Stand With Strange Mushrooms

Fall’s come suddenly.  I came back from the Bay Area just this Monday.  My wife laughed at me.  I put my coat on when we went to dinner.  The coat on that I’d worn when I was in the brisk morning air leaving Oakland twenty hours earlier.  “It’s too hot for that.”  She was right.  Beijing was a hot and humid as had been all summer.  Today, three days later, that coat would not be enough to hold off the northern weather that’s blown into the city.

It’s the National Holiday week here this first week of October.  No one in the rest of the world cares, of course. So they still press you and expect you to be accountable.  So does the family.  The kids are home from school.  It should be a time to be with one another, for more than dinner.  Work has found its way into everything.                                                                                                                       

A hike was bandied about but the forecast was foreboding.  It is supposed to rain all afternoon.  Later, heading in on Jingmi Lv the traffic isn’t bad but the sky is ominous.  It looks highly probable to start pouring any minute.  It has looked this way for hours.  

We’ve got a driver who’s aggressive.  I’m glad.  We cut down the access road, weave in an out of lanes and cut seconds off here and minutes off there. It’s all rather energized in the front seat.  But we’re not in a rush, my wife points out.  She’s in the middle in the back and it isn’t working for her.  She asks Mr. Hu to slow it all down.  He obliges without a fuss.  He’s a “Hu” I see on the taxi ID card in front of me. 

Drizzle falling. 

Into the He Li wet market.  It is much bigger and more interesting than I had assumed.  My wife takes too long, my daughters don’t want to stand near the meat nor the creatures of the deep that are splayed out on into the aisle.  But the market is covered and as things go it's clean.  What can you get that you couldn’t get at our local market?  I begin to look more closely.  My daughters and I stop at stand with strange mushrooms, which we consider and begin to ask about.  “Which of these tastes good”, I ask.  These that cost fifteen dollars a jin.  I take forty kuai worth and consider how it is I’ll cook these things.  There’s a guy peeling seeds out of a big durian plant.  I buy a few and they’re quite good, not the least bit mushy and smelly as that plant often is.  I consider a proprietor’s bottle of zhi ma jiang.  I think about it and decide it’s probably not going to taste any different from the other Chinese tahini I’ve bought.  “Do you have any other brands”, I ask?  “No.  Just this.”  “Oh.  Ok.”  I’ve decided I’ll pass.  “It’s my brand.  I make it.”  “Really? You bottle your own?”  With that, he sold me.