火锅 is hot pot

Hot pot is exactly what it sounds like, but it's also much better than it sounds. Hot is the spice and the food and the oil and the air. Hot is your skin and your throat and the eel after it cooks. Pot is the container sitting in the middle of your table, with its contents boiling and rolling and making everything better. And it is beloved here in Chengdu.

Maybe it’s eating oil-boiled food straight out of the pot in August, and maybe it’s the spice, but eating hot pot makes you sweat. It's also all about the thrill of the chase, spelunking around in spicy broth using chopsticks and ladles and serrated spoons to find all of the things you’d dropped in earlier.

The hardest part is keeping yourself from eating the items that need more time to cook – the lotus root that given time will become soft and chewy, the quail eggs whose insides melt into orbs of molten yolk if you can wait. But at the same time you should hurry up and get at the pieces that are ready much more quickly, the thin slices of meat and the sheets of tofu skin. It’s both hard to wait and hard to know. And it’s hard to catch every bit of Sichuan pepper before it sneaks onto your tongue and the numbness sets in.

What you drop in the pot to soak up the spice is up to you. There were pork & coriander meatballs presented on cucumber slices. And there was eel… it came to the table fresh and horror-show-bloody but when it came out of the pot it had been transformed into something so good and rich and right. It was instantly something we’d order every time.

But one of the things we’d ordered, a sort of thick rice noodles, just never turned up – except on the bill. We pointed this out to the server and then like clockwork another server came over and produced the missing dish from thin air. (Actually she found it on the lowest rung of a small stand next to our table.) It was strange to discover the missing dish hiding like that when all of the others had been so dramatically delivered to our table or even dumped into our pot by a server. So in a sort of ultimate Chinese test, where a passing grade would mean a whopping $2 off of our bill, we told the server what we thought.

And we passed the test. Not only did they take the rice noodles off of our bill, but we received a very educational explanation about why the noodles had never made it onto our table in the first place. Something about how Server 1 had put the noodles on the shelf but had neglected to tell Servers 2, 3 or 4 that they were there. Naturally this would be a problem in a restaurant where one person is assigned to bring an item near the table, another puts it onto the table, still another dumps it into the pot, yet another swoops in to remove the empty plate, and 16 others circle at all times just to keep the air moving. Not that we begrudge the breeze. Like I said, hot pot makes you sweat.

neon, with pup

welcome to our home

In Chengdu there's a magical apartment full of chili oil and fresh vegetables, tofu chunks and fire. It's easy to walk past and not know that you have a standing invitation to visit. That you're welcome to come in and eat at their table.

This is a place that people tell friends about in near whispers. As in, don't tell a bunch of other people because then the retired couple that runs this little restaurant - and lives here - might be overwhelmed and then our favorite lunch place won't be the same.

This husband and wife have a flow in the kitchen. And with the kitchen being a small stretch of a place there's not much room to stray from the plan, which seems to be to take the fresh things that line the shelves and turn them into wonders.

I want to spend more time watching them in the kitchen. Watching the way the wife preps the ingredients and lines them along the windowsill. The way the husband takes them in a certain correct order and uses two woks and fire to make them delicious.

At one point, as I watched the husband cook, the chili had so overcome our shared cloud of breath that I choked back a cough, afraid to insult the finished product by seeming weak. Truly, each and every dish they turned out was worthy of appreciation.

We ate in an outside patio, under a loose tent. Accompanying our group were vats of chili pickle baking in the August sun and an oscillating fan. Each time the breeze from that fan made its way back to me, my heart nearly skipped a beat. Each time I ate a bite of the food, it skipped two.

foundation

miracle in chinese

I called the restaurant with my cell phone. I told the person who answered that I wanted these three things. I said I would pick them up. Then I went to the restaurant and picked up my order. It had these three things.

before the bread fell on the ground

mystery breakfast

This dumpling has something to do with vegetables. We know that because last Sunday morning when we said the Chinese word for vegetables to the lady behind the wall of steaming baskets, she pointed at the steaming basket with these dumplings inside. Then she packed some into a wimpy plastic bag.

The dumplings were awesome. Soft and savory. As for the actual ingredients, that's a real mystery. But it always is. Under ideal mealtime circumstances we're usually working with a best guess level of understanding. At worst we discover a secret Santa level of surprise. As long as you're free of allergies and not a vegetarian it usually works out ok.

summer chat, on yellow

learning

We were taught how to play mahjong (麻将) a few weekends ago and it was fairly straightforward: memorize the pieces and what they’re called, learn how to arrange them in the proper groups. I can recognize and remember the pieces. And I know what I have to do. But I have no strategy, nothing that shows I organically understand what I’m doing. In other words, I know enough to sit down at the table but I don’t know enough to win. It’s like my Chinese. The real players, the born players, could easily run me over and take their win. But so far they just offer encouragement. It's the best kind of beginner's luck.

sunbrella, sunset skirt

how to say takeout (打包)

When you’re speaking Chinese in China you have to not mind blathering on in front of wide-eyed strangers all focused on you like you’re the one monkey at the zoo. You have to not mind because within that group of people is the one person who may eventually figure out the riddle of what you’re trying to say. When it starts happening you can feel the tilt of understanding tip in your favor: she’s crazy… she’s crazy… she’s crazy… wait a minute, I think she means fish-fragrant eggplant! And with that discovery the crazy evaporates and they invite you inside.

It’s a wonderful moment, and you have to work for it – and wait for it – because it doesn’t come easy. But once it does, once that communal light bulb goes on in all of your heads, the butchering of the language and the over-sized pantomime is worth it. You’ve communicated.

In fact, a few days ago I was standing outside a restaurant doing this very thing, and once the group of seven or so restaurant staff finally figured out I was trying to order take-out we were really rolling. It only took five more minutes, along with the help of a translation app on my iPhone and the restaurant's picture menu, to figure out what I wanted to eat. In my personal China this is defined as success – and I say that without a single note of sarcasm.

Once the food was ordered I was invited inside to wait while it was prepared. I’m convinced this is because at the time I was sweating more than anyone else in Chengdu and they were worried I might die. So I followed their suggestion and sat down in front of an air conditioner which they so nicely pointed right at me. I was presented with hot tea and one of the staff talked to me about how much he loves watching American wrestling. I understood at least half of what he was saying which by my current standards of communication is pretty awesome.

And the food… the food was incredible. The top layer of the crispy duck rice (脆皮糯米鸭) was perfectly crisped rice, below that was a chewier rice layer and at the very bottom was the rich bacon-y layer of soft smoky duck, with its crisped skin facing bottom. The fish fragrant eggplant（鱼香 茄子）was all sour and hot and sweet, with ginger, chives, pepper, and garlic swarming over silky eggplant, the flavors building to a molasses-tinged burn.

It’s these kinds of things – the guessing, the wrestling, the eggplant – that can really teach you Chinese.

mug

fire food

We had been warned. A man had seen fit to actually come out of his restaurant and tell us that the food there was hot. Except that we were speaking Chinese so the word he used was 辣. He said it over and over – even after it was clear that we understood Chinese.

After convincing him we were ready for the spice, our other problem was that we had no clue what they were serving. So we played charades on the sidewalk until we had guessed the two main options. “Rabbit” was easy. After he said the word for rabbit, which we knew, I used my index and middle fingers to make rabbit ears and he nodded happily. Guessing “frog” was more of a challenge, mainly because we didn't know the word. Also because in trying to pantomime what he meant, the man kept moving his arms in a way that was more reminiscent of flapping chicken wings than hopping frog legs.

In the end we ordered the rabbit and as Shi-Wen would later say, “If this food isn‘t hot, then nothing is.” It made us sweat. A lot. In fact, before last night I didn't know it was possible to actually feel your ankles perspire.

The big metal bowl they plunked into the sunken center of our table was filled with molten hot oil, ginger, cilantro, garlic gloves and big green chilis – all swirling around pieces of hacked-up rabbit and red pepper and cucumbers. We would dredge around with our chopsticks looking for rabbit – then drag it out and slop it through the sauce bowls before using our teeth to separate the meat from the small and only vaguely recognizable bones.

Our sauces were mercifully mild, but that wasn't our doing. In fact when the staff had asked how hot they should make our sauces, we said, in Chinese, “a little” hot. The girl who was helping us, and who’d landed that role because she was most adept at understanding our Chinese, then turned to the girl who was preparing our sauces (the one who every time we spoke to her looked at us with a blank smile) and distinctly told her to make our sauces with no heat at all. And hallelujah for her because she was absolutely right.

As was the man who had come out on the sidewalk to warn us. He was 100% right about how our lips were on fire and how they nursed wispy licks of chili flame each time we ate a bite. But what he had neglected to mention was how awesome the food was. And how well it goes with peanut milk. And how it’s the reason crowds wait outside in the August heat, crouched on small plastic chairs, breaking sunflower seeds open with their teeth as they kill the time it takes to get a table.

It’s also true that small Chinese children pointed at me and my sweating ankles. And maybe that made me sweat a little more. But I would do it again.

And when I do I’m getting the frog.

dinner rush

茶 is tea

There’s a place where tea is served under an unexpected roof, its drinkers tucked into the underbelly of an overpass. From here you can’t see the sky. There is only the cement ceiling, swaths of it coated in fresh white and the rest just peeling away. Swimming past are city girls in summer dresses taking a shortcut through the shade, and cyclists bobbing gently by the tables and tea drinkers.

Each fleeting breeze comes from a fan plugged into a long and winding cord, and the stone bridges lead to nowhere, like the stunted versions resting on aquarium floors, covered by more water than they cross. The line of hedges separating the tea drinkers from the traffic hides everything but the buses, their passengers watching us through glass windows, making this feel even more like a separate world.

The Chinese spoken down here is unintelligible not only because it is a new language for me but because it is spoken among friends, so it degrades, like voices captured in soup cans, lost in the quick speak and casual mumbles used by people who know each other well.

The man across the way shakes open a large painted fan. He moves liquidly, each pass of the fan raises his white hair and then lets it fall with the gentle current. A left-behind newspaper is snared by someone who hasn’t yet finished his tea. A dog is asleep. And a table near a fan is claimed by someone looking for a breeze.

Men’s pants are hiked above the knee, well above the knee, and the grey breeze keeps coming. The dust from the traffic, the embers from the cigarettes, it all drifts through. Drifting the way the server does, from table to table, opening his large plastic thermos in a cloud of steam and refilling each of our glasses. Making the bright green leaves rise in a flurry and then settle to the bottom again.

spaceship, with granny

faces on the bus

relaxing, with dog

two sides, same country

China is a shifting heap of anything and everything, with a billion people navigating the contrasts and contradictions. In Chengdu’s side streets a Maserati will as likely run you down as a hard-charging old man and his bicycle will — the Maserati propelled by European engineering, the bicycle gathering momentum from the industrial-sized photocopier bungee-corded to its frame.

The corner vendor dredges your tofu from a plastic bucket on the pavement next to the peaches and drops it, unceremoniously, into a thin plastic bag. Or a doorman ushers you into an air-conditioned luxury mall to buy Louis Vuitton and Prada. The corner vendor is lively and fun and nothing she says makes sense the first time because her Chinese is so overcome by local dialect. The luxury mall is sparkling and cool, and desperately empty on a Saturday afternoon.

Someone out there is buying expensive China. Someone is the reason that luxury cars sit in the parking lots and new construction projects boast high-end living in the sky. The bakery at Kempinsky Hotel even sells $5 batches of macaroons; each piece delicate and then chewy, with paper-thin tops and buttery insides. But it was empty there too.

It’s the supermarket that’s always full, and usually with a crowd around the lychees. When I asked a young woman which lychees were good she responded by picking up a single fruit and rotating it for me to see, then putting it in my bag. Again and again she’d pick up a lychee, show it to me, and then put it my bag. Before she left I had a bag filled with perfect examples of the fruit. The lot rang up at fifty cents and each was wonderful: thick, wet and dewy.

This is China. You can eat fifty-cent lychees along sidewalks that are spat upon by shirtless men and treated far worse by small children with no bottoms to their pants. Or you can eat $5 macaroons in empty air-conditioned malls that sparkle and shine. As an outsider you sometimes crave the macaroons, but the lychees have a richness you can’t just whip up overnight.

pink sandals, pig parts