The photos come from all over: partially abandoned and bulldozed hutongs in Tianjin’s less developed districts, the Great Wall in northern Tianjin, street markets, etc.

Click a photo to go to our Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer gallery.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Breakfast is an especially big deal in Tianjin. Many people don’t like to cook breakfast themselves and the sidewalks are filled from early to late morning with folding tables, plastic stools, and crowds of people enjoying their very public meals.

Last week my sister came from Canada to see us, so I took her out before 6am one morning to sample both the local daily exercise scene and some breakfast. We took pictures, so here’s breakfast, Tianjiner-style, in no particular order. See the warning label at the bottom. Most dishes cost around two kuài ($0.30).

When Tianjiners travel overseas and get homesick, this is the stuff they miss.

1. 锅巴菜 gābacài

I like this stuff, though I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s made of just from eating it: maybe some sesame sauce, strips of something, some pink sauce, thick brown broth, and you can throw in some cilantro and crushed hot peppers in oil if you want. Apparently gābacài (锅巴菜) is a Tianjin original, and it’s seriously high-energy food; you feel like running a few miles afterward. According to this online recipe, it’s made with a mung bean-&-millet broth, strips of chopped, crepe-like jiānbǐng (煎饼), some of kind of gravy made with over ten kinds of seasonings, sesame paste, chilis in oil, pink fermented tofu sauce and cilantro. In standard Mandarin it should be guōbacài, but in Tianjin it’s gābacài — people often think it’s funny if the foreigner knows to use the local pronunciation.

2. 老豆腐 lǎodòufu

My students rave about “old tofu” (老豆腐) or “tofu brains” (豆腐脑) whenever I bring it up in class, but even they admit that it looks disgusting.

From what I can tell, it’s slimy lumps of tofu in an oil bath with some brown (sesame?) sauce thrown in. For me, the taste doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for its appearance. Of all the Tianjin breakfast foods, we liked this one the least. I think my sister stopped after the first or second spoonful.

3. 油条 yóutiáo

Two small strips of dough pinched together at the ends and deep fried, “oil sticks” are pretty much donuts without any sugar or flavouring. I honestly don’t see the point, unless you were trying to consume as much oil as possible without actually drinking it straight, though for some reason I still eat them occasionally. These things are everywhere at breakfast time, perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Tianjin’s breakfast offerings, maybe because they travel easily. 5 máo ($0.07) each.

The wider thing in the fry pot in the above photo is called a guǒbìngr (果饼儿) in Tianjin (薄脆 báocuì in Beijing). Guǒbìngr are thin and crispy rather than donut-y.

4. 面茶 miànchá

If you cooked it in less oil and traded the salt for brown sugar, you could slip bowls of miànchá (面茶) onto a Canadian family breakfast table and no one would notice (assuming that some Canadians actually still have family breakfasts). According to this online recipe and my Chinese-English dictionary, it’s made from millet, sesame paste, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Unsweetened porridge, basically. I don’t know how to translate the name; the characters are the ones for “noodles” (面) and “tea” (茶), but I’m not seeing either in this dish [see comment #14]. Anyway, I’ll definitely be eating this again on a somewhat regular basis, though I can’t say the same or the “tofu brains” in the right half of the photo above.

5. 煎饼果子 jiānbing guǒzi

This is more or less the Chinese breakfast burrito, except that other than having a thin crepe-like wrapper, it’s (sadly) nothing at all like a burrito. The styles can vary and you can sometimes choose for yourself (see a list here), but a standard jiānbing guǒzi (煎饼果子) will be a green onion crepe lined with egg wrapped around a yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) or a crunchy guǒbìngr (果饼儿 — stacked overhead in the photo below), with some sauce and crushed red peppers in oil, and then folded twice. These transport well, and I often see them on the subway in the morning.

6. 豆浆 dòujiāng

“Bean broth” (豆浆) is better known in North America as soy milk, only the Tianjin variety is unsweetened and served really hot in a brimming bowl, scooped out of a big pot. Dòujiāng to-go comes in a bag with a straw. Sometimes they’ll add sugar to it if you ask. I like dipping the yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) in it, but I get funny looks from my Chinese friends when I do this.

This post doesn’t include every single kind of Tianjin breakfast food (there’d be no end; Tianjiners love them some breakfast!), but these are all the biggies. Hungry?

P.S. — Warning

Adventure eaters, be ye warned: This kind of local food is pretty much guaranteed to use the cheapest, poorest quality ingredients, and in China that means something different than it does back home. If, for example, you were deliberately trying to consume “gutter oil” (地沟油), which is discarded cooking oil that’s been skimmed off the sewer slop that was scooped out of manholes and resold in used containers back to restaurants and street vendors, you would eat things like yóutiáo (油条 “oil sticks”) or lǎodòufu (老豆腐 “old tofu”) at places like those pictured above, or you could go to an average local restaurant and order shuǐzhǔròu (水煮肉 “water boiled meat”), which is basically meat and vegetables in a serving bowl filled with oil. Most Chinese dishes use incredible amounts of oil, but the ones I’ve mentioned here use even more than usual and are therefore thought to be the most likely candidates for gutter oil.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.

Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

This is the new banner that went up in our neighbourhood this week. What it actually means is, “Sidewalk vegetable sellers are officially no longer welcome here.” When this went up, the chéngguǎn (城管), which are the low-level bylaw enforcers who deal with things like illegal street vendors, came and kicked out our neighbourhood’s vegetable sellers — a migrant couple from Húnán (湖南) who daily pedal in their vegetables on a three-wheel cart — and the noodle vendors with their push carts. All of them have been daily fixtures inside the front gate of our apartment complex since the day we moved in. Jessica’s buying noodles after a walk in the park in the photo below (vegetables in the background on the left):

The Pros & Cons
We like having these people in our neighbourhood. In a big, dirty, noisy, anonymous, soul-quenching concrete wasteland where you don’t even know the people in your own stairwell, having an informal community center inside the front entrance where people play, gossip, buy breakfast and lunch, etc. really changes the feel of the place. We get to smile and make small talk every time we come and go (and show off Lilia), and the old guys sitting around doing nothing all day get just as big a kick out of it as we do, I think.

But it’s not simply a matter of vain city officials disregarding the poor in a selfish rush to create a sterile urban facade that will advance their careers and prestige (though no doubt that’s a big part of it); there are real downsides to having these vendors around. The chǎobǐng (炒饼) lady, whom we call “auntie” (大娘), leaves a pile of eggs shells, cabbage, and other rotting food waste right by the entrance every night. More than once when biking home from work at night I’ve seen and heard big rats scrounging around in it. These vendors are unregulated, and in China that often means things like dìgōuyóu (地沟油), cooking oil that was skimmed off the sewage scooped out of manholes outside of restaurants and resold in used-but-new-looking containers, usually to street vendors but often to restaurants as well. Street vendors also create traffic nightmares in a city where the traffic is already beyond brutal. Tianjin used to be known for its bustling street markets, which was a nice way of saying ridiculously crowded streets that you could barely push your bike through. These days such markets are harder to find, but I videoed a bike ride through one a couple blocks away.

Getting Kicked Out
Here’s the best shot we have of the vegetable selling scene, pre-eviction. It’s hard to see, but there are shelves of vegetables along the wall on the left, behind the chair and cabinet:

And here’s afterward, with their shelves and things torn down:

It doesn’t happen as sinisterly as I could make it sound in the telling; it’s not like there’s a squadron of stone-faced riot police that show up and bully people around. In our neighbourhood it means an unenthusiastic middle-aged guy, who looks just like the other middle-aged guys in our neighborhood aside from his rumpled, ill-fitting, cheap-looking uniform, standing off to the side smoking, almost apologetically telling the vendors they have to go. He’s just the messenger; he has no real power, but the people that sent him do and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except comply. He’s the opposite of intimidating.

That’s how it is here and elsewhere in our area: the vendors don’t get mad at the messengers — they even stand around and chat, taking their time. But that’s not how it is elsewhere, where chéngguǎn are often violent and beat the street vendors, in some instances provoking violence in return — not to mention the controversy surrounding the alleged leak of a chéngguǎn manual explaining how to use violence to enforce bylaws. In Kunming people are even getting creative in their resistance. No such drama for us, though.

I leave for work on my bike around 8:20am, and on the morning all this happened I passed the chǎobǐng lady on my way to the subway. She was pushing her cart down the road after being kicked out that morning. She’s funny because she’s tiny, can’t be more than 5 feet tall or more than 80 or 90 pounds, but she’s a real firecracker. I asked what happened and she animatedly told me that the chéngguǎn made her leave. I asked when she could return and she said, “After 9:00.” I double-checked, “You mean you can go back after 9:00? You just have to wait until after 9?” Yep, that was the deal apparently, at least for her and the other push-cart vendors. Maybe there was an inspection coming through. Since then they’ve all been back every morning like normal, except for the vegetable sellers.

Other stuff about street vendors, street markets, and city clean-up:

• Tianjin Street Market Dash (video)
• Behaving yourself… with Tianjin characteristics
• Before & After: Tianjin’s transformation at ground level
• GROOOOOOOSS!

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Then I decided to go back through the other way for a different view:

More about Chinese markets and traffic:

• Crossing the street (video)
• Stayin’ Alive Part 2: Learning to cross the street
• Our Neighbourhood càishìchǎng
• Flower-Bird-Fish-Bug Market
• Local Wet Market
• Keelung Night Market
• Shilin Night Market
• Bike trip to the marriage market
• Tianjin: more colourful in the rain, more marriable in the sun
• Marriage market, Eric Liddell, weekend slogan
• How to: Ride a Bike in China (Part 2)
• Metaphors for Tianjin Traffic
• How to: Ride a bike in Tianjin (Part 1)

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

I self-censored a lot out before submitting the final draft, but even still none of the people involved on my end had much hope that the magazine would actually print it. In the past the censors have been extremely strict about anything related to Chr!stianity in China — as if they have orders to publicly pretend it isn’t here. Below is what they eventually printed, except for a couple of things:

1. Although they left most of the Chr!stian content in, a couple lines were removed. I added them back in in red below. There were some other odd (to me) editing decisions that seemed to characterized parts of his story in unnecessary ways, but I’ve left most of those alone.
2. I’ve altered the spelling on potentially sensitive words just to avoid triggering any automatic word filters or whatever. I know that’s paranoid, but since censorship enforcement is inconsistent and this is just a personal blog, I’d rather not unduly tempt fate.
3. I replaced their title with my original title (they substituted “Ask and you shall receive”, which I though was lame).

At the end I’ve also included the text and (bad) translation of the Chinese summary that they added, which contains some interesting vocab. Without further ado, here’s May’s Regular Zhou.

A Blessed Life

…one young Tianjin professional discovers something more powerful than fate and more valuable than success

Maybe you’ve seen the aerial photos of Chinese job fairs, the only events whose sprawling, densely-packed crowds could possibly rival those of a Spring Festival train station. China’s alarmingly over-saturated job market is especially tough on males, who first need to establish financial self-sufficiency for themselves and their parents and buy an apartment in the inflated housing market before they’ll be considered marriageable.

Employers benefit from the claustrophobic rat-race; millions of college graduates struggle to find their feet in spite of it. This is one young Tianjiner’s success story, though it’s not merely about transitioning between college and career in modern day Tianjin. This particular Tianjiner, whose Chinese name could be translated as “cultivate hope”, is passionately convinced of something he’s discovered along the way – there’s much more to life than salaries, promotions and apartments.

Sink or Swim
Zhū Lǎoshī (朱老师 / ‘Teacher Zhu’), as he’s known to students and coworkers, was born twenty-five years ago near Long Rainbow Park in Nánkāi (南开). He grew up in the Dàgǎng oil fields (大港油田) before studying teaching Chinese as a foreign language at the Tianjin Foreign Languages University. After four relaxed college years, the pressure was on.

“After graduating I found a part-time job teaching Chinese to foreigners at a private language center,” he says. “I worked there for one and half years. It was hard at first. I was a new teacher with no experience and in class I didn’t teach that well. But the students were really patient and encouraging and my coworkers helped me prepare lessons. They gave me lots of help and basically taught me how to teach.

“At the time my parents still lived in Dàgǎng but my job was in Héxī (河西). My part-time income wasn’t enough to rent an apartment, but my bosses provided a free place to stay for two months. Eventually I rented a small two-bedroom with five roommates. Every weekend I’d go home to Dàgǎng and my mom would make enough food for the whole week plus some to share with my friends.

“Working at the language center really gave me a lot of help. I made a lot of friends, I learned how to teach and work, and gained experience. Yet, while I was happy to begin with, during the third semester things got really difficult. With my lack of experience I was still only part-time and wasn’t making much money. I hated the idea of leaving because my students and coworkers were really great. But I couldn’t see my future there; that last semester was pretty painful. It was sad, but I stopped working there in February 2009.”

An Open Door
“I considered starting my own small business, but within one month of leaving the language center, one of my friends who works at a private school in town mentioned they were looking for a Chinese teacher. At first I wasn’t that interested, but when I found out there were Chr!stians working at this school I became really interested. I’d heard the Gospe! for the first time over a year before and I’d continued studying the B!ble. I wasn’t a Chr!stian then, but I’d started to believe. I believed there was a G0d and I’d had some really moving experiences, so I really hoped I could have some Chr!stian coworkers. I started preparing my application the very next day. I also started thinking a lot about how I’d come to believe in G0d.

“The interview went really well. On April 12 I moved out of my crowded apartment and moved my parents out of the oil fields into an apartment in Héxī where we live together. Two days later I received the call from the school and started working part-time on the 16th. I was extremely happy.”

Deep Impressions
“When I’d just started at my new job I saw the students’ art work and heard their songs – they were beautiful. They did science experiments and studied happily – they all had happy smiling faces. They were all really obedient, so different from the 90’s kids at my Chinese school. I could see it’s because this school provides a good environment. The school also held fun relationship-building activities for the teachers, students and parents. I really wanted to work there full-time.

“At the end of April I heard that two of my former students were having complications with their pregnancy. I was worried, but they’d returned to Canada to have the baby and I was in Tianjin. I wasn’t married, I couldn’t really understand, so I thought: All I can do is prey.

“I asked my coworkers to prey for them, too. At that time I’d just started working there; none of these coworkers knew who I was yet and they definitely didn’t know who my former students were. But when they heard about the situation, they wrote down their names and the details and promised to prey for them. Other coworkers preyed right away with me right there. I was deeply moved.

“I also discovered that many of my Western coworkers had adopted Chinese children. My coworkers aren’t really rich, so I don’t think it’s the same as rich people adopting kids. Adopting kids gives them lots of stress, but that doesn’t stop them. They do things the way G0d does; their love comes from G0d. Those kids were pitiful, no parents, but because they were adopted they have parents and brothers and sisters and an education. Their fate has been changed. I deeply respect these coworkers. They’re like this because they have G0d’s love.”

An Altered Destiny
“My students gave my supervisors positive feedback about my classes, and this really gave me hope that I’d be able to work full-time. The next semester I preyed about it a lot. Friends also preyed with me. Soon became a full-time teacher.

“I’ve worked there for almost a full year now. I really love this place and this job. It’s a good environment; they really care about people and give you lots of support. Sometimes coworkers ask me, “How are you?” I always tell them “Excellent!” because that’s really how I feel. Now that I have steady work that covers my rent, my family can live together and I don’t need to worry about them.”

It’s no surprise that some of Zhū Lǎoshī’s favourite B!ble verses are in Psa!m 23, about how G0d is like a good shepherd who provides His sheep with everything they need.

“I was bapt!zed on Christmas Eve 2009. I’m so thankful I have new life. Now everyday in the evening I prey together with Chinese a friend. This makes me closer and closer to G0d, and He refreshes me and gives me peace. I share the Gospe! with my parents and I hope they will believe, and stay in good health. I think G0d led me to this school. I want to continue working here for a long, long time.”

寻找生命的航标
朱老师来自天津大港，毕业几年间一直作着兼职中文老师的工作。从最初的“蚁族”，到如今能够把父母接到市区一起居住，朱老师经过了不懈的学习和努力。现在他已经shòuxǐ成为一名jīdūtú，这让他的心变得更加柔软，用更多的爱和关怀对待周围的人。通过一年的努力，朱老师终于转正成为专职老师了。他对自己的新生活心存感激。每天他都会虔诚地qídǎo，感谢shàngdì把他带到这所学校，并且希望能一直这样工作下去。

Seeking a Life Buoy
Zhu Laoshi comes from Dagang, Tianjin, and in the few years since graduating has held consecutive Chinese teaching jobs. From being part of the “ant tribe” at first, to nowadays being able to bring his parents to live together in the city, Zhu Laoshi has untiringly studied and worked hard. Now he’s been bapt!zed and become a Chr!stian, and this made his heart change to become softer, and uses even more love and care to treat the people around him. After a year of great effort, Zhu Laoshi finally became a full-time teacher. He has gratitude in his heart for his new life. Every day he will devoutly prey, thanking G0d for bringing him to this school, and also hopes that he can always continue in this kind of job.

[You can read about China's "ant tribe" (蚁族) here, here, here, here, or here.]

Related stuff:

• Meet Mr. Lù – a living Léi Fēng
• Meet Mr. Cháng – Navigating Fate
• Meet Guāng Yuǎn (光远)! (a.k.a ‘Shine Far’)
• Meet Liú Wěi – Coming of Age in a Changing China
• Meet Mrs. Shǐ – Striving Hard for a Stable Future
• One Tianjiner’s first impressions in America
• Two Worlds; One Apartment
• National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 1): Not fit to print in Tianjin
• National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 2): One hour of criticism on the “Regular Zhou” column & Tianjin Olympic interviews video

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.