The Eating Story of a “Not Entirely” Failed Worker

Going into the office on a weekend to work overtime meant ordering takeout, naturally. I remember that even the weekend of my birthday was spent working overtime. Fortunately, the manager who had me working overtime wasn’t a bad sort; he came to the office specifically to treat me to lunch. That year, my birthday wish was: not having to work overtime on my birthday to calculate salaries. But the Excel spreadsheet crashed on me several times before I’d finished — an absolute nightmare for anyone stuck working late.

Sometimes, even on a weekend at home, I was too tired to cook. Besides, if I was suddenly struck with a burst of inspiration to cook, the first thing I had to do was go out and buy spring onions, ginger, garlic and dried chillies — ingredients I could never get through in one sitting but had to use every time. By the next time I remembered I wanted to cook, those ingredients had long since gone bad or shrivelled up. Once, my garlic scapes sat in the fridge for nearly two months and actually flowered. I suppose that counted as a pleasant surprise. So the sensible choice, the one that wouldn’t add extra hassle, was simple: don’t turn on the stove.

When work was hectic, I often brought the job home with me. Even when overtime wasn’t on the cards, the moment I walked through the door I only wanted to do something more relaxing. So if I planned to eat at home in the evening, the first thing I did once I stepped into the metro was order takeout, so that by the time I got home the delivery would be arriving at my door. But when I untied the bag and opened the containers, seeing the vegetables gone sallow and yellow from being sealed inside, and catching a whiff of plastic mingling with the smell of rice, I instantly regretted ordering.

When I was little and watched TV, the immortals were perfectly content just catching the scent of a good meal. When Grandmother was still alive, she would tell my aunt that at festivals there was no need to visit her grave — just pouring a ladleful of the hot-and-sour broth from our Shaanxi saozi noodles onto the doorstep would be enough to satisfy her. So clearly aroma is the soul of a meal, and yet the very moment I came face to face with that soul, all I felt was distaste.

Of course, takeout could be good sometimes — Nanjing Da Pai Dang’s salt-water duck, for instance. I could eat half a bird on my own. But most of the time the taste was mediocre. I just thought, well, I’ve paid for it, so I’ll poke at it a few times. Yet I could barely finish anything, and there was no point saving the leftovers for the fridge, because I could never be sure I’d be home to eat them the next day. In the end, most of the takeout went in the bin.

The whole scene could be captured in a single long take: I carry the delivery bag eagerly from the front door to the table and untie it; chopsticks poke at the food a couple of times; then, sulkily, the plastic containers go back into the bag. The string is tied up again, the bag is carried from the table back to the door, the door is opened, and the bag is set down on the ground. Just as the delivery rider had placed it there before, as though nothing had happened at all.

Do I feel bad about wasting food like this? Yes, genuinely. Am I genuinely hungry? Yes. Do I genuinely not want to eat? Yes. Will I throw it away anyway? Yes. Will I order again next time? Yes. If the food isn’t tasty and I can’t eat properly, I always feel unsatisfied inside, and that puts me in a foul mood — and how can you possibly work overtime “cheerfully” like that?

After about a year of this, my body started showing problems big and small, like a dilapidated house where you pull down one wall to patch another — something always breaks. I’d been to the hospital often enough; fortunately, there were few organic abnormalities. I was aware I should adjust my work–life balance, but I still wanted to do better at my job. As the type of work kept changing, the workload never decreased — if anything, the challenges grew.

But time was finite; cooking every day was simply not possible, so I decided to heal myself in the mind first. I began reading on the commuter metro — books I had always wanted to read but never found the time for. On the packed morning rush-hour trains I could only squeeze onto after waiting for two services, I finished Meditations on Beauty, Ancient Greek Art as Familiar as One’s Own Treasures, What to Eat Today? Take a Look in the Field, and A Year in the Garden, among others.

The signal on the metro wasn’t great, so there was no need to clutch my phone, fretting that I might miss an important work message. In that way, inside the ward my books had cast around me, every discomfort of the commute simply melted away. For me, the crowded metro I once dreaded became a world that offered me a moment’s peace.

I also started watching television programmes about farming and nature. I can’t remember how many times I have watched The Biggest Little Farm. I yearn for what it depicts, yet I never quite dare believe the stories it tells are all true. I cannot fathom how brave the couple in that documentary were — giving up everything for the sake of their dog and breaking new ground. I can hardly believe, either, that they truly turned a barren patch of soil into a sprawling, thriving orchard. So I began to learn about permaculture, bought The Poetic Farm, and on Uncle Meng’s enthusiastic recommendation on Gardeners’ World, started turning my tiny balcony into a garden.

II. Breaking Life’s Vicious Cycle

Gradually I came to realise that the busier I was, the more often I ordered takeout, and the less appetite I had — it was a vicious cycle. It wasn’t until late 2019 that my life began to shift, when Dad came to Shenzhen and stayed for a while. After his countless invitations, I finally agreed to go with him to the nearby wet market. Little did I know that after just one visit, I would be completely hooked. The wet markets down south are like enormous oil paintings brimming with colour and life! The vegetables, the meat, the people — all gathered together — feel a little like a Chen Liu painting, alive with colour and fragrance. Green vegetables of every shape imaginable, in shades running from dark green to forest green, from yellow-green to the palest yellow, are stacked in tidy, towering piles, encircling the farmer in a ring. Then you watch the butcher at the meat stall carving up his cuts, and it is like watching a Tarantino film — there is that sense of violent aesthetics in the cinematography. Strange, really, how the meat looks so alive and full of meaning once it is no longer crammed into a plastic supermarket tray.

Before Dad headed back to Xi’an, he packed our freezer with hand-rolled dumplings, freshly rolled noodles, stir-fried saozi meat sauce, ripe tomatoes and blanched yardlong beans. That way, even on days when I had no time to buy groceries, I would still come home to something to eat.

But before long, those quick vegetarian dishes could no longer satisfy my craving for meat. So I dug out Jiang Xianzhu’s series The True Flavours of Home Cooking to scratch that itch. Yes, I am just that kind of bookworm — when a problem hits in real life, my first instinct is always to look for answers between the pages. When I first bought the books, I loved the memories and stories about food woven through them; little did I expect to stumble upon a recipe for dry stir-fried spare ribs! I was also deeply influenced by an essay called ‘Tofu’ in Wang Zengqi’s The Flavours of Life, in which he writes about all the different bean products — tofu above all, the truest taste of this world — and how endlessly versatile it is: it can be eaten plain and delicate, or bold and rich; it can be quickly stir-fried or simmered slowly for hours.

One day while visiting my aunt, I discovered just how delicious and easy Grandmother’s blanched choy sum and chicken soup were to make. The method is simple: place the chicken in a cold pot of water, turn the heat to high, and once it comes to the boil and the foam rises, turn to a low simmer. Skim off the foam, then add a few slices of fresh ginger, some fresh abalone or rehydrated dried scallops, and porcini mushrooms, and let it simmer gently for forty minutes. When it is done, pour the chicken broth over the dried wheat noodles and greens you have cooked in a separate pot, add a pinch of salt or a splash of soy sauce, and there you have a steaming, fragrant bowl of chicken soup noodles.

My experience is that chicken breast poached the same day tastes best in the noodles, or you can serve a simple dipping sauce alongside. For the rest of the chicken on the bone, I portion it into small freezer bags and freeze it. I also divide any leftover broth into small glass containers and pop them in the freezer. That way, on weekdays when I can make it home for dinner, I can pull those out and have a bowl of chicken soup noodles ready in no time — no need to order takeout.

But after eating chicken so often, my body started acting up again — chest pain. At first I thought it was something else, but on a stroke of luck I noticed that if I stopped eating chicken for a few days, the pain eased. Even I was startled by this discovery. And just like that, the one easy, comforting recipe I had built my evenings around was gone. So I began looking into other simple dishes I could keep in the rotation — pan-fried steak, for instance.

I also bought a Little Bear electric steamer at the time. Each evening before bed, I would pull frozen baozi and eggs from the freezer, set a timer, and have the eggs simmer in the bottom tier while the buns steamed above — a perfectly good breakfast waiting. Later, inspired by a friend, I started using the steamer for steamed seafood. The beauty of it is that you can cook and eat at the same table, with no cooking fumes at all. At weekends, I would set the pot below to simmer plain congee, then steam a batch of Manila clams on top, followed by fresh prawns, and finally a pot of baby garland chrysanthemum. After finishing the seafood, I would drink a bowl of congee alongside the tender little greens — so good that you feel like you are living the life of the immortals.

Oh, and I also adopted a crested gecko I named Wuwei, who now expects to be fed and misted the moment I get home. On weekends, I fuss over the plants I have grown. So the fixed daily workload at home grew quite a lot, yet somehow the sense of being swamped by work actually faded, replaced by a feeling of fullness in life. Of course, there were times I forgot to feed Wuwei, stumbled through the front door and collapsed straight into bed. I would jolt awake in the middle of the night, remember Wuwei had not been fed, feel terrible about it, and scramble out of bed to feed the little one.

I am still busy every day, but whenever I get home the first thing I do is check on my roses — stroke the leaves, water them, gently pick off any spider mites. It was through this experience of growing Chinese roses that I first understood how fermented microbial solution helps regulate soil health, and how essential good soil is to a plant’s healthy growth. When spring came, I started following along with What to Eat Today? Take a Look in the Field — buying green plums, steeping them for plum wine, and making perilla-salted plums. I wanted to imitate the stories in the book: that one day, I might taste a jar of perilla-salted plums I had made thirty years ago. Looking at it now, I reckon that is quite achievable.

III. Learning to Treat Yourself Kindly

But these small shifts and little pleasures in daily life could not, in the end, change the nature of my work or the state I was in. My health kept deteriorating. My eyes were constantly red and itchy, and my ears kept getting inflamed. After a visit to the ENT department at the hospital, I would take anti-inflammatory medication only for it to flare up again and again — it was not until I later travelled to Spain that I learned it was rhinitis causing all of it. On the day I finally decided to resign, the moment I walked into the office in the morning, I began to pant, and with each breath it grew harder to breathe, terrifying a colleague into rushing me to the nearest hospital. The doctor asked whether the two of us were a young couple who’d had a row. This left my well-meaning male colleague looking perfectly innocent. After every manner of test at the hospital — they even had me wear a 24-hour Holter monitor — all the results came back normal. But for a time after that, whenever I looked at any typical CBD office tower or high-rise apartment block, I felt dizzy and sick.

After resigning, I genuinely stopped ordering takeout most of the time. I had grown tired of eating out, too — especially those final farewell dinners with friends, which were almost all taken at restaurants. The one I remember most vividly was my farewell with my tea teacher. Teacher Zhou was so thoughtful: knowing that I had lost all interest in restaurant food, she had deliberately cooked several home dishes at her own house and brought them to the tea house. I remember the dishes that day were winter melon, Job’s tears and spare rib soup, steamed spare ribs with garlic, and a Dai-style cold-tossed sweet-and-sour aubergine.

Since meat was not welcome in the tea house — it would disturb the tea qi — we sat at a table outside. As we ate, she kept advising me that all these dishes were easy to make and very good for the body, and that I should cook them more often for myself. Before we parted, she gave me a porcelain teapot decorated with the chicken cup motif. I remember her saying that, as my teacher, she treated me with maternal warmth, and so she had chosen porcelain to give me. Porcelain, she explained, does not absorb flavour, so it would be practical for me to carry with me wherever I went — I could brew any tea in it, as long as I cleaned it thoroughly after each use.

And so that is the eating story of a worker who failed, but not entirely. In all those days gone by, I picked up work skills, learned to strive and persevere, and also learned to be kind to myself and to give myself a break. As for why I put “not entirely” in quotation marks — well, my life is still going on. I hope that the soil I have tended will bear blossoms as modest yet beautiful as the persimmon blossom, and that this chapter of my life can give those blossoms their own unique top note.

Foodthink Contributor

Miantuan Jingjing

A learner who aspires to become a soil cultivation technician.

 

 

 

Eat Something Good

Foodthink
In the first two editions of the “Eat Something Good” column, Foodthink invited readers to share their little tips on, respectively, “The Moments You Don’t Want Takeout” and “What to Eat Instead of Takeout”. This piece is an expanded version of one reader’s response — that of Miantuan Jingjing. The impetus came from her answer’s sincerity and depth: she placed the question of whether to order takeout within the context of her working life and her state of mind, rather than treating it as a simple dietary choice — an experience that is, in truth, shared by countless urban workers. So we asked her to tell her story in fuller voice. In the latest edition of “Eat Something Good”, Foodthink is asking readers to share their gripes about excessive food packaging. Do you also feel uneasy catching a whiff of plastic in your takeout? Do you also worry about the mountains of single-use plastic waste that delivery generates? All that plastic wrapping — inside and out, sealed in layer upon layer — and all those disposable plastic utensils: are they really necessary? Beyond takeout, where else in your daily life have you encountered excessive plastic packaging? Do you have any good ideas for cutting down on plastic waste? We welcome your comments and experiences.

All photographs taken by the author

Editor: Yuyang