How do you like your eggs steak cooked?

Posted Jun 15, 2008

2 min read

This post was translated from Chinese by AI. The original post is available here.

Although I’ve been in the US for ten days, every meal has been Asian — Chinese food, longevity noodles. Basically no Western food. Today is my last day in America. For the final meal, some students talked me into trying Western food. And we got looked down upon at the restaurant.

Due to strict budget limits, we’d been eating Chinese food for $7.19 every day. Today some students noticed a Western restaurant advertising three eggs and beef steak for only $7.40, and they all started clamoring for Western food. Fine — it’s within budget.

Eight of us marched into the restaurant and sat down. The waitress came and asked “Are you ready?” meaning “have you decided?” One student got excited and said “Yeah!” Then she asked “All of you?” and he said “Yeah!” again. We hadn’t even opened the menu! So we were forced to order. No choice — we pointed at the glass and said “that特别 cheap one.” All eight of us ordered the特别 cheap one.

Order placed, but trouble came. Western food is different from Chinese — the same “egg” can be prepared in many ways. So the waitress asked: “How do you like your eggs cooked?” Although simple and clear, in pure American accent, we all heard her perfectly. But after hearing it, not one of us could answer. We just stared at each other for twenty seconds. Then came the killer question: “How do you like your steak cooked?” This one, although we’d never eaten it, we’d heard of medium-well, well-done, etc. But we didn’t know how to say it. One student mustered up courage and said “half” — meaning medium-rare. The waitress looked surprised, thinking he wanted just half a steak, haha.

Final result: we all stared at each other for a full minute. The waitress, seeing no response — probably used to unresponsive customers — gave us the default. Well-done steak with scrambled eggs…

Looked down upon indeed. Ten days in the US, never capsized in the gutter, but on the last day we were tripped up by “egg.” Anyone who’s studied English for a week knows the word “egg.” Yet this simple word defeated a group of so-called college students, grad students, and teachers… This partly shows the failure of Chinese English education.

Determined not to repeat this embarrassment, we’re now learning. It turns out eggs have many preparations:

Scrambled Fried Hardboiled Poached Omelet Style

We know the words, but still don’t know what they look like! Thank God for Google Image Search. Using image search, we finally learned what each egg looks like. Let’s learn together:

Poached — what we call “he bao dan” (pouched egg)