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Intestines & Chopsticks
Light person story on learning to eat in China.
Mr Yang was watching me with a boyish chuckle, and making sure I didn’t cook the geese intestines a second longer than appropriate. I had to follow the exact procedure: lower the intestine into the bubbling hot-pot for four seconds, lift it out for two seconds, plunge it back again, and repeat five times. Me, I wanted to overcook the intestines to make them more palatable; the ‘correct’ technique leaves the meat half-cooked and chewy, and munching on the soft slippery mass made me queasy. But Mr Yang cried out fussily when I let the intestine linger in the pot; he reminded me that we had driven 100km for this special treat, and that overcooking ruined the delicate meat.
We were a gathering of friends in a rural town in Sichuan that’s famous for its geese. “This is the only place in China,” Mr Yang explained, “where the intestines are yanked out of live geese. The meat is tastier than if the geese are killed first, so eat lots as you won’t find this anywhere else.”
I kept lighting cigarettes as a diversionary tactic and proclaiming that I was full, but my companions wouldn’t take it, and plateful upon plateful of intestines were shoved in front of me. As a foreigner I was the special guest, and I had to indulge, in intestines and beer and much else.
Yes, much else: small fishes, pig brains, pig hooves, pig ears, and many parts of the famous geese (intestines, feet, gizzards, hearts, livers, and heads). The cuts of meat or fishes were delivered raw, and then we had to cook them in the bubbling hot-pot set in the middle of the table. The broth in Sichuan hot-pots is made of beef oil, pork stock, dried chilli pods, Sichuan peppercorns, and lots of different herbs; when the meat is cooked in the hotpot, it is then dipped in a bowl of sesame oil, garlic, and chopped spring onion before being transferred to the mouth.
I had become used to hot-pots; they are popular in Sichuan where I had been staying for many weeks. I had gone to visit my girlfriend in Deyang, a city of 300,000 where I was one of two foreigners in town. “You’re like a panda, a rare creature,” a friend told me. So rare in fact that people stared at me in the street and other people become giddy in my presence. Some girls in the street yelled ‘hallo, hallo’; men in bars came over and welcomed me and filled my glass with beer – then I had to swig it down clean. People invited me out to eat and drink; the Chinese like to entertain, especially foreigners who are culturally perceived as guests.
But I had to learn to eat like the locals, feet and intestines and heads and all. At least Sichuan’s cuisine is delicious – its tastes defined by garlic, ginger, soy sauce, dried chilli, dried peppercorms, central Asian spices; grilled meats and flat bread at roadside stalls brushed with central Asian spices; a bewildering array of supple mushrooms; vegetables pickled in vinegar; hearty soups of duck and black chicken. I also like spicy food, as Mr Maa discovered to his discomfort. Mr Maa, like other friends, derived much joy in gorging me with things he thought I would find hard to take in. That included getting me drunk many times – drinking the Chinese way, guzzling down the beer (the Chinese ‘cheers’ is gambei, meaning ‘bottom up’). At least I wouldn’t be paying, so I could console myself that I am getting drunk for free, and Mr Maa was also paying when he invited me out for a hotpot and ordered the broth extra spicy. Then the broth came and I had the last laugh – I relished the pungency, and I took pleasure watching Mr Maa sweat and choke and bluster from the spiciness.
It was a good year for eating and drinking – the year of many pigs, signifying abundance and wealth, an auspiciousness year that saw a spike in births. I asked my companions what’s the symbolism of the pig in Chinese folklore. “The Chinese are like pigs,” Mr Yang joked. “They like to eat and sleep.”
In weekends, after clubs emptied, we often finished the night with more beer and more food. We ordered delicacy foodstuffs; top of these are duck-tongues – soft meat, a cartilage in the middle – and others include rabbit brains, chicken gizzards, duck feet, baby eels, river crabs, snails, intestines, and small birds marinated and then coated in sesame seeds and deep-fried whole.
Many of these things are delectable. I needed a lot of goading to crack a duck’s skull and nibble at the diminutive brain within, but it’s surprisingly good – the brain’s texture and taste is like foie gras. So I had to overcome my initial aversion and acquire a taste for things like feet, brains and offal; for lumps of fat crackling in my mouth – the Chinese love fat – and after a while I even started relishing foodstuffs drenched in oil. But I always made a mess. Try picking a whole fish with chopsticks, gnawing out the meat from the bone with your mouth; or try picking out the meat from the bone using only chospticks – or chicken feet, as well as rabbit’s head. The Chinese don’t separate the meat from the bone prior to the cooking; they simply chop up everything and dump it in the pot. Then the diner has to do the hard work of extricating the meat using only chopsticks or hands. It’s difficult; many things you have to spit out, and that’s why the Chinese leave trails of bones and shells and soiled paper serviettes on the table and floor after eating. Yet the mess I left was always larger, and afterwards you could tell I had just eaten by the splutters of oil on my shirt and trousers.
The English term, chopsticks, is a misnomer. You can’t ‘chop’ anything with the ‘sticks’; their purpose is to transfer food to the mouth in morsels – which is better for ingestion and digestion – and leave behind inedible things like slivers of ginger, dried chillies, dried peppercorns, and oil (something that would be hard with a fork or spoon). So Chinese food and chopsticks have co-evolved; the structure, density, and preparation of the food is specifically geared for eating with chopsticks, at least in the most part.
Yet my proficiency with chopsticks – so nimbly impressive in the west – was inadequate by Chinese standards. I would drop bits of food, leave precious meat attached to bones; I found it difficult to pick up loose aggregates of rice grains with chopsticks. I’m used to taking in mouthfuls at a time, not tidbits or a few grains of rice, and it’s not easy to master the way of holding the bowl close to my mouth and then, using chopsticks, hurling the rice into my mouth from the rim of the bowl. Likewise, I couldn’t learn the art of sucking in two-feet-long noodles (if you don’t do it fast enough the noodles would swing, spluttering oil or broth over your shirt). Even after many weeks I still exasperatedly soiled my clothes, and couldn’t clean the bowl completely of rice. “You’re like a baby,” my girlfriend kept joking, “still learning to eat.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg
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