justina forever

Across the street from my neighborhood compound sits a small grocery shop. I had hoped in my heart of hearts to make it mine. It had everything I needed: fruit, vegetables, tofu, even some meat. The summer peaches were plump and juicy, the grapes bright green and turgid. Best of all, it’s so close to my home. But my dreams were dashed by the mewing of a tiny kitten scampering, unseen, somewhere among the crates of potatoes and corn. I followed her mews all the way to a cardboard litter box tucked away in the back corner of the shop next to the onions. There I found her hopping between the onions and kitty litter with not a care in the world. A cute sight to see, sure, but soon the question of hygiene eclipsed all else. Never mind that onions are encased in protective skins and that kittens are cute; suddenly the shop seemed a little darker, mustier, and dirtier than I liked. I stopped patronizing the shop that day.

The other day the kitten sat at the entrance guarding a crate of tomatoes. She’s twice as big now because she’s a teenager. When I stooped down to tease the cat, the shopkeeper said, “Long time no see! You haven’t shopped here in a long time.” (Four months and three days, to be exact.) Rather than explaining my thoughts on the onions and kitty litter, I gushed on and on about wow, how big the cat is, wow, how cute she’s become! I felt a pang of guilt. It’s true: the less we know the better. I sometimes wish I’d never discovered Littergate.

I didn’t want to tell the Madame Littergate that I have a new market to call mine now, up the block and around the corner. This market is brightly lit, not musty at all, and covers all the major food groups: seafood, meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, and pickled things. Plus, there is a diary shop next door. Here you can buy different varieties of peaches and grapes, the peaches pale as a fresh pair of sneakers or yellow as a meadow of sunflowers, the grapes fat like water balloons. Here you can find all kinds of mushrooms – white buttons, oysters, enoki (aka 明天见, so called because they pass through your system intact, so you can see them the next day in the toilet), shiitake, cremini, portabello, and other varieties I don’t know the names of.

The only downside here is the vegetable man smokes like a chimney, lets the ashes fly while he arranges the potatoes in neat rows or stuffs 5 kilograms worth of eggplants into a giant bag in the middle of the night (perhaps for a restaurant that produces baba ghanoush, is my guess). The first time I went into the shop, he told me he couldn’t take his eyes off me (hopefully not in a creepy way). “Your hair is so short, but it really suits you!”. Now whenever I go into the shop, he says, “Ha? Your hair STILL hasn’t grown out yet?” Maybe one day I’ll go in with a wig.

Once, the vegetable man asked me why I always buy the cheapest variety of mandarin oranges. It’s because I like my fruit to be mildly tart. How can anyone resist the crispy tang of a Granny Smith apple? When I’m feeling extra fancy, I treat myself to a Granny Smith apple (or something that looks close to it) from the international imports supermarket. Only when I’m feeling extra fancy.

I struggled to come up with something interesting to write about today, but writing this post made a bunch of other topics pop up in the back of my head. Note to self on other things I can write about: retired aunties, going to the park, the security guards, things my Chinese teacher tells us that aren’t in the textbook.

Every day after class, I head to the school cafeteria to get something quick to eat before I go home to work. There are several canteens strewn across campus, with types of food from all over China (this week they even have hairy crab), but today’s post isn’t about food. It’s about cafeteria traffic.

Here’s how it works. On one side of the cafeteria is the area where you get your food; the other side, tables and chairs. All over the walls, posters ask students not to save seats with their backpacks, but we all have banner blindness now, so the tables and chairs are occupied not by human bums but by backpacks and other personal objects like keys, pens, and even a solitary piece of Kleenex. You and your friends plop your stuff down on the table you like and then go to the food area. Since I have no friends here, I never save a seat for myself.

The food area is basically a bunch of stalls with windows. There are all sorts of stalls.At some windows, trays of prepared food wait to be doled out. You tell the cafeteria worker which food you want, they ladle it out onto a tray, and they weigh your tray and charge you through a student card or QR code. You can order noodles made the way you like. You can order Japanese curry. At the hotpot-type stalls, you grab tongs and fill a bowl with whatever meats and vegetables you want, and then the cooks cook it up for you. Prices are maybe half what you might pay off campus. Sometimes you have to wait ten minutes while your food is prepared before they call your number. You pay for your food at the stall from which you order it.

I think the chaos of the cafeteria is exacerbated by this seat-saving phenomenon, which leaves people who haven’t saved seats hopelessly clutching their trays with soup sloshing over the lip of the bowl searching for a place to sit while all the tables are covered in bags and pens and keys and a single Kleenex and other random belongings.

It made me think back to when I was an undergrad, and how the flow of traffic was so different in that cafeteria. The area where you could get food was separated from the eating area by workers at cash registers. You would enter the cafeteria through the “get food” area, pay for your food, then proceed to the seating area. Nobody really saved seats, I think because of the flow of traffic.

Come to think of it, though, the likelihood of someone stealing your backpack was not low, so there’s also that.

It also made me think of how it’s very common to see people eating alone here, one hand shoveling food into their mouth, the other operating a mobile phone while they watch videos. This happens everywhere, not just in the cafeteria. But when I was an undergrad, I remember some of my friends thought I was super weird for eating alone sometimes. Another thing that strikes me is that men and women don’t really seem to mix on campus here.