A Roomful of Chinese Children

    I was to meet friends, Chrissie and her son, Ivan, at a small theatre near Leicester Square. I arrived very early and so I wandered about the tourist-choked streets to find somewhere to eat that wasn't also stuffed with foreign visitors, with their ubiquitous wheely-cases. 

     I settled on a small Chinese restaurant. The delightful young waiter pointed to a table near the back, which faced the window and all the other diners. I was the only non-Chinese customer in the place, which I took to be a very good sign that the food would be authentic and good and not expensive. Everybody was under twenty-five, which meant that they all looked about eleven. The boys all wore basketball caps, turned backwards, as if they'd stepped out of a John Hughes movie; their girlfriends were all tiny and delicate, like flowers; one or two of them wore big, plastic-framed spectacles - or, to be more accurate, they wore the frames, as there were clearly no lenses in the objects.  They were all speaking Cantonese and poking pieces of food lovingly into each other's mouths with chopsticks.

     I looked at the menu. It featured such items as: 'Crisp Fried Colon'; Loofah Eggs; 'Duck Blood in Chili Sauce' and 'Pig Foot Warm', none of which I felt like experiencing on this occasion. There was also 'Crispy Chiken', which I thought was probably a slight misspelling of the popular bird.

     I decided on fried pork, some plain rice and a glass of beer. At the next table the young lovers were served with an enormous wok-full of food; it sat before them, bubbling gently on its hotplate. They picked at it with their sticks as they sent text messages with their free hands. Elsewhere, other couples were also delicately tweezering morsels from huge trays and pans of food. I marveled at their optimism and felt sure that I could never manage to get through this amount of food in several days, let alone a single evening. They sat all around me, happily chatting and texting and Skyping and selfie-ing and chewing and smiling and nodding. My food arrived and I was glad to see that it had been served in much more modest proportions. I felt that I would almost definitely be able to get through it all.

     It was possibly the very best fried pork I have ever eaten: small, tender chunks of crispy pork with onion and large chunks of red chili. The first few pieces of chili were very mild. But the fourth piece I began chewing was hot as Vesuvius, leading to streaming eyes and nose. It was well-worth this small inconvenience, however. It was delicious. 

     The young child-couple in the corner were served a single egg on a plate. The girl picked it up, excitedly, and shook it. The shell was mottled and the colour of mahogany. She began to delicately tap tap tap at the shell with one of her chopsticks, and then to peel it off the egg. Some brown water flowed out, and then the egg was revealed. It was slate-grey and looked faintly poisonous. I turned away as they began to break it with their sticks and feed each other.

     My meal finished, I called for the bill. It was inexpensive. Outside in the street a middle-aged Chinese woman came from behind me and grasped my elbow. She smiled broadly up into my face and said,

   "You want Chineee  massagee? You come with me." I smiled in return, showed her my palms and apologetically declined her generous offer before continuing through the teeming Babel in the wintry streets.