Cultural Exchange

Near the start of the semester, Xueqin and I discovered a café across town from school, on the West side of the city where many foreigners seem to live and where interesting restaurants abound. This café is not only a peaceful study spot, it’s also home to a wonderful menu of western style foods, from breakfasts to sandwiches and salads and pasta and entrees. We took a few friends there a couple of weeks ago to get our fixes of BLT, mac and cheese, salad and apple pie, and yesterday decided to take our roommates out and give them a taste of American cuisine.

Five of us and two roommates (mine and Yazhen’s) ended up at the restaurant, and proceeded to try and explain the options to Xiaojun and Lifang, neither of whom had eaten anything that could be considered “Western” and didn’t come from a fast food place. In direct contrast to the general trend, the English menu had many more options than the Chinese one, onto which only a few western choices had been translated. In the end they asked us to order for them. We ended up getting them several dishes to share: a BLT, potato soup, fish and chips and apple pie. The result was an amazingly comical reverse of the hesitation and aversion to which we initially approached some Chinese dishes.

First to arrive at the table was the salad, which came free with the fish. Chinese people as a rule avoid raw vegetables, but both girls tried it, commenting at several vegetables they didn’t know could be served raw. Xiaojun bit into a carrot and immediately spit it out, making a face of half surprise and half disgust, which sent several of us into laughing fits. Lifang took a nobler stab at eating the salad, while Xiaojun ate some lettuce and concentrated on the soup.

Following our lead, Xiaojun picked up a knife and cut the sandwich in half for them to split. I think she liked the sandwich well enough, but we all noticed too late that Lifang was going at it awkwardly with a knife and fork, and had managed to mangle half and pull out the inside of the rest. When the fish and chips arrived (we were leaning toward pasta but figured that they were more likely to be comfortable with fish), Xiaojun ate several French fries and Lifang (who had initially said she really liked fish) picked at it a bit, but for a while it sat mostly untouched. Finally we figured out that they were having trouble figuring out how to eat it, as it was all in one piece, and hard to pull apart with a fork. Their fork skills were nowhere near as practiced as even the worst chopstick user when we first arrived, and they couldn’t get the hang of it, plus cutting with knife and fork was a bit too daunting. I took over and cut several pieces, instructing them to scoop rather than stab, and talking Xiaojun through cutting off a piece herself. Lifang was still having trouble, so I handed her the soup spoon and let her go at it that way. The apple pie was much the same, and Xiaojun ended up scooping bits of it onto the knife and eating off that. Overall an amazingly comical process to watch, though we felt bad we weren’t better instructors.

Perhaps the best was their reactions to some of the other food on the table. We knew better than to order them anything with cheese in it, but Yazhen had ordered a macaroni and cheese casserole and pressed them into trying it. Xiaojun politely chewed it and said that one bite was good, but it very much tasted of dairy and she wouldn’t want to eat a whole plate of it. Lifang ate some but made a face and declared the flavor to be “a little strong”. In the end, Lifang observed that she’d never thought to eat vegetables like lettuce and tomato raw, and never thought to cook apples, and yet we’d just given them a salad and apple pie!