“Eat some more bread. Eat some more vegetables. Do you want milk? Eat some more meat.”

Tianqi’s mom took the raisin bread from my hands, pulled the mini-loaf apart with her hands, and stuck pork slices inside. I didn’t even know I wanted a sandwich, but what a brilliant idea.

“Haochi ma?” [Is it good?] she asked before I could finish swallowing my first bite.

“Haochi,” I assured her as she peeled me a pear.

The Chinese are good at a lot of things, but one thing they really excel at is mothering. It’s a sign of affection to put food in your bowl, to handle your food for you, to offer you anything and everything and push more food on you when you say you’re full. Tianqi’s mother is my China mother—she’s sweeter than high fructose corn syrup.

Since Tianqi was at work, her mom and I had the morning to hang out before I met Annetta for lunch after her class. After breakfast, we went out for a walk to buy fruits and vegetables. She grabbed my arm every time a car passed by us in the street to pull me a little closer to the curb. Every food stand we passed, she asked me if I liked to eat whatever they were selling.

Then we came upon this bicycle bundled with woven cages, a cicada in each.

All of them were buzzing, so the street was practically vibrating with their screams.

They were a people magnet.

Tianqi’s mom decided to buy me one.

I tied him to my purse.

And then he stopped singing. I think he was lonely.

We wove through the community of blue, pink, and green painted apartment buildings. In Huzhou, and mostly in Shanghai, everything is varying shades of grey.

We stopped at a local veggie and fruit vendor, who had all the produce strewn on tarps lining the damp dirt ground.

I really think that a lot of Westerners would have a germophobe attack if their produce touched a sidewalk. I probably used to be unsettled by food on the ground, but it doesn’t bother me a wink now. Somehow the billion point three people in China are still alive.

Tianqi’s mom bought some corn and a hami gua.

I don’t know what hami gua is in English. It’s got a yellow rind, and inside it’s color is similar to cantaloupe.

After we walked through a park, I helped haul the produce back home, where we watched some bad Chinese television until Annetta’s class was over.

This summer, the enviously photogenic Annetta has been studying at Beida, aka Peking University, which is pretty much the Harvard of China. It’s The big name university and even counts our beloved Mao as one of its alums! I frequently wonder how different it would be (if at all) to teach there, since the students are (presumably) the best (test takers) China has to offer. Would their English be better, would they be less indifferent, would they want to learn?

I’m not even going to try answering that question. I’ll just get depressed.

Annetta and I had lunch at the restaurant at her hotel, which had the Annetta stamp of approval. Annetta lamented that none of the students in her program like to eat much except McDonald’s, Subway, and, if they’re going ‘ethnic,’ Pad Thai. For a feizhu, the only thing worse than a dearth of people who enjoy eating quality food is a dearth of quality food itself.

We started off with seaweed-covered peanuts.

I had never heard of anything like this, and I live by the rule that if you’ve never tried it and it sounds different, tasty, and intriguing, I am bound by the moral feizhu code to order it. The code rarely steers me wrong, because these were great. A little salty, a little sweet, a little umami, fried, crunchy, and totally bad for you. I finished the whole bowl.

Next our plate of three (or four?) types of mushrooms arrived.

Thick and almost meaty, not too oily, they were a win.

It’s hard for me to go to a restaurant and not order eggplant.

This one had basil so I was excited, but it was pretty basic.

And then came Annetta’s fish. She claimed that because no one was interested in eating anything ‘weird’ or ‘Chinese,’ when she went there with friends, she would just order this fish and a bowl of rice and eat it all herself. That’s my girl!

Inside the foil packet waited a whole fish in bubbling, thick red sauce.

The sauce was thick and a ketchup-y, and despite the slivers of onion in it, it didn’t have a really strong flavor. But still, win.

Annetta next took me for a little tour of Beida.

This is the well-known Weiming hu (Weiming lake).

I was a little jealous that the campus is like a park when mine is like a…campus.

This pagoda is one of the best-known spots at Beida.

As is the West gate, where two of these lions sit guarding the gates.

These lions are the subjects of controversy, as they were looted from the nearby Yuanming yuan. I’ll delve further into this in subsequent posts.

Annetta took me to the building where she takes her classes, and we were suddenly mobbed by a large group of school kids with funny haircuts.

Appetite is not the only reason Annetta and I get along so well—we have long, involved conversations, and though we have a lot of similar ideas, we are different enough to encourage friendly debate and devil’s advocate-ing.

That afternoon, we talked about the prejudices that foreigners encounter. The fact that we speak Chinese doesn’t mean we get treated better, it just means we know when we’re being discriminated against. People selling anything are very likely to quote us higher prices and very unlikely to engage in bargaining—as hard as we bargain, we will never get the local price. This is a large source of Annetta’s consternation, and she’ll frequently tell people, “You’re just telling me that price because you see that I’m a foreigner. If I were Chinese, your price would be lower.”

To combat the price inflation, I try to go to the same vendors each time, so that they know me. I even have a fruit guy who gives me free fruit. The relationship is key, but at shopping malls where bargaining is required, the foreigners will never get the lowest price. That’s just how it is, unfair or not, so I try not to get too worked up about it.

There are two things that do get me worked up, though. I intensely dislike when people tell me they want to be my ‘friend’ because I am foreign and they think that’s neat, or because I am foreign and they want to practice English. (I’m an English teacher, but I don’t need to teach English all the time. It’s a bit like befriending a masseuse so that she can give you massages when you hang out.) What also gets me worked up is that when I do try to make friends with locals, or even just talk to them, they decide that even though I speak Chinese, and, by their own admission, do it well, they decide that I don’t really mean what I’m saying, and therefore they choose not to listen. Annetta has also experienced this. For these reasons, it’s very, very difficult to become actual friends with a Chinese person—our otherness is too pronounced. Tianqi is evidence, though, that friendship is not impossible.

Annetta and I picked Tianqi up from work and taxi-ed over to Houhai, an area with a fair tourist draw and TONS of bars.

Annetta and I found it interesting that, in a country that so heavily values modesty, men will parade around in Speedos. But you know, modesty is really only for women anyway.

There was a very specific, edible reason that we headed to Houhai: The Kejia Fanguan (Hakka restaurant).

And there is a very specific, edible reason that we did so. For those of you with either a great memory or a lot of devotion to Plate of Wander, you may recall my attempt at recreating a fish that remained in my memory. While the fish was edible, it was nowhere near the real thing. Behold, the Real Thing:

This fish is so spectacular. To any relatives who are reading, I apologize, but: if you ever want to find out what an orgasm tastes like, EAT THIS.

Annetta and I had planned a comparison of the lunch fish and the Hakka fish. She took one bit of the Hakka fish and said, “Okay, there’s no comparison, this is way better.”

And it is. The sauce is thick but not too syrupy—and a perfect topping for rice. It’s salty, it’s sweet, it’s tangy, it’s AMAZING. And I don’t have the faintest idea what they put in it.

The fish was gone in mere minutes. The waiters were staring (par for the feizhu course). Annetta and I decided that if we were to eat there with more than three people, we would have to order another serving of fish, because it would not be acceptable to split it between more than three people.

We ordered other food, too. Cucumbers, but these were free.

This is also a classic Hakka Restaurant dish: Salty meat slices wrapped in leaves.

Also has perfect sauce for rice.

Broccoli with…something tasty and gooey.

We ordered some greens with tofu, but the photo was blurry (I was in a hurry to eat) and the dish was nothing special, anyway.

And for dessert, papaya with sweet yogurt.

It’s so comforting to eat something you love again for the first time in two years, and even more reassuring that it still tastes as fabulous as ever. Much as I wish I could get this fish whenever I wanted, it makes it that much more special that I can’t.

After dinner, Tianqi returned home and Annetta and I took a few hours to shop and walk around the Houhai lake. Another tenet of feizhu-ism: walk a lot, both to justify the amounts eaten and to work up an appetite. But we probably would have had to walk to Tibet to make enough room for what the next day would bring.

Tags: beijing, feizhus, fish, Parks