Homesickness ≠ foodsickness, but it may as well

"There are you—you drive like a demon from station to station [...] It's too late to be grateful; it's too late to be late again." — David Bowie, "Station to Station" from Station to Station, 1976†

From my dormitory window I can see a portion of the neighborhood of Wudaokou, and from my vantage point the the buildings seem to quake down from a high rim to a low center, a conical slide from the tips of the Microsoft and Cernet towers to a low point near the subway station, and this dip—this fat, low dip—like an enormous sinkhole, drains right down to an epicenter where the energy of Wudaokou trembles and erupts. You can walk to this epicenter, this lowpoint in the staggered concrete, and there you'll find (sandwiched between a restaurant and a lingerie boutique) a two-foot wide window and a long, thin kitchen where they sell hot dogs. 

The place is called Holy Fries!, either an exuberant statement about the nature of the blessed french fries or a 1960s-era-Batman-TV-show Robinesque exclamation, either of which works for the little 饭馆。Holy Fries! suits the neighborhood, a university-dotted area known for its terrible pedestrian-laced traffic and its high level of diversity (due to the amount of foreign students pouring in). Holy Fries! is owned by and operated by a husband-wife/girlfriend-boyfriend duo (I haven't done my homework) of Australian or German (him, and again, I really haven't done my homework) and Chinese (her) descent. Like Wudaokou and its residents, theirs is a marriage of two hemispheres (unless he's from Australia, d'oh!), and the American or Italian style dogs and the "French" fries are enough to remind any worldly student of their greasy hometurf food. 

I went to Holy Fries! at the suggestion of a friend who once lived in Beijing, and the real reason he suggested it and another friend and I went was to quench our thirst for that rarest of sodapop gems, nearly impossible to find in China: Dr. Pepper. Hujiao Boshi, in the parlance of our region, isn't processed here (like Coke or the Chinese variety of Mt. Dew). Rather, it is imported by daring restaurateurs like the folks at Holy Fries! or the owners of Grandma's Kitchen††. It is a sweet/sharp reminder of home, and, when returning from Kunming (to Beijing, as noted in an earlier post), I strangely longed for such a taste. On that plane, that three-hour jaunt across the country, I felt my first real pang of homesickness, and the first thing it directly latched onto in my mind wasn't friends or family but food, oddly enough, and I craved a deli sandwich or a plate of nachos, and finally this craving for recognizable food led to a desire to see friends and family, to tell them stories, to hear what they have been doing, to listen to them simply speak, and finally to simply be home, to be in an open grassland where there is near-silence and solitude, to bike along a gravel road in the Midwestern countryside and be at peace, with what I don't know, but to simply be at peace. And this longing, as real as it may be, can be curbed by drinking an imported can of soda.

What I need to say though, is that in about three hours I leave for Huangshan (黄山), and though homesickness may hit me from time to distant time, there is entirely too much to see in the world to return home at the slightest tinge of desire. Until then, I'll drive like a demon.

†A twofold footnote here: 1) I will be leaving for Huangshan, Nanjing, and Qingdao very soon and won't return until April 17th, so I won't be posting anything for at least a week and a half. 2) David Bowie's Station to Station is not only the man's greatest album (IMHO) but boasts his largest and deepest-diving lyrics possibly in his career. Each song has catchy hooks and Bowie wailing, of course, but he packs some amazing punches beneath all the production. Check it out, maybe.

††Grandma's Kitchen, yes. When my friend and I first went to find Dr. Pepper, Holy Fries! was closed due to a power outage, so we ended up going to the only other place we knew of that sold the stuff: Grandma's Kitchen. Unfortunately, they sell the imported goods for 20 kuai a pop (pun unfortunately intended). The cost one must pay for perfection, though, is great, so we grabbed a few cans despite and enjoyed them for all they were worth.

Consider the Jiaozi

"There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other." — David Foster Wallace

Jiaozi, pot stickers, gyoza, momocha, jiao'er, or, more simply, Chinese dumplings have existed, been cooked and eaten, for, at the most liberal side of the estimations, at least four thousand years. The guotie, or pan-fried jiaozi (the most delicious and least good-for-you variation on the Chinese dumpling) has been around for a less-hefty one thousand years (all according to Wikipedia) and is reportedly good for the human soul, though, metaphysically speaking, the sustenance of the soul is a mystery only penetrated insofar as knowing that metaphorical versions of chicken soup possess the ability to lift a soul in a low moment, though (and this is philosophical backtracking) the notion that there can even be said to be "metaphorical versions of chicken soup" let alone a soul that consumes them — that notion requires a house-of-cards stack of premises that is, alas, a bit fragile. These guotie (called Peking ravioli in Bah-ston), regardless of their supposed ability to sustain the human soul, do possess the uncanny quality of filling the human stomach with meat, vegetables, and a starchy outer layer in one convenient package without resorting to the sandwich-stack Western style of doing things. And, ah, the kicker: you can find them (really) anywhere in Beijing, and they're dirt cheap.

In 2006, the average yearly salary for an urban worker in Beijing was 1,759 yuan (US$1,517). Compare this to the average weekly wage of a Manhattanite: $2,404. In China in 1959-61 somewhere between 14 and 40 million people died of famine. The national population in 1949 was about 400 million; today it is roughly 1.6 billion. Violent crime has increased steadily since the 1980s. The burgeoning gap between rich and poor defies the notion of a classless society.

In Beijing, steaming, squat, ill-painted little food vendor stands pepper the busier neighborhoods (really they're all "busier" neighborhoods), operating year-round to supply the cheapest, best taste-to-price ratio dishes of any restaurant, bistro, snack bar, or rathskeller in Northeastern China, and these often-family-run mini-businesses sweep in the tourists, the students, the bustling work crowds to their facades — their sliding windows — to offer up what you might call fast food or takeaway but would more accurately be referred to as street food. One of these stands with an indecipherable name (one might say inscrutable, an inscrutable name) pops up from the concrete in front of a place called the U-Center in Wudaokou, and most people refer to the little noodle shop as, simply, The Jiaozi Stand, though, to be fair, dozens of other jiaozi stands exist within a half-mile radius of this one. Despite its rather plain sobriquet, the stand, with its quiet fry chef and ever-smiling, matronly shifu, has some of the best food in the neighborhood, and its specialty (you guessed it: jiaozi) can be had for the steal-of-a-price of only six kuai (for a plate of ten). Upstreet there's a McDonald's. Downstreet there's another McDonald's. KFC is a block away. A Big Mac combo is 22 kuai. A chicken sandwich with fries is 14 kuai. A plate of jiaozi is 6 six kuai. Six renminbi.

Han Dynasty, 200 AD, generations away, in the dead times, cold times, evolutionarily infinitesimally close, no one knows anyone anymore, cold mountaintops open freezing plains plateaus iced over, before us — here Zhang Zhongjing, a medical practitioner, author of Treatise on Cold Pathogenic and Miscellaneous Diseases — here he took two jiaozi and said to the cold and ultimately dead, Here, warm your ears.

Making jiaozi involves a lot of crimping, a lot of folding over and pinching and massaging. To make jiaozi you have to trap the filling and close it in, then you can boil it or steam it or deep-fry it or, if you're a Beiyu student with a hankering for the cheap, pan-fry it. Jiaozi is often dipped in vinegar or various other sauces, but it can be eaten plain, too, or with some noodles or rice, or it can be eaten as part of a full meal as a main or supporting dish. To eat jiaozi you have to get a firm grip with your chopsticks, but if you squeeze too tightly the jiaozi will be sent flying and ah, what a pain. To make jiaozi, to eat jiaozi, you need to have a steady hand, you have to be just a bit careful, but you can still take risks so long as you keep that hand steady. You can even get fancy. Just remember that the jiaozi is old, older than you, and when you're eating something that has a history spanning empires —literally spanning empires — well, something's going on, and maybe someone sat where you sit and warmed their ears, and maybe not, maybe they just kept on moving, because they didn't have time to do anything but stay alive.