“What is your favorite Chinese dish?” Ask any foreigner this question, and most answers you get must be Kung Pao chicken! But how much do you know this foreigner’s favorite Chinese dish?

What is the meaning of Kung Pao? We need to look at the four Chinese words. ”gong“ means ”palace”; “bǎo” means guard “(保卫)”; “jī” means chicken; “dīng” means small pieces. If we put them together, it can be understood as “palace guards” chicken pieces“.

But where did the name come from? We need to talk about Ding Baozhen-the man who gave us Kung Pao chicken. Ding was a governor of Sichuan during Qing Dynasty. When Ding was a child, be fell into a river. He could not swim, but a family passing by saved him and brought him home. At their home, they served Ding a delicious chicken dish(the earliest Kung Pao chicken). Ding loved it very much and always remembered it. Years later, when Ding became a rich and powerful man, he invited that family to his house. The family cooked him the same dish and Ding soon made this dish popular all over Sichuan. In the late 1800s, Ding was given the title of ”gōng bǎo“(the person who guards the palace). Soon, people started calling him Ding Gongbao, and giving his favorite dish a name after him-Gongbao chicken. The English name Kung Pao sounds just the same as Chinese.

This dish appears on the menus almost everywhere in the world. Different countries and even cities in China have different ways to cook it. ▲ You have to ask some old cooks in Sichuan. They think three things-dried Sichuan peppers, sugar and vinegar—are the key to the most traditional Kung Pao chicken. The Sichuan pepper is the most important one. It is hard to buy it for many people outside Sichuan. That is probably why they cannot get the best taste.

Next time, when you are eating Kung Pao chicken with others, you can tell them many fun facts about this dish!

Working or learning in a foreign country can be a difficult experience, both professionally and personally, due to the cultural shock.

The hardest part of working abroad isn’t to find a place to stay or learn the language but to overcome the cultural shock. The anthropologist (人类学家) Kalvero Oberg first put forward the term “culture shock”. He reported that it was caused by the “anxiety” that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of communication while living and working in another culture.

These things are part of daily life, and include gestures, facial expressions and customs. When we enter a new culture, these signs are usually so different that they’re no longer comprehensible (可理解的) to us. “When an individual enters a strange culture”, wrote Oberg, “all or most of these familiar signs are eliminated. He or she is like a fish out of water, however broad-minded he or she may be.”

This is what happened to Lara, a young IT consultant from America who began to work in southern Europe last year. Three weeks after arriving in Europe, she sent a desperate e-mail begging to return home. “The people are so rude,” she wrote. “They eat at strange hours and I’m starting to feel appetizing to local food. I can’t get anything done because their way of doing business is so efficient. I just want to be home.”

What Lara and other IT consultants meet on their work abroad is a culture shock. While we can’t prevent it from happening, we can still take steps to weaken its effects.