Lingering Spice

My lips still tingle from the chili in the spice I added to the bowl of steaming hot noodles. The oil that oozes out of the la da seems to have numbed my lips even a half hour after finishing the bowl. This culinary delight once more reminds us of the adage "seek and ye shall find".

Having just moved out of Wudaokou we had no expectations of the place we would find. It was seemingly so far from the glitzy lights of the up and coming neighborhoods of Modern Beijing. Nestled in groves of perfectly spaced aspen or white birch (the kind of spacing that seems like an optical allusion when you look straight down the rows), we found ourselves in a traditional courtyard style house. The hallways, unlike the subsidized heat of the apartment complex, remain cold all the time—ushering you quickly into the respite of the few heated rooms. During any other season the pagoda in the center of the garden that the house surrounds would beckon all who see it to come and read, but now we only look on and shiver as we rush between warm spaces.

Seemingly cut off from the rest of Beijing we were uncertain of what we could find in the surrounding area. But a quick walk around the ramshackle neighborhood revealed just as much life as anywhere in Beijing. I can only imagine that the dusty and dirty alley ways of this neighborhood closer resemble the Beijing of 20, or even 10, years ago. Laundry lines and raw coal littering the walkways amidst streams of whitish colored liquids and other foreign substances.

As if seeking to inverse the previous experience of a hyper modern Beijing, this place oozed like an open sore. It was raw, and hard. The faces of those who live there bore more wrinkles. More soot, more dirt. We received stares, and bemusement. Not anger, or rejection, but an experience of being considered completely alien, completely foreign. It seemed they were stunned when we sat down for a bowl of noodles (the only thing on the non-existent menu).

It was, to me, a more authentic China. Perhaps that is my obligatory Western perspective. Always seeking to find the developing in developing countries. But, there was something magical about seeing the backlit dust of flour explode into the air as our proprietor stretched and twisted the fresh noodles. Something far more real than the fluorescent and plastic place we had formerly found ourselves in.

It was far less comfortable, but far more tasty.