Two Plates of Dumplings

ULAN-UDE, Russia — At a dinner party, when a new acquaintance discovers I live in China, they usually smile and rack their brain for the easiest line of inquiry. Inevitably, "How is the food there?" comes out. Then, to show that they've been to college and know a bit about the world, this caveat is tagged on: "Of course, the food is nothing like the Chinese food we have here..."

I stumble to answer this question, regularly not getting much more out than, "it's good," and mumbling something about there being plenty of culinary variety inside China. Sometimes this turns into a total meander, as I start listing off the tell-tale flavors of Cantonese, Sichuan, Fuijian and Heilongjiang schools of cooking. Then my inquirer's eyes begin to glaze over and their feet start shuffling toward the hors d'œuvres table.

The problem is party-goers believe they're asking a simple question, when instead they're stumbling into the complicated field of Chinese food around the world. There are many, many restaurants that serve a over-salted, watered-down version of Chinese food. But at the same time, the constant flow of immigrants from the Old World to the new ensures that more authentic tastes usually aren't hard to find, no matter how far from the Middle Kingdom.

Here in Ulan-Ude both flavors are easily available, and in the spirit of investigation and a rapidly diminishing tolerance for Russian food, I checked them both out.

My visit to the Siberian-Tibetan Temple awakened my hunger for Chinese cuisine, so after getting back into town I went looking for a Chinese restaurant. I didn't need to look far, as I saw Chinese characters on the building just beside the Hotel Udon. I went inside, down three stairs to what I expected to be a dining room. Instead I found a low-grade dance floor, complete with spinning yellow, magenta and blue lights and a tiny Mirrorball. The couple tables remaining were pushed to the side of the room, and were empty. Bad disco music blared from a very loud sound system. A busty woman in a tank-top and too much eyeliner motioned me toward the dance floor. Instead I went for the exit.

I grabbed chips, dried apples and a Coke from a small grocery store and went back to the hotel for a cold dinner. As I passed through the lobby, I saw a sign posted next to the desk. It was in Chinese, and said there was a restaurant on the hotel's top floor. I didn't even bother to drop off my fake dinner before going up there.

The restaurant was heaving with people, all Chinese. The restaurant's dining area wasn't much bigger than my single room, but the owner managed to cram a half-dozen oblong tables inside. Christmas lights and prints ripped off Russian Orthodox calendars hung on the walls. Each table was full, except for a tiny one near the kitchen door, which had a half-eaten bowl of fried rice on top. A waitress, a middle-aged Chinese woman gestured for me to sit down. She then cleared the bowl, wiped the table down with a foul smelling rag and placed a menu entirely in Cyrillic in front of me.

"I'd like to see a Chinese menu," I said, in Chinese.

The waitress did a strange thing: nothing. Didn't blink that I spoke in her native tounge, rather than Russian or my native English. Instead she got a Chinese menu to replace the Russian one.

I ate a very standard Chinese meal: kung pao chicken, fried rice, and a bowl of dumplings in soup. It was all quite tasty, and when the chef came out in the middle of my soup, I complimented him on the food. Were there many people in town, I asked.

Yes, the chef said, quite a few traders. Then he thanked me for coming and asked if I could make way for the next diner.

It was a completely normal Chinese dining expierence. Replace the Russian kitsch on the walls with some posters of Guilin and Lucky Cats, and I could have been in Sichuan Province. There is really is authentic Chinese food outside of the country.

The next day I woke up late, still suffering from a strange form of jet lag caused by my irregular schedule on the Trans-Siberian and the nosy comings and goings of the businessmen and hotel guests on the hall. I started walking the rough sidewalk toward the train tracks and downtown Ulan-Ude, not really sure of a destination. At a corner where I needed to turn right, I saw something that I'd walked by on my previous trips: a mostly-underground shopping plex, a concrete building designed based on what must be stolen blueprints from the Montreal Olympics. It was all gray, irregular slabs, topped off by an ugly cone rising from the entrance. I went inside.

The mall had two largely open levels. Most stores were filled, with music shops and places hawking cheap Chinese clothing. On the bottom level I noticed a small restaurant jutting into the atrium. The restaurant's name was in Cyrillic, but on either side were large Chinese dragons.

It was a mall food court restaurant minus the court. Food was ordered and paid for at the counter, and then customer brought it to an open table. At the counter I was presented with a Cyrillic menu.

"Do you have a Chinese menu?" I asked the woman behind the counter.

This time she stared at me blankly. I studied her features: flat face, pale skin, thick eyebrows. This woman wasn't Chinese, she was a Buryat, and didn't know Chinese from Martian. Thankfully the dishes were being prepared in the front of the stall, and I pointed to a few dumplings and some rice.

My first bite was strange. The dumpling wasn't wrapped in rice, instead it was fried in a thick dough. Inside wasn't pork, but instead a thick beef stew. This was Chinese food for Russian people. All the customers appeared to be citizens of the Federation, a typical Siberian mixture of Buryats and the Rus.

The food wasn't bad, just a bit bland; it was actually hardy in a way that traditional Chinese food is not. The lesson I draw from these back-to-back meals is that the Chinese adapt the menu to suit the audience. Not a terribly profound moral to this tale I know, but it makes a quick and easy answer at a dinner party.