On restlessness, Chinese honesty, and the comfort of hot tofu
Recently I was reading The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk when this paragraph stopped me in my tracks.
Our friends were sorry to see us go. They did not believe that we would find a place we liked better, for it seemed obvious to them that we were afflicted with restlessness and with a love of the unknown that in their eyes was a kind of curse, like the curses in mythology that are forever sending people from their homes to seek what perhaps can never be found, for it is in the seeking itself that the punishment lies.
Part of growing older has been the realization that no matter where I move to, I am still the same person. This is comforting, at least in the beginning.
Do you feel at home in China? a friend asked me. Do you feel more American or more Chinese? I say I feel the same in Shanghai as I do anywhere else. I fall into old rhythms in new surroundings. I run, I go to the gym. I sit by the Huangpu river and watch the barges pass in the soft light. I find a coffee shop and work. I walk outside to buy fruit, but instead of pink lady apples and Oregon berries from Talaricos I get longan and tangerines and dragonfruit at the wet market. I cook dinner and wash the dishes and then change into pajamas and lie on the couch with my Kindle, reading until I grow tired. I go to bed early. I call my mom.
At a coffee shop on Donghu Lu, the woman besides me asks if she can take my extra chair. It wasn't for a friend, it was for her coat.
She takes bites out of a mango chestnut crepe cake with her fork, attacking the layers of whipped cream with slow enjoyment. Under the whispery lo-fi, the barista’s movements are punctuated by puffs of steam and hissing liquid, satisfying taps and thumps. Pendulous lights overhead resemble pipes or stalactites, I feel like I am sitting in a vast digital cave. Someone is taking a work call, and over the drownings of music and conversation I realize I feel exactly the same, everything around me is just in Chinese now.
The frictionless ease and frequency of my movement baffles my friends, although they aren’t surprised; I don’t talk about what I leave behind, and from the outside there appears to be no hesitation when I move to a new place, no apparent cracks or fissure in my sense of self or purpose. I wake up in a new neighborhood and feel tenuously happy, momentarily freed from the disenchantment, claustrophobia and boredom that Cusk describes.
The restlessness is harder to escape.
In Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, the character describes living in Iberia and the feeling of being at once more distant and more proximal to his own experience, observing himself over time.
This, I would say to myself, referring to the hemic taste of chorizo or the aromatic spliff… this is experience, not because things in Iberia were inherently more immediate, but because the landscape and my relation to it had not been entirely standardized.
There would of course come a point when I would be familiar enough with the language and terrain that it would lose its unfamiliar aspect, a point at which I could no longer see a stone in Spain and think of it as, in some essential sense, stonier than the sedimentary rocks of Kansas.
As a traveler, initial value is found in novelty, in uncommon and new experiences. But how long does that last?
I was talking to a friend about how unnatural movement is these days, the fact that you can get on a bullet train or metal bird and hurtle through time and space, stepping out into a new landscape within hours, where previously it would have taken weeks or months, maybe even a year's journey. Time would have passed, you would have seen the differences in terrain and felt the shift in climate, and your mileage would have been hard-earned, a pilgrimage carved with memories, a journey that changes you. Instead, we drop down into a new culture and country like it is a playground, a place to eat and take pictures for a few days and then leave again.
But there is complacency in living like a local, too. When you move somewhere, your relationship to the landscape, at first vivid with immediacy, soon becomes standardized. The new and novel quickly become commonplace. After moving thirteen times in my life, five as an adult, I’ve developed as a protective mechanism a locus of control that is internal, independent, and intensely private; my sense of self is regulated by and cradled tightly around routine and solitude.
I have rarely met a boring person in Shanghai: every foreigner or migrant is here for a reason, usually an interesting one, having left behind the standard grooves of lifestyle and career where they came from and chosen a different path, more untried and unknown. It often feels like countermotion to our parents. My friends have been in Shanghai for fourteen months, two years, five years on average. Their parents left long ago, they live in Australia, Hong Kong, Germany. But we don’t talk about the “adventure of living in China,” we discuss the air quality, dating, rent prices, other daily disappointments and concerns.
For me, the “foreignness” of China wore off in the first week. I speak the language. I blend in, I feel safer here than in most places I’ve lived. I look like everyone else but in lapses of comprehension, I wish I could pass as an American. I long for the easy, privileged treatment and breezy halo of curiosity and charm that white foreigners walk around in, are protected by. I fit right into the homogenous culture and realize that it is both a blessing, that I don’t stand out, and also a curse, because I balk at many aspects of Chinese-ness.
Chinese-ness is familiar to me, it reminds me of my mother. If you’re sensitive to honest feedback and unsolicited advice, if you take things like people honking their horns at you as a personal offense, don’t live in China. People have no reserve or inhibition when it comes to asking deeply personal questions and telling you what you should do. My friend describes this honesty and directness as “both rude and healing.” There is hardly any awareness of personal bubble here, even less when it comes to eye contact, you can be minding your business but simply existing invites observation.
A few weeks ago I was on the metro when a woman rushed onto the car as the doors were closing, her daughter scrambling in front of her. The woman’s rolling bag was left behind and her hand caught inside the door. Let go, a few people screamed. The guard held the train until the doors reopened and the bag was retrieved. Everyone began talking now, strangers jolted loose by the scare. How dangerous, old ladies cried, what if the child was caught instead, you should’ve just waited for the next car, so irresponsible. The woman was embarrassed, she tried to scold her daughter. She sat in the wake of the entire car’s judgement for the rest of the ride. I felt bad for her but couldn’t help but laugh at the transformation of a car of strangers into a village, of the collective shaming that reminded me that no, this is not New York, strangers still care about each other here, a little too much.
I think about temporariness as I am cooking dinner. I only have a clay pot and a small saucepan, but it’s been enough for most meals. (I will always champion the clay pot as one of the more versatile tools you can have in the kitchen. It holds onto heat and sustains a gentle simmer for beautiful stews and soups.) I also use my clay pot to make congee and oatmeal. I cook rice in it, and eat the toasty burned crust off the bottom. I plan to buy a wok, but this item comes with weight and a sense of permanence.
There is a Chinese saying that goes, when your heart is restless, you can't eat hot tofu. (心急吃不了热豆腐). Literally, it means that when you’re in a hurry you shouldn’t eat hot tofu, you will burn your tongue. Tofu is remarkable at retaining its temperature. I used to work at a restaurant where we kept buckets of tofu in the walk-in refrigerator, and every time I reached in to grab a block of tofu my entire hand would turn numb, it felt like the coldest water imaginable. But once tofu is bubbling hot, it will stay hot. This is exactly what I want in the winter: a gentle food that will keep me warm as it goes from my rice to my spoon to my stomach.
Tomato is the key player in this recipe— because it is diced, it disintegrates into the soup, so you barely notice any tomato texture. The tomato adds acid, it makes the broth more flavorful and rounded on the tongue. I add a hunk of Chinese cabbage and a handful of fresh mushrooms for savoriness.
As I stir the ginger, garlic, and green onions in my clay pot, the smell blooms suddenly around me, and fills the kitchen. The neighbors must smell it too. I am still the same, with my ingrained habits and old anxieties, the hidden sadnesses and absorptions of my brain, but as I eat, I have to be patient. I wait for the tofu to cool. I wait for things to take their course. I sip the soup, my restlessness quieted.
Soft doufu soup in a clay pot
This is a one-pot meal that takes less than twenty minutes.
