Buckets of Rice Abound: China Expert Gets It Wrong at a Chinese Restaurant in the U.S.

Although acknowledged by a seemingly growing number of people, China's immense diversity remains difficult to grasp. It is also easy to forget. A story in The Washington Post about a recent incident involving a group of diners and a big bowl of rice at the Chinese restaurant Peter Chang in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., touches upon this:

One of the diners, who had lived in Beijing for much of the 2000s, was surprised [when a server brought out a family-style bowl of rice] and made a comment to the server, saying "'Oh, you guys don't serve them in individual rice bowls?'," related another diner in the party, who asked to go by his first name, Matt.

The server told the group that when rice is served to three or more diners at Peter Chang, it comes in a large bowl. The former Beijing resident thought that was odd, considering the family-sized portion ran counter to the personalized bowls he encountered in China. The server then asked if the foursome would like individual rice bowls instead. They declined.

"She said, 'No, no, I can bring it for you,'" Matt related. "He said, 'No, no, don't worry about it. It's fine. Just wanted to let you know that's the way it's done in China. It's not a big deal.' . . . It just got really awkward."

Read the rest of story for the sarcasm and insults which followed and the resulting fallout. I will just focus on the claim made by Matt's friend. Had I had been there, I would have felt compelled to respond.

But before sharing what I would have said, I would like to take a slight detour and introduce a wonderful, spicy chicken dish (茶油鸡) I enjoyed in Hengyang, Hunan.

Looks delicious, right? It was. But what I really want to highlight is in another picture I hadn't expected to ever share here. It shows the dish in a more-consumed state.

The photo also includes a family-sized portion of rice served in a shiny metal bucket. I wasn't surprised by it at all. And I didn't question the waitress about it.

How the rice was served at a nearby trendier restaurant did surprise me though.

It is hard to see in the above photo, so I will share a cropped version.

At this restaurant, you can have your family-sized portion of rice served in a rice cooker which sat on your table. In my experience, this is rather unusual.

But what isn't unusual in Hengyang is restaurants serving family-sized portions of rice for diners to share. In fact, it is quite common. Part of a rice bucket can be seen in this photo of a tasty chicken dish at another restaurant in Hengyang.

And at yet another restaurant, one can be seen in this photo of my favorite eel dish in Hengyang.

Are family-sized portions of rice just a Hengyang thing? Nope, it is common elsewhere in Hunan province too. For example, here is a photo of a spicy chicken dish (earlier shared here) I enjoyed several times at a restaurant in Hunan's capital, Changsha.

In this case, a lovely wooden bucket was used. They are common as well. Please don't complain to your server about these. Wooden buckets of rice are the best.

So are family-sized portions of rice just a Hunan thing? Again, no.

Here is a part of a meal I enjoyed over nine years ago in Wuhan, Hubei.

In this case, a big glass bowl for the family-sized portion of rice worked just fine.

But the glory of wooden buckets shouldn't be forgotten, so here is one with a lot of rice at an incredible vegetarian restaurant in Guiyang, Guizhou.

At another restaurant in Guiyang, this one with meat on the menu, a big metal bowl sufficed for the family-sized portion of rice.

But Peter Chang isn't famed for serving the local-style food found in Hunan, Hubei, and Guizhou. Instead, it is described as an "authentic Sichuan outpost". I happen to be a big fan of Sichuan-style (Szechuanese) food. On that note, here is a rabbit dish I ate in Zigong, Sichuan.

Now that is a stunning wooden bucket (with rice).

Here is another rabbit dish I ate in Zigong.

Both of these meals in Zigong came with family-sized portions of rice. Like rabbit meat, this is common there.

I am not familiar with the details of Peter Chang's menu, but many Sichuan restaurants outside of Sichuan province base their menu on the style of food found in its capital Chengdu.

So here is a dish I enjoyed during my most recent visit to Chengdu.

I am not sure whether this is a rabbit or a chicken dish, but there was definitely plenty of rice in that beautiful wooden bucket.

Undoubtedly, many places in China serve "personalized bowls" of rice. In my experience, region is one key factor affecting the likelihood of receiving a family-sized portion of rice at a restaurant in China. Other factors matter as well. Even in a city such as Hengyang where family-sized portions of rice are especially common, single servings in small bowls are typical in some environments — for example, cafeteria-style restaurants.

I don't know the percentage of restaurants in China which serve family-sized portions of rice, and a guess wouldn't be very meaningful. But I am confident it is significant number. I don't take photos of every meal I eat, when I do photograph a meal I rarely capture how the rice is served, and in preparing this post I only searched through a small percentage of my photos for relevant examples. In other words, these photos represent just a tiny portion of the many times in China I have been served a family-sized portion of rice. This is all the more remarkable, since in a majority of the above examples I was eating alone and would sometimes point out I only needed a small bowl of rice. But the bucket or big bowl of rice would still come.

So if I had been at that table in Virginia, I would have asked Matt's friend what in the world he was talking about and pointed out that serving family-sized portions of rice is certainly another "way it's done in China", particularly in a place such as Sichuan. I would be curious to learn about his own experience in China to better understand how he came to his conclusion. Perhaps we would discuss how China's "different colors" trip up even the people who may know it best.

And hopefully it would have been possible at some point for me to say "pass that authentic and awesome wooden bucket of rice".

Qingnian Road in Tainan, Taiwan

When the U.S. Bombed Tainan, Taiwan: Signs of the Past at the Hayashi Department Store

The Hayashi Department store in Tainan, Taiwan, has several floors filled with a variety of goods for sale. The most recent renovations were completed two years ago, but on the 5th and 6th floors several signs suggest not everything was fixed.

On the top floors, the store provides an explanation (quoted "as is"*):

During the Pacific Wars in WWII, Taiwan was bombed by American's air raid. On March 1st, 1945, the Allied Forces conducted the biggest air raid to Tainan in Taiwan's history, bombing massively around Honcchou (Now Minquan Road) and Suehirochou (Now Zhongzheng Road). The roof and part of the floors were destroyed and government agencies nearby such like Tainan Prefecture Office suffered severe damage. The marks and bullets holes left on the façade of Hayashi Department Store were already repaired during the restoration, but on the top floor visitors can still see the evidence of that ferocious attack.

For those wondering why the U.S. felt inclined to bomb Taiwan during World War II, the last three words of the store's history provided on a lower level are a big hint (quoted "as is"*):

Hayashi Department store was opened on 1932 (year 7 of the Showa Era) and located in West Central District of Tainan. It was known to the Tainan people as "The Five-Stories-House" (Gō-chàn-lâu-á). Upon completion, the building was the second large department store in Taiwan and also the highest in Tainan. Hayashi was the first department store in Tainan with internal lift and other modern equipment. It was also a symbol of Tainan's prosperity and progress milestones during the Japanese colonial period.

The store's website has more details about its history.

I wouldn't have been at all surprised to hear this morning I would soon see an example of how the U.S. has left its mark in Tainan. This isn't what I would have expected though.

* I did fix two punctuation mistakes and added a needed space. Click the links for photos of the original texts which also include Chinese and Japanese versions.

Another Look at What Life Was Once Like Near Shangqiu's Dieze Gate

The previous post featured some buildings inside the Shangqiu's ancient city wall at the Dieze Gate which I had seen in November 2010. After I took the photo of them shared in that post, I walked through the gate and headed to other sights in Shangqiu. When I later returned to the ancient city through the same gate, I took a photo which includes some of this same buildings. In this case they appear on the right side.

I also took a photo of the other side of the street.

The photos aren't remarkable to me just because I found the buildings in both have since been demolished, with the exception of those behind the trees, but also because of the life they capture such as hanging clothes, an electric scale, vehicles, items for sale, and, of course, people on a day which for them might have been mostly unremarkable.

Destroying to Restore: Disappearing Life in the Shangqiu Ancient City

Mark Rowswell, aka Dashan, a performer in China famous for his Chinese language skills and comedy, recently tweeted about a city I rarely see mentioned:

Huge project underway in my hometown: small 4th tier city of Shangqiu (pop 9 million) to restore ancient city wall pic.twitter.com/kMjOtIvyJz

— 大山 Dashan (@akaDashan) April 20, 2016

The tweet reminded me of my own visit to Shangqiu and how everyday life continued amidst construction in its ancient city. A subsequent tweet by Rowswell and an accompanying photo captured how some of the life there hasn't continued in the same way.

Mixed feelings on the obvious sacrifices made to restore this bit of cultural heritage 河南商丘归德古城重建工程 pic.twitter.com/iraprKMNwe

— 大山 Dashan (@akaDashan) April 20, 2016

The mark of the building which had once stood against the wall made me wonder how much of what I had seen in Shangqiu was now gone. Rowswell's photo specifically reminded me of one I had taken inside the western portion of the ancient city wall at Dieze Gate (垤泽门).

When I took the photo back in November 2010, I questioned whether the buildings next to the wall would last long. Now I was especially curious. I am not near Shangqiu at the moment, and, even if he were still there, I figured it would be a bit odd to ask Rowswell to go over and snap a photo.

Fortunately, there was another option. Baidu's online street-view service, which didn't exist when I visited Shangqiu, has greatly expanded its coverage during recent years. Not only does it now cover portions of the Shangqiu Ancient City, it offers a similar viewpoint.

The tree, a little larger, remains, as apparently does some of the activity near the wall. But clearly much is gone. Seeing the remains of the demolished buildings wasn't entirely unexpected, yet I still felt a complex combination of emotions I have experienced before elsewhere in China.

When I visited this location the buildings and the life around them caught my attention as much as, if not more than, the ancient city gate. I wonder what life was like there during the wall's early years. In some ways it may have more closely resembled what I saw five and a half years ago than life there now.

Regardless, the buildings are history. Perhaps it was the right choice. And perhaps someday in the future people will want to reconstruct the buildings for the same reasons they were destroyed.

Like Rowswell, I have mixed feelings.

Signs of Tainan's Past

Cemetery in Anping District, Tainan, Taiwan

Assorted Links: People's Daily's YouTube Rant, Taiwan's Principles, Delhi's Pollution, and Composer Chou Wen-chung

Some links for today:

1. China's People's Daily is upset about its YouTube account. No, People's Daily isn't advocating for YouTube to be unblocked in China. It is mad because thousands of its YouTube subscribers suddenly disappeared, and it is letting people know about it:

On Wednesday, Ren Jianmin, managing director of People’s Daily Online USA, penned an English-language online column about the paper’s YouTube channel losing thousands of subscribers in two days. Mr. Ren, who also oversees the newspaper’s social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other foreign sites, concluded that “YouTube did not show a bit of respect to our 3,552 subscribers by removing them from our channel without any reasons.” . . . .

Naturally, the People’s Daily took to another blocked social media network, Twitter, to voice its indignation.

As explained, one possible innocuous explanation for the disappearance is that they were simply accounts for artificial users. There was no word on Ren's thoughts about this. The article ends with a question one can only hope Ren will also address.


2. I am in Taiwan at the moment. And Taiwan's status is an especially fascinating topic. So here is some recent news:

Taiwan President-elect Tsai Ing-wen said she will maintain the status quo in the island's relationship with China, but that her policy will be based on democratic principles and transcend party politics, a nuance likely to be lost on Communist Party leaders in Beijing.

3. An article titled "What It’s Like to Live in the World’s Most Polluted Place" isn't about any city in China. Instead, it is about Delhi, the capital of India. But the two sets of photos featured reminded me of similarly polluted scenes I have seen in China. The caption for the tenth photo in the first set especially caught my attention:

A dairy farm sits between a massive construction project and a garbage dump. Livestock are regularly in contact with waste, increasing the risk of contaminated dairy products

I thought back to some questions I recently had after seeing fresh goat milk sold and a goat eating outside in Jieyang, Guangdong.


4. Finally, a story about a composer whose teachers included Edgard Varèse and Bohuslav Martinu shares how 91-year-old Chou Wen-chung doesn't identify himself as a "Chinese composer" even though he grew up in China. Yet he doesn't deny his experiences there have had an influence:

But the sternest teacher of all was war, which swept over Mr. Chou’s native China in 1937, and which, over the next eight years, forced him to flee from one town to the next and often brought him face to face with death. In Shanghai, he practiced Bach and Mozart on the violin to the sound of artillery fire. Later, he trained his hearing as a university student in Guilin, where he learned to identify the flight path of Japanese warplanes by their sound. During a recent interview in his West Village townhouse, Mr. Chou recounted many harrowing war stories.

“This is the kind of thing we don’t want to experience,” he said after describing a traumatic escape from Guilin in 1944, moments before Japanese forces entered the city. “But if you do experience it, use that. We have to learn from life.”

Night Work at a Hole in Tainan

A few hours ago at an intersection next to the Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple (祀典武廟) in Tainan, Taiwan

Life Amidst Construction in Tainan

Call it coincidence. Call it fate. But I can't call it planned. After posting yesterday about the intermixing of everyday life and a construction site in Shangqiu, today I saw a similar mix at Zhengxing Street in Tainan, Taiwan. Today's construction was both far smaller in scale and far briefer, but like in Shangqiu, there weren't hard borders between the roadwork and life on the rest of the street. Below are some photos capturing a few different stages of the work by the Taiwan Water Corporation, passersby, people standing in line at a popular milk tea stall, and a woman who decided to move some potted plants which were next to the area being dug up.

Life Amidst Construction in the Shangqiu Ancient City

When I visited the Shangqiu Ancient City in Henan province in late 2010, road construction made the central Zhongshan Main Street difficult to navigate, especially if you wanted to cross from one side to the other.

There were few barriers around the construction site, and it was easy for people to enter, whether accidentally or on purpose. The border of the construction site was often fuzzy and in places materials obstructed sidewalk space.

So like in many other parts of China, seemingly ordinary construction had become remarkably intwined with the lives of many people, including playing children. And people continued with their daily lives whether on it . . .

next to it . . .

or over it.

The road is in far better shape now, but change doesn't stop, even in an ancient city. And sometimes life can't blend in as easily. I will share a more recent example from Shangqiu later.


Update: See here for the more recent example.

Strategy and Luck: A Game of Banqi in Tainan

As I approached a group of men surrounding a small table yesterday in Tainan, Taiwan, I wondered if I was seeing yet another outdoor game of xiangqi, otherwise known as Chinese chess. But the xiangqi board was rotated from its usual position by 90 degrees, only half the board was covered with xiangqi pieces, and some of the pieces were upside down. So instead of a photo of an outdoor game of xiangqi, here is a photo of an outdoor game of banqi:

As indicated in an unsourced but detailed Wikipedia entry, multiple versions of banqi, which also goes by several other names, exist, yet all, unlike xiangqi, involve a significant element of chance. A how-to-play guide on a blog by Woody Thrower, whose most recent post on the same blog is "Ubuntu 12.04 initramfs dependency nonsense", provides a brief look at the game and so does a fast-paced how-to-play video using alternative pieces by Joseph Larson, whose most recent post is "3D Printing with Ninjaflex". To my great joy, after finding these two guides and the two other posts, I finished watching the tail end of the video and discovered Thrower and Larson are indeed friends.

Presumably the men I saw in Tainan were playing the Taiwanese version of the game. Or perhaps like Thrower and Larson, they selected rules so the "balance of luck and strategy" better matched their tastes. Whatever rules they use, I wonder if they would agree with Larson that:

The combination of luck and strategy means that nobody really loses. If you lose you go 'eh, it was just bad luck'. But if you win you get to go 'aha, isn't my strategy incredible".

Guarding in Red in Tainan

Today's guardian lion, courtesy of the Anping Kaitai Matsu Temple in Tainan, Taiwan: