Growing Old over Food
Discovering the world through food with Chen Xiaoqing: everyday warmth, hometowns, and memories.
I discovered this book on this year’s Dedao Reading Festival recommendation list, but I had known of Mr. Chen for several years. I used to enjoy watching Roundtable, and he appeared on several episodes. I saw in him the warmth of everyday life. Although I am not especially demanding about food, his descriptions still made my mouth water. Reading this book had the same effect.
I. Overview
The author, Chen Xiaoqing, is a documentary director, producer, and food writer. His best-known documentary is A Bite of China, which I believe most people have seen.
This is an essay collection that explores life through food, a sincere work written from the heart. It follows him from leaving home at seventeen to study in Beijing, to accidentally becoming a food documentary director, and eventually a nationally known food lover. Every stage of that long journey has memories connected to food.
II. Selected Passages
2.1 Food and Taste
-
According to gourmets, food has three levels: first, satisfying hunger; second, pleasing the palate; and finally, comforting the soul.
-
People’s tastes are sometimes as stubborn as rock and sometimes as open-minded as flowing water.
-
Stubborn taste memories from adolescence inevitably influence a person’s food choices throughout life.
-
The best food must find the person best suited to it.
-
Food is my most effective and interesting channel for understanding the world. A small act of cooking lets me see the shared wisdom of people living across the Pacific. From the perspective of food, no cuisine is an isolated island; humanity lives in one shared home.
-
Many foods, like small-pot rice noodles, are part of local life. Only when enjoyed where they originate are they truly alive. Moved far away, they become somewhat unaccustomed to their surroundings, “get moody,” and may even give up and turn into mummies because so few diners appreciate them.
-
Once a native cuisine leaves home, ingredients and seasonings cannot be supplied as plentifully or authentically. In unfamiliar surroundings, facing new customers, cooks also inevitably watch their customers’ reactions and make compromises. An orange grown south of the Huai River remains an orange; north of it, it becomes a bitter trifoliate orange.
-
Seeking good food and a decent life comes from human instinct. This is common sense.
-
One person’s honey is another’s poison. Such feelings are hard to share with others. Do not impose on others what you dislike; do not impose what you like either.
-
There is no single standard of deliciousness. Instead, we should feel respect and gratitude for all the foods that have ever warmed us.
-
Everyone’s tastes are as different as their experiences.
-
More often than not, food carries memories and bears witness to passing years. It belongs to the individual.
2.2 Everyday Warmth
-
What attracts me most to a city is never its historic sights or commercial centers, but its food markets. Markets are the best way to get close to a city. In Bangkok, Tainan, Tokyo, Shunde, Chengdu, and Changsha, you can find almost all of each city’s scents in its markets. This was also how I first came to know Mr. Chen. On Roundtable, he said that whenever he visits a city, he goes to a market first to feel its atmosphere.
-
The earth has no shortage of concrete cities; what it lacks is the warmth of everyday life.
-
When I eat, I choose the main dining room over a private room, the roadside over a grand restaurant, outdoors over indoors, and standing over sitting whenever possible.
2.3 Reflections on Life
-
The happiest conversations between friends leave no specific content clearly remembered, but an overall pleasant impression.
-
Whatever you do, persistence and seriousness can make it profitable. The book tells the story of a stallholder growing a business. The same applies to what we want to do.
-
Reading is a process of taking things in; thinking is the process of digestion. People should maintain their ability to produce output. Even if they do not have it, they should force themselves to create. Many people enjoy taking notes and collecting materials, but that is only input. What they acquire is fragmented, with little thought of their own—mostly other people’s thinking. They should try producing something.
-
Hosting a meal always means finding the greatest common denominator of everyone’s tastes.
-
At work or in social settings, I come across as harmless and good-tempered. The laziness and irritability in my character emerge almost only around those closest to me. I feel the same: an easygoing person at work and in social situations, but more irritable and lazy around loved ones.
2.4 Hometown
-
The taste of home is not only spatial but temporal, connected to memory and growing up.
-
Everyone has always had two hometowns: one in space and one in time. I have lived away from home for more than ten years. Without realizing it, I have long since come to regard another place as home.
-
Many things reveal their beauty only after you leave them behind, like mooncakes or the moon over your hometown. At the time, we thought it was ordinary.
-
Only after leaving familiar surroundings and family for somewhere entirely strange can a person understand that home means more than familiar people or scenery. I felt this way when I first went to university.
III. Conclusion
For someone who cannot cook, I hardly dare ask much of meals; mostly I just need to satisfy my hunger. But this book deepened my understanding of food and taste. My family is from northern Jiangsu, and the author describes many foods from that area, which felt very familiar.
What touched me most was the warmth of ordinary life. I also enjoy roadside food. We called the stalls outside my university the “eighth canteen”; they supplied most of my dinners during those four years. When I stayed on campus in the summer of my third year, the stalls closed, and I spent nearly two months eating malatang and noodles from a nearby shop. I missed all those stalls terribly. Auntie Guo’s moon-shaped stuffed flatbread was the most famous, but my favorite was Xuzhou vegetable-stuffed jianbing—perhaps because of my hometown roots.
In short, food and desire are fundamental human appetites. What to eat is something we consider every day. I hope everyone eats and drinks well and lives a good life!