A few paces down the alley behind our place there is a tiny restaurant where they sell the most delicious "jiaozi" - dumplings. Inside each one there is a meat-ball, and a spoonful of soup that has the sticky quality of oxtail but a sweeter taste. They are a tad too big to put into your mouth all at one go, but to try to eat them with two bites is a disaster of the splashy kind. And however you try to eat them, it has to be accomplished with chopsticks ...
Usually we buy half a dozen each (for a mere 9 kuai, or $1.50) in a polystyrene take-away dish, and devour them in the privacy of our own living room, or even sitting on the bank of the Grand Canal. Today we decided to eat in. This meant the added privelege of a bowl of soup - a clear soup, like greasy water, with pieces of chopped chives and some sprigs of fluffy purple sea-weed floating around - a slight salty taste, and not bad. And there was a tiny bowl to put soy sauce and/or vinegar and/or chili in, for dipping the dumplings. So, after putting sauce in my bowl, I wrangled my chopsticks around a dumpling and had it dangling over my bowl. I tried to bite it, it broke, slipped, splashed - and all the time the guy in the doorway never took his eyes off me, barely blinked. Seeing my attempts to reach the packet of tissues on the counter - the waitress was in my way - he slowly came over and held them out for me. I tried to believe he did so because he cared ...
They were delicious, though. Peter was happy - only his sleeve had been splashed - and I had made a firm decision that next time I would eat at home. Trying to ignore my be-speckled shirt, I headed off with Peter further down the back alley to the supermarket. We smiled at and greeted the people we passed, and wondered what was really in those delicious-looking pastry parcels on one stall. I saw a man come the other way with his brown pants pulled up too high - but not high enough to cover his white underwear that was pulled even higher and peeping over the waistband. The cuffs of his trousers were also rolled up revealing the other extreme of his winter undies. We passed him and walked on, but a little further he turned and came up to us, chattering incessantly in a mixture of poor English and some other language - if it was Mandarin we couldn't pick up on any words at all.
His social distance was all wrong, he kept leaning on Peter, and he was very "touchy-feely". I tried to move away every time he turned towards me. He carried on about being American, or having an American brother, or maybe we were his brother/sister/mother, and there was something special he wanted to tell us about Washington. He kept wanting to give Peter cigarettes, and after a number of refusals Peter gave in and accepted one for "later". We tried to walk away, but then he grabbed Peter's arm and started insisting that we go to see his home.
Now this is something that Peter has always wanted - to see into people's homes and find out how they live - and it was obviously too good an offer to miss. As we turned to follow the man, people round about started to look quite concerned, and some of them grabbed me by the arm and indicated with a twirling finger near their ear that the man was deranged. But what could I do, I wasn't about to abandon Peter.
So we followed him down a side alley - the crowd of onlookers growing all the time. He fooled around with his key, getting Peter to unlock his door for him. We stood in the doorway of his single dingy room, and the village people followed, becoming increasingly frantic in their attempts to draw us away. The room contained little more than a large bed, chair, and TV and DVD player. The man kept trying to offer Peter gifts, including a DVD with "sex" written on the front. He forcibly put the rest of his packet of cigarettes in Peter's shirt pocket, and then some nuts and some small pieces of money. He noticed I also had a top pocket in my gravy-splattered shirt, so he came across to me, thrusting a handful of nuts into my pocket and giving my nipple a hard tweak through my clothing as he did so. I grabbed his hand and thrust it away, removed the nuts from my pocket and put them in someone's bike-basket that was in the hallway, and left the room. The people standing about were looking genuinely concerned, so I pulled on Peter's arm and said loudly that I was going to the supermarket.
Of course, the friendly man followed us all the way there, grabbing Peter and whispering stuff to him, but I walked quickly ahead, grabbed what I needed at the shop and we headed back. We were very relieved when he left us alone at the corner where we originally met him. I don't believe I will be shopping in that alley again - although the rest of the people there seem like they are really sweet, caring people.
And I'm sorry, I don't have a photo of him. But I did draw a picture:
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