Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Mang Guo Bu Hao! (Bad Mango!)

I have a fondness for exotic fruit. And many fruits that are either unavailable or extremely pricey in the States are quite affordable here in the PRC. Things like papya, dragon fruit, and mango.

I love mango. If it’s one of the options when ordering a smoothie, icecream, or yogurt, it’s usually the favored fruit. (I have particularly fond college memories of making my own mango smoothie whenever I worked a shift at Spill the Beans.) Mango salsa, mango chutney, mango pocky sticks—I have yet to meet a mango I didn’t like.

But last week, I found a mango that really didn’t like me. Or a part of the mango, to be more specific.

It all started when we were invited to have dinner at the home of one of my students. We went to her house on Saturday around 10:00, watched a short outdoor display of singing and dancing in her apartment complex (it seemed to be some kind of show to celebrate and promote recycling), and then pretty much feasted Chinese-style until about 2:00.

For those of you unfamiliar with this custom, let me elaborate. We entered their lovely apartment at around 11:00 and were immediately ushered to the living room, where there was a very nice display of fruit, nuts, chocolates, and tiny elaborately decorated cakes on the coffee table. They poured us some orange juice, and we ate small amounts of the beautiful spread of food, knowing that this was just the appetizer.

In about 20 minutes or so, it was time to begin the real meal. We moved about 8 or 9 feet over to the dining table and sat next to my student and her classmate who had come to join us. Her parents, however, immediately disappeared into the kitchen. They were our chefs and were required in the kitchen. On the table, there were about five small bowls of food (in traditional Chinese meals, you eat small portions of many different dishes). Each place was set with a tiny bowl (used as a small rest stop for your food as it travels from the main bowl and then into your mouth), chopsticks, and a small plate (used not for food but for leftovers—things like bones and shells that you must discard*).

For the next hour or so, her parents brought out dish by dish of what ended up being a 15-dish meal. I’ll try to give you a quick run down of all the delicious food we ate:
• unknown green vegetable (a finely chopped spinach like vegetable with what appeared to be equally finely chopped mushrooms)
• beef (finely sliced with sauce)
• fish #1 (small dried whole fishes that looked rather scary but ended up being one of my favorite dishes)
• salad (basically an interesting mix of potatoe salad with a bunch of mayo)
• chicken #1
• fish #2 (large whole fish cooked in a sauce)
• baby bok choy (the favorite green vegetable in China)
• chicken #2 (fabulous BBQ wings--her father’s specialty)
• mushroom soup (a basic broth with about four different kinds of mushrooms)
• shrimp (the biggest and best I’ve every tasted--cooked in some kind of divine sauce)
• rice
• broiled mushrooms
• unknown vegetable-like seafood
• desert “soup” (don’t know any other word for it) with small glutinous rice balls
• more fruit (eaten at the end of most meals as it is believed to aid in digestion)

It was an amazing meal. Her parents are truly talented cooks (not their profession but their hobby). At the very end of the meal, they came in and sat at the end of the table and ate just a few items from the table, all the while making sure that we had eaten our fill. This was a particularly good time to be with our friend and fellow teacher, Matt, who seems to be a bottomless pit when it comes to food. The family happily watched as he continued to eat even after most of us had become full.

We left the table, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the food. Remember that beautiful spread on the coffee table? Well, as we headed back into the living room to talk and watch a little TV, the family continued to offer us delicious things to eat. I was able to avoid most of the post-dinner offers, but after about a half an hour, I finally succumbed to the offer of a delicious mango. My students even taught me a new way to eat it (because, after all, the trouble of getting the mango off its pit and out of its skin was the main thing that kept me from eating mangos all of the time).

Many Chinese eat mangos by peeling them with their fingers (actually quite a simple task, and less messy than it sounds) and then biting into them directly. My students peeled half of the fruit, ate it, and then peeled the rest. So I did the same.

And that, was my big downfall. But of course I didn’t know the danger I had exposed myself to at the time (namely, mango skin**). I happily ate the fruit, and as we left the house her mother insisted on putting all of the other mangos in a bag for me to take home. So later that night, I ate another mango (Chinese-style), and the next day, I ate one at every meal (didn’t want them to go bad, you know).

On Monday, I had a small blister on one corner of my mouth, and by Wednesday, I had puffy itchiness all the way up to my left eyebrow. Thankfully, I have an entire staff of wonderful nurses on call here at the school (thanks, ladies!), and on Friday I was able to go to the doctor and get a prescription for steroids and powerful antihistamines. My face is pretty much back to normal now. The down side is that I need to avoid mangos in the future (at least the skin, anyway). But on the positive side, I got to give my students a really good example of some vocabulary I taught them: allergy, allergic, and allergic reaction.

Desiree

*In our experience, the main difference between Chinese food and Western food is that Chinese chefs rarely debone or shell any of the meat before cooking or serving. Most food requires the diner to put it into her mouth (or hold with chopsticks) and attempt to eat around the bones and shells. The most difficult things to eat are chicken and shrimp. While Americans often use chopped chicken breast in a stir fry, Chinese cooks will simply chop all parts of the chicken, leaving the meat firmly attached to the bones. I have seen Chinese people stick most of a whole shrimp into their mouths and then spit out all of the extra parts. It is truly an amazing feat that seems quite beyond me. Most of the time, I try to order things that are cut up very small and seem to have already been separated from the bones.

**I found out later that most people who are allergic to mango are allergic to the skin, not the fruit itself. The mango tree is actually related to the poison sumac family. Very interesting stuff, really. As long as it doesn’t affect you personally by making your face blow up into a huge mass of itchiness.

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