This year has been marked with great travels and great stories, and as I hear and read about all the awesome moments that may or may not have been as striking as when it's put in writing, I'm starry-eyed nonetheless. I have always hoped to start a travel blog, but find that I need to travel first in order to have something to write about. Which is why I've hyperlocalized most of my offline writing; focusing on this grimy and glamorous city called New York, trying to find the nuances and nooks and crannies that seem to draw everyone here and wanting more. I've been here 6 years and am still discovering new things around every corner. I love it, and all the same, I regret every single day that I am not somewhere else.
In an attempt to blog about my travels to Asia a year and a half ago, I scanned my photo albums for some common thread, some distinguishing skin to hold the contents all together. Food. Culture. Globalization. Development. Dirt. Dogs. History. Modernization. Heat. Sanitation. Comfort. I couldn't do it. All the pieces are there when I look back on these photos, but to string them along like same category beads on one single string...well, I just couldn't do it. Perhaps if I wanted to write a longer piece, I'd have colored patterns of themes that alternated seamlessly, woven together to make one cohesive adornment. But seeing as I'm not even entirely sure still, almost two years later, of what I experienced or how I feel about it, all I have is a mental basket where I've dumped these random moments and my only clear thought: I am tied to all of these things and yet none of these things.
It's one of the dilemmas of being Asian American, a topic I don't usually touch upon because it opens up too many floodgates to never-ending debates about nationalism, orientalism, or cultural hybridization. At the end of every intellectual sparring around what it means to be Asian-American, I always walk away with the same thing: I'm Asian and I'm an American. Both I'm very proud of, both I cannot change. It is a welcomed existence, and while it hardly operates as my only perspective, a trip "back home" certainly makes someone like me more aware of how I straddle the line between cultures, how my world can be informed by three paradigmatic ways of thinking--as a Chinese, as an American, as a Chinese-American. And even more curiously, how my world switches these lights on and off exclusively, and a rare sometimes, simultaneously. It all depends on where in the world I am anchored at the moment.
On Food in China: An Asian American Perspective
Food during travel is always precarious. There's a stigma that food during travel in Europe is more acceptable than in Asia. As an American, I totally get it. You're eating weird chicken's feet, maybe a beetle or some intestinal glob, and smelling spices and fermenting flavors your poor brain's probably in cahoots over, trying to identify even though you've never encountered it before. As an Asian, come on. We eat everything! And everything tastes good. I promise. It's the mantra of being raised Chinese, conditioned since we were 5 years old and learned to pull faces when we were forced to eat tofu. If it tastes funny, smells funny, or has a really gross texture, it's good for you. That, or your parents convince you that whatever you're not liking, you're supposed to like. I'm pretty sure all Chinese has convinced ourselves of this, and probably why, to this day, I have a 98% success rate of being the world's least pickiest, most open, eater (2% goes to NOT eating bugs, brains, or tongues).
So. While I was in China, the following were delightful:
One restaurant we went to sprinkled chrysanthemum petals on every dish served. I've always been delighted with eating flowers, and my favorite tea is sweet chrysanthemum tea, where a huge clump of flower falls into your cup with every pour. Then there were the hairy crabs. I didn't know crabs could have hair. But no fear, I overrode my slight disgust and shock with my Maryland stomache, and said, what the hell. A crab is a crab. And then the chicken? Chicken wrapped in foil and then newspaper? Come on, uncouth is a great way to eat. Especially when the story behind the cooking style is that a robber stole a chicken, hid it in the ground and came back to find it cooked perfectly under the sun in the dirt when he came back for it by nightfall.
We had stopped in a matriarchal village where they graciously offered the first three (I was one of them) a potent shot of some form of home brewed liquor, poured us their best tea, and danced for us. Sure we were on tour, and sure they get paid in some way for bringing us into their home, but it speaks volumes and is so very much in the same vein in which I was raised--to offer all strangers, all guests, your very best, however minimal. And to the Chinese, being poured a great cup of tea is a fantastic gesture. At the very end of that visit, they served us fresh squeezed pineapple juice and sugar cane juice. Above are the shards of sugar cane strippings once we had exhausted its liquid through a juicing machine.
Another day brought all three of my favorite things together, in the span of 15 minutes before I boarded the bus again. We had just walked out of a store and as the local economy goes, where there is a bus, there are push cart vendors dragging their antiquated technology around to make a mere dollar off of you. I was amazed at this woman's contraption; a makeshift furnace/stove from a tin barrel heating grilled yams on top, coal-roasting chestnuts in an age old wok, and weighing dried lychee (I've never had dried!!) on an old school hand scale where she literally balanced a bag on one end and a weight on the other. Ahh, the unpolished ways of cooking and eating--how you make food so much more primitive and that much more enjoyable!
On Food in China: An American Perspective
Those goodies were pretty tame, considering what other things I ate, such as chicken's feet and other anatomical parts I'm not entirely sure of. But that's nothing new to rave about. On the flip side, where my 2% failure rate kicks in, I was sincerely disgusted at the following:
On the bus ride over to a Chinese garden that cultivates herbal plants, fruit trees and other delicious shrubbery, we were told we had something amazing to look forward to if we were still hungry after our chrysanthemum-covered lunch. Now, we've all heard stories of Asians eating dogs, faking rat meat as chicken meat, and having a finger-licking good time with the odds and ends of a pig's snout or a bull's testicle. I cringe every time I think of the inhumanity and the sheer grossness of that, but this one made me lose my appetite completely. Long story short, sparing the gory details, we were quizzed on how this baby bird was killed and then prepared and then cooked. Think baby bird and plastic bag, et voila! Appetite dismissed. I heard it was succulent and worth the $25 for each one, but my poor mother and I sat through it all, grimacing while diverting our twisted stomaches towards the fresh cut fruit we had instead.
And then there were the following. I don't care how much of a delicacy this is, but eating writhing maggots and bee larvae still stuck in honey comb is never okay with me:
Is that dried squid being ejected from a vending machine in the top-right food photo?
ReplyDelete