Leaving a trail of dim sum like Hansel's trail of breadcrumbs
Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. As a 12-year San Franciscan, I tend to leave something else of mine behind in every city I visit.
No, it's not what you think, you dirty mind. I always leave a little food in the hotel fridge whenever I travel to another city.
It's a quirk I have demonstrated time and again. Just this week, I tried to avert my fate by resisting putting my food in the fridge in a Shanghai hotel. But on the morning I checked out, it occurred to me that I should not leave food around when I go outside and shut off the air-conditioner. So, I moved it to the fridge, making both a mental note and a physical one on a newspaper.
Sure enough, as soon as I was out of the city, I remembered what I had forgotten. I have always been meticulous and check every nook and crook of the room, but somehow, it never dawns on me to open the fridge.
What I bequeath to the hotel is not of much value. Usually, it's something like a few snack bars and some Chinese dim sum.
Strangely, I don't have a tendency to indulge in food binges and rarely eat anything after dinner. But the thought of having something handy is comforting. And I don't want to run up a 30-kuai bill for a chocolate bar that sells for 3 kuai in a supermarket - hence, my habit of lugging a little food in my suitcase.
I cannot make sense out of this ostensible contradiction. So, I conjured up my inner Freud and did a little self-psychoanalysis, which I then fused with Buddhism.
I was born shortly after famine struck the country in the early 1960s. It would be chronologically reasonable to assume that in my previous incarnation, I probably starved to death. I do not remember experiencing hunger or anything remotely like it. But here I am, with this irrational fear of it.
It's painful for me to attend Chinese banquets, because I have to witness large amounts of food thrown away.
I was taught not to waste food. Before the American practices of using doggy bags and licking your fingers clean of any remnants of food were introduced to China, I was propounding them, eliciting sneers from friends.
When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me a fable about a wealthy family discarding great quantities of food day after day. The poor neighbor designed a way of "recycling" what was frittered away. One day, the rich family went bankrupt. And the poor man led him through a dark tunnel, which opened in a courtyard that glittered with gold. "This is how I turned your throwaways into fortune," he said.
I didn't know how it was done. Without any knowledge of chemistry, I thought leftover food could somehow morph into gold nuggets. Now, I would assume the neighbor could have been a pig farmer or something.
Sometimes, I wonder what would go through the mind of the cleaning lady when she finds my edible mementos. She'd probably think: "Is this supposed to be a tip or a scheme to make me fat?"
In the end, perhaps this article is a psychobabble defense mechanism to justify my own growing weight.
(China Daily 06/29/2007 page20)
