So this last Sunday, JJ’s mother came over for lunch to bring some food and cook lunch.  JJ’s father was also planning on coming over but I guess he wanted to play Mahjong at the last second and let just the mom come over.  Up until now I have seen the parents several times since I arrived in China.  Actually they are really nice people, extremely supportive and gracious, always doing things for me and giving me gifts.  I was really surprised how nice and welcoming they have been, especially after hearing about the reputation and stereotype of traditional Chinese families.  Don’t get me wrong, they are enormously traditional, as you will see.

So first she cooked us lunch.  When she arrived she had a bunch of food and bags that she was carrying.  Vegetables, some bowls and all this shit that she brought over.  This woman has so much energy, I kept telling JJ she is like mother machine, never stops for any kind of rest.  She immediately got to work with the lunch.  She was going to make dumplings (potstickers) from scratch.  She brought over a bowl of this mix that she had prepared beforehand.  It was a combination of spinach, pork, and a bunch of seasonings and spices.  Actually it looked pretty damn good.  Beside this mix was a stack of the flour-like pancake which is used to make the dumpling.  You take the small square, put some stuff inside, fold it in a certain way, connect the ends with a touch of water to make the flour stick together and avoid the insides coming out when its being cooked, and voila.  Dumplings.  Actually she is a total magician when it comes to folding these things, like so quick and each one is just perfect.  Mine were not quite as nice, just picture “Sean’s Cooking Video”, Dumpling Edition.

Anyway, we eventually ate lunch, it was a good meal, real home-cooked food.  She kind of knows, through JJ what kinds of food she should stay away from when I am eating (chicken feet, any kind of strange bony meat, fatty meat, etc).  We took a break for a while, I ended up taking a nap on the couch, while the mother just kept working, cleaning everything from the kitchen to the living room to the bathroom.  I swear, this woman never stops.

When the late afternoon was approaching, she was ready to start preparing for dinner.  She had to go buy some food at the market, because we were pretty much out of stuff at home.  She asked if we wanted to go, and even though JJ wanted to stay at home, I wanted to go, so we all went.  The reason I wanted to go though, was because the mother does not go to the big supermarkets.  She is too traditional for that, and she prefers the local markets.

There is actually a local market near my neighborhood.  When we arrived, the first section in the front of this big area was the fish and seafood.  She wanted to buy a medium size fish for dinner.  All of the fish were in these small tubs, swimming, alive.  She stopped at several small shops, looking in the tubs, complaining that the individual fish were too small.  Eventually she found a fish that was good enough, asked me if it was ok, and found a good bargaining price for the fish.  Then the shop owner took the fish with his bare hands out of the tub, raised his arms above his head and threw the fish down on the ground with all his force.  He repeated this process several times until the fish was basically dead.  (I dare not mention that the ground which the fish was being killed on was about as disgusting as you can imagine).  Then he washed the fish, and began cutting out all the crap that nobody eats, the gizzards and insides and all the really nasty stuff.  He of course leaves all the bones inside and the skin, but actually this time, he kept the head.  They put it in a bag and off we were.

Our next stop was the produce section.  Actually this section of the outdoor local market was excellent.  Just imagine some kind of outdoor farmer’s market with a bunch of different stalls with individual sellers.  But the cool thing about the produce was that I saw a bunch of things I dont ever see in the bigger supermarkets, such as zucchini, good snow peas, nice size potatoes and some other things I cant recall right now.  And of course since its the local market, the prices are less.

The most interesting (and amazing) section of the local market was next.  The mother wanted to get some kind of meat.  She asked me if I wanted some chicken, to which I replied.  They had several stalls of your basic chicken pieces, breasts, wings, legs, etc.  But she briskly walked past these stalls to a more interesting store.  And by more interesting I mean the living chicken store.  Yes, they had cages of live chickens.  She said she wanted to look at a fat chicken.  The store keeper took out the most fat chicken out of the cage, brought it to some kind of viewing window where he held it in front of us.  She petted the chicken, I did the same.  I felt the belly and some kind of area just above the feet.  She said the chicken was fine.  They weighed it, then placed it inside of this big barrel which I later found out was hot water.  They leave it in the hot water for about five minutes, until the chicken is dead and the feathers are easiest to take off.  By the time we came back, the chicken basically looked like it did at the store.  They took a few extra measures by cutting off its head, trimming its feet, removing any last bits of hair, and once again, voila.  Chicken is ready.

I have to admit, by the time we ate dinner and I was eating the chicken, it was kind of difficult.  I could not get the image out of my head of me touching it alive.  I dont know why that is just so strange, but that feeling is hard to overcome after doing that.  As you can imagine, I did not eat too much of the chicken dish.