A Curry and a Beer in Suzhou
Sauce on the Side: a Peking Pizzeria Debacle
I’m at a pizza place in Beijing, maybe somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where. It’s in China so I usually get the same thing: pepperoni, sausage (if it’s homemade), mushrooms and/or onions (depending on spontaneity), and always extra cheese. Sometimes I do half and half, like a Margarita on one side and more loaded on the other. But this type of order invariably confuses the waitstaff, most of whom are conditioned to the prescribed titled options, like “Meat Lovers,” Quatro Formaggi,” and so on. Anything customized tends to rattle them, requiring a slow and deliberate explanation. In some cases the manager or chef is involved.
It has usually worked out in the end, and even when it doesn’t I’m still happy. Aptly written on a bumper sticker I once saw, “Pizza is like sex. When it’s good it’s good, and when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.” I’m a New Yorker after all, which makes me a venerable pizza junkie from birth. And while the bar for good “zah” has been set to the highest of Queens standards, I’ve years ago forgone any snobbery for a quick and easy fix.
But the last few years things have changed as a direct result of the growing prevalence of the cheese crust. The problem with the cheese crust is it doesn’t have enough flavor. So the logical and, from my upbringing, obvious solution is the addition of a simple side-dish of pizza sauce. It is upon this innocuous, if even harmless, request when the pizza situation goes pear-shaped.
The server is usually baffled, if even speechless, or at least floundering for words, in English in Chinese, it makes no difference. The sauce thing goes far beyond their training, far beyond the comfort zones of expectation. They have no idea what I’m talking about or what to do. And exhorting that I’ll pay extra for the pleasure only compounds complications.
I’ll call another passing server to come over and assist. While the original waiter still bumbles with inaction, the new one listens intently. This one scurries off and as quickly whizzes back with one hand proudly toting a bottle of grated parmesan.
“No, no, no. The TOMATO sauce the CHEF uses to MAKE the pizza.”
The first waiter finally speaks since taking my order, and he confesses that HE doesn’t know how to make pizza. While an incredulous reply, anything, after all, is possible with oft exception of the most obvious. So here I am, teaching THEM the basics on how to make pizza.
Luckily, I have an iPhone to assist in the crash course, and I’m Googling for images of pizza sauce, pizza, anything that might help. But the connection is too slow and besides, none of us has much patience. The waitress buzzes off again and soon reappears hopeful with a bottle of tabasco sauce. This is nothing new, I’ve seen this before.
A third person, a manager type-of-sorts, enters the scene. With optimism anew I extol my desire for dipping the cheesy crust into flavorful pizza sauce. She listens intently with the trained ear of one who’s ambitious for more authority. I ask if she understands, the flavor thing, does she get it? Does she eat pizza, does she even know how to make it? Reluctantly but with a disingenuous smile she noncommittally shakes her head denying all knowledge.
With the iPhone still in hand something occurs: a stroke of genius. I have a pizza-making app on the phone. My four-year old son loves playing it. It’s called “Pizza Party” or something. I open it with haste and hope, and the three of them huddle in. I select the make-your-own pizza game option, not the timed game where you have to make the pizza they choose.
I hurriedly get through the first stages: with an index finger I chop a pepper and click “ok;” now onto spreading the dough into a gooey amoeba shape. The accompanying sound effect of slurps goes unappreciated, even by me. And then onto the grand finale, and the very purpose of this entire song and dance: the sauce!
I excitedly finger the screen in circles showcasing the red splotch and reveling from the epiphany.
“Ketchup?” she bleats.
It is always the same: nonsensical and hopeless.
But the culinary dream is within reach, it is just a matter of endured passion, a matter of going the extra mile. It is not for lack of language nor of reason. And if I knew it were my only play, I would even march right into the kitchen with the three of them surely running after me and grab the pot of sauce in triumph.
But the inexplicable goes beyond understanding. Butterflies flap their wings. Brains fall apart.
I go into auto-drone: “pizza sauce, pizza sauce, pizza sauce?” I say it over and over. This is a desperate tactic, and they know it. I suggest someone asks in the kitchen. A simple favor. One of them goes, I think, then comes back. It is irrelevant.
On this occasion she returns and finally utters the magic words, “Pizza sauce.” She says them cooly and matter-of-factly as if absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had just transpired between us. She even confirms to my amazement that what I want is some extra sauce they put on the pizza, after the dough and before the cheese, the pizza sauce, yes, she knows now. But there is a problem, there is a catch, a caveat if you will. It couldn’t have been this easy. The issue at this juncture is the pizza sauce is cold. It is cold, I see, and so they can’t serve it this way. She is worried, at an impasse. She/They can’t be responsible if I get sick.
Though I would have never seen this coming it is still a step in the direction of progress.
“Heat it up. Put it in the microwave. I’m not going to get sick. It’s pizza sauce! I absolve you and your franchise of all responsibility.”
I raise my voice in case other patrons should bare witness. I again offer monetary compensation for the unusual provision. Harmony seems to have been restored, my chosen lunch order finally recorded.
Twenty minutes later the pizza arrives. Two waiters dutifully bring it over, one making a clearing on the table and the other presenting it. The manager comes stomping from the kitchen behind them with a smaller tray holding an elongated lasagna dish. It is empty accept for a thin layer of pizza sauce spread across the bottom. They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong than if they brought me the open can.
And the pizza sucks. The sauce instantly goes from microwave-piping hot to cold and congealed. I just want to cry, but I acknowledge the achievement with obligatory thanks, and I devour the sad pie and scrape the lumpy crust through the barely edible paste. I have long ago relinquished the bar on good taste. I am as happy as a pig in shit. And this story, this routine, in one iteration or another, would be entirely uneventful and unworthy of note were it not for the bizarre fact that I have lived it, as if through quantum parallel universes so often a time: the craving, the quest, some sauce on the side.
How to Spear a Lion
The Masai Mara is too hot during the day to make a game drive. All of the big animals have already fed and now retreated to the shade until dusk.
At my camp’s reception tent I sprawl amidst colorful pillows drinking a cold bottle of Elephant beer while zoning out on my electric guitar. I have brought a travel-size guitar, which is amplified through a portable walkman-like effects box and enjoyed through headphones. As the lone patron lounging under the oversized tent, this scene garners the curious enthusiasm of the several Masai warriors whom are waiting to greet the next SUV of arriving tourists.
A Masai warrior, Mbeke, who I met the day before invites me on a nature walk through the surrounding bush. He hands me a traditional bright red- and pink-checkered blanked to shield my head and arms from the engulfing sun. I haphazardly drape it around myself and sling my guitar over a shoulder. He fetches his spear and we both begin our stroll.
Only meters from the tent he leads us onto a narrow path through the thicket, clearing the overgrown thistle and thorns with a stick he tears from the underbrush. He stops at one shrub and plucks off several leaves which are edible. I try one but it doesn’t taste like much. Farther along Mbeke shows me a surprisingly velvety leaf that he chuckles is used for toilet paper.
A few minutes later we again pause and Mbeke yanks loose a small branch. He skillfully whittles at one end with the large tip of his spear, which appears ineffective for cutting the much narrower stick. But within moments he transforms one side into a bouquet of fine shreds. Mbeke repeats this process with a second branch and hands the undisclosed finished product to me. He then opens his mouth, displaying a naturally manicured set of white teeth, and in controlled semi circles glides the freshly torn end of the branch around them: a Masai toothbrush. We saunter onwards twisting our makeshift dental tools between our teeth, myself mimicking Mbeke’s nonchalance as if it, too, were something I have done all my life.
then inquire about his spear, which he says was handed down to him by his father and from his father’s father before that. He explains how a boy becomes a warrior when he is of age and then a cattle herder or a farmer after he is too old. I ask his age but he doesn’t know. He says the Masai don’t count time the way we do. Hearing this makes me recollect a case study I read about the Masai tribe in an introductory anthropology class in college. He looks 17 or so.
When we come to a clearing I want to know if the spear is hard to throw. He slows and steadies its weight, which seems as solid as Mbeke himself. It looks too heavy to be effective for throwing, but with his arm and elbow extended at an obtuse angle to his ear he then propels its mass about 15 feet in front of us. The spear briefly sails just above the bushes before collapsing with a thud and sticking into a soft patch of grass. Mbeke asks me to try and I graciously accept.
I balance my guitar upright against a thick shrub and he hands me the spear. It is even heavier than it looks, and it is hard to find the balance between the metallic head and wooden shaft. The butt gets tangled in my unravelled blanket, so when I chuck the spear it just drops a few feet ahead and skids across the sun-baked dirt. More determined than embarrassed, I collect the weapon for a second attempt as Mbeke gesticulates some pointers in the air. With the Masai cloth now properly tucked out of interference, I aim for a closer target, and my second try results in the spear’s briefly careening before feebly sticking into soft ground. We acknowledge the result and carry on.
I ask about safety in the Mara from animals, and Mbeke explains there are occasional hippo and lion attacks. Not expecting that he had fallen victim, I discontinue my gait in disbelief when he says he had once used this very spear to kill a lioness. With all my attention now quizzically focused on him, I am eager to hear the tale.
One evening Mbeke was returning to his village when he was abruptly stopped in his tracks by a lioness. She was en route to her cubs which he surmised to be nearby because she began threateningly growling and circling, refusing to let him pass. Forced to defend his position, he held out his spear keeping her at bay. This dance transpired for ten minutes while Mbeke’s attempts to quell her anger by shouting and kicking up dirt proved futile. Fortunately for Mbeke, the ruckus caught the attention of a cattle herder across the narrow Mara River banks. And the farmer’s arrival distracted the lioness just long enough for Mbeke to pick up a rock and hurl it at her, which connected solidly against her head. With the predator now disarmed, this proved opportune for Mbeke’s warrior instincts to kick in. He lunged with his spear, plunging the weighty point into her unguarded shoulder. And then again into her side. Badly wounded, the lioness collapsed. Mbeke rushed behind her and with a dagger he deftly slit her throat.
Mbeke relays the account with animated expressions and exaggerated gestures, like when he pulls a clenched fist across his neck and widens his eyes at the part about cutting the lioness with the knife. He sometimes pauses unsurely and thinks what to say next. Some of the details seem hammed up if even implausible. But it is hard to tell. We now shade ourselves under a large tree surrounded by cattle, and I half-interestedly inquire as to what happened to the lioness, to which he says he removed her furs and saved them as a token of his prowess and for good fortune. Even if he is making the whole thing up, even if it is all just a canned ruse reserved to indulge doughy eyed tourists, it is still the perfect Masai Mara story.
Years later I will hap upon a brittle toothbrush once fashioned from a stick that was torn from a bush somewhere far away in the Kenyan savannah. It will be in the back of a draw or stored in a closet, a peculiar souvenir I might think, and not quite ready to be discarded.
Trip Slag 