4.4: Let's Eat Chinese: Part One

China is dispatching hundreds of thousands of civet cats, who have the misfortune of being fingered as the little varmits who brought Sars to the country. It matters little, since they would have been eaten in any case, pretty much any other wild critter that is hauled into Chinese kitchens. The wilder the beast the more coveted (and expensive) it is to the Chinese palate. The Chinese will also eat parts of animals that most Westerners didn't know existed. Thus, eating Chinese can be a real adventure, and for those of fussy palate, a survival experience.



Death By Duck

La Tour d’Argent. Pride of the new [Tokyo] Otani Hotel since 1984, La Tour d’Argent is a worthy scion of its ritzy Parisian parent [which features] . . .in the main dining room. . .the enormous drapery-sculpted marble carving table, with its silver duck press. The specialty of the house is, naturally, caneton: as in Paris you receive a card recording the number of the duck you were served. In 1921 when Crown Prince Hirohito dined at the Tour d’Argent in Paris, he had duck number 53,210; the numbers in Tokyo began with 53,211 when the restaurant opened. [Fodor’s JAPAN 90, p. 182]

My guide, Mei Ping, looked like she was ready to turn me over to the People’s Liberation Army. I had suspected for a couple of days that she might have once been a “Red Guard”. It was that stern, j’accuselook that said: “You running capitalist dog. You decadent Western pig. Admit that the reason you wanted to take the subway in Beijing is to discover the weaknesses in our Civil Defense system! We have ways of getting at the truth.” That sort of look.

Now she was giving me that look again, because I had the effrontery to decline the much-ballyhooed “Peking Duck Dinner”. To add to the cultural insult I had asked to be taken to a restaurant that had a Western menu, preferably one that had as a choice: Spaghetti Bolognese.

She glared at me, but told the driver to take me to the Gloria Plaza Hotel.

Chinese food may be one of my very favorite cuisines, but I can’t eat it every day, and there are definitely a few dishes that I would prefer to starve before eating. But Chinese food in general is right up there near the top of the list for me, though not as high as Spaghetti Bolognese.

Still, Chinese food was the only cuisine that I had been eating for nearly two weeks. And now that I was in Beijing, where it was possible to get some variety into my diet I craved Spaghetti Bolognese. I was obsessed with thoughts of rich meat-laced sauce over al dente pasta, not those flaccid Chinese noodles I’d been slurping up for days on end. And nothing could be further from my palate’s desire than Peking Duck!

That’s what really got Mei Ping’s goat (or should it be “duck”); that I would refuse a dish that the Chinese just relish, and that every tour of China includes as the piéce de rèsistance. She took it as a cultural insult.

It wasn’t that I just craved, needed, some Spaghetti Bolognese, it was also that I had this fear of Peking Duck. Or rather, Death by Duck!

I had read in a book by a journalist from a respectable newspaper that, since China had opened itself to the West in the early 1970s and large numbers of westerners had come to visit its magnificent sights and eat its delicious food, there had emerged a curious dark, and little known phenomenon quietly referred to as “death by duck.

The scenario of this form of demise was described as follows: tour groups containing large numbers of overweight and under-exercised Americans come to Beijing, a city with a pollution index equivalent to three packs of cigarettes (or one pack of a Chinese brand) per day, and are toured through the huge complex of the Temple of Heaven, then taken to the Great Wall, which they clamber over in the suffocating summer heat, and then are returned to their hotels for the promised and much-ballyhooed, Peking Duck Dinner. Take the permutation of lack of physical fitness, bad air, over exertion, dehydration, and the sudden infusion of enough fat and cholesterol to clog an artery the diameter of a garden hose and you have the formula for “Death by Duck”. The book went on to say that there’s a not inconsiderable number of Western tourists have returned home through customs in a box and Chinese characters on certificate that indicate, if in clinical terms, Chi ya er si (eat duck cause death).

At first surprised by the information I was less so when I researched the recipe for the preparation of Peking Duck. It’s been perilous being a duck in China at least since the 15th century when the delicacy became a dish for more than just the aristocracy. They are herded in great numbers through the streets, piled like feathered firewood on the backs of tricycles, their carcasses hang ignominiously, curing in the open air on bamboo poles on buildings and balconies, strung-up like little baby sleeper pajamas, and they end up dangling in their bronzed skins in restaurant windows.

Killer ducks on display in restaurant window


The cooking process is long and complex. After being scalded, coated with molasses, inflated with air, and hung out to dry for up to two days, they are roasted over different woods to a golden brown. The lacquered-looking duck is cut up and served with a sweet bean sauce and paper-thin pancakes. The most favored morsels are the vessel-clogging, duck skin.

Of course I did not related my phobia of “death by duck” to Mei Ping. Such a faux pas on my part might have resulted in my serving a few years as one of those poor wretches whose unenviable job it is to tricycle around the old hutongs (Beijing’s compounded, dense old neighborhoods) collecting last night’s chamber pot contents and ferrying the ‘night soil’ out to local farms. But a few years later I made the acquaintance of a veteran China Travel Service guide, a Mr. Wang. We exchanged addresses and when I arrived home I wrote to him to inquire what he knew about “D by D”. A few months later his letter arrived to say that in his fourteen years of guiding American tourists he knew of no cases of “D by D,” nor did any of his colleagues. In fact, he said even the term “death by duck” was unfamiliar to him or his colleagues and claimed that the author of the book I had read must have fabricated the whole this to “. . . make his story more (sic) fascinated.”

Sure. Mr. Wang doth protest too much. Fourteen years and thousands of foreign guests gorging themselves on Peking Ducks, and not a single victim of the deadly Chinese treat? Sounds like the official China Travel Service line to me. Pass the Parmesan for my Bolognese, please. For my money I am “fascinated” by the possibility that if Emperor Hirohito had experienced ‘death by duck” in 1921 the entire history of the Far East might have been different. China might have been spared the invasion and ravages of the Japanese thanks to duck No. 53,210. That Peking duck would have been a real hero for his country!

Posted: Thu - January 8, 2004

4.8: Let's Eat Chinese: Part Two

The customary salutation in greeting a Chinese is nihao (sort of “hello, how are you”). But Chinese often greet one another with the phrase chi fan mei ah (have you eaten yet?) Westerners may joke that forty-five minutes after a Chinese meal one is hungry again. It may well be that the Chinese developed their cuisine to actually produce that result: the Chinese love to eat, anytime, anywhere, and often. And pretty much anything.

Waiter, there's a wu ying in my soup . . .

For some reason the admonition of my mother, when I was a child, came to me when I flopped into a chair at a table facing the door. Words about the “starving children of China.” It didn’t seem that there was much starvation in Hong Kong: it is reported that there is a restaurant for every eight-hundred inhabitants of Hong Kong and Kowloon. I had walked on past most of them until my hunger overtook my fastidiousness. The chair reminded me of one of the set from my grandmother’s kitchen when I was a kid back in New York: tubular chrome frame with green plastic-covered vinyl seat and backrest with some ambiguous pastel pattern. But the stains were from soy, not marinara, sauce. I chose the chair rather than one of the rickety little stools arrayed at round tables.

Over the open door of the restaurant a large exhaust fan turned lazily, chopping the bright, electric rays of the neon across the street into a bright kaleidoscope. Grease and dust hung from its blades, stalactites formed by the exhalations of uncounted numbers of cigarettes, and untold breaths of “Crystal Chicken Feet in Garlic Sauce,” Blanched Kidney and Liver,” and “Congee with Congealed Duck’s Blood,” among other exotic treats. Now that I saw the device that pumped the thick stew of aromas into the street that had snared me, my appetite quailed. Only a few blocks away, in tourist-gorged Nathan Road, there were golden arches and the gastro-intestinal assurances of other familiar fast food logos.

So why was I sitting here?

I pondered the wobbly table with the chipped formica, the dirty ashtray, and the incomprehensible menu held between the bottle of soy and the napkin dispenser. This was the kind of establishment that separates the gweilos (white ghosts) from the Chinese, and the real travelers from the tourists.

That it could also separate me from my dignity was not lost on me. My appreciation of foreign food does not extend to the exotic; that generally means “no innards.” My Parisian friend Bob once ordered me an andouillete, and I decided when the unappetizing, half-cooked, stuffed section of stomach was put before me that it was less insulting to politely decline to eat it than to have somebody clean up after me.

So why was I sitting here, in a “congeetorium”? These restaurants are actually called dai pai dong, literally “big stores in a row,” although they are anything but big and are sort of the fast food joints of Cantonese cuisine, although they are family-run, open for long hours just to make ends meet, and the staff uniforms are only distinguished from patrons by the excess soy sauce stains on them.

To say that the décor of these places is a Spartan-utilitarian would be to confer upon it an underserved elegance. There are legions of them in Hong Kong. These are where local people of limited means, those without Diners Club cards, come for their congee, the ubiquitous and viscous rice porridge garnished with just about anything—spring onions, pieces of fish or fish heads, bits of chicken, or frog’s legs. The patrons may consume it quickly, if they are local workman, slurping with relish with mouths just centimeters above their bowls, or more leisurely, if they are one of the retired neighborhood elders.

These congeetoria are where one encounters the true “natives” of Hong Kong. Not the three-pieces suited expat investment banker from The City or Wall Street, but the true resident of Cantoville. An old lady with the adjustable aluminum cane sits almost motionless, her breathing imperceptible, for a good twenty minutes. Her legs are splayed out for balance as she bestrides one of the plastic, blue stools. A blue, quilted vest covers the upper part of her black pajama suit. Opposite the spare, gray hair are little cloth Maryjane shoes that are very much a signature of her cohort. When an elderly man in a greasy brown shirt and trousers ambles in and sits at her table the old woman does not register his presence. It is the way of a people who live in such close and constant proximity. His skin is very dark, probably from years of outdoor work, and his glasses, with their warped bows and frame a-kilter, have lenses so thick that his eyes are grotesquely enlarged to the appearance of some silly, imaginary space alien. Without uttering a word he is served his bowl of congee, along with a sponge cake that looks like a brick of Styrofoam. He’s a regular, too.

Two Chinese men were enthusiastically slurping from bowls over in one corner and the man I assumed to be the waiter, wearing an apron, was sitting at a table against the wall buried in a Cantonese scandal sheet and billows of cigarette smoke. I kept the menu open in order to buy some time. Would I be the sophisticated traveler having a gastronomic adventure, or would I cut and run in the direction of Nathan Road. The moment of truth was only being delayed by the waiter’s fascination with his tabloid. There was time for reflection.

My mother’s words about those starving kids in China. She was always telling me that she would send the food I left on my plate to the “starving people in China.” So naturally I expected that the Chinese would by now have acquired a taste for all the Brussels sprouts and lime jello I “sent” them. But the Chinese are smarter than to adopt some gweilo kid’s leavings. I didn’t see a single Brussel sprout or squiggly lime jello dessert anywhere in China. They would rather to take some animal “innards” that look like “road-kill” to a Westerner and turn them into “delicacies” I was totally unfamiliar with because no Chinese mom has ever been heard to say: “You eat up all those duck’s feet and sea slugs or I’ll send them to those starving American kids.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t identify most anything on a “congeetorium” menu because it was in Chinese, I couldn’t identify them by sight. Very little is wasted in the Chinese diet. This is a people who have known more famine than plenty throughout their long history. Virtually anything that flies, swims, walks, or squirms is fair game for the gustatory latitude of the Sino-palate. To the Chinese “all creatures great and small” translates as “all creatures, lunch and dinner”. Food stalls are festooned with dripping, or desiccated, cooked or raw, creature body parts, all body parts: goat heads, duck’s feet, fish lips and eyeballs, pigs trotters, and things you can’t name. At the public market nearby my flat the stalls for meat have the gruesome appearance of a zoo that has had a direct hit by a fragmentation bomb. There are delicacies displayed in restaurant windows that seem to have come from outer space.

The waiter looked over at me again, but didn’t move. I think he was enjoying my discomfort. But I was starting to worry about giving offense. I always fear that I’m going to give insult to a Chinese who is honoring me with a delicacy like Bird’s Nest soup, which is actually made from the bird’s saliva. I’ve had enough with what bird’s do to my car; I’ll be damned if I want them spitting in my soup. But I don’t care if I insult a Chinese by turning down “shark-fin soup.” The suppliers of shark fins simply capture a shark, cut off its fins, and then toss it back into the sea to die a painful death. I tasted shark fin soup once and don’t think sharks should die for something that tastes that mediocre.In fairness I should report that a Chinese guide once complained to me that the food in America was not very good at all. He had escorted a delegation of Chinese businessmen to California and brought home as gifts some canned food.

“I am sorry to say that the dog meat I brought home to my family did not taste very good,” he complained to me.

“Dog meat! Where the hell did you buy canned dog meat in America?” I replied, wondering if the SPCA knew about this.

“At the supermarket, the big supermarket. There were many cans of dog meat with many different names. I bought several kinds but they were all not very good. I am glad that I did not buy the cat meat.”

I wished he had bought canned tuna; at least in that case the picture on the label identifies what’s inside not the animal is supposed to eat it. I thought it better for me to lose face by being from a country that didn’t know how to prepare dog meat, than to cause the guide to lose face by informing him that he had been feeding his family American pet food.

I must have been gazing, lost in my reverie of past meals and hypnotized by the lazy exhaust fan when I noticed the waiter standing beside my table. He had a look on his face that seemed to say “Now what have we here?” I sensed a bit of an attitude of superiority in his posture, something that said: “OK Mr. Gweilo, let’s see what you can order from a menu in Chinese.”

But I was ready for him. He wasn’t going to see me bolt for the door and run for the comfort of those golden arches. No way. In my best mentally-rehearsed Cantonese I looked up at him with a confident gaze and intoned: Mgoi, yaat wùh bóulei (“A pot of dark tea, please”).

© 2002, James A. Clapp. Posted: Wed - January 14, 2004