Eating Adventures 2, the Sequel

What I've learned since my last entry is that, although the practice of eating anything is a habit throughout China, it is more than just a habit in the province of Canton. Guangzhou especially is a place where you go to eat. A chap from the American consulate, who has lived in China on and off for decades, showed a few of us around Guangzhou. He told me that the Cantonese associate a certain machismo with omnivorousness; this practice has roots that date back to ancient times, when scholars would make lists of everything edible, to lay up in store for future famines.

The more general principle seemed to me based on the saying, "You are what you eat." The Chinese believe that each edible thing is good for a certain part of the body, and much of what you see in the market is not sold as some sort of sick nouvelle cuisine, but for its medicinal properties.

This is evident in that part of Qingping market whose archway greets you with the sign "View and Admire Insects and Fish." A great many of the stalls sell only one kind of herb or animal, such as ginseng root, turtles, dried seahorse, etc. There is one gent who dozes beside sacks of desiccated, coiled-up snakes of different sorts. There are dried beetles, meal worms, scorpions (all kinds), and centipedes. And gypsy-like guys who hang out at the entrances with tiger claws and horns and antlers of various kinds laid out on blankets, who swiftly cover it all up if you try to take a photo.

The market occupies two streets that cross each other. The two arms with herbs and insects make sense, in an esoteric way: there are so many kinds of roots and herbs, hundreds, perhaps thousands, that you start to think they must do something. Every animal and plant possesses some property or quality to an extreme degree and, if you tend to the ancient (and perhaps "outmoded") view that man bears some relation to the natural world, you start to see all these plants and creatures radiating from a diagram of a naked man, each one connected by a line to some part of the body and, as I said before, it all makes sense and not superstition.

The live animal section, which unfortunately had neither monkeys nor dogs the day I visited, makes me wonder a little more. So here's the list you've been waiting for, all of them alive but not really kicking:

The whole flavor of the experience is summed up in the following exchange: John (pointing to cats): So what are these for...exactly? Vendor: You eat, you pet, whatever! You buy?

I began to wonder what in the hell eating a water beetle could do for you, especially if it ended up tasting like chicken. And then I saw a one-legged beggar with a crutch dragging his body down the market, through the filth of saltwater and excrement...must...get...out....

But hey, I went to a dinner a few nights later and ate eel, snake, turtle, pigeon - and had another helping of that delicious spicy jellyfish. I would've eaten anything they put in front of me. Why? For the westerner it is aesthetic; for the Chinese it is something else. I put it under the heading "experience," and leave it at that, for comparisons are odious.

My last glimpse of China was in Hong Kong, walking past a restaurant that was steaming big turtles in a big copper wok. Hong Kong - there's another can of worms, to be opened next time.

Your man currently in China,
Dan Nelson

Eating Adventures

Once I got over the initial shock -- Whoa, they're shouting such a strange language, all the signs like neon hieroglyphs, bicycles, motorcycles, taxis all competing for the chance to flatten me, everyone staring at the big-nosed white man--I began to wonder what really distinguished filthy hazy Shanghai from a filthy hazy American city, or Xiamen, which is a charming place that seems a little older and a little less influenced by The West, from picturesque parts of the western world. Xiamen possesses more of the distinctive than Shanghai, but in both I was overwhelmed by what the Chinese would call cuisine and what Tex would probably call -- zoology.

This is what everyone is most interested in anyway: "Whadda they eat, whadda they eat?" Well, in short, whatever will fit in their mouths. Paul Theroux wrote an excellent account of traveling through China by steam train called Riding the Iron Rooster. In it he notes the scarcity of refrigeration in southern China and the subsequent practice of keeping everything alive until the last minute before it is eaten. One of the first things you notice is that most restaurants have tanks, even the little noodle huts a dozen to a block. In the tanks you see fish, prawns, eels -- if there were tanks at all there were eels.

We visited an excellent place the day before leaving Xiamen. Upon entering the gilded crimson lobby, you are confronted with a hundred tanks containing every sea creature you can think of swarming, squirming, squirting (but not all of them frolicking) to see how the octopi look today, hmm are the prawns lively enough? During a most excellent meal of many courses, we saw spicy jellyfish, steamed whole fish, some minuscule kind of mollusk, snake and fish soup -- in which both creatures had apparently been lopped up without ceremony and thrown into the pot, Amy receiving the fish head which was good luck(?) -- and steamed octopus, the head of which has the consistency of a soft-boiled egg, but is very tasty.

Damion and Kelly report seeing tongue on a stick and, on Gulang Yu island, a cart loaded with rats (on sticks?) bound for the table. And there are lots of creatures which are not so weird, but -- like tiny chicks plucked and fried whole hanging next to the chickens, ducks, intestines, and brains in the restaurant windows. Ah, but this was nothing, the tip of the iceberg: we hadn't seen Qingping Market, in Guangzhou, yet. About this next time!

Your Man (formerly) in the Pacific
Dan Nelson

March 16, 1998

"No more salad!" Andy announced yesterday. The lettuce, the cucumbers, the tomatoes have all been eaten up. Occasionally we get eggplant, some onions. The day before we ran out of fresh fruit. Now we'll have three weeks of soft, soggy canned everything, and lots of that patron vegetable of schooners - canned corn. The loss of "fresh" goes beyond the usual deckhand obsession with food (the two primary thoughts of the deckhand being belly and bunk) and becomes a "quality of life" issue. The feeling of isolation that we live on an island for a month at a time, outside of which there may as well not exist an entire world, is made more keen when the tangible reminders of the rest of the world become absent. If you're peeling an orange, you know, at the very least, that there was a fruit tree somewhere a few weeks ago. But canned fruit? It could be left over from the '50s!

Oh well, even if it SEEMS that time utterly ceased sometime in the past weeks, we KNOW that's not true, right? Every four hours, there is another little dot closer to the left of the chart, the speedometer always reads something besides zero, the position on the GPS is constantly changing. But none of these are tangible evidence that time is passing and that we are moving. The clouds offer more substantial testimony of the reality of change - their shapes are more numerous and more varied than those of terrestrial landscapes.

Today I watched a rain cloud astern of us - its dark underbelly and the column of dark rain leaning to the south that seemed to hold the cloud aloft, though it floated freely in the air and I knew its lightness. Though I've seen rain clouds before, this was unlike any other. Later, fair weather clouds began to dominate the sky. Their undersides lay all at one level giving me the impression that the sea was covered, all around the rim of the horizon, by a transparent lid on which the clouds were spooned and painted. Ahead lay some thin wisps of cloud as if a dull white pigment that turned gray at the edges had been applied in long strokes. Interspersed with these heaps of meringue and near the horizon were iceberg-like formations of plaster-of-paris. And on our port quarter another rain cloud passed, not like a portico over columns of water, but an indistinct messy mass penetrating even to the sea surface, within which visibility was sure to have disappeared.

The stars too - made more distinct for the lack of mountain, tree, and all else that occupies the senses on land - begin to reveal their own character as the observation of many nights distinguishes their features and habits. This was true especially on the passage to Hawaii during which our course was almost constant for three weeks. When we came on watch at midnight, Capella in the constellation Auriga shone her distinct white over the starboard bow as she descended into the ocean. As winter wore on, Scorpius began to appear astern with the dull red Antares, the heart of the scorpion, poking its head and claws above the horizon. Now, by one o'clock, the entire scorpion is visible, tail curling like a gigantic seahorse, with the Archer appearing later to the left, below it. And the ever-present big and little Bears wheel to starboard, standing now on their heads, now on their feet.

The stars, the clouds, the swell - none of them ultimately contradict the impression that we are living in lala land. It's all very real, all three-hundred and sixty unbroken degrees of it. Sometimes the world of the ship produces the feeling of liberation we seek; other times, there's that feeling of...CONFINEMENT!!

But more about that in a few days on the next episode of "As the Windlass Turns...."

Your Man in the Pacific
Dan Nelson

Log from the Foc'le

March 13, 1998

One morning last week we caught three Mahi Mahi, two of them almost simultaneously. So the lines were brought in for a couple of days, and we had Mahi variously prepared: cheviche (a kind of Spanish raw marinade), teriyaki, and good ol' fashioned fried. One of them was caught by a lure that John gave to Jennifer on her birthday. The lure is worthy of description. It's a green and pink squid that has an actual sardine (or something) encased in plastic at the forward end of the squid. The funny thing is that the weight in the lure is coming out of the sardine's mouth and the sardine has little googly eyes that, well, google. Like a stuffed animal. Absurd yet magnificent.

Mahi Mahi love flying fish. And the flying fish love us! The other night Damion was on the helm and a flying fish flew out of the darkness without warning (it's always without warning) right into him. The next night one hurled itself into the aft cabin skylight, ricocheted below, and flopped around on the sole until we threw it overboard.

Yesterday a Mahi, today another Mahi. For some reason I seem to be on bludgeon detail most often, although the general opinion is that pouring vinegar into the gills is the most effective and rapid method of dispatch. But try doing this when the fish is flailing about madly! It struck me as rather morbid that I'm the first to grab a belaying pin when a fish is being hauled in, but I think my motivation is to put the creature out of its misery quickly.

Two nights ago we crossed the international date line -- at 2352 hrs to be precise. That's eight minutes till midnight. At nine minutes till, it was March 10; at eight till, it became March 11; and at midnight, it became March 12. Jan was trying to "wrap his mind around the idea" of the date line, which seems an appropriate way of putting it. But what about the fact that if you keep going west (fast enough), it will become the eleventh again - or would it be the tenth? Someone wrote on the calendar under March 10 - "NEVER HAPPENED."

More later from
Dan
Your Man in the Pacific