September evening. Clear blue sky. Moon rising behind a distant building. I ride a pink bicycle across west campus and bumpity-bump down the ramp into the underpass, up the other side and across east campus with its tiled path and students walking in twos and fours, past the lighted volleyball courts on the left, the dorms on the right, through a construction zone where the ground is covered with steel plates, and finally out the back gate manned by a youth in a pale green uniform. A little speed now on the open street. It’s the first night of the Mid-Autumn Festival vacation, so there are comparatively few people out. I’m feeling free and loose after a frustrating day in the parenting world.
The air feels good on my face. I pedal hard and the iron fence passes to my right in a prison bar blur. I turn left onto Stinky Street and it’s the same crush of people and the same one or two cars honking their way through the throng, nudging, rolling forward at steamroller speed, never stopping, and the people swinging their bags or dismounting from scooters, all of us now bottlenecking as we try to squeeze through a two-foot-wide space between the car on our left and the produce vendors on the right. I finally have no choice but to hop off the bike.
The vendors are dark-skinned and shouting. It doesn’t take a translator to get the gist. “Best apples from Shandong Province, good eats, good eats!”
“Sweet potatoes, three for five kuai!”
“Spinach, bok choy.”
“I have grapes, good eating grapes.” “Best apples from Shandong Province!”
Here is where the bile smell hits me, half-way down the block where some function of the sewer system or refuse system produces a smell not exactly like garbage and not exactly like sewage but an odor of puke that isn’t puke. It is strong enough to make me gag. I make no expression, matching my face to the faces. Nobody winces, and why should we? We move on together and against each other in a common effort not to get our toes smashed under car tires.
Why is this street always so crowded? Stinky Street runs between the campus of BFSU and a middle class neighborhood of apartments and condos. There is a Chao Shifa grocery store with its logo red and green like the Mexican flag. There are beauty parlors and grubby nightclubs, clothing shops, a bakery, and a thousand cheap places to eat. You can smell the hot oil and sizzling meat, the brothy noodles and roasting corn. At night, the area gets hit from two sides by college students looking for calories and neighborhood folk just getting off work. The fruit and vegetable vendors park their carts on the sidewalk or along the edge of the street.
I push my girl bike over the curb. Gray and grimy. Cracked sidewalk with cars parked at odd angles and young people slurping noodles from low tables. Now the stench is behind me and the blue dome of sky seems magical and clean.
In the grocery store, two women in white uniforms stand at a dumpling station smearing filling into little dough patties about the size of sand dollars. They giggle when I ask, “Is this pork? Is this mushroom?” They laugh at my pronunciation. They laugh because I am slow to understand that this lump of filling with the green chunks is pork, that one with bits of corn is shrimp. The dough looks supple and dusty with flour. They slice off a portion with a spatula, smear it onto a wrap, fold, twist. They work fast, hands twitchy and unthinking. Slice, smear, fold, twist. Plastic shields cover their mouths.
I ask more questions. More giggles. In my fumbling effort to order the right number and kind of jiao zi, the ladies grow impatient, using all manner of gestures to communicate that I must order at least ten. I ask for sixteen and believe this makes them happy.
They get to work, folding and twisting the dough. One of the ladies points to a shallow pot of hot water, wanting to know if she should cook them here or pack them to go. Lacking the words for “boil” and “home,” I check my dictionary and respond with “I’m going home to boil” and “to go.”
I want to say that jiao zi is my daughter’s favorite. This is comfort food, slick and salty on the tongue and warm in the belly. I will bring them home, set a pot of water to boil, and ladle the slippery buggers onto plates so we can chase them with our chopsticks.
They line up sixteen little dumplings in neat rows on a plastic tray. They take my damp bills into their plastic-gloved hands; that’s seventeen yuan, or the equivalent of $2.75, for handmade dumplings enough to feed my family. They are of exceptional quality, not too fatty, full of good stuff like bok choy, ginger, mushrooms, or Chinese cabbage. I have eight pork, four shrimp, and four mushroom.
What does it mean to bring dinner home to your family? Nothing heroic, though it is every bit as good as any act of heroism. It is pleasure to do the essential thing. All ye rock climbers and tightrope walkers boasting of supreme focus, of “being in the zone,” take this: I’m bringing perfect food home to the ones I love.
But first I have to brave Stinky Street. The wind whips through a corridor between buildings. Papers fly along the pavement. There’s no way I can ride through all those people, so I bang the kickstand and push into the crowd with the bike astride my dirty shoes and the plastic bag dangling from the handlebars. I go along at a satisfied pace, breathing through my mouth.
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