Jensen Huang's Wince and the Envy of Noodles

It is 2:14 PM on a Friday, an hour I have learned to distrust because it is too late for productivity and too early to forgive myself for not having any, and I am eating leftover rice standing up over the sink, which is the only way I eat rice now, when I see the video. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the man whose company is currently worth more than several countries I could name if pressed, is also eating noodles standing up. He is in Beijing. He looks happy.

The Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, informs me that Huang was spotted at No. 69 Fangzhuanchang Noodles, where he ordered zhajiangmian, the local specialty involving noodles and a thick soybean-paste sauce with vegetables and meat. "It's so good," he said, in front of the restaurant entrance, while onlookers crowded around filming him. He was touring Nanluoguxiang, an eastern district of preserved hutongs, the low-rise traditional houses that Beijing did not, for once, demolish. He also tried douzhi'er, a fermented soybean drink, gray-green and slightly sour, and he winced. The wince trended on Weibo. He then bought a sweet drink from Mixue Bingcheng to recover.

I have read this paragraph four times now and I cannot tell you why. Something about it has lodged in me sideways. Maybe it is the wince. Maybe it is the small, embarrassed humanity of needing a sweet drink to recover from a sour one, a thing I have done in my own kitchen, alone, with no Weibo to document it. Maybe it is that one of the most powerful men in the global economy spent an afternoon being a tourist, eating noodles on a sidewalk, and people filmed him the way you would film a minor weather event.

I think what I am feeling is envy, and I am embarrassed about it, because the envy is not of the wealth or the company or the leather jacket. The envy is of the noodles. The envy is of standing in front of a restaurant in a neighborhood that was almost demolished but wasn't, eating something hot, while strangers smile at you because you are visibly enjoying it. I work from a chair. I have eaten the same lunch for eleven days. The chair has a divot.

There is a version of this story where I am supposed to have a thought about geopolitics, about chips, about the strange diplomatic theater of a CEO performing delight in a country his company's products are politically tangled with. I do not have that thought. I have the other thought, which is that he looked, for a minute, like a person, and that this is now news, which suggests it is rare.

My rice has gone cold. The sink is still the sink. Somewhere in Beijing, a man I will never meet is drinking something sweet to forget something sour, and I understand him completely.

Source: The Seattle Times — Business (image and reporting)