Why does 'eat well' mean so much in China?

How do you get to know China from abroad? For many, it begins somewhere unglamorous: a Chinese restaurant on a street corner.

There's an old joke that wherever people go, a Chinese restaurant follows.

It's an exaggeration, of course, but quite a telling one, as it speaks to a culture that has spent centuries perfecting the art of the meal, and to something quieter still: the way a modest table, set anywhere in the world, can carry the full weight of someone's hope for a decent life.

The film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East opens on exactly this kind of table.

A Chinese chef has traveled abroad to cook at a local restaurant – nothing more ambitious than paying off debt, sending money home.

Then the war finds him.

He is no hero, just a man trying to survive.

But survival, it turns out, is not the same as indifference, and he ends up shielding a group of local children from a conflict that was never his to begin with.

Through it all, one phrase returns again and again: Eat well.

It sounds almost too simple to mean anything.

But in Chinese, it rarely just means food.

It means: stay whole.

Stay close to the people who matter.

Let this meal be where the hard things get said, or forgiven, or simply set aside.