The shuffling of Zhao Yihe, my boss, down the office corridor came to a shocked halt when he saw me. With his hair wet, his feet in plastic slippers and a towel draped around his neck, he must have come from the bathhouse at the back of the office compound. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were shower days for men, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for women. “Did you miss the bus?” he asked.
“No, I’m eating lunch here now, downstairs,” I replied. Foreign experts like myself normally took a private bus back to our hotel for lunch, bypassing the office canteen’s limited fare and its all-in-Chinese chalkboard menu.
Zhao just raised his eyebrows in reply, a bit impressed and probably a bit concerned. Was I getting too friendly with the locals?
I enjoyed learning the words for the most frequent offerings at the canteen: eggplant with pork, green beans with pork, cauliflower with chicken, and always, Peking ravioli. A toothy young man named Wan would read off to me the day’s choices, translating when needed, and then I’d thrust my bowl through the window along with the appropriate number of ration coupons. “Eggplant with two units of rice,” I’d say in Chinese, or “Three
units of ravioli.” Taking back my bowl steaming with simple, filling food, I’d follow Wan to his dormitory room, where we’d eat and talk. Almost everyone else in the big building settled down in their offices for a half-hour or hour-long nap.
Trying to fit in as much as any Westerner working in Beijing in the 1980s could, I noted that learning what to say in any situation involved much more than the dictionary meaning of words. For instance, when your jam-packed public bus or trolley approached your stop, you needed to call out “Xia che! Xia che!” Literally this translated as “Getting out of the car,” but the loud plea to fellow passengers actually meant, “Slide out of the way
so I can push out to the door, folks!”
Likewise, I’d carefully learn the name of some un-ordinary item I needed, such as a stapler, then ask for it at the dimly lit store near the office. Almost always this prompted “Meiyou” in the flat, impassive voice of a shop assistant. Literally this meant “There isn’t any,” but going by the attitude of the assistant, it really signified “We don’t have any, and don’t bother asking when we might or where else you can get it, because I don’t care and
no one else working here does, either.”
I also had to learn the meaning of seasonal events, like why in November cabbages appeared on almost every street corner, piled high like pale green army fortifications. “Families stock up now on cabbage for the winter,” my work colleague Ming explained. “Everyone has a closet where they store cabbages. They’ll keep well for months. When it’s time to cook, we just peel off the outer layer.”
As the frigid winds of winter blew in, the cabbage piles diminished and then disappeared. Also vanishing was the colorful variety of foods served for lunch at the canteen and at our hotel for dinner. By January, options shrank to cabbage with pork or ravioli, and rarely, eggs stir-fried with tomatoes or cauliflower with pork. “They don’t have refrigerated train cars or trucks here,” my friend Annise, who worked in the bureau’s French section, noted. “In winter, fresh vegetables are available only where they still grow in the local weather. But I heard they have better supplies in the higher-grade hotels for foreigners.”
The monotony of cabbage, cabbage and more cabbage at meals bothered me more than I would have predicted. Annise felt the same. So with precious yuan saved from our one-year-contract salaries, we headed one Sunday to the legendary Peking Hotel, prepared to splurge on an eggplant or green bean dish and maybe beef or lamb if they had it. In a plush booth, we opened the tall Western-style menus and brightened at the multitudinous entrees listed. “I’ll have Beef with Green Peppers,” Annise announced to the waiter in Chinese.
“Meiyou,” he responded, in a tone resembling the bored shop assistant’s.
“I’ll have Gong Bao Chicken,” I said.
“Meiyou,” he replied again.
We named several more items on the vast menu, only to hear “Meiyou,” again, like a
reprise of Monty Python’s “spam, spam, spam, spam.”
“And what do you have?” Annise inquired. We gazed at the waiter with hope.
“Cabbage with pork, cabbage with tofu, cabbage with mushrooms,” he recited. Annise
and I looked at one another and sighed. Where food was concerned, we had at least four
more months to make our peace with “meiyou.” Or not.
Share this post with your friends.
