Living in China is a little like an emotional roller coaster.
Sometimes, I find myself amused and interested by everything. Other times, I
look around and wonder what series of unfortunate events and bad decisions
caused me to end up here.
It is the latter feeling that is perfectly captured by David
Sedaris’ essay “Chicken Toenails, Anyone?” In this essay, from the
July 15,2011 edition of The Guardian, Sedaris
vividly lays out a negative view of China. Many have called this essay racist
and unfounded. Since much of what Sedaris says is true, I wonder if these
naysayers have actually been to China. The
parts of the essay that aren’t factual are his opinions, which he is entitled
to have.
Now, do I agree with everything in this essay? No, of course
not. Mostly, I do not share Sedaris’ views of Chinese cuisine. Thus far, I have
not had anything weird or upsetting. Maybe this is because I haven’t been to
the Chinese countryside so, I can’t relate to those experiences. But, in my
experience, in Beijing, you know what you’re getting to eat. The majority of
restaurants have a picture menu. Therefore, language is not an issue when
ordering. Sure, some foods have been a
little odd to me. I once tried a vegetable dish that had big chunks of
something very gelatinous, slimy, and tasteless. I just picked out the chunks
and went along with my meal. As
Shanti Christensen of ShowShawnti.com said,
“Exposure usually defines what is delicious.” I didn’t like those gelatinous
chunks but, for some, that was good eating.
It’s important to remember the source of the essay. David
Sedaris is a humorist, not a journalist. As a humorist, his writing is very
much colored by what will get someone’s attention and make them laugh. A
factual, very straight essay is not funny. Such an essay might be informative
but, it will not make anyone laugh. Hyperbole and other literary devices are
needed to make something funny.
In addition to being a humorist, Sedaris is an American,
writing in English. While his books have been translated into 25 different
languages, presumably, his audience is other English speaking Westerners. Most
of these people have never been to China so, he is playing on their lack of
knowledge to make things funny.
What do you think? Is this essay racist or, just a funny
piece to be taken lightly? Here is the full text of the essay. Read it and let
me know what you think.
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David Sedaris: Chicken toenails, anyone?
'After the cook had slit the rooster's 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.'
Photograph: Dan Matthews
"I have to go to China." I told people this
in the way I might say, "I need to insulate my
crawl space" or, "I've got to get these moles looked at."
That's the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off
was the food. I'll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I've never
looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me.
I was in my early 20s when a Chinese restaurant opened in
Raleigh, North Carolina. It was in a new building, designed to look vaguely
templish, and my mother couldn't get enough of it. "What do you say we go
Oriental!"
I think she liked that the food was beyond her range. Anyone
could imitate the twice-baked potatoes at the Peddler, or turn out a veal
parmesan like the Villa Capri's, but there was no way a non-Chinese person
could make moo shu pork, regardless of his or her training. "And the
egg rolls," she'd say. "Can you imagine!"
The restaurant didn't have a liquor license, but they
allowed you to brown bag. Thus we'd arrive with our jug of hearty burgundy. I
always got my mother to order for me, but when the kung pao chicken was
brought to the table, I never perked up the way I did at the steak house or the
Villa Capri. And it wasn't just Raleigh's Chinese food. I was equally
uninterested in Chicago and, later, New York, cities with actual China Towns.
Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu
would be different from what I'd had in the US. "It's more real,"
they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike
it more authentically.
I think it hurt that, before landing in China, Hugh and I
spent a week in Tokyo, where the food was, as always, sublime, everything so
delicate and carefully presented. With meals I drank tea, which leads me to
another great thing about Japan – its bathrooms. When I was younger they
wouldn't have mattered so much. Then I hit 50 and found that I had to pee all
the time. In Tokyo, every subway station has a free public men's room. The
floors and counters are aggressively clean and beside each urinal is a hook for
hanging your umbrella.
This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from
Narita to Beijing International, where the first thing one notices is what sounds
like a milk steamer, the sort a cafe uses when making lattes and cappuccinos.
"That's odd," you think. "There's a coffee bar on the elevator
to the parking deck?" What you're hearing, that incessant guttural hiss,
is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly
from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering,
"Where are you going to put that?" A better question, you soon realize,
is, "Where aren't you going to put it?"
I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters
on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the
sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people
weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting
wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and
using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to
get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her
opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and
then put it back into his pocket.
"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 one notices in China is 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.
In Tokyo, I once 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
towards 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 station,
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 towards 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 may not be able to detect it but I would most likely realize that these
particular eggs taste 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 20 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
one 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
as if 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 on to 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 past 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 jong 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.
Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had
been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the
comb and intestines as well. I don't know why this so disgusted me. If I
was a vegetarian, OK, but if you're a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary
lines? "I'll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that
sits on top of the head, doing nothing?" And why agree to eat this animal
and not that one?
I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant
in the Guangdong province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat.
The place was called The Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn't
exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you're
getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats,
and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most
westerners I tend towards herbivores, and things that like grain: cows,
chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat – a pig would happily eat a human – but
most of the pork we're privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather
than other pigs and dead people.
There are distinctions among the grazing animal eaters as
well. People who like lamb and beef, at least in north America, tend to draw
the line at horse, which in my opinion is delicious. The best I've had was
served at a restaurant in Antwerp, a former stable called, cleverly enough, The
Stable. Hugh was right there with me, and though he ate the same thing I did,
he practically wept when someone in China mentioned eating sea horses.
"Oh, those poor things," he said. "How could you?"
I went, "Huh?"
It's like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against
those chocolate chicks they sell at Easter. "A sea horse is not related to
an actual horse," I said. "They're fish, and you eat fish all
the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?"
He said he couldn't eat sea horses because they were
friendly and never did anyone any harm, this as opposed to those devious,
bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new
potatoes.
The dishes we had at the Farming Family Happiness were meant
to be shared, and as the pretty woman with the broad face brought them to the
table, the man across from me beamed and reached for his chopsticks. "You
know," he said, "this country might have its ups and downs but it is
virtually impossible to get a bad meal here."
I didn't say anything.
Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood.
I'd thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated
into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. "Not bad," said
the girl seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth.
Jill was American, a Peace Corps volunteer who'd come to Chengdu to
teach English. "In Thailand last year, I ate dog face," she told me.
"Just the face?"
"Well, head and face." She was in a
small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To
show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good
eating. The head was supposedly the best part, and rather than offend her
hosts, Jill ate it.
This, for many, is flat-out evil but the rest of the world
isn't like America, where it's become virtually impossible to throw a dinner
party. One person doesn't eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can't
digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won't touch
it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians
, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into
consideration and it's actually rather refreshing that a 22-year-old from the
suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the shar
pei.
I'd like to be more like Jill, but in China something kept
holding me back. In clean, sophisticated Japan the rooster blood, arranged upon
a handmade plate between the perfect, tempura snow pea and a radish carved to
look like a first trimester foetus, would have seemed a fine idea. "We
ought to try making this at home," I'd have said to Hugh. Here, though, I
thought of the sanitation grade, and of the rooster, pecking maggots out of
human faeces before being killed. Most of the restaurants in China to me
smelled dirty, though what I was smelling was likely some unfamiliar
ingredient, and I was allowing the things I'd seen earlier in the day – the
spitting and snot blowing, etc – to fill in the blanks.
Then again, maybe not.
While on our trip we ate at normal, everyday places, and
sometimes bought food on the street. Our only expensive meal was in Beijing,
where we went alone to a fancy restaurant recommended by an acquaintance. The
place was located in an old warehouse and had been lavishly decorated. There
was a wine expert and someone whose job it was to drop by every three minutes
and refill your water glass. We had the Peking duck, which was expertly carved
rather than hacked and was served with little pancakes. Towards the end of the
meal, I stepped into the men's room to pee and there, disintegrating in the
western-style toilet, was an unflushed turd, a little reminder saying,
"See, you're still in China!"
Back at the table I asked for the bill. Then
I remembered where I was and amended it to "the check". In
France, you can die waiting to pay for your meal, which is something I've never
understood. "How can they not want me out of here?" I'll think. Ten
minutes might pass. Then 20, me watching as the waiter does everything but
accept my goddamn money.
I'll say that for China, though – offer to pay and before
you can stab a rooster with a rusty screwdriver someone has taken you up on it.
I think they want to catch you before you get sick, but whatever the
reason, within minutes you're back on the street, searching the blighted
horizon and wondering where your next meal might be coming from.
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