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Boston University’s new Chinese dishes baffle Chinese students

Boston University announced last month that it would add 15 new Chinese dishes to its residential dining menus. But the dishes did not impress the very people the dining services were courting.

In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”

Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.

Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”

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Bitch

Bitch Winter Issue

Bitch Winter Issue

This issue of the Portland-based feminist magazine tackles women’s food production and consumption roles. What is refreshing about this magazine is that many of its contributors take on a scholarly approach, calling on histories, data and stakeholders’ interviews to challenge the readers’ existing knowledge of the topics at hand. Yet the articles are not typical of scholarly papers—incessant and sometimes sleep-inducing. Most stories run only a couple of pages, an appropriate length for a casual read over a cup of coffee.

The piece that I find most intriguing is about a group of women who quit their jobs to collect, categorize and utilize coupons in the most efficient and tactical ways coupons can possibly be used. The larger issue revolving around couponing is that it challenges the age old idea of shopping as trivia and the women responsible for it as frivolous and wasteful. Full-time couponers demonstrate wisdom and economic muscle, no less than the working women, and as a result they save thousands on child care, commuting, and grocery bills yearly. Most importantly, couponing proves the economic value of household chores that is so often ignored by the tax-paying segment of society. How homemaking is different for these women compared to their home bound mothers and grandmothers is that it has become a financially viable choice as opposed to a duty imposed upon them. But what I wish the author had also discussed is the types of food discounts available on the coupons. My fear is that the choices are limited to nutrients-deficient processed food and that couponing further drives the domestic diet towards a high-in-sodium/fat one if modernity hadn’t already done that. In other words, couponing isn’t as empowering as it appears to be. Instead, it has given manufacturers and retailers more intimate control over where consumers spend their buck.

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Thanks to Malaysia, Singaporeans have a place where they can relive the past

tanjong pagar railway

In the final days of Tanjong Pagar Railway

“Bhai makes one of the best teas.” Salem S.O. took a sip of his tea and put his cup back onto the table. The rest of the men around the table nodded in unison and picked up their drinks too. It was a humid Tuesday afternoon and the lunch hour crowd had just left. From 11a.m. on, all of the 50 or so tables at M.Hasan Railway Station Canteen were filled with workers from the nearby port and offices. As the lunch hour ended, the crowd had dispersed, leaving behind their plates of leftover curries and noodle soup and customers like Salem and his uncles.They are the people who neither live nor work nearby, but will travel here as often as once a week, ordering multiple rounds of teas and lingering to admire their surroundings. In the evenings and during weekends, they even come with their families — all three generations in tow — as part of their weekly or monthly gatherings.

All the food in this canteen is Halal: no pork, and all other animals except fish are slaughtered according to Islamic law, which explains why most of the customers are Muslims. But the food is only part of the reason why Salem and the others alike keep coming back here. Except for the one or two outstanding dishes, the Malay and Indian cuisines served here, according to them, are common and ordinary in taste. What keeps them attracted to this canteen is that it looks, smells and sounds like the past. The aged stonewalls and exposed water pipes; the train engines’ deafening boom; and the pungent smell of belacan that wafts freely in the air and then clings to people’s clothes — all of them attract the connoisseurs of the old and the forgotten.

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