The phone rang in our hotel room; it was my niece, Kelsey: “I’m hungry – let’s go out and get something to eat. There’s a strip mall across the street; I can see it from my room.” Apparently, the next leg of the Amazing Race would involve feeding the five of us armed only with my niece’s Lonely Planet phrasebook app.
We met her downstairs, and made our way across the street in the darkness, navigating around some large lion/dog statues and a moat. What we found sitting where the strip mall should be was definitely not a strip mall. It was a handful of shops on a small street adjacent to our relatively monstrous hotel. The five of us peered into the storefronts, sizing up the food establishments and wondering why a beauty salon would be open so late. There were basically two choices, restaurant #1 or restaurant #2. “This one looks a little more lively ... let’s go here.” Thankfully, Kelsey was not only hungry, she was also very decisive.
We walked into the well-lit, informally furnished restaurant, and an older gentleman and a very young woman spoke to us in Chinese – which we did not understand – and walked us over to a table, handing us five menus.
I flipped through the menu and quickly realized none of it was in English, and there were no pictures to help us out. I looked up at the gentleman and said, pathetically, “English?”
The gentleman looked at me for a split second, then turned to my Chinese American husband and said what we all took to be “English?!!! What?!!! Are you kidding me? You look Chinese, don’t you speak Chinese?”
To which my husband replied, in English: “No.”
The man burst out laughing, thrust the menus and notepad into the hands of the young woman, and said, “Ha ha ha!!! Here you go, sweetie, you take care of them – you are studying English now at school, right? English! Ha ha ha!”
The young woman’s eyebrows rose into an unhappy, worried rainbow as she started asking us what we would like to order. I looked at the menu again, trying to decode based on my limited knowledge of Japanese kanji. Well, that has meat in it, so does that one, and that has fish ... hmmmm ...
Not wanting to wait for me to decipher the menu, the young woman proceeded to talk to us in Chinese, which to me sounded like, “something something something jiao zu something something ...” Wait. I know that word. I practically jumped out of my chair with excitement and blurted out, “Jiao zu! Yes! Jiao zu! We want that!” I had recognized a word that was somehow embedded in my memory, thanks to Ben Sun and Alex Te circa 1982, when they told me that “jiao zu” was the Mandarin word for the Japanese “gyoza.”
The waitress seemed unfazed by my enthusiasm and continued talking. “What kind?” is what we think she was asking. She walked me over to a chart on the wall, which I assumed was a pricelist of the various types of dumplings with brief descriptions. Unfortunately, I could not recognize any characters beyond “meat,” “fish,” and “leaf,” so we are not sure what to do next. I look up at Kelsey, and we simultaneously noticed that they were plating up some dumplings for another table, so we both pointed and said, “That! We want that!”
Luckily, pointing is a universally understood gesture. The waitress took our order and we sat down to wait for our food. There were a couple of kittens running around, eating peanut shells and other scraps that were on the floor. A toddler roamed about, his little tushy peeking out from his special potty-training pants, reaching up to a table and helping himself to a half-empty glass of beer and some nuts. We were guessing he was the child of somebody who was working there, since none of the customers seemed to be concerned about this. We took our cues and tried not to act alarmed. I turned off my Mommy Reflex and watched with amusement. If there were any health code or child welfare violations here, nobody seemed to be worried about it, so I wouldn’t, either.
I start to comment that the dumplings look like those Shanghai dumplings that we used to get at Wu Kong in San Francisco or at Shandong in Oakland ... when I realize that we are in Shanghai so of course we are getting Shanghai dumplings! Wow. We were really here, half-way around the world.
Our food came out pretty quickly, and the dumplings were delicious. Although we must have been somewhat of a curiosity to the other patrons, nobody seemed to be bothered by us, and it was nice to just blend in (well, as long as we didn’t try to say anything). My family was nourished and happy. We had successfully complete this leg of the race.
