Noodle Lady

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything here. Lately I feel I haven’t had much of interest to say. I’ve been in China for seven months now, and most of the time things seem, well, ordinary. The shock and awe of the first few months has worn off, and now China feels like any other place. At least, most of the time. There are still those moments that catch me off guard, and remind me again what a stranger I still am.

I was struck by one of these moments this evening. I had eaten a large dinner at “Soymilk Place” a restaurant around the corner from our campus. There they sell, as you may have guessed, delicious hot soymilk in giant bowls. After finishing, I headed home stuffed and exhausted, taking a quick detour to pick up supplies for my lesson tomorrow. On my way back I passed by “The Noodle Lady” who is, you guessed it, a lady who sells delicious and incredibly spicy noodles from her kitchen. It’s a place that would violate every health code in the book, if China had any. Yet it’s only made me sick once, so I still frequent her establishment on a bi- or tri- weekly basis. Adding to the appeal is the fact that I can get a giant bag o’ noodles, which usually lasts me two meals, for just 4 yuan, which is roughly sixty cents.  Noodle Lady’s kitchen consists of a sink and a hot plate and the ingredients for her amazing concoctions are stuffed into plastic bags that sit on the floor. Her seating consists of three stools that you can set out on the sidewalk. As I passed by Noodle Lady this evening, there were two old women sitting with her, chatting away and enjoying the warm evening. I said my usual “ni hao” and continued on, but then heard a shout of  “eeeey laowi!!” and turned around to see Noodle Lady beckoning to me. I went to her and she motioned for me to sit, which I did. She then proceeded to place numerous bowls of food in front of me, and shoved a pair of chopsticks into my hand. So what else was I to do? I ate. I sat there on a stool in the middle of the dark sidewalk as three old women asked me questions I couldn’t understand, and ate my second dinner of the evening. I just nodded and smiled as they looked at me and talked and laughed. I did manage, what I think was a quite intelligent, “what is this?” pointing to a noodle-type thing that I had on a previous occasion identified as tapeworm. I don’t know what she said in response, but whatever it was I decided it was much too short a word to mean “tapeworm”, so I was satisfied. As I tried to shove down as much of the food as I could, I glanced over and almost choked. There on Noodle Lady’s table was a newspaper. Not any newspaper, though, but an English newspaper! From my hometown, no less!

In Zhengzhou, there isn’t much of an organized recycling service. Though, like in many places, recyclables can be redeemed for money. Consequently, there are numerous people who dig through the trash to find boxes and bottles and pile them meters high in the backs of bicycle carts. I can’t bring myself to throw plastic bottles or boxes into the trash, so I save them up and periodically take them out to leave on a street corner, where someone will quickly nab them up to be redeemed. In the bottom of one of these boxes there obviously must have been a forgotten newspaper from home, likely used as padding in a package from my mom. Someone in the Noodle Lady camp must have found the paper and decided to keep it as a rare oddity. 

And thus, I found myself eating free noodles on the corner of a dirty street, in a giant city that no one has ever heard of, staring at an oh, so familiar newspaper header, as three old women laughed at me. And I laughed too. I laughed at my burning lips and aching stomach, laughed at my inability to say a simple “no thanks, I ate already.” I laughed at the absurdity of it all, and felt so happy to have had this unique opportunity to travel to the other side of the Earth, and realize just how ridiculous life sometimes can be.