Dumplings

We didn't eat dim sum while we were in Hong Kong. It is usually served as a brunch-lunch-afternoon food, and we didn't have enough free time during the day to run off and eat a sit-down meal like that. That means we have been in China for about 10 days now, and we have yet to eat jiao zi. The students can't really handle this. At each meal time, when once they would have asked patiently, "Ni you jiao zi ma?", they have taken to crying out “dump-dump!” like baby birds begging to be fed. In Shenzhen, the ground zero of modern globalization, a restaurant owner tells us in very slow Mandarin (because I can still barely comprehend) that we will not find a dumpling around here any closer than Fujian Province. The students wept, but I assured them that dumplings abound in Xi'an, our next stop. Suffice to say, garments may be global but food is still extremely local.

Yesterday we visited an urban village in Shenzhen (see next post) and ate their local dish, essentially called “the big bowl.” The dish is a huge bowl that combines between 12 and 16 different foods in layers of delicious: in our bowl we found everything from broccoli and tofu to pigs' feet and squid. Everyone parks around the table and chows down out of the huge bowl. This village has the world record for the most people eating the same dish at the same time, thanks to the big bowl (it was a really big bowl – about 3,500 people ate out of it!).