Cheese

While many who come to China find that authentic Chinese food immediately becomes their favorite food out there, and while I still am definitely holding any lasting judgment of the cuisine here in abeyance until I can manage to interpret more than 1% of the characters on every menu I see, I will say right now that, following several runs on Imodium and a couple of encounters with plates of food that are staring back at you as you eat them, I've already had several incredible cravings for American food—American food with cheese, particularly. There is essentially no cheese in China, and many visitors to the country find that they return home lactose intolerant after their time abroad here.

I love cheese. I really didn't know how much I loved cheese until I couldn't have it. There's plenty of dairy in other forms in China, predominantly in the form of eggs (hardboiled and soaked in soy sauce, fried and mashed up in rice, etc.), but the cows here are used solely for their meat and not for their milk. There does seem to be a fair amount of soy milk consumed here, but for the life of my I cannot figure out why some of the most resourceful people on the planet when it comes to most things haven't decided to use animal milk to create another food group so highly sought after by Westerners like myself. I haven't really asked around about this, but is there an issue with many Chinese and lactose intolerance, similar to the widespread allergy amongst Chinese to alcohol? I'll have to find out, but for now, if anyone knows, feel free to comment on this below. Anyways, last week I was thinking about cheese quite a bit and needed a fix. I had heard that there’s a pizza place on campus--DuFeng Pizza Bar--so I decided to stop by to check it out.

Located on a second-story patio above a post office, DuFeng Pizza Bar is quite popular amongst Tsinghua students looking to go out while staying on campus on weekend nights. As the name advertises, there is in fact a full bar at this pizza parlor, serving and thoroughly advertising classic American beers and liquor like Budweiser and Jack Daniels. The advertising seems to be working—two bottles of Jack Daniels sit on the plywood shelves behind the polished wood bar, one totally full and one with one or two fingers of bourbon left sitting below the label. Budweiser labels--all organized and facing outwards, covered in Chinese characters—gleam through the plexiglass door of a refrigerator. Another plexiglass window allows patrons to see two dirty-aproned men shoveling pies in and out of the pizza oven aside the bar area. It’s about 1:00pm when I sit down, so the stage in the back of the seating area is noiseless and bare except for a drum set that remains set up there waiting for the next band to show up. Poppy music with Chinese lyrics is playing quietly throughout the place, accompanying the reading and writing of the 7 or 8 other Chinese folks who are sitting around and trying to get some work done while out to lunch.

A massive poster of beer bottles takes up a quarter of one wall in front of me. It's one of those posters you see on the walls of many sports-type bars in America—sweating glass bottles arranged like bowling pins, emphasizing both the variety and volume of the drink available behind the bar. Despite the presence of perhaps two dozen bottles and bottlenecks in the frame of the poster, you're only able to see w or 3 other brands besides Budweiser, whose labels again gleam in glossy print. I order a Coke and a margharita pizza. At 22 kuai, it’s by far the most expensive meal I've had in ten days, and it didn't help that the free-refills Coke cost 15 kuai on top of that. But I was craving some cheese, and this was the only show in town, I thought at the time. The pizza was better than decent—fresh toppings, well cooked break, good sauce—but had hardly any cheese on it at all. I would get a sense of some cheese being in my mouth once every three or so bites. But it was a bit of cheese, so I left DuFeng contented and with their telephone number in case I ever had another attack of hunger pangs for American Italian back in my apartment.

A few days later I heard a story about someone named Kro who ran the other pizza shop frequented by students of both Tsinghua and BeiDa (the informal name for Tsinghua's rival university, Beijing University). I was outside the western part of campus, north of BeiDa, near Kunming Lake. A vague sense of homesickness had set in the day before, and, combined with thoughts of cheese being peddled by a fellow countryman, I again felt the need to get outside campus and to sample some more Beijing pizza. Also, I was interested to see what this American's entrepreneurial spirit had accomplished in China.

Kro is an American who moved to Beijing somewhere around a decade ago, perhaps starting off by teaching English but soon moving on to other things. Around five or six years ago he opened up a restaurant located on West Qinghua Road, a five-minute bike ride from Tsinghua University's West Gate, called the Kro's Nest, a pizza bar. He was able, with the Mandarin he knew and the political connections he cultivated, to hire a full staff and get the place up and running, and it rapidly became a popular haunt for the students of the two neighboring universities.

One day, maybe six months to a year after opening, Kro came in to open up shop and no one else was there waiting and getting ready to work. They weren't there the next day, either. Within a couple of weeks or months, advertisements starting popping up around the Tsinghua campus noting the grand opening of a pizza parlor and bar on campus—DuFeng Pizza Bar. The former staff of the Kro's Nest had stayed on just as long as it took to learn everything they could about the pizza bar business, and, when the time was right, they all had quit simultaneously to go set up a shop of their own in the midst of a college campus containing tens of thousands of students and staff. The pizza was the same—same sized pies, same bread, same sauce, the same specialty toppings. Although he nearly went out of business, Kro managed to pick together a new staff and stayed on his feet.

Thinking about the history between DuFeng and Kro's Nest, I rode by back westward along the northern wall of Beijing University out towards the Summer Palace. I passed a construction site on my right, and had to dodge around three dozen hard-hatted men on my bike as I made my way long the sidewalk. About a half a mile from Tsinghua I saw a neon sign for the pizzeria on my right, on the front of what looked like an abandoned greenhouse. The sun had set about a half an hour beforehand and night was setting in; no noise escaped the restaurant to disturb the birds nesting for the evening in the tress above where I locked up my bike.

I walked past several thick wood tables outside, which were covered in menus and ashtrays, then almost fell over as the wall of sound hit me when I pushed open the double doors to get inside. There had to have been a couple of hundred folks there, sitting around large, family-style tables, finishing up their beers from the happy hour that had just wrapped up. I seated myself on a high stool behind a thick oak bar table and took a look at the menu as the waitress walked over. After perusing for a bit with the waitress standing over me (which they tend to do here, ready to write as soon as you've decided your order), I ordered a pie with a bunch of different toppings, the most critical of which was extra cheese. I also got a Tsingtao, the price of which had jumped from 5 kuai to 10 kuai in the past 15 minutes. I was happy to see that the beer that came back was poured into a big pint glass. I ended up ordering two more before I left.

(I don't know if I've explained what money is called in Chinat: The formal term when you're writing about money is “ren min bi”—“people's money,” or “people's currency.” When speaking about money, you can say “yuan” or “kuai,” which is more of a slang term, like “cash.”)

As I sat there in the corner by myself, drinking and reading Maxine Hong Kingston's fantastic book, "China Men," I looked up and drank in the vibe of the place. Instead of the cheap, plastic chairs probably bought at Ikea by the owners of DuFeng, Kro's had heavy wooden barstools. Etched into walls and seats with pens and penknives were the typical scribblings and barroom defacements—“Ken was here 7/10/06,” “Beijing Rocks,” etc. Neon beer advertisements hung from the walls. The Chinese students sitting around me were speaking English, not Mandarin. The waitresses and cooks were dressed in the alternative, hipster garb of the younger generation of city kids worldwide, but their clothes seemed to sit on them more naturally than it did on many of the other young people I had seen around the city. The music playing loudly overhead was one of the most striking features: everything from John Mellincamp and Springsteen to The Cure, Live, Green Day and Tupac. What sounded like a loud cap gun exploded just above me—I jerked up to see the fizzling purple light of a mosquito attractor. Laying across the transparent roof above my stool were several wet leaves, and, beyond them, a starless, smoggy Beijing sky.

I wondered what the conversations must have been like between Kro and everyone who works at Kro's Nest. How were they vetted? Did he have them sign something, or were all of these people friends of his that had began working to help him out after he had been abandoned? Did these employees feel and value that they were inside a place that had somewhat genuine character, a place that seemed individual in a city full of rip-offs? Although I was paying 30 kuai more for a pizza of the same size at Kro's, I was happy to pay a premium for the ambiance. I had a feeling that many of the students sitting around me—the most brilliant young minds in the country—were willing to pay a premium for their pizza for similar reasons. And, anyways, it was the only place I had been and have been thus far in China where you could taste cheese in every bite of the food you have in front of you--delicious.

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I've been spending most of my time in recent days trying to get at least a couple of weeks of notes prepared for my classes, which begin next Monday, September 15. I'll be teaching seven speaking classes and one writing class—16 course hours in total. A late night at a bar down by the Wudaokou subway stop kept me from going on a field trip this morning to the Capital Museum, where there's apparently a stunning exhibition of Greek antiquities being put on. I might ask that some of my students examine the exhibition and give a presentation on their findings in one of my speaking classes. I hope to be able to get down to the museum at some point before the Greek stuff is removed at the end of October, but every day here has me meeting new people, agreeing to more lectures, and arranging more stuff to do with my free time. Things are getting busier, and a routine is starting to form. I'm getting up quite early in the morning in preparation for the 8am classes I'll be teaching on Mondays and Tuesdays. I hope to have a Mandarin tutor lined up for 4 or 6 hours a week of 1-on-1 lessons soon, which should help to drastically open up to me this country and its encyclopedic and as-yet undecipherable menus.