Atlanta Chinatown

I was in Atlanta with my daughters recently. One of them wanted to go to a bookstore; the other wanted to go to Chinatown. So, we went to Maomi Bookstore in Atlanta Chinatown.

As we pulled into the parking lot, my older daughter and I were struck, rather belatedly, by a thought: “Will we be able to read any of the books?” The answer, as it turned out, was “no.” With the exception of some bilingual children’s books and the odd word or two in English, we could read nothing.

I could read before I could remember, so the experience of being illiterate in a bookstore was quite striking to me.

But the bookstore is lovely, and also offers stationery, office supplies and tea, so we bought cards, pens, pencils, erasable highlighters (erasable highlighters!) and notebooks. If you are ever in Atlanta, it’s worth your visit! They are having a Chinese New Year festival on February 9-10 that’s free to attend, if you’re close.

We walked through the mall to the Dinho Supermarket. Ash, my older daughter, wanted to see if they had mochi, a type of treat she had tried in her Japanese class at college. Mochi are balls of sticky rice wrapped around a sweet treat, and served frozen. We bought red bean curd mochi and strawberry ice cream mochi. Fortunately, both were labeled in Chinese and English. But an awful lot of the food seemed to be white balls of various sorts, and not all of them were labeled in English.

If the experience of being illiterate in a bookstore was striking, being illiterate in a grocery store was positively humbling.

In elementary school, one of my textbooks had a short story about a man who cannot read who goes out shopping. He buys what looks like milk, and it turns out to be buttermilk. He buys other things that look like what he wants, but they all turn out to be wrong. For some reason, that story has stayed with me, and I felt very like that hapless protagonist as I walked through the store guessing at what each round white ball was. Fish? Candy? Crackers? I picked up one package of round white balls, and the only English word on the package was insecticide. I would guess that they were moth balls. It looked just like the mochi and fish balls and candy… but it would not have been good to eat. Cora, my younger daughter, likes gum, and chose a package that looked to her like gum. It turned out to be hawthorn-flavored candy, similar in texture to a Sweet Tart. Good, but not what we guessed from the package.

I make fried rice and a Thai pasta recipe at home that use toasted sesame oil, which can be difficult to find in western grocery stores, so I decided I would look for toasted sesame oil. They did indeed have a wall of sesame oil, but the labels did not distinguish “toasted” from the rest. The oil labeled “black sesame oil” looked right, so I carried it to the cash register and asked the cashier whether it was the correct kind of sesame oil to make fried rice with. She smiled, nodded, and said, “Sesame oil. Yes.” It seemed to be the only vocabulary we had in common.

I bought the black sesame oil.

Whether I shall turn out to have been as unfortunate as the fellow in my textbook remains to be seen.