The first time a Shanghai colleague invited me to dinner at her parents’ flat, I almost bought a wall clock. It was early spring, a Saturday around 5 p.m. I was standing in a housewares aisle near People’s Square with a boxed quartz clock in my hands because it looked useful and mid-priced. A Chinese…
The first time I took two foreign coworkers to a busy hot-pot hall in Chengdu, we froze at the tablet menu. One coworker pointed at a red pot icon and said, “Spicy, right?” The waitress, patient but fast, tapped yuānyāng before we could dig a deeper hole. Split pot: chili on the left, clear bone…
In December 2024, a week before Winter Solstice, I walked into a Yonghui supermarket near Guomao in Beijing looking for dumpling wrappers. Not in the flour aisle. Not in the frozen bags either. A clerk in a green apron pointed me two aisles over, past the chili sauces, to a refrigerated case stacked with round…