Breakfast, street food and markets

Breakfast is 早饭 zǎofàn, “the rice of the morning”, or, more formally, 早餐 zǎocān. But what you hear most is 早点 zǎodiǎn, literally “a bit of morning”: what you pick up in passing, on the way to work. Careful, the same 早点 also means “a bit earlier” (早点睡, go to bed earlier), and only the context decides. The previous page, Restaurants and banquets, stayed at the table; this one goes out into the street, where many Chinese people eat their first meal standing up, or walking along, 边走边吃 biān zǒu biān chī.

The king of this breakfast is the 油条 yóutiáo, “the oil stick”, a long fritter that you dip in soya milk, 豆浆 (see From rice to dessert). Its story is worth the detour. General 岳飞 Yuè Fēi was executed in 1142 on the orders of the chancellor 秦桧 Qín Huì, and the people of Hangzhou, so it is said, took their revenge by frying two little dough figures in his likeness and his wife’s: the 油炸桧, “Hui fried in oil”. The story is too good for me to vouch for it. But Cantonese still calls the fritter 油炸鬼, “the fried devil”, and that 鬼 looks very much as if it has taken the place of the 桧.

Every city has its own breakfast. Tianjin swears by the 煎饼果子 jiānbing guǒzi, a pancake filled with an egg and a crispy fritter (in Tianjin speech, the 果子 is precisely the fritter). In Wuhan, people do not say “have breakfast” but 过早 guòzǎo, “pass the morning”, and they pass it with a bowl of 热干面 règānmiàn, dry noodles with sesame paste. Everywhere, silken tofu, 豆腐脑, is eaten savoury in the North and sweet in the South: this is the 甜咸之争 tián xián zhī zhēng, the quarrel of sweet and savoury, which sets the Internet ablaze every year. I shall not take sides (savoury).

Between meals, people nibble 小吃 xiǎochī, literally “little eating” ⟶ snacks. Every region has its own, and Xi’an (see our page Xi’an) has made them an institution, with the snack street of its Muslim quarter. There you eat the 肉夹馍 ròujiāmó, whose name amuses grammarians: it says “the meat holds the bread”, when it is the bread that holds the meat. The usual explanation sees in it a shortened form of a classical turn of phrase, 肉夹于馍, “the meat held in the bread”. I find it plausible, no more.

In the evening, the street changes face. The 夜市 yèshì, the night market, serves 夜宵 yèxiāo, the late-night snack: lamb skewers in the Uyghur style, 羊肉串, grilled sausages, deep-fried skewers. Going out for skewers is, colloquially, 撸串 lūchuàn, where 撸 is the movement of the hand that slides the meat along the stick. In the South, you sit down at a 大排档 dàpáidàng. The word comes from Hong Kong, where in the 1950s these open-air eateries were given a large licence, a 大牌; people ended up writing 排, “the row”, which suited just as well these tables lined up along the pavement.

Beijing (see our page Beijing) has its street sweets. 冰糖葫芦 bīngtánghúlu are hawthorn fruits skewered on a stick and glazed with sugar; the story goes that a Song doctor prescribed them to an imperial concubine who had stopped eating, and that she recovered. 驴打滚 lǘdǎgǔn, “the donkey that rolls over”, is a roll of glutinous rice coated in roasted soya flour: the flour is supposed to recall the dust a donkey raises when it rolls on the ground. For once, the image is enough.

The market is 市场 shìchǎng, the very word used for the market economy. Mencius gave a simple definition of it: 古之为市也，以其所有易其所无者, “in the old days, those who held a market exchanged what they had for what they did not have” (this is sentence 24). He told what came next: a base man climbed onto a mound, a 龙断, to take in the whole market at a glance and snap up the good deals; and so the merchants began to be taxed. The mound has stayed in the language: a monopoly today is 垄断 lǒngduàn.

You buy by weight there, and Chinese weight has its own history. The 斤 jīn is worth 500 grams today and is divided into ten 两 liǎng. But until the reform of 1959 it had sixteen, and Taiwan still counts that way. Hence the expression 半斤八两 bàn jīn bā liǎng, “half a jin or eight liang”: it is the same thing, six of one and half a dozen of the other. The old steelyard, 杆秤 gǎnchèng, carried sixteen marks, and it is said they stood for the seven stars of the Northern Dipper (our Plough), the six of the Southern Dipper and the three gods of happiness, fortune and longevity: the merchant who cheated on the weight, 缺斤短两, lost a little of his luck. The explanation is pretty. It is also unverifiable.

At the market, the phrase to know is 多少钱一斤 duōshao qián yì jīn, “how much a jin?”. The seller weighs, 称一下 chēng yíxià, then often rounds the sum down in your favour, 抹零 mǒlíng, literally “wiping off the small change”. He may even slip a stalk of spring onion into the bag, for nothing (this is sentence 23). The best time is the 早市 zǎoshì, the morning market; in the countryside, people “rush to the market”, 赶集 gǎnjí, on the days it is held, often every three or five days.

The supermarket, 超市 chāoshì, is short for 超级市场, “the super-grade market”: Chinese simply calqued the English word supermarket. At the checkout you are asked 你要塑料袋吗 (this is sentence 7), because plastic bags have not been free since 2008; hence the 环保袋 huánbǎodài, the reusable bag. And you check the 保质期 bǎozhìqī, “the period during which quality is guaranteed” ⟶ the use-by date.

But the real revolution is delivery. 外卖 wàimài, “selling outside”, used to mean the dishes a restaurant sold to take away; today it is a whole sector of the economy. You 点外卖 diǎn wàimài on your phone, from 美团 Měituán, born of group buying, 团购, or from 饿了么 Èleme, whose name simply asks “hungry?”. Millions of couriers, the 外卖小哥 wàimài xiǎogē, “the little brothers of delivery”, criss-cross the cities on scooters and fear nothing more than a 差评 chàpíng, a bad rating.

The market has left words everywhere. 卖萌 màiméng, “selling cute”, is acting childish to please; 出卖 chūmài, “selling” someone, is betraying them. 卖关子 mài guānzi is said to come from the street storytellers, who stopped at the crucial moment so that people would come back the next day. A 土包子 tǔbāozi, “little bun of earth”, is a country bumpkin, and a 香饽饽 xiāngbōbo, “a fragrant cake”, is something everyone is fighting over.

Confucius, for his part, was wary of what goes round the streets. The Analects (see Chapter 17 of the Analects of Confucius) say 道听而途说，德之弃也, which Couvreur translates: “To repeat on the road to every passer-by what good one has learned on the road is to throw virtue to the wind” (this is sentence 25). Modern Chinese has kept 道听途说 dào tīng tú shuō from it: spreading gossip. The street feeds you well. It informs you badly.

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