Presumptuous behaviour (China)

 

Presumptuous:  (dictionary definition) (of a person or their behaviour) failing to observe the limits of what is permitted or appropriate.

The series I’m watching at the moment has a scene where the two boys (late teens) arrive in Guangzhou (old rendition Canton).  As they disembark from the train, some of their bags are grabbed by two men who are freelance porters looking to earn a bit of money carrying people’s bags for the short distance from the platform to the front entrance.  When the boys challenged them, they reduced the original fee of 5 yuan to 3 yuan, then called the boys penny pinchers when the boys said no.  This is set in the late 80s.

    It reminds me of something that had happened on my second trip to China in 1997, with my brother and a then-student (a Westerner — let’s call her Mary).

    It was a two-destination trip:  first to 厦门 Xiamen (old rendition Amoy, famous for the soya sauce brand name) in 福建省 Fujian province, then to my father’s birthplace in the 潮州 Cháozhōu / Teochew dialect area of 广东省 Guangdong province, both in S.E. China.

    My brother had been to my father’s village a number of times, and had asked me more than once if I’d like to go.  He’d caught me in a nostalgic mood when he asked yet again in 1997, so I thought I’d give it a go, although I’d sworn in 1988 after my 37-day film shoot that I wouldn’t go back there ever again, nor have anything to do with the people or the culture.

    After a few days in Xiamen, we took a long distance coach bound for 汕头 Shantou (old rendition Swatow), the nearest town in 广东省 Guangdong province for my father’s village.  The coach driver had forgotten about our request to be dropped off at an earlier spot in the outskirts (where we were to be picked up by my brother’s contact), so Mary and I were left standing somewhere beyond the meeting point while my brother walked back to see if he could find his contact.

    There we were, two women (one of whom was a Westerner) standing by a main road leading to Shantou, with luggage and other bags sitting at our feet.  We could’ve been wanting a minibus into town, it’s true.  All the minibuses heading that way would slow down and ask if we’d like to get on board, to which we shook our heads and said no.

    One of them, however, actually came to a halt, in spite of our having declined.  The conductor got off, grabbed two of our bags and started to get back on the bus.

    Incidentally, he had picked out the two most expensive-looking bags:  one was my brother’s leather attache case, the other was an airport duty free goods bag with a couple of bottles of whisky in it.

    I grabbed his shirt from behind, shouting, “Hey, put those bags down!”

    He held on to them, saying, “Oh, Miss, I’m only helping you to put them on the bus.”

    I said, “But we’d said no, we didn’t want to go into town.  Put those bags down, or else…” and at this point, I’d picked up a huge plastic bag with a big tin in it, swinging it, à la cowboy with a lasso, in the air above my head.

    What he didn’t know was that the tin was filled with pastry called Kueh Kapit*, each shaped like a hollow cigar, therefore very light.  The hollow cigar-shape pastries take up a lot of room, hence the size of the tin.  It was this big tin in the huge plastic bag I was swinging in the air above my head, threatening to whack his head with it, that the bag-grabbing minibus conductor saw.  He immediately put the two bags down, and they scooted off.

    This story with the dramatic last bit had my family laughing for days after that.

(China, 1997)

PS:  I’m normally a flight, rather than fight, person.  Having been brought up to think that it’s unfeminine behaviour to fight in public, my brain freezes up when there’s any friction or potential confrontation.  Even if I was in the right or being wrongly accused of something, I’m unable to react.  I might come up with the right defence some five days, if not weeks, later, so I don’t know where I got the courage from on that particular day, or how I managed to react so quickly.

* (AI overview) In Singapore, a hollow, cigar-shaped pastry resembling a love letter is called Kuih Kapit. It's a thin, crispy crepe-like biscuit, often enjoyed during Chinese New Year. The name "love letter" comes from its historical use in conveying affectionate messages between lovers. The pastry is made by pouring batter onto a hot, patterned mold and then rolled into a cylinder while still warm.

Mother said mustn’t eat green vegetables (Singapore)

 

When I was in my teens, some distant relative’s wife died of cancer, leaving him with two young children: a girl of about eight, and a boy of about six.

    He was away a lot, working on construction projects in Malaysia, so he couldn’t look after them.  It was decided that the siblings should be split up, maybe so as not to burden kind relatives with two children at once.  The boy was sent off to some relative on the mother’s side.  My grandma took the girl in on her coconut plantation.

    One of the things I noticed about the girl right from the start was that she’d refuse to eat green vegetables.

    A bit of cultural background here.  In all my years of growing up in Singapore, I’d never heard of children having trouble eating their greens, not in the way I’ve heard about British children doing it.

    British children, from what I’d read, never liked eating their vegetables because the traditional British way of cooking them was to “boil them to death” (according to an expression that cropped up regularly in the literature I’d come across on the subject), so we hear of British children typically hating Brussels sprouts and cabbage, for example.

 

    The Chinese way of cooking vegetables is most commonly stir-frying them, so they’re not overcooked, they stay fresh and crunchy (not boiled to almost a mush), with the flavour retained.  If children out East don’t like their veg, it generally would be them being fussy (like the younger me about coriander and spring onion, which I’d call “smelly veg”).

    With this in mind, this orphaned girl refusing to eat ALL greens was a bit puzzling.

    I tried to get to the bottom of it, as I didn’t think she should exclude greens from her diet altogether.  I went through the list of possibilities:  was it the way it was cooked, or the sauce used (soya sauce, bean paste, chilli sauce, etc.)?  She couldn’t give a satisfactory answer.

    In the end, she said, “My mother told us not to eat anything that’s green.”

    That was even more puzzling:  how could a woman tell her children not to eat green vegetables?  I couldn’t check with the mother in this case, of course.

    After a while, the penny dropped:  in my dialect (Teochew / 潮州 Cháozhōu, a S.E. Chinese dialect), the word for “green” (the colour) sounds exactly the same as the word for “raw” (uncooked).

    The Chinese are not big on raw vegetables (e.g., salads that feature much more prominently in the Western diet).  I grew up hearing grown-ups saying, "I’m not a horse or a cow!"

    It could be partly due to health concerns, rather like the Chinese not drinking water straight out of the tap, they need to boil it first to make sure it’s safe.  (Just my own theory.)

    So, I put it to the girl:  “I think your mother meant raw rather than green colour veg.”

    Once this interpretation was introduced into her head, the barriers came down, and she ate all her greens after that.

(Singapore, 1960s)

The nature vs nurture of food: 07 (Habits from upbringing)

 

The Chinese generally use soya sauce in the cooking process, or as a dip, but not for adding on to a dish once it’s served up.  Not even by an individual for his/her own portion  — it doesn’t work, anyway, as the helpings come by the chopstickful, so it’ll be too fiddly adding a drop of soya sauce to each chopstick helping of food.

    I grew up being taught never to ask for soya sauce as a dinner guest, even if I found the food bland for my taste, because it implies that the cook had not got it just right in the kitchen.  Adding soya sauce to one’s food at the dinner table could, therefore, be insulting to the cook.  

    I apply the same principle when eating out in a restaurant.

 

    Even eating fish and chips, which I love, I instinctively hardly ever add salt or vinegar or ketchup, the most common condiments for it.  I eat it plain, as it is.

    That’s the nurture bit, from how I was taught as a child, and it has stuck right through my life.

    If I’m given a salad without the dressing, I’ll eat it plain (although I enjoy salad dressings).  

    Again, the nurture element:  I don’t add extra to the dish at the table.

    That’s how deep conditioning goes.  In me, anyway.

The nature vs nurture of food: 06 (Saltiness)

 

I’m from a S.E.Chinese dialect group, Teochew (Cháozhōu / 潮州), whose speakers eat their food quite bland on the whole.

    As a child, I’d hear these generalised statements, “The Cantonese eat their food very salty and oily.”  (True or not, I’m just reporting what I’d grown up hearing the adults say.)

    The Brazilian friend, who’s mentioned in the other Nature vs nurture blog (on the size of the cooked ingredients), dipped into a Chinese dish I brought one day and said, “You didn’t put any salt in it??!!”

    She and her Portuguese husband love Chinese cooking, and Chinese cooking ingredients (e.g., soya sauce).  They don’t just add soya sauce to the food while it’s being cooked (which is what the Chinese do).  They would also sometimes actually drizzle soya sauce fairly liberally over their Western cooking at the dining table.

    She even makes what she calls “ramen”: Chinese egg noodles with a stir-fried mixed veg and meat.  Yes, I did find it too salty for my palate.

    So, it’s very much nurture when it comes to saltiness and other flavouring intensity.

Blame the other, not the udder

I don’t just teach the language, I throw in the cultural bits too:  cultural (vs grammatical) usage of language; cultural behaviour of the people; etiquette; taboos; etc.  So here's a blog about a food item that is received differently by the Chinese and Westerners, brought on by something a student (white, British) said during her lesson.

    The student has been to China more than once to visit her son who works out there.  She said she’d tried offal there before, in the form of udder, and found it bland.  (I'm surprised that she even dared to try it at all, but then she's quite an adventurous person — she has to be, braving learning Mandarin...)

    Offal-based dishes are a common enough offering in the East, at meals eaten outside, not just cooked and consumed at home to save money.

    They taste good to the Chinese, because of the mindset:  no squeamishness, therefore no revulsion from the psychological influence that I’ve found in a lot of Westerners I’ve come across.

    Also, because of the processing: 

• Pre-cooking:  properly cleaning out items that might smell, e.g., intestines.  My family used to buy pig stomach for soup, and spend hours cleaning it out — repeatedly with flour, which removes any lingering pungent smell.

• The actual cooking:  the right condiments and sauces can greatly enhance the taste of offal that’s not particularly flavoursome, or reduce the impact of the strong innards taste.  Dark soya sauce, ginger, star anise and cloves are common ingredients for this purpose.  Chilli (sauce or fresh or dried), too, of course, as it would mask almost any other smell/taste.  The pig tripe soup we used to make at home would be cooked typically with a big handful of white peppercorn inside the stomach for the flavour to permeate through to the whole item, which would then be cut up into strips before serving.

    So, for the dish that my student had found bland in China, blame the other (element(s)), not the udder.

(Sorry, can't resist the word play...)

Why are Brussels sprouts so hated by so many?

I don’t remember children in my childhood days in Singapore being so fussy about eating their greens.  It seems to be a big and fairly universal problem here in Britain, if not the whole of the Western world.

The Brits are traditionally known for boiling their veg to death.  One reads stories about cabbage cooked until a pulp, leaving the house reeking of cabbage for weeks.  No wonder the Brits hate the cruciferous family of veg.  They are very nutritious, yet are avoided whenever possible, it seems.  

It is, therefore, the presentation that’s at fault — in this case, over-cooking it, not flavouring it except with water and salt.  (To be fair, the Brits have come a long way since with their attitude to cooking, to the point where Britain has built up quite a reputation for its gastronomy.)

It’s almost unheard of in Chinese cooking to just boil their veg, never mind boil it to death.

It’s so easy to be a vegetarian in Singapore — out East as a whole region, actually.  

One can just have three basic staple flavouring ingredients for a stir-fry: soya sauce, garlic, red chilli.  

There’s a wide range of green leafy veg in the market.  Just stir-fry any of those with the three ingredients, and each one will come out tasting delicious — and different, purely on the basis of their own flavour.  Hardly any work at all.

Just to name a few off the top of my head: 

* Indian spinach (the stalks are reddish at the base) 

* Chinese mustard leaves (commonly served in a Chinese restaurant) 

* amaranth

* sweet potato leaves 

* pak choi

* mange tout (/snow peas) 

* runner beans

They all taste different from each other, so there’s no need to wrack one’s brain for different — let alone elaborate — cooking methods (unless one likes to experiment).  Just use soya sauce, garlic, and red chilli.  Pak choi is very bland, so it doesn’t even need garlic or red chilli.

Brussels sprouts can be quartered and stir-fried the same way.  One can vary it by adding dried mushrooms — the dark brown of the mushroom in combination with the dark green of the sprouts makes a visually attractive dish without having to do little presentation tricks like drizzling some arty sauce around it on the plate or topping it with a carved vegetable rose.  Just stir-fry and serve.  

Oh yes, forgot about the contribution of the garlic and red chilli:  white/cream of the garlic, red of the chilli.  That’s four colours in one dish without needing to have a creative streak.  (That’s why I like it, as I’m not arty at all…)

The hidden message in Chinese food 06: consuming vinegar (Taiwan)

Another Conoco Taiwan local staff lunch outing was to a dumpling restaurant.  I was absolutely amazed at how many dumplings my colleagues could each eat.  Even the women could eat something like 25 of them at one sitting.

The simplest dip for dumplings is soya sauce and vinegar (醋 cù).  One can also add one or all of the following: chilli oil, sesame oil, garlic paste, ginger, chopped spring onion, coriander.  Anything that one fancies really, I guess.

My youngest colleague, Mary Fu 傅曼麗, then only 21 (three weeks younger than I), had her saucer filled with something like one part soya sauce and four parts vinegar.  

Accountant Cray Chang 張城隆, as usual, immediately remarked, “哇，你很会吃醋！wa, nǐ hěn huì chī cù / Wow, you very much know how to eat vinegar.”  

This was an obvious pun, because 吃醋 chī cù / “eat vinegar” in Chinese means “to get jealous”, so Cray was saying to Mary, “You get jealous easily (You’re very good at eating vinegar).”

Mary’s instant response was, 我只会吃湿醋，不会吃干醋 / wǒ zhǐ huì chī shī cù, bù huì chī gān cù / “I only know how to eat wet vinegar, not dry vinegar”.

(Taiwan, 1975)