For those first visitors to China, they may bring back home with three different impressions: metropolitans like Shanghai, Beijing, middle-income cities like Hangzhou, Xiamen, and backward townships that will be forgotten in a blink of eye. To shock them most, it seems Chinese people is a congregation of intellectual creatures (yes, not human beings as highly civilised as they do) with unfamiliar, alien and sometimes horrifying traditions and social etiquette, which vary in regions and nationalities. .
For example, hot water. Hot water to Chinese people is icy water to Americans. One of my friends who went to America for a month returned with a bad stomach and eye balls for awful local American food and their habit of drinking icy water. "No comment for those fatty fast food." she said, "but how can American tolerate icy water even in freezing cold winter?" The similar complaints were heard from my Spanish friends on my frequent request for hot water and reheating food when we went for trip together in summer. It seems so elusive to them that some of them even thought Chinese people have a more heat-resisting tongue and stronger stomach than they do, or even that Chinese food is so dirty that Chinese people have to heat them to kill the bacteria. However, this is way far from the truth. Generally speaking, it is an age-old eating tradition in China to eat hot food, to avoid possible contamination by the germs dating back to a time when food was not that abundant and food preserving was simply the use of salt, sugar or pepper to get rid of those bacteria on the food. It was not surprising that for the poor to keep the leftovers for several days until they all ended up in their stomach, and the only way to keep the food less harmful to their health is to heat and reheat it. For those rich people, heating food was only a way of multiplying its taste; with the heat, it is easier for different flavours of those ingredients and condiments to fuse together, which was later proved by the modern theory of thermal motion of molecule.
