I have fantasized
for many years of world travel with the organizing theme of exploring local
cuisines.
At home, my
criterion for my favorite places to eat is simple; find a place where no one –
except perhaps the cashier - speaks English. The tiniest hole-in-the-wall
family run dives – that usually won’t be there in six months – are my personal
favorites.
While living in
Beijing, my favorite restaurants were in the miniscule Muslim (Uyghur/Turkish)
district where no one spoke English and most food was Halal (essentially the
same as kosher). I would take the waiter and walk around the other customers
and point to what looked good to me.
I could only hope
it was as good as it looked (and smelled). My biggest problem was that I never
knew what anything was called, so I couldn’t order it again.
When it comes to
food, I have made the transition from picky to unpronounceable to
unidentifiable. I'm not Asian, but my local Asian store has tempted me with
enoki mushrooms (they look like miniature elongated alien life forms)
hard-boiled ptarmigan eggs, and fish cakes as well as things a few degrees
closer to normal like fresh tofu, seasoned bean sprouts and seasoned &
toasted seaweed.
Once in a while I'll venture into the entirely incomprehensible; the bags,
pouches, jars and sometimes open bins of bulbous, gelatinous, tangy smelling,
sometimes pulsing globs taunt me not only with their scents and textures but
with their uses, their preparation and their sources. Is this particular vat of
steaming multi-colored brightness a vegetable delight, a soaking for aching
feet or part of an untranslatable religious or coming of age ritual? Is this
breakfast, a spiritual endurance test or some sort of sensory-overload baptism
which will leave me shivering and shaking and saying “That was wonderful!” or
“Never again” or some unhinged combination of both?
One city in
Southern China had as its local specialty “stinky tofu”. I had never heard of
it until I saw a crowd around a food stand that smelled like fresh sewage. They
walked away with a multi-colored glob on a stick – and a look of bliss.
So yes, I had to
try it. Beyond the gut-wrenching smell, it was wonderful…sort of like sweet
& sour on steroids, delicious and disgusting at the same time. In a sense,
looking back, perhaps my whole time in China could be summed up in that fierce
dichotomy; delight and horror, squalor and unspeakable beauty, tedium mixed
with flashes of unmitigated exaltation; a sweet & sour of the soul with no
sense at all of what the next moment would hold.
The traveler’s
mind is an acquired taste, a disciplined muscle. One learns as one goes – or
not.
Far from home or even at a (relatively) typical day at work, I pluck insights
from absurdity, life lessons from the endless parade of frustrations and
minutiae of every day life.
As I meet and
work with people from around the world, I realize that we have intense,
non-negotiable differences that leave us puzzled, frustrated and sometimes
lost. Yet at almost exactly the same time I recognize our common ground that
surpasses all the cultural divides. The delights, occasionally, trump the
crises.
After a year in
China I returned to what I thought was home. I had changed, home had changed,
and my world had shifted.
Somehow I had
expected life in America to be, well, American; but the monochromic, single
race dominant America is long-gone, at least in my region.
Here, for example
are only a few first names from just one
current class of mine; Sida, Zhixiang, Parambir, Igor, Geliza, Junyi,
Chenggang, Hua and Mahogany.
Every day, as I
see my students (and struggle with their names) I am reminded that my world,
local and global, is one in flux and everyone seems to be everywhere.
On a daily basis
I work with students from Viet-Nam, Cambodia, Moldova, Rumania, Iran, Korea and
many, many, other far-flung places. My home has, for whatever reason, become
theirs.
They remind me
that a key aspect of our era might not be wrapped around technology – as useful
as that is – but it is personal mobility. We see a large scale migration not
too different from the movements as people moved in response to the Ice Ages.
Now those who can afford to are leaving their roots and making a life their
ancestors could never have imagined.
These pioneers of
a new culture are my students. Perhaps
they are dissatisfied with their life options at home, or perhaps they will
return, but either way, they and their world will never be the same.
For the past few
years I have not travelled as much as I would have liked, but even so, I have
had a constant flow of the foreign. The wide world comes to me now, but I’m
ready to meet it again on its own turf.
