I have a confession to make. For the first four and a half years I lived in China, I did almost no cooking. Sure, I owned all the necessary equipment- I made sure of that. I wanted people to think I cooked, but didn’t really want to actually do it. Going out to eat seemed so much easier. After all, it was cheap, tasty, and sociable. As a single man, the process of buying ingredients, preparing a meal, and eating it in solitude seemed unrewarding. Plus, then I’d have to wash the dishes. Who wants to spend their evenings doing that?
I suppose had I arrived in China a little later in life, I’d have known how to cook. Over the years the friends with whom I used to scarf burritos and pizzas during our university days gradually learned how to prepare their own meals. They had little choice; in the West, young people with meager salaries simply cannot afford to eat in restaurants all the time.
