I used to love Chinese food, the kind that I ate in the elegant Chinese restaurants in Washington, which serve the predictable egg rolls, barbecued spare ribs, chicken chow-mein and egg-foo-yang, and even the door-to-door delivery type in cardboard boxes with the plastic pouches of soy and duck sauce. The exotic smell of the unfamiliar food was always enticing, but now, after one year of eating the real Chinese food, I yearn for the familiar, the simple meat and potato variety.
I have not had a fresh garden salad since I got here - the Chinese boil their salad leaves; they eat very strange foods: last night, the appetizers consisted of the ever present chicken feet, the cold sliced duck with finger thick fat under the skin, a leafy green vegetable soaked in oil, chewy jelly fish, broiled pork on the bone, and some terrible tasting sliced cold cuts, beef tongue and peanuts.
The main courses were pork belly with one inch fat strips; boiled shrimp in the shells; Hainan chicken, which is served cold, totally undercooked with the blood still running in the veins; turtle stew, served with the turtle shell, head, feet and skin; mushrooms and mixed vegetables; some fish which was smothered with bamboo shoots and tomatoes and cooked on the table; crabs in the shell, which had to be cracked with the teeth because no other tools were provided; two kinds of soups; sticky sweet rice; tofu; Chinese steamed bread; and fresh fruit as desert.
I once tried the chicken feet, the white variety, which are served with horseradish sauce; they were eatable, because all I tasted was the sauce, but this is not something I would take a liking to very quickly. Of course, in my position as honored guest at the dinners I attend, I have to eat all the food that is served - once. Then, if I do not like it, I can decline, although that does not always work, because it would embarrass the host if the guests do not like the food he is serving. So, I grin and bear it....
When I came to China the first time in 1989, I made the mistake of pretending that I liked the snake dish that was served, with the result that every meal thereafter contained another snake variety. I am now more careful in my choice of words when I thank the host, but still, I have had to eat some pretty weird stuff: cows veins, fish stomach, fish head, fish eyes, eel, pigeon, turtles, sea weeds, cows throat, heart, lungs, pork intestines, teeny octopuses with their arms all curled up, etc.
The worst, and most difficult to swallow, are the bugs: the ants, overgrown maggots, the beetle bug type and the scorpions. The latter are great delicacies and said to have some medicinal qualities. They have no taste whatsoever, and neither have the bugs, but the thought alone makes one sick.
What I hate most about the Chinese food is the way it is served - everything is on the bone, or still in the shell. Take a chicken for example: after removing the chicken breast, which is reserved for another dish, the cook takes one big machete and chops the chicken across the ribs into little bite-size pieces, each one containing a tiny bit of meat and the rest is bone, fat or gristle. In feeding the eyes, a bowl of chicken cut up like this goes a long way, but not in feeding the stomach.
A person unskilled like me in the art of chewing food in one corner of the mouth and spitting out from the other, will not succeed in getting much nourishment from food "on the bone". I have a similar problem with the shrimp that are served still in the shell. The traditional way of eating them is to put the entire shrimp in the mouth, somehow separate the shell from the meat with the teeth and the tongue, and spit out the shell.
Of course, all the spitting is done onto the same plate where the fresh food is served, or on the table cloth next to it, where one can find a collection of chicken bones, fish grates, duck gristle, and the usual variety of half chewed and discarded food. This method goes for all other shell food, such as crabs, which are served cut in several pieces and require good teeth to manage.
The proper way of eating in China requires one's head to be about three inches from the plate, to either spit as above or shuffle food into the mouth or slurp the soup. The slurping is necessary because the soup spoons have a funny shape and are too big to fit into one's mouth. There are no serving utensils provided, so everybody just digs with the chopsticks in the serving dish, picks up whatever they will hold and skillfully maneuvers the load across the table and into the mouth - no matter that the sauce or part of the food drops into the other dishes.
Smoking and burping are standard procedure (although I have put a stop to smoking at my table on account of an "allergy", which everybody seems to accept), as is drinking heavy rice wine in a ceremony that requires one to get up every time someone lifts the glass to toast, which is constantly.
Old food never gets removed from the table and new dishes are simply piled on top of the old ones up to three layers high - this, as I found out, is the poor man's way of showing his neighbor how many dishes he can afford to eat. After about five minutes into a meal, the table looks like a war zone - with pieces of food splattered all over the table from chop stick mistakes, cigarette butts, spit out bones, and the like.
Needless to say, I am not looking forward to these lunch and dinner occasions, which are intended to "entertain" me as the honored guest. I sure hope you'll have less trouble finding edible food at the Olympics! Surely there'll be a McDonalds somewhere...
Andrea R Lucas is an entrepreneur, writer and mentor who has traveled extensively all over the world. She is a member of several travel clubs and entertains her readers with amusing anecdotes from her trips abroad and within the US. As a travel consultant with http://www.celeratravel.worldventures.biz - Andrea gets incredible travel deals and dream trips at a fraction of the regular travel costs.
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