Before I arrived in London, a local friend supplied me with a list of must-sees: Buckingham Palace, Harrods, St. Paul’s Cathedral. I diligently check items off the list, impressed, but uninspired. The last sight on the list is noted with two stars — Postman’s Park. The trouble is, I can’t find it.

I study my map, scanning street by street as if playing a word-find jumble, without luck. The persistent drizzle is wearing down my patience, so I stop a cabbie for directions. He points to a green speck on my map only a few blocks away. Then he puts his finger to his lips and drives off, and I sense that I’m about to be let in on a special secret.

The park is empty save for a woman smoking a cigarette, a black bird with a bright orange beak, and me. The bird lands at my feet and hops toward me, holding one foot up as if injured. Here, next to the noisy, crowded streets of downtown London, I finally feel I can get acquainted with the city Shakespeare called “this other Eden.” Postman’s Park, tucked between looming office buildings and steps from the hoards of tourists at St. Paul’s, is as humble as a park could get — no life-size bronze statues, no Sound of Music hills, no majestic elms. What it has is this: tidy lawns, blooming perennials, a few koi in a small fountain, and a series of plaques.

The plaques make this rather unremarkable park remarkable. Under the eaves of a loggia where the woman and I are sitting, ceramic tiles commemorate ordinary people who died trying to save the lives of others. “Edmund Emery from Chelsea leaped from a Thames steamboat to rescue a child and drowned on July 31, 1874.”“Solomon Galaman aged 11 died of his injuries September 6, 1901, after saving his little brother from being run over in a commercial street.”

My first impression is to fill in the blanks in my mind. I see a cobblestone road filled with horse-drawn carriages traveling in all directions and the Galaman boy darting after a ball. Solomon pushes his brother out of the way just as a carriage overtakes him. But then I feel a little cheated because I don’t really know if that was how the event transpired. There isn’t enough information. I want to know more — like how Solomon’s mother handled the news and if Mrs. Emery was proud of her husband’s bravery. Most of all, I want to know why. Why did Robert Wright of Croydon enter a burning house on April 30, 1893, to save a woman even though he knew there was petroleum stored in the cellar? Did he recognize the woman, or did he just hear cries for help and decide to act? But I will never get more than the paltry details written here.

These tiles were the brainchild of painter and sculptor George F. Watts, a socially conscious Victorian rebel of sorts who disliked the upper classes. During his own time, he was very successful and was called “the English Michelangelo.” In 1887, the Queen’s jubilee year, Watts wrote to The Times requesting a memorial be built to record examples of everyday heroism and self-sacrifice. Nothing came of the letter, so he decided to go it alone. He paid for the first 13 plaques to be built on this wall in the former churchyard of St. Botolph’s, still located at the west end of the park. After Watts’ death in 1904, his widow continued working to bring the total to 53. The most recent date I can find is 1927.

The black bird flies away, maybe to find someone willing to share his lunch. Then the woman stubs out her cigarette and leaves too, and I am alone. Her heels clicking on the stone path get fainter and fainter. I have that illusive feeling of being sealed and protected from the outside world — the sounds of the double-decker buses and salesmen hawking souvenirs cannot permeate the gates of the park.

It’s not hard to imagine Mark Tomlinson and Ellen Donovan and Herbert Maconoghu, each dead about 125 years from some heroic act, sitting along side of me. Theirs is an invisible weightiness, a presence here in Postman’s Park that forces me to wonder if I would come to the aid of another, no questions asked. Would I have what it takes to run into a burning building to save three children like Alice Ayers did? Could I jump into a river for a boy entangled in weeds like William Donald? Without the pressure of my life on the line, it’s easy to say yes, I would do the right thing. But I don’t know for sure.

Jacquelin Cangro

We are looking over the menu at a small restaurant on the beach in Beira, Mozambique. The borders of this city hang into the ocean; appropriately, Beira means “the edge” in Portuguese.

Although it is dinnertime on a Saturday night in the heart of the country’s second-biggest city, only one other table in the restaurant is occupied. Upstairs is a deserted discotheque; to the right is an empty pool hall. Our table is right on the beach, and the restaurant’s weak lighting barely illuminates the whitecaps as they break on the sand.

The menu is impressive: ten pages of pastas, meats, fish, and fancy drinks. Of the four people at our table, three of us have lived in Brazil, so we are naturally thrilled to see some Brazilian delicacies on the menu. When the waiter comes, we order only to find out that they don’t actually have any of those dishes available. Further into the ordering process, we find out that they don’t have much of anything. I politely ask for the pasta alfredo. “We don’t have that,” replies the waiter in a heartfelt, apologetic tone. I request the pasta with garlic instead. They don’t have that either.

“Which of the pasta dishes do you have tonight?” I inquire.

“No, that’s what I mean,” says the waiter. “There’s no pasta.”

Deterred, I reopen the menu and motion to my husband, Joe, to make his order. He discovers that there is no stroganoff, nor chicken, nor shrimp. Of the full page of fish dishes, only one is available. Joe takes some time to regroup.

“Do you have the vegetable salad?” I ask.

“Sorry, no.”

We all end up ordering pizza.

While we’re waiting for the food to arrive, Joe and I step out of the wall-free restaurant onto the smooth sand. A twelve-inch-wide piece of concrete juts out of the sand and leads out into the ocean. I walk on the concrete while Joe holds my hand, suspicious of my balance. We can see the concrete disappear into the sea and we stand there on the edge, deeply disoriented. It doesn’t feel like we are right by the shore. Waves rise up like monsters and crash all around us. We could be in the middle of the ocean, on a boat somewhere, lost at sea. I am dizzy from the sloshing and pounding and frothing of the waves. I could lose my balance, fall into the water and be lost forever. The stars glint and glimmer on the ocean’s dark surface; all at once, they are trapped by two vast skies. I tilt my head back to meet them, and my head swims with all the light — there is nothing so limitless as the African sky. If you’re not careful you could tumble into it, head over heels, heart over feet, to that blurry horizon where ocean becomes sky, where no one could ever find you again.

When the dizziness is too much for me, I jump off the concrete and join Joe on the beach. We write notes to each other in the sand until the waves wash them all away and we’ve gotten our feet wet. We have been married for only a few months; every day is still a honeymoon.

The waiter beckons to us. Our pizza has arrived. Although we ordered different kinds, the food all looks pretty much the same.

As we are finishing our meal, two obviously intoxicated women stumble to the table next to ours. I don’t know what they’re on, but it is pretty clear what they’re after. They can barely sit up in their chairs, but they are making eyes at my husband. I am slightly angry, but mostly I am filled with pity. I try to imagine what I will do if they make my husband an offer; I can’t decide what exactly, but I’m certain it will be awkward for all of us.

A restaurant security guard comes over and asks the two women to leave the premises. One argues loudly with him; the other, with glazed eyes and frizzy, explosive hair, is slumped over the table like a corpse. The guard has to physically remove them both from the restaurant.

The waiter comes over to apologize. “Some people have no shame,” he laments.

While we pay the bill, I think about the two women and what their lives are like. Sometimes we are so quick to assume that people have made choices, when really life can be a blinding sandstorm of disappointment. What happened to these women? How did they get where they are at this moment? How can lives dissolve so quickly, like so many handfuls of salt cast into the open ocean?

As we leave the restaurant, we notice the two prostitutes in the street. The silent one is laying in the dirt as a puppy laps at the hem of her jeans. The loud one is standing over her, shouting something at the security guard who is watching from across the street with his arms folded over his chest.

We drive away into the night, moving west until we can no longer hear the rushing sound of the waves.

Three hours north of Beira is Gorongosa National Park, one of Mozambique’s remaining big game parks. A couple of months have passed since our first pizza dinner on the beach, and we are starting to realize the many ways that Mozambique’s civil war, which ended in 1992, still affects everyday life. I am no longer surprised by restaurants with long menus that only serve thin pizzas. As we have visited schools, orphanages, and health centers, we have seen the more vital ways that the civil wore tore down this country. People are still trying to build it up.
When we arrived at the park today, after a dusty early morning drive, we went in search of bottled water and found, instead, the park’s director.

“We don’t have any food here,” he said. “As you can see, we are still trying to rebuild.”

It didn’t take him long to explain that Gorongosa used to be the best game park in Africa — nay, the world. He said that before the war, people came from all over the planet to see Gorongosa’s animals. During the war, however, all the game parks in Mozambique were virtually destroyed. The rebels used one park as a base of operations and many animals were killed for food because local populations were starving. Since then, it has been difficult to draw tourists to visit the game parks. Most people go to Kruger Park or other famous game parks in neighboring South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Despite all this, we are sort of tourists, and the clouds are perfect. The landscape seems to change and undulate as each moment passes. One minute we are surrounded by feathered trees, when suddenly the horizon comes into view and the tall grasses sway in the wind, ruffled like ocean waves. There are few animals, but I am content with the trees. Joe and I are riding on the top of a land cruiser straining our eyes for a glimpse of a baboon or warthog. We missed the lions — apparently, they are sleeping. We are searching for the elephants, but they are shy.

As we drive further along the dirt roads, bumping over potholes and brushing grasshoppers off our arms, reality fades away until I can remember it just vaguely, the way you remember how salty seawater feels on the back of your neck when you are living in the desert. I can’t remember what Africa is, or America, or even the planet Earth. It is just me, the husband that I am leaning on, and an azure sky that stumbles into the horizon and bumps into one especially tall gnarled tree. When I look closer I see that the tree is filled with monkeys.

What was apparent our first week here becomes increasingly clear as the months pass by: There is more than one kind of post-war reconstruction happening in Mozambique. Some people have dedicated themselves to attracting tourism to the game parks and nightlife, but the real and most vital kind of reconstruction is happening quietly, little by little, in individual homes. Things fall apart and get torn down; every moment is a good time to start the process of fixing. I have met social workers, teachers, volunteers, nurses, government officials, and aid workers who are dedicated to building up individuals and families and communities. They are the ones who will really reconstruct this country and every other country, and eventually, if all goes well and their wishes are granted, the whole star-speckled universe.

Despite the amazing differences, every place is strikingly similar to all the others. Wherever you go, there are happy people and sad people and empty restaurants and blue skies and, occasionally, eternally tall trees filled with noisy animals. There is nowhere in the world like Mozambique, and by that I mean it is just like home.

Melissa Lambert

Amman, Jordan, is on its way to becoming a modern city in the Middle East. High rise buildings dot the landscape, and Mercedes and BMWs shoot through traffic circles. In the basements of every high rise and apartment building, you will find a “boab” who is sharing his living space with the tenants’ cars. The boab is a jack of all trades: he is a 24-hour live-in doorman, the building’s guard, a maintenance man, a personal grocery shopper, and the car washer. Indispensable but nearly invisible.

My name is Abu Hassan. People laugh at me because of my small feet. They are almost a size 4. No matter how I try, I can't hide them. I wear sand-colored open-toed sandals, like the ones we have back in Egypt. But here, in Amman, I wear sweatpants and not a long gallebeya, my traditional Egyptian robe that conceals my feet.

What's my daily routine? It's simple really. I wake up before the sun rises and wipe down each of the cars in the apartment building. There are 18 in total and they are all lined up. The six-story building is old and badly needs to be sandblasted. It's not nearly as nice as the one my son Mohammed works in down the road, but both buildings have the same owner. He is fair and occasionally generous.

I have my own room on the ground floor right beside the elevator, more space than I ever had in Egypt. There, we were six, packed in a tiny room. It was always filled with flies. The flies crowded around our babies' eyes when they slept, especially in the summer.

Now I have an entire bed to myself. I even have an extra one for when my son visits. There are no bugs, and I own a small black and white TV.

After washing and polishing each car early in the morning, I come back to my room and put my copper kettle on my small stove and wait until it whistles. I snatch it off the flame just as it is about to fully let out its piercing song so that I don't wake up everyone in the building. I mix in five spoons of sugar and dunk a tea bag that seeps its ochre goodness into the boiling water.

The glass warms up my fingers, which are rigid from the cold cleaning water outside. Unlike Egypt during the winter months, it snows here in Amman.

After my break, I sweep the entire entrance to the apartment building. The 14 pesky kids who live here leave little piles of candy wrappers in every nook you could imagine — between the cracks in the pavement, the grooves of car tires, and the tops of the entrance bushes. Every day I am forced to go on a trash hunt to keep the place spotless as they giggle and watch. As soon as I've cleared the entire area, they run to their school buses, leaving whirlwinds of dust and trash behind them. And I have to start sweeping all over again.

If it's a good day, the foreign woman on floor two may ask me to clean her apartment or help her fix things. She tips well, perhaps an American trait. She's clumsy, speaks broken Egyptian Arabic, and has a strange talent for breaking things.

She asks me to come up once a month to help her with repairs. I never know what to expect.

Last time, she had somehow ripped her curtains off their hooks. I've never known anyone who managed to do that. The time before, she had yanked the handle off the toilet. It took me a week to figure out that one. She then cracked her wooden bed frame in two. And one time she blew up her glass coffeemaker.

I call her Ruru, and that's what the kids call her too. At least she's able to distract them, by playing football with them after school so that I can get about my business.

Best of all, she loves my tea. She comes by once a day to chat, and I laugh. From her stories, I can tell that she's not just clumsy at home; she takes her klutziness into the world. Over tea and sometimes a tobacco waterpipe, or sheesha, she tells me stories — about her experiences at work and her convoluted attempts to buy things.

She calls pillows "beans." And when she tries to say "beans," she uses the word for "money" instead. Her Arabic is mangled, but she talks with her hands and reminds me of being back home in Egypt.

Ruru lived in Cairo for three years and has carried our humor with her. She seems to trust me more than others, because I can understand her even when her words make little sense.

Ruru is friends with the apartment building owner, so I feel extra kind towards her. I always put an additional scoop of sugar in her tea, even though she says it will make her lose her teeth. In return, she brings me treats. She knows what my favorites are: dried apricots and strawberry milk.

I pray that Ruru marries someone good. Someone who can fix many, many things.

Rhian Kohashi ORourke

The writer with her sister, Lisa, on a family vacation in St. Thomas in January, 2006.

Growing up in a house of people with digestive disorders, I have always lived with bland food. My family members share an alphabet soup of conditions, from the intestinal disorder known as Crohn’s disease to lactose intolerance. I never would have thought that eating sugar and spice could give us more than an upset stomach. But these seasonings almost killed one member of our family.

My older sister Lisa has been on medication since she was 11 months old, having inherited extremely high cholesterol and high triglycerides from her birth father. Because of this, she has always had to keep an extremely strict diet—no cholesterol, no sugar. Growing up, I remember watching her cheat on her diet and struggle with her weight, but never thought too seriously about it until this past August. That was when Lisa suffered three heart attacks, and we nearly lost her the same way she lost her father when he was only 29. At 32, she has now outlived her dad by three years, but is having to re-examine her lifestyle and her diet after being given a second chance at life.

As a sibling who does not share her constraints, I have often wondered what it means to have to keep a “healthy” diet among those who don’t have the same types of restrictions. What foods does she eat, and what do they taste like? And what does it mean for the rest of our family to continually watch and worry over someone we love as she struggles with a difficult life devoid of cholesterol, sugar, and now salt in order to simply survive? The phrase “the spice of life” has begun to take on a very different meaning for all of us.

When we were growing up, I had only a vague sense of the life Lisa led. I knew that she wasn’t supposed to eat anything that had sugar third or higher in the list of ingredients. I knew she wasn’t allowed to eat the same sweets and candy I devoured constantly, and I knew she had to take medicine every day—pills and a weird yellow powder that she mixed up in juice or water. When cooking for her, my mom would always use egg whites instead of yolks, and she wouldn’t always eat what we did. I watched, but I didn’t really contemplate how such constraints played out in daily life.

I did, however, watch her cheat on her diet. She’d say things like, “Well, I’d rather live a short, happy life than have a long, boring one.” Lisa is seven years my senior, so I really didn’t see a lot of life-threatening habits—such as when she stopped going to the health clinic for monitoring, or when she occasionally skipped her medicine because it got too expensive and she didn’t want to ask for financial help.

Lisa made some spirited attempts to keep up a routine at the gym, but nothing stuck. I can’t say that I’ll ever know exactly what it’s like to be in her shoes—even if we do wear the same size—but I instinctively know that her lifestyle must be incredibly trying, and that I’m privileged because I don’t have to live by the same rules. In fact, while writing this story, I tried sticking to her diet myself. Let’s just say it didn’t last long.

To be honest, I never thought Lisa’s life was so much at risk. Maybe none of us did. I guess sometimes you have to learn things the hard way.

Although Lisa’s food restrictions have remained relatively the same since her attacks, her approach to life and her attitude have changed. For her heart disease, she keeps to a healthy low-fat, no cholesterol, no sodium diet. She tries to combine different spices to replace salt and throws in “all the vegetables you can eat” as well as certain fruits, but she still has to stay away from food high in natural sugar, such as most dried fruit. She uses a lot of Mrs. Dash, a salt-free seasoning, and sugar substitutes like Sweet’N Low. She drinks skim milk, and the breakfast foods she eats are always healthy and very bland, such as kasha, a porridge made with buckwheat—“cereal with twigs,” she jokes.

Lisa’s diet is also combined with a new zest for exercise. Right now she’s recovering and has to take things slowly, but she’s started walking on the treadmill at the gym. Once she has a second angioplasty to clear another blocked artery, she’ll start rehab under the watchful eyes of a cardiologist and a lipidologist. She is taking eight new daily medicines and keeping track of their dosage, their sizes, their side effects, and what she calls their “popping” times—enough to make the eyes glaze over.

When I ask Lisa if she finds her diet constraining, and how she feels when compared to others, she says, “Dining out is hard. When I go out with friends and they want to share platters, often I can’t, because so much is deep-fried. When I see on their plates that they’re having this or that, it’s hard. It never gets easier.”

“I try to come up with new stuff and interesting recipes. But this is something I’ve battled with all my life,” she adds.

I know Lisa has a new outlook, and that she understands she has been given a second chance. She told me that at the park the other day. Just watching the lake and the birds made her eyes well up with tears. The nurses in the emergency room called her the “miracle girl” because she only had about 30 minutes to get to the hospital before she surely would have died. She is one of the lucky ones.

Beginning again

Of course, the rest of us want to do everything we can to ensure Lisa will be with us for a long time. We are trying to make changes in our individual lives to share this challenge with her. Lisa’s husband has cut certain fatty foods from his diet, and has begun eating similar things as she does. “My husband eats more salads, tries more vegetables, and opts for low-fat salad dressings instead of creamy ones,” says Lisa. “He’s trying fish, and we’re making healthier choices.” The two go to the gym together. As for me, sometimes I exchange recipes with her—or helpful hints such as the one about replacing salt with lemon—something I learned from my roommates.

I fly into town for a weekend—it’s Canadian Thanksgiving, and we’re also having a surprise birthday party for my dad. The night before the party, my sister’s husband and I pick up chocolate and chips at the grocery store for an evening of movie watching. My sister picks up a bag of pretzels, then puts it back—a past stand-by snack that’s now off-limits because of the sodium.

I can see her frustration build. Everything has salt or fat or too much sugar. She keeps apologizing for taking so long, and even though I want to grab her and tell her she can take as long as she wants, all I can muster up is a weak “really, it’s okay.”

The next day I help prepare the Thanksgiving birthday meal. Lisa makes squash, and we all agree to add cinnamon but to leave the brown sugar on the side. We make a turkey with garlic. Our stuffing is made simply of bread, apples and shallots. A honey Dijon sauce is reserved for the vegetables, which we also leave on the side for those who can’t eat it. We use salt-free, low-fat margarine in place of butter.

And then we feast.

Rachel Van Thyn

Markets are a still a big part of life in rural China and are usually the main place that people buy their groceries. The Zoiige market sells quite a few varieties of colorful peppers.

It didn’t start as a slow burn, or a tingle, or even a twinge. I had expected the hotness to build up gradually, the supposed intricate balance of heat and flavor to melt in my mouth. I had expected to douse the fire with cold beer and kick back feeling satisfied by finally eating an authentic spicy meal. Instead, the food instantly numbed my mouth, I could barely eat it, and I had immediate heartburn.

I was sitting in a huoguo, or hotpot restaurant, in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province. I came to Sichuan searching for spice, and knew that this was the place for it. My guidebook gave me high hopes, proclaiming Sichuan to be an authentic source for spicy food. The book even included a Chinese saying, “Shi zai Zhongguo, wei zai Sichuan,” which translates into: “China is the place for food, but Sichuan is the place for flavor.” Sichuan cuisine — or Szechuan, as it is more commonly known — is renowned for its hotness, which is something that I have always sought but was unable to find in American Chinese restaurants. Back home in the United States, I always needed to order the food “extra spicy.” I craved spice, so I came to the source.

Sichuan Province is located in the southwest of China and is about the size of France. Its unique positioning has the natural beauty of the high mountains of Tibet on one side with the Yangtze River creating the border with other neighboring provinces. The authentic Sichuan pepper originates in the Himalayan region and is sometimes called “mountain berry” in Chinese. It is a hearty small peppercorn that has medicinal anesthetic qualities.

This is contrary to the belief that the red chili peppers inside Szechuan dishes in the U.S. are real Sichuan peppers. Sichuan cooking incorporates both the Sichuan peppercorns and red chili peppers to create fiery and mouth-numbing dishes. Because Sichuan is home to 53 ethnic minorities, including Tibetans and Hui (Muslims), there is a wide range of cuisine. But spice, I find, is the universal language here. I start my journey through Sichuan in the Tibetan town of Langmusi and wind my way down to Chengdu, sampling the variations of spice along the way.

Fresh peppers are often used in Sichuan cooking but sometimes dried or powdered spices are just as good. Many varieties of dried pepper are sold at the Zoiige market.

A spicy sort of satisfying

Langmusi straddles the border of Gansu and Sichuan provinces with the White Dragon River splitting the two, but most of the town lies on the Sichuan side. Because it is a growing tourist spot, many of the signs are in English, and the restaurants have English menus. And since the town is mostly Tibetan-speaking anyway, knowing Chinese isn’t an advantage here.

In the restaurant attached to the Langmusi Hotel, I ordered “spicy chicken” in English, not exactly knowing what would arrive. The dish came out pretty straightforward: strips of chicken with sliced green peppers and rice. The taste was definitely spicy, not bland like the Chinese food back home in America usually is. The sauce was delicate, garlicky, and had no traces of peppers except the green ones in the dish, but they were mild. Soon the taste began to build up. It was hot and satisfying. I left the restaurant relatively pleased by my first encounter with Sichuan spice.

The Tibetan food I encountered was not spicy at all, even though the Sichuan pepper originates in the Himalayas. My short experience with it on a two-night stay with Tibetan nomads near Langmusi proved it to be hearty, filling, and salty. Tibetan nomads live off the land, herding yaks and sheep and living in tents. Their lives are filled with physical labor and the harsh conditions of their high cold grasslands, so heavy food helps them sustain life. Most of the Tibetan meals I had consisted of potatoes, cabbage, and a little mutton fried up in a big pot and served with rice.

However, one of the best meals I had was during my stay at the second nomad tent. The daughter-in-law of my guide cooked noodles with cabbage and mutton into a stew. It seemed like the same thing I had been eating at the last tent—tasty and filling but not zingy. But at this tent, there was something special; after I was served, I was given a little pot of hot oil. I eagerly added the spicy oil to the dish and started eating, the spice adding the perfect zip to the food. This proved to me that the taste for spice could be found anywhere in Sichuan, even in a black yak-hair tent on a grassy hill 12,000 feet high in the mountains.

Noodles are eaten at any time of the day in China. Around nine in the morning, passengers on a packed bus from Songpan to Chengdu stop for a rest to eat spicy noodles, prepared by the steaming bowlful.

A spice like never before

Zoiige is another Tibetan town in Sichuan that lies between Langmusi and the tourist town of Songpan. I made a stopover on the way to Chengdu. Not many signs were written in English, and so I entered a restaurant with a little trepidation. Most of the restaurants in China are specialty places, meaning some places serve only noodles, while others serve only dumplings. Walking by this particular restaurant, I noticed that another customer was busy with a huge bowl of spicy noodles, making it easy to decide what to order. I walked in and pointed to his bowl and said “mian tiao” (noodles), feeling pleased that I could order in Chinese. The waitress then asked me a question, and I shook my head and said “wo bu dong” (“I don’t understand”). So she went in the back and brought out a big pot of spicy oil. At this I smiled, shook my head yes, and gave her the thumbs-up sign. This was definitely understood. A large bowl of noodles swimming in spicy sauce with beef chunks and scallions was soon put before me, and I began to eat. It was very spicy and, at first, easy to eat. Another waitress came out to see how I liked it while she refilled my teacup. Soon it began to taste a little too spicy and maybe even a little greasy. Then it definitely became too spicy and my mouth was too hot to finish the bowl. I left feeling a little silly that I couldn’t handle the spice that I had so eagerly pursued. But this, I figured, was a one-time occurrence.

The author eagerly anticipates dishes cooked in a classic Chengdu “hot pot,” a split pot with mild fish broth on the left and spicy oil on the right.

I finally made my way to Chengdu and the hotpot restaurant. Hotpot is a Sichuan specialty, and it’s the one thing visitors shouldn’t miss. There are numerous hotpot restaurants around, easily identifiable by the burner in the middle of the table. I entered hesitantly and ordered mostly by pointing at other people’s tables. The waiter walked me through the process and I waited eagerly for my super-spicy meal. The restaurant was beginning to fill up with large groups of people gathered around their tables, chatting loudly. A large metal pot split down the middle was put on the burner on my table. One side had red oil with lots of red chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorns floating around, the other side had a milder fish broth. The liquids began to boil, and I was brought dishes of sliced meat and vegetables. You cook these by putting the morsels in the oil or broth, snagging them with chopsticks, and dipping them in a sesame-flavored sauce on the table.

The cooking part was actually the most fun. I happily dipped my meat and vegetables in the boiling oil and then put them on a plate to cool before tasting. I ate the first piece of meat and it was numbing, absolutely searing; I could barely taste anything. I tried to clean off the meat by dipping it into the fish broth, but the spice had already been seared into it. Eating the food was actually painful, and my stomach was beginning to feel upset. I decided to cook the rest of the food in the broth side, but the fire from the first few pieces of meat hadn’t yet dissipated. In fact, it felt more intense. I sat in the restaurant for quite some time trying to finish the rest of my meal. I managed to barely finish the vegetables cooked in the broth, and only consumed half of the meat cooked in the oil.

As I left the restaurant feeling a little defeated by the heat of the meal, the waiter gave me a look that I took to mean, “you foreigners can’t handle real spice.” And I agreed with him and felt humble. I came to Sichuan looking for spice, and I certainly found it. But in the end, my seared tongue and aching stomach proclaimed that Sichuan spice is serious business.

A big bowl of steaming hot noodles is a delight on a cold day. After just arriving in Zoiige, the author agrees to lots of spice in the noodles but is anxious to start eating. Indeed, the dish turned out to be too spicy.

Lisa Tae-Ran Schroeder

There are some days when I feel like a bucket of cold water has been splashed in my face. Injustices happen to women all over the world every day, but sometimes it is easier to desensitize ourselves because the realities are unpleasant, and after all, what can we do?

I have been guilty of this attitude at times. Then a day comes along when something pricks our conscience, and we don’t just become socially aware. We become socially aware and angry.

“Five girls dead after Amish school shootings”

“Gunman May Have Planned Abuse”

“A pattern in rural school shootings: girls as targets”

“Police: Colorado Gunman Sexually Assaulted Hostages”

I am having one of those days.

When gunmen enter a school and order the males to leave so they can sexually assault and murder the females — an incident in Bailey, Colorado, that repeated itself days later in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — it becomes hard to ignore that gender-based hate crimes are still rampant. Girls and women are targeted for violence, causing the rest of us to stand back and wonder, What can we do about this?

And so I think back to smaller incidents when there was something I could have done to defend women against hateful behavior. I remember those times when women have been devalued in speech, and how I restrained myself from defending us in order to maintain a sense of politeness.

For instance, I was with my sister, her boyfriend, and three of his friends at a diner one night. When my sister and her boyfriend left the table, the friends exchanged jokes:

“What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?”

“Nothing, you already told her twice!”

“What does a woman do when she gets home from the hospital?”

“The dishes, if she knows what’s good for her!”

I was disgusted by their intense laughter and amusement on the subject of domestic violence, which claims the lives of four women every day. But I said nothing because I did not want to cause trouble among the friends of my sister’s boyfriend.

In another instance, I was with my boyfriend and a couple of his friends as they were barbecuing. One of them fussed a bit over how the other was grilling, and the other said, “Stop being such a woman.” As if “woman” were a dirty word. To some, it is. I sat there wanting to ask, “What’s wrong with being a woman?” But I didn’t want to be rude to my boyfriend’s friend.  

Another time I was sitting in a class, listening to a female classmate give a presentation on the role of women within ancient cultures. Another classmate asked how patriarchy got to replace matriarchy, and the presenter theorized that it is because women have always been weaker, so men could just force them into submission. I seethed. I tried and tried to get a word in, to set this woman straight, when my professor said we were getting off-topic and didn’t have time to pursue this conversation.

In retrospect, I am ashamed by my lack of action. Having allowed this kind of talk to pass by as if it were appropriate and true is a difficult thing to look back on. There are those who say that a joke is a joke, an offhand comment and nothing more, and that I shouldn’t take things so seriously.

The people who say these things don’t hate women, these observers say. They’re just stating their opinions or having a little fun.

I don’t think it’s fun when society accepts the degradation of others as a source of amusement. Perhaps it would be funny in a world where these comments were not so loaded, where women did not have to struggle for equality or a social environment free of fear or abuse.

Words are powerful and can influence a young boy at the next table.

Jokes about beating women are inhumane.

Calling a man “a woman” in order to degrade and embarrass him supports the idea that being a man is much better than being a woman, and that any man who even slightly resembles a woman — in action or words — should feel ashamed.

Generalizing that women are naturally weaker than men is dangerous. If someone has the impulse to commit a violent crime, why not target the “weaker” sex?

So why do we use our words to hurt or to lend support to evil practices?  For a laugh?  To get a point across?

And why do we remain in silence?

For the sake of my sisters, my girlfriends, my mother, my future daughters and granddaughters — I just wish I hadn’t waited so long to break it.

UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.