Street Food 
Working in an English training center means that your hours are mostly
likely converse to the rest of the working world. Catering to adults-only, business market your
classes are taught at times when your full-time working students are available: nights and
weekends. It’s just like going to night school back home. So, while working at such a center in
Nanjing, on weeknights I would get off work at around 9:00pm. While this is not particularly late,
most of the small restaurants that I frequented would have closed about an hour before. China is a
country in which people enjoying eating their meals at rather fixed times; dinner time is 6:00.
However, being myself, and that means somewhat disorganized when it comes to meals and
eating times, I would usually miss the appointed hour for dinner and emerge from the massive
business building ravenous. My walk homewards took me through the business district surrounding my
work place on large, wide avenues. Such avenues were simply not the place to start looking for some
small hole-in-the-wall where I could get a bowl of 红烧牛肉面 or a plate of 鱼香茄子. However, as I got
closer to my apartment, in between Nanjing University and Nanjing Normal University, the street
food action started to warm up.
As I walked up the last hill on Shanghai Lu I could smell the work of the two vendors
who called my street corner their nightly home. They were always there together, one man and one
woman, though how much of their partnership was distinctly planned and agreed upon I could never
tell. On rainy nights she would bring a tarp that he would hang over their two communal tables; and
only on the coldest of nights would they be absent.
She sold 白菜 and 青菜水饺 and tiny 馄饨, and he sold a plethora of deep fried kebabs of藕, 茄子, 鸡肉,
年糕, 生菜, 蘑菇, 鱼, and 鸡翅, that after cooking he would douse in his homemade chili concoction.
Together, I came to believe, these two sidewalk chefs formed the perfect culinary twosome. Almost
every working night I would stop and eat a chicken and a lotus kebab while waiting for my 二两 of 白菜
dumplings to cook.
It didn’t take the dumpling lady and the kebab man long to learn that I was a regular
customer. And in a few weeks she told me that she even knew which nights to expect me, Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. She had even guessed that these must be my work nights. Often when I would
arrive and place my two orders, they would be terrifically busy, and frequently I had to wait for a
seat at the table or choose to take my dumplings home with me, 打包带走. Occasionally, on a
particularly chilly or misty night the customers would be few and I could attempt to speak with
both her and him in my broken Chinese.
She was a small woman, probably about 5’1 and he wasn’t much taller at 5’5. She had a
youthful face, which stood out in striking contradiction to her work-worn, and frostbite havocked
thick, red fingers. Once, coming home unexpectedly early from work I saw her pulling her cart
towards her claimed spot on the corner. It was a large cart, laden with her large wooden table and
four wooden benches that provided her customers with a comfortable place to eat. She walked in
front of the cart, her body almost parallel with the ground and her arms thrust back, as she pulled
the heavy wooden contraption behind her. When I asked her where she lived she told me the name of a
place that I later realized was nearly a mile distant.
His cart was smaller and, correspondingly, so was his table. Attached to his bicycle, his
cart was considerably quicker and easier to transport along his journeys to and from the corner. He
had a full head of thick black hair, which, at the whim of the weather, would stand either high or
higher off the crown of his head. Even more reticent than she, he rarely asked me questions, and my
wide smile was often met by his much terser one. On occasion, arriving later in the evening, I
would notice that he had either arrived at the corner drunk, or had become so over the course of
the evening. On these nights he would sit on a small stool next to his cart awaiting customers, and
more than once did I have to choose to wake him from his slumber, or go without my deep-fried
kebabs.
When either she or he did question me it was almost invariably about home. She wanted to
know whether or not I had siblings; how many, how old, did they have children of their own? He
wanted to know about my parents; were they living, were they wealthy, had they kicked me out of my
childhood home when I turned 18? She once asked me about September 11th, and if my family was safe
and healthy in its aftermath. He once asked me why I chose to work and live in China; couldn’t I
make more money at home? No matter the question I always tried to answer it as fully as my brief
understanding of Chinese would allow, though I was invariably as dissatisfied with my answers as
their searching looks told me they were.
The last time I visited Nanjing I went expectantly to my old corner, after sinking a few
beers at the local bar, and I was disappointed to discover both the dumpling lady and the kebab man
absent; the corner starkly empty under a single street light. I asked my friend, who resides in my
old neighborhood in Nanjing, if he had seen either of the two recently, and he said, to the best of
his recollection he hadn’t seen them in quite some time. I took a turn through the neighborhood and
its environs, hoping that perhaps they had merely abandoned one locale for another, busier one, but
no luck.
Glossary of Terms:
红烧牛肉面: Extremely popular dish of soy sauce roasted beef served over
spaghetti-like noodles in broth.
鱼香茄子: Another very popular dish, originally from Sichuan, consisting of eggplant stir fried
with fish sauce, garlic, ginger and often pork.
白菜: White Chinese cabbage, sometimes called Napa cabbage in the U.S.
青菜水饺: Boiled Chinese dumpling stuffed with pork and green vegetables.
馄饨: Wonton to the U.S. reader, which is simply the Cantonese for the same small boiled
dumpling. They are usually filled with pork.
藕: Lotus root
茄子: Eggplant
鸡肉: Chicken
年糕: Rice flour patty; delicious when fried and covered in chili.
生菜: Romaine lettuce, or close to it.
蘑菇: Mushroom
鱼: Fish
鸡翅: Chicken wing
二两: 两 is a unit of measure, in this case I ordered two两 of dumplings, or 14.
打包带走: Phrase used when talking about food: To go.
