Study Chinese - Leaving a trail of dim sum like Hansel's trail of breadcrumbs

ENTERTAINMENT / Hot Pot Column






Leaving a trail of dim sum like Hansel's trail of breadcrumbs

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-06-29 15:45



Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. As a 12-year San
Franciscan, I tend to leave something else of mine behind in every city I
visit.

No, it's not what you think, you dirty mind. I always leave a little food
in the hotel fridge whenever I travel to another city.

It's a quirk I have demonstrated time and again. Just this week, I tried
to avert my fate by resisting putting my food in the fridge in a Shanghai
hotel. But on the morning I checked out, it occurred to me that I should
not leave food around when I go outside and shut off the air-conditioner.
So, I moved it to the fridge, making both a mental note and a physical
one on a newspaper.

Sure enough, as soon as I was out of the city, I remembered what I had
forgotten. I have always been meticulous and check every nook and crook
of the room, but somehow, it never dawns on me to open the fridge.

What I bequeath to the hotel is not of much value. Usually, it's
something like a few snack bars and some Chinese dim sum.

Strangely, I don't have a tendency to indulge in food binges and rarely
eat anything after dinner. But the thought of having something handy is
comforting. And I don't want to run up a 30-kuai bill for a chocolate bar
that sells for 3 kuai in a supermarket - hence, my habit of lugging a
little food in my suitcase.

I cannot make sense out of this ostensible contradiction. So, I conjured
up my inner Freud and did a little self-psychoanalysis, which I then
fused with Buddhism.

I was born shortly after famine struck the country in the early 1960s. It
would be chronologically reasonable to assume that in my previous
incarnation, I probably starved to death. I do not remember experiencing
hunger or anything remotely like it. But here I am, with this irrational
fear of it.

It's painful for me to attend Chinese banquets, because I have to witness
large amounts of food thrown away.

I was taught not to waste food. Before the American practices of using
doggy bags and licking your fingers clean of any remnants of food were
introduced to China, I was propounding them, eliciting sneers from
friends.

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me a fable about a wealthy family
discarding great quantities of food day after day. The poor neighbor
designed a way of "recycling" what was frittered away. One day, the rich
family went bankrupt. And the poor man led him through a dark tunnel,
which opened in a courtyard that glittered with gold. "This is how I
turned your throwaways into fortune," he said.

I didn't know how it was done. Without any knowledge of chemistry, I
thought leftover food could somehow morph into gold nuggets. Now, I would
assume the neighbor could have been a pig farmer or something.

Sometimes, I wonder what would go through the mind of the cleaning lady
when she finds my edible mementos. She'd probably think: "Is this
supposed to be a tip or a scheme to make me fat?"

In the end, perhaps this article is a psychobabble defense mechanism to
justify my own growing weight.


(China Daily 06/29/2007 page20)










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