Forever Green and Gold

A Culinary Exchange

A home-cooked meal, an eye-opening conversation and a connection to the other side of the world

Illustration by Genevieve Simms

The door to one of HUB Mall's many anonymous cement stairwells slammed behind me. The sound of my entrance reverberated off the cold grey walls as warmth rushed past me into the winter night. As it escaped, my nose and cheeks began to thaw.

I'd walked 10 blocks from the off-campus apartment I shared with my husband and three oscars (as in: large, carnivorous fish). It was one of the coldest nights of the year, and dark had descended at a time that most of the world referred to as "late afternoon." I felt disoriented. I wasn't accustomed to walking into the U of A's Hub Mall at dinnertime. Usually by 5 p.m. I was at home, a couple of hours into an essay on the Free Trade Area of the Americas or hopelessly confused by Nietzsche.

As I climbed the stairs to the dorm rooms, I felt anticipation. I had never lived in a student residence. I had never even visited one. I'd never had any reason to leave the mall's centre spine, its main hallway crammed with tables, textbooks and students, the alternating dark and light windows in the stacks of rooms above always seeming to wink at me. Teasing.

Finally, in my last semester, I had been invited upstairs. The smells weren't that different from the hall below: the heavy oils of fried food and coffee. I knocked and Jing opened the door. Her round face beamed welcome. I walked inside and was enveloped by smells of Chinese home cooking.

I had met Jing through the U of A's International Centre. She was an exchange student studying mechanical engineering. I was a domestic student from a tiny Alberta town, a virtual wasteland in terms of cultural diversity. When I moved to Edmonton for university, I'd eagerly anticipated a host of intercultural experiences. It turned out that being invited to someone's home for suhoor or Diwali was harder than I thought. (Because, you know, I invite random strangers to my home for Christmas morning all the time.) In my final year of school, I took matters into my own hands and volunteered to be matched with an exchange student through the International Centre.

So, in exchange for me showing her the art of making gingerbread, Jing had prepared a meal for me. She'd bought dumpling wrappers and noodles at Lucky 97, then bused to T & T Supermarket for a particular Chinese vegetable. We feasted on her findings: stir fry and noodles and soup with wontons. The dumplings, made from scratch, were filled with pork and leek. In her tiny kitchen, she boiled the dumplings, then methodically extracted each one with a slotted spoon. Jing was a careful cook. I was struck by our differences: had it been me, I'd have accidentally disembowelled most of the pockets well before they reached my plate.

I would come to appreciate other differences that night. Jing chose her education based on how it would equip her to care for her parents and disabled brother. She politely disagreed with my take on Tibetan sovereignty. She was grateful for her father's extreme discipline that motivated her as a school-aged child. She had been an agnostic who discovered the Christian church around the same time that I'd grown disillusioned.

Warmed by good food, discussing childhood and politics with someone from the other side of the world, I realized that this meal in a Hub Mall dorm room would be a defining moment. It was the experience of university at its best.

Carissa Halton, '03 BA, lives with her husband and three kids in Edmonton's Alberta Avenue area. She is currently at work on a book of essays: literary portraits of her neighbourhood.