My first experience with Chinese food, ever, was with college friends my first or second week in Redlands, who took us out to a restaurant in San Bernardino.
I'd never had Chinese food. Chinese food was not something which was known in my family. It had never been mentioned or experienced, not once. My only knowledge of Chinese food was that Laura Petrie loved moo goo gai pan. So the menu was like hieroglyphics to me, or Martian. I had no idea what the dishes were, and I didn't find moo goo gai pan, and I wouldn't have known what moo goo gai pan was if it had been there.
So I ordered rice. Plain, white, steamed rice. And I ate it with some butter.
Naturally my school friends were concerned for me. Granted that behavior was extremely odd. I did not feel comfortable saying out loud that I had never experienced Chinese before and didn't know what anything was. I'm not sure why not. That would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Perhaps it was an unusual experience of peer pressure, to which I was ordinarily immune. More likely it was embarrassment over the lifelong grief I'd been given by the adults in my world over not eating enough and being so thin, so that not understanding the food was as someone once said just another brick in that wall. In hindsight I'm surprised I agreed to go at all.
I don't think I learned Chinese food at school. There wasn't any in walking distance, so that Mexican became my major culinary reference. I think learning Chinese food was a shared experience with my mother when I was home for summers. That may be a false memory, but I don't think so. We found a restaurant we loved, Yen Ching on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, and went there together all the time, for sizzling rice soup and kung pao chicken. Those are among my very few memories of shared experiences with her, and I'm grateful for them.