Learning How to Eat Rice...

My plate was piled high with all of the necessary items which could be found at every party—various forms of chicken, beef, pork, goat (yes, goat), vegetables in mystery sauces, blood soup (made from a not-so-delightful mixture of pig intestines and blood) and of course, rice. There is always rice. Every meal. Every day. Rice. We had been in the country for over a year at this point. We had eaten a lot of rice. I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to the deep fried and fatty assortment of meat and bones that a party such as this inevitably produces, but my palate, for lack of much variation in the food choices the past year, had adjusted to the cuisine. It’s not that the food is bad per se—it’s just not, memorable I guess.

As I stood there rapidly shoveling the blood soup down the hatch so I wouldn’t have to taste it, another partygoer wandered over to me. I almost knew what he was going to say before it came out of his mouth. I’d heard it so many times since being here. He looked at my plate, looked at me then looked at my plate again, shaking his head and smiling in apparent disbelief. It seemed as if he had never seen anything as spectacular as the scene in front of him. His smile grew bigger. He looked as if he was happier than he had ever been before in his whole life.

“So…” he said, not able to hold back the huge grin on his face. “You’ve learned already how to eat rice?”

Maybe for him, this was a perfectly logical question. He must have thought immediately of our physical differences. My shaggy, blond hair, mixed with my blue eyes and pale white skin on 6 feet of American-ness stood in stark contrast to his 5 foot-nothing frame, dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. We were dissimilar in so many ways. I had arrived from inner-city Oakland to this remote, rural province in the Visayan region of the Philippines. From here, it was a 20 hour boat ride to Manila, but it may as well have been 2 million hours. Many of the people from our province, especially those who lived in the mountainous interior, had not ventured very far out of their hometown, let alone to an urban center. Racial diversity was non-existent. The spectacle of a tall, light-haired, fair-skinned foreigner was probably too much for most to handle. And if that foreigner was eating rice…even more bizarre.

“You are, ahhh…learning how to eat rice?” he asked again, doubtless confident that the pile of small, cooked white grains were totally foreign substances to this gangly ‘Kano.’
In my head, I contemplated various answers to his question that I would love to give, but would never think of actually uttering aloud.

“Rice? Am I eating Rice? Is THAT what this is??”
or
“Yes. It is hard for me to learn how to eat rice. It must take years to master. How do you do it?”
or
“No, you idiot! We have rice in the US, too! The whole world eats rice! Are you a freaking moron? Get out of here!”

I held back on the sarcasm and rudeness and grinned that big, goofy grin that I give every time I’m asked this question. I grin a lot.

Then I thought a second longer about my answer. Should I use this time to gently correct him? One of the 3 goals of Peace Corps is to help foster understanding of American culture to the Host Country Nationals with whom we work. I should tell him, “Yes sir, we do have rice in the United States. Yes, I’ve eaten rice before. No, we don’t eat it every meal. No, we don’t eat it every day.”

But then I realized, what if he wasn’t asking me if I was literally learning how to eat rice. Maybe his question was filled with deeper meaning, masked only by his broken grasp of English. Maybe his real question was more like this:

“Since moving here to the Philippines and finding our culture embraces the virtues of rice at every meal, and since you, in your culture, do not have the same eating habits as we do, are you adjusting well to the changes you have to make in order to properly fit into our culture, not just in dining but in daily life altogether?”

I couldn’t be sure of his real intent. What was he asking? Am I learning to eat or am I learning to adjust? Was he really that shrewd?

So not sure of his intent, I merely continued to grin, shrugged my shoulders and patted his arm.

“Yes sir. I am still learning.”

He smiled an all-knowing smile at me, either confident in his pre(mis)conception that I had never before touched rice in my life, or that I was still struggling to adapt to a culture in which I had suddenly found myself immersed.

Either way, he shook his head, apparently satisfied by my answer, and walked away. In my head, he would have this story to tell his friends and family for years to come:

“You should have seen him—tall as a house and white as a ghost with blue daggers for eyes. And you know what? He was eating rice. Rice!! Do you believe it? I swear, I saw it with my own eyes. Just like us Filipinos! He wasn’t doing it very well, mind you, but he was trying.”

And so my story goes.

I may not have been doing it very well, but I was trying.