No Seat for the Squeamish at the Chinese Table

Being the only foreigner amongst the 300,000 city dwellers of Deyang, people in the street stare at me. Girls yell "hallo, hallo." Men in bars come over and fill my glass with beer which I have to swig down clean. Everyone wants to take me dining and drinking, but my (Chinese) girlfriend doesn't want to hold my hand in the street. (She says foreigners have a reputation for sexual abandon and she would be embarrassed to be viewed this way).

I learned to eat like the locals--almost every part of the animal is used. The cuisine of Sichuan province is delicious--garlic, ginger, soy sauce, dried chili, dried peppercorns, and Central Asian spices. Mr. Maa, like other friends, derives much joy in gorging me with things he thinks I will find hard to take. This includes drinking the Chinese way--guzzling down the beer--but at least I won't be paying (in China, the person who issues the invitation pays). Mr. Maa also paid when he invited me out for a hotpot and ordered the broth extra spicy. But when the broth came I had the last laugh--I relished the pungency, while Mr. Maa sweated and choked and blustered.

At the weekends, after the nightclubs, we often finish the night with more beer and more food. We order delicacy foodstuffs, including duck-tongues (soft meat with a cartilage in the middle), rabbit heads, duck feet, baby eels, river crabs, snails, intestines, and small birds marinated and deep-fried whole. Believe it or not, many of these things taste good. As to the others…I had no choice but to acquire the taste. Things like feet, brains, and offal, and lumps of fat crackling in my mouth. I even got used to foodstuffs drenched in oil.

When eating Chinese-style I always make a mess. Try picking a whole fish with chopsticks, gnawing out the meat from the bone with your mouth; or picking out the meat from the bone using only chopsticks. The Chinese don't separate the meat from the bone prior to the cooking--they simply chop up everything and dump it in the pot. Then the diner has to do the hard work of extricating the meat using chopsticks and hands. It's difficult. With many things you have to spit out the bones, that's why the Chinese leave trails of bones and shells and soiled paper serviettes on the table and floor after eating.

The English term, chopsticks, is a misnomer--you can't chop anything with the sticks. Their purpose is to transfer food to the mouth in morsels, which is better for ingestion and digestion--inedible things like slivers of ginger, dried chilies, dried peppercorns, and oil are left behind.

Yet my proficiency with chopsticks is inadequate--I drop bits of food, leave precious meat attached to bones, and find it difficult to pick up loose rice grains. I'm used to taking in mouthfuls at a time, not tidbits or a few grains of rice, and I still have to master the way of holding the bowl close to my mouth and, using chopsticks, hurling the rice into my mouth from the rim of the bowl. I also find it awkward to suck in one-foot-long noodles, or slurp soup down directly from the bowl. I practice all these things, but I still soil my clothes and dirty the table; I can't yet clean the bowl completely of rice. "You're like a baby," my girlfriend keeps joking, "still learning to eat."

Victor Paul Borg
For International Living