You Could Buy Paji

Meeting with an systems integrator over in Haidian.  I don’t know how necessary I was for this meeting but I’d promised I’d go.  The Didi driver had a square face and a course smile.  He wanted to know all about me.  “Well yes, I’ve been here for a while.”  Once he heard my wife was from Shandong, he reckoned we were family.  He was from Dezhou!  “Right, Dezhou,” I thought checking my mental map of the province.  Oh yes, you guys are famous for the braised chicken, aren’t you.  Dezhou paji.  “Yes.  That’s us.”

When you take the high-speed train to Jinan from Beijing, you often stop in Dezhou.  The young ladies in purple outfits walk up and down the aisles selling large bags with entire dezhou paji’s vacuum wrapped within.  My colleague always raves about the chicken as we speed along though I’ve never raised my hand to buy a bag.  I don’t think I’d know where to put it.  Two or three stops down the line is Weifang and while I have a very clear, and favorable memory of their mustard chicken, I guess I can’t place the Dezhou taste. 

The driver mentions to me that, in as much as I am married-in, I am a Shandong guye.  I don’t recognize the word but when I start to clarify the characters:  “Gugu de gu?  Yeye de ye?” I know it has something to do with my family status: indeed, it means ‘son-in-law.’   My driver loved this, somehow and began to wax to the theme: “You know, there’s another way you could say it too.  And when you talk to your younger brother in law, you did say you had a younger brother in law, right?  Yeah, he can be called little-bro, well, don’t say it unless you’re kidding around, you know?  Say it with a smile.  Wink a little bit and then it’s OK to call him that.”  And it was all suddenly very familiar this talk of proper family nomenclature for one’s extended family is the quintessential Shandong conversation.  It felt like every chat I’ve ever had, introduced in one apartment or another out with my relatives in Wudi County.  Akin perhaps to how we Americans limit ourselves to one word: “snow” when the Eskimos have a hoard of nuanced terms, we also suffer a clear vocabulary deficit, when we default to simple terms like “aunts” or “cousins.”  Your mom's younger brother's second son, is a rather different set of ideographs from your father's elder sister's first daughter.  

Later after dinner I referenced this chat with my wife.  She was characteristically disinterested.  My suggestion that familial, relational assignations were an obsession in Shandong, and this was perhaps indicative of Confucian culture, sounded about the kitchen with all the fine timbre of one hand clapping.  But she did pick up when I mentioned dezhou paji.  “Oh” she said: “I remember they used to sell them at the train station.  You could buy paji when the train stopped in Dezhou.”  I thought of the old train that took five hours instead of ninety minutes to get to Jinan, and I was glad to hear that the city had been marketing the local specialty, along the train line, for longer than I’d reckoned.  They just didn't have vacuum bags and purple outfits back in the eighties.  I must try this braised chicken someday.  Google maps tells me there’s a Dezhou Paji restaurant only twenty-four minutes’ drive from home . . .  Can't find that in New York. 

Friday, 11/16/18