入乡随俗, or, when in rome…

As an American living abroad, there are times when you’re with a group of local friends who are looking forward to eating a favorite food that you, the foreigner, have never eaten. They’re aware that you’ve never eaten it and so out of a hospitality-driven kindness they’ll often pre-emptively excuse you from eating the dish.

Like last week when my teacher pointed at the menu and told our luncheon host that, “She doesn’t eat those, but she’ll be ok with the rest of us eating them.”

Sometimes I think my teachers forget that I understand Chinese. But the shocking reality is that even when it's Chinese that has been smothered with the local dialect I still manage to understand. Or at least I understand a good chunk of it. So when my teacher used the word “she,” I already knew the she was me. So I asked, “What don’t I eat?”

I could see her think it through… Wait, how does she know I’m talking about her? Oh, right, she speaks Chinese. But how can she speak Chinese? Oh, right, I’m her teacher. With the internal dialogue complete, she finally told me, in Chinese, that the food up for consideration was chicken feet.

Chicken feet... It's normal to see people here walking down the street gnawing the hell out of these knobby, scratchy appendages with big goofy smiles on their faces.  The smile is probably just the most advantageous mouth position for ripping tiny ligaments from tiny bones, but that doesn’t mean they’re not enjoying it. In fact, from what my teacher tells me, chicken feet are the most popular snack for men who are out drinking and women who are at home watching TV.

So, would I eat chicken feet? That’s a question we all saw coming.

After ramming myself into the middle of the conversation, I certainly deserved it. And actually, it was kind of my point.

Truth is that in the U.S. I probably wouldn’t eat chicken feet. But here?

This is where my China eating plan comes into play. The plan is as follows: If I’m with someone I trust, and they’re eating something that, although perhaps a bit different from a western perspective, tastes good to them, then I’m going to try eating it too.

And that's how I ended up with a chicken foot in my mouth.

It’s also how I discovered that the bone soup (aka tempura’ed pig bone chunks with remainders of meat still clinging to them floating in broth along with seaweed) was as delicious as the chicken feet. And that the hand-torn noodles with small rabbit are amazing.

So then yes, I’d have to agree with my hosts: chicken feet are good. I expected they'd be tasteless and annoying, but instead they were a flavorful and challenging eating puzzle. It’s labor intensive but you’re mostly eating skin, and the people in the kitchen made sure that the skin tastes good.

I just said skin tastes good. And not just any skin -- the skin from a chicken’s foot. 

I guess it’s official: my China eating plan is working.

my chinese family tree

It's true. I've acquired a Chinese relative.

As of Tuesday I’m tangentially related to a little girl named Tang Ci Yan. I don’t know where she lives, and I’m not super clear on which Chinese characters make up her name, but it’s all been recorded in the town register so I guess it’s official. Or at least as official as these sorts of holiday-driven-godparent-like-pseudo-adoptions of strangers’ children go.

There isn’t a parent in any country that doesn’t want their kid to grow up big and strong, to find their way to a long and prosperous life. And here in China, where by law most people are only allowed to have one child, there is a traditional holiday, 保保节, BaoBaoJie, that pairs children with strong-looking strangers in the hopes of drawing on that strength to give the child some additional life-long protection.

To become one of these “godparents” you have to travel to the one town in all of China that still celebrates the holiday with fervor --- 广汉 Guanghan. And fortunately for us, Guanghan is only an hour’s drive from Chengdu. So on Tuesday we drove over and went straight to the park where the event was being held.

Once you’re there, you find yourself walking through thick crowds that are multi-tiered and eyeing all of the prospective candidates like meat in a market. But don't assume that a person automatically gets to be one of these sort-of-godparents. It's not that simple. You have to be selected. Or more accurately put, you have to be dragged off by strangers.

A relative or a paid finder literally handpicks their target from the teeming crowd and drags them through the masses to meet the child. And in my case, as in all the others, as the dragging began, the crowds quickly parted to let us through. Then after we'd passed, the crowds closed behind us again with a near audible thud. All the while the man who had taken hold of my arm was yelling, “来了! 来了!” She’s arrived, she’s arrived.

This is probably the closest I will ever come to experiencing the insanity that comes with fame, the thousands of eyes trained on you, along with their cameras. There was a lot of excited shouting and I quickly learned that if I raised my hand, or gave a whoop, the crowd responded by ratcheting up their own hoots and hollers. 

I felt like I was on the floor of a stadium and the crowd was doing the wave, except that I was the one crossing the space, and the peak of the wave -- that cresting surge of standing and screaming -- never moved from the front of my face.

There is no way to accurately express what it feels like to have a wall of people part to let you through while at the same time pressing in to see you more closely. Along the way I was also pulled aside to hug children, was interviewed on camera, and took a photo with a man who told me this was the first time he had ever seen an American.

I didn’t see any other non-Chinese in Guanghan that day and when I walked down the sidewalk people would literally turn and stare. Even from across the street I could read their lips: 外国人. Foreigner. I was visiting the city with two of my Chinese teachers and one of them told me that after she had been separated from our group it was very easy to ask random strangers where the foreigner was. When she’d started to describe me further they would cut her off and say, "The foreigner went that way."

It’s exactly that foreigner aspect that made me an attractive candidate to “adopt” the little girl. And it’s the same foreignness that made the crowd hoot and holler. I could say I felt like a victorious gladiator before a roaring crowd, but I’m guessing I more closely resembled a dancing bear, or better yet, a unicorn – something rarely seen but said to have special powers.

The TV crew that trotted alongside me first asked if I spoke Chinese. After I said yes the reporter asked a series of questions including what I thought of the event? I said it was really interesting and a lot of fun. I didn’t mention that I appreciated the irony in placing one of the government’s omnipresent slogan posters, a red banner with white lettering, immediately inside the park's entrance. It read: 少生晚生 都要优生 生男生女 都要优育 or very roughly, "Having fewer children is awesome and remember that having a daughter is just as nice as having a son."

Despite the festive atmosphere, some passersby actually put up a fight at being selected. I imagine this is because for the newly minted Chinese “godparents” this new relationship can actually involve a commitment of time and money. They're expected to occasionally telephone and check in on the child, or to give them small gifts each year. But for me, most of these expectations are lifted.

The "adoption" process was very simple: I gave my four-year old new relative a big hug and a simple gift (a lollipop) to cement the relationship, and then we were officially registered in the town's logbook. Another hug and that was that. Now I just need to think of Tang Ci Yan each year on 保保节. And I will.

Later that night when I was watching the news I learned that the man who paired me with Tang Ci Yan is a sort of professional dragger who makes money from relatives for finding a suitable candidate. Good to know that even the professionals thought I was a good catch. 

But the part of the news that I really wanted to see, I missed.

According to one of my teachers, once we were back in Chengdu she turned on the nightly news and there I was, being interviewed as I moved through the crowd. I was speaking Chinese and per her account I made no mistakes. Zero.

She went so far as to tell my other teacher that I had never spoken Chinese as well as this and that my tones were a lot less “weird” than usual. Yes, she actually used the Chinese word for weird: 奇怪. Coming from her this is high praise.

As for my new Chinese relative, the most important thing is that a big, strong stranger is thinking of her at least once a year and sending good vibes her way.


Happy 保保节 Tang Ci Yan!

chinese road trip scenery

Looked out the car window and saw this barreling down the road next to us. Definitely don't want to know where he's headed.

in expert hands

They call it an alley but it’s really just a small stretch of street so crammed with bicycles, and cars, and random people who’ve stopped to sell one kind of fruit or another, that the already small space narrows into something smaller and more intimate. The alley is really a neighborhood, a trillion-celled organism that thrives in the heart of a giant city, and both sides of this stretch are relentlessly packed with restaurants ranging in size from small to tiny.

It was raining when we went there for lunch this week. We were walking through something between a fine mist and heavy drops and we just kept walking until we almost reached the end. This is where you find the restaurant that Shi-wen came home talking about last week.  

We sat on plastic stools and ordered off the menu on the wall. Or better said, we asked the 10-year old server some questions and listened as his mother yelled answers from the kitchen. Together they figured out what the foreigners wanted and then brought the plates to our table.

I absolutely got what I wanted: 辣面, spicy noodles, the foundational fast food of Sichuan and of my lunches. I eat them so often that I’m used to explaining to waiters and restaurant owners that despite being a foreigner I somehow still manage to eat spicy food. And because we foreigners are still so memorable here, and because I have a habit of going back to the same places, I find it both kind of charming and kind of alarming how quickly the staff at these places remember me and what I like to eat. They see me and ask, “Spicy noodles?,” and I nod, yes. And if there is someone I don’t know working that day, any person I do know will automatically pre-empt the inevitable question, telling their colleague that yes, yes, this foreigner does eat spicy food.

It could just be me but I find people here to be friendly and warm, especially when you’re obviously in need of Chinese attention. Like when I was trying to mix up my noodles in the alley. My efforts caught the attention of the waiter’s mother, the cook, who was already interested in me because I was one of those peculiar foreigners who take pictures of their food. 

As I was mixing up my noodles she stepped in and told me that I needed to do a better job. I needed to whirl that pile of deliciousness sitting on top of my noodles into the depths of the pile. In essence, I needed to be able to use chopsticks, and use them to manage multiple meters of noodles, with much more finesse.

But there was a better solution. She took my chopsticks from me, and standing beside our table made what can only be described as beautiful love to my noodles. She carefully stretched them, rolled them, lifted and spun them. Her rhythms were regular with occasional surges, and I’ll be damned if by the time she was done those noodles hadn’t been transformed, each length now coated in its own beautiful cloak of spice and meat. "See," she said, "every noodle now has the flavor."

And they did. They absolutely did. Every bite was what she promised, a balanced mix of spice and salt, with slashes of cilantro and nut. And after I told her how much I loved them she returned to the kitchen, satisfied. We were then left alone to eat while her waiter ran around out front with another kid. At one point the two boys were tossing a coin back and forth and it found its way into the hood of my coat before tumbling onto the floor. The boy apologized, and through my noodles I garbled, “没关系,” no problem.

This is exactly what I like about these places. They’re normal. But they’re a different kind of normal. A normal I’d never before been a part of, but that’s now just down the street. Chengdu normal.