Joy

Elaine’s friend took us to the Green Willow Village Restaurant, a neighborhood joint that’s been service the finest Chinese food for the last forty years. Joy is from Shanghai and this is one of her favorite restaurants. I figured we would eat well – different kinds of food and a lot of it – and I was not disappointed. It started with eggplant and just kept coming: eel, noodles, chicken, rice, spiced pork with some type of couscous, tofu, and some sort of fig-type snack. All of it was good, but my favorite had to be the eel. It was a bit spicy, but my tolerance for spicy food has increased from needing to tone down rye bread to being able to eat something on a menu with one of those red peppers next to it (three peppers is still off-limits; in fact my brain detects this symbol and makes my eyes subconsciously ignore it).

The table conversation jumped around a bit. Joy is a kindergarten teacher and is obviously fluent in Shanghainese and Mandarin Chinese. She tried to teach us a little Shanghainese and some of it stuck. For instance, instead of saying Nihao; in Shanghainese, it is pronounced “Nung-haw.” She lives in Shanghai, but on the outskirts. Her commute to work takes two hours everyday, when she listens to music. For her to get home from dinner that night, it was going to take her well over an hour. I admired this and felt thankful to know someone that was more than willing to make that trek just to take us to dinner, and blessed that I can walk to work.