A Short Letter Home

To seek out new loaf

We now return to the saga of the quest for "pig" bread. As we last left our intrepid bread hunters, they had been dealt a devastating blow. Although they had succeeded in their quest for whole wheat flour, the bakery had closed down and their waiban was on holiday. Left alone with no language skills and no connections within the baking community, they had no choice but to go on holiday themselves and to eat at a lot of western restaurants.

On the Monday after our Kunming trip, Thad dropped by to visit. We heard about his holiday (it sounded like a great camping trip) and told a bit about ours. We also told him about how our bakery seemed to have vanished. He replied with typical Thaddish concern and promised to look into it. The next day he told us that he had tried to call the bakery, but the phone had been disconnected as well. So any hopes that they had merely relocated were dashed. Thad did suggest that he might go and inquire at the other shops around there to see if there was any gossip about the bakery. He also said that he had a plan to try and get the school's cafeteria to bake the bread for us. The only drawback to that plan was that they had just hired a new head chef, or whatever they call him, and Thad wanted to wait a couple of weeks to let him get settled into doing his regular job of feeding the students.

We accepted Thad's plan with mixed feelings. Getting our bread baked on campus was quite convenient, but we didn't know if we wanted to wait for two weeks or more for it. Somewhere along the way me mentioned the dilemma to our neighbor, Joan, who of course had no ambivalence about the matter. Upon her suggestion, we would seek out a new bakery to make us a stopgap batch of bread. Actually, Joan was the one to do the seeking. I have no clue as to how she proceeded. The next thing I knew, it was Friday afternoon and Yau Neih was taking a load of flour with Joan and Michael to our new baker. If I wasn't so busy that day, I would have tagged along. I might have also questioned the wisdom of handling this without someone with better Chinese language skills. But like I said, I was busy. Nor do I have Joan's chutzpah in engaging the culture.

On Saturday afternoon, we returned to see if the bread was ready. This time we brought the whole family. But, of course, the answer was "mei yo." We don't have it. There seemed to have been a problem with the bread rising. Joan had tried to tell them to mix our whole wheat flour with white flour, so that the dough would rise better, but, of course, you lose a lot when you communicate by sign language. The bakery folks seemed to indicate that the loaves would be ready at 10:00 pm, so we left them to their business. Joan seemed eager to return at 10, to try to retrieve the bread. I, pessimistically, thought it might be better to just try again tomorrow, to give the bakers some extra time. Anyway, each household had other business which needed tending, so we went our separate ways.

Later, after English corner, we reconvened to plot our strategy. Yau Neih wanted to get the kids in bed and Michael had to study for the next morning's Mandarin lesson, but Joan and I were game to try again. I wasn't expecting the bread, really, but I was willing to make the attempt. As I suspected, the bread wasn't ready. A sales clerk with a few words of English took us into the back room and showed us that the loaves weren't rising. She then took us back into the office as a quiet place to try and communicate. Whoever the boss was, they sure had nice digs. We sat on the leather upholstered furniture as the bakery clerk tried to give us the scoop. That process didn't go so well, though at one point another clerk brought us free Cokes. I got the impression at one point that she was saying that the bread wouldn't be ready for a week! Finally she did manage to get across that they would try to bake one loaf and see how it turned out. This seemed okay to us. Joan wanted to try to do some shopping, so at first I was going to just wait at the bakery. At this point, however, some important looking woman walked in. Everything about her demeanor indicated that she was not amused. She was polite, of course, but I quickly changed my mind and decided to stick with Joan.

We bade them goodbye and made our way to the supermarket. It was just before closing time, but Joan managed to pick up what she wanted. One thing about the supermarkets here is that they seem to have a gazillion clerks just hanging around in the aisles. Or I should say that when we normally go, they're just hanging around. At this point in the evening they were all busy mopping the aisles. When we got to the checkout counter, a large group of them were waiting at the entrance, coats in hand. Fortunately there was one customer behind us, so I didn't feel as bad about keeping them all. ("It's not my fault, it's his!") We then headed back to the bakery, as all around us shops were closing and people were heading home.

This time at the bakery we were told to wait at the counter. Our helpful clerk went upstairs and fetched us our test loaf. It was about the size of a burrito. We sampled a taste and deemed it was good... enough. It was definitely whole wheat bread, but the baker had put too much sugar in the mix. The clerk seemed to say that they were going to try some other trick, but of course, that was just my conjecture. We thanked them and said we'd pick up the rest in the morning. It wasn't the best bread I've ever had, but it was a bit better than the stuff in the stores. Plus I had to respect the efforts of the bakery staff, trying to make bread to please a bunch of crazy foreigners. So we left for home, wondering what we'd find on the morrow.

posted by John @ 1:48 AM