Why I hate "tofu"

When I first came to Beijing a few years back, I decided not to be picky about food. Flexibility, I thought, is the key to survival in a foreign land. Fortunately, I am not a vegetarian like some of my friends back home. When they travel abroad, their mission is neither sightseeing nor shopping - it's all about finding a vegetarian joint. They would never take a job here, howsoever lucrative, because to them, China is still a country where people eat "everything that moves." At first, my breakfast and lunch were provided free in the employee canteen. I would fill my plate with small portions of everything, without knowing which meat it was; then my tongue would decide what to eat and what to leave on the plate.

I was excited to proclaim that I could eat everything in China - because I mostly didn't know what I was eating.

On a pleasant evening, on a walk around my neighborhood, I suddenly smelled something awful. I thought there was a gas leakage. I covered my nose. It didn't help. The bad smell kept chasing me. To my surprise, I eventually discovered that it was coming from a food stall. Though I couldn't go near enough to figure out what it was, I saw something being cooked on a grill. How can people eat such a smelly thing, I wondered.

The next time I entered a subway station, I recognized the same awful smell. If I were in power, I thought, I would ban this product and put the lady selling it behind bars. This time, my Chinese colleague identified it as a type of tofu (bean curd) that was supposed to be healthy. I took a vow never to eat tofu in my life.

Then, on a daytrip to the Great Wall forest park on a national holiday, after hours of traffic jams, lunch was delayed and we were very hungry. The tour organizers took us to a special place, called - believe it or not - "the tofu village."

"What luck," I said. Everyone was so excited. But I went hungry, since they served an endless variety of tofu and tofu only.

I know most foreigners like tofu. But that smelly tofu has gone to my head. I can't accept any type of tofu. Over the years, I have mastered the use of chopsticks with both hands and learned quite a few Chinese words … but whenever I'm invited for dinner and the hosts ask me what I would like to eat, my proverbial answer is "Anything except tofu."

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.