Food, smog and claustrophobia
Over and over, Jesse had told me how cheap the food in China was. He’d told me how good the food was too. How he would go to this shop that made homemade noodles and could get a whole meal for $1.50 and have leftovers. How right next to where they lived, there was this huge food court with tons of selection, including pizza and sushi. The sushi, he said, was something like $2–4 a roll. That made me swoon.
As I’ve said before, I thought I would be saving money in China.
I should tell you about the neighborhood. The getting to the food.
We lived in one of these. This was the view when you came through the gate. I’m not sure if all apartment communities in China have gates and a gate crew, but this one did. If you walk along this red-brown path and take the first right…
… this is what you’ll see. This was a very nice apartment complex and everyone here was considered rich, so I was told. It looks better with sunshine, which happened all of 3 days that I was there due to the ever-present smog.
The smog
My readers who have been to China know you never forget your first smog breath. Have you ever been near a construction area while an excavator is clawing, or maybe a dump truck is passing by? A blast of exhaust fumes hits you. You hold your breath, let the cloud pass, but even still you can smell the rebar cooking in the sun. You breath through your mouth: the dust of crumbling concrete dries on your tongue.
That’s Beijing the moment you step out of the airplane. It’s Jinan too. Hell, it’s probably all the cities.
And you think, “Oh God, there’s not enough oxygen in this air.” And you remind yourself that people have lived in these cities their whole lives and are still alive, and you too will survive one breath at a time.
It’s not always as bad as a construction site. It’s better indoors. I guess the HVAC systems filter some of that stuff out. But outside, this is how the air tastes — like exhaust and metal and dirt — and you just get used to it. The first few days, you can’t drink enough water. You develop a sore throat. You gargle salt water and lemon. The sore throat eventually goes away. And then, you are used to it.
They sell face masks at every corner store, but they do fuck all. I think this is the Chinese version of the TSA. The illusion of filtration.
You need the 3M masks that have filters on them, that can cinch over your nose and underneath your jaw. All the cloth masks did was shield you from approximately 1/2 of the smell. Your lungs were still taking the hit.
I wore a cloth mask sometimes, but usually I felt like an idiot because most people didn’t and it wasn’t even helping health-wise. So I stopped. The entire time I was there, I searched for the equivalent of a 3M N95 mask — seriously every store that could possibly have it, I looked — but I never found it. Even the last week there when it mattered less, I continue this search out of baffled curiosity.
The reason I was a obsessed about this is because I have a minor health issue that can become exasperated by smoking. I have no idea how much smoking will do it, just that smoking statistically increases the chances of an undesirable side effect. I hoped I wasn’t inhaling the equivalent of 3 cigarettes a day or something. But maybe I was.
So, the smog always rendered the prospect of venturing outdoors unpleasant.
But when I did venture outdoors, this was the view after leaving the apartment complex area. At the intersection at the bottom of this hill, on the left, there was a Walgreens-type store that I frequented. I went nearly every day. On the right was the food court that Jesse had told me about.
Directly across the intersection is the university that I never learned the name of. A lot of the students ate at the food court. These youngsters were a little less stare-y than other Chinese people. On a scale of 1 to 10, if a 50-year-old Chinese woman stares at you with the unrelenting intensity of a 10, the university students were a 6.
Unfortunately 6 is still something when you’re used to 0.
The problem of food
I had the problem that I needed to eat a few times every day. The days Jesse and Jane weren’t teaching, they would often go to the school for studying, and they managed their own food situation. Sometimes they’d pick up to-go. But, I couldn’t rely on that. I needed food autonomy. I also needed caffeine every day in the form of Coke Zero, preferably, although green tea would work in a pinch.
Not a coffee person.
The Walgreens store had Coke Zero. Score! The apartment refrigerator was full of expired foods and something had exploded in the freezer and grown a foamy fur. But I cleaned it out as best I could and kept my precious, cold Coke Zeros in there. (I didn’t touch the freezer.)
You can see my cleanliness OCD already. If I can keep my Coke Zeros in an orderly refrigerator, I will choose that every time. No, it doesn’t matter that the aluminum is protecting the liquid. My mouth touches the rim. I don’t want to be bothered to wash the rim; I don’t want to think about that; how the rim is probably germ-infused even in a clean refrigerator? No, I don’t want to start down that path. I want to grab the can and go. It’s OCD in the name of stopping further OCD.
(Apologies to anyone struggling with actual OCD.)
I bought bread, peanut butter and honey at the Walgreens store. In Singapore, this was my old meal stand-by and man I got sick of it fast in China. The bread tasted like shit; Wonder bread garbage; no zest, no life. The peanut butter was flavorless. The honey was just honey and I have no complaints there.
On day 3 (or so), I asked Jesse to take me down to this food court place and get me set up with a pay account. You couldn’t use cash there… you put money onto a card and you used that. I put 200 yuan onto the card, about $30. Then I tried the sushi.
The sushi tasted like shit.
Like seriously, worse than Kroger sushi.
I tried the pizza.
The crust of the pizza was sweet, and so was the sauce. All the toppings were fucking weird, except for cheese, and who wants to eat sweet cheese pizza? The crust was like soft bread anyway; no crust consistency to speak of.
It was also difficult to order there. Again, no one spoke English. This is where “yi-ga” came in handy, as I’d point to a picture of a food item, and they’d touch it and confirm that yes, that’s what I’m pointing at, and then they’d charge my card and I would have no idea what to do while waiting for the food; did they bring it to me? No one else was waiting around at the counters. So I sat at a nearby table and kept an eye on things, and eventually learned they just kind of wave you down. Even now, I’m not sure I was doing that right.
Here’s the thing about this wonderful inexpensive food in Jinan: it was shit quality. I’m talking like, worse than the USA’s McDonalds. (Travel tip: overseas McDonalds are rather good.) So I didn’t really want to eat the crumbled up beef bits. Or the unidentifiable meats.
I wish I had taken a picture of this place. Here’s one I found online that gives the effect.
Would you know where to begin? There were several stalls, but they were all variations on this theme. I would just stand there, staring, thinking, “I don’t want to eat any of this.” I was very aware of how much of a stupid American I looked. Fat, too, since this was food-related. Whenever it’s possible to rationalize “fat” into the Chinese insult of the American, just go ahead and do it, because they probably will.
Being 5'11, I was very, very fat. I towered over everyone. Super fat.
One time I thought I had finally discovered what I wanted to eat: sweet and sour chicken. Don’t hate me — I’m not a Chinese food person, not even the Americanized version. I found the picture of the sweet and sour chicken and I ordered it. Yi-ga.
It was actually a dessert. These are sweet potatoes or yams, cooked hot and soft. Then molten sugar is poured across them. As the sugar begins to cool, you have this interesting crunchy sugar exterior and warm, soft yams on the inside. This could be a hit in America if it were dough not yams.
I don’t know, maybe the yams could work too. “Healthier.”
I asked for rice with this order, and it really confused them. But I was thinking, “Why isn’t the rice already included with the chicken?”
I quickly gave up on this food court. That $30 went to waste. On me anyway: I left the card with them.
On the last week I was there, I got a little more daring and tried a few things that had stood out to me but had always looked difficult to order. The results were mixed.
The thing on the left is known as the “Jinan pancake.” It was lucky I ordered it, since it’s an iconic Jinan food. A tour guide in Beijing told me that. #thankstourguide The way you ordered this was like a Chipotle situation, which is why I had always avoided it. There were no pictures to point at. Just a person waiting for you to tell them something. When I pointed at the grill they used to make the pancake, the guy figured it out fine.
I wish I had discovered this earlier. It was amazing. It was like doughy naan bread with savory ingredients mixed in: celery, onions, etc. I would have eaten the $30 worth in those.
The sandwich thing on the right? The beef was like yarn and slime. It was mostly fat. Which can be good, but was not good there.
And the reliable Coke Zero.
I had a few good inexpensive meals
Jesse took me to some sit-down, store-front restaurant when I got exasperated about the shit food I’d been eating. Even the dumpling place was gross to me. I was like SHOW ME THIS GOOD FOOD YOU WOULDN’T SHUT UP ABOUT, WHAT THE ACTUAL.
This was pretty good. Quality meat. But it was a 5 minute drive by bike, and I had no idea how to walk there. (Wangyu wine sucks; never buy it.)
And then there was the noodle restaurant. Very good noodles. The problem was, there was nothing else to them. Seduced by tales of leftover noodle meals, I had mistakenly imagined meat to go along with the noodles. The meat plates were more expensive, and I got about 1 ounce of meat divided into 3 popcorn-sized pieces, buried in all the noodles. And again, the meat was shit quality. I wasn’t going to ask for more, even if I knew how to.
Cleary I can never be a vegetarian.
I can only describe how I felt…
… because it seems a little melodramatic now. Why couldn’t I have sucked it up and been more adventurous in the food court? Tried another dumpling store? Walked around some, found other options?
I just felt so stuck.
It was really hard to leave the apartment. I hated not having anonymity when I did. I hated the air. I hated the dirt. I hated the difficult interactions. I hated trying stuff that usually ended up being gross. I hated being alone.
As I said, Jesse and Jane picked up some good to-go on occasion. They came back with sweet-and-sour chicken about 2 weeks in and I was like THERE IT IS. I don’t know why I didn’t verbalize my desire for sweet-and-sour chicken; I guess I just assumed it was some American invention. I asked them to pick that up twice after that. And, there was a pizza place that would deliver, and it was tolerable — and therefore became one of my comfort foods — but it was about $8 for an 8-inch pizza. I wasn’t saving any money there.
The kitchen was dirty and disorganized, so I didn’t feel like cooking in it. Eventually I did, but just for Thanksgiving.
I think I lived these steps over and over.
- Feeling disregarded
- Wondering why I’d come
- Hating myself for coming
- Feeling depressed
- Being a slug
And that’s not very conducive for getting outside your comfort zone. Food is always a comfort thing to me. That doesn’t mean I’m not adventurous: it just means it’s one of the first things I go to when I’m down.
I ended up eating probably $50 worth of M&Ms, because M&Ms were expensive. The Walgreens store would run out of M&Ms, I ate so many. There was other candy — Snickers, for example — but I don’t know: M&Ms stretch farther. It was always M&Ms.
M&Ms and klonopin. And Coke Zero. And Pringles.
There were some fun meals, but I’ll talk about those later when I’m talking about the good times. They were expensive. I didn’t care.
In conclusion, I spent about twice as much on food as I would have in the States. It was yet another thing that stung.
Addendum
I forgot to mention an anecdote here. Jane was under the impression that, because she was out of the States, the food was much better quality — not understanding, I think, why it is that people in the States are fat (actual fat, not tall fat) and what forces us to have bad quality food.
A large population.
China has even more of a problem there. And yet, one day we were eating KFC chicken and she said, “Mmm, you can just taste how the chicken is better.” And I was thinking, “Actually, no, I cannot taste that.” The chicken was smaller… but I’m pretty sure it’s still mass-produced chicken. The chicken was not, as I think she was imagining, raised on a farm.
People in the states are actual-fat because of the massive amount of carbohydrates and our sedentary lifestyle. Well, China has the massive amount of carbohydrates. Carbs are everywhere.
And China has little-to-no food quality control. So, you can be laid up with food poisoning, but I guess that’s okay because the food was healthier before it went bad?
Jane and Jesse are missionary kids, by the way. It’s worth mentioning that because missionary kids have the irksome tendency, in their younger years, of thinking that any country does it better than America.
From my observation, China had exactly the same food quality as America does. Whether they cook it up better or worse is beyond the scope of this post. And yet no matter what I said to nudge her to this realization, she was stubbornly against it. So I decided to die on another hill.
(The hill of the M&Ms I had eaten.)
