China
I <3 Crayfish Pizza
Found in Chengdu. All their restored cultural streets (where you can shop in trendy boutiques and dine in French restos) have a requisite Starbucks.
There is a cafe in Tianzifang on trendy Taikang Lu in Shanghai which is populated not by white Macbook-wielding, double espresso-drinking, tight pants-wearing loathsome hipsters, but by yeah, a lot of stuffed animals. That’s my friend Danielle embracing a popular cartoon lamb.
Here’s a prime example of “glocalization,” as we anthropologists like to say. Crayfish pizza, anyone? (Crayfish is a popular local dish which I wrote about for GoodEater.org.) Papa Johns knows that mere pepporoni is not enough to move Shanghainese through the door.
I paid 10 yuan (about 1.50USD) for this laminated photo in a tourist site in Chengdu. The girl who took it was curt and rude, declaring only the most bored and hateful-sounding of “SMILE!”s as she took a singular photo in front of several backdrops. So this was the only decent one, and I ended up giving it to my mom since she loves traditional Chinese dress. Me, I could definitely live without it. The necklines are way too high – qipaos a prime example.
Weird Eats: Bull penis and live scorpions. Also, Starbucks coffee.
My sojourn to Beijing was marked mostly by my daily (nay, twice daily) visits to the altar of that is holy in the Middle Kingdom: Starbucks, charmingly translated/transliterated as “星巴克” (xing ba ke). There, I soothed my cultureshock embattled soul with endless tall iced coffees; occasionally, I’d spring for a muffin or biscotti, which tasted excruciatingly American. It was like imbibing a potent concoction of NASCAR, Elvis, Old Glory, and apple pie.
When I wasn’t ensconced in Starbucks, I’d be wandering the streets, trying to find a nice, small eat. As I made my way down Beijing’s Wangfujin shopping street, I found their “xiao chi jie,” or snack street.
I knew they sold weird crap on sticks, but I had no idea that the scorpions on those skewers are actually alive. Best of all, the sellers would occasionally give the counter a slap, just so the little critters would wriggle their sad, doomed little legs. Can’t you hear their anguished cries? Neither can I.
Just to prove they’re alive, I uploaded a video.
I actually didn’t eat this, since I got a case of sticker shock. 20 kuai! For a kebab!! Of scorpions!!!
But I did what comes next: bull penis on a stick. I’ve totally emasculated that poor animal, brains, balls, and all.
Mmm. Uhhh. This is unpleasant. My male friend also gave it a try.
What does it taste like? Not very good. But it also wasn’t prepared very well – it had gotten very gummy and had an unpleasantly gluey texture. The texture varied from the shaft, which was wider and had a harder, almost cartilage-like core, to the tip, which was just gooey nothing.
I don’t think i want to repeat the experience anytime soon, but maybe I can blame it on poor preparation.
To cap it off, here are some photos from the Forbidden City, predictably overrun by tourists, including this overzealous Chinese woman covered by not only a parasol, but also a towel and sunglasses (not pictured).
Look how intense that is!!!
The perils of being Chinese in China
My China experience was often frustrating. Though I imagined myself to be extremely flexible and open-minded, living for 3 months in a foreign country, despite speaking the language, proved to be a challenge.
I am, for all intents and purposes, an American girl. If China taught me nothing else, it’s that my “Chineseness” doesn’t extend all that far below my skin tone, even if my Mandarin isn’t too shabby for a girl with her feet planted firmly on US soil since the tender age of two. When I was out with white friends, I was surprised at how the level of service was consistently higher. They were never seemed to bear the brunt of bored, dismissive glances or suffer through outright hostility. Chinese people, according to them, were so sweet and nice! Are you kidding me? I’d always reply, deeply jealous that I couldn’t slip a well-oiled path through my summer, coddled and swaddled in my foreignness.
“I think it helps that I don’t understand Chinese,” one friend admitted to me. “If I knew what they were saying, I’d just get angry.”
And I definitely had hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing moments of anger. There was the shoe repairman who ripped me off, did a shoddy job, then ignored me as I stood literally over his shoulder as if I were a statue. It was hard to explain at first why I found this so infuriating, but I eventually realized it wasn’t because of his crooked pricing scheme. I’m in the fortunate position where I can afford to get a little bit ripped off – what I wanted was better treatment in return. I suddenly hated hovering in cultural limbo and realizing at the same time how arrogant and self-serving my dissatisfaction was.
If only, I mused, I looked as white as I felt.
Let’s compare two situations: interactions with Chinese service people by myself, and when I was with foreign friends. If I was by myself, service could range anywhere from abominable to decent. It was a dice throw on however they felt that day – one time, I tried to buy a skirt and the shop girl gave me nothing but attitude, marked up the price for no apparent reason, and seemed angry my arrival forced her to get up from her chair. (It was so ridiculous that I didn’t buy the skirt.) An editor at City Weekend one time had me call up a shop in English, even though I could speak Chinese, just since by virtue of sounding like a foreign customer they’d make the effort to actually answer her inquiry.
Of course this isn’t ALL service in China. I’ve also had my share of truly friendly, professional, and memorable service experiences, particularly with good taxi drivers. But the best way to ensure prompt, respectful service is just to be obviously, blatantly foreign. People are far more helpful and forgiving, in part because the “laowai” represent the moneyed expat class. It’s a double edged sword, and one I wished I were on the opposite side of for convenience’s sake. Why see the “real China” when it’s one that’s even more unpleasant and humiliating than for Chinese locals who know the ground rules? Why would I want to sign up for a summer of waiters copping attitude when I genuinely wanted to like the culture and people?
People most of the time sensed I wasn’t really Chinese. 90% of the time, they’d guess I was Korean. One time I even just told a DVD salesman I was, only to be called out on it by another customer who asked for a Korean TV series recommendation. (Sorry, I told her, I’m a Korean girl who only watches English films.)
There’s a part of me that’s bitter about the summer I could have had. I imagine some of the more traumatic experiences might have been erased – like that time a shop girl pointed to a Chinese sign and bitchily asked me to read it, just to humiliate me with proof of my semi-illiteracy. It’d be pretty unlikely she’d try to pull that on a blonde customer with accented Mandarin. I may have seen a more authentic China, but sometimes, I found it exhausting and painful in a remorselessly personal kind of way. It’s probably why I fell in love with Starbucks while I was there, taking comfort in American drinks and Western-style service. It was a relief not to have to worry about whether they’d take credit cards, make change for me, or get my order correct. Sometimes, you just want coffee. And pizza. And burgers…
Shanghai’s Swedish Chef at T8
For City Weekend, I had a great meal at Xintiandi restaurant T8, billed as one of the world’s top 50 by Conde Nast in 2003, which is now headed by Swedish Chef Roger Johnsson. We ended up chatting after the meal for quite awhile and talked about the food industry, crazy eats, Anthony Bourdain, and preparations of crayfish, among other things. He’s very likable without being over the top, and is turning out a menu of T8′s signature East-meets-West cooking with a strong Scandinavian slant. It’s the kind of food that rewards a bit of thinking and slow chewing to pick up on some of the witty touches, like a sprig of dill that hints at his culinary birthright.
When my coolly elegant waitress brought over this dish and pronounced it “lobster ravioli,” I wasn’t sure what to expect. It took the most bare concepts of ravioli – filling in between two flat pieces of pasta – and used that as a springboard into some other foodstuff altogether. The toasted nut salad on top served as a spicy entree into a refreshing offering below, which married the lobster filling with a crisp bed of green mango and jicama slaw. In between bites, I sampled the sweet rice wine froth piped on the edges. It’s a lot of flavors, but if you eat it patiently, you appreciate the highwire balance between each of the components: just enough of that, just the right sweetness of this, all anchored with a cool crunch at the bottom.
Cured salmon roulade stuffed with goat cheese, sweet corn soup on the side. Those are spicy cornflakes dotting the surface of the soup!
Seafood lasagna, prawn-lobster, salmon-abalone, ginger okra, saffron sauce
Bacon wrapped scallops and crispy prawn, green curry braised leeks, purple potato pancake, orange beurre blanc. I’ve had quite a few bacon wrapped scallops in my day, and while this is a dish that is always delicious on principle (as literally anything involving fresh bacon is), I loved the golden sear on the scallop – too bad I was pretty full by this point already.
And a lighter note to end on: Peach Martini – white peach sorbet, raspberry cream, candied popcorn.
A big bite of Sin
Pick up a copy of the next City Weekend for my “I’ll regret this in a few months, but this is still pretty hilarious” appearance in the cover story. The genetically-blessed male specimen on the left is the boyfriend of the editor’s friend, who appears as one of my wingwomen (if wingwomen to short Asian girls are always so Amazonian) in the photos.
I had no part in writing the story and merely lent a pair of high heels and a permanently quizzical facial expression to ham up various portions of the sad, sorry tale of the mating dance. The kind that begins with 43 year old married bankers to whom gravity has not been kind and ends in the male being eaten alive. Oh wait, that’s in the animal kingdom. Or is it? Stay away from that serpent, Adam.