Most of the time in the US when we go to a restaurant, each person orders their own dish of whatever they want to eat, and they eat it. Maybe they share a bite with someone so they can try it and see what it's like. But mostly my food is my food and your food is your food. Sometimes, however, when it comes to Chinese food (in the US) we share more than that. I think we are aware that the Chinese don't hoard their food like we do; they share and share alike. But here's the thing, even when we share our Chinese food (in the US), we still have our own plates.
In China, you don't. Each dish is set out in the center of the table, but there are are no clean, common serving spoons (which nobody puts in their mouth) by which you take however much you want and put it on your plate, and then proceed to use your own silverware to eat what you have taken. No, here, everyone reaches with their own chopsticks to the communal serving dishes, and eats straight out of there. Chopsticks from common serving dish to mouth, and back to serving dish.
You don't have your own plate, but you often have your own bowl of rice. You can use this to put a bite or two of food onto if you want, but in any case you still don't have any clean serving utensil by which to obtain the food; just your own now-unhygienic chopsticks.
In the US, all restaurants give you cold tap water for free. In China, tap water is not potable, and anyway the drink of choice is tea. It's always served hot. (At most restaurants I've found, either tea or a brothy soup is served free.) It's weird to me to be in tropical Hainan where it's sweltering outside, to go into a restaurant at noontime, sweating, and instead of a tall glass of cold water, be given a small cup of hot tea. Does anybody really want to drink that in this weather? I can't believe they still serve hot drinks in this heat. But I completely recognize that it might be equally weird for, say, a Chinese person to go to the US and in the middle of the freezing winter to be served a big glass of ice water. For me, of course, that's not strange. Drinks are best cold, even in the winter. No doubt the Chinese think the opposite: drinks should be hot, even in the summer.
I have wondered if it somehow stems from the fact that the water has to be boiled anyway before you can drink it. Aside from the fact that I know tea has an important place in Chinese history and culture. But even when you get served water, it's still hot, recently boiled water. And I wonder if that has something to do with it. But it might also have to do with the Chinese ideas about health. I haven't gotten into this a lot, but there are a lot of sort of folk-medicine ideas floating around out here, many of which are not at all the same as the ideas we have in the US. One of the most common ones I've run into is the idea of not getting cold when you're hot. I'm not sure I know all the specifics, but people always say things like not to drink cold water when it's hot out and you're hot (really? that's when it's best!). One time shortly after I arrived I was walking with a friend and it was hot and they were drinking warm Coke and I was drinking cold water, and they were trying to tell me that what I was drinking was bad for my health. (!) Last weekend I played ping-pong off campus and worked up a sweat, and the friend I'd been playing with advised me not to take the bus back because it would be air conditioned, and I would catch cold. I told her I'd risk it. But people are always saying things like that. Don't take a cold shower right after you play basketball in the afternoon heat was another one I heard. Sorry, but that's the only time I'm ever going to take a cold shower. (My whole life I've hated cold showers, but here the weather is so hot, and the water from the pipes isn't even that cold, so in the heat of the daytime, coming in from exercising, the cold shower is actually bearable.) C
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I wonder if I can think of more to say tomorrow about food?
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