Eating with the Chinese

And now for the much-awaited continuing adventures of Klipspringer 5...

It's so much easier to let go and say something silly when I'm drunk.
And I've got to be careful of Chinese hospitality, the constant
refilling of the glass, it's not a good thing for someone who drinks
whatever is put in front of him like water.

So I got to taiji right after my afternoon class today, maybe a little
after five, don't go home to change but bring my clothes with me so I
can change, but today is different. Turns out a tour group is passing
through, so I'm getting taken out to
dinner by my teacher and this farmer dude from between Moon Hill and
somewhere, along with a tour guide from Australia. So five or six
people from this group will be going over Wednesday morning for a
taiji lesson, and it's good, and traditional Chinese public relations
(as well as most other places) to cement a deal by taking someone out
to dinner and giving him, and all others in attendance, all the
alcohol they can take. We got some dumplings (jiaozi, which are like
what you normally see as steamed or fried dumplings in the US,
possibly the best I've had in China), some pumpkin cakes (what we
universally call squash, they universally call pumpkin, thanks to some
colonial legacy, ditto for Sri Lanka, which is thoroughly mixed half
and half with very glutinous rice and then fried, yummy), and a goat
meat hot pot (also very good, different, a little stronger flavor than
mutton, those tin cans get metabolized well), along with some pickled
vegetables and a little dipping bowl of spices. And 10 bottles of
beer. And I'm not talking those wussy-ass little 12 oz. bottles of
beer you get in the US, these are a solid pint and then some. Of
course the beer's only like 3% or so, but still, it adds up.
Especially when the two Chinese know how to nurse a glass of beer,
which means, after the approximately one bottle of beer that went into
the hot pot, the Aussie tour guide and I probably each netted about
3.5 bottles, which, while not enough to make me dangerously drunk, is
more than I'm used to, not even really drinking beer very much any
more, the stuff here's not good enough to drink alone, and it's too
expensive on West Street.

The farmer dude "Farmer Tang" is pretty cool though, I hope I get a
chance to go out and visit him some time while I'm here. I also got
some good advice from the tour guide about places worth visiting. But
the farmer, he's an interesting guy. Very vertically challenged, even
by Chinese standards, heck, I was probably bigger than him in 5th
grade. But he's very friendly, personable, enthusiastic, and
apparently he's got a 45 minute story about how he got married, which
he told us the beginning of, but didn't finish, although it involves a
Norwegian tourist giving him a trip to Guilin about 14 years ago.

In other adventures, on Saturday I got the chance to have what may be
the freshest fish I will ever eat. The school planned a bike trip on
Saturday, which happens fairly often. It was a good trip, through a
bunch of back roads and little villages, and then in the afternoon it
actually got sunny, I got a little color. But for lunch we stopped in
Liugong, which is a place on the river south of Yangshuo known for 3
different-colored pools. They do exist, and they're kind of cool,
sort of worn into the ground... but they're all shades of green,
nothing very exciting. It's not like one's yellow and one's blue and
one's red. One's dark green, one's light green, and one's lighter
green.

So anyway, we stopped in this village for lunch, found a house-like
restaurant that is apparently owned by an Australian who lives in
Yangshuo, not around at the time. A bunch of the students had gotten
some snacks, spicy pickled radish, peanuts, oranges, pomelo, which we
munched on until lunch was ready. Lunch was hot pot, water in a pot
with a lid over a heater, to which we could add oil, salt, MSG, and
the main ingredients. These included, first, a chicken, mostly likely
freshly killed and plucked and chopped into bits and some tofu. Oh
yeah, the chicken's blood was included as a condiment to add to the
hot pot. Fortunately no one wanted to. Then came possibly the most
disturbing main courses I have ever seen. The waitress brought up a
heaping plate of fresh, slimy, green, brown, and yellow little river
catfish, ranging from maybe 2-5 inches long, with a few river shrimp
thrown in for good measure. The fish were slit up the middle so
they'd cook more thoroughly and quickly, but (dramatic pause) they
weren't dead. Of course, we kind of assumed they were, being on a
plate, out of the water and sliced up, so imagine our surprise when
one leapt from the pile onto the table and lay there flapping and
gasping for oxygen. Several more fish attempted escape from the mound
of death, after which a larger platter was brought up to put the plate
in and the escapees were dumped in the pot. Even that was not enough
though as more flipped out, gooey yellow guts oozing from their extra
orifice, while the shrimp
feebly flexed their feelers and legs. Eventually the bloody plate on
which the chicken parts had lain was placed over the remaining fish to
keep them in, which mostly worked. I have never been so glad to see
animals dropped in boiling water, both to put them out of their misery
and me out of my grossed-outness. Seriously, if any country's culture
or cuisine is going to turn me veggie, it'll be China.

Of course, in some ways it's good to be reminded that the meat you eat
came from something living, but it can get taken to an extreme here,
walking past street restaurants with someone hacking the head off a
fish just taken out of the tank, or a boiled hare, the occasional dog,
an horrific grimace carved into the features...

And even with dogs or cats that are kept as pets it's strange, the
concepts that lie behind raising a pet just aren't here (nor in Sri
Lanka). They're things that were, for the most part, introduced by
the colonizers a hundred-some-odd years ago, without the moral system
that makes pet-raising feasible. When I started taking taiji there
were three dogs that lived at the training place, one mommy, named
Dan-dan, and her two kids, of whom one was named Lucky and the other,
well, I never quite made it out. Anyway, the one who wasn't named
Lucky disappeared during Spring Festival, whether to a restaurant or
another home, I know not. But the remaining dogs get no training, or
anything really, some food scraps, maybe some rice... Dan-dan will
usually let me pet her, if she's not moving to begin with, but Lucky
seems quite scared of being touched, occasionally he'll smell my hand,
but that's about it. Yet now there's a new problem because, while the
dogs aren't really trained, they aren't really allowed out of the
training center very much either. And Lucky's a horny young male dog,
and the only female around is his mom, which results in some
surprisingly disturbing attempts at intercourse. Fortunately Dan-dan
seems annoyedly uninterested, but still, seeing a dog sniffing and
licking it's mom all over, I mean, I played Oedipus for Jeezum's sake,
and I want them to
stop. Although admittedly, I was raised with a fair dose of New
England puritanism. Or Middle America prudishness or something.

Anyway, bedtime, more stories later.