“Where did you get this book?” I ask Honey.

“A friend of mine gave it to me as a gift.  You can have it if you want.”  She walks away nonchalantly.  How do her pencil thin legs even bend? I think to myself.

I pour over the contents inside of the Bible and decide that I am going to try one of these restaurants at random.  Putting my work aside for a few minutes I decide to check the Hou Hai^W section of restaurants since I live in that area.  Best to start in a familiar area and then work my way out.  I decide to go to a restaurant specializing in Beijing delicacies (not duck).  It’s called Hu Guo Si Xiao Chi (Hu Guo Temple Snack).

I know that the Hu Guo Temple area is not that far from where I work.  If I walk it should take me a little more than an hour to get there.  This is a relatively close distance in Beijing.  The weather is not to hot, not too cold, and the wind carries with it a gust of Spring time.  I walk from my office near Yong He Gong Llama temple, making my way through hutongs and alleyways, familiar and unfamiliar.  The walls of the hutongs are grey and silent.  Every few hundred meters I come upon some sign of construction, destruction, or Springtime sprucing up.  Some of these hutongs are hundreds of years old dating as far back as the Yuan Dynasty^W (1206-1341).  In an effort to preserve what little of the hutongs remain, the city’s government rebuilds and updates them little by little each year (the most sweeping update taking place just before the Olympics).  One can find migrant workers scaling houses, carpenters finishing wooden beams used for roofing, bricklayers mixing fresh sement, piles of hot pavement steaming beside a wall, and mountains of dirt being sifted in preparation to be used as mortar.

Passing through Beijing’s ever-evolving cityscape, I arrive at Hu Guo Temple Snack just in time for dinner.  The restaurant is jam packed with people lined up at the counter waiting for service.  It’s not the kind of place where you go in and waiters come to your table.  Every customer has to stand in the swarming line and wait their turn.  I look behind the servers and ticket takers at all of the little Beijing snacks, almost none of which I can name.  Some look swet and doughy, others are brown and sticky, braided together by their own runny syrup that they are cooked in.  Someone cuts in front of me in line as they notice that I am still contemplating the enormity of my choices.  The menu is all in Chinese, and most of the snacks’ names are new to me, as they are ”Beijing only” specialties.  The person in front of me orders a bowl of something called “mian cha” meaning “noodle tea.”  The server takes out a bowl filled with some yellow goop that looks like a sneeze and holds a ladle with some brown syrup and pours it over the sneeze.  Another customer orders a steaming bowl of lamb guts soup along with some powdered balls filled with sweets.  There are buscuits filled with lamb meat and others filled with red bean paste.  I want to eat everything.  My stomach growls at me.

“What’ll it be?” the waitress asks me.  The line behind me puts pressure on me, and I don’t have much time to look over the menu on the wall.

“Uh, I’ll get a bowl of “dou zhi” 豆汁, along with “jiao quan er” 胶圈儿.  And some “xian cai” 咸菜。”Dou zhi is a kind of Beijing snack drink that is made of the fluid remnants of fermented mung bean.  It’s greyish in color, extremely sour in taste, and has a slight odor of death hovering about it.  It’s extremely healthy and is usually eaten with jiao quan er, which are basically fried circular crullers.  A side of xian cai, or salty pickle shreds also goes well with it.

The dou zhi is only a snack, so I also order a couple of buscuits filled with lamb meat, as well as two of the puffy balls that are coated with powder.  They remind me of the glutonous rice cakes I know from my time spent in Japan, except they are filled with sugared candies.

I take my tray of Beijing snacks and search for a seat amongst the crowd.  People leave trays at vacant tables, and I’m not sure if they have been saved or what.  As I’m searching for a table, I notice that there has been a man following me.  I noticed him when I first walked into the restaurant, sort of just walking around aimlessly as if in a daydream.  He’s dressed in a construction worker’s clothes and has still not ordered any food.  When I sit down at a table, he sits down next to me as well and continues to stare.  Uh-oh.

“You’re from England?” he asks.  His eyes have a nice color.  His skin is worn, but the eyes are clear.

“No, I’m from the States.  What about you?”

He says he is from Anyang^W in Henan Province.  I have heard of this city and know it for its oracle bones, some of the earliest known records of writing done by Man.  We shake hands.  As I grasp his hand I notice that the third finger has been chopped off below the joint and ends in a kind of point where a new fingernail seems to have started forming.  I wonder what kind of accident caused this to happen, but I know I shouldn’t ask.  We talk for a couple minutes about Anyang, and then he interrupts the conversation.

“Do you have any American money?” he asks.

“No, no bills.  I get paid in RMB, so it doesn’t make sense to have any bills.”

“Nothing?” he asks.  He seems a bit disappointed.

“I might have some coins.  Let me check.”  I reach in my pocket and pull everything out–small notes, big notes, business cards, coins, etc.  I notice that I do have one penny and show it to him.  I shove everything else back in my pocket.  He asks how much it’s worth, and I tell him.

“Hey, I saw another coin in your pocket that wasn’t Chinese…what was that?”

I reach back in and pull out the pile once more.  Sure enough there is a 2 pence piece in my pocket with a picture of the queen on it.  My friend, James, gave it to me a couple months earlier and I’ve just left it in my pocket ever since.

“This one is from England.  I’m not sure how much it is worth.”  I hand it do me so he can rub the coins in his hands and between his 3rd finger stub.

We talk for some more minutes about Anyang and what there is to see there.  He tells me about his work and says that he’ll probably be returning to Anyang within three weeks.  I ask him how many hours he works.  About 10 each day.  He eats almost the same thing everyday, never going to restaurants.  He only came into this restaurant to wander around and see what all the commotion was about.  As we talk, he puts the two coins into one of his shirt pockets as if it was as natural as scratching his head.

I’ll never see this man again, and I’ll never see those coins again, either.  It’s just a penny and a 2 pence piece.  I have no sentimental attachment to them.  I was going to give them to him, anyway.  Really, I was.  But something about the way he casually puts them into his pocket without even asking me makes want to leave immediately.  I’m tired of this conversation and decide that it’s time to go home.  My plate is clean, my stomach is full, and the man from Anyang is still staring at me.  I reach out and shake his hand one more time, wishing him luck.  He remains in the restaurant, sitting at the same table, in front of my empty bowl.