Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(42)
“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”
Another thing you notice in China are the turds. Oh please, you’re probably thinking. Must you?
To this I answer, “Yes, I must,” for if they didn’t affect the food itself, they affected the way I thought about it. Once, in Tokyo, I saw a dog pee on the sidewalk. Then its owner reached into a bag, pulled out a bottle of water, and rinsed the urine off the pavement. As for dog feces, I never saw any trace of them. In Beijing you see an overwhelming amount of shit. Some of it can be blamed on pets, but a lot of it comes from people. Chinese babies do without diapers, wearing instead these strange little pants with a slit in the rear. When a child has to go, its parents direct it toward the curb or, if they’re indoors, to a spot they think of as “curby.” “Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart,” a young woman named Bridget told me.
This was the seventh day of my visit, and so desensitized was I that my first response was “You have a Walmart?”
There are the wild outdoor turds of China, and then there are the ones you see in the public bathrooms, most of which feature those squat-style toilets—holes, basically, level with the floor. And these bathrooms, my God. The sorriest American gas station cannot begin to match one of these things. In the men’s room of a Beijing subway stop, I watched a man walk past the urinal, lift his three-year-old son into the air, and instruct him to pee into the sink—the one we were supposed to wash our hands in.
My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we’ve got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it toward the back of our minds. In China it’s brought to the front and nailed there. The supermarket cashier holds out your change and you take it thinking, This woman squats and spits on the floor while shitting and blowing snot out of her nose. You think it of the cab driver, of the ticket taker, and, finally, of the people who are cooking and serving your dinner. Which brings me back to food.
If someone added a pinch of human feces to my scrambled eggs, I might not be able to detect it, but I would most likely realize that these particular eggs tasted different from the ones I had yesterday. That’s with something familiar, though. And there wasn’t a lot of familiar in China. No pork lo mein or kung pao chicken, and definitely no egg rolls. On our first night in Chengdu, we joined a group of four for dinner—one Chinese woman and three Westerners. The restaurant was not fancy, but it was obviously popular. Built into our table was a simmering cauldron of broth, into which we were to add side dishes and cook them until they were done. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering us some tofu, some mushrooms, and some duck tongues,” said the Western woman sitting across from me. “Do you trust me to keep ordering, or is there anything in particular you might like?”
I looked at her, thinking, You whore! Catherine was English and had lived in China for close to twenty years. I figured the duck tongues were a sort of test, so I made it a point to look unfazed. Excited even.
When I was eventually forced to eat one, I found that it actually wasn’t so bad. The only disconcerting part was the shape, particularly the base, from which dangled tentacle-like roots. This reminded you that the tongues had not been cut off but, rather, yanked out, possibly with pliers. Of course, the duck was probably dead by then, wasn’t it? It’s not like they’d jerk out the tongue and then let it go, traumatized and quackless but otherwise whole.
It was while eating my second duck tongue that the man at the next table hacked up a loud wad of phlegm and spat it onto the floor.
“I think I’m done,” I said.
The following morning, and with a different group, Hugh and I took a drive to the mountain where tea originally came from. It was late January, and the two-hour trip took us by countless factories. Mustard-colored smoke drifted into the sky, and the rivers we passed ran thick with waste and rubbish. Eventually we hit snow, which improved things visually but made it harder to move about. By the time we headed back down the mountain, it was almost three. Most restaurants had quit serving lunch, so we stopped at what’s called a Farming Family Happiness. This is a farmhouse where, if they’re in the mood, the people who live there will cook and serve you a meal.
One of the members of our party was a native of Chengdu, and of the five Americans, everyone but Hugh and I spoke Mandarin. Thus we hung back as they negotiated with the farm wife, who was square-faced and pretty and wore her hair cut into bangs. We ate in what was normally the mah-jongg parlor, a large room overlooking the family’s tea field. Against one wall were two televisions, each tuned to a different channel and loudly playing to no one. On the other wall was a sanitation grade—C—and the service grade, which was a smiley face with the smile turned upside down.
As far as I know there wasn’t a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard, and then there just wasn’t. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognizable.
I’m used to standard butchering: here’s the leg, the breast, etc. At the Farming Family Happiness, rather than being carved, the rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce.