“Do the Chinese Just Look Like They’re Smiling?”

(Gerry Furth-Sides)  Editor’s Note:  This was a true experience though I was always welcomed effusively and genuinely at The Panda Inn and I was there often.  When  I handled Special Projects for the Panda Corporation soon afterward, I had the same pleasant experience.  And while  filming in China with Chef Tommy Tang, the people we met (possibly with the exception of the military guards and the people “in line” at stores and the airport, which was usually a continually moving horizontal one), I found the people to be warm and exceptionally friendly, especially when you greeted them in Chinese!

Want to put a smile on an immigrant’s face? I’ve found that one sure way is through even the feeblest try at communicating in their native language. After all, your attempt signals an enthusiastic interest in their culture and that is a happy reaction.

However, one exception is the Chinese;   it might look like they’re smiling, while that might not be the case at all. The trick is not to mistake the “Face-saving” smiles of the Chinese for being happy.a happy reaction. And it is a trick that took me months.

“Thank you” and ordering food in French or Italian or Spanish or even Japanese wasn’t that hard.   But it took me months to even get a Chinese to even correct me. When I finally did one evening at a restaurant after the owner had thrown back his head in obvious delight, he followed it up with “That was the last thing I expected out of you, an American!”

Then I remembered that the Chinese have a reputation for being “rather brisk with foreigners, when they are no longer needed,” as Paul Theroux put it in his marvelously observant book, Riding The Iron Rooster.

The Chinese also make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality.   Not exactly what is taught in Western-style Hotel Schools, which is why so many of the greetings in an American- Chinese restaurant seem forced. The Chinese are out to serve the best food they can to please a patron and collect the money. Finished. The Chinese expect their customers to come back for the good food, not the coddling We westerners (me among them), on the other hand, will eat inferior food if we’ve given exceptional service.

The red of the wallpaper might mean “good luck” to all Chinese, which is terrific subconscious marketing since it has been proven that the color red psychologically increases appetite, — so much so that at one time most American restaurant interiors featured red.  Otherwise, we view a Chinese restaurant as bland while the purpose of a restaurant to the Chinese is to serve good food, not show off their interior decorating or provide “atmosphere.”

One good reason for not exactly welcoming foreigners is the strangers’ history of “borrowing” ideas from the ingenious Chinese and making them their own.   So what about the Chinese in America?   Not surprisingly, the many considerations depend on age, birthplace, and upbringing.   After all, until very recently, it was illegal for a foreigner and a Chinese citizen to converse in China.

On the other hand, the Chinese are totally forthright. This too has to do with survival in a harsh environment; every Chinese has a purpose and fulfills it. No frilly explanations needed. For example, when I pre-interviewed a dedicated, young Chinese chef for a television show about how he became a chef, there was none of the usual family lore of the kitchen. He simply answered, “It was my fate. There was nothing I could do to change it.” And that was that.

When another prominent chef was asked whether his children would follow in his profession, he laughed and said, “I hope not.” This was not because of the arduous work and long hours, often the concern of American chefs who are parents. Instead, this chef emphatically continued, ” I want them to be a doctor or a nurse.   When I was a boy my father, who was a cook, looked at me and said, ‘There are five thousand people in our town and 500 places in the university. You better learn a trade, and a cook is best because it allows you to work anywhere.’ And that’s how I became a cook, then a chef.”

We’re also talking mere survival is the game in a country almost too large to comprehend and with as much of it as possible dedicated to growing food.

Maybe this is why every Chinese whom I have gotten to know has been eager to share food, especially the eight (for good luck) course classic feasts.   For example, one young Chinese lady I worked, wealthy enough to have a servant accompany her everywhere, would take me to such feasts or sumptuous meals in American restaurants, pay the bill and without a word simply disappear immediately afterward.

The feast always includes toasting with cups of wine and many, many toasts to the hosts, with an enthusiastic “Kan-Pei” or “bottoms up!” It is only one of a range of social

Amenities, beginning with the guests being summoned several times to the table — and it is rude to be in a hurry to eat your host’s food! The signal to begin the event is when the host toasts back his company and announces, “Serve yourselves.” Then the meal is underway. (And don’t clean your plate when you are full; that signals another serving!)

The beginning of the meal usually consists of an array of eight dishes: roast pork, mushrooms, abalone, white chicken, cucumber salad, juicy chicken livers, ham and jellied fish. Most of the foods or their names have a double meaning. For example, the phrase for dried oysters and “good times” are the same.   Mandarin might be the common language of China but it is the Cantonese greeting, “Gung hay fat choy”   announcing the new year with wishes “to accumulate wealth ” that is becoming most familiar to Californians.