(2) Dinner Time!
Blog 2 Dinner Time
I was thinking this week about which aspects of being a stay-at-home mother are easier here than they would be at home and which are more difficult. There is no doubt that having Xiao Long and Xiao Zeng to help me is an enormous blessing. Partly what it does is compensate for the fact that the basic domestic routine is more time-consuming here: clothes get dirtier and have to be washed more often, there’s no dryer so they have to be hung out and the washing machine is an old fashioned top-loader, so the clothes come out all scrunched up and everything needs ironing. And the furniture has to be dusted and the floor mopped every day or so, otherwise layers of grimy dust accumulate overnight. I don’t remember that at home, I don’t think I dusted more than once a year when I lived in London, and it wasn’t a problem, although quite possibly my standards were lower. Without help there would be no end to it here, but two ayis more than make up for the difference and leave me free to do other things, so that is definitely an aspect that is easier. Nonetheless, there are certain things they cannot help with.
For me the most stressful time of the day is dinner preparation and consumption. Thinking about it, this is true to a certain extent when I am back in the UK, but not quite in the same way. Of course it would be a walk in the park if I just delegated all the shopping and cooking to Xiao Long, which is what many people and all working mothers do, but as we find her food virtually inedible that isn’t really an option. I do resort to it sometimes, when I have to be out of the door at 6 pm for a meeting, but I will then come home to find that Isaac refused to eat the meal and Xiao Long made him a jam sandwich instead. Plus, much as we love good Chinese food, our tastes are still essentially western and western food is what we all want to eat most nights of the week.
So shopping and cooking takes up a fair amount of each day, and this involves levels of stress not present at home. For example, getting to the shops in the first place entails waiting on the street for taxis, on the way back laden down with many small, heavy and easily-broken plastic shopping bags. Sometimes this is a smooth operation, with a friendly, helpful driver pulling up smartly to the curb in front of me. But other times it involves a lot of frustrating hanging around, hailing cabs which whoosh past with a supercilious glare from the driver, despite there being no evidence of a passenger unless he or she is prone in the back seat.
I have to digress here and say that if a cab does stop, it is frequently nabbed from under my nose by someone else, an elderly lady who was lurking in the shadow under a tree or more often a young woman in high heels who totters out from nowhere and grabs the door handle right in front of me. Men don’t do this to me as often as women, although they do to Ethan apparently. It is a particularly infuriating cultural quirk, one that makes the Little Englander blood in me boil with fury at the sheer rudeness of it. But like so many other things it just comes down to different rules. Getting a cab here is not a case of first come, first served, but first past the post. It’s the same basic rule as for driving: just look out for yourself, move towards your goal, avoid obstacles and ignore what everyone else is doing. If everyone does this, the system is surprisingly coherent; the problems arise when someone breaks the rules and pays attention to other traffic. The cab-stealing routine is based on the same principle: people spot a cab and try to get in it, oblivious of who else might be doing the same thing. I am one of those rule-breaking problems, giving everyone in the vicinity the evil eye to try and guilt-trip them into acknowledging I have been waiting longest. But it is very tempting to slide into this habit and I have to confess to sometimes turning a blind eye to the person who might possibly have been waiting before me. Is this acculturation? Or just plain bad manners?
The time I was most infuriated by it was when I was bringing the children home after watching the local ex-pat rugby team one Saturday afternoon. We strolled towards the main road with a couple of other long-term residents of Chengdu, making small talk as we went. We reached the road and the man next to us stuck out his hand to flag down the first cab. Oh, how helpful of him, I thought as I stood there clutching one child with each hand. But instead of helping me load the children into the cab, or even just waving me towards it and looking for another one, the man just jumped into it and sailed away without a backward glance. That is plain bad manners, in any culture.
Anyway once I get to the store, which is usually Carrefour, there are other challenges ahead. Yes, it is a large French supermarket chain and it does stock a certain amount of imported western food and some western things made for the local market. It also stocks many things completely unavailable at home, and on an adventurous day I may try my luck with some of them. Certainly I love the range of fruit and vegetables and the amazing number of different pulses and varieties of rice, not to mention the subtle varieties of green tea. The fresh market has higher quality produce but I usually end up in Carrefour because it also sells things like cheese and pasta and washing up liquid, which the market does not. Plus the meat is packaged and doesn’t still have hooves attached, which I cannot quite get used to.
With the food finally prepared, I usually sit down with Isaac and Sam at around 6 o’clock to feed them. At some point before this Isaac will ask in a wary voice, “what am I having for dinner?” If I say “spaghetti and bacon” or “pizza”, his response is ecstatic. If I say anything else, there will be whining and complaining. But our system doesn’t brook any complaints, so we sit down anyway and I set a kitchen timer to give him 30 minutes to eat. At some point, as he resentfully pushes his chicken and rice and broccoli around the plate he often asks me, “why can’t you make things I like for dinner?”
So then we have this conversation:
“OK, tell me what you like.”
“I like pizza with bacon!”
“Good, that’s one thing.”
“And spaghetti with bacon! And hot dogs!”
“OK, What else?
“Uh, cheese on toast…..and croque monsieur!”
“So that’s toasted cheese with or without ham in it”
“Yes, that counts as two things.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“Hmmm…….quesadillas!”
You see where this is going: he’ll eat anything so long as it is a wheat-based carbohydrate topped with melted cheese, with or without some form of over-salted pork product.
I try to point this out to him gently. “Sweetheart, those things you like are all the same kinds of food. I do make you those things several times a week but you need to eat different things as well, from the food pyramid you leaned about at school, remember?”
“Yes, but the biggest part of the pyramid is bread and toast and spaghetti, it’s good to eat loads of those foods." “True, but you cab't only eat the bottom part and the top part, you also need to eat lots of vegetables and fruit and protein like meat and fish. Can you think of something you like that doesn’t have bread or cheese or bacon in it?”
A pause, then a triumphant exclamation: “I know….candy floss!”
In the meantime, Sam will have shoveled half of the food in his bowl into his mouth and spread the rest around his person and the surrounding surfaces. He will then shout, “bu zuo, bu zuo!”, (no sit) struggle out of his seat and attempt to clamber onto the table to gain better access to glasses of water, hot cups of tea, pepper grinders and other attractive objects. Isaac then wants to get up and play with him and we go through the ritual of pretending to glue his butt to his chair until he has finished eating. At some point this results in a cry of,
“No fair! How come Sam gets to play and I don’t?”
“Sam has eaten his dinner already.”
“Not all of it, a lot is on his t-shirt.”
“True, but he ate enough, he ate it while you were still talking. Back in your chair.”
Another level of stress is that while buying the food, and while preparing it come to that, and for several hours afterwards, in fact basically until we all wake up safely the next morning, I worry about food safety. This is a big issue in China at the moment, as I’m sure you have seen in the papers. There was a very good BBC Radio Four news piece on the subject this summer, by Fuschia Dunlop on From Our Own Correspondent. I cannot access it from where I am right now but you can probably find it if you search the bbc site.
The current scare in our area is a pig disease called “blue ear”, which has caused the price of pork to sky-rocket. I assume that a large, foreign-owned supermarket chain is not going to buy pork from blue-eared pigs, but I still wonder every time I cook pork, or any other meat for that matter, let alone seafood. Even with fruit and veg. there is the issue of pesticides. OK, pesticides are everywhere, but what if I just happen to buy a bunch of spinach grown by a farmer who, knowingly or otherwise, bought a cheap load of pesticide made from something really deadly? There was a recent scandal in Beijing about meat dumplings filled with cardboard softened with caustic soda, another about milk that didn’t contain any actual milk…and then there was the tub of chocolate ice-cream I bought last week, thinking at the time that it felt a little on the light side, only to open it up at dinner-time and find it was already half eaten! Think about it all too long and I’m ready to serve cheese on toast every night.
Finally, however, the meal is finished and the mood lightens. Sam, like me, gets very grumpy when he’s hungry, but immediately after eating he gains a new burst of energy and good humour. Isaac is relieved that the dinner ordeal is over for another day. After he has reluctantly jammed the last piece of broccoli into his mouth, usually just as his timer rings, and I’ve picked the clumps of rice from Sam’s clothes, and we have tussled with the dustpan and brush for a while, me trying to sweep up the discarded food and Sam trying to spread it around again, then it’s playtime. So that by the time Ethan walks through the door, everyone is happy, there is music playing and the boys are dancing around or playing hide and seek or jumping on the sofas. Then it’s time for dessert, as long as it’s not ice-cream.
I was thinking this week about which aspects of being a stay-at-home mother are easier here than they would be at home and which are more difficult. There is no doubt that having Xiao Long and Xiao Zeng to help me is an enormous blessing. Partly what it does is compensate for the fact that the basic domestic routine is more time-consuming here: clothes get dirtier and have to be washed more often, there’s no dryer so they have to be hung out and the washing machine is an old fashioned top-loader, so the clothes come out all scrunched up and everything needs ironing. And the furniture has to be dusted and the floor mopped every day or so, otherwise layers of grimy dust accumulate overnight. I don’t remember that at home, I don’t think I dusted more than once a year when I lived in London, and it wasn’t a problem, although quite possibly my standards were lower. Without help there would be no end to it here, but two ayis more than make up for the difference and leave me free to do other things, so that is definitely an aspect that is easier. Nonetheless, there are certain things they cannot help with.
For me the most stressful time of the day is dinner preparation and consumption. Thinking about it, this is true to a certain extent when I am back in the UK, but not quite in the same way. Of course it would be a walk in the park if I just delegated all the shopping and cooking to Xiao Long, which is what many people and all working mothers do, but as we find her food virtually inedible that isn’t really an option. I do resort to it sometimes, when I have to be out of the door at 6 pm for a meeting, but I will then come home to find that Isaac refused to eat the meal and Xiao Long made him a jam sandwich instead. Plus, much as we love good Chinese food, our tastes are still essentially western and western food is what we all want to eat most nights of the week.
So shopping and cooking takes up a fair amount of each day, and this involves levels of stress not present at home. For example, getting to the shops in the first place entails waiting on the street for taxis, on the way back laden down with many small, heavy and easily-broken plastic shopping bags. Sometimes this is a smooth operation, with a friendly, helpful driver pulling up smartly to the curb in front of me. But other times it involves a lot of frustrating hanging around, hailing cabs which whoosh past with a supercilious glare from the driver, despite there being no evidence of a passenger unless he or she is prone in the back seat.
I have to digress here and say that if a cab does stop, it is frequently nabbed from under my nose by someone else, an elderly lady who was lurking in the shadow under a tree or more often a young woman in high heels who totters out from nowhere and grabs the door handle right in front of me. Men don’t do this to me as often as women, although they do to Ethan apparently. It is a particularly infuriating cultural quirk, one that makes the Little Englander blood in me boil with fury at the sheer rudeness of it. But like so many other things it just comes down to different rules. Getting a cab here is not a case of first come, first served, but first past the post. It’s the same basic rule as for driving: just look out for yourself, move towards your goal, avoid obstacles and ignore what everyone else is doing. If everyone does this, the system is surprisingly coherent; the problems arise when someone breaks the rules and pays attention to other traffic. The cab-stealing routine is based on the same principle: people spot a cab and try to get in it, oblivious of who else might be doing the same thing. I am one of those rule-breaking problems, giving everyone in the vicinity the evil eye to try and guilt-trip them into acknowledging I have been waiting longest. But it is very tempting to slide into this habit and I have to confess to sometimes turning a blind eye to the person who might possibly have been waiting before me. Is this acculturation? Or just plain bad manners?
The time I was most infuriated by it was when I was bringing the children home after watching the local ex-pat rugby team one Saturday afternoon. We strolled towards the main road with a couple of other long-term residents of Chengdu, making small talk as we went. We reached the road and the man next to us stuck out his hand to flag down the first cab. Oh, how helpful of him, I thought as I stood there clutching one child with each hand. But instead of helping me load the children into the cab, or even just waving me towards it and looking for another one, the man just jumped into it and sailed away without a backward glance. That is plain bad manners, in any culture.
Anyway once I get to the store, which is usually Carrefour, there are other challenges ahead. Yes, it is a large French supermarket chain and it does stock a certain amount of imported western food and some western things made for the local market. It also stocks many things completely unavailable at home, and on an adventurous day I may try my luck with some of them. Certainly I love the range of fruit and vegetables and the amazing number of different pulses and varieties of rice, not to mention the subtle varieties of green tea. The fresh market has higher quality produce but I usually end up in Carrefour because it also sells things like cheese and pasta and washing up liquid, which the market does not. Plus the meat is packaged and doesn’t still have hooves attached, which I cannot quite get used to.
With the food finally prepared, I usually sit down with Isaac and Sam at around 6 o’clock to feed them. At some point before this Isaac will ask in a wary voice, “what am I having for dinner?” If I say “spaghetti and bacon” or “pizza”, his response is ecstatic. If I say anything else, there will be whining and complaining. But our system doesn’t brook any complaints, so we sit down anyway and I set a kitchen timer to give him 30 minutes to eat. At some point, as he resentfully pushes his chicken and rice and broccoli around the plate he often asks me, “why can’t you make things I like for dinner?”
So then we have this conversation:
“OK, tell me what you like.”
“I like pizza with bacon!”
“Good, that’s one thing.”
“And spaghetti with bacon! And hot dogs!”
“OK, What else?
“Uh, cheese on toast…..and croque monsieur!”
“So that’s toasted cheese with or without ham in it”
“Yes, that counts as two things.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“Hmmm…….quesadillas!”
You see where this is going: he’ll eat anything so long as it is a wheat-based carbohydrate topped with melted cheese, with or without some form of over-salted pork product.
I try to point this out to him gently. “Sweetheart, those things you like are all the same kinds of food. I do make you those things several times a week but you need to eat different things as well, from the food pyramid you leaned about at school, remember?”
“Yes, but the biggest part of the pyramid is bread and toast and spaghetti, it’s good to eat loads of those foods." “True, but you cab't only eat the bottom part and the top part, you also need to eat lots of vegetables and fruit and protein like meat and fish. Can you think of something you like that doesn’t have bread or cheese or bacon in it?”
A pause, then a triumphant exclamation: “I know….candy floss!”
In the meantime, Sam will have shoveled half of the food in his bowl into his mouth and spread the rest around his person and the surrounding surfaces. He will then shout, “bu zuo, bu zuo!”, (no sit) struggle out of his seat and attempt to clamber onto the table to gain better access to glasses of water, hot cups of tea, pepper grinders and other attractive objects. Isaac then wants to get up and play with him and we go through the ritual of pretending to glue his butt to his chair until he has finished eating. At some point this results in a cry of,
“No fair! How come Sam gets to play and I don’t?”
“Sam has eaten his dinner already.”
“Not all of it, a lot is on his t-shirt.”
“True, but he ate enough, he ate it while you were still talking. Back in your chair.”
Another level of stress is that while buying the food, and while preparing it come to that, and for several hours afterwards, in fact basically until we all wake up safely the next morning, I worry about food safety. This is a big issue in China at the moment, as I’m sure you have seen in the papers. There was a very good BBC Radio Four news piece on the subject this summer, by Fuschia Dunlop on From Our Own Correspondent. I cannot access it from where I am right now but you can probably find it if you search the bbc site.
The current scare in our area is a pig disease called “blue ear”, which has caused the price of pork to sky-rocket. I assume that a large, foreign-owned supermarket chain is not going to buy pork from blue-eared pigs, but I still wonder every time I cook pork, or any other meat for that matter, let alone seafood. Even with fruit and veg. there is the issue of pesticides. OK, pesticides are everywhere, but what if I just happen to buy a bunch of spinach grown by a farmer who, knowingly or otherwise, bought a cheap load of pesticide made from something really deadly? There was a recent scandal in Beijing about meat dumplings filled with cardboard softened with caustic soda, another about milk that didn’t contain any actual milk…and then there was the tub of chocolate ice-cream I bought last week, thinking at the time that it felt a little on the light side, only to open it up at dinner-time and find it was already half eaten! Think about it all too long and I’m ready to serve cheese on toast every night.
Finally, however, the meal is finished and the mood lightens. Sam, like me, gets very grumpy when he’s hungry, but immediately after eating he gains a new burst of energy and good humour. Isaac is relieved that the dinner ordeal is over for another day. After he has reluctantly jammed the last piece of broccoli into his mouth, usually just as his timer rings, and I’ve picked the clumps of rice from Sam’s clothes, and we have tussled with the dustpan and brush for a while, me trying to sweep up the discarded food and Sam trying to spread it around again, then it’s playtime. So that by the time Ethan walks through the door, everyone is happy, there is music playing and the boys are dancing around or playing hide and seek or jumping on the sofas. Then it’s time for dessert, as long as it’s not ice-cream.
posted by Cat Platt at 2:33 pm
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