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Just over two months ago, I returned to Beijing for the second time, six years after my first visit to the city and after having studied Chinese for two years. What was the first thing on my mind as I emerged into the city from Dongsishitiao subway station? Before I found my hostel, and before I bought a Chinese SIM card, there was something I needed to do which I had been craving for so many years: one of Beijing’s street-side snacks. During the weeks leading up to my departure, I had not been able to stop thinking about the world of food I would get to revisit upon my return. My friends had started to get annoyed by my constant mentions of all the treats that awaited me. Now, after years of longing, I bit into a jianbing (a snack that resembles a crepe with egg and chili sauce and a crispy fried wanton skin in the middle).
For perhaps most foreign newcomers to Beijing, the biggest cultural delight is the dizzily intricate food culture of the capital. A whole world of it’s own to explore and to fall in love with, and enough staggeringly diverse regional specialties to keep the curious exploring for years and years. Not only does one meet new flavors and cooking methods, but completely new ingredients, leading many to ask themselves: Can you really eat that? In the end, it is a wholly wonderful experience which I am sure leaves most China visitors with a hole in their heart that Western-style Chinese restaurants can’t fill.
As I started getting settled down in the city, I began exploring my surroundings, and especially my local restaurants. I had found myself an apartment near Andingmen, where one of my favorite restaurants was located, and began attempting to build a regular connection with the owner Mr. Li (who still doesn’t seem to realize I can speak Chinese, although we converse several days a week). I also brought home a copy of the all-Chinese menu and put aside schoolwork for a day to carefully make an English translation of the north Chinese dishes Mr. Li had to offer. This was when I first started to get a real feeling for the density of Chinese food culture, especially the culture as distinct from the dishes themselves.
What often gets reported back to Europe by enthusiastic China visitors, beyond the richness of flavors, is the bewildering experience of simply ordering food in a restaurant. Humorous direct translations, or even mistranslations of names of classic dishes into English, are by now a cliche in Western travel reports from the Middle Kingdom. These often serve as witty examples of cultural and linguistic divisions between the West and the East. Some will also admit a certain fondness for these accidental pieces of nonsense-poetry, while others see it as a slightly embarrassing mistake.
Turning a “spring chicken” into a “chicken without sex” (to quote a famous example of menu chinglish) is amusing. But what struck me as I sat toiling away with my own translation was rather the staggering depth of the Chinese food culture. As I was trying to find suitable names for luandun, laohu vegetables, huiguo meat, which an online dictionary translated as “chaos stew,” “old tiger dish”and “returned pot meat” respectively, I contemplated the thousands of years of culture needed to give sense to these poetic names. And this is just the first level of Chinese menu mysticism, which goes on to include “ants climbing trees” and “hidden treasures.” The next time I sat by Mr. Li’s plastic furniture my kung pao chicken somehow tasted more flavorful than usual when I remembered the Wikipedia article I had read outlining the 19th century Sichuanese history underlying the name of the popular chicken dish.
Perhaps these lost-in-translation chinglish menus are soon to be a thing of the past. The Beijing Foreign Affairs Bureau has recently published a book with correct translations of a large number of standard Chinese dishes, a move which will surely save many China visitors a lot of agony. But however misleading these mistranslations can be, I can’t help but feel that they more properly communicate the often nearly incomprehensible complexity of the many facets of Chinese culture than any neutral and informative expert translation can ever do. Perhaps the confused Beijing visitor, leafing through the laminated pages of his local restaurant’s menu, trying to make sense of “red burned lion heads”and “tofu made by woman with freckles,” understands more about Chinese culture than it may seem at first.