when I was pondering exactly why I hate shopping here so badly (as opposed to all the reasons I hate shopping generally), other than things I mentioned or alluded to above, here are a few others:

Selection. This is something that the Chinese really haven’t figured out. There is usually only two or three options for any given product.

Prices. There are two kinds of prices. Super cheap (for super crap), and prices that are equal to those in U.S. department stores. There is very little middle ground. What China really, really needs is for an outfit like Target to catch on. Some retailers are figuring out that there is a market for good quality at mid-range prices. The IKEA furniture store in Shanghai, for example, does great business.

One final shopping note. We are preparing to go home, and recently I said to a Chinese person that we would be bringing a lot of things back with us (from our U.S. shopping and restocking). She asked, rather pointedly, why I wanted to do that, when it was so obvious “You can buy everything in China!”.

I realize that have let her annoy me all out of proportion (there are extenuating circumstances why I am frustrated with this person), but that comment has stuck in my craw for days now.

It is possible that virtually anything I want to buy exists somewhere in China. That is not to say that I can buy it. Sure, if I spoke and read the language, had a car, and plenty of time, I could find some of the things I’ve been looking for. However, despite the fact that seemingly everything in the world is “Made In China” these days, that doesn’t mean that those same things are For Sale in China. Many products are manufactured exclusively for the export market. If I had a contact in that specific factory, I could cut a deal (does anyone want any Dewalt tools? I do have a contact in that company).

To make a long story short, no, I can’t buy many things in China. So purely out of spite, we have now been compiling a shopping list to give to this person. We won’t ever actually do it of course, but it makes me feel better. The first item on the list is a good pair of American size 10 ½ 4E width shoes.