LOVE IS LOVE
Siblings Through Sweet and Sour
The unexpected ways Chinese food deepened our connection
Potatoes sliced thin and fried with chili and numbing spice; broccoli infused with garlicky oil; lotus root and wood-ear mushrooms both crunchy and tangy with dark vinegar; dumplings stuffed with scrambled egg and chives.
These are the foods I’d dreamed of sharing with my sibling, Jo, all throughout my first year as a Peace Corps China volunteer.
Jo arrived in September when I had a few days off from teaching. I went to pick them up at the airport in Beijing because this was their first-ever solo international flight. I had a vision of how everything would be perfect. I’d get them settled into our hostel, then treat them to the region’s specialty — Beijing Roast Duck!
Fate had other plans. Jo’s first meal in Beijing ended up being greasy noodles. With an unexpected six-legged seasoning.
I snagged it out with my chopsticks and wrapped it in a tissue, laughing uncomfortably “Um. That happens sometimes.”
The suspiciously fuzzy gray fans overhead oscillated back and forth. Smudges marred the vinyl covers of the stools at each table.
Jo blinked at me for a moment and glanced around the otherwise empty little shop. “So… what do you usually do about it?”
“Eat around it?”
You know your sibling loves you if they can just roll with it when you accidentally almost feed them a bug.
The following day (and the whole rest of the trip) was bug-free, and I did get Jo their Beijing Roast Duck.
“Do you want some?” they offered, extending the little plate to me. They’d just finished preparing their third small rice wrap with carrot and cucumber slivers, a creamy soy sauce, and a piece or two of the duck breast itself. “I won’t tell anyone.”
I’d been an ovo-lacto vegetarian since I was twelve and although life in China had forced me to make some compromises (like not questioning the origins of some broths), I hadn’t consciously chosen to eat any previously alive animal in nearly a decade.
Temptation — thy name is Roast Duck.
The aroma filled the entire restaurant. My mouth watered. The meat looked perfectly cooked and flavored, nestled amongst the crisp veggies, wrapped into its translucent pancake.
“You’ll still be vegetarian if you try one,” Jo added. “No one but you or I would even know.”
I really did think about it — that’s how good the duck smelled. But I’d know.
“You enjoy,” I told them.
“Okay, thanks.” Jo didn’t offer again and hasn’t offered me any meat since.
Our dietary choices are just one of the seemingly endless differences between me and my sibling: Jo’s a healer, I’m a writer; Jo’s a thespian, I’m a humanities nerd; Jo prefers the stability of staying close to home, I seek intercontinental adventures.
Yet we respect each other, both despite and because of our differences. We help each other see the world in different ways, offer one another deeper perspectives, and enrich the experiences of the person we love and value.
Plus, we share snacks.
It was a six-hour fast-train trip from Beijing to where I lived and taught English at a vocational school in Tianshui 天水, Gansu province. You don’t make that kind of a trip without snacks.
On the way, we crunched huge, dried beans in coarse salt and nibbled candied hawthorn wafers from foil wrappers. We split packets of onion-ring chips and each had a tea-egg to tide us over until we got to my home. Between bites, we shared stories of our recent adventures and showed pictures we’d taken on our phones.
The days of Jo’s visit to Tianshui were all unique culinary experiences.
They got to try a regional specialty dish, hand-pulled beef noodles, and I bought a whole bunch of locally-grown apples for us to eat together most mornings.
I cooked stir-fried dishes on a hot plate using ingredients like bok choy, garlic scapes, and oyster mushrooms which we bought together at the wet market across the street.
I even showed off my self-invented one-person Peace Corps stipend cookie recipe: Mix one packet of black-sesame soymilk powder, one egg, and a handful of goji berries in a cereal bowl, dollop onto a tray in lumps, then bake in a toaster oven until the egg is cooked. Not exactly Grandma’s Chocolate Chip, but just the ticket on a chilly afternoon along the Silk Road.
One evening, I took Jo to try Sichuan-style hot pot in a restaurant. It was extra fun because you could pay by ingredient as each passed your seat on a conveyor belt.
“Too spicy?” I asked, watching Jo fan their mouth and sip the sweet lemon tea from a juice box.
They nodded, wincing. I showed them how to dip their hot veggies in a chili-free sesame sauce with green onions to take the edge off. Jo made it through the rest of the meal, but I don’t think they’ll ever be the world’s biggest hot pot fan.
After Jo helped me teach a fun English lesson, they were given some durian candies by a group of grateful girls. Other students I taught introduced Jo to Chinese karaoke and 5-Spice peanuts-in-the-shell on the same night. We sang Eye of the Tiger with abandon and got 10 kuai ($1.50 USD) soft-serve ice cream for dessert.
Every day of the trip was punctuated by interesting meals and fun snacks they’d never tried before. With every bite, I could see Jo becoming increasingly confident and courageous. People talk about being “bit by the travel bug,” but I think Jo was the one getting a literal taste of adventure.
The crowning culinary gem of Jo’s experience was not any spectacular fine dining, but a simple street snack made by a lady who set up her stall just across the street from my school’s side gate.
She stood beneath a canopy with a large yellow sign and wore floral sleeve protectors and a garishly patterned apron. The griddle she worked at was a great round slab of iron. She had a big plastic vat of batter on one side of it, and several metal containers of sauces and seasonings to the other side. A strainer full of lettuce leaves, a giant bag of crispy corn pieces, and several types of packaged meats also lurked behind her stand.
She made a dish called jiānbing guǒzi 煎饼馃子, which means “deep-fried dough sticks rolled in a crepe.” It sounds better in Chinese. Jian bing is a crepe-thin pancake made of mung bean flour, eggs, and water. The dish is originally from Tianjin, but it’s so popular that it’s spread all over China and beyond.
To make it, this woman would ladle a scoop of batter onto the griddle, rake it out from the center to the edges, and let it cook there while she collected the other ingredients. When it was cooked enough, she used a spoon to smear on a brown sauce that may or may not shorten a person’s lifespan due to its sinful deliciousness (and uncertain MSG content).
Then she’d add the amount of chili sauce you requested before adding any meats, lettuce, and green onion. The final gem was the great big deep-fried dough-stick, plunked down in the middle. At last, a pair of spatulas would shing, shing, shing across the hot plate to roll the delicacy up.
The final whack with the spatula served to chop the roll in half, displaying the glorious center as it slid into the bag.
Jo and I took ours, piping hot, and ate them in little tongue-scalding bites at first, then with greater gusto as the snack cooled. I watched Jo’s eyes widen as they ate.
“We’ve gotta get this again before I go,” they said. “How do you not just live on this stuff?”
I laughed. Some days I wondered the same thing myself, but there is simply too much wonderful food in the world for me to taste.
Plus, no matter how delicious a dish is on its own, it’s even better when I can share it with my sibling.
Thank you for reading! If you’re hungry for some literary dessert, Debra Urbacz’s delectable pastry laden article is a treat to read. Her skill with description and imagery is spectacular!
