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

street with trees, puddles

meat market

waiting, parking lot

friends, escalator

HOV, market

summer fruit

Chengdu is hot, and here the heat carries with it the construction and chemistry of an ever-expanding city. Each avenue has cranes lifting buildings to scrape the sky. There are the workers fitting the beams and concrete spines, and there is the detritus that is falling. Falling on us, falling on the trees, falling on our view. Each breath has a tinny taste and the sky has traded blue for silver grey. But there are also sweet tastes along the streets. The fruit vendors know that breaking into ripe fruit will help you forget the summer heat. I asked a vendor about the box of round purple fruit with little green leaves and stems. Mangosteens. She took one, plucked off the top, twisted the body until it cracked. She turned the exposed insides to me and I took a piece, ate it. Its pulp was sweet and humid and difficult to pin down. And good. Good like summer-warmed fruit can be good. And good because it reminds you that not every great thing is defined by being the tallest, the fastest, the brightest. Sometimes it just has to be the sweetest.