Eggs

There may have been a lot of fighting in our (now-divorced) household growing up, but happily there was never any physical violence. And at the schools I was at— a small Montessori and then a private k-12 spot— there was none of that after-school-special-schoolyard-fist-fighting. (Ok: there were the boarding school students from South Korea who pretty badly beat up another of their country folk with a belt, but I only heard about that— I didn’t see it.) The first time I saw any physical violence I was 17 and living in China and it was at the hands of the Beijing PSB.

We called him the 煎饼师傅— the jianbing shifu (master). And Ben Jacobs, the math teacher from San Francisco, called the jianbing the “Egg McMao.” A large crepe, slathered in preserved tofu, chili sauce (请你放辣!), green onions, a hoisin-like gloop, sesame seeds, and two eggs (两个鸡蛋), all folded over a deep-fried savory crispy cracker thing, cooked to order in under a minute from a wooden two-wheeled, rickshawish cart and served up to, among many many others, American teens in an alleyway off of Xinjiekouwai.

And then one day in late spring 1999, we walked out to get our lunch and there were police officers. Shouting at the top of their lungs. One of them was kicking the jianbing master on the ground, while the other turned the cart upside down and destroyed it. We watched, eyes wide and mouths open, for maybe 15 seconds, max, before deciding it was best to get the hell out of there. It was shocking, terrifying and traumatizing for us kids; I can’t even imagine what it was like for the kind jianbing shifu.

He never came back. Maybe he didn’t have a proper residency card. Maybe he didn’t have a license for his cart. Maybe he just got the very-violent-enterprise-destroying-randomly-angry-policemen fuzzy end of the lollipop, but I doubt that.

In any case, in honor of that man, that most delicious jianbing, that it’s “pancake day” in the UK and that @thegfw prompt today is #eggs, I give you a 2016 Shanghai jianbing, and me— with one in London’s Chinatown because, go figure, like my downtown Manhattan lawyer lunch salads, I have no pictures of what was once a daily meal. Two eggs, and spicy, please!