In Which Emily Discovers Cooking

I spend much of my time in China thinking about food. Chinese food, cooking food, eating food; food is a big deal. Mostly because, when food goes wrong, my life stops functioning here.

I have recently discovered cooking. Now, most of you are thinking, "Wow, it took her twenty years to realize cooking existed." Haha. No. I mean, I have discovered how to actually cook and feed myself.

It all goes back to June 2010, on my Italy EU Governance program, when I lost ten pounds in three weeks. Now, before you go asking me what my secret was, or congratulating me on the weight loss, let me just explain something quickly. I had a little revelation in Italy: if you train for a half-marathon and spend 80% of your time walking, while consuming roughly 900 calories daily, you drop weight like it's not even funny. For the record, I was literally starving myself, and not at all intentionally. I was just failing to get enough food into my body, and I was too excited by all the Italian sites and the intriguing EU lectures to care even remotely about food.

My mother made me promise not to repeat the Italy experience in China. I told her I would do my best to make sure I wasn't averaging negative calorie consumption every day. She didn't love that, but I figured that was a promise I could keep.

Well, I got to Shanghai, and guess what. The Italy trip came back to haunt me. I was eating 900 calories again, and I was sitting listlessly at my desk, no energy. One day, after five cups of coffee, I realized that this was not going to work long term. I had to learn how to feed myself.

Why was I consuming so little calories? Simple. I kept getting sick. I get a food poisoning based disease once a month in China. I throw up for a couple days. I don't eat. My metabolism slows to a crawl and it takes me at least a week to eat like a normal human being again. I figured out that most of this food poisoning was coming from the restaurant food I relied on. So, I stopped eating restaurant food. For me, this basically meant not eating. Not eating is not healthy; it doesn't take a bachelor's degree to know that. So, I did the only thing I could do: I started figuring out how to cook.

It's funny how getting food into one's body can become so complicated in a foreign country. For example, in America, I can bite into an apple, no problem. Sometimes, you can even do this *GASP* without washing it first. Scandalous! Well, try that in China, and you'll be throwing up for a week.

Here are the rules I must follow in China for cooking, or I am one sick puppy:

1. All vegetables and fruits must be washed and peeled. This means fruits like peaches, which don't stand up well to peeling, are a no-no. Oranges and bananas are the best, since you don't need a fruit peeler. Preferably, you wash, cook, and peel all vegetables before eating them. Washing is never enough. I have had the occasional salad in China, but only from very reputable restaurants, and with the expectation that I might be regurgitating it later.

2. All poultry must be cooked to within an inch of its life. I was charring chicken for at least a week before I calmed down enough to realize that it didn't need to be turning black not to kill me.

3. All poultry must be purchased from organic food sources and wrapped in plastic. Open meat markets are a death trap. Literally, bins of meat sit out, in the sun, in the June humid heat of Shanghai, with flies buzzing around, landing in it, burrowing in it...beginning to see why I kept getting sick? Yeah, I haven't tried meat from a meat market in China, and I don't plan to before I leave.

4. Milk products. Forget it. I shouldn't have to explain this one. I like my milk without toxins.

5. I take more probiotics daily than you want to know. Yakult and acidophilus are my best friends. They keep my stomach fortified against bacteria.

For those of you who wonder what I eat daily, it looks like this: oatmeal for breakfast, nuts for a snack, chicken with cooked vegetables for lunch, carrots and/or apple with hard-boiled egg for snack, chicken and cooked vegetables for dinner. I do this every single day except for Friday and Saturday night, where I go to restaurants and enjoy the food culture of Shanghai. I stick to my rules, and I haven't gotten sick since early June, which is the longest I've been well since being in China.

Basically, I am now eating a very balanced diet. Essentially, it's incredibly healthy, with the right portions of everything. Michelle Obama would be so proud. And, you know what? I feel fabulous. I have lots of energy, and I never feel sluggish anymore.

But my point of this posting is this: cooking is far more important than people realize. It is the foundation of our lives. Without cooking, there is no food. Without food, nothing can get done. As an academic, most of my life is spent with ideas far larger than real life. I have generally scoffed at cooking for a long time as an activity that isn't as worthwhile as studying, or writing, or reading. China has brought me back down to reality. Reality is that I only get to play with cool ideas at Siemens if I do the laundry and make lunch first. Don't forget to pack the snacks! Drink water! You know, the stupid, logistical things that no one considers valuable in college. But, you know something? These life skills make college possible, make life possible. So, I thought I'd give cooking a shout out, because it has saved my health in China.

Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Hong Kong

So, this is a question I get asked a lot: which city is your favorite in China? Which do you like better, Beijing or Shanghai? Where does Hong Kong fit into this mess?

SHANGHAI

Photo credit: http://blog.chinatraveldepot.com/tag/shanghai-vacation/

Let me just start by saying, I think about cities like a director might think about where to stage her next film. When I first arrived in Shanghai, my first thought was, “This city would be perfect for a film noire,” something classy and in black and white. Shanghai is situated on the water, so we get these fog blankets cast over the city every other day (yes, actual fog, not just pollution).

Picture this: The sun has set, and you are walking through poorly lit streets, where the only beacons of light are those cast from the neon signs of restaurants and hotels looming stories above your head, piercing the sky, too high to see the peak. The fog settles betwixt the buildings alit with every color of light, and the city takes on this surreal quality, like you are in a theme park after dark. All signage is in a combination of Chinese characters and Romanized Chinese pronunciation. From the balcony of the apartment, the city seems to float in the night, so many buildings like ships set out to sea.

I am telling you, film noire. Shanghai is TOTALLY a film noire set waiting to happen. And don’t get me started on that nouveau French aesthetic of the French Concession, or the art deco atmosphere of Tianzifang.

BEIJING

Photo credit: http://rashbre2.blogspot.com/2005/03/beijing-smogwatch-webcam.html

When I arrived in Beijing, I was too jetlagged to form an opinion of the city. It came to me slowly, over time, that Beijing would be the perfect place to film a post-utopian apocalypse film. I’m talking zombies, robots vs. aliens, something catastrophic and involving lots of empty streets, broken lamp posts in the night, gunshots in the distance. Perhaps this sounds like an insult to Beijing; in truth, I love Beijing for its intensity. The city’s utilitarian architecture is essentially composed of apartment after apartment built in the same style. In a word, the theme of Beijing buildings is often austere. If Beijing was a shoe, it would be the combat boot. If it was a mood, it would be teen angst in a night club after dark. Beijing is very gritty and real, nothing soft or indulgent about it. It has an allure like that of a great action film; you went to see the film to feel alive, not for rainbows-and-butterflies nonsense. Beijing is excitement mixed with pollution and a shot of baijiu. That, in summary, is Beijing, in my mind. I’d go back for another screening of that film a second.

HONG KONG

Photo credit: http://www.tropicalisland.de/china_hong_kong.html

If you are in the market for the perfect set for a cyberpunk martial arts action film with a bent towards cyber warfare and in need of an anti-materialist backdrop, Hong Kong is your city. This place is a visual assault to the senses in the best way possible. It has the harbor and the jungle reminding you that nature is just around the corner, barely beaten back by the cement towers of the city. At any moment, the subtropical foliage might swallow you whole, if the urban jungle doesn’t claim you first. The architecture of Hong Kong is tall, unnaturally so, buildings so high the sun cannot reach the street. You look up from ground zero, and the sky is a strip of blue obscured by layers of decks and awnings and red neon signs announcing dim sum is around the corner. The street level is not for pedestrians; this is a car’s domain. Pedestrians instead climb through overpasses that weave in and out of buildings, passing major highways with eight or more lanes, cutting into art districts and through megamalls. It’s the Amazon jungle of humanity’s construction, built from concrete and Ethernet cables, electricity and plasma screen. Hong Kong is a place you could lose yourself; lose yourself to the electric show, the fast paced lifestyle, the sheer immensity and complexity of a city that only spans a tiny island south of the Chinese mainland.

So, which do I love best? How do you pick between such dynamic and disparate cities? I think, if I had to live somewhere for a long time, for years, Shanghai or Hong Kong would be the cushiest and most hospitable sets for the future film of my life. Beijing would be a hell of a ride, but it would be a fight every day, a challenge every second. Do I love Beijing less? Not at all; I love these three cities equally, each in their own ways.

Shanghai. Whaddup.

So, I know, I haven’t updated this blog in somewhere south of forever. Truth is, times be crazy here in China. Allow me to give a quick summary of everything that has happened in the past three months:

1. I graduated from my program at BeiWai in May. I was awarded Top Student of the Intermediate-Advanced Chinese level, along with another student in my class. Kind of came out of nowhere, but they gave me this super awesome Chinese calligraphy scroll. I honestly couldn’t care less about the Top Student thing, but the scroll? Friggin AWESOME. It’s the best souvenir ever, because it is the embodiment of all those hours spent memorizing Chinese, and one of the teachers in my program made it, so it’s authentic. As you can tell, I’m kind of in love with this scroll. I’m planning to elope with it as I type. I was thinking Hawaii, thoughts on elopement location? Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to photograph the living daylights out of it and post the photos. SO BEAUTIFUL IT PAINS ME!

2. I went to Hong Kong. Twice. So…the Chinese government changed visa policy RIGHT when I needed to be getting a visa for Shanghai. I am really not going to bore you with the details of this. Actually, to be honest, I don’t want to put my visa at risk, or risk getting myself kicked out of China, so I’m going to play nice in this post. Allow me to summarize, succinctly, why I hate the Chinese Visa Fight to the Death:

First: It is the quintessential red tape experience of a lifetime. Nothing is transparent. There are no summaries of how to do what you need to do to get visas. You have to go through back doors and through trials by fire just to get a flipping L visa.

Second: Everyone contradicts each other. Like, Hong Kong and Shanghai, do your visa offices ever, you know, chat? Like, to get your story straight? I mean, sure, I loved being toyed with as much as the next girl, but you guys are the worst manipulators ever. You are so transparent in your lies, it isn’t even funny.

Third: It’s expensive for no reason. It’s mainly expensive if you get raped by the system and have to do the visa trip twice. Which I did. Don’t even talk to me about it; my pocketbook isn’t speaking to me right now on account of how badly this whole visa thing went financially.

Anyways, while I was playing the leading role of Rocky in this visa match of pain, getting owned in the face by the Chinese government for nine rounds of blood, guts and gore, I got to see Hong Kong. Hong Kong, my friends and family, is awesome. You all should be worried, because I might just elope with my scroll to Hong Kong and never come back to the States. Hong Kong is so awesome, I’m going to give the city its very own post, just because it’s too awesome to describe in one paragraph.

3. I moved into an apartment in Shanghai. Now, as most of you know, I got a thing going with Siemens right now. Due to a non-disclosure agreement, I can’t really tell you anything about what I am doing via blog. However, if you want the particulars, call me and we’ll chat. Skype, people. I live on it. As Shakira once said, “Whenever, wherever.” Call me.

My apartment in Shanghai is really, truly wonderful. I love it dearly. It is situated one block from the Huangpu River, so I get to run along the Riverside Promenade whenever I want (this is a bit like being able to run along the Embarcadero in San Francisco whenever you want; essentially, it is an awesomely easy, daily activity you get to do that most people travel half the world just to see. I have run it dozens of times now, and I am still in awe). It’s just a couple blocks up from the Metro, so I have easy access to all of Shanghai for less than a US dollar per trip. The apartment itself is quite nice; two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen, a laundry machine, a refrigerator, two bathrooms, a living room, and free WiFi are just a few of the perks. Also, it has spectacular views of Shanghai; I can see the Oriental Pearl Tower from my room. Basically, this apartment is a dream. Except, the bathroom showers kind of like to go hot and then cold, and the washing machine takes forever to run a load. However, given the awesomeness of everything else in the apartment, I tend to overlook those downsides.

So, now you are pretty up to speed on my life. My next posts will be talking about life in Shanghai, my touring around the city, and I’ll probably be answering that age old question: “Beijing or Shanghai??? Which is better?”

If I say Hong Kong, am I cheating? Kidding! More on that in the next blog post!