Those Food & Drink

I always think of a restaurant called "Men and Women Eating", which stands like a house in the depths of my heart, full of colorful memories.

When I was a sophomore in college, four or five of my classmates and I went on a field trip with a foreign teacher on a weekend in early spring to practice our spoken English. The foreign teacher was from North Carolina, USA. He was 24 or 25 years old, with a long body, curly hair and big blue eyes. It was his third month in China and he was still very new to the environment. He readily agreed when he received our appointment and wryly said that he wouldn't have to pay for a guide if we accompanied him on his tour.

We accompanied the foreign teacher to the outskirts of the city, flew kites, and paddled in the river in the park. We had a great time, learning bits and pieces of colloquialisms as we laughed and talked. I was hungry near noon, so I asked my foreign teacher what he wanted to eat for lunch. He readily said he wanted to eat dumplings or noodles. One of my classmates suggested going to the restaurant near the school, which he said was clean and elegant. We hurriedly took a cab to there.

The restaurant is diagonally across from the west entrance of our school, with the words "Men and Women in Food" embedded on the door. I followed my classmates into the inside, only to see the cashier's desk placed immediately adjacent to the door, the inside is the kitchen, you can see the chef in the dense fumes of the busy figure. On the outside, there were several rows of wooden tables and chairs, a few customers were eating, and the glass windows reflected the cars coming and going. The stairs leading to the second floor are covered with a red carpet. The owner of the restaurant is a fat, middle-aged man with a bald head, a collapsed nose and a string of gold chains around his neck. With a smile on his face, he guided us to the elegant room on the second floor.

When the meal was served, the foreign teacher looked at the large bowl of egg noodles steaming in front of him and laughed. He held two chopsticks as if they weighed a thousand pounds and clumsily picked the noodles out of his mouth one by one. When he accidentally dropped the noodles onto the table, everyone grabbed the chopsticks and posed to show him how to use them. He ate a lot of noodles that day and burped.

The egg noodle soup was thick and delicious, with a garlic aroma, and the noodles were glossy and chewy and soft. Many years have passed and I have forgotten all about my spoken English, but I can never forget the taste of the egg noodles.

When I was in my third year of college, I was determined to go to graduate school, and I was busy every day. Next door to our dormitory was a student named Wang Kunlun. He was short and fat, with a dark complexion. One day he said to me that he also wanted to enter graduate school and would study with me in the study room. I was very happy to have such a like-minded classmate as a companion, so I shook hands with him and said, "Brother, let's work hard together, read books together, eat meals together, and believe that we will both get into graduate school."

We studied together in the study room every day, went back to the dormitory building together, and ran to the playground together. Our relationship was as close as brothers and sisters. One day Wang Kunlun said he was tired of eating in the school cafeteria, so I took him to the restaurant "Men and Women in Food". We sat near the glass window and ordered two bowls of egg noodles and ate them with garlic. After we finished eating, our mouths tasted like garlic, but we were so impressed with the egg noodles that we ate there almost every day afterwards, ordering two bowls of egg noodles each time. Many times when we walked into the restaurant before we could order, the owner said, "Are you still ordering two bowls of egg noodles?" When we nodded our heads in acquiescence, we shouted to the kitchen, "Hey, man, make two bowls of egg noodles!"

Sadly, neither of us got into graduate school that year. That night we went back to the restaurant for dinner. When we walked in, the owner said, as usual, "Are you still ordering two bowls of egg noodles?" I said with a dejected look, "No, I'll have two bottles of Erguotou and two plates of hot dishes." The boss looked surprised at that. That night we drowned our sorrows in wine and got very drunk. We staggered out of the restaurant and felt the foot of the wall back to the dormitory building. The next day we left school with our luggage and went our separate ways to find work. Wang Kunlun and I work after the sparse contact, occasionally a phone call to ask how things are going, catch up on the past. We also talked about the restaurant "Men and Women in Food" and reminisced about the taste of egg noodles with our mouths watering.

Near the end of college I fell in love with a girl named Shan Shan. It was a gentle and quiet spring night, I asked her to go to "men and women" for dinner. That night the store customers are few and far between, some cold. We were seated at a table near the glass window. She is 5'2" tall, wearing a long silver gray knitted shirt, draped with black hair, looks elegant and beautiful. The apricot yellow light in the restaurant smeared on her quiet face, like a thin layer of mask.

She slightly lowered her head to look at the menu and said: "I eat less in the evening, only order one dish - cola chicken wings, and a bowl of soup, there are three fresh soup, tofu soup, pork ribs soup ...... what do you like to drink? "

I casually said, "I like to drink phoenix corn soup."

She smiled and said, "Then order the corn soup." Then she handed me the menu, and I ordered fried lotus root cakes, slippery fish fillets, and, ruthlessly, an expensive beef stew. I pretended to order more, my eyes still resting on the menu. She whispered, "Don't order it, it's more than enough. We can't finish it and we'll have to leave!"

As we ate, we talked about what we were going to do after we graduated from college.

She said, "I plan to go back to my village and become a teacher after I graduate. My father and mother got divorced when I was six years old. My mom suffers for me and is usually lonely, so I want to go home and spend more time with her."

I sighed and said, "Your development prospects back in the countryside are worrying, so you should come with me to the big city and make a living."

She said seriously, "Everyone has the freedom to choose their own way of life. I don't want to give up my ideas for you."

We didn't have a good time at that dinner. I went to the check after a quick meal, and we left the restaurant, and she had to hand me money just after we walked out the door.

She coldly said, "Before we eat together are you pay, after the AA system, you go your Yangguan Road, I walk my only wooden bridge." After graduating from college, she returned home to the countryside, and I sank alone in the city. We gradually forget each other in the lake, so far have not heard from each other.

Whenever I think of the restaurant, I think of my foreign teacher, my brother in college, my former lover, and the time that never came back.