I Hate Jiaozi

You call them wontons: I call them jiaozi, and I don't care if they're boiled, frozen, freshly made or stir-fried (aka "potstickers") I hate them.

When I was a newbie here, I was invited to people's homes for dinner a lot. It was incredibly sweet, especially as nobody had a whole lot of anything back then. It's harder then hell to cook a lot when all you have is a single gas-burner, and I do deeply appreciate the effort people put into the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and supervision of dumb white guests. However, and this is a big however, sometime around 1995, someone decided the proper food for dumb white guests was jiaozi, and the entertainment for the evening should be making jiaozi.

So picture this: you're invited to dinner, and you get there, and you find everyone grinning like apes. Why? Because you have to help make dinner. They wheel out a barrel of flour. For the first time ever, you notice flat uncluttered surfaces in  a Chinese house. And then the hideous process begins: someone begins to mix flour with warm water and the stretching, pounding, roping and strippling begins. That's just to make the dough. The protein in the flour has to be developed into ropey gluten so the dough can be stretched. Ugh. This is a long long process and if you offer to help---being a hell of a great strudel maker--everyone will laugh at you and tell you how YOU don't know ANYTHING about jiaozi.

This is pretty much the crux of the matter. Even if you shoot pasta out your ass without trying, everone will assure you that you don't know squat. So you sit through the tedious process of beating the tar out of the dough. Then you sit through the resting period. Someone brings you a cup of tea. You're famished, and consider eating the cup. While this is happening, you hope for snacks: alas, none, as no one wants to take the edge off that first bite of jiaozi goodness. You'd think someone would take this opportunity to mix up the filling and let the flavors blend a bit but no, everyone sits around and stares at you, the pet foreigner. Pictures may be taken. Someone whom you have never seen before may come over for their promised English lesson. Oh, didn't the host tell you? He's studying for an important exam and you are going to teach him what he needs to know for the test. You've never heard of the test and in your coversation with the student you discover that if he passes this test, he's going to the UK as a lecturer in economics, and yet his English is on the "I am happy meet you Dear Friend" level. If that. At one point he refers to Milton as a "bourgeous proletariat revolutionary" and you try not to bean him with your empty cup. Very empty cup. So now you're hungry AND thirsty. Can it get worse?

But wait, it does. They are now pinching out bits of dough, then rolling them with little rolling pins that look like fat cigars. The rolling pins are dandy and might do well for that pie you were thinking of baking--mmmm, pie---but then you discover, as they roll on, and on, and on, that they intend to make over 2,000 jiaozi that very night, so they have PLENTY to give to visitors during Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and that every last one will be filled, stuffed, folded, and sealed shut that very evening before the first go into the pot to be cooked.

You wait, drooling, while 2,000 tiny wonton wrappers are rolled out before your eyes. Then the host comments on how he needs to put on his coat and buy the meat for the filling. "It's better fresh," he tells you as he heads out the door. So now you wait while the host tries to find an open butcher shop---it's now about a quarter past eight--and you wait, and wait, and wait, until he returns, triumphant, a sack of ground meat in his hand. Oh god, it's pork, and you are about to have pork-and-ginger jiaozi. The pork is dumped into a big wooden bowl. Ingredients--chopped ginger, and a LOT of salt--are tipped in. Now the humiliation begins. Before you can say "trichinosis" someone hands you a circle of dough, a teaspoon with raw pork, and instructs you to fold the dumpling up exactly the way they did. Having grown up with Czech great-aunts who taught you a thing or two about noodles, you make a respectable little dumpling. Everyone stares at you as if you just took dump in the jiaozi mix then bursts into laughter. Your dumpling is passed around so they can see HOW STUPID you are, you can't even fold a jiaozi! You notice, however, that EVERYONE'S jiaozi are folded in different ways but you keep silent as you think at this point if you talk you'll kill someone. Your feeble attempts at making jiaozi are put to the side, as they wouldn't want to hurt a real guest's feelings by serving them defective jiaozi. Someone seeing your disconsolate face (really, it's just hunger) tells you to cheer up because "Your bad jiaozi will open up and spill the content so no good for guests, you know we will cook them just for you and you eat and you will know what is good jiaozi." You want to say screw you all but can't, because it's not good manners and these people DID invite you over, even if they wrested a damn English lesson out of you, not to mention a photo op...You look up and notice with dismay that several of the family members are taking pictures of themselves wearing your discarded coat: they are showing how slim they are, and how they can wrap the coat around themselves with room to spare. My, so now they're mocking your clothes, your tastes, and the size of your ass. Fortunately, you are too weak with hunger to pick up a stool and brain Lao Tai Tai, the grandmother of the group who is showing that she can wrap your coat around herself twice, so you stay where you are and fold, fold, fold, even though each dumpling--lovely to your eye, firm, even, well-packed--gives rise to much merriment at your expense. But it's ok, as foreigners don't have feelings and don't mind being mocked as they are too stupid to know what is subtle.

Finally, someone thinks to put the pots on to boil, and two batches go in: theirs, the supposedly "pefect" jiaozi, and yours, the defects. They rise to the surface and the smell is, well, awful, as you loathe pork and ginger but know you can't leave until the meal is over, at which time everyone will charge to the door en masse. You'd also like to pee, but it's your first time in this home and it's kind of bad manners to use the toilet the first time in...it's warm, which is nice, but only from the steam and the amount of people packed in a tiny space. The smell of unwashed bits, damp wool, and Chinese herbal remedies is almost, but not quite, obscured by the smell of ripe boiled pork.

Finally, FINALLY, with much fanfare, the dumplings are fished out and ladled into bowls. Different types of vinegar are offered, black Chunking vinegar which you love but makes you vomit, millet vinegar from Shaanxi, which is your personal favorite, rice vinegar from the South. There are other condiments--a dish of picked peppers, for example, but you douse your dumplings in millet vinegar and then you notice something. Your dumplings are perfect: each one has held together perfectly, while the others--well, hee hee hee, most have split open and vomited their contents into the boiling broth. The dumpling which had a little coin inserted into it---like a Three Kings Cake only largely inedible--has split as well and the coin is nowhere to be found. Hee hee hee. The guests mutter among themselves as they fish through the broth trying to find the meat and ginger filling: without it, they're mostly sucking down limp noodle casing. It is a dim triumph, because you, sadly, now have stuffed dumplings, plump and proud, each filled with a mixture of chopped ginger, ground pork, and a not insignificant amount of chopped bone, gristle, and tendon. What can I say--the quality of meat back then was suspect at best, and hungry people eat what they can get. You are gagging each one down, partly out of hunger, and partly out of manners. You offer some of your plump beauties to other guests who shudder at their ugliness. Why? Why are they considered so ugly? They are symmetrical, nicely folded and crimped, and they didn't fucking fall apart while boiled. Why are they considered so horrible?

The answer is clear: because you,  a foreigner, made them.

When the meal is over, the guests charge out the door. By the time you get back to your building, the front gate is locked. You manage to alert the sleeping security guard and he lets you in, but the elevator is locked, as the person who is allowed to run it has gone to bed at 11. You walk up 12 flights of stairs and fling yourself down on your bed, noticing as you do so that it's almost two a.m. and worse, you're still hungry. The next day in Chinese class you will yawn, a lot, and your stupid foreigner advisor will scold you for not having done your homework and tell you that you should, for the sake of your Chinese, hang out with the locals more often.