Hot! Hot! Hot!

Xi’an has over 40 colleges, 1.2 million college students (vs. its population of 10mil or so). 1.2 million untamed, craving hearts. For many boys and girls, their first date starts at a noisy, smoky, special food stall.

It can’t be called a restaurant. No air conditioning, no table service, only plastic stools — squat-low and wobbly. Doors wide open, no kitchen. A giant glass cabinet sits along the wall, lit up in and out by lights. Stacked on the shelves are meat, veggies, fishes, shells. They are from the local market, cheap but fresh. They are washed, chopped, finally, SKEWED ON BAMBOO STICKS which look like the thinner version of pencils.

No price tag. All at a flat price, one CNY or 20 cents per stick.

At the age of quantity over quality, the large range of food on the shelf would beat any fancy restaurants in the town. Students are mostly on a budget. They are carefree. They know what they want and they impatiently move on, it’s just the foreplay of a crazy Friday night.

The boy and girl would pick up some skewered sticks, sit around a gas stove. On the top is a pot, boiling with red chili oil. The air is radiantly hot. But it wouldn't really matter, they wouldn’t stay long. The marinated beef is delicious, the fish balls look alluring, the shrimp is increasingly popular — a cost challenge for the stall owners. The girl would pick more veggies than she would really want — it’s a date, after all.

They would stab the sticks into the boiling pot. A few wisps of fog spiral up. One minute or two, they would take out a stick, clamp its end with chopsticks, strip the food onto a sauce bowl. Shuuua~~good to go!

Some meat sticks only have one tiny piece or two skewered on, they would send to the mouth and teeth-strip them right away. The young, hard, fearless teeth.

The sauce bowl is a mix of sesame butter, peanut butter, minced garlic, chili oil, and a range of spices. It mitigates the hot flavor upon the tongue. Another secret is, the thick oil would quickly give a sense of fullness, especially for the benefits of the girls.

There was once a survey among students, “When do you feel your girlfriend is sexy?” The №1 answer surprised the public.

“When she is striping down a bamboo stick,” one boy explained,

“She sits low on the stool, one leg on the top of the other. She leans forward, neck stretched to the extreme to avoid the drips. Her curly figures pop up. Teeth half exposed, she bits on the stick, then a swift head swing …”

“She is really hot, hot, hot,” he said.

The last sentence is plain English — not a hard one for a college student. It would cause a sweep of laughter among the students, especially among the foreign students and visitors.

Because it’s an impeccable pun. For many English speakers, the bamboo stick food has an English name:

Hot Hot Hot.

Why? Chinese people tend to name a food according to its flavors. The bamboo sticks have three equally strong flavors:

1, Regular chilly comes from chili oil.

2, Lip-numb chilly comes from a magic plant seed — the size of the green bean. It’s widely grown in the southwest of China and used in almost every meal. People there insist that lip-numb hot is the only hot flavor in the world. They say, “Chili never comes without lip-numb hot.”

3, Burning hot, or scalding hot, refers to the short time of scalding of the skewered food in the pot that ensures they are still fresh.

So it’s got its Chinese name, Ma La Tang, which refers to the three flavors. For many English speakers, their tongues are certainly attacked by all the distinctive sensations. But they struggle to catch them with words. After fumbling in the dictionary for a long time, they finally came up with this:

hot hot hot.

Coming out of a poor dictionary, however, it hit people with the power of repetition. It rapidly swept across the colleges. When a flimsy boy is fumbling in his loving dictionary to please the girl he loves, he would find this perfect sentence, powerful and full of flavor,

“You are Ma La Tang.” Plain Chinese, but she wouldn’t get it without a poor English dictionary.

Most likely, he would receive a satisfactory, seductive smile. And a beautiful night would ensue.

Chinese colleges are still built without great walls. The educators try to keep everything within the wall. Once in awhile, in an early night, a couple of students walk out of the walls, get to a Ma La Tang stall. They sit around a gas stove, pile up a little hill of bamboo sticks, red oil boiling in the pot, thick fog dancing in the air. Fading away with them is the repression built up inside the walls.

They say, there is nothing that you can’t skewer with a stick. If there was, go get another stick.