life

The Noodle Joint

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

Just outside of the gate of the apartments where I teach was a noodle joint.

At least three days a week for the last 18 months, I have gone to this noodle restaurant. I have ordered a bowl of tomato and egg noodles from the manager, a pretty and alacritous women who spat words like they were a snare drum solo and slung noodles almost as fast. I have sometimes ordered a bowl of tofu soup, too.

I have learned how to order noodles, how to order soup, how to ask for them to go, how to ask what else they’ve got but never order it. I have learned how to have a conversation in Chinese.

I have seen the price of a bowl of tomato and egg noodles go from 10 to 11 yuan. I have quit having to actually order, smiled and said thank you, and just handed over the money, again and again and again. I have become a regular.

I have sat at one of the four plastic stools that surrounded each of the 20-odd wooden tables that ran down the sides of its long and narrow interior, shivering far from the closed doors in winter and sweating next to them in summer.

I have pulled the brown plastic chopsticks from the metal can on the table. I have used them to mix, then eat my sticky, chewy, gravy-slathered noodles. I have struggled to learn how to eat noodles with chopsticks, and I have forgotten how hard it used to be. I have shaken my head at the noodle juice splattered on my sweater. I have picked up the bowl with two hands and slurped down the last bit of cooling tomato slurry sprinkled with cilantro leaves and chives. I have watched myself do this in the half-length mirror that ran down the left side of the plain white walls.

I have listened to the Chinese customers bicker and spit and cry and joke and lecture and laugh and live.

I have studied Chinese characters during my lunch and dinner breaks with the spring-blue sky and the pink plum blossoms waiting outside. I chatted with friends about Beijing while hiding from the dark and smoggy night. I have sat with Jordyn when she was a fellow teacher and sat alone when she wasn’t anymore.

I have read a book and tried to take a deep breath on days when teaching threatened to overwhelm me, or when my relationships got rocky, or when it was just hard to be in China and I wanted to be home.

And now without even a prior hint, I have seen the interior go dark, the voices quiet, the pretty manager disappear, and the tables and stools and chopsticks and cans and half-lengthen mirror ripped out and tossed to the curb.

Eighteen months. One more change. But sometimes a noodle joint is more than a noodle joint.

Fixing my (T)Rusty Steed

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

My bike is a decades old, famous-China-brand Flying Pigeon, which is the steel horse that clogged Beijing’s streets following World War 2. When you think of 9 Million Bicycles in Beijing, think of the Flying Pigeon. Mine used to be black but has faded in many places to rust or gray. It’s a massive bike, cruiser-style, so I sit straight up to ride it, sorta tilted back behind the far-protruding front wheel like a hog. I bought it at the only licensed used bike store in Beijing, near the Lama Temple a little more than an hour ride from my home. The flying pigeon reputation for sturdiness means bike weighs about 50 pounds so its tough to get moving. The brakes don’t often work well, I have to pump up the rear tire every other day, and I need to get my seat to stop moving around somehow. But I love it.

I love sitting straight up, dweeb-like, and cruising through the Beijing night, through the hutongs and past the gate towers .

Once in a while, the bike even gets me compliments from the locals. One day riding to work, I cut across on intersection more or less in front of a turning car. The driver pulled up next to me and rolled down the window. I expected to see an angry face. Instead, the middle-aged man had a toothy grin spread across his face.

“You are so good!” he yelled, giving me a thumbs up. “So good!”

He drove along side me for 10 seconds or so yelling, “You are so good!” over and over again, his thumb stuck up the whole time.

Anyway, I ride it pretty hard, and last week on the way to work, something finally broke. My pedals jammed up in the middle of the road. I could pedal backward a few turns, then forward again a few turns to keep moving, but once I got to work and took a look at it, I knew something was wrong. I really didn’t want to walk home from work and lose the time to go to the gym, so I set out on my dinner break to find a guy to fix me up.

There’s no Performance Bike Shop in Beijing. At least not one that I know of. In fact for the most part there isn’t any “shop” at which to get a bike repaired at all. Instead, you walk around with your bike until you find somebody with a cardboard sign — usually red lettering on white board — and a cart full of grease-covered tools. This is your shifu. He is usually balding. He is usually wearing a green, military surplus coat. He is usually sitting on a wooden, child-sized portable stool. He is usually smoking a cigarette. And he will try to fix your bike.

This particular fix took four shifus. It’s still not all the way fixed.

The first shifu, across from a nearby primary school, beat it with a wrench, tried to force the pedals around, then gave up and told me it was a problem with my crankshaft. As he was a variety shifu — key-making, shoe-improving, bike-fixing, and more — he didn’t have the parts to fix it. This cost me 2 yuan.

The second, a younger bike specialist down the road behind some apartments, told me it was a problem with my rear flywheel. He scrounged through his cart for a new one, then as the sun sank and we chatted about the NBA, he took apart the rear axle, beat some stuff with a hammer, scattered metal parts everywhere, replaced some stuff, and put it all back together. It didn’t fix the grinding sound, and before I got home, the whole thing was jammed up again and the chain fell off the gear. I nearly made it all the way home. This cost me 35 yuan. At least I got a brand new flywheel out of it.

The next day, the third shifu, this one totally bald with a shop at the bus station, took one look at the chain laying jammed inside the single-speed drivetrain and waved me off with a “can’t fix it”. This cost me 0 yuan.

Just around the corner, practically in the middle of the narrow street, the fourth shifu was a balding man with a tiny stool, a green coat. and a cigarette. He fiddled with the jammed bike chain for 20 minutes before he finally got it back on the gears. For a while, he chatted with another customer who was sprawled out in a reclining chair with a newspaper. Then he changed gears to complain about the state of my old bike while trying to sell me one of his newer used bikes. Eventually he gave up and decided the real problem was with my crankshaft and told me to come back at 5. I wasn’t off work till 6. We argued for a few minutes about whether this was an acceptable time.

“Just don’t be late,” he said, tugging at his coat. “I’m going home at six. Don’t be late.”

I came back at 4. He watched me stroll all the way down the street with a slight smile twisting the corner of his mouth. When I arrived, he didn’t say anything, he just held up his black, gunk-covered hands.

“My god. So dirty,” I said.

“Errrggg,” he said. “Old bikes are no good. Too hard to fix. You should buy a new one.”

“I like these old bikes,” I said. “Very Chinese.”

“Yes, very Chinese,” he grumbled. “Very Chinese.”

He gave me my bike. I gave him 40 yuan.

On the way home, the pedals started to wobble, then the crank went limp. I pedaled home with one foot as best I could. The next morning I saw that while the shifu had indeed fixed my crankshaft, he’d forgotten (or lost, given the way shifus are apt to throw parts all over the ground) the screw for the pin that holds the pedals together so they turn the gears in tandem. I pushed on the pin with my shoe, and it went back in.

All the way to work the next morning, the pedals would start to clunk, then go limp. I’d hold them parallel with one foot and push the pin back in with the other, ride a few dozen meters, then do it again. On the way home it was more of the same.

When I got home I beat the pin with a wrench until it seemed to stick. Then I put some tape on it.

That’s the shifu way. So far, so good.

Snail Soup

/ Jim Sojourner / 1 Comment

It took almost 8 months to learn I was eating snails.

Well not snails, exactly, but snail broth. With my noodles. And lots of it. In fact, every time I ate these noodles, once the noodles were gone, I’d slurp down the broth spoonful by spoonful until I couldn’t spoon it anymore, and then I’d grab the bowl with both hands and tilt it back and pour every last drop into my gaping mouth. Every last drop of snail broth, once or twice or sometimes three times a week.

Only I didn’t know. I wish I didn’t know still. I haven’t eaten the noodles since I found out. I need to. I love them, but now I’m afraid that I won’t be able to slurp down every drop of broth without thinking about snails, dead snails, marinating the boiling broth. Which tastes so delicious, especially with some bamboo shoots, lettuce leaves, tofu skin, rice noodles, and a hefty spoon of chili oil. I just wish I didn’t know.

From photobucket user Izos, these look almost identical to the Luo Si noodles I eat. Or ate.

It’s my Chinese teacher’s fault. Last week in class we started a new unit about “the taste of China.” The first word on our list was 特 (te) which means special. She asked if we’d found, by ourselves, any special tasting food in Beijing. I spoke up fast.

“Downstairs there’s a green noodle restaurant in the basement next to Burger King,” I said.

“Oh yeah, the 螺蛳 （luo si) noodles. Yes, even Chinese people think the flavor is very strong,” she said.

“What?” I said. I didn’t understand what “luo si” meant.

She drew a snail on the blackboard and tapped it with the chalk.

“Luo si.” Tap, tap. “Luo si.”

“No, no,” I said. A different place. There are no snails in the noodles. It’s always really busy. I told her the restaurant slogan.

“Yeah,” she said. “Snail noodles. No snails in the noodles. Just in the broth.”

“Snail noodles.”

When class ended, I walked by the place on the way home. I still didn’t believe her, even though I’d been thinking more and more how the noodles did have a strong, kind of strange taste. I reached the green storefront and looked at the massive characters, white ones, above the door. This why it’s dangerous to be bad at reading. They weren’t hard to see.

螺蛳 – snail.

Snail noodles. How I wish I didn’t know.