Why 'big nose' US boy still calls China home

Flavors, memories

Plymire has his lunch meals delivered to his home. But he also keeps a stash of his "own food" on hand.

In his freezer are homemade dumplings, a couple of pig ears and some pig tongue. He also keeps instant noodles on hand, which he adds a few Chinese sauces to and sometimes cooks for himself.

One of his favorite dishes is shouzhua yangrou, a traditional northwestern Chinese dish of boiled mutton usually eaten by hand. Lamb is easy enough to find in the United States, he said, but mutton is harder to come by.

"That's in the area where I grew up, that was the major meat," he said. He misses the taste.

When Plymire lived in Huangyuan, rice was rare, and a pound (450 grams) of rice would have made a decent wedding gift. He usually ate mantou, or steamed buns.

Later, when he returned to the United States for school, a geography teacher told the class that the Chinese ate rice as their staple food. Plymire raised his hand.

"This book is wrong," he said. "They eat bread."

He later realized that he was the one who was wrong. He had lived in only one small corner of China, but that corner had shaped his understanding of the country and much of how he saw the world.

What people know of a place, he said, is often limited to what they have seen. He encourages people visiting China today to venture beyond Beijing and Shanghai, visit smaller towns, and get a sense of how people live in different parts of the country.

Traveling for Plymire has become difficult due to his age. He hasn't been back to China in 10 years. He misses everything about Huangyuan, he said, but still keeps up with news about the town and China online.

"China has made some very rapid advances," he said. "I have covered enough time so that I've been able to compare the China of today, with the China of 50 years ago because I was there. China has made great strides."