Chinese Leaves / Jinling Wu
Image by The Willowherb Review
There was a nice restaurant near Greyfriars Bobby not far from my home in Edinburgh that I went to for lunch from time to time because its quality food came at a very reasonable price. The staff were very pleasant and the head chef shared the same name as my favourite film star. It had a diverse menu with some Asian ingredients typical of the fusion style that was apparently trendy in town.
One day I was shown to a seat near the window with a beautiful view of a medieval castle. It was still early for lunch, and the restaurant was very quiet. Instead of going straight for my favourite dish, I decided to take my time to study the three-page menu carefully and indeed found something interesting: pan-fried cod with Chinese leaves and mashed potatoes. I have never been a fish person but I was curious about which kind of Chinese leaves it actually meant. So I settled on this dish. When the food was served, I examined the ingredients on my plate. I found one baby bok choy.
Chinese cuisine includes such a large catalogue of vegetables that a normal fresh market in China would have at least forty different kinds of vegetables, with a good one extending to seventy or eighty. When I am translating Chinese to English for foreigners, the various vegetables’ names have always been a headache. It is impossible to explain them without looking up words in the dictionary. But this elegant restaurant found a simplistic yet effective way to tackle the issue. To most of the customers here, it was sufficient to know there was an exotic vegetable to keep the ordinary cod company. The confused were only the Chinese. Apparently with greater knowledge comes greater confusion.
When I’d moved to Scotland, I’d been warned of the difficulty of living in a foreign country, but I couldn’t foresee that even keeping my own Chinese name would demand exhaustive labour. When I introduced myself, there was often a pause as people needed extra time to process the information. In lucky cases, people got it right and told me it was a beautiful name. Sometimes they smiled and stopped asking after I repeated it a few times, knowing that they would not be able to comprehend it in a short timespan. In a few cases, people got so frustrated that they accused me of speaking unclear English.
I was bored by cod that day, but entertained by the fact that Chinese leaves confused the Chinese.
China was an agricultural society for four thousand years and this cultivated in its people a close connection with nature, especially for those who were born in the countryside like me. I lived in a small town in rural region until I was twelve. Most of my relatives were farmers when I was a child. I used to spend a lot of time during the school holidays working with my grandma in her garden and would snatch fresh pears, tomatoes, roasted chestnuts, and potatoes as my rewards while the adults were working in the rice field. At noon, they came back to have lunch. They left their rubber shoes at the door, lifted water from a well in the backyard, and washed their muddy feet and hands with cool water. The staple food was rice harvested by themselves in the previous year.
Nowadays I still keep quite some farmers’ habits and instincts, which have never really faded despite living in cities for many years. A lot of fond memories are celebrated with the tastes of the season: rice soup with seven leaves to freshen up in spring, chilled watermelon to resist the summer heat, roasted chestnut to complement the autumn leaves, steamed pear with rock sugar to dissolve the winter chill. I grow vegetables and fruits in my own Scottish garden. My farming attempts haven’t always been successful, as I am poorly equipped with practical knowledge after years of studying and working on subjects other than agriculture. Once I grew carrots in my garden and ended up harvesting carrots the size of my thumb. But no matter how little I harvested from my own garden, I appreciated having those plants around me. Our existences have been inextricably intertwined.
Back then, during the Spring Festival, when most of the adults played mahjong at the table, I’d hang out with my youngest aunt to hunt for wild greens. It was pure joy to wander on the spring hills with a wicker basket, picking out the edible leaves. We were very satisfied to see the basket filled with all of the treasures we got for free. They were gifts from nature, not the same as the freebies given by vendors to urge you to buy their products. We would wash the dirt off and chop them into tiny pieces, mix them with rice, and steam them. There was an aromatic scent while we were waiting for the rice to be cooked, and the cooked rice was dyed a greyish green to our delight.
By then, we were living in a country with a lot of things to complain about. But I never heard anyone complaining about food. It was a national comfort you could afford easily and legally, unlike sex, fundamental rights, and material comforts. In our remote town in central China, food stands with dim yellow lights in colourful plastic tents served as a different kind of night club, keeping people’s morale high. They held our passion for life. They came with atmospheric steam, smells of delicious food, and an extra bonus when there was flirtatious pop music. People didn’t talk about politics because there was nothing they could talk about. They talked about the concrete things they held responsibilities for: their businesses, their daughters’ marriage agendas, and their sons’ new city flats.
Besides food, medicinals were also sourced directly from the land, without pharmaceutical companies as middlemen. My dad had arthritis in his early thirties, and the Chinese medicine doctor suggested dandelion. In late spring and early autumn during the dandelion’s flowering season, after my dad got off work we used to go to the field and forage the yellow flowers. We only bought them from stores when they were out of season. It was a herb that propagated fast and spread out all over the hills. We’d always get enough and head home to make a big pot of soup. Healing came slowly but resolvedly. It seemed an overly simple treatment, but it did its job. My father continued to drink it for two years and never complained about his knee problems again.
In my garden in Edinburgh, there are many uninvited dandelions. When they blossom, they bring me back to the small hills I used to walk with my dad.
Recently, when I was taking a Sunday walk along the Scottish coast, I saw a group of Chinese hunting for sea fruits at the shore. I thought it was a nice recreational activity in such fine weather, and would add something fresh to the dinner table. But the people in my sight looked timid. They wore caps, kept their heads down, avoided eye contact, and got nervous when they noticed they were being stared at. I didn’t know whether they were shy about foraging on public property or about the fact that they were collecting freebies in a foreign land. Perhaps because there was no inviting sign for foraging near the shore, they felt the shame of theft. I understood their caution. After all, perhaps we belong to the same category: we have built our homes on a land that we can’t really call our homeland. Like Chinese leaves laid awkwardly alongside North Atlantic cod, to so many, we are not identifiable as individuals.
I was thinking about that when I stopped to get a coffee in my neighbourhood. On my way back, at the intersection, I saw a car almost crash into two girls while they were walking through the zebra crossing. They looked like tourists with their posh dresses, heavy makeup, and large-brimmed straw hats. They obviously panicked, but on their faces the thrill of visiting a new land had not yet been lost. They said sorry in English with recognisable Chinese accents, and the driver drove away as if it was entirely the fault of the reckless pedestrians. I wanted to say something to the apologetic girls but after a second thought, I simply passed them without a word. I had no idea about who they were, where they were heading, and what kind of expectations they had. But I could tell they were still looking at the city in awe after the accident. I’d better not spoil their joy.
I turned onto another street, the so-called ‘shit street’, where local dog owners were reluctant to pick up their pet’s excrement. I barely noticed I wasn’t alone until I saw a passing white boy with his eyes locked on me. He looked straight at me and said, ‘Chinese… cunt!’ The moment in between had offered enough time to confirm that I was indeed Chinese. I was stunned and didn’t know how to react. I stopped walking and looked in his direction. He continued spewing filthy words, but as he walked further away, the noise diminished. He was perhaps ten or a young teen at most.
This time the message was not confusing at all. There was no one else on the street. I was the one and only recipient.
I opted for other routes as much as I could after this event. When I had to do my shopping in the butcher’s shop on the shit-street, I walked fast, but still I heard a whispering: ‘Chinese cunt’.