Category: Beijing

Chinese Food: China vs America

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I skype-chatted with Clarissa Wei, a Chinese-American journalist in Los Angeles whose post about stinky tofu in Los Angeles impressed me.

SR What do you think of Chinese restaurants in America compared to Chinese restaurants in China?

CW It depends on where you’re talking about. In broad America, the Chinese food is pretty different from that of China. In places like Los Angeles and pockets of New York… it’s much more alike

SR I’m thinking of the best ones in Los Angeles.

CW It’s definitely cleaner here that’s for sure. In Los Angeles, the food quality is pretty similar. The major difference would be the price and variety. The selections are also pretty similar. The set-up in American Chinese restaurants is obviously different than the ones in China so that influences things a lot

SR I have never been to a Chinese restaurant in America that resembles a high-end Chinese restaurant in Beijing

CW In Los Angeles — there are a couple high-end Canto restaurants. They typically are your seafood + dim sum banquet types. Lunasia is a great example.

SR What do you mean by the set up?

CW Well in China, a lot of the restaurants are literally hole-in-the-walls. There isn’t that much of a standard in terms of being neat and sanitary.

SR There is vastly more range in China, both better and worse

CW In the rural countrysides, it’s out of people’s homes. But in America, everyone has to have at least some degree of sanitation.

SR Chinese restaurants in China are more playful. Like a toilet restaurant, for example.

CW Very true. Yeah they’re opening one of those in LA.

SR Or a restaurant where everyone says hello when you enter and goodbye when you leave

CW There’s also a Taiwanese “Hooters” in L.A. A lot of the Taiwanese breakfast eateries in L.A. have that “cutesy” vibe.

SR When you were in China were you in any way disappointed by the Chinese restaurants?

CW I was in China in 2011 for 4 months as part of a study abroad program. I was disappointed mostly because I always got sick.

SR What city?

CW Shanghai. But I travelled to Guilin, Dunhuang, Beijing. I got sick from just the regular restaurants on my street. Some were marketed as higher-end. I lost 10 pounds from throwing up. Mind you, I go to Taiwan yearly and that never happens.

SR The first time I went to China I was sick every 2 days, but after that I was fine.

CW I think my toleration for bacteria is pretty low.

SR I get sick no more often in Beijing than in Berkeley. [But in Beijing I eat Korean and Japanese food mostly.]

CW That’s surprising. I was at Donghuamen [a night market selling strange food] in Beijing. Did an article on that place. But I just felt like throwing up because the streets reeked of trash.

SR The cheap restaurants scare me. They use recycled cooking oil.

CW I think that’s changing now with the media coverage on the Chinese food scandals. But in places like Los Angeles..the food is pretty up to par in terms of “authenticity”.

SR How was the food in the various Chinese cities besides Shanghai?

CW It was alright. I get turned off when a restaurant is dirty to be honest. But that may just be because of my American upbringing. It really influences how I consume the food and how much I eat of it. When I was in Dunhuang, there was a vendor making daoxiaomian but he kept on coughing over and over. And we watched him make the dish and serve it to us. I felt disgusted but we were starving.

SR What did you think of the food expertise of the Chinese people you met in China?

CW I learned a lot about Chinese food in China from my Chinese teacher. That’s when I started to gain in interest in the regional differences. The oyster omelette for example in Xiamen is similar to the one in Taiwan, but crispier and thinner

SR It was very hard to buy a kitchen timer in Beijing because I was told no one uses them when they cook.

CW No one uses fancy gadgets or exact measurements there. It’s all passed down and family recipes which is the beauty of it.

SR My students at Tsinghua are more connoisseurs of food than my Berkeley students. A lot more.

CW Food is such a central theme of the Chinese culture. There’s a fascination with Western food too. In Shanghai, my first article for CNN was “Top Western Restaurants in Shanghai”. I brought my Shanghainese friends along to one of the places — a bagel places — and they were fascinated.

SR I went to the best Korean restaurant I’ve been to outside Korea in Shanghai.

CW Shanghai has a tradition of really embracing foreign cooking traditions. One of the best fine dining restaurants I’ve been to was in Shanghai, Mr. and Mrs. Bund.

SR Do people in Shanghai understand how good the food is in Japan?

CW I think so. But a lot of Chinese people really don’t have the opportunity to travel abroad. They don’t have a feel or the exposure to foreign tastes as much as Americans do. In Taiwan, there’s a fascination with the Japanese. Obviously because of the occupation of the Japanese but a lot of the high-end Taiwanese restos are Japanese influenced.

SR Controlling for age who did you think are the more adventurous eaters, Americans or Chinese — I mean the ones you know.

CW Chinese hands down.

SR That’s interesting, I always worry that my students won’t like this or that. [At least, they draw the line at eating insects.]

CW Just because Chinese cuisine has a variety of meats and offal and “bizarre” parts you know. So they’re much more open to try …. snails from France than your average American. Because snails are a Chinese dish too.
Also in Chinese culture, you’re taught to eat anything and everything that’s presented to you. It’s rude to refuse.

SR A friend of mine said that Chinese (in practice) is a language of verbs, English is a language of nouns. One of the verbs is “eat”. Parents tell children: “eat”.

CW Yes. Americans have the luxury of being more picky — look at the whole gluten free, vegan movement in these metropolitan places. If you go into a Chinese restaurant in China and say you’re vegetarian — they don’t really know how to work with you. Some places will just roll their eyes.

SR After you came back from Shanghai to Los Angeles, how did you view American Chinese restaurants differently? The authentic ones.

CW I appreciated it a lot more. The food here is good and it won’t give me food poisoning. Sanitation was like the biggest worry in China. An article recently came out that said the ice from the KFC in China had more bacteria than toilet water.

SR I never go to KFC in China. Now I have been vindicated in that decision

CW The egg tarts there are fantastic. Modeled after the original Macau egg tart recipe apparently.

SR There should be a category: best food in worst restaurant. Also worst food in best restaurant.

CW Chinese restaurants have such extensive menus, it’s always easy to find a bad item.

SR I was impressed that Chinese restaurants managed to make mashed potatoes slightly interesting. That’s baby food! They added raspberry sauce.

CW Again — fascination with Western food.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Nassim Taleb makes a good point. There is a huge difference between using what you already know (or think you know), which is engineering, and finding out more, which is science. People who know little about science confuse science and engineering, but they do blend into each other, in the sense that science is using what you already know to learn more and engineering is full of uncertainties.
  • Association of vegetarian diet and death rate (new study). The vegetarian/non-vegetarian comparison interests me less than the vegetarian/pesco-vegetarian (I call them aquaratarians) comparison, which is less confounded. The pesco-vegetarians lived substantially longer than the vegetarians.
  • Levitating Beijingers. What Beijing really looks like.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Edward Jay Epstein, Bryan Castañeda, Paul Nash, Jay Barnes and Dave Lull.

Positive Psychology Talk by Martin Seligman at Tsinghua University

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Here at Tsinghua University, the Second Annual Chinese International Conference on Positive Psychology has just begun. The first speaker was Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former president of the American Psychological Association (the main professional group of American psychologists). Seligman is more responsible for the Positive Psychology movement than anyone else. Here are some things I liked and disliked about his talk.

Likes:

1. Countries, such as England, have started to measure well-being in big frequent surveys (e.g., 2000 people every month) and some politicians, such as David Cameron, have vowed to increase well-being as measured by these surveys. This is a vast improvement over trying to increase how much money people make. The more common and popular and publicized this assessment becomes — this went unsaid — the more powerful psychologists will become, at the expense of economists. Seligman showed a measure of well-being for several European countries. Denmark was highest, Portugal lowest. His next slide showed the overall result of the same survey for China: 11.83%. However, by then I had forgotten the numerical scores on the preceding graph so I couldn’t say where this score put China.

2. Work by Angela Duckworth, another Penn professor, shows that “GRIT” (which means something like perseverance) is a much better predictor of school success than IQ. This work was mentioned in only one slide so I can’t elaborate. I had already heard about this work from Paul Tough in a talk about his new book.

3. Teaching school children something about positive psychology (it was unclear what) raised their grades a bit.

Dislikes:

1. Three years ago, Seligman got $125 million from the US Army to reduce suicides, depression, etc. (At the birth of the positive psychology movement, Seligman proclaimed that psychologists spent too much time studying suicide, depression, etc.) I don’t mind the grant. What bothered me was a slide used to illustrate the results of an experiment. I couldn’t understand it. The experiment seems to have had two groups. The results from each group appeared to be on different graphs (making comparison difficult, of course).

2. Why does a measure of well-being not include health? This wasn’t explained.

3. Seligman said that a person’s level of happiness was “genetically determined” and therefore was difficult or impossible to change. (He put his own happiness in “the bottom 50%”.) Good grief. I’ve blogged several times about how the fact that something is “genetically-determined” doesn’t mean it cannot be profoundly changed by the environment. Quite a misunderstanding by an APA president and Penn professor.

4. He mentioned a few studies that showed optimism (or lack of it) was a risk factor for heart disease after you adjust for the traditional risk factors (smoking, exercise, etc.). There is a whole school of “social epidemiology” that has shown the importance of stuff like where you are in the social hierarchy for heart disease. It’s at least 30 years old. Seligman appeared unaware of this. If you’re going to talk about heart disease epidemiology and claim to find new risk factors, at least know the basics.

5. Seligman said that China had “a good safety net.” People in China save a large fraction of their income at least partly because they are afraid of catastrophic medical costs. Poor people in China, when they get seriously sick, come to Beijing or Shanghai for treatment, perhaps because they don’t trust their local doctor (or the local doctor’s treatment failed). In Beijing or Shanghai, they are forced to pay enormous sums (e.g., half their life’s savings) for treatment. That’s the opposite of a good safety net.

6. Given the attention and resources and age of the Positive Psychology movement, the talk seemed short on new ways to make people better off. There was an experiment with school children where the main point appeared to be their grades improved a bit. A measure of how they treat each other also improved a bit. (Marilyn Watson, the wife of a Berkeley psychology professor, was doing a study about getting school kids to treat each other better long before the Positive Psychology movement.) There was an experiment with the U.S. Army I couldn’t understand. That’s it, in a 90-minute talk. At the beginning of his talk Seligman said he was going to tell us things “your grandmother didn’t know.” I can’t say he did that.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

What to Do in Beijing: My Suggestions

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Because Tyler Cowen is going to Beijing, I made a list of suggestions:

1. Don’t go to the Great Wall. It’s a long drive. I preferred to see it on the Today Show. The only interesting bit was a guy who sat in a chair on the path to the wall and charged 30 cents to go further. We paid the 30 cents but in retrospect I wish we hadn’t.

2. Visit some of the many “markets” that consist of a building full of tiny booths. There are markets devoted to cameras, jewelry, clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. There can be more choice of furniture in one building (say, 100 manufacturers) than exists in the entire Bay Area. Along similar lines there is a whole neighborhood full of tea sellers — if you like tea.

3. Peking duck is a good dish but I cannot tell the difference between the better restaurants serving it. So don’t go out of your way to go to an especially good place. I usually go to Quanjude which has a branch very near my school (Tsinghua).

4. Middle 8 is a very good restaurant (in Haidian and Chao Yang).

5. Din Tai Fung is a very good dumpling restaurant. It is a big international Taiwanese chain. So it isn’t even mainland Chinese food exactly.

6. There are grilled chicken wing restaurants near the west gates of both Peking University and Tsinghua University. I don’t know their names but they are very good. Popular with students.

7. I have never found a nice place in Beijing to walk. Even in parks there is a lack of shade.

8. In my neighborhood (Wudaokou) there are excellent Korean restaurants.

Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

A Beijing Bystander Inaction Story

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Long after the famous Kitty Genovese story — supposedly many people watched her being murdered without doing anything — doubt was cast on its accuracy. In the meantime, John Darley and Bibb Latane, two professors of psychology, it as the starting point for a series of experiments on what they called the bystander effect — the more bystanders, the less likely that each one will help. They concluded there was “diffusion of responsibility” — the more people that witness something, the less each witness feels responsible for doing something.

In China the problem is much worse. A few years ago a woman was hit by a car. A second car stopped to help her. The woman told the police that the second driver had hit her. The second driver was furious, gave many interviews, and eventually a witness was found who said it was the driver, not the injured woman, who was telling the truth. Someone I spoke to attributed her behavior to the need to pay hospital bills. The driver who hit her would never be caught, she reasoned. Maybe the second driver could be forced to pay.

My Chinese tutor, who is Korean, told me a story that illustrates the depth of Chinese bystander inaction and suggests another reason for it. A friend of hers was visiting from Korea. When this friend was in Wangjing (in the Chaoyang district of Beijing), she saw a person lying on a busy street, bleeding but still alive. Apparently the bleeding person had been hit by a car. Three hours later, the friend returned — and the accident victim was still there! Now dead. So, with difficulty — she doesn’t speak Chinese — she called the police.

The police treated her as a suspect. She was forced to come to the police station five times, for hours each time.

What a deterrent to calling the police! I cannot believe the police were so stupid as to consider a Korean tourist on foot who calls the police a serious suspect in the death of someone lying in the middle of traffic. I believe that by causing her a lot of trouble, they wanted to send a message: Leave us alone. The fewer calls they get, the less work they have to do. No wonder everyone ignored the bleeding victim.

“I am afraid I am scaring you,” said my Chinese teacher. “You are,” I said.

 

Beijing Quantified Self?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I recently had lunch with Richard Sprague, an engineer at Microsoft Beijing. He raised the possibility of starting a Quantified Self Meetup group in Beijing. The meetings could be held in one of Microsoft’s two brand new buildings, which are in the exact center of Zhongguancun. If you might attend, please let me know (e.g., by commenting on this post).