Unit 14 A Foreigner Encounters Chinese Food Culture

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A Foreigner Encounters Chinese Food Culture

By David Moser

Introduction

As a Chinese,you might take Chinese food and its culture for granted.But have ou wondered how a foreigner,an outsider to our culture,will viex the Chinese way of eating?This unit is intended to broaden your mind by helping you lokk at what you are familiar with from a completely nex approach.

I first began to learn Chinese ten years ago from a cheerful middle-aged visiting scholar from Sichuan,who was living at the time in my apartment bulding in Boston.He was a great talker,and often our lessons would turn into lengthy digressions on various aspects of Chinese Culture.The very first weo Chinese characters he taught me to write were the characters in the word for “population,”renkou.I vividly remember that he pointed to the characters on the page and said,”You see,people-mouths.Since China has a billion people to feed, this word naturally picks out the mouth as the most important part.And this can give you an important clue to Chinese personality:Food is never far from out minds.”

As I came to know more about China and Chinese people over the next few years,I found that his observation was indeedaccurate:Chinese people not only think a lot about food, they are virtually obsessed with it.The result is that Chinese culture is oftencharacterized as shi wenhua,”food culture,”Chinese people do not kid around when it comes to food.

My first direct exposure to this aspect of China came when I attended a Chinese banquet during a trip to Beijing in 1988.In the United States I had eaten Chinese food often,bot I could not have imagined how fabulous and extravagant a real Chinese banquet could be.The first six or seven dishes seemed to fill the table overflowing,with plates precariously wedged one on top of anther.With my American-bred expectations,I assumed this vast first wave of food was surely the total number of dishes to be served,and I dug in greedily,dazzled by the variety and sheerquantity. The Chinese guests,around me,have a different recreation.They seemed merely to take a bite or two of each dish and then put their chopsticks down,continuing to char.”They must not be very hungry,”I thought with a shrug,and continued my feast.

To my surprise,more dishes soon were piled on top of the already mountain ous stack.Plus two or three soups,side dishes,desserts,and delicaciesof various kinds, all seemingly enough to feed the entire People’s Liberation Army.No wonder my fellow guests had merely sampled a few bites of each dish;they knew very well that these first few items wrer just the tip of a titanic culinary iceberg.I ,however,was so stuffed after the first fifteen minutes that I could only watch in a bloated stupor as the remainder of the banquet took its course.

Years later,I still am not accustomed to this aspect of dining out in China,and it alse seems from my American perspective that Chinese people

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have an implicit rule of ordering at least one dish too many.”Enough ”is never