But the centrality of rice and other grain foods in the idea of life and livelihood is threaded through the language. A restaurant is a place that serves fan (fan guan), to cook is to ‘make fan ’ (zuo fan) and a beggar is someone who asks for fan (yao fan). A glutton is a ‘fan-bucket’ (fantong). If you have a job, it’s a ‘ricebowl’ (fan wan); lucrative enough, it might be a ‘golden ricebowl’; if not, it might be a ricebowl of paper or clay. In Maoist times, a stable job in a state-owned factory was an ‘iron ricebowl’ (tie fan wan), which the economic reforms of the 1990s went on to ‘smash’.
