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China Elevator Stories
The Chinese Grandmother Who Didn't Allow Me to Eat Raw Cucumber Salad
I visit a little restaurant in a mountain village near Chongqing.
13/12/2012
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
In June 2012, I visit a small restaurant in a mountain village a few hours from Chongqing. The restaurant’s plain white walls are decorated with a single print of Mao Zedong in the center, surrounded by other CCP leaders of the era. Although the village is a popular domestic tourist spot, the restaurant is frequented only by locals.
Most things in the restaurant are made of plastic, as is common in many places in China. You sit on plastic chairs, eat from plastic bowls, and reach for a plastic napkin holder at the end of the meal.
I’ve been hiking the whole day through a nearby valley, the Wulong Tiansheng Three Bridges UNESCO World Heritage Site, without a decent lunch, so after finishing my bowl of noodles, I still feel hungry. I reach for the menu again to study the dishes.
While I’m reading, an elderly Chinese woman who works at the restaurant starts talking to me in the local dialect. She’s very curious why I came to their little village on my own. All the other tourists arrive in large groups, like swarms of bees. I explain to her that I enjoy traveling alone.
A little while later, her son comes home from work. Seeing her talking to me, he tells her she shouldn’t try so hard, as I wouldn’t understand her dialect. She replies that we’re communicating just fine.
Sometimes you don’t need to understand every single word to grasp what people are saying. I’ve met travelers who go through remote parts of China, not knowing a word of Chinese, yet still managing to communicate with locals.
Meanwhile, the grandma’s daughter-in-law—the restaurant’s owner—is nowhere to be seen. When she returns, I order Sichuan-style cucumber salad. As she turns to prepare the meal, the grandmother quickly intervenes, insisting that she can’t serve me cucumber salad. In her opinion, raw cucumbers are not healthy to eat.
In the end, I’m served cucumber-with-century-egg-soup instead, which is also delicious.
Has anyone ever told you that raw cucumbers are unhealthy?