SHANGHAI, China – On my plate sits what appears to be a toy octopus. It’s dark red and black, with tiny tentacles curled back, suction cups and all, toward a bulb-shaped head.

Except it’s not a toy. It’s a cooked squid. The Englishman beside me and I have each placed one with our chopsticks on our small white plates, and now we have to do something with them. We look around to see what our fellow diners are doing. The old Korean scholar with the friendly smile confidently pops his toy into his mouth.

Well, here goes. I clench my squid in the tips of the wooden chopsticks, gripping it by the tentacles since neither I nor the Englishman can quite bear to grab a squid by the head, shove it quickly into my mouth, and chew. It’s rubbery and has the familiar Chinese smoky-fish flavor. Not bad.

My son Jack and I have been in Shanghai, where I am teaching literature on a U.S. Fulbright grant, for about three months. And we have seen some odd-looking things on our plates. But while often strange, most Chinese food is quite tasty, once you bend your mind around its appearance and get it into your mouth.

At a formal Chinese dinner, the guests are seated at a round table, on which is a turntable covering half the surface. Wine glasses, small plates and bowls are arranged neatly at appropriate intervals, with a napkin folded delicately like a fan. Unhurried, pleasant waiters and waitresses fill our glasses, offer tea and Coca-Cola, sometimes both red wine and Tsingtao beer.

Soon the dishes start to arrive, placed one by one on the turntable, and the guests push the food around affably, selecting cooked celery, a strip of roast pork, slices of cold beef or chicken. The meat of fowl is cut directly across the bone, so your bite-size chicken or duck may be crunchy.

One dish at a time. It’s not unusual for small pastries to appear midway through the serving in Shanghai, city of sweet food. Farther south and west, around Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and in Sichuan province, is the land of spicy foods.

Usually a carp or perch is brought – whole, split along the middle, glazed eyes upturned. The meat is sometimes cut in thin strips, sometimes left for the diners to flake from the bones. You take a little with your chopsticks and move on. More vegetables come. Tofu in cool white slabs, covered in a thick clear sauce with chopped chives.

Sliced cucumbers, lightly cooked in another clear sauce. Shredded pork in a red sauce with small chilis or even diced vegetables as in some American restaurants. Where we usually have soup first, the Chinese have theirs to end the meal – an egg-drop soup perhaps, with ingredients often unidentifiable to Western eyes, or hot-and-sour soup with bits of mushroom, pork, tofu.

Less formal, brightly decorated eating places, with a half-dozen hostesses in tight red dresses waiting by the door, are everywhere in Shanghai, which must be the restaurant capital of the world. Tiny cafeterias are hidden in every other entryway, it seems. Old women sit with steaming pails of corn on sticks and brown “tea eggs.” Open-air grillers singe kebabs of pork or squid over glowing charcoal.

At night in less chic parts of the city, white-garbed cooks set up large tables on the sidewalks, bring metal pots with steaming noodles, rice, fish and meat, and stacks of bowls and plates. Passers-by stop for supper, sitting on folding chairs beside the pots or standing in the city bustle with bowl in one hand, chopsticks flashing in the other.

In the morning in our neighborhood near Fudan University, the tables are set up right in the street, inches from the sea of bicyclists, pedestrians and creeping, honking taxis. Women with aprons deep-fry twists of flour and spread egg batters thinly over large portable grills to create a sort of omelet pizza. Others sell fried cakes dotted with sesame seeds.

The Chinese have a saying about the elements of good food: se, xiang, wei – color, scent, taste. Even the most bizarre-looking food is usually good. I’ve eaten, for example, things that exactly resembled eyeballs, with silvery, veined, translucent outer coverings and dark centers that looked just like irises, but turned out to be sweet bean paste inside a gluten, tasty.

Once we had what looked like brown withered grass, but was actually shredded dried beef. Another time, a dish of what appeared to be miniature loofah sponges faced us. Our Chinese friends were eating them up, as it were, so I plucked one from its broth. It was just rubbery enough to be firm, tasted woody and pleasant. What was it? A porous mushroom grown in long slabs and cut to size.

Once we were treated to a Chinese “hot pot” dinner, in which a metal cooking pot was brought to the table and a little Sterno fire lit under it. Soon assorted sliced vegetables arrived – potatoes, Chinese cabbage, crunchy lotus root. Then a raw fish, shredded in thin strips.

When the water in our pots was boiling, we dropped in slices and cooked them to taste. Midway through this, our smiling waitress brought shrimp – 6-inch shellfish wriggling and trying their best to flip off the plate. Our hostess dropped one with her chopsticks into the pot, popping the cover on to keep the meal from bucking out.

To Jack and me, this was a bit much, but we moved on. We didn’t know that two months later an Australian friend would report that in Guangzhou he’d eaten his prawns, lightly braised in wine sauce, while they were still twitching.

In Beijing we had pan-fried dumplings like the ones to be had in Maine, with a similar delicious soy sauce. We’ve had the recognizable “Shanghai rice,” fried rice with peas and wispy strips of scrambled egg. “Western-style noodles” were a salty, drier approximation of the lo mein we’re accustomed to, and the Sichuan-style dan dan mein, or noodles with hot chili sauce, were excellent.

We’ve learned to beware of menus with English equivalents – the language barrier here is strong. Once an American friend ordered a “Western steak,” and was brought an unidentifiable piece of flaming chopped meat surrounded by bubbling tomato sauce. We normally invite Chinese friends to accompany us to restaurants.

A meal can cost anywhere from $25 per plate at the best hotels, to just a few dollars. Recently at The Red Wall, a small, homey restaurant in our neighborhood, four of us had spicy eggplant, eel fillets fried in a rich sauce, two plates of sauteed greens, three plates of Shanghai rice, a pile of pork and spinach dumplings, white rice, nearly a half-gallon of an excellent hot-and-sour soup, a Coke and oolong tea for about $8.50, total.

Sometimes, I confess, the food defies the courage of my palate. Several times I’ve had golden-brown chicken’s feet plunked on my plate by well-meaning fellow diners. The Chinese call it the phoenix, traditional food of the emperor. I watch my colleagues gnaw at the bone and gristle, but still can’t discern exactly what they ingest, and so I quietly abstain. Another problem is the revered green tea, which tastes very good, but is drunk in glasses, not cups, with a fistful of wet leaves floating on top.

The Chinese, in their good nature, are relaxed in their table manners and find our apprehensions amusing. They don’t mind a bit if we leave a chicken’s foot or, as my English colleague decided to do, a scale-model octopus on our plates.

They just as apprehensively, and politely, decline a cup of coffee.

Dana Wilde, a former copy editor at the NEWS and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maine in Orono, is living for one year on a Fulbright grant in Shanghai, China. He teaches graduate courses in American literature and American poetry at Fudan University.