As a non-Chinese person living in China, I get a lot of stares. Over the years I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed a shift and people don’t stare as much as they used to, and that could be because I now live in a large city; expats and foreign students are pretty common. But there are still some times that I can feel the stares of lots of people. Rarely a day goes by when a child doesn’t point out to his parents that “There’s a foreigner over there.”
Sometimes the stares bother me, sometimes they don’t.
One time the stares tend to intimidate me the most is when I go to a certain kind of restaurant. There’s a style of food in China called 木桶饭 (mu tong fan) and it literally means “wooden bucket rice.” The food is traditionally served in a wooden bucket with the rice on bottom and the stir-fried vegetable/meat dish on top of the rice. Now, the dish is often separated from the rice, and I prefer this style because it’s easy to share with friends and it also keeps the rice from absorbing all of the oil from the dish.
I love this food. You can choose from a huge variety of vegetable and meat combinations, but my favorite is a long, green bean stir-fried with pieces of pork. They also have potatoes, carrots, eggplant, mushrooms, and lots of other choices.
However, the biggest thing that keeps me from eating at this type of restaurant is the clientele that I often find there. This food is good and cheap, and the restaurant is usually found on side streets in village areas rather than in malls. Often, the kinds of people who eat here are middle-aged male workers. I rarely see other females in these types of restaurants so I feel awkward when I go there by myself because I can feel all the stares and I feel exposed and uncomfortable.
The other day, I convinced a couple of friends to go to one of these restaurants with me, and the food, as always was SO GOOD! Since it’s summer and very few restaurants are open (I live on a university campus and when the students go home for the summer, the cafeterias close as do some of the nearby restaurants), I decided to go back the next day with a couple who also teach at my school. They also have a young son who is extremely cute.
“Have you been here before?” I asked my friends when we arrived.
“Yes, but we didn’t want to eat here because we were intimidated by all of the stares,” the wife’s thoughts mimicked mine exactly.
We sat down and ordered. The lady who took our order was friendly and even spoke a bit of English with us.
As we talked, we did notice some stares, but when I was surrounded by my friends, I didn’t really care.
“I really like the culture here in this shop,” the husband said as we ate.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, I like the way that these guys all have some time off for lunch, so they come here, they chat together, they drink their beer, they smoke, and they all have such a good friendship.”
I looked around the shop and realized that what he said was true.
Sometimes, it’s easy for me to get so distracted by how I feel and how I perceive someone else to be looking at me that I forget to see the other people as fellow human beings.
My life is quite different from these men who gather together for lunch around 木桶饭, but for just a few moments, we all have a shared experience because there I was with my friends, building relationships around rice and delicious food.
I don’t like smoking or drinking, but my friend was right—I do love the culture of building relationships around food.
Rather than focusing on how uncomfortable I am when people stare at me, I want to try to focus on the people behind the stares (that may not change how I act, but I think it will definitely change my perspective and my attitudes and therefore my feelings). These people are living in the same city that I am, and we all have struggles, although our struggles are often quite different.
Stares may still make me feel uncomfortable, but I want to keep in mind that the people behind the stares are much more often curious rather than hostile. We look at what is different and unusual. As a white girl in China, I am definitely different and unusual!
I probably won’t make a habit of visiting these restaurants alone, but I’m thankful for the perspective of people in these restaurants that recognizes their community focus rather than just seeing them with the label “creepy middle-aged men.” Rather, these are people eating with their friends and enjoying a break from their work.