This is another I Hate Jiaozi story, part two. This is completely, utterly true, and I can provide witnesses if necessary. Forgive me if I get some of the smaller details wrong.
Several years ago I was teaching in a suburb of Beijing with a very nice foreign staff and the usual mix of nice, competent Chinese staff, and incompetent dullards. The dullards were usually in charge. The foreigners, although in different departments, socialized occasionally, always careful to ask Chinese colleagues in the same office or department to come along. They seldom did, but seemed to appreciate being asked.
One of the Chinese colleagues was a woman--let's call her Mei Mei--who had excellent English. She had taken an MBA in the US and was somehow hired as a math teacher, despite the MBA and no teaching credentials. She referred to herself as a member of the foreign staff, which is fine, but we noticed she was quick to criticize anything we did in the classroom as "That is foolish foreign thing." "Foolish foreign thing" included giving pretests to see how students knew about a subject matter before teaching it, a method which prevented teachers from wasting time teaching concepts that were already mastered. Another "foolish foreign thing" was a syllabus. You get the idea.
So, Christmas rolled around and the married couple with the biggest apartment offered to host a Christmas Eve potluck. After much consultation of schedules, it was decided that a four o'clock gathering, with a meal at five, fit into everyone's plans pretty well: the family with the two kids who were going to see Santa at seven could join us, eat and play games, and get out in plenty of time. I had a gig singing carols at a hotel at eight. Everyone else wanted to go to church at midnight, Skype home, or get merry in their own way. The hosts, Disa and Jarvis, scrubbed up their big flat. Jarvis, being a Southern boy, decided we needed plenty of ice and spent a week manufacturing spotlessly clean ice cubes out of drinking water, two trays at a time (all they had: good ice cube trays were at a premium at the time.) Disa made home-made Christmas rolls, her family specialty, the yeast sent over from Saskatchewan by her mother. On the 23rd, as she was kneading the dough, her cell phone rang. She ignored it. Within seconds it rang again--and again--and again. Same number: co-worker Mei Mei. She washed her hands and was reaching for the phone when it rang again, this time a different number. She answered it and Mei Mei shouted, "Ah-ha, you are so bad, Disa, you don't answer if you know it's me." Mildly annoyed, but with great restraint, Disa explained she had been kneading bread dough and couldn't answer it on the earlier calls. Mei Mei ignored this and charged into her topic: she was bringing an American friend to the Christmas Eve dinner. Disa wondered vaguely how Mei Mei knew about the dinner but was too polite to ask. She explained that several of us had to leave for other events--notably Santa--and that we were meeting after work at four, planning to serve a potluck meal at five, and that Mei Mei was welcome to bring whatever she liked, if she wanted to contribute anything at all.
Mei Mei stated flatly, "We are eating at six." Disa explained that the young Koothrapalis wanted to see Santa, had tickets to see him at a Christmas Eve party at a hotel. and that they had to be out before six-thirty. Mei Mei repeated, "We are eating at six," and Disa said kindly that it was potluck, the food would be out all evening, and Mei Mei was welcome to join at any time, but that dinner was served at five. Mei Mei informed her that all foreigners eat dinner at six and Disa replied that in her very foreign Canadian homeland, her family ate an early Christmas Eve dinner at five sharp so they could attend a carol sing at their church at seven, leaving the Christmas rolls to cool on the counter so they could be consumed with cocoa before turning in. Mei Mei then uttered those deathless words, words which Disa informed me later "chilled her to the bone."
Mei Mei asked, "Do you know what is jiaozi?"
Christmas Eve rolled around. We met at Disa and Jarvis's big flat around four and put food in to heat in their two tiny toaster ovens. We played Dirty Santa. We drank bourbon on the rocks. Around five, we began to fill our plates and eat. Everyone was happy: the kids were young enough to be delighted by everything, the food, the adults who wanted to play with them, the presents heaped upon them. The family cat condescended to let us pet her. Contentment reigned. A Christmas pudding made the round, with mince pies, gingerbread cookies, plates of fudge...coffee was brewed. The rolls were baking, filling the house with the heavenly homey scent of bread. And then the doorbell rang.
Mei Mei stood behind the door, muffled to the eyebrows, carrying a sack of flour in one hand and a sack of raw ground pork in the other. Next to her stood a man, similarly clad, also carrying groceries. Once his coat was shed he looked to be Mei Mei's twin. No introductions were made, other than "This my American friend" and when he spoke, his accent was definitely Beijing (although his English was superb.) Mei Mei strode into the party and stared at Disa and said disapprovingly, "I told you we eat at six." Disa said very graciously that we had begun the potluck at five, and to have a seat and sit and enjoy the meal. The Koothrapalis, sensitive to social situations as well as mindful of the time, got up to help clear a space at the table, bussing their dishes to the kitchen (and incidentally washing them as well) prior to leaving. Mei Mei glared at them and said, "Clear off the table. Disa, why you not have a big dish ready for me to make jiaozi?" She then sniffed and said, "What is that bad smell?" (I am assuming it was the baking bread.) "I hope it won't hurt the jiaozi."
Make jiaozi she did. She directed her friend (Brother? Lover? Husband?) to clear the table--which he did by picking up the dishes and taking them to the kitchen. She preferred a more direct route, and placed them on the floor, which made a little Christmas miracle for the cat (not so much for the rest of us.) And then she began her task of scolding, directing, folding, rolling, stuffing, boiling without stop for over five hours.
I then witnessed one of the finest acts of hospitality I have ever witnessed: there was not a word said by either Disa or Jarvis to indicate that anything was wrong or out of place. They had smiles on their faces as they helped to turn their entire apartment into a jiaozi factory. They offered their guests more bourbon (and partook of it themselves) while chaos reigned. There was flour everywhere, and soon wet flour from the dough making process. I had to leave as scheduled for carol singing, but a few witnesses remained until the two o'clock finishing time, and they were just sober enough to report that Mei Mei scooped up virtually all the jiaozi into plastic bags (along with a hefty portion of the Christmas Ham) and took off, leaving behind a mountain of filthy dishes. A small bowl of jiaozi, stinking with raw garlic and vinegar, was left behind for the foreigners to taste, portioned at exactly one each.
For weeks after, visitors to the home were welcome to take out a credit card and start chipping away at the fine layer of dried flour-and-water paste that encrusted the cracks in the lovely tiled table. I think Disa and Jarvis slept all of Christmas Day. When we went back to work on Boxing Day, they had not a word to say about the incident (they were also still hung over.) However, at the end of the day, as I was passing Jarvis, he made one comment. "You know what we call Mei Mei now?" he asked. "Um, the Jiaozi Fairy?" "No, the Christmas Cunt."
You can draw a lot of conclusions from this about how Chinese are this or that, and Foreigners are all X and Y, but if you do, you are missing the point: I am writing about Mei Mei because clods exist all around the world, and she was a world-class clod. Her ethnicity had nothing to do with it. Had she been Czech like my grandmother's family no doubt we would have been braiding hoska all night.
Yet I wonder if there was some piece of propaganda, some commercial or newsreel that all kids in China saw one day which featured a happy band of jiaozi makers kindly showing a delighted foreigner how to wrap those little bastards. Virtually every Chinese friend I've had over the age of 45 has wanted to make jiaozi with me. Friends from age 30 to 40 don't seem to have this desire, and they don't even know the songs from The Sound of Music. I don't have a lot of friends in the under thirty group, outside of the rock music scene, but from what I can tell, none of them have the slighted interest in rolling anything other than a cigarette. So, you tell me: was Mei Mei a product of her time, or just a stone-cold idiot? I think we can both side with the latter. As for Disa and Jarvis, don't we all wish we had more friends like that? Canadian friendliness and Southern boy charm (yes, two more cultural stereotypes) combined to show true graciousness under a very awkward situation. Well played, Foreign Friends, well played.
