East-West Station

“I love babies, but I couldn’t eat a whole one”, said someone once. Some grumpy old man I guess, but I couldn’t find out who, even on Godgle. In any case, it used to be my attitude more or less, and until very very recently I found it very hard to imagine myself as a Daddy or much less as a (shock horror!) kindergarten teacher.

Having been an English teacher for donkey’s years, I used to get asked from time to time to teach children and my answer always used to be, “I don’t do kids”. But about 5 months ago when I went with my wife and 1 year-old baby to a nearby swanky kindergarten to inquire about prices and lessons etc, I was again offered a job and on very good terms. I only had to teach weekend mornings for a couple of hours and my baby daughter could go to the kindergarten for free anytime she wanted, and on top of this they’d pay me a hundred an hour. I told them I had never taught kids before (and only just resisted saying that I never want to) but they shrugged this off and said I should just try it out…so I did. This kindergarten is a franchise of a well known Australian brand, “Kindyroo!”, and they teach all their “lessons” in English, with a Chinese translator. All the foreign instructors apart from me are Filipinos, and the Chinese management was keen to have “a white face” at their school, to appeal to the daft and rather racist idea that a proper “外教 waijiao/ foreign teacher” shouldn’t be asian looking. Ho hum, good for me I guess.

The lessons turned out to be surprisingly easy and enjoyable. I have only ever had to teach the “cooking class” and so on weekend mornings I help the little darlings to make tacos or cookies or cupcakes or burgers or whatever. It’s a “language and culture” cooking class, so we introduce them to western food and teach them some polite phrases “Yes please, thank you very much, it’s yummy etc” and run through the list of ingredients in English and get them to repeat. And I usually get to sample the fares, so what a great job! And the kids are lucky because I don’t actually do any of the cooking, we have a proper chef who does it. Lessons would be deserted and the school would be forced to close were I the chef.

The age range is 2-6, and they pay 190RMB ($26) each for this particular class, which makes it rather pricey. As I said before, the school is very nicely designed and decorated, and the staff are well trained and good at their job. Apart from me that is, I’m just some big-nosed joker who turns up and tries not to scare anyone… and as I have to do a bit of singing and dancing every lesson, that’s not an easy task.

And I have found that teaching kids in short spells is not too bad, but it’s tiring and I wouldn’t want to do much more of it than I do now. It takes a sunnier temperament than mine to “keep up with the kids” and although they are mostly deeply cute and well behaved I just couldn’t hack it as a full time job. Most of the staff at Kindyroo are there because they love kids and while most of them are also well-adjusted adults, there are a few who have “the look”. This “look” is a kind of glaze to their features that radiates the unfazeable radiant cheerfulness of the terminally baby-besotted. (And, sorry, but it is an exclusively female trait.) Maybe these types start to revert to normal if you take them far away enough from kids but as I’ve never met them outside of work, I wouldn’t really know.”The look” is not so obviously a bad thing of course, but it reminds me of the “Stepford Wives” or “Brave New World” a little too much for my comfort.

Maybe the most positive thing to come out of all this is that I am able to be unabashedly warm and fuzzy in my feelings and reports about Chinese kiddies. We have all read in some papers, I think, that because of the one-child policy China is bringing up a nation of rottenly spoilt “little Emperors”…but my findings are quite to the contrary. This is an expensive school we are talking about and the well-heeled mummies are clad in designer clothes and accompanied by nannies and so there is a fair bit of potential for pampered little brats. But they are not; they are charming and well behaved and lovable and…ayah, I am becoming a big soppy baby softy.

Oh yes, and the best way is to boil gently for half a day or so, depending on weight. I found that roasting and frying leaves the meat a bit too tough. Add salt according to taste. Yummy!

After slightly more than a year in Dalian, I’m off back “home” to England for a couple of weeks. My university gives me a return flight at the end of every year (when they give you a single it’s time to look for another job) and so on Feb 8th I’ll be jetting off and leaving my poor wife and baby daughter to fend for themselves in the bleak North-East midwinter.

What am I looking forward to? What do I miss about dear old Blighty? Other than family and friends obviously.

Well, I want some good steak and proper bacon. In fact, when I wake up in England I want to have my proper bacon with some free range eggs. Then for my next breakfast I want to have some non-sweet sausages, maybe with some Worcester sauce or some Colman’s mustard. Then some black pudding.

And I want bread and cheese. I want Vintage Cheddar and Cheshire, and some Stilton and Stinking Bishop. With crusty sugar-free bread.

Too much sugar in the wrong places in Chinese cuisine!

And I want some more bread, with hummus and big green olives. And then I want some pasta and pesto with generous sprinklings of Parmesan, washed down with good red wine. And then I want some Tiramisu.

I want, I want!

I want to sit in the pub and drink real ale by the barrelful. London Pride and London Porter, Old Speckled Hen and Old Peculiar, and Bishop’s Finger and Hobgoblin. But, actually, since most good ale comes at almost 3 pounds a pint and since you can get a banquet for that in China, I will limit my pub crawls to a couple of sessions.

The other thing is that you don’t get a wide range of international food in Dalian, so I’ll go to a Thai restaurant to eat some Som Tam with sticky rice and Singha. Then maybe go Greek for some rich lamb stew with Retsina. Then it’ll be time for a Balti and some Kingfisher.

And I don’t want any fish ‘n’ chips. They’re shite.

As you can no doubt deduce, I am an enthusiastic trencherman/complete greedyguts.

Actually, I’ve lost 8 kilos in China over the last 12 months. I mean, I love the wonderful Chinese, Korean and Japanese food here in Dalian, but it’s just not fattening enough. Plus I can afford to play squash regularly here, and go to a very good and nearby gym.

But what else to do in Merry Old England other than to scoff and quaff?

I’ll go to the British museum for a day…the best museum in the world and it’s free! And, if it’s not raining, I’ll make sure to make time for a Sunday morning at the always entertaining and occasionally enlightening Hyde Park speaker’s corner: an unthinkable place in China.

Then I’ll go to some non-censored second-hand bookshops. And I’ll see if there’s any decent bands or poetry readings or political debates, or other such cultural events that don’t exist in Dalian.

Then I’ll do some shopping for jackets and jumpers at Marks and Sparks and get some shaving cream and deodorant at the Body Shop. Fascinating stuff, eh?

My big regret is that I won’t be able to fit in a game of cricket. Now that’s what I miss the most perhaps. Ah yes, I miss the cricket.

And that’s about it really. I don’t miss the telly and I can get the radio and the papers online.

I’m looking forward to it. I like England, although I don’t want to live there any more. Why not is a topic for another post of course.

Went to a wedding last week and played the toast the foreigner game.

Most of the time, thank God, we were toasting with watery Chinese beer, but towards the end someone got out some Taiwanese 55% baijiu and so off we went with that for a few shots.

And, perhaps because it was an expensive bottle from Taiwan, it was not a totally grim experience. Quite smooth drinking for a 55% liquor and a pleasant grainy dry flavour, with a long aftertaste of fire and brimstone.

To say that baijiu does not have a good reputation amongst expats in China is putting it wildly mildly. I’ve seen people cringe, wince and shudder at their memories of baijiu evenings, and for many it is simply known as “the nasty stuff”.

Here’s a couple of representative expat comments on China’s national firewater…

The shanghaiist says

If ever you’ve imagined taste-testing insecticide or paint thinner, Chinese white wine, or baijiu (白酒), should be a fair approximation.

And Comrade Language up in Beijing claims that baijiu’s special flavour comes from the secret ingredients of “rodents, migrant workers, and dung.”

And how about this from Wapedia? It’s not - at least not obviously - a dig, but it speaks volumes about why westerners have problems with the stuff:

Jiang xiang (醬香): A highly fragrant distilled liquor of bold character. To the Western palate, fragrant baijiu can be quite challenging. It has solvent and barnyard aromas, with the former, in combination with the ethanol in the liquor, imparting a sharp ammonia-like note.

Barnyard aromas? Sounds like there really is dung in it.

But I would like to commit heresy by mooting that baijiu can be damn good. No, really, it can…this is not a sick joke, honestly. However, it has to be rice baijiu and it should be sipped straight from the fridge, or served with ice.

Rice is God’s gift…not sorghum or millet or any of that crap that goes into normal baijiu. Drink rice baijiu, or a rice mix such as Wuliangye (五粮液), and drink it cold and it can be as complex and rewarding as a good whisky.

I made a similar mistake with Japanese sake when I first went to Japan. The typical - and wrong - way to drink sake is hot after a meal. To be fair it’s nothing like as strong as baijiu but it’s easy to quaff and will deliver a hangover as foul and wretched and soul destroying as anything baijiu can manage. This is because most places will sell cheap sake (with loads of added brewer’s alcohol) for warming because you can’t really taste much when its warm anyway.

But good sake drunk cold was a revelation. I love good wine, but I think I like good sake more. The amount of flavour those master Japanese brewers manage to get out of rice is astonishing and the range of taste is just as varied as wine. Quality sake and fresh sushi are a sublime combination.

But here I am gibbering on about sake. My point is that it is rice that does it. Here’s a big Cheers to chilled rice baijiu!

Buy a bottle this weekend and put it in your fridge. Go on, try it, you might like it!

On my walk to my part time job these days – a pleasing 5 minute stroll to what Chris “Eyes East” Amico has described as “one of the nicest office buildings I’ve ever seen. Not in China, mind you. Anywhere. This place holds its own” – I have been bemused by the sight of a freshly severed goat’s head set proudly atop a blood bespattered fleece on a ledge outside one of the little shops that line the side street leading to my swanky corporate tower. I know it is a freshly severed head because the blood has not congealed (much) and it is definitely a different goat every day because I have been carefully inspecting the horns.

I’m not really squeamish about this because, if you’ll forgive a little wander down memory lane, back when I was a very little Kim growing up in the South Downs of Sussex our family kept goats. Two nannies called Emily and Suzy and a dangerously stupid billy called Charlie. Charlie was so dumb that one day while tethered to a tree he walked round and round until the rope bit into his neck and then kept on trying to go the way he’d been going until he fainted, fell over, and throttled himself. Quite a feat to strangle yourself, but Charlie pulled it off. Good country instincts of waste-not, want-not meant that when my brother and I got home from school we were confronted by the flayed corpse of a billy in the bath. It was, I recall, a little alarming and weird but our parents assured us that Charlie was soon to be turned into lots of very tasty curry and that we were not to worry. So we didn’t -and he was- and since then I’ve not been much troubled by butchery.

But anyroad, I was nonetheless a little baffled about why exactly these grisly goats’ heads were grinning at me from the shopfront. So after about a week I did as all good foreigners should when confronted with the mysteries of the east and asked a local, in this instance my wife. She winced at the description but immediately had the explanation. Apparently a few kebab shops are under suspicion of catching cats and dogs for their skewers (chuan) and so the goat is there to vouch for the authenticity of the wares. Of course! And how much more persuasive than a certificate from the Health and Safety!

I wonder how this sort of customer assurance would go down in my hometown of Brighton? I guess a few people would faint, a few would vomit, and a few would think it was connected to satanic rituals and call their village priest/try to get a piece of the action. Health and Safety officials (fascists!) would froth at the mouth and have a stroke before shutting the place down, or maybe the whole lane down. England doesn’t do that sort of advertising any more, although Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall might be allowed to do it in his River Cottage on the telly. In any case, there would be no end of bleating about it – though not from the goat of course.

Anyway, it’s a nice snapshot of the new/old China cheek by jowl. The gleaming skyscraper next to the medieval alley. Of which more soon…

Anyone coming for a goat kebab in downtown Dalian this weekend? I can promise it’s fresh.

yours aye

K

I lived in Japan for 3 years and took to the cuisine like a fish to water, so I get sushi cravings from time to time. The Japanese like to give an honorific “O” prefix to important (honoured) aspects and things in their culture and hence you have “O-kaasan” (honourable mother) “O-yu” (honourable hot water - it makes sense when you go to a Japanese hot-springs resort) and of course there is the right honourable “O-sushi”. This pretty much sums up the way I feel about sushi.

After Japan I worked in Thailand for two years and finding good sushi in Bangkok was easy, and -This is Thailand! - quite cheap. But being back in Brighton, Britain, for a few months last year was a shock. My 15 pounds an hour English teacher wage would get me about 8-10 pieces of (Yo!) sushi, which would make me about one quarter full. And most of the sushi I ate in “Brighton-by-the-sea” did not look fresh and did not taste right. I didn’t go often.

I’m now living in Dalian, North China. It’s a city famed for its seafood throughout the land but the Chinese, by and large, do not do raw fish. Maybe it’s too Japanese and would stick in a nationalist’s craw. Maybe it’s because the average Chinese still doesn’t like to stray outside of the Chinese kitchen that often. But a few do, and there are also a lot of Japanese living and working here, so sushi can be hunted down. The high end Japanese restaurants in Dalian serve the real McCoy, but still and all they are aimed at Japanese businessmen so they bump up the price…why not?

But compared to Britain they are more than reasonable.It took me a while to find the cheap and cheerful sushi places around town and the best find, without doubt, is on the fifth floor foodcourt (why can’t Britain do foodcourts?) at NewMart. It’s welcoming, clean, does very decent sushi, and between the hours of 5 and 9 it has an “All you can eat” (tabehodai) sushi buffet for 58 yuan . That’s 4 British pounds, and my hourly wage here is 8 pounds an hour.So you can see that Dalian well and truly trounces Brighton on the “quality-of-living-as- measured-by-a-bellyful-of-O-sushi” benchmark and is just another point to prove how richly deserved is the tag of “Rip-off Britain”.

That’s all for now honourable reader.

With Respect
K