And Your Little Dog, Too

I’d say I’ve never been one to follow trends, Tomaguchi’s and 6th grade yoyos excluded. I would also say that I’m even less of a trendsetter. I just wear what I like and try to put it into something presentable and personal. When I started having to deal with East Coast winters, I discovered how useful scarves are. And then I discovered that they’re very pretty and come in an assortment of different colors. I brought two scarves to China, and have since bought four more. The thing is, everyone likes them. I wear them every day, and I get compliments on them all the time. And now, many people are wearing them. My friends have all bought some for themselves, and then they bought them for their roommates.



Earlier this week, my friends and I decided we would like to eat dog meat. Dog. As in, woof woof. The restaurant we tried first wasn’t serving it that night, so we ended up going to a Korean restaurant instead. The only previous Korean experience I’ve had is an awful (Yvonne will back me up here) Korean Barbeque in Shanghai. So I was a little apprehensive at first, but this place was amazing. (All photos, sadly enough for my photography ability, are by Jason Foong. He’s like the CET paparazzo.)




In the middle of eat table is a small grill. You order lots of raw meat, they bring it to you, and you roast it yourself. You smell of grill for the rest of the night, but it’s so worth it. We ordered dog meat, but it was a cold dish. Sounds gross, I know, but it was good. A little spicy, a lot oily, and stringy, not unlike pork. Here I am putting it on my plate:



Up closer and personal:



We also had these nifty rice cake cube things. They are soft and chewy and come dusted in sugar. I ate a lot of them, as you can see since there were only three left when Jason took this photo.




But our appetites for dog meat were not sated by this small appetizer. So Friday, Victoria, Jason, Annetta, Victoria’s roommate Xiaotong, and I went to a small restaurant and ordered us some dog soup.




And it was good. It was very good. The broth was spicy, the meat was tender, like a soft, well-cooked beef, and it was served on the bone. I want to eat it again.

And no, the idea of eating dog does not disgust me. I do not think it is cruel to eat dog, because I do not think it is inherently cruel to eat beef or chicken (though the way they raise and slaughter the animals is a different matter). I have a dog at home, Sparky, whom I love and adore, but I didn’t feel bad when I ate dog soup. I didn’t think of my cute fuzzy Sparky, because I wasn’t eating him. I wouldn’t eat him, and I wouldn’t knowingly eat your dog, either, at least not without your consent. But now all the Chinese roommates are telling me it’s time to eat snake. Hm. I don’t know why that sounds so creepy, but it does. My friends also want to try scorpion, so that may also make it into my digestive tract.

Friday night was my classmate’s birthday, so 26 of us CETers went out for roast-it-yourself meat. Method-wise, it was not unlike the Korean restaurant, however here you fetch the meat yourself from refrigerators, then bring it back to the table and roast it, cooking the raw meat with the same chopsticks you use to eat. Probably not so sanitary.




The restaurant also had a little help-yourself buffet on a card table that featured non-meat dishes. They also had some buttery, wonderful cookies. For some reason, that night I needed cookies. Now I ask you: how many cookies do you think one person can physically eat, after a large meal, in one sitting? Now quadruple that number and that’s how many I ate. I couldn’t keep track, actually. But I ate enough that even the guys around me were impressed. I think I may have scared them a little. I don’t know, it’s just been so long since I’ve had starchy, non-oily, sugary vittles that something in my brain just said, “Eat, and don’t stop.” I feel guilty.

So while I was getting drunk on buttery, sugary goodness and probably doubling my risk for diabetes and an assortment of bacterial diseases, a good number of the guys were getting drunk on beer. Keep in mind that Chinese bottles of beer are much larger than those in America (I believe I heard someone mention that they were 40 oz bottles. I believe I am correct, but if anyone from CET is reading this and thinks I’m wrong, please correct me). So, I have an approximate math problem for you: 26 students go out for dinner. Let’s say that half of them are male. The table goes through 35 bottles of beer. The females collectively drink 8 bottles. If half the males drink a third of the remaining beers, how many beers do the other half of the males drink? I don’t know if the stats are right, but there was a lot of beer to be had. It was an incredibly fun night. I ate too much in good company—if I had died last night, I would have died happy.

On the subway ride home, I had a conversation with two girls, one of whom has decided that she wants to live the rest of her life in China, because she just feels at home here. She looks like a waiguo ren—blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. I find it admirable that she has not only found the place she wants to call home, but that it is so different from her original home and that she is brave enough to live here. No matter how long she lives in China, she will always be considered a waiguo ren. No matter how perfect her Chinese gets, or if she becomes a Permanent Resident, or if she never sets foot in America ever again, she will never, ever be considered Chinese in any way. I suppose it’s much the same for foreigners who move to America, but I feel like in America, someone who is Chinese/Chinese American (or anything, really) can still pass for American, at least superficially. Here, that is not the case. Even if my parents had moved to China and given birth to me here, pretty much nobody would consider me Chinese. This must be the sort of identity crisis that immigrants and their offspring go through. It’s tough, and I’m only beginning to understand it.

This conversation also got me thinking about where, if money were no object, I would consider home. I guess I haven’t seen enough of the world to know where I belong, but knowing how I get, I would need to be changing scenery with some frequency. I always want to have a home to come back to, a place to which I feel attached, but I also suffer from what my dad calls “itchy feet.” I get stuck in geographical ruts. I want the world to be my home.

Friday afternoon before the big roast-athon, I went with Jason to the coolest part of Beijing (in my opinion). In the Chaoyang district way out on the Fifth Ring road is a place with a bunch of buildings that used to be factories but that are now small art galleries. Jason was going there to do an article on a company that produces high-quality stereos and amplifiers and such, and he let me come along since I didn’t want to stay at school (geographical rut).

We also walked around tons of little art galleries all afternoon. I kept thinking of my dad, because he’s a sculptor, and I think he would have fit right in and loved looking at all the Chinese contemporary art. Actually, I found two paintings that I really, really wanted to buy. Here they are:




I don’t know how much they are. I’ll have to email the gallery and ask so I can find out how much money I should wish I had.

One of the galleries we went to was actually an artist’s studio. He was there painting and took to me right away because he though I was pretty. He also thought I was 17 or 18 years old.



I felt like a total idiot because I could hardly understand a word he said to me, but Jason had been to his studio last year and said that the guy had barely talked to him then, so I guess my waiguo ren-ness opened him up despite my shortcomings in communication.

This gallery/restaurant was a factory, and there’s still original paint on the walls from the Mao era that say (in Chinese) “long live Chairman Mao” and something about building a great country.





My internet’s not working so well (actually it’s not working at all), so sorry that these updates are rather far between. They also take a long time to write, prepare the pictures, and find internet that works for periods of 10 minutes or more. I’m also a little busy going out and having fun.


It’s nighttime as I write this, so zhu nimen hao meng.