I'm illiterate. In Chinese, that is. I can speak well enough, but I read like a five year old (at best). Here in Bellevue, Washington, this limitation is not super debilitating except at Chinese restaurants. As many of you have probably surmised, you get better service at most Chinese restaurants if you're Chinese. Deal with it. So, whenever we're at a Chinese restaurant, I try to order in Chinese, but since I can't really read too much, I'm limited in what I can order to the few things I know or can read. (As Michelle discovered when we were on our honeymoon, the "something something" in "beef something something noodles" can be a lot of different parts of a cow, not all of them things most Westerners would be comfortable eating.)

So, you can imagine my delight (and her relief) when Michelle pointed me to How to Order Chinese Food Dot Com. This gem a site has photos, English names, and Chinese names for popular dishes, broken out by region and type. The author even has PDF versions you can print and carry with you.

I'm looking forward to expanding my repertoire and maybe even advancing to second grade food Chinese.