Too Assertively

The Shanghai night traffic is prancing around outside.  It’s a particular type of Shanghai street traffic.  It is not the hipper-than-than though, plane tree shrouded, darkness of Ruijin Road in the old French Concession’s evening time. This is Huanghe Road between Dingxing Road and Feng Yang Road, not far from the People’s Park.  It’s Shanghai, so there are plenty of Shanghainese.  If I take off the Menahan Street band and listen I can here people ending their interrogatives in “vah?” instead of “ma?”  But the wait staff area all probably from Anhui.  And the people on the street seem to a mix of locals in their bathrobes and waidi tourists and a smattering of ‘heading somewhere else’ foreigners.

I’ve been residing in this neighborhood when I come to teach here for four years or so.  This place isn’t bad.  I’ve sat here and written before.  It’s not as good as the place I ate last night.  But I ate there last night.  I ate too much there.  They should give me paltry Shanghai portions, instead of heaping Shandong portions.  That place is better managed.  The wait staff is all busy and look labored, serious.  This place has a twelve, young people in brown shirts standing around.  When I signalled to one that I was ready to order, he elbowed another kid, who went to the wrong table.  They all laughed as he asked the table that wasn’t yet ready what they wanted for dinner.  “So why don’t one of you three come over then, and take my order, since he went to the wrong table?” I offered, just a bit too assertively.  They laughed nervously and gestured to a girl, out of sight who was also equipped with a food-input-phone and hence allowed to take an order.

I tried to order bean sprout leaves, dou miao, but the young lady, whom I’d yet to really look at told me they didn’t have any dou miao.  Is that right?  What’s good?  She began with an ill-fated sentence: “well, you foreigners tend to like . . . “  “What foreigner?”  I interrupted.  “Stop there.  I’ve been ordering food in this country since before you were born”, I offered, a bit too assertively.  I looked at her face.  I considered her humanity.  I tried to order more slowly.

One of the kids whose job it is to bring things over to table, it would appear, an order taker in training, brought me over my rather more appetizing shizitou than the shizitou they offered me yesterday on the China Eastern flight down here.   “So where are you all from?” I asked, presumptuously, assuming he was less an individual and rather the member of a group.  “We’re all from Guizhou” he said, confirming the collectivity if not the geography of what I’d asserted.  “Oh really?  Guizhou?  That’ great.”

An employee who is allowed to wear a white dress shirt, rather than a brown uniform has just taken a brown shirt clad young fellow outside, just before me here at the windwo, to smoke a cigarette.  The brown shirt kid looks unsure of himself.  Seven of his brown shirt colleagues can see him out there, luxuriating.  There is a story here.  Why there are eight or nine young people from Guizhou manning this restaurant, when two or three would do. There’s a story that goes back to a village in Guizhou I suspect, that has nothing to do with running a profitable restaurant, and everything to do with returning favors.   Then again, perhaps I make my case too assertively.

Tuesday, 5/30/17