Crispy sock holes

I'm less than enchanted with Qiu Xiaolong's When Red Is Black. I think part of the reason for the popularity of his books is the fact that he provides literal translations of Chinese idioms, which non-Chinese might like, but that make the book a little too quaint for me. Far worse, towards the end of chapter 7, he speaks of noodles with a "crisp" texture, at one point speaking of them as boiled. How could boiled noodles be crisp? Surely he means the kind of chewy I mention below. The last straw for me was that he describes the detective's wife as having holes in her socks, apparently to show how poor she and her husband are. Plenty of people who are not poor, including Paul Wolfowitz, have holes in their socks.