Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

Saturday night in Louisville, after an extensive search by Google maps and by foot, I finally found a Mexican restaurant that could adapt a few dishes to be vegan, but the dinner I ordered was so huge that I could only finish half of it. (Seriously, if you’re ever in Louisville, look for Aztecas; I got a huge plate of beans and rice and another of veggie fajita filling, along with a reasonably strong lime margarita, for under $15.) I boxed up what was left, not because I thought I would eat it before flying out the next day, but because rather than have it go to waste I figured I could find someone to give it to on the way back to my hotel.

Indeed, I did run across an older homeless gentleman, and we had a brief chat.  He said he was glad that the food was vegetarian because he usually was given unhealthy food. After we parted ways, I encountered a bicycle cop on the corner who immediately asked me if the man had asked me for money. I immediately explained that, no, I had been looking for someone to give my leftovers to, and the officer cycled off on his merry way.

I can imagine how it had looked to the policeman: a young white woman—blonde even—apparently of middle-to-upper class standing (I was still in my conference clothes): why else would she be talking to a homeless man? Someone encoded as needing and deserving protection (and I would have been the height of it) isn’t supposed to talk politely to someone coded as dangerous, let alone initiate contact. What else could have been happening but that the man had asked for money? That we had a conversation more than a few seconds long, too, would have seemed to suggest that he hadn’t just asked but had hassled me. My blondeness and my height contributed to a perception that my stopping and talking instead of simply walking on was some sort of naivete or excessive kindness.

The police are encouraged to view the unusual as a source of potential trouble: a highly privileged individual treating a homeless person like a human being (outside of accepted, contained and controlled situations such as those in a soup kitchen) is certainly that, but let’s step back a moment. What happened was this: someone paused for a second to help someone a little at no cost to herself, and someone else, watching from a distance, thought that something was wrong with that picture—and that’s a real shame.

I had to go grocery shopping today because it turned out that the dried legumes I bought from the bulk foods section in Parksons (the only food left in my cabinets) were maggot-infested.  I wouldn’t have been surprised had I bought them from the open bins in one of the groceries out here in Longhu, but Parksons is one of the clean-looking department stores in the city of Zhengzhou proper.

I figured that I’d give the relatively new three-floor grocery store another chance, but the vegetables were just as bug-eaten as last time, and I’m still trying to figure out how a place with so much more shelf-space than any of the other stores in the area manages to have no more variety in dry goods.

I did, however, manage to find a few things there that I wanted.  The woman at the register where I checked out spoke to me in English and, as is typical on the rare occasions when that happens in Longhu, the surprise was such that it took a few moments to process what she said.  I suppose I shouldn’t have been entirely surprised given that she did appear to be university-aged, and most young adults here not only speak at least some English but also want to take every opportunity they can to practice it.

This evening, one of my students from last year told me that many of the seniors she knows have gone on dramatically restrictive diets– eating a piece of fruit at each meal– in order to improve their chances of finding a job.  Apparently, many employers believe that attractive people represent their companies better and, when it comes to women, attractive means very thin.

The job market for recent college graduates is tight, so for the most part, these young women don’t think about protesting the unfairness of these standards, even when they do recognize how unhealthy restrictive diets can be.  This, of course, goes to show how economic problems can have very gendered.  I also have to wonder about the degree to which the beauty standards involved have been influenced by imported Hollywood movies.