Bob Lucky, CN
A Taste
of My New Home
Hangzhou, where I
live and work, is perhaps the most visited tourist site in
China, at least among domestic tourists. Close to 30 million
Chinese visit every year to walk around its famous West Lake.
There are dozens of famous West Lakes in China, but the one in
Hangzhou is the most famous. And it is beautiful. It is
practically in the middle of the city and is ringed with
gardens and pagodas, crisscrossed with colorful boats, and
provisioned with teahouses, restaurants, and a couple of
strategically placed Starbucks. Nearby are the equally famous
Longjing tea gardens and several well-known temples of various
stripes – Buddhist, Daoist, and a recently renovated Confucian
temple. Across town a portion of the old Grand Canal is being
spiffed up and gentrified in hopes of attracting World
Heritage status.
But I live in a suburb across the Qiantang River. Bin Jiang is
Hangzhou’s high-tech zone. Once farm land and villages, it is
now high rise apartments and home to the likes of Bosch,
Nokia, and Samsung. It was a fairly dull and sterile place
when I moved here a year and a half ago, but things are afoot.
For starters, people, expat foreigners and Chinese, are
finally moving into the apartments, most of which were bought
as investments and sat empty for years. Despite the slowdown
in the economy, building continues at a fast clip, bringing in
more migrant workers, who live in rough conditions, often on
the construction sites, but still need places to eat and buy
basic necessities. Businesses seeking to tap into these two
disparate communities have popped up almost overnight.
Starbucks now has a branch a mile and a half down the road not
far from a Japanese-Korean café specializing in ramen and
bibimbap. There are two branches of a local Chinese chain that
began eight years ago as a noodle shop, was briefly
transformed into Grandma’s Kitchen and is now known as The
Grandma’s. The menu is extensive and has several local
specialties. The Strait’s Café, another chain, specializes in
the cuisines of the overseas Chinese. The local Sheraton’s
Chinese restaurant serves excellent dim sum, daily. Sherpa’s,
a food delivery service, has yet to make inroads into the
wilds of Bin Jiang, but the day is coming soon.
All those places are nice for a splurge, but closer to my
apartment several eateries, which is really the most accurate
term for them, have sprung up to serve the migrant workers and
the middle class families and young couples moving into the
area. Anyone who knows me knows I like to eat, and knows to
keep an eye on her plate if I’m around. These eateries have
seriously improved the quality of my life. I can step out
early in the morning and buy a dozen steamed buns stuffed with
meat or vegetables for my family’s breakfast for less than a
cup of coffee at Starbucks down the road. In the evening, we
have a choice of several noodle and soup venues.
Our favorite we call the Muslim noodle stall because, sadly,
we are still more or less illiterate in Chinese and can’t read
the name. This stall is typical of a type of establishment run
by Chinese Muslims from Western China, who seem to specialize
either in noodles or a variety of flatbreads. A bowl or plate
of noodles topped with a variety of meats, excluding pork, and
vegetables and sauces, with a small bowl of mutton broth, will
set you back about US $1.50. A picture menu conveniently
covers one entire wall. But this is not cheap fast food, not
instant noodles and a packet of freeze-dried broth. No, the
broth comes from a simmering, steaming cauldron. The noodles
are hand-made to order on a table next to the cauldron. People
who know me also know I like to cook, but fresh, hand-made
noodles at that price make going into the kitchen seem like a
chore.
Bob Lucky
