Conversation with a Chinese restaurateur in a west central Mississippi town
« previous post |
Running down the road in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I screeched to a halt (felt like Rroad Runner) when I passed by a Chinese restaurant with the odd name Rice Bowl (in Chinese it was Fànwǎn lóu 饭碗楼 — the only characters I saw on the premises). It was a tiny, nondescript establishment, with six or so chairs against the walls where you sat while you waited for your order to be prepared. Most people, however, stood in line or just came in to pick up what they had ordered over the phone.
The owner did a brisk business, but it was strictly take out. There were about 8 spaces for cars to park outside, though they were constantly coming and going.
The clientele was 100% Black Americans. About half of them ordered egg rolls ($1.75 each), a quarter fried rice, and the remainder a predictable mix of standard American Chinese dishes (e.g., General Tso's Chicken, Moo Goo Gai Pan, etc.). I wasted not one second on further scrutinizing the menu as soon as I spotted the Egg Foo Young. There were several reasons for my hasty choice. First of all, I hadn't tasted it for a long, long time. Secondly, Egg Foo Young was my first exposure to "serious" Chinese cuisine. It wasn't La Choy and it wasn't Chun King, i.e., it didn't come out of a can:
The only exception was that once a year our Mom would alternate taking one of the seven siblings to the big city of Canton (population about eighty thousand) five miles to the west and would treat us to a Chinese restaurant meal. I think the owners were the only Chinese in the city. The two things that impressed me most were how dark and mysterious the room was in the unmarked, old house where the restaurant was located, and how the egg foo young (and I just loved the sound of that name!), which was so much better than the canned chicken chow mein we ate at home, was served to us on a fancy, footed platter with a silver cover. It was always a very special moment when the waiter uncovered the egg foo young and I smelled its extraordinary aroma.
(source)
After about 10-15 minutes, the Rice Bowl owner called out, "Egg Foo Young". I walked up to the counter and said a few words in Mandarin to the owner as I picked up my order. She was amazed. "You speak Chinese?", she asked in English. "Yes," I replied. "Nǐ huì bù huì jiǎng pǔtōnghuà? 你会不会讲普通话?" "Not really," she answered in English. "I speak Cantonese." So I said a few words to her in Cantonese. She was stunned, but after she had collected her senses, she asked, "Have you been to China?" "Yes, a hundred times."
That left the owner speechless. So I repeated it in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Her eyeballs were glued to the back of their sockets and she seemed no longer able to breathe.
The owner had lots of other customers to take care of, so I thought it was time for me to leave.
"Zàijiàn / baai1baai3", I bid adieu.
P.S.: The owner's actions were not unexpected. In the many years she had been running that bustling, little take-out joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I doubt that she had ever seen a white man come in, certainly not one who spoke to her in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Selected readings
"General Tso's chikin" (6/11/13)
"General Chicken" (8/8/15)
"Chinese Philadelphia Food" (5/6/04)
"Chow mein from a can ≠ chǎomiàn / caau2min6 from a wok" (8/21/17)
Victor Mair said,
June 13, 2025 @ 9:42 pm
Martin Schwartz recommends Hong Kong Restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, a small homesey place with a huge menu and unusual dishes.
I checked their website, and it looks really good. I will go there the next time I'm in Eugene.
Aaron said,
June 13, 2025 @ 10:41 pm
Fantastic that you were able to do the meme in real life.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/white-guy-orders-in-perfect-chinese-shocks-patrons-and-staff
cameron said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:27 am
my memory always associates egg foo young with the Benny Hill gag: "it's not egg, it's not young, it's just 'foo'"
but of course that doesn't make any sense because it's pretty obviously egg-based
katarina said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:46 am
Professor Mair's anecdote about language reminds me of a recent experience.
In my little town near San Francisco, I ride the senior bus, which is free of charge for senior citizens, taking them to shop at the major supermarkets and large stores like Target and Costco. I am Chinese and I met two other Chinese senior citizens on the bus. I heard one chatting fluently in Spanish with the bus driver, who is from Mexico. I learned that she (the Chinese person) is from Panama, doesn't know Chinese and only understands a little Cantonese. Her parents had a grocery store in Panama. Her principal language is Spanish and her second language English. I asked the other Chinese person where she was from, and whether she knew Chinese. She said she was from Semarang in Indonesia, didn't know Chinese, and could only understand a bit of Hokkien (a Chinese topolect). Her principal language is Dutch. Age 94, she grew up when Indonesia was called Batavia and was a Dutch colony. She also knows English and Indonesian Malay.
katarina said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:53 am
correction:
"when Indonesia was called the Dutch East Indies and Jakarta the capital was called Batavia"
KWillets said,
June 14, 2025 @ 9:08 am
My only story of this genre involves going to a Korean restaurant in Redmond, WA with a Taiwanese-American colleague who had asked me to recommend something from that cuisine.
The server greeted him and asked for our order in Korean, obviously mistaking his ethnicity, so feeling the awkwardness I replied "보쌈 하고 맥주 크게 한병 주세요" (bossam and one large bottle of beer), and they both cracked up.
Jerry Packard said,
June 14, 2025 @ 9:34 am
When my son Sammy was in the Peace Corps in Panama many years ago we went to visit him at his hut deep in the jungle near the Darien Gap. Part of his job was to teach the local Emberá language to other pc volunteers. It took us 2 1/2 days by bus taxi and canoe to reach his village. In transit we found our best way to communicate with the local populace was to go the corner store which was invariably run by ethnic Chinese. They always understood my Mandarin and replied with heavily accented putonghua. And of course I received the same eye-popping reaction I always do when Chinese came out of my mouth.
wgj said,
June 14, 2025 @ 11:34 am
As someone who doesn't look Caucasian but speaks a European language (which isn't English) fluently, I get the same reaction every time I do so outside countries and regions where that language is natively spoken. I think this must be true for almost all languages other than the world languages – i. e. English, and to a lesser degree French and Spanish.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 14, 2025 @ 11:44 am
The ethnic-Chinese community in the small towns of the Mississippi Delta is an interesting one with a longstanding history, although now much diminished in numbers. See, e.g., https://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/519017287/the-legacy-of-the-mississippi-delta-chinese
I've seen footage of members of this community and seeing visibly-East-Asian-ancestry people speaking English with a very thick rural Mississippi accent is perhaps at least as unexpected as seeing someone white (or black) speak Mandarin fluently.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:27 pm
Another relevant "world language" is Portuguese, where the vast majority of L1 speakers live outside Europe and probably less than 50% of all living native speakers worldwide are of exclusively-or-predominantly European ancestry. If modern Indonesia (mentioned in a prior comment) were Dutch-speaking the way Brazil is Portuguese-speaking, you would have a similar demographic/geographic situation with Dutch-speakers, but for a variety of reasons and differences in circumstances the Dutch imperial venture in that part of the world left much more modest linguistic traces. (Although linguistic connections between various former Dutch colonies are responsible for a stratum of Malay-origin loanwords in Afrikaans.)