The next day I encountered a book that could have come to the rescue: the Longman Chinese-English Visual Dictionary of Chinese Culture. It's kind of like a Richard Scarry Best Word Book Ever about modern China. To communicate with the waiter I could have merely pointed to "Vegetables" on page 22 and "Cooked Foods Made from Wheat" on page 25.

The Visual Dictionary tells you what you're seeing in Chinese cities and countryside, in restaurants and shops, in private kitchens and public baths, at tourist sites and train stations, and, should you visit, hospitals, nuclear power plants, and military bases.

Its black-and-white schematic line drawings–accurately drawn down to the tiniest detail–are keyed to numbered captions written three ways: in Chinese characters, pinyin (the English transliteration of Mandarin), and English.

For example, those things on the restaurant wall that look like post office boxes are wangui, personal lockers for dining utensils. Ah-ha. That big container with a spigot is called a chatong, a hot-water urn. Of course, for tea. The game the men are playing in the hutong (alleyway community) is shuzqi (numbered chess). The curved appendage on the corner of a traditional tiled roof is a xiziweir (crest shaped like scorpion tail). The flatbed tricycle for transporting goods is a pingbunche; the streets in the high-tech districts are crammed with young men delivering computer parts on them.

Now in its third printing, the Longman Chinese-English Visual Dictionary was produced by a team of Japanese editors, writers, and illustrators, who spent 20 years on the project after completing a successful Chinese-Japanese Visual Dictionary. Jointly published by Shanghai Foreign Education Press and Pearson Education China Limited, it's licensed for sale in the People's Republic for 50 RMB (about $6.25), and available here only from Amazon.com (search under ISBN 7-81046-662-3) for $38.95. You don't need a translation aid to figure out that the price differential sums up the economic differences between China and the U.S..