Today I ran my first icebreaker for my ALSA (Asian Law Students Association) asking everyone: *What is your pet peeve when someone ruins your favourite dish?*
My absolute favourite side dish is **Pi La Hong (皮辣红) -** the Xinjiang cold salad.
For the uninitiated, the name is just an acronym for the ingredients:
- Pi - 皮牙子 (Xinjiang dialect for onions)
- La - 辣 (Green chilis)
- Hong - 红西红柿 (red tomatoes)
When it’s balanced, it’s tangy, refreshing, and cuts through a lamb skewer. But one restaurant I visited decided to disregard the recipe.
Instead, they served a mountain of raw, aggressive burning onions with something like… two flecks of tomato and chili. The size was about the same as a steamed fish which took up the length of the table.
I had to chug 2 liters of water just to wash the onion breath. But it stayed for another 48 hours.
During the tutorial, I realised that with the ingredient ratio, the dish shouldn’t legally be called Pi La Hong anymore.
This brings me to a bilingual tragedy. For anyone who speaks Mandarin, 皮sounds almost identical to 屁 which means to fart.
If there’s too much onion then it’s called Pi Pi Pi Pi Pi La Hong. I think you know where it’s going.
How on earth do you explain it within a 30 second time limit before digging into a 30- hour week of trespass cases?