Well, happy new year.
The family all went to Tang's Chinese buffet for lunch today. If you haven't tried eating Chinese food in West Virginia, you might have to experience it to believe it. I'm not sure there are any words for that weird blend of the *almost* and the *not quite.*
You normally pass by a red-and-gilt enameled dragon or buddha image on the way in, gaudy and mysterious with orange halves and burnt incense sticks scattered at its feet. Tang's doesn't have this, strangely enough. Maybe they're Christians? Next in order of appearance comes the cash register, holding watch right next to the door. A kind Asian-seeming but probably not Chinese girl shows you a table. You sit, vaguely smiling and giving a drink order. While she's pouring the drinks, you wonder about whether she's Vietnamese or Korean.
Then comes the buffet, the bending of reality, and the suspension of reason. This is the part where you load your plate and arrange everything just so. You make a mental note of several dishes, saying "Hmm. Better remember this for my next plate." or "No, no, it's not quite right for my idiom just now. Maybe with the meats." But by the time you've eaten and convinced yourself that you need another plate and loaded said plate and returned to the table for round two... well, your appetite has gone right out the window.
But you eat it anyway.
And of course, you are initially served flatware. You ask for chopsticks and bravely snap them apart, under the watchful gaze of the waitstaff. They compliment you on how well you use them, and in the back of your mind you think they are sad because they wonder where you learned to use them. They know that the food is not quite authentic and might possibly be disappointing to someone who uses chopsticks like you do.
You wonder if you are reading too much into that neutral facial position, or if their sadness over the inauthenticity really is a reflection of their sadness at not being home and working in a Chinesse restaurant when they're really from Vietnam. You want to let them know that even if normal Americans don't know, YOU know that Vietnam is not the same as China, and YOU don't fault them for working here. You want them to know that you understand the Chinese calendar and that new year's is more than a month away.
But all you can do is smile when they bring water and not leave too much of a mess on the table. And you walk out past the lucky dragon and think, Nah. They probably don't feel that way at all. I need to be less of a romantic and more of a consumer. I'm just a victim of my predjudices, once again. Just like in the mall when the old lady with not-so-many teeth offers you a piece of stir-fry chicken on a toothpick. You remember that everybody working in those places is always of Asian descent, and where do those people live, anyway? Nobody on my street works at the Panda House or at Tang's Buffet or in the mall at Sakkio's...
Posted by nickles at January 1, 2004 04:35 PM