A mainland Chinese student, who was on the M.A. Bilingual Translation course I was teaching in the late 90s, was clearing out her room, and gave me a whole stack of a Chinese equivalent of Reader’s Digest.
In it was a short article by a mainland Chinese couple who’d gone to Germany for their study abroad.
They were out walking in the woods one day with a German couple, when they saw a plant they thought they recognised as 薺菜 / 荠菜 / jì cài. When they asked their German friends what it was, they were told, “It’s just a weed.”
Later, the Chinese couple went back to that spot and picked a load of the “weed”, cooked it and confirmed that it was indeed what they thought it was.
They then invited the German friends over for dinner a few days later, and served up the “weed”: as a stir fry, and in the filling of home-made dumplings. When asked for their opinion, the Germans said it was delicious. The Chinese couple then said, “This is what you called ‘a weed’ the other day when we asked you.”
薺菜 / 荠菜 / jì cài is shepherd’s purse in English, with the Latin name of Capsella bursa-pastoris.
It is also widely considered a weed here in the UK (by non-foragers), but there are deep frozen, commercially packaged dumplings with specifically 薺菜 filling that are sold in Chinese supermarkets over here.
So, what’s a weed to some is, for others, money-making, dumpling-filling material, not just used in home cooking (in order to save money).
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