CHALLENGES – Z. MCNEIL
As a vegan, I expected that eating would be difficult. I believed that I could live on rice and tofu and vegetables. But, the Chinese eat more meat than Americans. Everything is covered in animal products. Their tofu can be stuffed with meat. Their vegetables are covered in fish sauce. And there isn’t even a word for vegan in Chinese.
Not eating is exhausting. I want to say being vegan is easy (And it IS in the US, believe it or not), but here my options are as follows: red bean buns and rice porridge (which the Chinese eat for breakfast and is hard to find), some salads, and, wait for it, rice. So I’ve eaten a lot of rice. Unfortunately, there are a lot of health issues with just eating rice and it doesn’t provide enough energy or nutrients for one to be happy and active for too long.
Caveat: Thank you Dr McIntyre for the peanut butter. You don’t realise how much you love and need peanut butter until you no longer have access to it.
As for being “lost in translation,” I, luckily, often didn’t run into issues with it. I didn’t expect English to be on the majority of signs and pamphlets in the cities, and, often people spoke rudimentary, but still an impressive amount of, English.
Of course, I don’t really want to be the “ugly tourist” or “ugly American” who expects everyone to speak English back to me. Taking two years of Chinese did truly help, even though my language skills are very rusty. And having Chinese-speakers on the trip was extremely necessary.
That being said, I’ve very much enjoyed being lost in a language. Facial expressions and gestures are mostly the same here. I like being able to communicate by smiling and pointing and laughing. It’s very freeing.
Yesterday I sat with two college boys who understood some of my English, but couldn’t very easily speak it back. Sometimes they’d use a translator app, sometimes they would say a word, and sometimes they would respond by gesture. I adored their company and I felt like we did have a conversation. They even taught me some Chinese.