There is something about roadside food and the sadness I see in my life. I don't mean that roadside food is surrounded by sadness, is among sadness. No. Just that the few times I have traveled and had roadside food, that day, I was reminded or heard a story of something sad from my friends. Let me randomly go through my memory stick called the brain. One time I was outside the Muslim quarters of the ancient city of Xi'an, where you go to see the Chinese terracotta soldiers. My travel companion told me that the spicy noodles we were having reminded her of her grandmother, whom she loved dearly, but had just passed away before our trip started. If the trip weren't so monumental in every way, she would have postponed it. I let her talk about it, to the point when her eyes were all teary, not just from the super spicy broth whose mere steam would draw tears. We sat by the eatery for a good deal of time, to the point that I knew her grandma almost as much as mine (though admittedly, I don't know mine that well at all.)
Another time I was outside my office, where there's a whole slew of food carts selling stuff from local restaurants, though by "local" we mean the whole county. I was waiting for my food after ordering, and then this voice called out. It was from my Spanish conversation partner. I thought he had left, or at least I'd not see him again. He was very happy to see me, cut in front of everyone without noticing it and ordered his food while commencing a conversation with me. It was the medical area, which means the hungry doctors, and nurses, and patients, and the equal number of researchers draw in a lot of carts for business. He, on the other hand, was not any of the above from the medical area. So it was an even greater surprise that I saw him there. I wasn't shy about my surprise, and he said he was surprised too, by his own presence. And as we started walking towards this open area where everyone was sitting, he told me he was happy to see me, thinking that he wouldn't. He was sad to be leaving everyone. He had had to say goodbye to a lot of friends he had made in the few months he had been here. We had already had our semi-sad farewells, so I guess I would have to have another one now, just a week later. He had told me that first time that he was going to miss this woman he was seeing. They had been dating in some clandestine manner, why clandestine, I don't really know. She wasn't married, though she still had young children from her divorce. Perhaps they were hiding him from the kids. They would meet everyday, go out everyday, but then she would always have to go back home on the other side of the state line. It was always a sad story, sadder because you know how it would end. Even with real love it wouldn't have worked, and here the clandestine nature made any claims of love quite questionable. He had said that they would spend one more night together, near her house, so neither would have to travel far when departing. They had some ideas about how to meet up, but, let's face it, once you're out of college, you stop allowing yourself to be romantic, to wear the robe of self-deception again. So it was all good, all realistic. Now he was sitting in front of me, all sad after the smiles of surprise, saying that the last night was beautiful, amazing, and that his heart was aching. Perhaps he should walk a block down to see the cardiologist, but I wasn't going to cheer him up with such a crude joke. I asked what he was going to do, and with a typically Spanish smile of enjoy-life-now-and-not-worry, he said simply that he was sad but was happy with whatever had happened.
I can remember one more, at least, occasion of sadness connected to roadside food. It was really part of a festival, I think. I was in a historically German town in Romania. I heard German spoken, a slight relief from all the Romanian I had been listening to and not understand nearly everything, despite my OK level of Italian back then. A sadness episode had already happened when I was followed around by a Gypsy girl who thought my attention to her merit some extra effort in whatever scheme she had for me. I didn't detest her for her scheming, just felt sorry that she had to do this instead of playing and that whatever she was up to wasn't sophisticated enough to fool me. But that's not what I wanted to mention. I went to the sweets section after all that fatty sausages. A short, thin, young woman whose face was too weathered by the sun and the elements, were selling these things you find all over Eastern Europe (though each country will tell you it's from there and that the other cultures stole them). She had a very bad set of teeth, which chipped a little away from her otherwise beautiful smile. I was all smiles, not sure why. She didn't speak English, or German, for that matter. But we did our best using our arms. She was from around here, I gathered, and she pointed out her mother, who was emerging from the shades having observed our discussion. Suddenly the emaciated girl became a showcase for the older lady. I realized that she was less interested in selling me this hand-made and hand-painted thing that resembled a ping-pong paddle with chickens lining the side so that when you twirl it the chickens bob their heads as if eating from the center. She was more interested in getting me to consider her daughter as a bride. I thought it was hilarious until I realized, reading her eyes, that she was serious. Her daughter was thoroughly embarrassed by whatever sales pitch in Romanian the older woman was blabbering so passionately. No doubt they were from a village nearby. There was probably a man in the equation, the father, working hard or doing something else, who knows. I felt sad. I didn't understand their story, but I know enough from my journeys to imagine and piece things together. In a country that would join the European Union in a few years, here was a woman hoping her daughter would strike it rich with someone whose racial and ethnic group they probably had never seen before. But life was tough, and beggars aren't choosers. It wasn't easy to walk away, but I had a feeling that no high hopes were dashed, and life just went on.
So now I think about these and other memories of street food connected to sadness as I munch on this plate of freshly grilled lobster on a seaside town near the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. There are plenty of poor people, poorer than that Romanian girl, if she could imagine it. There are plenty of goodbyes made as the country's social fabric is shifted, sometimes torn, by modernization. There are plenty of funerals here, as is everywhere. And I look around, wondering what sad story will spring up around me in on cool spring day. A friend of mine is probably going through a divorce. Any minute now, my phone will ring, or at least an text message. There's plenty of sadness if you care to look for it, but here I am having an exotic meal in an exotic corner of the world.
