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I had a very American-centric view; that is to say, I really didn’t give a ton of thought to China, which is kind of crazy. I see Americans now perceiving China in a way that’s hard to articulate but I think totally wrong. Let me give it a shot.

Americans are scared that China is going to ‘take over’ America in some meaningful way. Unless it’s important to your ego that the USA be the ‘greatest country in the world’, this is meaningless.

Might China’s economy beat the USA? Sure.

Might they be a military force to be reckoned with? Yep. But they are not our enemies unless we make them.

I only once encountered any form of anti-USA sentiment during my 4+ years there, and it was mostly just splash from anti-Japanese sentiment.

Almost everybody I met thought of America like the kind of wacky fun cousin. We make fun movies and are kind of crazy sometimes. America is a 200 year old country.

China is essentially a continent.

So the thing Americans miss is 5000 years of contiguous Chinese civilization. We’re forgetting that our biggest city is around 8–9 million; a small town in China.

You’ve never heard of the names of Chinese cities of 9 million, because they’re everywhere.

The Pearl-River-Delta is home to 148+ million people! That’s half the size of the entire United States.

There are vast swathes of China that are populated by Muslim populations, including ethnic groups with blue eyes.

There are tropical islands, and millions of miles of tundra.

Cities have their own unique dialects, and I don’t mean how southerners say y’all – I mean distinct languages with only minor cosmetic similarities.

So I guess I’ll say the biggest mistake I ever made about China, or misconception that I corrected, is that China is any one thing.

I was living in a flat and needed some furniture, so down to the second hand shop, and bought a wardrobe for the bedroom and a set of matching drawers.

I got them back to the flat and was giving them a wipe over.

I found a false bottom in the wardrobe (I wondered why the guy at the second hand shop had not found it) , the screws were nearly invisible so that was probably why.

Anyways, I removed the bottom panel and found several old papers and bundles of cloth, so I thought as I didn’t know was in the cloth, time for some gloves.

The papers were very old (about 50 years), but due to the location they had not gone yellow.

They contained news of the day and advertisements, which I found very funny, you could buy a 3 piece suit, including extras(?) at a cost of £3.00 (about 4 dollars) and it was made to measure.

You could buy gas cookers for £4 (about 5 dollars and fifty cents) and lots of other items at silly prices, but when you think in those days the average weekly pay was about 10 shillings (about 60cents) if you were very lucky.

So I thought i would see what was in the bundles of cloth, (I’m glad I wore gloves for this one).

I unrolled the first one and it contained teeth, yep teeth, all tiny ones, (Obviously baby teeth), so to the next one, hoping this one was not teeth.

Well it wasn’t teeth, It was a pair of tiny baby shoes, hand stitched and still looked as though they had just been made, go on say it il’e wait. awwww.

To the next one, this contained personal items like combs, brushes, and hair clips? and a handkerchief, with initials on I think they were MA or something in that line.

At this point I started to think, that this looks alike a tragic episode in some ones life.

Reading between the lines, I had a feeling that the woman who’s items these were, had died shortly after giving birth to a child, the baby have survived for a while, then also died.

The next roll, this contained what i would call trinkets, bits of jewellery, buttons, hair slides (looked like they had been made from bone) and other little items, now down to the last roll.

This contained coins and rings, and weirdly shirt buttons, and collar studs, collar studs were used to attach the collar to the shirt, in them days they wore very stiff collars, that were starched and ironed flat, as shirts did not have collars attach, this was eventually changed, and the collars were attached to the shirts. so that was my collection.

What to do with it, I couldn’t chuck it in the bin, I did not want to keep it, so I donated the items to the local museum, they were on display a few weeks after.

I was invited to see the unveiling of the items, and the curator had some news about the items, the newspapers contained a story about a works accident at the local cotton mill, and it would appear the lady in question was trapped behind a spinning machine, and died of her injuries.

The husband had gathered her belongings and hidden them, for safe keeping in the wardrobe, a fascinating story of one family torn apart by tragedy.

All in a second hand wardrobe.

Yes, I found 20 stock shares of Apple…

No, I’m fooling.

I hope you get someone with a good story; I love the topic, too.

When I was little, I would explore old basements in Utah. People would build basements to live in while they saved up to build the houses above. These were abandoned, which is the next coolest thing, I think: exploring unused buildings. Anyway, we would go in these houses in the dirt—wallpaper tattered but still there. Sometimes we would find furniture. We were young, maybe ten, and this was back in the 1960s when you would still find such things.

About five years ago, I was doing an apartment and found an old pump organ from the turn of the 20th century. It was remarkable in that the old bellows worked. It was playable! Unique, too, because it was made by what would eventually be called Baldwin Instruments, one of the leaders of piano manufacturing.

I went through it carefully to talk about the condition with the buyer, and the idea of being able to play a song with it for him made it that much better.

As I was going through the hammers of the instrument’s front, I found a couple of prizes. The instrument was “imported” to where I am in Oregon—significant in that Oregon was a very spartan area at the turn of that century. Organs, while popular and plentiful in the east, were a novelty out here.

Mr. Rbt. Manning bought the organ in Chicago and had it shipped out on Feb. 21st, 1903. He paid $87.50 for it. Why all the detail? The receipt was in an instruction book of how to play the instrument, which was tucked into the framing on the instrument’s inside.

I had both out on display when I presented it to the new owner. I played a tune on the organ. It sounded horrible. Perfect tune—they never go out of tune—but it sounded more like impressionist jazz. It very well might need a tune-up after 117 years.

Thanks for the chance to relive the story.

My mom’s mother died a week after my parents got married. Lung cancer. She was a habitual chainsmoker. I never got to meet her. My mom tells me she was a petite, fiery Southern woman who wore 5 inch heels till the day she died. I’m named after her.

Probably 8 years later, my pregnant mom was driving to pick my dad up from work. Two year old me was sitting in the backseat, happily blabbering away about anything and everything.

(For anyone who says that I can’t really remember these things, I was too young, my mom refuses to talk about what happened next. It gives her anxiety attacks, I think she suffered from PTSD from it for a long time.)

A bright red hummer rammed into the passenger side of our car doing sixty, trying to make the light that had long been red. Our car flipped over three times and, somehow, landed upright.

My mom was scraped up badly from flying glass. Her neck hurt so bad that EMTs strapped her to a back board and wheeled her away. My brother wouldn’t move for days inside of her, my parents feared the worst.

I didn’t have a scratch on my body.

The carpet from the front seat had, against the laws of physics, flown to the back and wrapped itself around me.

I heard someone with a strong southern drawl saying in my ear, “It’s okay. I have you.”

And I smelled old, stale cigarette smoke.

My dad is originally from Shenyang and he was the one who taught me how to cook Chinese cuisines when I was a kid. Actually, he kind of tricked me into it, as he was wont to say “If you don’t learn how to cook, you’ll never find a wife.” No pressure.

I don’t eat “Chinese food” (or other Asian cuisines) for the purpose of being “slim and healthy” though. I eat it because that’s what I ate growing up, what I enjoy eating, what I know how to cook, and because to me, it is delicious. Of course, I am well aware that there are certain dishes that are healthier than others, and because I enjoy being healthy, I try to steer away from those that are not as healthy. For example, I cannot remember the last time I had 油條 (Yóutiáo, I am not sure what you call this in English. I think the closest food item would be a crueller?) or as I call it 油炸鬼 (oil fried ghost / devil… which might be an apt name, actually)

Am I “slim and healthy”? I think the “slim” part applies more to the ladies – I don’t aim to be “slim”. I think I am pretty average-sized, at 183 cm and currently 79 kg, but I used to be 83 kg. According to the Asian BMI calculation though, I am fat. Lol. Oh, dear. But if you see me in person, you’d probably say I am average-sized, or maybe even on the leaner side. I remember the doctor saying BMI isn’t that useful of a calculation for people who are athletic, but I can’t exactly remember why. Suffice to say, I make it a point to exercise at least 30 minutes every day, and so far, all my medical checkups have me in good health and shape, with % body fat levels about 14–16%, albeit a few years ago the doctor did say my uric acid level was a bit higher than normal.

There are as many Chinese diets as there are Chinese people in the world, what more when you apply it to all Asians, who make up 50-60% of the world’s population. I know. It may sound trite. But the truth is, Asia is a huge place. Each individual’s diet is going to be different to the next person’s.

Even in China alone, there are many different Chinese cuisines and schools of cooking, and people in different parts of the country eat differently. I remember watching a video on here, a while back, and there was a lady in a food establishment who was saying to a customer something along the lines of: “This will be great for you. You Guangzhou people like to eat X, X, X, etc. right?”

I’m not going to go through all the different Chinese cuisines because other people on Quora have already done it umpteenth times, and I think they have all done a fantastic job and knowledge-wise and they are very likely miles ahead of a lazy-in-research person like myself. I just know how to cook and eat.

If Chinese cooking was a degree, my major would be in 粤菜 (Cantonese cuisine) and 客家菜 (Hakka cuisine), with a minor in 潮州菜 (Chaozhou cuisine). I know some dishes from the other cuisines, but that’s about it.

Since I don’t eat Chinese cuisine for the purpose of keeping slim and healthy – and I am definitely not a nutritionist – I feel like I should leave it to others, perhaps non-Chinese folks, to tell you why Chinese cuisine might be helpful with that. Mr. Chris Ebbert has already done a good job at it, though I somewhat disagree with his assertion that even vegetables are served with plenty of oil (most of the time, in the cooking process, water comes out from the vegetable, like for example, if you cook spinach or tomatoes. That’s not oil.) I somewhat disagree because for me, the amount of oil depends on which Chinese cuisine. For example, I would say that 潮州菜, 粤菜, and 客家菜 all feature less oil than the other Chinese cuisines.

So instead, I’ll show you what happened when I attempted an eat-Chinese-food only meal plan a couple of weeks ago. I usually eat a mixture of Asian and Western food, and even for the Asian portion, I don’t stick to just Chinese. Why should I, when I can also cook Japanese, Korean, Thai, Singaporean, Malaysian, cuisine (I wish I knew Vietnamese cuisine better, though).

But, just for fun, I did try going all out Chinese-cuisines-only a couple of weeks ago.

You can look at what I ate – for one day – and you can make your own conclusions whether Chinese cuisines are healthy or not.

Disclaimer 1: Once again, I would like to repeat, I am just one person, who knows a tiny fraction about the great big world of Chinese cuisines and how to prepare them. I don’t claim to represent all Chinese people in the world, nor do I claim expertise in any Chinese cuisine, nor do I claim that what I cook is what “normal” people cook.

Note 1: I did take SOME pictures of the food I cooked, but not for everything. I mean, if you cook English or American-type food every day, would you be taking pictures of every dish, like the spaghetti dinner you had with your glass of wine?

So, most of these pictures are not mine – I just used them to illustrate what I cooked. I’m too lazy to mention which are mine and which are not. If it’s an ugly picture, it’s probably mine.

Note 2: These are bog-standard Chinese home-cooking dishes that probably to a Chinese person who eats Chinese food every day, would find utterly commonplace and nothing special, maybe even a little boring. I worked in Chinese restaurants previously so I know how fancy Chinese cuisines can get, but I don’t have the time, energy, money, inclination, or even the kitchen to replicate any of that. (Good luck trying to get “wok’s breath” on a mid-range induction stove…)

Note 3: Everything was cooked by me, to be eaten by me. I live alone. So it’s just a one-person portion, but usually with some leftovers, which are either eaten as a snack later on or in the next meal. To be fair, I think I might have a very healthy appetite. In my family, we tend to lose weight very fast, if we don’t eat above a certain amount everyday. Especially the men in my family. This is why I usually lose weight very fast during assignment or exam-season, because I eat less when I’m stressed,

Breakfast

I made 燒賣 Siumai. With pork and prawns.
Please excuse the lazy wrapping technique.
Finished about three-quarters of this.

Mid-Morning Snack

釀苦瓜 Bittermelon / Bittergourd stuffed with pork and mushrooms.
This can be braised, but I also like just steaming it, and letting all that brothy liquid gather at the bottom.
I can eat 3 to 4 of these for a snack.

Lunch

Not my picture but scarily accurate as to what I actually ate!
If I cook Chinese, I usually subscribe to the Three Dishes + 1 bowl of Rice setup because I’m too lazy to cook more than that. But adding the braised peanuts required very little effort.

From top to bottom:

粥 (Congee)
焖花生 (Braised Peanuts) – I just use the ones that come from a can.
炒菠菜 (Stir-fried Spinach) – Plain, with just garlic.
姜葱鸡肉 (Ginger Onion Chicken)
洋葱煎蛋 (Onion omelette) – great for lazy people. I like to let my onions caramelize a little before adding the eggs.

Mid-Afternoon Snack

番茄炒蛋. Scrambled eggs and tomatoes.
Probably every Chinese person knows how to make this one.
I like this dish wet and juicy.
Because it’s meant to be “scrambled eggs” not “omelette”.
No leftovers. Ever.

Dinner

Not my picture but again, very accurate to what I ate, except I didn’t have clams in my soup.

From top to bottom:

冬瓜湯 (Winter Melon Soup) – Whenever I make soup, I always try to make a big pot so that I will have soup for the next 1–2 days. Soup is love. Soup is life.
Rice
干煎味噌鸡 (Pan-fried Miso Chicken)
虾米炒四季豆 (Dried Shrimps with Beans)

Dessert:

One to two mandarin oranges.
Eaten usually one to two hours after dinner.

Bed-Time Snack

烤白薯 Roasted Sweet Potato.
I can usually eat two medium-sized ones before bed.

After that snack, I go off to bed.

THE END

I came from a family who used to hide things “to keep them in a safe place.” Diamond earrings might be in the bottom of a flower pot of nylon flowers. The heirloom silver I found in the attic in a box marked “old curtains.” Yes, it had old curtains, but it also had silver. Our son listened to all this as new discoveries were made.

With that background, our son got to work in our business when he turned 16. We paid him minimum wage, and he was told, “By the time you get out of high school, you’ll either love this business or hate this business. But either way, you’re working for us.” (By the way, he now lives several states away, and I think that was a wise move.) When he worked for us, he always did a conscientious job on everything he was given to do.

He was also the newest hired, and so he tended to get the worst jobs. We purchased a mobile home from the relatives of the old woman who lived there. It was still furnished, so we sent our son over there in the big truck to clear everything out after the large furniture had been moved. So, clear out all the drawers, closets, cabinets, and everything else he could find. Pitch it into the truck and then from the truck into the dumpster.

With his usual conscientious effort, he did just that, carefully looking through every garment, box, and paper. Way back in the closet, he found some of those gift boxes that department stores used to give out, the kind that fold flat for storage. As he went through the gift boxes, he found $500 in cash!

He finished the job, came back to the store and told his dad what he found. My husband said, “Well, the rule is that if you find something in a dryer you are fixing, then you get to keep it. (Dryers usually had less than a dollar in change inside.) The same applies here. Now it’s your money. Enjoy!” And that is just what he did!

when I was in college a girl that lived in the same house I did bought a piece of furniture, it was like this super old weird shaped stacked drawer thing and after about 6 months of having it she was pounding on my door at 3am saying I had to come check this out.

I went into her room and she had found an envelope under a wooden lining of one of the drawers with a 9 page letter in it and it told the story of how this girls dad went to prison in the 70s when she was little and he had left her a map to a massive amount of cash hidden in an abandoned well but she never had the courage to go and get it thinking that she would somehow be taken to jail too for not turning it in.

It included her story, details, the maps he gave her, and names and dates. The location it gave was about 3–1/2 hours from us, so that weekend, 6 of us, all girls, loaded up and went on a treasure hunt.

To make a long story short, we found what we were looking for, we found the woman that wrote the note, and we found out that you don’t get to keep stolen money no matter how long it has been.

But we did get a reward, not much, but enough to pay our rent for the whole next school year.

And I know people are going to ask me, why didn’t you just keep it, well first off, it had a piece of steel that was about a 1″ thick and prolly 6 feet square laying on top of it that took 6 men and a backhoe to move, the rope that was tied to the bags had rotten and there was no way to pull them up with that, we had to go onto private property, so we basically had to share the story to get to do it, and there was no way possible for us to have taken the necessary equipment to the hole to retrieve the bags without a ton of people knowing.

So we basically just knocked on this woman’s door and said hey we think there is a ton of money in your backyard lol. Next thing we know, half the town including the fire dept was pulling bags of money out of an old dried up well.