is that something you eat?

My teacher and I spent Thursday morning exploring a park that celebrates one of China’s greatest poets. Chengdu is very proud that a peaceful patch of bamboo and flowers once played host to Du Fu’s grass-thatched hut. His was a five-year stay – less than a blip in the face of 5,000 years of history – but facts and figures haven’t dimmed Chengdu’s passion for embracing this Tang dynasty superstar as their own.

The brevity of his residence is dismissed by a stone marker posted near the ruins. The inscription, which you read from right to left – because if I’ve learned anything over the past two years it’s that Chinese delights in making itself difficult – proposes that when mentioning Du Fu, one can overlook the place of his birth and the place of his death, but one cannot forget his thatched cottage in Chengdu. Not that they're biased or anything.

The park is a popular tourist site but it’s also a place where regular people go about their days. Groups of older men come together to “walk their birds.” Each lugs his own birdcages to the park, peels back the red fabric covers shielding the delicate inhabitants and hangs them in the trees for a spell while chatting with his buddies.

I crossed the lawn for a closer look into one of the cages and the bird inside was the same kind as those flying around the park. I couldn't tell if the outing was an invigorating out-of-doors experience for the creature or a crushing reminder of what life was like before being relocated to its current quarters.

Newspaper readers and knitters placed thermoses of tea off to the side and went about their efforts, while letter writers and musicians practiced their arts in the shade of tall and sleepy bamboo. Kids under the care of their grandparents fed crackers to fish so fleshy and active that they seemed on the cusp of making the evolutionary leap into the lives of legged beasts. 

In a newer park located just outside of Dufu’s we found small bands of men and women playing instruments and singing, while more organized choruses carrying sheet music cowed to the demands of musical directors who urged, 再来一次！One more time! 

There was also a bride doing her best to ignore the sticky threat of an ice cream wielding tag-along as she posed for wedding photos. Her steely calm is most likely grounded in the fact that this is not a dress she has purchased herself, but rather a rental provided as part of the photography package.

Dufu’s park is a nice place to be. The paths are cool and shady, and the doors are different shapes. There are lanterns in the eaves and ponds in the distance. A giant bell hangs at the top of a tower and from that height you can see the rest of the city in the grey scrubby distance.

But a morning like this begs the question, how do you keep a good day going?

With a leisurely lunch, of course.

My teacher invited me to try a favorite dish of hers at a favorite place. So we drove to the restaurant and joined two lone diners and a team of bored staff milling around the empty dining room. My teacher explained that most people come there for dinner and she also mentioned that the women next to us were from Shanghai. She could tell by the dialect they spoke. 

Then she asked if there was anything I wouldn’t eat. I said I would eat whatever she ordered except for offal. She said ok and ordered two dishes. They were not offal. They were pig ears and mudfish.

Pig ears and mudfish.

Were I not sitting down to a meal in China I would not have associated these two items with anything I'd purposefully put in my mouth and chew. But if you’re willing to go with the flow and not look back then this path is inevitable.

The "path" is a stream of moments that strike as strange to western eyes. And as they crash into your space you have a thousand opportunities to ask yourself why you think the way you do and why you see the world a certain way.

If you decide to grab hold of your notions and flee the scene no one will be surprised. You’re not from here and the people who are from here will be the first ones to suggest this as your excuse. 

But if you don’t accept that notion, and if you don’t want them to either, than you can belly up and dig in. So we washed our chopsticks in our tea – cleaning them with tea is better than not cleaning them at all – and dug in.

The ears came to the table first. They were room temperature slices that demanded very active chewing due to the disconcertingly crunchy layer of cartilage sandwiched in the middle. This is a perfect example of how the Chinese palette appreciates a food’s texture as much as its taste. No one minds having to work for the pleasure of a good dish and the work itself is part of that pleasure. 

Once you discover that after all of the chewing there's a real taste to what you're eating, and that it’s a salty smoky taste, you’re willing to keep up with the work of it. I'd also suggest you take advantage of the pile of chili pepper sitting next to the ears on the plate.

"Sitting next to the ears on the plate..." That's certainly the first time I've used those words in describing a meal. 

But as long as we're getting into descriptions, I'll say that pig ears taste about as close to bacon as something that's not bacon can get. And really, couldn't we just consider them as bacon from a different neighborhood of the pig?

The second dish was a fragrant vat of spices and oil that held a mess of small ugly fish. Their heads, which had been disengaged from their bodies, were lurking alongside the garlic and celery vines. The lack of heads is supposed to make the fish easier to eat although I doubt anyone mistakes this dish as something easy to consume.

Each slip of a fish holds a string of petite bones at its core. Eating the flesh without snagging a mouthful of tiny daggers is an art. Thankfully I received instruction from my teacher and learned that one is to start at the tail and gently use their lips to urge the flesh from the bones.

In this way you play to the direction of the spine and hopefully avoid taking in any more bones than is absolutely necessary. It’s careful work and the flesh is maddeningly fragile. But when you can steal away with a chunk of the complexly spiced fish it is absolutely worth it.

The eating was deliberate and slow-going and where on my teacher’s plate there was a calm stack of perfectly clean, silvery spines, mine held the site of a ham-fisted massacre. There was no doubt as to who was the beginner here. My "clean" bones lugged nearly as much meat as the amount I’d managed to extract and eat.

A large chunk of the refuse was due to a change I’d made mid-meal. It turns out that fish heads are easier to plunder than their bodies, so I started hunting for them instead. And if I hadn't already realized that this was something I’d never done before, my teacher took care to mention that she’d always thought westerners didn’t eat fish heads.

Later in the day Shi-wen found it necessary to first point out that dogs are the biggest fans of pig ears in the U.S., and second, that any fish drudging around in a Chinese river can’t possibly be all that good for you to eat. That’s fine, I said, but I’m still happy I put these things in my mouth. I’m also pretty pleased with myself for holding a set of chopsticks (and a tiny fish spine) with my right hand while taking a photo with my left.

And by the way, Shi-wen ate this stuff too.

My teacher is very considerate and before we’d even dug into our meal she’d had the waitresses separate out hearty portions for me to take home for Shi-wen to try. They were ladled into clear plastic bags, the standard way leftovers are packaged here.

That night I warmed the fish in the microwave and set the ears on a plate. Shi-wen and I sat down at the table and I tried to teach him how to avoid the mudfish bones. I recommended dipping the pig ears in the spice. 

He would flinch and I would try to convince.

Clearly something had shifted. 

Now I was the one selling pig ears and mudfish as perfectly normal to eat.