Kitchen, as it’s to me

I’m consciously knowing about important space/place in my life.  It’s a gradually process of formation, or sometimes just a contingent moment. I can imagine myself seeing kitchen as something important.  

Some people, especially guys would think kitchen is never a space they would ever pause at even a moment. Most people think that it really doesn’t worth spending one to two hours in the kitchen. Kitchen to them, it might just be something satisfy their fundamental food requirement. Mainly before the WWII, the modernization process of kitchen in the United States was meant to keep women at home to take care of kids and help run family routines. Kitchen is always being seen as a female domain, although I realized that it might be different across different cultures and regions. When I saw how guys in Shanghai, China, can cook that well in college, I shocked.  There are always people kidding that marry a guy from Shanghai, you stomach will always be satisfied. 

Kitchen itself to me means something more. It wasn’t my space before I started graduate school in the States. I barely cooked when back home due to many reasons, but now it became something necessary. Yes, I like cooking and I know it’s pretty time-consuming. It is a kind of moment that I can forget the outside and concentrate on just like I’m reading books. It’s not something that I consider as “have to do” but I must do, especially in between stressful work. It gives me breaks and pleasure. If you ever asked me which part of my apartment I’d like to keep with, it is the kitchen. I don’t really care about the compliment that I would get when I cook something terrific but the moment of cooking itself satisfies me a lot, relive my stress.  Of course there are many other moments I enjoy in life, reading, writing, playing pool and going to gym for example, but cooking is the only thing that could relate myself to a space, a specific space that I want to be there. This happened under a contingent condition–studying abroad–when this became a necessary routine, but I consider it more as a trigger. I could link myself to kitchen before it finally became my own space.  I had the desire to dominate it long time ago. 

Another thing that I can link myself to kitchen is my shopping experience. One good experience I relate myself to is shopping for dishes and cooking ware. This is another activity that I can strengthen my moment in the kitchen, a space that I self immersed in. 

At the very end I’d like to say, “cooking kills my loneliness and gives the feeling of HOME.”

 

 

Experiencing restaurants across cultural contexts

Everytime I finish meals at restaurants in the United States, I am into a struggle. I don’t know what to do on whether I should clean up my eating area or just leave it there. To figure this out, I usually look around to see if there are waiters or waitress serving for cleaning up the tables, but still I am doubting my decision when I simply leave my leftovers there. I keep looking back to see if there are people coming to clean that up. Then I suddenly realize that I am judging myself in turns of the western value.

Tracing myself back home in China, I never had this kind of struggles. I would just leave my leftovers there and go because I know there are people coming to clean this up. It’s not me being lazy. Almost all the restaurants in China have pointed staff that are assigned this cleaning job. Looking around, you will see people unconsciously leave their leftovers there without any hesitations. I’m not going to evaluate the morality of this kind of behavior but to bring this up into the cultural contexts.

There is a longstanding ethos in China called, “the customer is god.” Customers in China are used to being served as the merchants are trying to sell out their products and restaurant are trying to provide the best experiences for the customers when having meals. The better the restaurants are, the better services people get. I recalled my research on Qianmen district in Beijing, many traditional stores broadcast this golden rule although many of them may not actually perform the way in a real sense. For example, some stores sell stuff that are fake. But anyway, the ethos “the customer is god” is the thing at least they tend or pretend to perform. Thus, customers practice in ways that they are supposed to be provided with services.

For the case of the United States, it’s quite different. The simple case is the fast food chain stores like KFC. There are no people serving in the customer area but only these behind the counter for ordering food. At the first beginning, I thought I would just leave my unfinished food there but with more experiences and senses with the situation here, I know I should have cleaned up my eating area. The case for fast food chain stores are so easy that once people recognized the “rule,”  they know how to behavior. My struggle came from the Asian restaurants in the United State when I can barely find people serving cleaning the tables. There is kind of continua that I tend to perform, which means I tend to clean up the table in the Asian stores like I did in other local fast food chain stores. Sometimes it turned out to be unnecessary, because the strange part is these Asian stores don’t really have a recycled center for people to put back the dirty dishes, then you can’t do anything even if you want to.

The above experience also influence the way I behave after I return to China. I tend to clean up my own eating area after I finish up meals especially in fast food chain stores. I clearly remember that the staff serving for cleaning up the tables was so appreciated that I did her job and asked me to leave it to her. I didn’t realize that I was helping her but just perform the continua I was cultivated in the States.

Any of you share the same feeling? It’s a feeling I consciously experience but never came up with a so sure solution after I experienced the different social ethos across different cultural contexts.

Coffee talk and after

I have been feeling lucky and unlucky about my prospective topic of my Ph.D. dissertation. I knew what I want to do, and that’s good on one side, but I know that I am not very capable of doing it, and that drew me back. Anyway, that’s the reason why I am here, in BLC.

Yes, my almost one-year staying in this program gave me lots of possibilities, imaginations, and of course some hardships. It upset me because of some administrative reasons, but at the same time lots of supports from advisors. Today’s coffee talk with one professor motivated me to think a lot about my future academic lives. First, what I should work on in future. As I have reminded myself, I am not capable of doing American landscapes because I can barely sense it. Anything special to me might be just something the local people already know and can tell. Yes, I can do things like a lot foreign scholars did on their home groups in the United States. This might be a possibility. But what excited me a lot more is the idea of doing everyday life back home. This leads to my second thought on academic vocabularies. When talking to the professor, I said if we can’t phrase it well, everyday life is just nothing. We need vocabulary and deeper scholar knowledge to sit in. I feel like talking about a lot of things I have noticed around very often, but the inability to speak it out is causing me hardship. It is a really challenge of writing academic stories of everyday life. Reading a lot is the very basic. The third question is if I should work on China. The professor asked me why don’t I work on China. She is right I never look at the everyday life of China with a scholar’s eyes. Looking back on China would give me a lot of passions. This might be the possibility I am particularly interested. The forth question is my methodology.  I know to create its own methodology is something that may take more than ten years and it might not be arrived. Again, telling myself to read as many as I can, as deeper as I can.

I hope one day I will be able to use the vocabularies I learned here to look back at the everyday life of China just like she did.