It’s been almost a week now, and I thought that I would be pretty adept at eating Chinese food. After all, I like it a lot, my husband is an excellent cook of Chinese, Thai, and various other Asian cuisines (on our first date he made hot and sour soup and beef with asparagus; he’s recently started working his way through a cook book of pot stickers of the world), so I thought, hey, a month in China, no problem.

Two Chinese banquets later, it is still no problem. I love Chinese food–for lunch and dinner. I’ve eaten jellyfish, the innards of bamboo, goose liver and green beans, bits of whole fish with its eyes in it, and shrimp with its head on. Weiping (see below) prevented us from eating pigeon. We may, however, have eaten frog. We’ve certainly eaten pork. And I’ve sampled some wonderful Chinese alcohol that you do shots of when your host toasts you (a necessary cultural competence!). But I haven’t quite managed to grow to like Chinese breakfasts.

(Weiping Wang, photo AG)

The first problem with Chinese breakfasts is they way they look. It is, in fact, the whitest collection of food I’ve ever seen. Everything is white. You get a glass of white soy milk, a white bun with a bit of pork in it, a white bun with nothing in it, a cracker, and a piece of white cake with two sesame seeds on it, and a bowl of rice gruel. There may be some kind of pickle served with it, which is green or brown or red, and you’ll get a hard boiled egg that’s been cooked with soy sauce, but other than that it is entirely white. My favorite two and a half year old frequently requests that her father scrape the brown off her Trader Joe’s meatballs. Norah would love this breakfast. There is no brown in it after you peel the egg.

(White breakfast, photo AG)

At first, I was intrigued by this white breakfast. I played let’s bite into the bun and see what flavor it is. I tried drinking the soymilk. I thought about all of the healthy protein I was getting from soy, instead of my usual three cups of coffee with milk. I wondered if I put the pickle into the rice gruel if it would taste better. I hit my hard-boiled egg with my chopsticks and peeled and ate it. I ate rice gruel with chopsticks and slurped from the bowl.

However, after three days, the novelty wore off. I started only eating my bit of cake and my bun with pork. I experimented with splenda in the soymilk. Others experimented with splenda in the rice gruel. I started looking at the white breakfast and not eating it. The revulsion for white food wasn’t helped by the general traveler’s stomachache that followed an evening of embracing cultural competence and eating jellyfish, cold duck, goose liver, and possibly frog.

(Mary Ann, trip coordinator and provider of splenda, with white food. Photo AG)

Which leads me to brushing my teeth before a day of white breakfast and discovering black tongue. Nothing is more disturbing than being half awake and discovering that some time during the night your tongue has turned black. Half awake your thoughts turn to the bubonic plague, to malaria, to the fact that you’re in a communist country away from home and family and you have some symptom that certainly requires medevacing to the United States. You suddenly understand why ever doctor’s appointment requires you to stick out your tongue and say Ahh. Clearly, the tongue is more important than you thought.

Fortunately, you have an internet connection, and you immediately email your spouse, who immediately googles web sites and reports back to you that according to the Mayo clinic you probably have had a reaction from the pepto you’ve been popping with something fermented or sulfuric in the food you’ve been eating (jelly fish? Chinese alcohol? goose liver?). The recommendation: brush your teeth–a lot. Since you’ve been brushing your teeth for the last half an hour, you think you’ve got this covered, and you really hope for a quick end to the black tongue. Your spouse, via email, points out that it could be worse. You could have, according to the Mayo clinic, the dreaded black hairy tongue. You are grateful that this is only a matter of more vigilant oral hygiene and not a disease that requires negotiations between world powers.

While white breakfast and black tongue happened to coincide only coincidently, you decide to swear off white breakfast (could it have been the one bit of color in the fermented pickle). You turn to the other white breakfast–the latte–and discover an Italian coffee shop in the middle of China. You go there, content to have Chinese food for two of three meals per day, and happily embrace the American ritual of caffeine.

Antony, Emily, Liz, and Ann, with coffee in Nanjing, China!

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