Maid for You

The great thing about Asia is the availibility of domestic labour - maids, cooks, gardeners, sweepers, drivers, etc. The not so grat thing about China is that none have any language skills. The cook is vital to my existence since the past several years. Being practically vegetarian, the food at the office is a mish mash of some horrible meat, fermented, with eyes and all and par boiled vegetables. But it is not ujust this and I kind of reserve the argument for my Western friends who find the idea of a maid shocking, to say the least. If you have a maid, you eat fresh food, not out of a ocntainer with a million watts of global warming. Everything can be cooked from a scratch. Plus, the idea of a trickle down economy means you can share your wealth and create employment. A maid is not the same as servant but more like a modern day well-protected construction worker - life is hard, but you are well compensated.

I went through multiple interview and finally located a maid who also cooks and cleans (15 RMB/Hour) plus I got another specialty maid (30 RMB/Hour) who has worked for an Indian family and knows how to cook Indian food. This combination of maids (called "Ayi") works well for us so far. Ayi 1 comes at 8 AM. She takes fast instructions from me for cooking which goes something like a process flow diagram from my area of expertise, Process Engineering:

Step A: Chao Guo(frying pan)+Yi Shao You (1 teaspoon oil)+(point to cumin)+cong qie (cut onion)+ suan(garlic)+jiang(ginger)+la jiao (chili) _ Yi dian Jiao (fry till brown)

Step B: Jia (add) ga li fen (garam masala)+ jiang huang (turmeric)+fan qie (cut tomato)+yan (salt) ---> Wu fun Shu (cook for 5 minutes)

Step C: Add X vegetable and cover and simmer!

This is all accompanied by a beautiful pantomime, as many Indian ingredients don't have Mandarin equivalents.

Yesterday, I had her grill eggplants - this was done really well. Occasionally, if I am getting late for work, I ask her to "Chao Zhongguo" or Cook Chinese. This itself is confusing as there is no such things as "All things Chinese". There is Shanghainese cuisine, the Beijing food, Sichaun, and finally my favorite Hunan and Muslim Xinchuang --> very few Ayi know the latter type of cuisine as most hail from Anhui province. Shanghainese food is bland, hospital food, incredibly healthy, mostly poaching and steaming with a lot of the inevitable meat.

Some days I come home at night to doctor the food into something palatable. But, this is fine , the journey being the destination and all that. Either way, there is food on the table. That is good for now. I pack it for work together with some great tiny oranges called Clementines.