Suck it Into Your Body
Once somebody asked me the difference between Japanese and Chinese food. In Japan, they eat food that's not cooked. In China, they eat food that's not dead. At a birthday dinner, Chinese friends Barkley and Wendy ordered up quite a feast including one bubbling dish of shrimp. Turns out that the dish wasn't boiling - the shrimp were violently protesting their immersion in alcohol. We asked Barkley how to eat them. "First," he replied, "you take off the head. Then you suck the rest into your body." Similar instructions applied to the crabs, snails, and crawdads. I firmly believe this should be the only instruction printed on any food product.
Let your tongue do the walking and don't ask for a translation until after dinner, although in this case, it was pretty obvious I was eating some poor small bird.
Things taste much better when you don't know what they are. Every four-year-old knows this. Why let all those folks on Survivor have all the fun? Just about everything on those reality TV shows is available at Chinese food markets. Duck tongue and necks, little birds on a stick, chicken feet, cow stomach, fish eyes, sheep tail, silk worms, and of course, roast dog. None of it is bad, although I could pass on the duck tongues... too much work for so little cartiledge (Cam and I agreed that it was like French kissing a duck). How about some snew fungus for dessert?
On of the first questions people ask you is whether or not you can use chopsticks. The correct response is: "Can you use a knife and fork?" My friend's cousin, Monica, struggled with the effort when we took her to a Pizza Hut. Referring to the difficulty in eating such horrid food with ill-equiped impliments, she said "this is why Western girls are so skinny." I guess if you had only seen Western girls on TV, you might be tempted to believe that they are all annorexic blondes with boob jobs. I mean really... where did they find all those plastic people for MTV?
I confess that I had an affinity for street food. You can order rice and vegetables, egg burritos, or what this guy is fixing, Xar Bing. He can bake them with a sweet bean or an onion filling, and a quarter would buy you 5 or 6 of them. In Northern China they are usually fried in heavy soy bean oil, but in the South they are often baked. Ordering street food is a good opportunity to practice Chinese and meet people without nagging social obligations that can crop up inside of restaurants. One restaurant owner asked me if I was single and how much money I made while her daughter hungrily looked me over from behind a cigarette. When the mother asked about my parents' income and the ease of obtaining passports for spouses, I knew I should have definitely ordered street food.
China has been cooking for a good 5,000 years, so their culinary arts are further along the evolutionary cooking chain than say, a cheeseburger. I miss the noodle shops where you can get a filling meal cheaply. In the US, the only small restaurant meal is the ubiquitos salad, and you can't even order that without fumbling for some excuse why you aren't eating half a dead cow. "I'm just having a salad," you have to lament. "I'm really sorry I'm not overeating and indulging in wanton excess." This isn't to say that the Chinese like eating all the colorful dishes available to them... Michael had issues with his chicken foot, and Susanne clearly sucked the wrong snail into her body.
For the Walk Through Tour
«Previous Page: Dalian University | Next Page: The Forbidden City »
