Hard or Soft Taozi

I've been having a debate with my host mama although I'm not sure she 100% knows it. Every time she gives me a peach to eat, I gently push on the flesh to see how hard/soft it is. If it is too hard (I like ripe peaches) I hand it back and say, "wo bu yao!" (I don't want) she then shoves the peach back at me saying, "hao chi! Hao chi!" (Delicious, delicious!) I stare at her, shaking my head, and repeat, "wo bu yao!" Sometimes I knock it with my knuckles and give her the side-eye like, 'how could you give me this rock to break my teeth on?!?!' I've told her I didn't want it because it wasn't ripe, but in China, it's simply a piece of fruit. There is no real word for "ripe." This concept is foreign to her. If you have a piece of fruit, you eat it. There is no waiting period for ripeness to develop. Yet for me, eating a hard crunchy peach is sacrilegious.

I posed this question to my Site Manager, Chloe, a Chinese woman who has experience overseas and she laughed and told me that this is an actual debate online here in China: Which is better? Hard or soft peaches? 

Let that sink in for a moment. In China, there is a debate on whether peaches are better crisp or juicy... They say that crisp like an apple or sweet and juicy and soft are the two types of ripeness for the fruit. This is an actual ongoing debate/conversation, yet they have no real word to describe ripeness that is understood the way Americans do. It's a linguistic lacking in my humble opinion.

Here, the Taoist teachings say fruit has two parts like yin and yang. I spoke to my Language teacher and she explained that there is an ancient Chinese tradition that says that eating the skin AND the flesh provides a person with balance. In China, people peel almost all fruit because they believe this prevents them from injesting pesticides. You would not believe the conversations I've had about pesticides, antioxidants, and organic farming methods since I got here. Chinese people are fascinated by the concept of systemic fruit. I had to explain that even most Americans don't understand how fruit actually grows and that systemic fruit has pesticides throughout the flesh.  Throwing away the peel only prevents one from injesting the part of the fruit with the highest concentration of antioxidants and doesn't prevent one from injesting pesticides basically at all. 

But back to the soft versus hard debate, if I could use a peach as a hammer, I don't want to try and put it anywhere near my mouth. Period. Sometimes I get a beautiful and magical ripe peach, perfect in its soft and juicy glory. Those are happy days indeed. Even my closest friend here has gotten in on this and sends me messages every time he gets a decently ripe peach. Sometimes the pictures he sends with the messages are downright pornographic. This is how we entertain ourselves in China. We send each other well lit pictures of the juicy ripe fruit our Zhongguo mamas give us. It's a hard life...