Leaving a trail of dim sum like Hansel's trail of breadcrumbs

By Raymond Zhou ( China Daily ) Updated: 2007-06-29 15:45:54

Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. As a 12-year San Franciscan, I tend to leave something else of mine behind in every city I visit.

Leaving a trail of dim sum like Hansel's trail of breadcrumbs No, it's not what you think, you dirty mind. I always leave a little food in the hotel fridge whenever I travel to another city.

It's a quirk I have demonstrated time and again. Just this week, I tried to avert my fate by resisting putting my food in the fridge in a Shanghai hotel. But on the morning I checked out, it occurred to me that I should not leave food around when I go outside and shut off the air-conditioner. So, I moved it to the fridge, making both a mental note and a physical one on a newspaper.

Sure enough, as soon as I was out of the city, I remembered what I had forgotten. I have always been meticulous and check every nook and crook of the room, but somehow, it never dawns on me to open the fridge.

What I bequeath to the hotel is not of much value. Usually, it's something like a few snack bars and some Chinese dim sum.

Strangely, I don't have a tendency to indulge in food binges and rarely eat anything after dinner. But the thought of having something handy is comforting. And I don't want to run up a 30-kuai bill for a chocolate bar that sells for 3 kuai in a supermarket - hence, my habit of lugging a little food in my suitcase.

I cannot make sense out of this ostensible contradiction. So, I conjured up my inner Freud and did a little self-psychoanalysis, which I then fused with Buddhism.

I was born shortly after famine struck the country in the early 1960s. It would be chronologically reasonable to assume that in my previous incarnation, I probably starved to death. I do not remember experiencing hunger or anything remotely like it. But here I am, with this irrational fear of it.

It's painful for me to attend Chinese banquets, because I have to witness large amounts of food thrown away.

I was taught not to waste food. Before the American practices of using doggy bags and licking your fingers clean of any remnants of food were introduced to China, I was propounding them, eliciting sneers from friends.

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me a fable about a wealthy family discarding great quantities of food day after day. The poor neighbor designed a way of "recycling" what was frittered away. One day, the rich family went bankrupt. And the poor man led him through a dark tunnel, which opened in a courtyard that glittered with gold. "This is how I turned your throwaways into fortune," he said.

I didn't know how it was done. Without any knowledge of chemistry, I thought leftover food could somehow morph into gold nuggets. Now, I would assume the neighbor could have been a pig farmer or something.

Sometimes, I wonder what would go through the mind of the cleaning lady when she finds my edible mementos. She'd probably think: "Is this supposed to be a tip or a scheme to make me fat?"

In the end, perhaps this article is a psychobabble defense mechanism to justify my own growing weight.

(China Daily 06/29/2007 page20)