Chinese Food

(This is post #4. To start with post #1, click on "Deja Vu" at right and work your way up.)

Our Olympic trip was amazing, and the more time that passes the more the non-amazing aspects fade from memory. For example, I can't even remember anymore how friggin' hot and humid it was when we schlepped out to Shanghai's Hong Kou district to visit our former home at the SISU Foreign Experts Building, although if you looked at our pictures you can see how revoltingly sweaty we all were. Man, was that gross. However, one challenge that will not be soon forgotten was keeping the kids fed. I had expected it to be tough to sell Elsa on Chinese food. I had not anticipated that she would go on full-blown strike against any non-white food. Her diet consisted almost exclusively of rice, totally plain noodles and pancakes. (Yes, I know that the outside of a pancake is gold, but the inside is ... white.) What kind of mood do you suppose a little girl is in most of the time when all she eats is carbohydrate? I'm sorry, let me rephrase the question -- what kinds of moods? -- because there were actually two varieties of mood in evidence: (1) Totally spazzy, bouncing off the walls, shouting random gibberish, or (2) totally bereft, sobbing, shouting inbetween sobs, "But I WANT/DON'T WANT XYZ!" The highs and lows were quite pronounced. Not a lot of middle ground.

After about a week Elsa started to have GI trouble, and we explained to her the connection between what goes in and what comes out. This led to two hilarious moments when Elsa announced in public, at the top of her lungs, "I'm going to drink my water now so that my poops won't hurt!" (But perhaps the word "poop" is not widely taught in Beijing English classes, as I was the only person on the subway to crack up at this statement.)

William was also following the All-White Diet, limiting his intake to two items: milk from my left breast and milk from my right breast. I have been desperately trying to wean the little man off of daytime nursing for a couple of months now, but in China it was just pointless. He destroyed the collars of 3 of my shirts as he insistently tried to gain access to the source of all nourishment. It did not take me long to realize that resistance was futile. (Yes, my baby son is the Borg.) If I tried to deny him he went absolutely maniac on me, so I decided that the embarrassment of nursing in public – not exactly commonplace in China – was preferable to the embarrassment of an all-out tantrum. William, by the way, is not the discreet nurser that his big sister was. With Elsa it was no big deal to breastfeed in public because she would latch on and calmly suckle under my shirt-tail without making a big scene. William likes to multi-task, so while he nurses he likes to lift mommy's shirt and expose as much boob as he possibly can. When I try to restrain his wandering hand he always yanks it away from me and grabs onto the shirt again. I am convinced that he thinks it is a funny game to play with Mommy. He also likes variety, so he will take a few swigs off boob #1, then pop off for a grab at boob #2, leaving #1 hanging for all to enjoy the view.

Because I hadn't been nursing full time prior to the Olympics, Mr. Man would get hungry in the middle of the night and wake up yelling. So his diet also had a majorly negative effect on the rest of the family's sleeping patterns.

What was especially surprising about the whole eating situation was that both kids rejected food that they eat regularly at home. Elsa LOVES watermelon, and she really likes pineapple and strawberries, all of which were available all the time, in the hotel breakfast buffet and at the hospitality suite. She would have NOTHING to do with these fruits in China, beyond picking them up and announcing their names in Chinese (loudly, duh) to anyone who happened to hear her (which would be anyone in a 100-foot radius), then putting the mauled pieces back on a serving dish for others to enjoy. I tried taking her to the hypermarket (which is like a supermarket, except bigger, louder and more crowded) to choose things she'd like to eat, but she preferred instead to re-enact one of her favorite Chinese videos. By the time we got to Shanghai we were desperate to get some protein into her, so Jonathan bought her a McDonald's hamburger, which she said she wanted. But once it was presented to her it was no go – it turned out that Elsa only wanted a hamburger if she could go to the McDonald's Playplace. Sadly, neither the McD's on Nanjing Road nor the one in the basement of our hotel had a playground, so Elsa refused to eat her burger. William at least got some protein every morning when he snarfed scrambled eggs and yogurt from the breakfast buffet. (I refused to think about the food-borne illness one might catch by eating runny eggs in China.)

Sukey was, as usual, the heroine of the food story, as she somehow got Elsa to eat a few pieces of broccoli when they went to the food court next door to the JW. I was impressed that Sukey knew how to say "broccoli" in Mandarin, let alone get some into Elsa's system. Apparently William ate broccoli, too. WOW!! (When is this girl going to realize that she should drop out of her fancy-pants liberal arts college, abandon her career aspirations and be our full-time nanny???)

If I bore the brunt of William's food issues, Jonathan paid a high price too. He is all about food and had been looking forward to authentic Chinese fare, soooo much better in China than in Chinatown. And when we were living in Shanghai he was deprived of Chinese food during our last month because I was pregnant with Elsa and nauseated by the mere thought of dishes I had loved when we first arrived. We spent our last few weeks in Shanghai sampling the restaurants of whiteytown – oh wait, I mean, of the expat neighborhoods. We ate Mexican, Indian, Thai, American, Continental, etc., because of my queasiness vis-a-vis Chinese food. Now the source of that queasiness is a 4-year-old bundle of energy, and she is still coming between Jonathan and his Chinese food! Of course, it wasn't entirely her fault – part of the problem was that we were often at Olympic venues at meal time, and as we posted earlier the food offerings there were crap. Non-Chinese crap. So our Chinese meals consisted of... (1) dim sum in the hospitality suite, (2) won-ton soup from room service in Beijing, (3) one single dinner out at a restaurant across the street from the JW called "South Beauty," and (4) Shanghai noodles and fried rice from room service in Shanghai, (which was surprisingly good but not particularly exotic).

Jonathan expects to return to Shanghai for a meeting this winter, so I hope he will gorge himself on the finest local cuisine he can find!