Asia Literary Review No. 21, Autumn 2011 - Food

AUTUMN 2011

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No. 21, Autumn 2011 www.AsiaLiteraryReview.Com

No. 21, Autumn 2011

Publisher Ilyas Khan Editor-in-Chief Stephen McCarty Deputy Editor Charmaine Chan Managing Editor Duncan Jepson Poetry Editor Martin Alexander Art Editor John Batten Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Shweta Moogimane, Michael Chau, Alan Sargent Design George Pang Main Cover Image Corbis Back Cover Image Cha Chan Teng, Sheung Wan (Connaught Road), Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin.

Silver gelatin print, 15cm x 23.5cm

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: (852) 2167 8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com, charmaine.chan@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: (852) 2167 8910 / 8980 Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed in Hong Kong by Magnum Offset Printing ISBN: 978-988-18747-8-8 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2011 the contributors This compilation © 2011 Print Work Limited

Contents

Contents Stephen McCarty Felipe Fernández-Armesto Michael Carlo C. Villas

From The Editor

5

History à la Carte

11

Non-Fiction

Seeing

18

Poetry

John Batten

The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

19

Essay Photographs Rick Martin

Murong Xuecun

Table d’Hôte

25

Fiction

Anne Abad

Three Meals Etiquette

38 39

Poetry

Lizzie Collingham

Japan and the Battle for Rice

41

Non-Fiction

Paul Fonoroff and Clarence Tsui

Chop Suey Cinema

51

Non-Fiction

Chandrahas Choudhury Captain

59

Fiction

Sarah Murray

Dining with the Dead

71

Non-Fiction

Erin Swan

Tomatoes

81

Travel

Chrissie Gittins

Frontiers

94

Poetry

Chandran Nair

The World Food Crisis – An Asian Perspective Opinion 3

99

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Jennifer 8. Lee

Making Pasta Sauce: My Independence

109

Memoir

Laksmi Pamuntjak

Two Women Sitting at a Window Table in a Cafe Box

118 121

Poetry

Bernard Cohen

The Chinese Meal, Uneaten

123

Fiction

Fuchsia Dunlop

Sweet and Sour

131

Non-Fiction

Ha Kiet Chau

Lychee Tree and the Other Woman A Man Kissing a Woman Kissing Honey

138 139

Poetry

Wena Poon

Fideuà

141

Fiction

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Scavenging on Gold Mountain: of Food and Poetry

157

Memoir

J.P. O’Malley

Hari Kunzru

165

Profile

Fionnuala McHugh

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

177

Review

Reid Mitchell

Mouth Pursed for a Kiss Jabberwock Sandwiches Wise Onion

182 183 183

Poetry

Victoria Finlay

Indigo by Catherine McKinley

185

Review

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

My Kind of Town ...

Party Like it’s 1966

189

Endpiece

Contributors

4

197

From The Editor

I

   and droll, erudite Australian broadcaster and author Clive James is reporting from a Hong Kong trudging reluctantly towards a long-arranged marriage – or is it towards a sacrificial altar?

No one knows what will become of the well-endowed bride (or votive offering) when the boys from Beijing, already massing at the gates, come to town to claim their inheritance, but on the wretched streets of Tsim Sha Tsui the ever-perceptive James is acting the playfully disdainful foreigner perplexed by the sensory overload of bright lights, big city. The stimulatory excess extends to what he orders for dinner as he sits roadside at a dai pai dong.

“Usually I prefer my Chinese food in a metal foil box with a cardboard lid and a plastic spoon,” intones James in voiceover to shots of live, trussed crabs. “Here it looked a bit too fresh for my taste; any fresher and you’d have to fight it for your life. It all looked a bit X-Files, but I was ready to give it a try,” he declares, as our courageous pseudo-tourist occupies a table near which an inquisitive crowd has assembled to gawk. “When my main dish came something in it was blowing bubbles, so I decided to put it off until never,” he admits, intimidated by the worrying weirdness of it all.

Later, James sets off for a wander through Western District. Here he discovers “the actual, original Chinese Hong Kong” of small businesses, be they dried-goods or bloody butchers’ concerns. He strolls awhile and announces: “A bit further on things started getting really Oriental. At first I thought they were rattan beer coasters,” he says sniffily, peering at the contents of ranks of cardboard boxes. “They were dried coiled snakes.

Python pizza. Dried beetle bar nibbles are something I must try sometime, perhaps after an atomic war.”

James made Postcard from Hong Kong as part of a series for British television in which he hammed up the part of the avuncular tourist guide to everywhere from Berlin to Bombay. But his cultural clowning, which in its Hong Kong rendition reached its apotheosis whenever such bizarre (to Western tastes) comestibles made an appearance, speaks to the outsider in us all about how alienated we may feel when facing a defining characteristic

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of a society not our own: its attitude to its food, what it eats and how it consumes it; what it means and how and why it features in its festivities.

Global travel is a natural part of billions of modern lives and some travellers venture abroad specifically for the joy of eating foreign food. To what extent might the rest of us be flummoxed by the ingredients of a dish cooked for a moveable feast whose significance passes us by?

Our intrepid foodies will enjoy their Shrove Tuesday pancakes in the knowledge that their rich ingredients traditionally represented the last chance for gastronomic indulgence before the month-long Christian fast of Lent, which precedes Easter. Tucking into turkey at Thanksgiving, they might reflect on the fact that they could just as easily be eating pheasant, duck or goose: turkey’s precise role in the original, days-long celebratory dinner party thrown by the revered pilgrims – who blundered into Massachusetts while looking for Virginia – remains hazy. As Edward Winslow, who was to become Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote in a letter: “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.”

While celebrating New Year in Japan, said foodies will be informed enough to know that their osechi ryori, presented in lacquer boxes called jubako, are likely to include, among much else, simmered kombu rolls, mashed sweet potato with sweet chestnuts, dried sardines and burdock, because each dish is invested with meaning and is supposedly evocative of prosperity, health, happiness, a bountiful harvest and so on.

And in Hong Kong, our dauntless food frontiersmen will be clued up on the significance of mooncakes, eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Another harvest thanksgiving, which takes place in the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, the feast also celebrates the first moon landing, accomplished 3,500 years ago by a woman named Chang-O. (Sorry Neil.)

The epicurean adventurers will be au fait with the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, which is held in late April or early May. This Taoist shindig, said to commemorate the miraculous lifting of a plague that once afflicted the Hong Kong island, culminates in a race to the top of a 14-metre “bun tower”, in which athletes who would pass for semi-professional rock climbers scale a conical structure studded with thousands of buns, grabbing the uppermost 6

From The Editor

confections first and collecting as many as they can on the way down. That today’s buns are plastic, to avoid potential injuries promoted by the mushiness of genuine foodstuff accidentally violated during the raucous competition, seems to dilute the enthusiasm for the ceremony not a jot.

So much for the cultural confusion and historical niceties that lurk behind the significance of food. The Asia Literary Review also has weightier reason for turning its attention, for most of this issue, to something none of us can live without. Acclaimed writers from Ernest Hemingway to Junichiro Tanizaki, Margaret Atwood to Maxine Hong Kingston, have used food and the rituals surrounding it to portray conflict, status, mood and even ethnicity. For ourselves, with Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s astute assessment of the historical impact foods have had on societies around the globe; Fuchsia Dunlop’s ode to the sweet and sour pork balls of her youth; Jennifer 8. Lee’s assertion of autonomy manifested through her struggle to create a particularly elusive pasta sauce; Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memories of a childhood haunted by the spectre of starvation; and Bernard Cohen’s tale of marital discord toxic enough to poison an entire restaurant, we hope to augment in some small way the literature of food. Numerous other courses follow, all of which we hope will prove satisfying too.

But a crunch is coming, if reports are to be believed, to the food industry and to how and what we eat. The tale now cooking, albeit on the back burner, is a story seemingly shrouded from public view by phone-hacking newspapers, urban riots, Irene, royal weddings, plummeting markets, tsunamis and football. The food crisis professedly about to descend on Asia and perhaps the world is not a story on everyone’s lips, although it is surely as potent a predicament as global warming.

Chandran Nair’s analysis of Asia’s inability to feed itself (page 99) warns of stark difficulties in catering to burgeoning populations. Mix increasing numbers of people with iniquitous trade regulations, the growing of corn for biofuel instead of dinner, inflationary food prices, climatic upheaval and the neglect of rural economies and the dish produced is foul tasting.

The China Daily recently quoted Li Zhengdong, China’s representative in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, warning of continued global grain price rises coupled with grain yields achieving slower growth than in the previous decade.

As the expanding middle classes of China and India come to demand 7

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an increasingly varied diet, and that irrepressible bugbear the price of oil maintains its steady march skywards, food prices will also continue climbing, repeating the spikes of 2006, 2007 and 2008 and putting staple foods beyond the reach of millions of Asians already afflicted by poverty. In a time of food insecurity, what price political stability? Remember that the touchpaper of the Egyptian revolution (and the riots in Cairo and elsewhere in 2008) was a leap in the cost of bread, or more specifically wheat, of which Egypt is the world’s largest importer.

Consider too the likely impact of changing weather patterns. In Nepal, for example, reports the BBC, Himalayan farmers, echoing the cries of their brethren around the world, complain that their land is drying up by the season. “If there is rainfall,” said one farmer in May, “we can grow a little bit, but it’s hard. Even if we work all year round we can only grow enough to feed us for three months.”

And they are not alone in worrying about water, but for different reasons.

A water war between China and India is threatening to erupt because of Chinese plans to divert the flow of the Tsandpo-Brahmaputra River that rises in Tibet and eventually flows into Arunachal Pradesh and Assam.

Countless Indian (and Bangladeshi) farmers depend on the river for their livelihoods; but to China the Tsandpo-Brahmaputra is a potential source of hydroelectric power, the solution to the problem of infertility in the drought-scarred northeast of the country and the answer to continued silting in the Three Gorges area. The proposed monumental project could realise thousands of miles of canals, pipes, tunnels and dams – and a shooting war with India the moment Beijing turns off the tap.

In a special report in February, The Economist set out to answer what it called “the nine billion-people question”. Nine billion people by 2050 is the projected world population, up from today’s seven billion. The conclusion was that it should be feasible to put food on everybody’s plates, despite land constraints, water shortages, diminishing returns on fertiliser use and growing demand for meat, especially in the newly rich parts of Asia (corn is fed to cows, to fatten them, in tons by the million).

Our saviours, the report suggested, will be advances in plant genetics; a “livestock revolution” requiring more eugenics wand waving; augmentation of yields; and the reduction of harvest waste in African countries particularly – although the Horn of Africa is currently experiencing another famine 8

From The Editor

and web initiatives like The Hunger Site continue to plead for clicks and donations.

Writing in The Jakarta Post in June, however, Professor Richard Fielding, of the Hong Kong University School of Public Health, argued that technological wizardry was unlikely to prove a magic bullet capable of shooting down shortfalls in food supply and other systemic agribusiness failings: “Supply shortages are not the sole, or even most important, reason for present food scarcities,” he stressed. “Monopolies and subsidies distort the economics of production in favour of multinationals: supermarket chains like Tesco pay paltry rates to producers, which discourages production and drives small farmers out of business, yet charge a premium to shoppers in their energy-hungry urban retail outlets. Rural populations and urban slum dwellers don’t get a look in.

“These problems must be addressed before adopting high-technology approaches that move us even further down the road to corporate-controlled food dependence that excludes the wretched of the Earth.”

Fielding’s assertions hint at a secondary debate concerning the nature of the highly industrialised, intensively mechanised operation that feeds much of the world: is it wise to allow food production to be the preserve of a handful of politically powerful multinational corporations that control what we are permitted to eat and even what we’re licensed to say about it?

Food, Inc., Robert Kenner’s 2009 film about “big food”, is a startling exposé of the practices underpinning the mass production of what America consumes and the often dangerous methods, for people and animals, employed to make towering profits for a few Hydra-headed companies.

Along the way the film explains how bacteria such as E. coli find their way onto our plates and why junk food is much cheaper than beneficial foods such as broccoli – ensuring that poor families remain wedded to burgers and fries and are ultimately obliged to face the medical music. The production techniques in food factories in other developed countries are the same and we are what we eat – even though much of it seems to be bad for us.

Nor do genetically modified crops appear to be the panacea they were once considered. Pathological problems associated with the consumption of genetically altered plants are reportedly beginning to emerge – hardly what Dr Norman Borlaug envisaged when his “green revolution” brought what he called “a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation”.

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For the moment, this remains the age of the celebrity chef, be he ever so humble, or condescending and obnoxious, with culinary tourism firmly cemented in place as a pillar of programming. It doesn’t take much cableTV channel flipping to find a connoisseur of the repugnant trusting to his consumption of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, scorpion broth, Asian hornet larvae, green tree ants or raw-blood soup to procure him a job with a network that has a real office and a staff of more than two. So I wonder, from these times of terrible television, drought, mad cow disease, factory farming and starvation amid abundance, what brand of food-flavoured literature will emerge – and come to think of it, what calibre of cinema might be spawned by food-centric books. A Saturday matinee featuring the updated likes of Babette’s Feast, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Delicatessen and Tampopo would take some topping.

Shall we have literary feast or famine? Perhaps a new Proust, with madeleines made for the 21st century, will arise; or a Shakespeare for the age.

In Antony and Cleopatra the sultry Egyptian queen, lamenting her youthful tryst with Julius Caesar, evokes what she calls “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” This remark, of course, doesn’t even constitute food imagery – but that didn’t stop an old classmate of mine, every time he heard it, thinking of lettuce.

Stephen McCarty

10

History à la Carte Felipe Fernández-Armesto

T

  were strange. So were the staff and my fellow lunchers.

Before I made my first visit to Veeraswamy’s, the old Indian restaurant off London’s Piccadilly, I had often walked past it, hand in hand with my mother and admired the smart uniform, turbaned and tasselled, of the doorman who guarded the unobtrusive entrance. He reminded me of the box of lead toy soldiers – Bengal Lancers I think they were – which, before I was eight years old, gave me an image of the grandeur of the Raj and the splendours of the Indian Army. Eventually, when my mother yielded to my importunities and took me inside, I saw for myself what the Raj was like and what, 10 years after independence, the old army had become. The clientele consisted mainly of ageing, balding, gently fattening Englishmen with toothbrush moustaches retrieving the sensations of India at separate tables, remembering what it was like to be a minor sahib in the military or the administration. They savoured their tiffin and spooned chutneys, grated coconuts and sliced bananas from the sinuous, silvery epergnes that raised their arms, like voluptuous houris, in the centre of each starched tablecloth.

While my little nose twitched at the unfamiliar scents that rose from the curries, the old officers maintained unflinching discipline, unseduced by spices, impassive at their pungency.

Meanwhile, as I later learned, in India and Pakistan the denizens of officers’ messes – all by now natives, of course – were stolidly chewing through roast lamb with mint sauce and bottled peas out of reverence for even the most unpalatable traditions of their corps. Food is funny. It is at 11

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once the most conservative form of culture and – in some circumstances – the most permeable to alien influences. Veeraswamy’s is still there, in the curved alley that winds into Regent Street, but it is changed now. The decor, uniformly off-white in my day, is now as glitzy and shimmering as Sennacherib’s cohorts. The staff have shed their turbans, tunics and deferential mien. They now include sharply suited, unobsequious men and glamorous young women. The food is inventive and calculated to surprise.

Among the lunchers, wealthy Indian families predominate. Riches have succeeded Raj. I have always thought food was the most instructive kind of historical document. You can calibrate cultures with a kitchen measuring spoon. No problem occupies more historical scholarship nowadays than that of the relative input of different cultures to a globalising world – in particular, the comparative contributions of “East” and “West” to each other as cultural exchange shifts back and forth across the globe. Historians quarrel about when and how and in what respects the rising “West” overtook the declining “East” in technology, science, ideas and sheer power, and how far the process has already begun to go into reverse. If we focus on food, we can see the ebb and flow of influences with some clarity.

In what we conventionally think of as the Middle Ages, when Latin Christendom looked to Islam for lessons in science and standards in taste, the arts of Islam shaped tabletops and informed recipes at Western courts.

The aesthetics of food resembled those of the sacred arts, with a bias towards goldsmithery and jewellery work, which the best cooks emulated.

They used saffron for gilding, sugar like diamonds, and meat, sliced alternately white and dark, “like gold and silver coin”, as the 10th-century cookbook The Baghdad Cook said. They made dishes to imitate carnelians and pearls. Just as Christians heavily censed sacred spaces and altars, so heavy aromas perfumed royal banqueting halls and tables. Sweet flavours and scented ingredients commanded most esteem. Cooks sought almond milk, ground almonds, rose water and extracts of other perfumed flowers, sugar and the spices of the East, to which Islam had privileged access by comparison with Christendom.

Almonds appear in sauces for all the sweet Egyptian stews that Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi described in 13th-century treatise the Kitab al-Tabih.

Fowl, he recommended, should be boiled in rose water on a bed of crushed 12

History à la Carte

hazelnuts or pistachios, with purslane and poppy seeds, or rose hips, cooked until they coagulated, then enlivened at the last minute with precious spices, because to cook those for an extended period would diminish their flavour.

A typical banquet, wrote al-Baghdadi, should include three roasted lambs stuffed with chopped meats fried in sesame oil, with crushed pistachios, pepper, ginger, cloves, mastic, coriander, cardamom and other spices sprinkled with musk-infused rose water. Between and around the lambs the attentive cook should scatter 50 fowl and 50 small birds stuffed with eggs or meat and fried with the juice of grapes or lemons. Pastry, sprinkled with rose water and baked until rose red, should envelop the whole.

Aristocratic tables in the West retained some tastes inherited from antiquity and, of course, local and regional traditions, but the effect of Muslim magnetism is evident in the balance of ingredients suggested, for instance, in a menu from Richard II’s England. Pig’s umbles, boiled in stock with leeks, onions, blood, vinegar, pepper and cloves, was a dish that would have done an ancient Roman table justice. The rest of the meal, however, was fit for a sultan: small birds boiled in almond paste with cinnamon and cloves; rose-scented rice boiled soft in almond milk, mixed with chickens’ brawn, cinnamon, cloves and mace and scented with sandalwood. Dishes prominent in late medieval Western cookery books regularly betray Muslim influence with these unmistakeable signs, or with the inclusion of telltale ingredients such as pomegranate seeds, raisin paste or sumac berries sweetened with almonds.

The Renaissance interrupted the era of Western indebtedness to Eastern food by urging court cooks back to supposedly classical recipes.

From the 16th century to the 18th, global ecological exchange and longrange trade transformed the food of many parts of the world, taking New World ingredients to Europe and Asia. The impact on Eastern eating was immense. No one can imagine the food of Sichuan or Thailand without fierce American chillies, or satay without peanuts, which are indigenous to Brazil. But the penetration of Western markets by Eastern ingredients was at least as conspicuous a feature of the period. New World plantations made rice more easily and widely available than ever before, while sugar – previously a luxury in Europe – became a cheap sweetener for the masses.

Tea (Chinese) and coffee (Arabian) followed a similar trajectory, adopted as the counter-opiates of the labour force of the industrialising West.

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Western imperialism dominated the succeeding era; but although the balance of power favoured Westerners in the 19th-century world, their Eastern victims, subjects and collaborators influenced their culinary tastes far more than the other way round. In part this was because members of Western elites and even, sometimes, hoi polloi who saw the East on military or naval service adapted to unfamiliar food. In part, it was the consequence of migrations of labour, coerced or bought, to Western imperial frontiers and heartlands. Coolies from India had a big impact on the food of parts of the Caribbean. Workers from China were probably responsible for the creation or adumbration of chop suey and chow mein in the United States. In South Africa the even earlier importation of Malay workers, some from Java, in the 1650s created a distinctive cuisine now called Cape Malay. In Peru the Nikkei style of cooking took shape among Japanese migrant workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Worldwide, the cases fall into two categories: dishes transferred westwards without radical modification and dishes contrived in vague imitation of the Orient.

Britain is particularly rich in the latter. Chicken tikka masala is the locus classicus, former foreign secretary Robin Cook declaring it “a truly British national dish”. In 2009 Mohammad Sarwar, then Labour MP for Glasgow Central, campaigned for the city to be assigned European Union Protected Designation of Origin status for the curry.

The idea, however, of combining tandoor-baked chicken with cream and tomatoes (another plant of New World origin) must have arisen in a colonial context. Most authorities trace it to Indian restaurants in London in the 1950s. It is now reputedly the most popular restaurant dish in Britain, displacing roast beef and fish and chips.

Vindaloo, a fierce form of curry, seems to have a similar colonial history.

The name is probably a corruption of the Portuguese vinho de alho, or garlic wine, which in Portugal is a typical marinade for diced meat. Now the English think of it as viscerally English – so much so that for the 1998 World Cup the pop band Fat Les used it to sum up the essence of England in a footballing anthem: We all like vindaloo, We’re England, We’re gonna score one more than you.

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History à la Carte

Balti cooking – quick currying in a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan – is now big business in Britain. Remote origins are traceable to India and perhaps, according to some analysts, to China. But it seems to be truly indigenous only to Birmingham and to have been unknown before the 1980s.

The Dutch equivalent of chicken tikka masala is rijsttafel. In Somerset Maugham’s short story The Vessel of Wrath, Dutch commissioner Mynheer Evert Gruyter eats it every day without tiring of it – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that scores of side dishes can accompany the rice, which is the staple ingredient. The Netherlands has its own native national dish, the hutspot of stewed root vegetables that commemorates the humble food that sustained the defenders during the Spanish siege of Leiden in 1574. But rijsttafel, which is eaten more frequently and more enthusiastically, has replaced it as the country’s honorary dish even more completely than vindaloo has replaced the roast beef of Old England. Rijsttafel is exotic where hutspot is domestic, celebratory rather than commemorative, lavish rather than austere and variegated rather than limited. Chafing dishes around a central rice bowl keep garnishes hot. Sambal goreng is obligatory: chilli, spices, onions and garlic are fried to make a sauce in which to bathe meat or fish. Other sambals appear, usually mixing chillies with citrus zest or shrimp paste.

Rendang is the essential curried ingredient. The Dutch usually make it with beef, though the classic version demands buffalo meat, marinated in coconut milk with the native spices of Sumatra – turmeric, ginger, galangal, garlic, salam leaf – and the chillies of the colonial era. It conquered Dutch naval and colonial personnel in the East in the 19th century and penetrated the Netherlands with the domestic staff that some of them took home. In The Hague, the Garoeda Restaurant started serving it in 1949, just as Indonesia was fighting off the Dutch Empire and the city began its widowhood with the loss of the former colonies.

Occasional adaptations of Western cooking styles in the East include tempura in Japan – though no Portuguese fry-up was ever so delicate – and baguettes in Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnamese banh mi is as likely to be stuffed with pâté or mayonnaise as with Chinese-style pickled vegetables.

Today, Japanese cooks do things with beef that no Texan or Argentine ever thought of.

Western colonialism in the East, however, seems almost never to have transformed subject people’s tastes, but those of the intruders only. The 15

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Philippines is the great exception, where more than 300 years of Spanish presence – which no other Western empire could match for endurance – did have an effect. By the time the Spaniards reached the Philippines they had learned a thing or two about colonialism. Missionary policy ensured that indigenous languages would be inviolate, whereas of the other two bedrock features of culture – religion and food – the first would undergo total subversion in a spiritual conquest that was remarkably successful on most of the islands, and the second would be a hybrid. The hybrid is complex today because Chinese colonisation, which – despite periodic massacres, expulsions and exclusions – was vital to the economy, contributed as much as that of the Spaniards, while settlers have never compromised the Malay foundations of Philippine cuisine. Fluffy rice, often flavoured with banana leaves, is the basis of almost every dish, but bread usually appears alongside it in perpetuation of the Spanish legacy. Some Filipino bread has the flavour of coconut, which, in one form or another, features in most meals and supplies the universal cooking oil.

The Spanish legacy also affects the lexicon of the kitchen. Prawns, for instance, are gambas, while aromatic stews are adobos (or, in the Malay corruption, adobong) and sweet pancakes are turrón (which in the Spanish of Spain signifies almond sweetmeats). Some lightly adapted Spanish dishes are prominent in the popular repertoire, including paella, caldereta, made with kid, and suckling pig roasted in the Castilian manner and called lechón. In the sweet course that ends a typical Filipino meal everything is of Spanish origin: crème caramel or flan (the only Spanish pudding to have a place on the global menu), marzipan cakes and other confections of egg yolks and sugar.

When the tides of empire ebb, returnees and counter-colonists travel with them. So Britain has become, in the post-colonial era, a springboard for the worldwide projection of Indian food. The Netherlands has played a similar role for Malay dishes and France for those of the Maghrib and Vietnam. In the same period, globalisation, long-range mass tourism and worldwide migrations have demonstrated that the West is highly receptive to exotic innovation, while beyond the Middle East, the peoples of the eastern and southern extremities of Asia are far harder to wean onto alien cuisines.

McDonald’s and Starbucks buck this trend – though one doubts whether their popularity has much to do with their food. Their customers in India, 16

History à la Carte

Japan and China seem rather to be choosing a “lifestyle option”. In the West, by contrast, even the most introspective food cultures – those of France, Spain and Italy – have failed to resist the intrusion of cuisines with which they have few or no imperial links, such as those of Lebanon, Thailand, Japan and Turkey, from where the kebab has become a global rival to the burger and the burrito. Western food has registered no comparable countercoups – apart, arguably, from the Irish pub, which seems to be a concept with an infinitely elastic range – although I hear there is a Bauernstube in Beijing and one of the best views of Tokyo is to be had from The Peak Lounge at the Park Hyatt Hotel, which bills itself, rather unconvincingly, as an English tea lounge.

One of the surprising effects of counter-colonialism is the current proliferation of Afghan restaurants in the United States; do the outlets for qabeli palaw or mantu in Wisconsin outnumber those for hamburgers or hot dogs in Helmand? If the history of food is anything to go by the world seems to be reverting to normal. After a brief period of Western supremacy, the direction of cultural exchange is again preponderantly from East to West.

That is how the world has worked for most of history. Western civilisation, as John Hobhouse has told us, has “eastern origins”. Until the 17th century, at least, as Joseph Needham demonstrated, the West took its technology and some of its scientific ideas from China, with Southeast, South and Southwest Asia helping with mediation. The oriental restaurateurs who are conquering Western palates are exercising a benign form of imperialism, with highly respectable precedents.

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Poetry Michael Carlo C. Villas Seeing is believing that berry seeds will bear berries, not blooms that yeast will always cause the dough to rise that coffee beans will surely yield brew to warm our day that frost heavy on the trees outside will turn to water in the sun that the sky will not fall on us as long as God has said, “Let the sky …” and the heavens open for us, a poem to even more windows: window to the world and of the inner eye Mt. Cloud Bookstore Baguio City

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng John Batten

S

 . I catch a Mong Kok-bound bus from the Star Ferry Pier in Tsim Sha Tsui, jumping off at the first stop after Jordan Road.

Turn left into Ning Po Street and head for a locality evocative of the Kowloon streets seen in Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung, the movie that best captures the 1997 fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Hong Kong’s return to the mainland.

Walk straight, across Shanghai Street, then take another left, into Reclamation Street, to its market. Old men happily sit outside restaurants drinking beer, consulting the racing papers; lip-dangling cigarettes defy gravity and the overhead government-placed no-smoking signs. The market of fresh vegetables, fruit, flowers, herbal plants, sugar-cane juice, a tofu seller, hair accessories and cheap T-shirts; the bloody shop-corner butchers and fishmongers thump, slicing and dicing alongside Nepalese grocery stores and local bakeries with excellent cakes adjacent to the high-ceilinged Chinese medicine shop, with its idle doctor smoking as nonchalantly as all the rest.

At 38 Reclamation Street the market vendors melt on this sweltering August day around Lai Heung Yuen, the cha chan teng. Joyously crowded with parents, grandparents, grandchildren, all fussed over by the staff. At communal corner tables, taking a break from computer and other games, shifty teenagers sip iced coffee.

The Silver Cafe in Wah Fu; the atmospheric Mido Cafe of Yau Ma Tei; the Ben Hur Fast Food Shop in Tuen Mun and the China Cafe in Canton Road, Mong Kok. Every Hong Kong neighbourhood has its cha chan teng. Designed to incorporate practical diner-style tables and benches and 19

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serving hot and iced milk or lemon tea, coffee, sausages, Horlicks, Ovaltine; sandwiches; French toast; a variety of quickly cooked, served and eaten rice dishes; pineapple buns; egg tarts; coconut tarts; walnut cake; and instant noodles topped with luncheon meat and a fried egg. Individually served or as part of a breakfast, lunch or afternoon set meal.

Hong Kong’s cha chan teng and their style of preparing and serving food evolved in the 1950s, when crowded tenements and precarious squatter housing made cooking, eating and privacy difficult. A neighbourhood cha chan teng provided cheap and fast food in a flexible cafe-style atmosphere catering to single customers and large groups. The combination West-East menu reflects Hong Kong as a former British colonial outpost and as an international crossing point for the Chinese diaspora, which may have emigrated but which also frequently returns.

A decade ago, photographer Rick Martin and I visited numerous old cha chan teng, many of which continue to operate. The evocative pictures throughout this issue of the Asia Literary Review express their unassuming success: often family-run, with original decor intact, these cash businesses occupy self-owned premises immune to Hong Kong’s high rents.

Just up the road from Lai Heung Yuen is the 1960s, clean-lined modernist indoor Yau Ma Tei Market. Inside the main entrance is a booth with neatly stacked stools and boxes of instant mie goreng waiting for the early Indonesian helpers who, after dropping off the children at school, have a chat and noodles before Monday’s shopping. A new week begins.

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

Cha Chan Teng, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm. All photographs courtesy of the artist.

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Restaurant, Diamond Hill, Hong Kong (2001) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Restaurant, Diamond Hill, Hong Kong (2001) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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Table d’Hôte Murong Xuecun Translation: Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan

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  attached to the Green Willow Abbey, open to members only, is called Studio of Enlightenment, which suggests to me that it is run by the fictional Monkey King in Journey to the West, who is called The Enlightened One. But the restaurant’s name is actually a reference to the pursuit of truth. And this truth runs on American time: the restaurant opens at 2am, puts up its shutters at six and never sees the light of day. I am sitting in the Studio of Elightenment watching a parade of gorgeously dressed young nuns as I meditate on the monkey with no interest in money.

Four vegetarian appetisers precede the main course: celery roots, baby cabbage hearts, sweet potato leaves and pumpkin seedlings, all delicate and refreshing. No alcohol is served, but a pretty young nun proffers with both hands a small cup of strongly brewed tea. At first I think it is for me to drink, never imagining that it is for rinsing my mouth. “The main course will soon arrive,” says the nun managing the restaurant as she twirls rosary beads in her hand. “Rinse your mouth so as better to savour the taste.”

“What can possibly call for such solemn ceremony?” I wonder out loud.

“Oh, nothing special,” she replies, her eyes flashing with a charming femininity. “Just a little trifle that would not impress the discerning gastronome. I only hope you will not dismiss it as inadequate.” Then she unhurriedly invokes the name of the Buddha of Infinite Light: “Amitābha, Amitābha.” The nun, who looks about 28 years old, is dazzling. Despite her

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being bundled up in a nun’s vestments her every gesture is enchanting. I am smitten.

Four young nuns push a table into the room. It is wrapped in a fabric skirt and has a large overturned bowl in the middle. The bowl, with its lustrous white enamel and vivid blue designs, is obviously a valuable antique.

The manageress, swaying like a willow in the breeze, floats over and lifts the bowl. What I see is mind-boggling. I spring to my feet and blurt out, “What is that?”

“Amitābha, Buddha of Infinite Light,” she incants with a jovial smile.

“This is that most beloved dish in all China: live monkey-brain hot pot.”

A muted sound comes from beneath the table. A chill pierces my heart, yet I am unable to resist lifting up the fabric skirt. I see a monkey with glossy fur looking back at me as if deep in thought, its eyes darting about mischievously. I reach out to touch the monkey and it immediately pouts like a grumpy child and rolls its eyes. Does it have any idea what’s about to happen?

The beautiful nun nudges me back up to my seat. “The soup has come to a boil, sir. It’s ready to eat.” She holds out a ladle and scoops deep into the unctuous white cerebral matter. The monkey’s brains, crossed with troughs and gullies, quiver and I almost vomit. “You. You’re a nun,” I protest, glaring at her.

She dips the ladle into the gurgling pot, gracefully moving it back and forth across the surface of the churning broth like a butterfly passing a flower. “Amitābha,” she intones. “But sir, is it not true that all sentient beings are equal? How does a monkey differ from a pig or a sheep? Why is it permissible to eat pigs’ and sheep’s brains, yet not a monkey’s? Is it because he is alive?” She ladles the cooked monkey brains into my bowl and again intones the name of the Buddha of Infinite Light: “Amitābha. Is it not true that all living beings die and all that is now dead was once living?”

I can’t swallow. As the contents of my stomach surge up my oesophagus I turn to look at my friend. He has not spoken since we first sat down. “I don’t mind if you abstain,” he suddenly says, smiling at me. “But do you know how much this dish costs?”

“How much?”

“Twenty-seven thousand six hundred yuan – and that’s with a VIP discount.”

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The implication is I should partake. Slowly, I pick up a small chunk of brains with my chopsticks and put it into my mouth hesitantly. “Even so,” I grumble, “it doesn’t need to be so expensive.”

“Amitābha! Good sir, this is no ordinary monkey! It is a Golden Thread Macaque, which is high on the list of the nation’s protected species.” The beautiful nun scoops out another ladleful and cooks it in the broth. “Many say that monkeys screech when their brains are scooped out, but that is false.

Amitābha! Completely false. While it is true that the brain is the centre of the nervous system, the brain itself has no nerves and consequently he feels no pain. Look. No ropes or chains to restrain him, yet he is not moving about. Why? Because we’ve made a few improvements. First, we employ highly skilled trainers. Second, we use a local anaesthetic– that procedure alone costs several thousand yuan – to avoid ruining the flavour of the brains while keeping the monkey alert. Amitābha! These costs add up.”

I feel like crying as I put another piece into my mouth and force it down my gullet without chewing. The nun now opens a packet of expensive cigarettes, lights one and elegantly takes a few puffs before bending down and passing the cigarette to the monkey. “Come and look. This is something new just for your entertainment. When you give him a cigarette he makes obeisances with his hands reverentially held in front. Isn’t it adorable?

Amitābha!”

I squat down to observe the poor monkey up close. He is puffing away like a steam engine, with both hands clasped together as if praying to the Buddha. Is he imploring me or thanking me? I am dumbstruck and just stare at him like a simpleton. After paying his obeisance the monkey starts to scratch himself. Then he suddenly grins at me and laughs.

He’s laughing. He is actually laughing.

I sit frozen in my seat, my mind in tumult. The nun cooks another ladleful and brings it up to my mouth. I let her feed me. Finally the ladle scrapes the bottom of the small skull. The cigarette butt falls to the ground, but the pale blue smoke continues to hover with an indistinct warmth. The prayer beads on the nun’s neck clink as she says, “Tasty? Amitābha! It is the finest taste known to mankind. To tell the truth, many VIPs come here for this dish but we won’t serve them.”

Finally, the table is taken away, its fabric skirt hiding the monkey and the cigarette, made by the Shanghai Tobacco Factory, goes out. At 40 yuan 27

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for a flip-top box of Chunghwa, the prestigious Chinese brand favoured by government officials, a single cigarette is worth two yuan. But the nun is mistaken about one thing: after the table is taken out of the room I clearly hear heart-rending cries.

The monkey is screeching.

Amitābha! The finest taste known to mankind.

Screeching.

Next, soup and a lesson in ethics are served in a small celadon bowl emblazoned with a dragon and phoenix motif obviously intended for the exclusive use of the royal family.

“This masterpiece from the Northern Song Dynasty imperial kiln is worth more than 50,000 yuan. Amitābha! Southern Song Dynasty ceramics, given their association with a failed empire, cannot even be considered for this dish. Why, they would taint the delicacies with their aura of defeat.”

I’m sceptical as I use a precious ceramic ladle from the imperial pottery of the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty to dish out half a spoonful, which I put into my mouth. The nuns are all smiles as they watch. Before I even remove the spoon something snaps in my brain and every pore in my body opens. My tongue feels like it is in knots and I can barely speak.

“What, what is this? Why is it so delicious?”

“Amitābha!” replies the alluring nun with a gorgeous smile. “This is the world-famous Soup of Parental Love. Surely you know the poem, by Meng Jiao of the Tang Dynasty: Stretching a thread in her hand, a mother Makes warm clothing for her departing son.

Painstakingly she sews, stitch by stitch, Fearing that he will not be back for long.

Who says the gratefulness of inch-tall grass Can ever return the grace of the spring sun?

The spring sun is parental love.”

The milky soup is unadulterated by any sediment or oil drops floating on the surface. I drink another two large ladlesful. Every joint in my body pops with pleasure and every square inch of my skin tingles with joy. “Exquisite!”

I exclaim. “This is delicious. What is it?”

“Human soup.”

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“What?”

My friend slowly stands. “Foetus soup, actually,” he explains with a warm smile. “A five-month-old foetus has a fully formed face as well as hands and feet. It even has black eyes and a small tail below its back.” The hairs on my neck stand up as my friend’s smile becomes ever more cheerful. “Do you know the best way to stew human flesh? In mother’s milk. The Bible might say, ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,’ but that’s because they didn’t understand how to enjoy life.” Ha ha ha, he laughs. “Soup of Parental Love uses mother’s milk to boil her kid.” Ha ha ha, he laughs again. “That’s why it’s called Soup of Parental Love. You understand that the sunlight of spring in the poem refers to motherly love, right? Motherly love.”

I knock over a chair as I rush to the door. The monkey brains sloshing about in my stomach surge and before I can make it to the toilets I emit gurgling sounds. I stagger forwards then spray the contents of my stomach onto the wall.

Several young nuns make a big production of assisting me back to my chair. My friend, now standing in the middle of the room, points to a scroll hanging on the wall. “Do you know who wrote that poem?”

There we shall feast on barbarian flesh and cheerfully imbibe barbarian blood.

“Yue … General Yue Fei.” “Correct. Yue Fei defended the Southern Song Dynasty from the northern barbarians. He was a true sage. If a sage may partake of human flesh, what do you have to fear? Haven’t you heard the saying, ‘Devour thine enemy’s flesh and splay his hide on thy bed’? If human flesh can be eaten and human skin can be slept upon, what’s wrong with sipping a few ladles of foetus soup?”

I sit down gradually. “There is,” he continues, “a precious medicine from the Chinese herbal pharmacopoeia called Scarlet River Chariot. Do you know what it is?” His face is bright red and he does not look at me while he speaks.

“What is it?”

“Placenta,” he replies with a sinister cackle. “Human placenta. This is a Chinese tradition. The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety mention ‘cutting

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flesh from one’s own thigh to provide medicine to cure an ailing parent’ – is that not eating human flesh? In times of famine parents swap their children with their neighbours’ – is that not eating human flesh? During the rebellion of An Lushan in the Tang Dynasty, the defender of the city of Sui Yang served his young wife to feed the troops – is that not eating human flesh? That didn’t prevent Zhang Xun from taking his place in history.”

“Amitābha!” the nun chimes in. “What are people but protein? If pigs, cows, goats and dogs may be eaten, if monkeys may be eaten, then why not people? The Callatiae ate the corpses of their fathers out of filial devotion. Melanesians consider the consumption of human flesh to be a sacred act. Have you heard of the Feast of the Massagetae? The Massagetae cooked anyone who was old, not only making the consumers happy, but also delighting those about to be consumed. Amitābha! The Padaei ate even the sick and infirm to avoid their flesh being spoiled as they wasted away from disease. Amitābha! The Scythians used skulls for wine goblets and – Amitābha! Which peoples have not partaken of human flesh? Who has not drunk mother’s milk? What is the difference between mother’s milk and human blood? And what is the difference between human blood and human flesh? Amitābha!”

So if the work of scholars is of any use then logical argument is vital, for otherwise what can we use to guide us through life? I pick up the antique porcelain spoon and mouthful by mouthful empty the bowl of soup, while staring at the plaque overhead commemorating The Vimalakīrti Sutra. Well damn you Vimalakīrti, what would you preach if you were sitting here instead of me?

It will soon be dawn. Outside the Green Willow Abbey the wind has dropped and the trees are still. In the faint lamplight an early-rising nun chants the Heart Sutra in the distance: Without walls of the mind and thus without fears They see through delusions ...

Dishes keep coming. Next is Imperial Consort Cassoulet, a dish prepared in much the same way as pork braised with fermented bean curd, though the principal ingredient is breast of a mother-to-be, pregnant for the first time. The former owner of these breasts, surnamed Zhang, hails from

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the province of Shanxi, where she previously worked at a construction site preparing food. After selling both her breasts she opened a lingerie shop specialising in brassieres. The meat is melt-in-the-mouth delectable; I would say 84,000 times tastier than that famous delicacy, camel’s hump. Then comes General Xiang’s Gall, which is crunchy and tasty. This dish is made from an 18-year-old boy’s left kidney, which was bought for 640,000 yuan.

The lad is from a village in impoverished Anhui Province. With the money he made from the deal he built a two-storey house and married the prettiest girl in the village.

Other dishes that follow, such as Eyebrows of the Tragic Princess, Legendary Beauty’s Exquisite Eyes and the Shuttle of the Swallow are inspired by famous beauties of a bygone era. I am also served the Smile of the Poet Dongpo and a dish called First Light Sea Cucumber, which resembles a mature pale pink bêche-de-mer. The cardinal ingredient is the erect penis of a nine-year-old boy. Quivering in the centre of the serving dish, it is crunchy to chew. Four hours ago his drug-addict father sliced it off his sleeping son and sold it for 800,000 yuan.

Eight hundred thousand yuan.

“This banquet costs 10 million yuan,” the beautiful nun giggles. “It is the most lavish in the world. Amitābha! Look at these inscriptions from old customers: ‘Exceeds dragon liver and phoenix marrow’; ‘Green Willow Abbey has taught me the meaning of life’; and look at this one …”

I belch loudly and the nun laughs even harder, making the little dots of the monastic scars on her shaved head bounce like a procession of blind eyes.

“You rich people should enjoy life to the full. You live in grand houses, drive luxury cars, wear famous-brand clothes, but when it comes to dining you end up eating the same old stuff every meal. What are the choices? Bird’s nest or shark’s fin soup? Sea cucumber or abalone? Amitābha! Even migrant workers can afford that stuff, so it is hardly appropriate to your status, is it?

A regular Taiwanese customer here put it well when he said, ‘The venerable must partake of human flesh.’ He comes here every month and despite being older than 60 his sight is sharp and his back is ramrod straight. None of his teeth is missing and the skin on his face is as taut as a 20-year-old’s.

Amitābha!”

I am sprawled on the chair, eyes closed, as the nutrients aggregate within me. An unusual aroma wafts by and I slowly open my eyes. The beautiful 31

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nun has taken off her billowing robes to reveal the fair skin of a young body. She floats around the room in a seductive dance of graceful and fluid movements.

“Amitābha! Look at me. Who doesn’t want to live a long life and be young forever? Look at my legs. Look at my waist. Who would believe I am 87 years old?”

As if intoxicated I reach out and caress her. Her eyes sparkle lasciviously.

“I’m old enough to be your granny! Amitābha! Stop it! No touching!

Amitābha!”

Nuns line up in the spacious entry hall like an honour guard, hands clasped reverentially in front while chanting the name of the Buddha of Infinite Light. The manageress wriggles from my embrace, her eyes aflame with desire. I abruptly withdraw my hands. Her exquisite fragrance, a fragrance that can drive a man mad with desire, is on my skin, in my blood, in my marrow.

Finally it is time for a toast to longevity. An exquisite goblet of seven precious glazes from the imperial collection of the Qianlong Emperor is full to the brim with a bright red liquid. The beautiful nun is in raptures.

“Amitābha! This is the world-famous Cup of the Fallen Cherry Blossom.

A truly peerless drink known only to one in a million, seen by only one in 10 million and of which only one in 100 million is qualified to partake.”

My mind is blank while she ministers a sip. I suddenly shudder, as if pure oxygen has flooded my lungs, as if I have been struck by a blow to the head. My body is trembling and even my ears are twitching.

“You would never expect that this, Amitābha, is the blood of a virgin girl,” the nun declares as she sways about, her face aglow with innocence. “A 16-year-old girl is as pure as spring water, but in these times where can one find a 16-year-old virgin? That’s why we consider only 13-year-olds. To be selected they must be healthy, dainty and beautiful and they must not have visible scars or a history of infectious disease, or engage in bad habits such as smoking or drinking. Amitābha! The selection process is more rigorous than that of the imperial court choosing concubines for the emperor.”

I take another sip. Something wriggles inside me. It will shoot out of my throat if I’m not careful. The nun becomes animated and her voice rises to a crescendo.

“Virgins are rare, but their blood is even rarer. Successful candidates 32

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have to go through a series of steps before their blood can be consumed.

After selection we have to spend three days just purifying their bodies. This involves colonic cleansing, stomach washing, a sulphur fumigation and the removal of all body hair. She may not eat anything during those three days.

Do you have any idea how filthy a human body can be? Amitābha! Without this drastic treatment there is no way to cleanse the body thoroughly. After that we need three months of meticulous nourishment, during which time she may not consume a single grain of rice. And what do we feed her?

Ginseng, deer antlers, glossy Ganoderma, Wolfiporia extensa and linseed; she may drink only the purest of glacial melt water. This is the formula used by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty in his quest for immortality. After three months the girl’s arms and legs are trussed up tightly with rope so that her blood can circulate only within her abdominal cavity. To make sure the blood for consumption is fresh enough, every day she has to flush out 400 millilitres of old blood. Amitābha! That is not torment, it’s artistry. Yes, artistry. The girl is then starved for seven days to increase the viscosity of her blood. The girl’s body turns cold after seven days, except for her heart. Then a wooden awl is put through the heart, Amitābha, and her blood spurts out like lava from a volcano. To harvest and convey the blood, we do not use a metal container. We use a pouch made from the hide of a newly slaughtered sheep to preserve its freshness. A five-foot-tall virgin can produce only a cupful of this world-famous Fallen Cherry Blossom. Amitābha!”

I’m thunderstruck. “You … you killed the girl?”

The nun looks up to the heavens. “Killed, but not murdered. Amitābha!

We had an agreement with the girl to buy her blood for one and a half million yuan.” She pauses momentarily, then, with a kindly and solemn countenance, continues. “Sir, everyone has compassion. This child … the child’s name was Lucky Wang, I recall. Last year she started her first year of high school. Her father is paralysed, her mother is chronically ill and her younger brother has to go to school. It was not easy for the young girl, you know. Amitābha! When we found her she was kneeling by the side of the road in tears. She begged us to buy her. She said one and a half million yuan would rescue her family from a lifetime of suffering. She was only 13 years old. Who would have had the heart to say no to her?”

My friend pushes a pile of documents towards me. “Take a look. This is a picture of Lucky Wang, whose blood you just drank. You should at least 33

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know something about her.” He pauses a moment. “After losing so much blood she was barely conscious. But the moment the wooden awl pierced her heart she came to in a flash and cried out. You know what she said?”

Something swells up in my heart. I shake my head. “She said ‘Mum, it hurts,’” says my friend, answering his own question as he turns and walks out.

“Mum, it hurts. Mum, it hurts, Mum it hurts. Mum, it hurts. Mum, it hurts …”

Lucky Wang looks tiny in the photo – a shy little girl in an ill-fitting floral shirt and dark blue slacks. She is trying to hide the patch on one knee with her hand. This picture, taken when she left primary school, is one of the few of her that exists. On the back is written: “To my good friend …”

The name is crossed out so there is no way of knowing to whom she wanted to give the photo. Why did she cross out the name? Was it because a girl, the intended recipient, said something hurtful? Or did a boy she fancied fall in love with someone else? What goes on in the private thoughts of a 13-yearold girl? I wonder as I sip her blood.

Beneath the photo is an ordinary exercise book, with a few lines neatly written in ballpoint pen on the cover: New Willow District Middle School Year 1 Class B Lucky Wang

Inside, the first essay is titled My Dreams, for which the teacher gave her 85 points. One sentence is underlined in red. “I want to be someone who is useful to my family, my society and my nation.” The second essay is A Person I Know Well. She writes about the girl she sits next to in class: “My deskmate is a kind person. Her family is well-off and she has an unlimited supply of snacks …” The teacher awarded that one only 55 points – a fail – because it exhibited “unrealistic egocentric idealism”. On the last page Lucky Wang records six things she has not managed to accomplish in this life.

My birthday is next month. Mum said she’ll buy me new trousers.

Better remind her.

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The stitches on my school satchel have come unravelled again.

Remember to repair it. I’m 13 years old now – I can’t keep on bothering mum about things like this.

Next Tuesday is my day on duty at school. Must remember to clean the blackboard.

Wang Xiaoyan told me there’s a poster of the pop star Zhou Jielun in the New China Bookstore. Must remember to take a look next time I’m there.

Mum’s bronchitis is back and she coughs all night. If there were a miracle cure I’d definitely find a way to get it for her.

I’ve saved up six yuan. I must not buy any more bobby pins. Will buy daddy some underpants instead. He never wears anything. It looks terrible.

“How did you like it?” the beautiful nun whispers seductively into my ear as she helps me finish the last sip of the incomparable beverage.

Smacking my blood-stained lips, I take a moment to savour the flavour.

“Excellent,” I reply. “Sweeter than pig’s blood and saltier too, though it does taste a little fishy ...”

Excerpt from the book Most Die of Greed

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Cha Chan Teng, To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Poetry Anne Abad

Three Meals Let’s pursue happiness.

No one wants to be sad. Who wouldn’t be of the same mind?

If only I’d known you always have a bowl of misery for breakfast.

For lunch you grow a paunch from devouring platefuls of secret curses. Sometimes you share them with me and we’re both filled with dread.

Each step back to the cube we couple with resigned grunts.

Change might be the order of the day, by dinner.

But you’ll not have a taste no matter my coaxing.

I have no appetite, lost it.

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Poetry by Anne Abad

Tomorrow’s already screaming of the things we must do.

It’s in our best interests then, to keep the job, the boss, our places.

The new always gives way to the old. And I’m a fool.

Sadness stays because we want it to.

Etiquette Welcome to my palace!

Wear your smile now.

You must. Here you must.

The Happy People need not dress in gowns nor jewels to bear the royal air, just a show of teeth will do.

Come, have my seat – No, not that creaking thing, though – like I always say – rust and splinters still are better than the dirt floor.

I’ve sent out my court to the streets – wilderness though it may be – to the city.

Soliciting a few coins, gathering what’s left, good, from those treasure troves of wood, plastic, odds and ends.

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I expect I might oer you a better chair, a meal even, fresh from the scavenge, once my court returns.

Don’t frown, or else fortune will have its way, vengeful it is to the ungrateful.

Weep only when laughter pushes the tears out, for in my palace, the smile is our sole supply.

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Japan and the Battle for Rice Lizzie Collingham

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  white rice is an essential part of being Japanese. In Japan (as in much of Southeast Asia) a bowl of white rice pulls all accompanying dishes into a coherent whole and transforms the food into a meal. And it is white rice that gives diners that satisfying sensation of a full stomach at the end of a repast. The countryside would not be Japanese if it were not patchworked with rice paddies.1 From 1937 to 1945 a meal of white rice came to symbolise patriotic support for the war with China and later the rest of the allied world by the placement of a single red pickled plum in the centre of a rectangular rising-sun lunch box. It was appropriate that the consumption of rice in a hinomaru bento could signal fervent nationalism during a war that was, in part, driven by a desire to secure the nation’s rice supply.

Food is not normally listed as a reason Japan went to war. But changes in Japanese eating habits since the late 19th century, in particular an increase in the consumption of rice, caused anxieties about the poverty and inefficiency of Japanese agriculture and the security of its urban food supply.

These worries about farming and food fed into an atmosphere of crisis that developed during the 1930s. It allowed right-wing militarist groups to gain political power and their influence helped to push Japan’s government into the decision to go to war.

1

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, Rice as Self : Japanese Identities Through Time (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993), pp.4-5.

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Changes in Japanese eating habits began with the Meiji (1868-1912) leaders’ attempts to improve the population’s diet as part of a drive to modernise Japan. In particular, the government wanted to reshape the Japanese body by encouraging the consumption of beef and milk. This would, they thought, create a strong and vigorous physique that could compete with that of Westerners, whose meat-rich diets were believed to be responsible for their robust frames. But although the Japanese, who were told that the emperor was partial to beef, doubled their meat consumption, even by 1937 this still amounted to only two kilograms of meat per person annually.2 Most animal protein in the diet continued to come from fish. The Japanese were unconvinced about the benefits of drinking milk and in the 1930s it contributed only a paltry half a gram of protein per capita per day.

However, they enthusiastically increased the amount of rice they ate and by 1914 were eating more rice, by about a quarter, than in the 1890s.3 During World War I Japan used its place on the side of the Allies to expand its interests in China and the Pacific and to stake its claim to the status of a world power. At home inflation curtailed the population’s desire to eat more rice. In 1918 riots flared across the country in an unprecedented level of protest against escalating rice costs.4 The government was keen to pacify the population by ensuring they could fill their stomachs: after the war, it looked to the colonies to solve the problem and Formosa and Korea were turned into “reserve rice baskets”. This seemed essential because the Japanese population grew by about a third in the interwar period and the demand for rice became insatiable. By 1935 imports of Manchurian sorghum into Korea and a government-sponsored increase in the consumption of sweet potatoes in Formosa allowed Japan to import from these colonies the equivalent of 20 per cent of its domestic rice crop. In Korea, Japanese agricultural economists referred to the exports as “starvation exports”. The farmers were forced to sell such a large share of their crop that each year “spring hunger” overcame them as they ate the last of the previous harvest and had to wait for the 2 Ishige, Naomichi, Japan, in Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (eds), The Cambridge World History of Food, two volumes, (CUP, Cambridge, 2000), Vol. II, p.1182.

3 Johnston, B. F. with Mosaburo Hosoda and Yoshio Kusumi, Japanese Food Management in World War II (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1953), pp.84-5.

4 Lewis, Michael, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990), p.245; Hane, Mikiso, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (Pantheon Books, New York, 1982), p.160.

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next crop to ripen. They survived by gathering wild grasses.5 Ahn Juretsu, who grew up in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, recalled, “Because we were farmers under Japanese government control, the conditions of our lives were so poor, you can’t imagine it. Just like beggars today.”6 Meanwhile, a worrying process of decline took hold in the Japanese countryside. Colonial rice was cheap and lowered the price of the domestically produced crop. The Depression pushed prices down even further. In 1931 it cost Japanese farmers more than it was worth to produce a bushel of rice.

Many farming families, having sold their crop at harvest time, were forced to buy some back, and at a far higher price than they had received originally.

As a result farming families fell into serious debt.

In 1932 the government calculated that rural debt amounted to more than double the national farm income.7 Farmers simply could not afford to eat the rice they grew, and a yawning discrepancy between rural and urban diets developed, with city dwellers eating at least 25 per cent more rice than their counterparts in the countryside.8 Rural families, about 80 per cent of the population, ate not rice but barley, millet or wheat and when farmers mixed rice with these grains it was brown, not the preferred white rice. (The greater nutritional value of brown rice was not common knowledge at the time.) For many their grain had to be eked out with daikon or yam and even the chopped leaves of those vegetables.

One disgruntled farmer fumed that such a diet reduced him to the level of oxen and pigs.9 Malnutrition, tuberculosis and beriberi were commonplace in rural areas.10 A peasant girl who found work in a textile factory in Osaka in the 1930s said that what pleased her most about her urban life “was 5

Beasley, W.G. Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987), p.149; Duus, Peter, Economic Dimensions of Meiji Imperialism: The Case of Korea, 1895-1910, in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1984), pp.128-71; Johnston, Japanese Food Management, pp.54-5.

6 Cook, Haruko Taya and Theodore F. Cook (eds), Japan at War: An Oral History (Phoenix Press, London, 2000), p.193.

7 Smith, Kerry, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression and Rural Revitalization (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001), pp.59, 64.

8 Johnston, Japanese Food Management, pp.84-5.

9 Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, pp.40-1; Cwiertka, Katarzyna Joanna, Culinary Culture and the Making of a National Cuisine, in Jennifer Robertson (ed), A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005), p.418.

10 Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, p.45.

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the fact that I could eat all I wanted”. At home her staple diet had been a mixture of yam and chestnuts with the occasional bowl of brown rice mixed with barley. For her, like many people in the countryside, a bowl of pure white rice was celebratory food eagerly awaited and associated with New Year festivities.11 In 1934 the northern provinces were hit by famine after weather-related crop failure. Those who survived did so on a diet of dried potatoes and herring dregs (normally used as a crop fertiliser), bracken roots and acorns.12 In the 1930s gloom descended on Japan. When, in 1932, a group of young military officers were tried for the assassination of prime minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, they cited the parlous state of the countryside as a motivation for their extremism. They argued it was indefensible that young soldiers were risking their lives while their families ate rotten potatoes and starved.13 Kingoro Hashimoto, a radical army officer, pointed out that there were three solutions to rural poverty, but that emigration was prevented by anti-Japanese immigration policies in other countries and that world markets were closed by tariff barriers. The last option was expansion.14 Some members of the military had observed that Germany was brought to its knees by blockades during World War I. Britain, by contrast, drew great strength from its maritime empire. There was a growing feeling that in order to fulfil its destiny as a great power Japan would have to build a pan-Asian empire.

In September 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, rich in gold, coal, livestock, cotton and soya beans.15 Six years later the military decided to expand Japanese control and led the country into war with China. Western powers did not look kindly on Japan’s aggression and it was expelled from the League of Nations in 1933. In 1940 and 1941 the United States embargoed shipments of scrap metal, then oil, to Japan. But in May and June 1940 the Japanese high command took heart when Germany stormed across western Europe and overwhelmed Belgium, Holland and France in weeks. The 11

Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, p.40; Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self, p.42.

Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, pp.133-5.

13 Wilson, Sandra, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33 (Routledge, London, 2002), pp.118, 130.

14 Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, p.117.

15 Peattie, Mark R., Japanese Attitudes Towards Colonialism, 1895-1945, in Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, pp.120-3.

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Japanese military was greatly encouraged by the apparent weakness of the colonial powers. They now looked to Southeast Asia, which had tin, bauxite, rubber and oil. Moreover, Southeast Asia produced 67 per cent of the world’s rice exports. Having allied themselves with Germany and Italy, the Japanese attacked America’s Pearl Harbour and invaded British Malaya.

Ironically, the acquisition of an empire led to severe food shortages rather than to a secure supply. The war in China boosted industrial development in Korea and Taiwan. The consequent rise in workers’ incomes and their demand for rice pushed up farm prices and meant that farmers could afford to keep back more rice for their own use. Poor harvests following a drought, however, resulted in decreased Korean exports to Japan; by 1942 they had fallen to almost zero. At home workers moved to cities to find employment in the war industries, but the consequent lack of labour on Japanese farms depleted domestic harvests.16 By 1939 townspeople were complaining of shortages and that rice prices were again becoming prohibitive. Urbanites, who disliked foreign strains of rice at the best of times because of their supposedly inferior taste, were told that on at least a couple of days a week they should switch to unpopular wheat noodles and barley.17 The government hoped Southeast Asian rice imports would address the shortfall and in 1940 and 41 imported 1.5 million tons from the region. But in April 1941, to tackle the problem of shortages, it was forced to introduce rationing. White rice was treated as the entire nation’s staple food. This had the effect of permanently changing the population’s perception of rice so that, paradoxically, at a time of extreme rice shortages it became widely perceived as the food to which all Japanese were entitled.

The business of sharing the rice crop across the population began at source with the farmers. Each farm household was allowed to store enough rice to allow each family member 400 grams to 600 grams a day.18 For many on the farms this must, at first, have made it possible to eat more

16 Pauer, Erich, Neighbourhood Associations and Food Distribution in Japanese Cities in World War II, in Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (eds), Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, Ostfildern, 1985), p.222.

17 Tomita, Mary Kimoto, Dear Miye: Letters Home From Japan 1939-1946 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1995), p.56.

18 Johnston, Japanese Food Management, p.192.

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rice than during the hungry years in the 1930s. Next in line to receive a share of the rice crop were the armed forces. Since the 1870s the military had gone to great lengths to improve soldiers’ and sailors’ diets. Throughout the 1920s recruits returning home from tours of duty recalled their diet with great pleasure. They were fed protein- and fat-rich meals with beef and pork prepared in curries and stir-fried dishes that were unfamiliar but extremely popular. With every meal they were served a bowl of white rice mixed with barley to boost its vitamin B content. For most of the recruits, used to victuals based on barley or millet, this was a luxury and in their minds rice was transformed into an essential part of every meal.

In 1941 the military rice ration was halved to 600 grams a day. This meant the men now received about half the calories in an American soldier’s ration.19 Nevertheless this was still nearly double the civilian allowance.

Meanwhile old men and women left behind on farms struggled to grow enough food. Tiny Japanese fields meant mechanisation was out of the question, but then metal shortages made scarce even ordinary hand tools, such as ploughs, rakes, sickles and hoes.20 Artificial fertiliser was almost unobtainable and many valuable hours were spent collecting night soil.21 During World War II the rice harvest fell by half and the barley harvest was similarly poor. This meant farmers were producing 102 grams of rice less per head of population.22 The amount of rice farmers were allowed to withhold to feed themselves had to be cut. One farmer lamented that government cries of “deliver, deliver” became ever more unrealistic and that when officials came to “take away at a song” the rice they had sweated so hard to produce, to the point where it was hard for them to eat, they couldn’t stand it.23 If the peasants were forced to eat a smaller share of the crop, the armed forces stationed in Japan were eating a larger proportion. During the four 19

Cwiertka, Katarzyna Joanna, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Politics and National Identity (Reaktion, London, 2006), p.82; Martin, Agriculture and Food Supply, p.193; Milward, War, Economy and Society, p.288.

20 Martin, Bernd, Agriculture and Food Supply in Japan During the Second World War, in Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (eds), Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, Ostfildern, 1985), pp.185, 190-1.

21 Johnston, Japanese Food Management, p.109.

22 Martin, Agriculture and Food Supply, p.192.

23 Havens, Thomas R. H., Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978), pp.99-100.

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years to 1945 their numbers grew from one million to 3.5 million and concurrently their demand for rice rose from 161,000 tons a year to 744,000 tons.24 In 1945 this amounted to about half the entire domestic rice crop.

Town dwellers were initially allocated a ration of 330 grams a day in April 1941. This was sufficient to sustain the austere Japanese diet of rice, a little fish, the occasional highly prized egg, pickles and side dishes of vegetables with miso soup. And it was possible to supplement rice with other cereals as well as sweet potatoes and pumpkin. Meat, never a fundamental part of the diet, all but disappeared.25 The seafood ration comprised a large amount of squid caught in shallow coastal waters, which was an ominous sign that deep-sea fishing was threatened: fishing boats were being requisitioned and there was a lack of fuel and even nets. In fact, the national fish catch fell to less than half of pre-World War II levels, seriously compromising the amount of animal protein in the diet.26 Eating rice was transformed into an act of patriotism. The Rising Sun lunch box is said to have been invented in 1937 at a girls’ school in Hiroshima Prefecture. Every Monday, to demonstrate their support for Japanese soldiers in China, the schoolchildren ate rice and a pickled plum that resembled the hinomaru. This soon spread throughout the country as a symbol of nationalism. On a train journey, Kappa Senoh’s alter ego in his autobiographical novel, A Boy Called H, watches as a fellow passenger eats such a lunch, bought on a station platform. The piece of paper that wraps the lunch is decorated with a picture of a thick iron chain and three faces: those of a soldier, a factory worker and a middle-aged woman. Underneath is written, “The Will! The Power! The Cooperation! In all-out war, we are all warriors together!”27 But by 1943 it was becoming increasingly difficult to eat rice. The American blockade of the Japanese islands began to have a serious impact on rice imports. Only tiny quantities were able to slip past the cordon. In IndoChinese warehouses 500,000 tons of rice eventually accumulated, while

24

Johnston, Japanese Food Management, p.152.

Japanese pamphlet no. 9, Australian War Memorial 54 423/5/22 Air Dept. Wellington N.Z. Japanese pamphlets.

26 Johnston, Japanese Food Management, pp.129-30.

27 Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine, pp.118-19; Senoh, Kappa, A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan (Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1997), p.197.

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the Tonkin peasantry, from whom much of it was requisitioned, starved.

Meanwhile, rationed rice in Japan declined in quality. The “mixture of white rice, yellow (old) rice, green beans, red grains and brown insects” became known as Five-Colour Rice.28 There was not enough rice to go round and Manchurian wheat and barley were used to make up the 330-gram ration.

The boy, “H”, watched with envy as soldiers training at his school tucked into white rice while he ate a lunch of “substitute rice”: pumpkin and sweet potato.29 In effect the urban diet was reduced to that of a 1930s peasant. In addition, farmers, struggling to produce enough cereals, neglected to grow vegetables and fruit.

Kiyoshi Kiyosawa, a secret diarist, complained that each family had to make do with two white radishes as their only vegetables for a week.30 Fruit disappeared in towns. The Japanese began to go hungry. The impact of wartime shortages on nutrition can be seen in the stunted growth of boys during those years. In 1949 boys aged 15 were no taller than they would have been in the 1890s. 31 As the American blockade strangled the home islands, Manchurian salt and soya beans began to pile up on Korean docks. The food rotted before it could reach the hungry Japanese because there were insufficient ships braving the mines and transporting food across the Sea of Japan. Even shipping the domestic rice crop between islands became increasingly difficult. In the face of its failure to feed the urban population the government exhorted civilians to show greater ingenuity and resourcefulness. They were told to eat the grubs of bees and beetles, to use ground-up sweet potato peel for flour and to mix rice straw (normally used in the making of shoes) with seaweed to make noodles.32 One woman who tried to follow this advice used acorns and flour made from the dried vine of the sweet potato to make dumplings.

“The children wouldn’t eat them. Even when we told them to shut their

28

Pauer, Neighbourhood Associations, pp.226-7.

Senoh, A Boy Called H, p.290.

30 Soviak, Eugene (ed), A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999), p.115.

31 Honda, Gail, Differential Structure, Differential Health: Industrialization in Japan, 1868-1940, in Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud (eds), Health and Welfare During Industrialization (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997), p.281.

32 Senoh, A Boy Called H, p.302; Matsumoto Nakako, interviewed May 2006.

33 Havens, Valley of Darkness, pp.129-30.

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eyes and eat, it was no good,” she said.33 Even more outlandishly, residents of Osaka were told that used tea leaves, the blossoms and leaves of roses, silkworm cocoons, worms, grasshoppers, mice, rats, moles, snails, snakes and a powder made of the dried blood of cows, horses or pigs could all be consumed. Nutritionists even suggested adding a special fermenting agent to sawdust to make it edible.34 In 1945 those within the government in favour of negotiating peace with the Americans feared that deprivation would persuade the people to stage a revolution. Before that could happen the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pushing Emperor Hirohito into surrender. In the first few months after the war problems remained: wet, cold weather and a typhoon, followed by flooding, afflicted the harvest and left the Japanese hungry again. In towns people survived by eating watery rice gruel and wheat bran usually fed to horses. Deaths from starvation began to mount.35 Ayako Tsutsumi thought that she “would be happy to die if only I could eat a big bowl of white rice first”.36 When American food aid arrived in 1946 it came in the form of wheat and the Japanese were forced to eat bread.

Schoolchildren were given small white rolls for lunch and companies began to produce electric bread-making machines.37 The forced modification of eating habits brought about lasting changes. The Japanese integrated bread into their daily menu and now frequently eat toast or rolls for breakfast. But as soon as the Korean War injected new life into the Japanese economy and people could afford it, they reverted to a bowl of white rice with lunch and dinner. For those who had served in the military, for the urban population and even for farmers, the experience of rationing had given rice the status of food to which they were entitled. A researcher who lived in the village of Shinohata during the 1950s and 70s found that a bowl of rice was of “central

34

Johnston, Japanese Food Management, p.202; Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (Penguin, London, 2000), p.91.

35 Dower, Embracing Defeat, p.93.

36 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Showa: An Inside History of Hirohito’s Japan (The Athlone Press, London, 1984), p.219.

37 Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp.169-70.

38 Dore, Ronald, Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village (Allen Lane, London, 1978), pp.86-7.

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importance … three times a day the centre of every Shinohata meal is a bowl of rice”.38 The wartime government had tacitly acknowledged that all Japanese had a right to a diet centred on rice. The fact that it had been unable to fill the ration reinforced rather than undermined this notion. The government maintained control of post-war cultivation and distribution of rice to ensure it could provide rice for the entire population.39 World War II had transformed white rice into a staple Japanese foodstuff and the central element of a meal.40

39 40

Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine, p.131.

Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine, p.131; Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self, p.39.

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Chop Suey Cinema Paul Fonoroff and Clarence Tsui

I

 , the San Sebastian International Film Festival, one of the longest-running cinematic showcases in Europe, included a delectable appetiser in its packed programme: food-related films matched with theme-appropriate post-screening dinners at some of the Basque city’s most acclaimed restaurants.

Culinary Zinema organisers deserve credit for the audacious addition that cashed in on the host city’s gastronomic merits, even though the idea was introduced a year earlier at its more prestigious festival counterpart in Berlin. The Germans heralded its Culinary Cinema with the award-laden Italian film I Am Love, which depicts an icy Russian trophy wife realising her desires through rediscovering the pleasures of eating.

The festivals underscore the leading role food has played in film, something Chinese film-makers have long emphasised in their visual and sociological allegories. They have dished up culinary references in everything from social-realist drama to martial-arts movies to comedy-of-manners flicks that have dissected, among other things, domestic schisms, class struggles and the battle between good and evil.

Which is why Eat Drink Man Woman is not just the title of Ang Lee’s 1994 paean to Chinese culinary art, but also an apt description of an important aspect of its celluloid culture. Just as art is a social product, films mirror reality. How food is prepared and consumed in movies, for example, is a sign of the times: that the 1990s was a conspicuously tasty cinematic decade points to the resurgence or resilience of the economies of Hong 51

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Kong, Taiwan and the mainland. Big-name Hong Kong comedies such as The Banquet (1991), The Chinese Feast (1995) and The God of Cookery (1996) all revel in a gastronomic extravagance that would have been out of place at a less prosperous juncture. Interestingly, these films, so rich in their suggestion of broad social values in Chinese society, have never been embraced by an international audience because they are considered populist pap made for Chinese-speaking viewers.

Still, in the past 20 years, and with the region’s growing profile on the cinema festival and art-house circuits, food has come to be treated with a seriousness never previously seen on Chinese-language screens. Take, for example, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s eight-minute-long dinner shot in Flowers of Shanghai (1999), about power plays among prostitutes (“flower girls”) at a brothel, their patrons and the establishment’s madam; and the ostentation (both calorific and allegorical) in Feng Xiaogang’s Shakespearean epic The Banquet (2006).

The overseas popularity of Chinese food made its presence felt in Hollywood films long ago, albeit bearing the same stereotypical quirks with which Hollywood treated orientalia in general. The trend reached a peak in the 1960s with Chinese-American delicacies making it to title status in The Fortune Cookie (1966) and With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), having hit a strikingly kitschy high in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s chop suey musical Flower Drum Song (1961).

In more recent times, the exoticism of the Chinese-American dining experience has given way to the familial comfort long associated with the Jewish-American or Italian-American movie kitchen, melodramas like The Joy Luck Club (1993) oozing soy-based celluloid schmaltz and, in modified form, showing up in such Asian-based Chinese pictures as Singapore’s Rice Rhapsody (2005), starring America’s favourite television purveyor of Eastern cuisine, Martin Yan. It is a comedy about nosh and norms, narrated by Jen (Sylvia Chang Ai-chia), a chef who thrives on making the traditional dish of Hainan chicken rice. Mother to three sons, she struggles to come to terms with the (homo)sexuality of two of them and is anxious that their orientation will not influence her youngest. Yan plays Jen’s best-friend-cumsecret-admirer, who specialises in “duck rice”, a play on the Chinese proverb about “chicken-duck talk”, which emphasises incomprehension between two conversing people.

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Beyond its use as a comedic or dramatic device, which one finds in cinematic gastronomy across the globe, food in Chinese films often serves to celebrate the joy of Chinese cuisine (and, by implication, Chinese culture generally) and as a springboard for gruesome thrills.

The former is evident in the large number of food-related songs. Diana Chang Chung-wen’s Hong Kong debut in The Three Sisters (1957) featured the “most beautiful creature in Free China” (as she was then nicknamed) coquettishly crooning a ditty called Barbecue Pork Buns. Though the tune was taken from Rosemary Clooney’s 1954 hit Mambo Italiano, the original lyrics were not literally translated into Mandarin but transformed by lyricist Li Chun-ching into a eulogy extolling a full range of dim sum delights, the well-endowed starlet humorously inviting viewers to select from her ample array of “Guangdong bao and Shanghai bao”.

The song was a sensation and created a trend of food-based serenades, such as Tang Yuan [sweet dumplings] for Sale in Storm in the Peach Blossom Village (1957) and Selling Wonton in It’s Always Spring (1962). Such vocalisations reached a peak of irreverent hilarity with Stephen Chow Singchi’s BBQ Chicken Wings, an ode to a Hong Kong street snack delivered in modern slang – despite its appearance in the Tang Dynasty costume farce The Flirting Scholar (1993).

But food songs weren’t – and aren’t – always performed for laughs. An early illustration of the recuperative power of nourishment can be found in Eternal Fragrance (1942), a controversial China-Japan-Manchukuo coproduction commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of the First Opium War. A major sequence features the Chinese-born Japanese superstar Yoshiko Yamaguchi – who was more widely known by her Chinese name, Li Hsiang-lan, and who became Shirley Yamaguchi when she worked in Hollywood in the 1950s – singing The Candy-Peddling Song in an effort to persuade 19th-century drug addicts to forsake their vice for non-addictive sweets. The movie was condemned in post-World War II China as having been a “collaborationist” exercise and the song banned from mainland airwaves until the late 1970s, when, with the demise of the Gang of Four, attitudes towards the pre-1949 entertainment world relaxed. Rapprochement in SinoJapanese affairs and a reassessment of Li’s Chinese career also helped.

It was hardly the first time food had played a political role in Chinese movies. A favourite subtext among left-wing film-makers in Shanghai before 53

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1949 was the great disparity between classes, with mealtime portrayal becoming an effective means of demonstrating the chasm between rich and poor. A typical case is the omnibus drama The New Year’s Gift (1937), a collection of vignettes tracing the path of a silver coin as it passes from hand to hand through various strata of Shanghai society. The screenplay by Xia Yan, a leading literary figure in the underground Communist Party and a future vice-minister of culture in the People’s Republic, is representative of food’s power on symbolic and literal levels: it highlights the discrepancies witnessed by the coin and, by extension, the audience.

Even shorn of an overt ideological context, screen edibles were often invoked as “class” items in the sense of prestige rather than struggle. For example, a humorous scene in Long Live the Missus (1947) – written by Eileen Chang Ai-ling – centres on the purchase of imported pineapples to impress a prospective in-law.

Exotic fruits were mentioned in a more solemn light in post-1949 mainland movies, especially during years of austerity. When Mao Zedong was given mangoes by a Pakistani delegation during the Cultural Revolution, the chairman’s refusal to eat such tempting fare and his presentation of it to workers and peasants was immortalised in a song whose lyrics began: “Each mango’s deep kindness flashes the golden sunlight. Chairman Mao, the red sun, your brilliance radiates in all directions”. The number became the theme of the 1976 Changchun Film Studio’s production Song of the Mango.

Not surprisingly, the horrors of post-1949 malnourishment and famine never made it to the mainland screen. Even the mass kitchens that were a fixture of communal life during the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962 were not given dramatic treatment until decades later, in Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994), a film whose description of the vast human suffering during the “Great Leap” and the Cultural Revolution led to its being blacklisted within China and Zhang’s banishment from film production for two years.

Hong Kong movies, however, have never been too shy to take on epicurean horrors, albeit of a non-political bent. Two of the most memorable works are remarkable for their A-list credentials and degree of establishment acceptance. Anthony Wong Chau-sang even collected a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor for his grisly impersonation of a bloodthirsty cook in The Untold Story (1993), an adaptation of a real multiple murder whose 54

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essence is more aptly captured by its Chinese title, Baat Sin Faan Dim – Yan Yuk Cha Siu Bao, which translates as Baat Sin Restaurant – Barbecued Human Meat Buns.

Dumplings (2004) took another popular nibble and gave it an equally gruesome secret ingredient – foetus flesh – consumed with gusto by the leading character, portrayed not by some fringe celebrity but by mainstream singer and actress Miriam Yeung Chin-wah.

No matter that her character finds the dumplings hard to digest; they are another example of the variety offered on the region’s celluloid menu, a buffet whose range, from stomach-churning escapism to song-inducing propaganda, reflects the culinary diversity of the Chinese cinematic experience.

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Mido (Beautiful City) Cafe, Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong (2001) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Cha Chan Teng, Sheung Wan (Connaught Road), Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 24cm x 9cm

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Captain Chandrahas Choudhury

W

  around comes around: this is what tradition says. But I know it from experience too. Those who deliberately inflict pain on others invariably receive pain in return. But this is only the beginning of the matter. Sometimes, blind in their troublemaking, such people continue to be blind in their suffering and so, when things turn around they set about making trouble again, like toasters with only two settings. This is why I think it is foolish to forgive them, because even plates and pressure cookers know more than them and are good to you if you are good to them. At the same time, to nurture a lasting bitterness or rage against them is merely to bring oneself down to their level; one must learn to practise detachment. I think it’s best to be very cold with such people, very calm, as if nothing they do can have any effect on you, even if they once drove you so hopping mad you had to take pills. That was the lesson taught me by my late father, who set up this restaurant in Prabhadevi, although in his time – and it was a long, long time, stretching from the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi to the third year of the third millennium – it was an Udupi establishment selling dosa, idli, vada, milkshakes and grilled sandwiches. My father in turn learned this straight from Mahatma Gandhi, born an ordinary Gujarati in Porbandar, just like our Umeshbhai Shah from the sixth floor of Silver Apartments, who too has been celibate for more than 20 years, although totally against his will. But here I am, running ahead of my story before I’ve begun, like an overeager waiter on his first day of work. Anyway, these men are not human beings but savages. It always heats up my head to think about such people.

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*** Last Tuesday, as soon as I arrived at the restaurant at 10.30am after my market run and sat down with a cup of chef Krishna’s tea, the phone rang.

The first order of the day – a sacred thing. You won’t believe it, but we’ve established that if the day’s first order is for either soup or hakka noodles the rest of the day goes very well. You might think it just a superstition, but a superstition that is believed is as powerful as the truth – or even more powerful than what you might call the freestanding truth, since it often becomes the truth through the process of trusting in it. These are matters we should discuss properly sometime, when we are in less of a hurry, because right now the phone is ringing …

I picked up the receiver and said in my deepest, most pleasant voice: “Good morning, China Dragon …”

There was a silence at the other end, as if the caller had last used a phone in the ’80s and couldn’t believe he had been connected so quickly.

“Sir!” a man blurted. “It’s me!”

“Me who? Say what you want quickly, it’s business time.”

“It’s me. Captain!”

Well, wasn’t that a surprise? It was Captain. In 2009, when I turned my Udupi joint into the China Dragon, I changed not just the decor and the menu but the language around the place. If you’re charging higher prices you have to become a bit more classy inside yourself, or as Gandhi says – that man again, he pops up everywhere – “be the change you want to see”.

So I established a practice of calling the head waiter captain, to make him feel better about himself and allow him to impose his authority on the rest of the staff. (In our industry, the definition of “staff” is “people who do the opposite of what you want them to do and ask for a salary on the 30th”.)

But of course, just calling someone “captain” doesn’t make him a captain.

The three previous incumbents of the captaincy had proved to have about half a brain among them. And the current one had less than a third: I had to carry him on one shoulder all day, when the restaurant was already on my back.

“Captain! What happened to your voice? And where are you? It’s your job to be here an hour before opening time!”

“Su-ur! Not Captain. Captain! Your Barun!”

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“Oh my God. Barun!”

Barun Mandal had been my first captain. A greater and at the same time more incompetent schemer and wretch has probably never been seen in Prabhadevi. Six months ago I fired him after he incited chef Uttam to desert me, believing that when a replacement arrived – and he knew as well as I that good labour is hard to find – he would be given a pay rise as the most senior member of staff. That was Barun’s snake-like way of thinking, always plotting a better deal for himself somehow, even if the restaurant went down. That was the last time he was allowed to mess things up at China Dragon. I hadn’t seen his face since the afternoon I ordered him to pack all his things from the staffroom and leave before night fell, before he could start putting wicked thoughts into the minds of the other staff. And what to tell you … even after Barun was banished, the things he did! And now here he was, back like a bad penny, saying, “your Barun” as if he were an old lover.

“Barun Moshai! Kamon acho?” I said cheerfully in Bengali, in the same slightly slurred tones in which Barun had given tongue to so many calculating thoughts in his time at China Dragon. “Is this a Bengal code, moshai? What happened to your mobile?”

“Sir! I am not in India,” said Barun. “I am calling from … Yoorope.”

“Europe!” Despite my contempt for Barun, I was impressed. I have never been to Europe myself. It has always been my dream to go to London some day. I want to see up close the people who once ruled us. “How did you get so far?”

“I got work here, sir.”

“Well, good for you. What country are you in?”

“I don’t know, sir. But it’s very cold here.”

I checked the country code on my phone and ran a Google search on my computer.

“You’re in Poland,” I told him.

“Yes … that’s right! I am in Poland.”

Barun’s voice seemed so close, as if he were leaning right over me here in Prabhadevi, trying to peer into the tip box to see if he might quickly raid it.

I could clearly see his shifty eyes, his dark, cunning face, like a marsh always flooded by the waters of secret thoughts. If he had been merely quarrelsome or dishonest with the staff they might still have tolerated him, because most 61

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were no saints themselves. But it was food that erected a wall between him and them. After he has spent all day labouring far from home and family you can’t deny a working man the needs of his stomach, his food the way he knows and loves it. Almost to a man the waiters despised Barun because, between him and Uttam, they made sure the staff lunch and dinner were always Bengali food, made to their own taste, cooked in mustard oil and spiced with radhuni and panchporan. Phulkopi, aloo potol curry, dimer jhol, aloo chorchori, mung dal, fried eggplant, enough rice to feed seven generations of their ancestors – that was what they made every day. No matter what I or the waiters said to them, the staff food always tasted the same. When they made Chinese food it tasted like Chinese all right, but when they cooked Indian, even their rajma tasted like it was made by a housewife in Sealdah or Medinipur. What a pair.

“Barun, what are you doing in Poland?” I said, restraining my tongue and my temper, even though I knew so much more about his activities now than I did when he was here. “And why have you thought of me all of a sudden?”

“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, sir.”

“Really? You’re sorry? So suddenly?”

“I am sorry, sir. What we – what I – did was not right,” Barun mumbled in his Bangla accent, which was probably now foxing a thousand Poles.

“Strange that you had to reach Poland to say sorry to me,” I said. “What exactly are you saying sorry for? That’s what I want to know. Are you saying sorry in general, or for something in particular?”

“Sir, not only me. Someone else also wants to say sorry to you. I am giving him the phone. ” There was a crackle and another voice came on the transcontinental line, booming and belligerent, even though it stuttered.

“Hello sir! G-g-good morning!”

“Chef Uttam!” I said. “So even you’ve reached Poland.”

“H-h-hello, sir! Good morning.”

“What is it? Are you people setting up a new Bengal out there?”

“We both came out here, sir, last month. Just the two of us. There is an Indian restaurant here.”

“Ahan,” I said. “Good luck to you. So, how was your wedding, chef Uttam? Or was that all just a story?”

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In December, at the very peak of the peak of peak season, Uttam had suddenly said he wanted to go home to Bengal. At long last his parents had found a girl for him to marry. A date had been set for the following week.

Although no great fan of wives myself, I understand a man’s desire to have one. Because Uttam was already 38, I couldn’t very well deny him the chance to marry a girl being offered to him at that advanced, semi-ineligible age.

And apparently she wasn’t just any girl. She had a BA in English Literature and was working as a clerk in a textile business just outside Kolkata. She had a brother in the navy. She was earning 3,000 rupees a month in Bengal, which in real terms was probably more than Uttam’s 8,000 in Bombay, though of course his food and board were free.

“I’ll leave on Tuesday and I’ll be back in a week,” he had said. “Maybe one day extra, if we go somewhere for our h-h-honeymoon. Let me go, sir, please. I’ll call you as soon as I get there. I’ll come back and think of all new dishes and make up like anything. Ch-Ch-China Dragon will not suffer.”

How could I say no? Not only did I let him go, I gave him an advance of 2,000 rupees so he could buy saris for his wife and mother-in-law. I even shared some of my vodka with him the night before he left, toasting his future as a family man. Even Barun had had a sip of Smirnoff and declared it had an imported taste in every drop. The next morning chef Uttam set off for Bengal with his shoulder bag and a two-litre bottle of water. He was never seen or heard of again. Two weeks after that I had finally had enough of Barun and fired him. I learned from the others that he’d continually been goading Uttam, filling his ears with all sorts of lies about me and telling him he could set him up much better in Kolkata, somewhere close to his wife.

So that was that. Or was it? Although I had more peace of mind after that deceitful pair left, business had been terrible. From January to March at least 100 grey hairs appeared on my head and I put on three kilos from drinking too much. Last month I had to apply for a fresh loan from the bank. We were doing all we could to see China Dragon up and running, but it looked as though our destiny was something else. One day my friend Premanand, who has a medical store on Worli Sea Face, happened to drop by. He took a look at the place and lent an ear to my troubles. Then he said – and Premanand is always someone who thinks carefully before speaking – that it looked as if I was going through not a bad patch, which can happen to anybody, but a bad spell, which happens for some specific reason and 63

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involves the agency of someone hostile. He asked me to go to see someone he knew, the astrologer Mamaji Bansode in Parel. I don’t really believe in all this astrology-shastrology, but I was desperate. So one afternoon, after lunch, when the restaurant had pulled down its shutters ’til evening, I went to see Mamaji.

Goggle-eyed, grizzled Mamaji heard me out patiently, his eyes wide open like a fish lying on its side at Mazgaon Dock and then, after asking some specific questions that showed he knew much more about my life than I’d told him, said some disturbing things. People from my past had, with the help of a tantrik, directed black magic against my business. I didn’t know whether to believe Mamaji; perhaps that was what he told everyone who went to see him. But I was on a railway line: the next stop was believing him, the next after that doing what he suggested.

“Don’t worry son,” Mamaji said, “you’ve come to the right person. When Mamaji is at your side, evil has no place to hide. I can dissolve such things in two days. Meanwhile, here is something that you must wear on your wrist from now on. Don’t take it off even when you go for a bath.”

It didn’t dawn on me until the next day, but I’d often heard Barun and Uttam speak about tantriks in their native town. Apparently Bengal is full of village ponds, communists and tantriks. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced those two were behind the plot.

Especially because, strange though it sounds, things miraculously started to look up after I began wearing the taveez Mamaji gave me. Last week we averaged 10,000 rupees a day in orders. It was as if the evil power had been neutralised and all the homes and offices of Prabhadevi had suddenly woken up to our existence. Best of all, Mamaji charged me only 101 rupees for the consultation, plus 21 for the taveez. Premanand be praised!

So now, when they suddenly called me, I happened to know things about Barun and Uttam that Barun and Uttam didn’t know I knew about them.

My question to Uttam about his wedding was only an opening move, just as in chess the pawn must go forward for the queen to come out and attack.

“No, my wedding really happened sir,” insisted Uttam from Poland.

“I am now muh-muh-muh-married. I am sa-sa-sorry, sir, I did not come back.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Nobody missed you over here except your bosom pal Barun. But you have a lot to answer for, Uttam. A lot.”

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“I am sorry, sir. Whenever I go back to India I will definitely come and meet you. Before anybody else – even my wife. I will get you lots of new recipes from Poland. The food here is very i-i-i-interesting, sir. It’s not like what you eat in India. They eat something here called golass. A mixed dish.”

“Gol-ass?” I said. “We have no need for round asses here in India. We already have enough.”

“Sir, there are many other very i-i-i-interesting dishes I can tell you about.”

“What about that 2,000 you owe me?”

“I will send it back to you, sir, as soon as I come back.”

“Okay. Very sweet of you. One last thing. How’s the black magic going out in Poland?”

There was a silence. Uttam said, “You – you know about that, sir?”

“Don’t think I’m a fool!” I roared. “I know all about the dirty tricks you people have cooked up! Don’t think you can succeed. China Dragon is bigger than you eunuchs.”

“I am very sa-sa-sorry, sir. Barun was so upset after you fired him that he got carried away. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen. It will never happen again.”

“It won’t because it can’t!” I said. “There are no tantriks in Poland. And even if there are, or you people have learned all the black arts yourself, I’m protected against all your evil designs. You think only you know godmen, you bastards? Nothing you do can touch me any more.”

There was an even longer silence. Uttam seemed to hand the phone back to Barun, who gave it straight back to him. Uttam said, “Actually, duh-duhduh-that’s what we wanted to ask you, sir.”

“Wanted to ask me what?”

“We wanted to ask …”

“What? What did you want to ask me?”

“Sir, if you have got someone to cast a hex on us, please get him to stop now. We are really very sorry. We are in bad shape, sir.”

“Me?” I was suddenly curious. “Why do you think I’ve done that?”

“Sir, we are in … we are in real trouble over here. There’s no proper he-he-heating in the room. We shiver all night long and can’t sleep. When we came here we thought we were getting paid a lot of money, but more 65

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than half our salary goes on rent and expenses. We can’t bear the food here.

They don’t eat rice at all and at every meal there is bee-bee-beef. We wanted to leave, but the contract we signed was for a year and the boss told us he wouldn’t return our passports before that. Worst of all,” Uttam’s voice broke and he began to weep, “my wife is very upset with me. She didn’t want me to leave for such a distant, unknown place and now I can’t send any money back she is planning to divorce me and muh-muh-muh-marry someone else.

I am sorry, sir, I am sorry! Please forgive me.” Uttam couldn’t bear to say any more and gave the phone back to Barun.

“Sir, we are very sorry, sir,” said Barun, who could never manage any sentences longer than seven or eight words in Hindi, although he could rattle on for hours in Bangla.

I was going to say something, but at that moment I heard angry voices in the background speaking what must have been Polish. There was a strangled shout, then the line went dead. As soon as I put down the receiver the phone rang again. I grabbed it and said, “Enough! Enough of you bastards!”

“Mr Pala, what are you babbling? This is Mrs Desai from Sanjay Building. I want to place an order. Two chicken hakka noodles with extra spring onion, one chilli chicken dry and one sizzling brownie.”

“Right, ma’m. Sorry about the shouting. There in 20 minutes.”

And that was the last I heard from them. Uttam and Barun were gone, like the spirits they had roused against China Dragon.

Somewhere, out in Warsaw, or somewhere, they were hoping I would do something that would save them. What a pair! I went to work on Mrs Desai’s order and after that there was such a rush at lunch that I didn’t have the time to think about my own mother. Long live Mamaji Bansode!

Later I was a little less busy and it all came back to me like a dream. I thought: what a world this is! For more than a year those two had worked for me, eaten my bread and salt, slept in a room I had rented for them, availed themselves of advances and bonuses from my wallet and driven everybody crazy by constantly speaking to each other in Bangla and making Bengali food. Yet all the time they had secretly believed they were being exploited and mistreated. They had then left, or been fired. And in their resentment they had cooked up all kinds of plots and spells against me from back in their village, using the only way they knew to hurt me. Being a straightforward person, I suspected nothing and kept living my life the best 66

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I knew, trying to make a success of China Dragon while falling deeper into debt, into the blues.

Meanwhile, Uttam and Barun had gone to a foreign country, with stars in their eyes, like idiots. They had run into all kinds of trouble there; and just because they were sure my troubles had something to do with them, those buffoons thought in turn that their troubles must have something to do with me! Truly, more than what happens, what is most interesting in this world is why a man believes something happens, the connections he makes between one thing and another. I myself had never given a second thought to the root of all my problems, believing them to be nothing more mysterious than the teething troubles of a new venture and the tight-fistedness of the denizens of my skinflint neighbourhood. But then a sceptical visit to Mamaji Bansode had revealed a malevolent force lurking above my head, invisibly but surely sucking the blood out of my business – a force set in motion from the other side of the country by two bitter brown Bengalis, whose culpability had now been confirmed by their phone call.

Yes, worlds exist above, beyond, beneath the world we know – just as Poland appeared this morning, probably for the first time in history, in the world of Pa-Pa-Pa-Prabhadevi.

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Cha Chan Teng, Sheung Wan (Connaught Road), Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Cha Chan Teng, Sheung Wan (Connaught Road), Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 24cm x 9cm

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Dining with the Dead Sarah Murray

W

  the first thing I ate after my father died? I don’t remember.

But I know it was – as must be the case for so many recently bereaved these days – an airline meal. So it was probably something tasteless and unprepossessing. But exactly what was served I cannot tell you. I was on an early Virgin Atlantic flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to London Heathrow. It was Christmas Eve. Perhaps they gave us turkey. Still, I suppose my culinary-recall failure is easy to understand. My feelings that day were of great sadness but also relief – that my father’s long and painful battle with cancer had ended at last. Having watched a man I loved lose his mobility, optimism, sense of humour and eventually life, why would I have been thinking about food?

Grief affects people in different ways, prompting a range of emotions, expectations, needs and desires. Famously, in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of how people deal with death (whether their own or of loved ones). The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She didn’t include hunger, but that could conceivably be one of our reactions to death. Still, would a keen interest in what was on the menu necessarily be at the top of our list of concerns?

Yes. Food and death are long-standing bedfellows. And the fare served in death’s wake is of the utmost importance in some cultures. Food is at the heart of many traditional funerary rites, memorial services and remembrance

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ceremonies. Its purpose may be sustenance or symbolism. But just as food sustains us in life, so it does in death – in a surprising number of ways. *** How we deal with death and the dead has a habit of reflecting what we do in life. Funerary rituals betray our traditions, beliefs, hopes and fears. In many cultures, as if sending them out on an important journey, we wash the dead carefully. We dress the dead in burial outfits (in some countries that means giving women who die unmarried a bridal gown). We place the dead in coffins with special drawers for keepsakes such as photographs, lockets and mobile phones. If clothing, memorabilia and communication devices are among mortality’s accessories, it seems reasonable that food should be too.

We see this in our ways of death. Take the traditional Japanese Shinto funeral. In part of the ceremony, relatives use dining utensils – chopsticks – to transfer the ashes of the dead to the funerary urn. Food also makes its way into creative contemporary services. When planning his own sendoff, Harry Ewell – whose business was selling ice-cream around Rockland, Massachusetts – arranged to have his van lead the cortège to the graveyard where, newspapers reported, ice-cream was served to mourners.

In rituals honouring the dead, items of food become symbols representing our beliefs about the nature of life. In the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, the seven-day mourning ritual observed by the closest relatives of the dead, the first meal after the funeral consists of eggs and bread rolls – roundshaped objects that imply a circle. This is a reference to the continuity of human existence and tells us that although we’ve lost one member of the community a new life is perhaps about to begin. What we eat at this time also reminds us that, while death may have turned one individual into a cold, lifeless cadaver, those left behind still possess vital, living, breathing bodies needing sustenance. Eating reassures us that we’re alive.

Of course, there are also practicalities. For centuries, friends, relatives and neighbours have felt duty-bound to take food to the bereaved. Gifts of food are an acknowledgement that grieving families may be far from able to think about shopping or cooking, particularly in places where society demands that elaborate rituals and long periods of mourning follow a death.

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Shiva is, for example, a particularly intense period of grieving during which mourners must cover all mirrors in their house, wear special mourning clothing and conduct regular recitations of the kaddish, an affirmation-offaith prayer. During Shiva, Jews are prohibited from working or having sex and, beyond taking a daily shower, are not supposed to shave, wear make-up or cut their hair. During this time, grieving families receive their food from friends and neighbours.

Today, we are often encouraged to “move on”, go back to work and “keep busy” in the face of loss. But in the past and in traditions demanded by certain religions, this was not expected of the bereaved. Everything came to a halt. Daily habits were temporarily neglected. Families abandoned the rice harvest. They held all-night vigils next to a body to keep the deceased company before their journey to the next life, or to safeguard the corpse.

They washed the bodies of those they loved in preparation for funeral rites that might preoccupy them for days, if not months. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” wrote W.H. Auden, “Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

At such times someone has to feed those mourners. So in many societies the first reaction of friends and neighbours to news of a death is to start cooking. This tradition survives. “Personally, I love funeral food traditions here in the Bible Belt,” comments one American blogger. “When a member of my community passes away the family doesn’t have to worry about feeding their children or putting dinner on the table for at least a week.”

The comment of another blogger shows us how essential a service this can be: “After my grandfather died I was so relieved that someone brought a big raw-veggie tray. I was not up for anything heavy … but I had to get some food into me to avoid passing out. I munched on a few red pepper strips, broccoli spears and carrots and thought – I should remember this for when someone I know needs help at a rough time.”

Although sustenance is important during a time of bereavement, culinary gifts are also expressions of sympathy: compassion baked into a cake; kindness in a dish of kedgeree. Food steps in when words fail us. Food brings us together when grief threatens to tear us apart. *** 73

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What appears on funeral menus around the world? Utah offers Funeral Potatoes, which is a dish of hash browns with a cheesy gratin sauce served in a casserole. America’s Pennsylvania Dutch eat raisin pie or fruitcake. In parts of Greece, a mixture of boiled wheat, cinnamon, sugar and nuts called koliva is passed round mourners as they stand in church courtyards. In Haiti, flaky pastries, black coffee and tea are served at funeral receptions.

In the American south, where people take comfort food seriously, Gayden Metcalf and Charlotte Hays have captured elaborate spreads and recipes associated with death – from Tomato Aspic and Pickled Shrimp to Liketa Died Potatoes – in the hilarious cookbook Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

My friend Debbie, who grew up in a Greek community in Sydney, remembers that some foods were unacceptable at funerals. “You could only serve certain foods,” she recalls. “There were savoury pastries, quiche-type things and coffee and dry biscuits. But you couldn’t have meats. Cognac or some sort of liqueur was served to everyone at the end, but some drinks were appropriate and some were not – it was surprising how prescriptive it was.”

Sometimes the dead themselves are on the menu. For the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil it is important to demonstrate respect for the dead by consuming some of the ashes of the cremated body by adding them to soup.

In Sagada, a small Philippine town 5,000 feet above sea level in the craggy Cordillera Mountains, a large roasted pig is de rigueur at funerals.

Most conspicuous occasions in Sagada – marriages, births, the breaking of ground for a house – require the sacrificial slaughtering of pigs. Death is particularly expensive in porcine terms. During the course of the year following the passing of an individual, about 20 animals might be despatched to meet the demands of funerary rites. Advances in swine husbandry and new fast-maturing breeds of non-native pigs make it relatively easy to build up the supply of animals needed for funeral ceremonies. Even so, ensuring you have sufficient numbers is tough (and the death of a wealthy or notable individual calls for an even greater number).

Strict rules govern everything from how many pigs to butcher (the number of animals killed is referred to as limina), the dates and times at which each butchering should take place and when to distribute the meat among relatives and neighbours (bingit). Depending on the age, gender and 74

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social status of the deceased, the procedures vary. Local divergences apply too: a family in Central Sagada, for instance, might follow different rules to one living across the valley in Eastern Sagada.

I encountered the powerful connections linking food, society and death when investigating Sagada’s intriguing traditional burials. In this small mountain community Anglican Christianity exists comfortably alongside ancient traditions, particularly when it comes to the rites surrounding death.

And these rites demand that the dead are not laid in earth. Instead, wrapped in ceremonial blankets and tied in the foetal position, they are placed in wooden caskets and left hanging from cliff faces or lodged in the fissures and crevices of Sagada’s spectacular forests of limestone. The evening before, an all-night vigil is held for them.

I joined one such event for Harriet B. Batnag, an elderly former resident of Sagada who once ran a shop. I would be welcome, I was told, as long as I took gifts of food and drink (cakes and cognac are evidently most popular) and some money. On arrival I went to pay my respects to the dead woman.

In the main room of her house, Mrs Batnag had been laid out on the floor in a plain wooden coffin flanked by two large candles and watched over by a carved wooden crucifix. Yet while Christian iconography was present, covering her body was a woven shroud in white bearing blue lines: the traditional tribal death blanket.

Outside in the yard, friends and relatives – mostly older people – sat several rows deep, the women in an assortment of headscarves and woolly hats (it was a chilly night by Philippine standards). A few of the most senior members of the gathering were nodding off. As warm sweet tea was handed round others sang quietly, alternating between renderings of Christian hymns in quavering voices and the baya-o, a tribal dirge. Meanwhile, at the back of the house in a small shed, an old man in a cowboy hat was tending the flames of a fire. His was a critical role: not only was the fire boiling water for the tea, it would later be used to roast a sacrificial pig. One was to be slaughtered at midnight.

In Sagada, roast pig is an integral part of the collective send-off. And gifts of money made to the bereaved family pay dividends at the funeral, mourners often showing up with plastic bags in which to take home some of the meat. As important as the food, however, is the presence of the community. In Sagada, funerary dining habits are born of a deep-rooted 75

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belief that the dead should not be left alone before heading to their final resting place in the mountains.

This is true of other cultures. Drinking at Irish wakes arose because refreshments were required to keep people entertained, the corpse, it was believed, needing company while it lay in state overnight. While traditionally food, tea, snuff and tobacco were also offered to mourners, it was the drinks, not the food, that were the focus of proceedings.

As well as feeding mourners while the corpse is still present, in many places we also nourish relatives after a burial or cremation. Of course, in the absence of friends and family, or when relatives live far away, the corporate sector is ready to step in. Companies such as the United States’ Virginiabased Sympathy Food, and gourmet-food outlet Send a Meal.com, offer customers everything from soup, bread and baskets of provisions to sevenday meal services for the bereaved.

Many food-service companies around the world also run successful sidelines in what they like to call “catering with compassion”. Choosing words carefully is one of the great skills of the funeral industry so, unsurprisingly, funeral caterers offer customers “bereavement buffets” and promise to “cater you with care”. One Hawaiian commercial food purveyor, Marujyu Market, seems to have no problem using on its funeral menus the same jaunty slogan it puts on its other food products. On the company’s online menus, above funeral-dish suggestions such as Shoyu Pork, Mochico Chicken and Kalua Pig, is the company motto: “Food so Good, you gotta smile!”

But should you be smiling? Should you be telling jokes? And should you really be savouring the cuisine at a funeral reception? If we enjoy ourselves at the party do we worry about having too much of a good time when death is in the air?

Ghanaians have no such anxieties. Like weddings in India, funerals in Ghana are huge community parties, often attracting hundreds of guests who all expect to dance, be entertained by live music and DJs and be fed plenty of good food. There, a wake is as much celebration as commiseration and funerals, more than any other ceremonies in Ghana, are opportunities to display wealth and largesse. In a country where many citizens live on a few US dollars a day families allot thousands of dollars to funerals, sometimes remortgaging their homes to lay on an impressive event.

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the bereaved family, which helps cover the cost of the entertainment. Placed prominently on a table at the entrance to the funeral ground is a donation box. Staff employed for the occasion, or family members, count the cash.

Donations can also be edible. When Hawa Yakubu, a politician and equalrights campaigner, died in 2007, Ghana’s New Patriotic Party, of which she was vice-chairman, sent her family four bags of polished rice, two bags of maize, two bags of millet, two jerrycans of cooking oil and a live bull for the banquet at her funeral. In some cultures we send flowers, in others, food. *** It is a year since my father died and, propped up on a shelf, is a picture of him standing in a country lane lined with trees stripped bare for winter. He is in his favourite hat, with his walking stick in hand and a red scarf round his neck. But he is not alone. Next to him on the shelf is a doll. She is a little different from your average toy: a female skeleton wearing a black and turquoise lacy flamenco dress. On the shelf below her is a life-sized sugar skull covered in dried berries and another decorated in coloured tinfoil with green metallic discs for eyes. Nearby is a plaster figurine of a skeleton sitting at a sewing machine, a skeletal sheep wearing a sombrero and a loaf of bread with the plastic head of a saint poking through the crust.

The unusual objects surrounding my father’s photograph are part of a Mexican Day of the Dead ofrenda, or altar, installed inside the entrance to the hotel where I’m staying in Oaxaca. The altarpiece is typical of the shrines created for the Day of the Dead, celebrated each November 1 and 2. In the days leading up to the festival these shrines are erected in homes, commercial establishments and public offices. This one is a commotion of colour, covered with pink and purple plastic tablecloths in bold floral designs while above, also in pink and purple, are draped papel picado (perforated paper) banners. In a couple of tall vases on either side of the altar are bunches of orange marigolds, called flor de muerto (since pre-Colombian times they have symbolised death), combined with a few burgundy-red amaranths, a flower known, appropriately, as love-lies-bleeding. Leafy branches with dangling oranges create a glorious arch over the entire construction.

My father is joined also by a dozen or so pictures of the dead relatives of other hotel guests, as well as a photograph of two tabby cats. I like seeing 77

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him there and I’ve already taken several photographs of the altar to show the rest of the family.

As well as photographs of the defuntos, the altar’s tiered shelves house food and drink. It is important to leave a generous supply of foodstuff on these altars, including the favourite treats of the deceased: this is the time when the dead return to Earth to visit – and they’re hungry when they arrive.

On this particular ofrenda a glass of water has been placed in a prominent position (the dead are always thirsty too). Then there are tortillas, a few cupcakes and that loaf of bread (pan de los muertos, or bread for the dead) with the little saint’s head embedded in it.

For my father I’ve left a handful of Werther’s Original sweets. They were his favourites and he always kept a few in his coat pocket. He started me on them, so although I was going to leave the whole packet I’ve saved a few for myself. Other goodies include a bottle of Noche Buena, a renowned Mexican beer, a packet of Marlboro cigarettes, a dish of peanuts, a bowl of plums and a few pomegranates.

What’s happening here? If food is what props up the bereaved during difficult times, it seems it is also needed to keep the spirits of the dead happy.

You can see the concept at work in the practices of the ancient Egyptians.

In a death-obsessed culture, the belief that life continued after extinction was powerful. It was the logic behind mummification, because to survive into the afterlife you needed a well-preserved body. Amulets helped: inserted among linen wrappings, they were inscribed with spells to protect the corpse as it journeyed through the underworld. But the dead also needed to eat, so in ancient Egypt relatives would take regular offerings of food to their tombs.

The ofrendas of Mexico are part of this tradition. And thousands of miles away in China a similar practice of paying tribute thrives. During the Hungry Ghost Festival in the seventh lunar month the doors connecting the three realms – heaven, hell and the domain of the living – are flung open and restless ghosts return to wander the Earth. They come to avenge themselves on those who wronged them during their lifetimes. But the itinerant spirits also long for a little entertainment, so throughout the month plenty of Chinese operas are staged. However, the ghosts also come looking for food – the chicken, pork, rice, fruit and sweets served on family and public altars.

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For millennia the dead have been well provisioned in their graves. In 1908, when archaeologists in southwest France discovered the tomb of a Neanderthal man who had lived roughly 70,000 years before, they found a bison leg had been left on top of his body. It is believed the leg was intended to give the dead person something to eat. The ancient Romans went to their graves accompanied by all they might need on the other side – jewellery, perfumes and weapons. Vessels of food and drink were among the most important items on the provisions list.

But as well as buying victuals for the dead you can also burn them – or at least likenesses of them. This is what Chinese mourners do and “food” is not the only immolated offering. Set alight anything from a paper ingot to a flat-screen television and, as pieces of gold and silver turn to flakes of black ash, cardboard versions of the real objects are spirited into the afterlife for the enjoyment of the deceased.

Hong Kong’s Tin Chau Hong Worshipping Materials shop has one of the best selections of paper cuisine I have found, its dinners for the dead leaving no ghost hungry. In the days leading to April’s Ching Ming Festival (or tomb-sweeping day), display tables are piled high with dim sum sets in small round baskets (steamed dumplings are crafted from tissue paper), fancy sponges and cupcakes (made of foam rubber) and boxes of swallows’ tongues, a rare Chinese delicacy, if rather tasteless in their cardboard rendering. For those who like junk food there are tubs of pot noodles and a boxed set containing a paper burger, chips, tomato sauce and a fizzy drink.

Also on the menu are six-packs of Coca-Cola, the name changed to CaixinCele. It is an unhealthy diet to offer your ancestors, but given that they’re already dead, why worry?

But worry we do. We fret about that “undiscover’d country from whose bourne no traveller returns”. Yet while Hamlet and others have pondered what happens on the other side of mortality, perhaps the food we prepare for the dead clearly reveals our need to believe that the undiscovered country exists. Preparing food for the dead reassures us that there will be an existence for us too once bones are stripped of flesh.

Psychologists say this need is rooted in what is called mortality salience: knowledge of our own death. Death is inevitable and uncertain. We don’t know when it will happen, we’re not sure what will happen afterwards, but we know for certain that it will happen. “Let sanguine healthy-mindedness 79

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do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting,” wrote psychologist and philosopher William James in 1902, “still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

Scary stuff, but, as practical creatures that like to find solutions to problems, humans have discovered all sorts of ways of dealing with the terrifying prospect of our annihilation. We formulate elaborate ceremonies to manage death. We build physical, intellectual and artistic edifices in its honour, leaving the world with a rich legacy of architecture, music, poetry and literature. We construct detailed visions of an afterlife – visions, some argue, created purely to alleviate the fear of knowing we have an expiry date.

Food comes into this too. For the Chinese it means treating ancestors as part of the family long after they have died, with the home shrine stocked with joss sticks and offerings of meat, confectionery and fruit. For Mexicans, it means building an elaborate ofrenda and stacking it with everything from bottles of beer and bread to packets of cigarettes. For the ancient Egyptians, it meant taking food and drink into the tombs of their relatives and rulers.

Nourishment, it seems, remains a necessity beyond the grave. In feeding the dead we are saying that life goes on after the heart has stopped. And the truth is that much of what we do while we’re in this world reflects the uneasy relationship we have with our own transience. With death looming over us, we do what we can to fend off thoughts of its finality – and that includes cooking.

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Tomatoes Erin Swan

H

  the barren gulleys and turrets of the Himalayas, we began to dream of tomatoes. Thin-skinned, split open, glistening with pulp.

We thought of them red, the brightness of first blood, but we would have taken them pale too, not even ripe. We wanted them sliced, on a plate, sprinkled with salt, but we would have eaten them like apples if we could have, just bitten right into them, allowing the juice to run down our chins.

Pete brought it up first – Old Pete from Germany, with his long, white beard and hollow cheeks, not the younger Peter, the American, the one I was travelling with. We were sitting around our plates of dahl and rice that second evening in Nako, in that scrappy little room at the front of our guest house, feeding chillies into our food for a bit of flavour and watching the evening hunker down on the road outside, when he suddenly came out with it.

“God,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice, ripe tomato right now.”

We paused in the middle of eating and eyed the bland mounds of rice and lentils on our spoons. Our collective mouths began to water – mine, Peter’s and Old Pete’s – and though we kept eating we couldn’t help noticing how lacking in colour everything suddenly seemed. The beige of the food, the walls, the scrubby road outside and beyond that, the little houses of Nako, made of pebbles it seemed, grey and forgettable, fading into the dry slopes all around. Forget what had drawn us to this place: the translucent blue of the Himalayan sky, the stab of the mountains against the horizon, the clarity of the air. At that moment, all we could see was what wasn’t there, what we didn’t have.

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After that, tomatoes were all we could think about. Not oranges, not mangoes, not the distant strawberries of our home countries to the west.

No. It was tomatoes, those singular, scarlet globes. It wasn’t that the rice and dahl were awful and the portions the guest-house owner’s son – an awkward boy of 10, maybe 11 – served us certainly weren’t stingy. They even softboiled eggs for us in the morning and cooked them to Old Pete’s exacting specifications, not even complaining if he demanded, on breaking open one that was too soft or too hard, that a new batch be boiled. The owner’s son – who had taken to calling Old Pete his grandfather, perhaps in an effort to soften the sting of his demands – would just shuffle back into the kitchen in his oversized flip-flops and reignite the gas under the pot.

The problem wasn’t that we were hungry or ill fed. The problem was that after a while rice and dahl tended to taste like cardboard and eggs like chalk. Having spent days travelling through Spiti Valley in India, eating hardly anything that even slightly resembled a fruit or vegetable, we had begun to forget about that sharp line of mountains against the sky, about the pale break of day across those peaks, about the contentment of sitting on a balcony in Nako during the late afternoon and watching sparrows dust bathe in the potato fields below. We forgot what started our journey in the first place and began to dream of better things.

The younger Peter and I had been in India for more than four months, most of which we spent in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, working as volunteers teaching English to Tibetan monks. We had more than another month to go before heading to Thailand to look for paid teaching work, which would, we hoped, lead to better careers on our eventual return to the United States. We had left pointless jobs in New York and had no intention of returning before a year was up, maybe even two.

Old Pete, I think, had been travelling for years. He hardly ever spoke of home, which we had assumed, before learning he was from Germany, was England, because he looked like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings and spoke with a slight British accent. He wouldn’t go into detail about what he used to do in Germany but he had numerous stories of his journeys, from Mongolia to Vietnam to Indonesia, even Afghanistan before the start of the war. I could picture him so clearly, with his frayed backpack and his lengthening beard, roving year after year, covering ground with his long sinewy legs, his face resolutely turned from the past. It seemed he had retired 82

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from whatever work he used to do and was spending the rest of his life roaming the world, demanding the perfectly soft-boiled egg.

Peter, my Peter, thought maybe Old Pete had cancer and was travelling just to die, like dogs that drag themselves into the woods in search of the solitude needed for such a solitary act. It certainly seemed possible because he was so thin and his sunken eyes so haunted. He had, in fact, edged perilously close to death on our way up to Nako, so Peter’s speculation didn’t seem far off. It was not cancer that almost claimed him, however, but the valley we had to cross to reach Nako, that village perched on the world’s roof. The valley, the lack of rain, a road tumbled to nothing: a matter not of what crouched within him, but what lay outside, the elements of an earth none of us quite understood.

It was early September and the dry season in Spiti Valley, which never saw much rain anyway. All around us the mountains were crumbling. They seemed to be made of sand and grit, occasionally rock. Walking up a hill, our feet would sink into the soil and we would scrabble for purchase, sending a scattering of pebbles down the slope. The air was so dry it made us thirsty just to breathe. Everything was faded with weariness, coated with dust. And over it all was the clearest blue sky we had ever seen, occasionally studded with clouds, but clouds that released no rain.

In conditions like those, the Himalayan roads, never stable to begin with, began to disintegrate. Often, this just meant they would sift away a little at the edges, making the narrow track even more perilous, forcing passing buses to slow to a crawl to inch their way past each other. But sometimes whole chunks of road disappeared, collapsed, and tumbled into the valleys below. Workers would begin reconstruction but it took time and meanwhile – there being only one major paved road running the length of Spiti Valley – access from one side to the other was blocked. The only option was to walk: leave your vehicle, take a few deep breaths and trek down into the valley, then up the other side, hoping there would be transport there to help you continue on your way.

Such was the case with the road that headed east to Nako and to the rest of the valley, the road that led eventually into the lush greenery of the rest of Himachal Pradesh, down to fabled Rishikesh, where holy men bathed in the river beside holy cows, where the chanting from temples layered the air with sound, where there was fresh papaya every morning for breakfast. The 83

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last thing we wanted to do was turn around and go back the way we had come, to ride the same overcrowded 12-hour bus a second time in defeat, back through landscape we had already seen, back to Manali and eventually to Dharamsala, where we had already spent so much time and left with such hope, such promise, such expectation of what was to come. So when we heard that an entire swathe of the road had apparently slid away, leaving a blank hillside tumbling with the random falling rock, we felt we had no choice but to press ahead. Backpackers we met in Tabo, the main town to the west of the landslide, who had made the journey in the opposite direction, all said it was no big deal, that you just walked down to the river and up the other side and caught a bus waiting for such passengers. It took an hour, tops. They also told us there was another option: glide across the chasm in a basket used to transport luggage and goods, a basket strung on a cable from one side of the landslide to the other. But being afraid of heights, this hardly seemed an acceptable solution to me.

When the bus pulled up in Tabo we boarded without misgivings, even happily because Old Pete – whom we had met in Kibber, a village so high you lost your breath climbing a simple set of stairs – was already on it and cheerfully waving from a window. It was about 10 in the morning when we left Tabo. We thought we would be in Nako by two, at the latest.

Of course, such expectations are foolish, especially in India, where nothing ever goes quite as planned. We did make it to the landslide by noon, as scheduled, but crossing to the other side was another matter entirely. We entrusted our backpacks to the metal basket strung across the gap, the same one we had been told about and that later transported without incident several tourists we met afterwards. This time, however, the men operating it said the line had snapped a couple of times, although they had thankfully lost only sacks of rice. I peered down the length of the cable strung so precariously across that chasm, pictured it snapping, me tumbling head over feet through the clear Himalayan air. One look at Peter and Old Pete told me they were thinking the same. So we walked.

I had feared descending the most because, as I said, heights made me nervous. But it was no big deal; I just followed the winding track all the way down. The Indians from the bus made it to the bottom first, hopping from rock to rock as though they had been doing it all their lives, which I suppose they had. Then came Old Pete and Peter and finally me, the rearguard. We 84

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paused for water and to catch our breath, which at that altitude was more difficult than it sounds. Then we braced ourselves for the journey back up the other side.

The problem was we hadn’t really considered the altitude. We had already been high in the Himalayas of Spiti Valley for a week or more and should have been used to being short of breath. But we hadn’t really tried to climb an entire hillside. We didn’t know just what our lungs were capable of, or not. Plus, we had been in India for months by then and the various food-borne parasites had taken their toll on our strength. Peter and I were already two sizes too small for the clothes we had brought and Old Pete, for all we knew, was being slowly devoured by cancer.

We started the upwards trek together. Then I had to stop, after just a few steps, to catch my breath. And then again. Peter, whose lungs were already saddled with asthma, stopped a few times too, but then miraculously seemed to rally himself and kept on, forging up the rocky trail, leaving the two of us behind. I kept stopping, wheezing and panting, unable to gasp enough air to keep me going for more than a few steps. It was Old Pete though who started having the worst trouble. He halted every five steps or so, which was a relief to me because I too had to stop and didn’t want to be the only one left behind. But then he started lying down, right there on the rocks, complaining of dizziness. I would pause and reassure him and brush off his apologies for slowing us down. After a few minutes he would stand and start moving, but after a few steps he would be lying down again. He was wheezing worse than I and his face was the colour of putty, his eyes more haunted than ever. Sometimes it would take him a few tries before he could sit up, then he would make it only a step or two before having to lie down again. Finally, there came a time when he couldn’t stand up, no matter how much he wanted to. He kept sitting halfway up then having to lie back down again, saying his head was spinning. I thought of Peter’s speculation about his approaching death and saw the look in his eyes, as empty of light as my lungs felt of breath, and I was afraid.

I didn’t know what to do. All the Indian passengers from the bus had long since disappeared. Peter by then was probably at the top of the slope, but that was too far away to call him back. Old Pete, though terribly thin, was more than six feet tall and there was no way I could lift him. We had

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long since run out of water. It was just the two of us, the rocky trail, the valley below and the blue sky over Spiti Valley.

Eventually I said, “I’ll go for help.” Old Pete just nodded, his head lolling against a rock. I thought maybe I could find some men at the top to carry Old Pete up the trail. It was laughable though. Climbing quickly to the crest was a joke, considering the state I was in. I was still stopping for breath every few steps. There was no chance I’d be able to reach help in time. Old Pete, it seemed, was doomed.

As luck would have it, on my way up I met Peter, who was coming down, a clutch of apples in his hand. Apparently he had made it to the place where the metal basket had deposited our backpacks and been given apples by the men operating the pulley. He realised we had been a while and came in search of us. I wheezed out my news about Old Pete and my failed plan to save him. Peter handed me an apple and wished me luck reaching the top.

I continued upwards, taking fortifying bites of the apple every few steps.

Peter, however, kept going back down the mountain to Old Pete. As he recounted later, he hunkered next to him when he found him and cut pieces of apple that he fed into his mouth, the way you would a baby. Eventually, Old Pete, who had apparently eaten nothing that day, was able to sit up, then stand, then slowly but purposefully continue his journey to the top.

By the time they reached me, where I had collapsed next to our backpacks, Old Pete was grinning, joking about his hardship. Even when we continued our journey – another two kilometres, past falling rocks, to a bus so packed we had to ride on the roof all the way up the hairpin turns to Nako – he maintained his good cheer, forging on ahead with the strength of a much younger man. And when we finally arrived in Nako at twilight, he felt well enough to produce a bottle of rum from his backpack and pour glasses all round for a toast to our survival.

I think it was those apples that saved Old Pete’s life. Whether he was truly dying of cancer, or if he’s still alive somewhere, I’ll never know. But he managed to survive then, on that day in Spiti Valley. He lived long enough to see the sunset over the peaks from the roof of the bus to Nako, long enough to reach that village made of stone and dust, a lake like a gem set in its centre, long enough to clink glasses together at journey’s end, warm rum settling in his belly like fire, like life. Because of apples, those simple little orbs.

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*** So I guess there was a forerunner of Old Pete’s craving for tomatoes, a kind of foreshadowing of what he thought he needed in life. Something round and sweet, something juicy. No wonder he became so adamant on the topic of tomatoes. He knew, of course, what could save him and it wasn’t rice and it wasn’t dahl. Maybe at first he thought it was soft-boiled eggs, but it turned out it wasn’t those either. Just tomatoes. That’s all he wanted.

He began to pester the owner of the guest house for them. The guest house was also a shop, apparently the only one in Nako and he was sure the owner would be able to scavenge some tomatoes from the muddle of onions, potatoes and eggs stuffed into the unlit room that served as the people’s market. Unfortunately for us, this wasn’t the case, but Old Pete persisted.

He eventually even began offering to pay exorbitant prices, prices far beyond what he would ever have thought of paying down on the Indian plains, where tomatoes were plentiful.

“Just a tomato,” he would say. “Just one tomato, that would be perfect.

I’ll give you 20 rupees for one, 50 even. Really, why don’t you have any tomatoes up here?”

But the owner would just laugh and waggle his mustachioed face from side to side and order his son to boil another egg or two.

Old Pete wasn’t the only one to develop this craving. Peter and I yearned for them too, though we heckled the owner less. After what we had seen in India we were both trying to stay satisfied with our lot. It wasn’t just the limbless beggars in Delhi or the lepers in Dharamsala; just the sight of a Nako woman trundling down the road in her layers of dirty blankets, a child strapped to her front and a couple of cement blocks balanced on her head, made me conscious of my well-stitched shoes, my unburdened head. Even our Tibetan students back in Dharamsala – most of whom had walked a month or more over these same mountains to escape the Chinese occupation of Tibet and reach India – were a reminder of what we had come from and where else we had the ability to go.

But though we told ourselves we were lucky we still couldn’t resist the idea of tomatoes. The thought of something so sweet, so juicy, was just about driving us crazy. We talked about it, Peter and I, and sometimes Old Pete too, during those afternoons on our balcony when we had done our 87

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exploring for the day and there was nothing left to do but idle away the time talking about everything we missed from home.

Because it wasn’t just tomatoes I was craving. Though our American money went quite far, Peter and I were still trying to save as much as possible, not knowing what would happen to us when we were in Thailand.

In Dharamsala we had sought the cheapest lodgings we could find, not wanting to spend more than 50 rupees a night, the equivalent of about US$1.50. What that bought us was a dank little room at the base of a guest house, a room so deep in shadow and damp that mould grew on everything, even our passports. At night, the sheets were so slick and cold it would take forever to warm them up and we would lie there, listening to the plunk of rain outside and the rustle of insects in the corners of the room, and congratulate ourselves on saving so much money.

And now here we were in Spiti Valley, whose landscape was so beautiful it almost hurt to gaze upon it, but which was also cold and lacking in the simple luxuries of home. I would lie awake at night in our chilly room above the potato fields, with the stunning stretch of the mountains just outside our door and dream of all the things I missed from New York. Tomatoes, obviously, but also bagels and cheese and wine and grapes and steak and anything else I could think of. Clean sheets and soft pillows, comforters in enormous snowy piles, anything other than the damp chill of our room in Dharamsala, or the dry frigidity of the guest houses in Spiti Valley. I dreamed of soap, big bottles of liquid soap and shampoo and lotion from the pharmacy; and of the fluorescence-lit aisles where I could find them, down which I could wander at my leisure, selecting any item I wanted without having to bend over a wooden counter at some roadside stall and point at grimy little jars, scratched bottles, tubes speckled with flies. I had taken such things for granted, I knew that and now I wanted them back. Except I couldn’t have them, because we had set ourselves on this journey through Asia and couldn’t go back, not then, not any time soon.

It wasn’t just our hope of better jobs; it was India itself that wouldn’t let us leave. The sweep of the mountains, the vaulted sky, even the overstuffed buses with their camaraderie and the distinct and pure calm that would settle over me after the fifth jolting hour of travel. Even the stink and clamour of its city streets, the excitement of careening through traffic in a flimsy autorickshaw, laughing at death through gritted teeth. The trains 88

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in the night, the hot cups of chai, the sight of folded saris in rainbow hues stacked on a shelf. The people with their numerous kindnesses and their precise English, the moustaches of the men, the combed and oiled hair of the women, the shouted Hellos! of uniformed children on their way to school. The smell of trash burning, the waft of incense. The thrill of crossing a landslide and living to tell the tale. There was no way a simple desire for tomatoes could cancel all this from our lives. So I dreamed instead, while on the other side of our flimsy wall, in his own chilly bed, Old Pete was dreaming too. *** Then came the day they were finally here. Peter and I were still sleeping when they were delivered; they must have been dropped off before dawn.

When we woke to find the box of tomatoes sitting outside the shop attached to the guest house, I imagined their arrival: the blue light before dawn, the hush of the sleeping village, the box wrestled free from the back of the pickup truck that had rattled its away along the switchback road to Nako, the sound it made when dropped into the owner’s waiting arms, like a sack of stolen money being passed from hand to hand, something illicit, something precious.

There they were when we stumbled from our room in search of our morning chai. The heap of scarlet globes in an unassuming cardboard box, dusty from their journey but no less enticing for that. As though it were Christmas and Santa Claus had come in the night.

“Holy shit,” said Peter. “Are they for us?”

Sadly they were not. Old Pete, who always woke at dawn, had already discovered the unfortunate fact. There he was, all six feet of him, his long white beard blowing gently in the Himalayan breeze, bent over the box with what can only be called a maniacal gleam in his eye, arguing with the owner about prices.

“Fifty rupees,” we heard him say. “Fifty rupees for one tomato. Come on, where else can you get a price like that? It’s 50 rupees, sir, for one tomato.”

But the owner wasn’t having it. He just kept waggling his head in that gesture that meant “no” instead of “yes”, his expression the resolute blank that people in India seem to assume when they have passed the point of 89

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compromise. It was clear that Old Pete had no hope. The owner was not going to sell him any tomatoes.

“Damn it,” I muttered. Peter and I nodded at the owner as we passed into the room that served as their cafe to signal our desire for chai and eggs.

“I would love a tomato right now.”

“God, me too,” said Peter. “I’d eat the hell out of one.”

“Do you think we should ask for one?”

“I dunno. It doesn’t look as though Old Pete is having much luck. Do you wanna try?”

I shrugged. “Kind of.” I looked longingly back at the box, at the tableau of Old Pete and the owner caught in their battle. The owner’s face looked thoroughly sealed; it reminded me of the metal shutters pulled over New York storefronts at night. There would be no persuading him.

“You’d think he’d part with at least one.”

“You’d think.” I sat down at the table. “It’s definitely not worth arguing with him.”

“Yeah. Poor Old Pete.”

I choked out a single bitter laugh. “Poor us.”

Peter joined me at the table and together we stared morosely at the road outside, its potholes, its stones, its dry dirt. With the loss of hope for tomatoes all my other hopes seemed to recede. There would be no bagels, no wine, no family-sized bottles of shower gel, no pristine sheets or fluffy comforters. No. Those days were past. From now on, this would be it. Dahl and rice, with the occasional pebble in it scraping our teeth. Tea boiled with old milk. Pale eggs and dry toast burned at the edges by the fire. Flat rounds of Tibetan bread like we ate in the Spiti capital of Kaza, served to us in a dirty room by a straggly haired woman, bread we had broken open only to find two long, coarse black hairs baked in, like a nasty little surprise. In that moment, all my joy in India, in what it had come to mean to me, dwindled to nearly nothing. This was our road now, our journey. This was what we had braved that landslide for, what we had travelled on all those 12-hour buses for, sweating, hungry, packed in among children and baggage like so much cargo. This was the path we had chosen so we had to accept it.

We knew this, we did, but that didn’t really stop our mouths from watering when we thought of those tomatoes, sitting innocently in their box just outside the door. Old Pete, of course, couldn’t forget them either.

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We could still hear him arguing, out there by the shop. By then, he had reached an offer of 100 rupees, which was about US$3, a ridiculous price for a tomato, even in New York, but the owner still wasn’t budging.

Finally he gave up and joined us at the table.

“He wouldn’t sell me even one.” Old Pete shook his head in bewilderment.

“Not even one. What could they possibly be saving all those tomatoes for?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe there’s going to be a wedding or something.

Maybe a special customer ordered all of them. Who knows?”

It wouldn’t, however, remain a mystery for long. We had breakfast, which took a while because Old Pete must have sent his eggs back at least three times, perhaps in retaliation for the owner’s refusal to sell him the goods.

Finally, on the third try, Peter and I just left him there, wanting to move on with our day. We showered and dressed and left our room, intending to hike up a trail we had seen that led to a mountain pass just above the village. But we stopped outside the guest house shop, amazed by what we saw.

“Oh my God,” Peter said. “Will you look at that? They’re all gone.”

And they were. Every last tomato had disappeared. There wasn’t even a small bruised one left, only a couple of stems and a smattering of dirt. The box had been scraped clean, stripped bare, like a field ravaged by locusts.

The owner was nowhere to be found but Old Pete was at the table again, his head in his hands.

“They took them all,” he said when he saw us. “All of them. You should have seen it.”

“Who?” Peter asked. “Who took them?”

“The villagers. It was like something out of a horror movie. They came in a swarm, a horde of them. I guess word got out that there were tomatoes at the shop and they all just came running.” Old Pete’s eyes were glazed, as though with wonder or despair. “I thought the first woman would buy the whole lot, but no, the owner just sold her one or two, and then the next one came, and then the next. He made sure everyone who showed up received at least one tomato. He had it all regulated, like he had done this before, but it went so fast. Within 10 minutes they were all gone. And he didn’t even save me one.”

“Wow,” said Peter.

“Wow,” I echoed. Peter and I looked at each other and I could read the shame written on his face, as I’m sure he could on mine.

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For some reason, we hadn’t even considered the people of Nako, what a tomato would mean to them. In my craving I had almost forgotten the women with their cement blocks, the children with their mucinous and hungry eyes. How often did they have tomatoes? Or apples? How numerous were their apple trees, how bountiful their harvests in such dry conditions?

What had it meant for the men at the landslide to give Peter those apples, the ones that had kept us going, saved Old Pete, the ones we’d accepted without a second thought? How many eggs had Old Pete wasted in his quest for perfection? We were griping after eating rice and dahl for a week or two; the people of Nako ate them all year long.

Old Pete, however, was still lost in his dream, his eyes more sunken than I’d known.

“I would have paid him 100 rupees,” Old Pete said. “One hundred rupees for a tomato. But he didn’t even save me one. Not even one.”

We stayed another minute, in silence, as though mourning a death, then we left him there, Old Pete sitting at the table with hands clutching his head, his hollow eyes closed and the cancer perhaps eating its way farther into his body. He had no tomatoes and he had no apples; as we left him there, I wondered what could possibly save him this time.

Walking towards the trail we passed a few patchy potato fields, a straggle of huts, two yaks huddled together in a pen – and at the point where the houses stopped and the mountains began anew, a wall of prayer stones.

The stones were different sizes and shapes, but they had all been engraved with the Tibetan prayer with which we had become so familiar back in Dharamsala. The Om Mani Padme Hum, with its curlicues, squiggles and lines, the way all language looks before you learn to decipher its meaning.

Each stone painstakingly etched, then stacked in among the others to form an entire wall. The barrier stood as high as our shoulders and stretched all the way across the ridge between the end of the village and the first sloping rise to the mountain pass towards which we were heading. A wall like that took time and patience and hope, the hope of a people wanting its prayers to be heard.

How long had it taken to build it? Who had engraved those stones?

How often did villagers visit the wall? I thought of the women with their burdens, the potato farmers with their hoes and shovels, the children in their thick and greasy sweaters, cold all year round. How they would perhaps trek 92

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there once in a while, on special days, to run their fingers over the stones, to murmur the mantra etched on them, to give their thanks for what they had and perhaps to pray for a little more.

We spent a while wondering about that wall, tracing the prayers with our eyes and fingers, taking a photograph or two. Then we continued on our way. We walked without hurry, because of the altitude, but nowhere near as slowly as we had up the landslide. We had eaten, we were rested and we had the energy to pick our way up that slope with just a little bit of breathlessness.

At the top, beyond a herd of goats hunting windblown weeds among the crags, we stopped and sat down, Peter on one boulder, I on another. I looked, down past the goats intent on their simple task, down the trail from which we had come, down to the wall of prayer rocks, which I could just discern as a winding snake across the ridge, down to where the village of Nako nestled among the peaks.

A cluster of houses around a lake, each one made of mud and stones stacked one on top of another. A few potato fields where sparrows went to bathe and flutter in the dust. A switchback road leading up to it from below and beyond that, a landslide that tempted each foreigner to fail. A sky overhead so blue it hurt to look at it. And somewhere in that muddle of stone houses, a single shop selling onions and hair oil and hard candies from dingy plastic jars. A store with an empty box sitting outside its door that had briefly contained our hopes. We who thought we had suffered so deeply, come so far, deserved so much.

Just an empty box; and inside each one of those ramshackle houses around the shop, a man or a woman or a child slicing into a tomato with a blunt, rusty knife, sprinkling it with salt and biting into it with a sigh. The way the pulp would glisten in the morning light, the seeds slip over their tongues. The way they would lean back while they chewed, closing their eyes, the juice running down their chins, a look of bliss spreading across their faces, as though all their prayers had suddenly been answered.

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Poetry Chrissie Gittins

Frontiers for Teddy Buri, NLD The Elsinore strawberries hung in their syrup like air balloons in a red sky.

Seville orange slivers, marinated overnight in Jameson Whiskey, lay cross-hatched in gelatinous amber.

Carefully wrapped for the flight, they nestled in my rucksack, refugees from my overweight case.

But they were not allowed – they might be explosive, the percentage of liquid to solid too high.

I pleaded their case – presents for my host, home-made. That’s worse, they said.

Would you like them? I asked the young woman who tried to be kind.

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Not allowed.

I’d like to think, at the end of the day, when no one was looking, she reached in the bin of disposed-of possessions and rescued my jars.

I hadn’t lost my clothes, I hadn’t lost my childhood in photographs, I hadn’t lost my country.

And still it cut me to the quick.

As the plane lifted from my country I thought of you fleeing to the border with your life, only knowing you were near to the camp when you woke in the jungle to the barking of dogs.

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Cha Chan Teng, To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Restaurant, Diamond Hill, Hong Kong (2001) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The World Food Crisis – An Asian Perspective Chandran Nair

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  Asia, including China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, are fighting to curb soaring food prices. After peaking at a record high of 238 points in February, the Food Price Index averaged 234 points in June, 39 per cent higher than the same period last year.1 In Asia, it has translated into an average 10 per cent increase in food prices and could push 64 million Asians into extreme poverty.2 In the Asia Pacific region, 578 million people were undernourished in 2010.3 The Neglect of Agriculture The crisis, while triggered by recent trends such as rising consumption, environmental degradation, climate change and demand for biofuels, has its origins in flawed government policies. Lured by the arguments of Western institutions and economists concerning a fast track to prosperity through “Washington consensus” models of economic growth, Asian policymakers have shifted their focus from a development path traditionally dominated by agricultural self-sufficiency to one mandated by the industrial and manufacturing sector. The common belief was that Asian countries could “manufacture their way out of poverty”. This led to policies that sowed the seeds of the exigency by not recognising that manufacturing-led economic growth would further push agriculture to the background and also result 1

www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/ www.adb.org/documents/reports/global-food-price-inflation/food-price-inflation.pdf 3 www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1683e/i1683e.pdf 2

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in worsening rural-urban disparities and unwittingly encourage overconsumption.

The critical role of the rural economy in being the breadbasket that feeds the nation as its people aspire to consume more, together with the consequences of giving priority to the industrial and manufacturing sectors and disincentivising the agricultural sector’s workforce,4 have been ignored by many political leaders owing to the conviction that the rural sector comprised a backward population and that agriculture was a “poor cousin” of industry. The waning of rural agriculture in the region was caused by institutional neglect and policy shortcomings. In particular, a lack of public investment in rural infrastructure (irrigation, water conservation, roads, electrification, housing and communication), social infrastructure (basic education and health care) and agricultural services (rural banking) exacerbated rural poverty, increased rural-urban migration and hastened the degradation of arable land – land vital to the survival of any nation.

Apart from the overemphasis on manufacturing, other strategies unfavourable to agricultural development have continued while politicians have paid lip service to the needs of the rural poor. On the supply side, increasing amounts of arable land have been usurped for the construction of factories, housing, resorts and golf courses. In China, for example, 8.2 million hectares of arable land were lost from 1997 to 2009.5 Today only 121.7 million hectares of arable land remain.6 A nationwide land regulatory system was implemented in 2006 to control land use strictly and reduce this shrinkage. However, China’s arable land may still drop below the “red line” of 120 million hectares (the figure essential to maintain food security until 2020) because of unchecked illegal use and land degradation.7 This threat has led the Ministry of Agriculture to consider the seemingly implausible prospect of leasing agricultural land in Australia, Latin America, Africa and other areas.8

4

www.fao.org/docrep/009/ag089e/AG089E05.htm Xinhuanet, news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-10/18/c_13562418.htm 6 www.whatsonningbo.com/news-3840-china-has-7m-hectares-of-reserve-land-that-can-bedeveloped-into-arable-land.html 7 www.china.org.cn/english/GS-e/210817.htm 8 news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7373213.stm 5

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Confounding Factors To add to this, in many countries, including the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, watersheds have been destroyed and soil has been degraded as a result of inadequate attention to natural-resource management. At the same time, the indiscriminate use of fertilisers and pesticides to increase productivity in the “green revolution”, which started in Mexico in the 1940s, spread to India in the 1960s and China in the 1980s, has had a long-term detrimental impact on agricultural land. The heavy use of agrochemicals has led to a severe decrease in soil’s organic matter, which is crucial in determining crop output. Increased application of chemical fertilisers has also led to higher susceptibility of crops to pests9 and contamination of aquifers. China has been the world’s largest consumer of chemical fertilisers since 2007, using more than 50 million tons a year. Usage has quadrupled since the 1980s to 434 kilograms per hectare. China also uses 1.3 million tons of pesticides annually, with usage per unit area 2.5 times the global average.10 In India, fertiliser application has risen from less than one kilogram per hectare in 1951 to 133kg per hectare in 2011.11 Agricultural centres like the state of Punjab, the largest producer of wheat in India, continue to struggle with this problem.

Within Asia, cultivated land will face mounting risks of yield decreases in the next few years as the degraded soil becomes less resilient to natural disasters such as drought, heat waves and windstorms, which are likely to become more severe owing to climate change. Another natural precursor of the food crisis is flooding. According to the UN World Food Programme, 57 countries, including 19 in Asia, such as India, Bangladesh and China, were hit by catastrophic floods in 2007.

Another factor relevant to the food crisis is that conglomerates have recently been allowed to have a much bigger influence on agriculture in Asia than in the past. In many ways they are beginning to play a more dominant role than governments, often shifting production to cash crops or grain for livestock. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United

9

www.agroeco.org/doc/soil-pestmgmt.pdf China Daily, July 18, 2011 11 Economic Times; articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-03-22/news/29174681_1_ soil-health-chemical-fertilisers-soil-test-based 10

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Nations, an estimated 30 per cent of the Earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly used for livestock production. In 2010 China imported more than 50 million tons of soya beans, mostly from the United States and Brazil. The tonnage accounted for 73 per cent of soya bean consumption in China and was used exclusively in the production of livestock feed, with cooking oil a by-product. Transnational agribusinesses own about 70 per cent of China’s soya bean-crushing industry.12 Although arguments about the pros and cons of industrial agriculture are widespread, there is no disputing the evidence that the dominance of conglomerates has resulted in food shortages for the less privileged and a marginalised role for small farmers.

On the demand side, urban-biased policies are rampant. In addition to better social services and infrastructure in cities than in the countryside, as well as higher wages, the maintenance of artificially low prices for essentials such as rice – to reduce inflation and sustain political harmony in urban centres – has created undue stress in rural economies. With the exception of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which have strong policies supporting farmers’ cooperatives, the result is that farmers who help to feed nations remain among their poorest people, not having benefited from the “Asian economic boom” of the last three decades. Improving the lot of the Asian farmer should not be treated by policymakers as a romantic attempt to help the poor, but as a critical manoeuvre linked to national security and economic development.

But national urban-weighted schemes aside, the current predicament can also be attributed to a number of trends affecting development at a global level. The first is continuing population growth. In Asia, the population expanded from 1.4 billion people in 1950 to 2.4 billion in 1975; then to 4.2 billion, or 60 per cent of the world total, by 2011. Increasing prosperity has also resulted in a consumption binge among the growing number of middle-class Asians. About 30 years ago, the United Nations estimated that up to 40 per cent of Asians were chronically undernourished. Huge progress has been made in food production and accessibility since then and by 2007 that number had been reduced to 15.6 per cent. However, with increasing prosperity, hundreds of millions of other Asians now enjoy a life 12

IATP; www.iatp.org/documents/feeding-china%E2%80%99s-pigs-implications-for-theenvironment-china%E2%80%99s-smallholder-farmers-and-food

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of abundance steeped in over-consumption and waste. For example, in India 28.9 per cent of urban women were overweight in 2006, while 47 per cent of children below five were malnourished.13 The percentage of overweight Chinese has more than doubled, from seven per cent in 1982 to 15 per cent in 2006.14 The adoption of Western consumption habits means richer Asians are eating away at their own resource base.

Consumption-led economic growth has also created a rapid departure from traditional Asian values of moderation and frugality. The transformation is putting pressure on the food-supply chain. Long-established diets have also begun to change radically, with many packaged foods including ingredients derived from agribusiness conglomerates. Meat consumption in India, a country with a strong culture of vegetarianism, has increased by almost 50 per cent since 1980, from 3.7kg per capita per year to 5.5kg today.15 Note that average meat consumption in the US is now 93.4kg16 and in China 58.8kg per capita per year.17 The growing availability of affordable meat is of concern because of its inherent inefficiencies as a food source and its extensive underpricing. To produce a kilogram of meat takes six kilograms of grain and more than 15,000 litres of water;18 as a result, livestock reared for meat are now eating the grain that would previously have fed the poor.

It is estimated that today, 50 per cent of all grain grown globally is used to feed livestock.19 Prices have also increased owing to the rush to cash in on biofuel production. The rising demand for subsidised biofuels in the US and Europe, further stimulated by soaring oil prices, encourages calls for grains and edible oils for biofuels to be produced instead of food crops. The US ethanol industry now consumes more than 40 per cent of the 335 million tons of corn produced annually in the US, with government subsidies reaching US$7.7 billion in 2010.20 This diversion of resources to the growing of crops for fuel instead of food is not only inefficient but could prove catastrophic for the 13

UNICEF Financial Times; www.ftchinese.com/story/001013374/en/?print=y 15 FAO 16 USDA 17 China Meat Association 18 www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery&product=beef 19 www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-world-preservation-foundation.html 20 Reuters, November 22, 2010 14

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world food supply. Asian regulators are waking up to this and intervening: the Chinese government banned the use of grains to produce biofuel in 2007.21 Also aggravating the difficulty are the inequitable international trade rules that shield farmers in rich countries, leaving developing countries’ agricultural sectors unable to compete on the world market. India is the strongest opponent of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules and has taken issue with the United States in particular, because the regulations favoured by the US benefit fewer than six million American farmers versus more than three billion people who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

At the failed WTO’S Doha round of global trade talks in July 2008, Kamal Nath, then India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry, insisted that “the most important thing was the livelihood security, the vulnerability of poor farmers, which could not be traded off against the commercial interests of the developed countries”.22 What can be done?

To help alleviate this crisis, one major focus of Asian governments should be to re-channel resources to solve agricultural and related policy problems. Doing so would help to rid the sector of the “poor cousin” stigma it has endured for the last 40 or so years. Part of making agriculture central to economic development entails integrating, in parallel, reforms in the rural sector with improvements in the industrial, manufacturing and services sectors. There must be a shift towards this parallel integration so that agriculture is not regarded as separate from, but central to, economic vitality.

Integration must also focus on improvements in the existing supplychain inefficiencies that result in significant food waste: it is estimated that more than 30 per cent of fresh produce is squandered in markets such as India, owing to inadequate transport and storage and other industrial infrastructure. Produce from scattered farm plots in relatively undeveloped areas across Asia also requires additional handling outside existing food logistics. Compared to the US, where more than 90 per cent of meat, fruit and vegetables is transported in cold-storage vehicles, it is estimated that 21 22

New York Times; www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/science/earth/07cassava.html The Guardian; www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/31/wto.india

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in China, only 15 per cent of meat and five per cent of fruit and vegetables is thus conveyed. The development of farmers’ cooperatives, reforms of land ownership rights, access to loans for farmers, availability of insurance and price controls must be part of a rural economic transformation that is long overdue in many Asian countries. Such reforms overhauled the rural sector and increased agricultural productivity in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan in the decades following World War II. Improvements should also be closely tied to policies that make resource conservation and environmental management in rural areas central tenets of economic planning.

Land-management practices: land-use measures that emphasise ecological food production and water conservation At the top of the agenda must be extensive investment to protect soil, water resources and biodiversity. Few countries have linked public-sector spending to their protection, even though they are essential to vibrant rural and therefore agricultural sectors. Conservation initiatives have been seen as impediments to development in most countries in their rush to industrialise their way to progress. But conservation policies are essential to the creation of long-term employment in rural areas – although they require a departure from the strategies employed by Asian governments relentlessly to pursue urbanisation and manufacturing in the name of job creation.

Fiscal measures: tax and other financial incentives aimed at reducing resource usage and emissions The industrialisation of agriculture should be reversed. Agriculture must move towards a regime of low chemical fertiliser, herbicide and pesticide use. All should be replaced where possible by labour-intensive, integrated cultivation techniques and local vertical integration, including processing of produce at or near the source. Many of the practices of large-scale agroindustry are founded on an underpricing of inputs. The introduction of resource taxes for the raw materials used in agriculture – especially water, but also chemicals – plus an emissions tax on the energy required, and a proper pricing of the impact of run-offs and other pollutants, would inevitably raise costs significantly. That, however, would also encourage a greater use of natural fertilisers such as organic compost and cover crops grown primarily

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to add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Environmental damage would be reduced as extensive use of fertilisers and pesticides was curbed. This would benefit small-scale local farming that remains widespread throughout the region and which should be at the core of economic policymaking.

Social resource practices: developing rural and urban environments that are sustainable and allow communities to flourish Asian governments must ensure that all farmers have access to the tools, including irrigation and agriculture inputs, needed to improve productivity.

This also demands that farmers be given access to capital on fair terms.

In addition, governments should ensure farmers receive practical help with production planning and sustainable, integrated-cultivation techniques.

Making weather and market information easily accessible can help farmers make business projections; and by diversifying the crops they grow, farmers can cushion themselves against market fluctuations and climate-related crop failure.23 Governments can also play a role in linking farmers and markets. In Shandong, China, for example, the provincial government is urging supermarkets and school canteens to buy vegetables directly from local farmers.24 Governments should support improvement of indigenous crops and make them available to farmers. For instance, Taiwan-based international non-profit research and development institution The World Vegetable Center breeds enhanced varieties of vegetables to extend their shelf lives.

Diversifying diets based on local foods to build secure agricultural systems resilient to food-price fluctuations would benefit consumers and farmers.25 Investment in education and health, with the aim of providing opportunities for the rural poor, is essential. And the opening of the rural sector to private investment by encouraging investors to capitalise on profitable, comparatively small-scale rural projects would unlock a new area of economic activity.

The current profiteering and overemphasis on biofuels is causing widespread harm. In the interests of food security, Asian governments must 23

China Daily, 13 May 2011, Innovations that can ensure food security: usa.chinadaily.com. cn/opinion/2011-05/13/content_12505245.htm 24 ibid.

25 ibid.

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introduce policies to ensure that production and prices are not influenced by the growing demand for biofuels. Asia could lead the world in introducing a certification scheme for such fuels that meet stringent criteria concerning the protection of food supplies and ecosystems. Cooperation with the European Union in this field would be a step forward.

More Asian governments should explore the adoption of genetically modified (GM) foods, viewed by some as a mechanism for the continuation of the “green revolution”. Japan and China are already importing GM grain for the production of animal feed and cooking oil.26 In November 2009 China’s Ministry of Agriculture issued biosafety certificates to strains of pest-resistant GM rice and corn, and further trials are in progress before commercial production commences.27 As food prices soar and grain shortages persist, governments, food companies and consumers may be forced to overcome their entrenched resistance to genetically engineered crops and look to biotechnology for sustenance. GM should not be seen, however, as a panacea, but as one component of a national food-security strategy. Public concerns about crops’ provenance should also be addressed.

Feed or be Fed For most people in Asia the food crisis is one of affordability. For a smaller percentage it is a range of issues, from lack of access to being unable to grow the minimum for subsistence. Because climatic conditions, trade subsidies in rich countries, diversions for biofuels and speculative purchases in commodity markets are difficult to control, it is imperative that Asian political leaders reassess their manufacturing-led development models and support policies to address the complex food predicaments now prevailing.

There can be no continued excuse for Asian countries’ expectation of food aid from the West. Countries receiving food aid today include North Korea, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.28 A history of reliance on aid has created a dangerous dependency that must be eradicated: Asia is capable of feeding itself instead of being fed. Poverty alleviation; managing the excesses of free markets; the use of technology (in fertilisers, genetic modification of 26

www.geneticallymodifiedfoods.co.uk/gm-foods-asia.html China Daily, www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-02/04/content_9424300.htm 28 UNESCAP, www.unescap.org/65/documents/Theme-Study/st-escap-2535.pdf 27

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food and so on); the role of industrial agriculture and investment (public and private) must be in equilibrium.

None of this will be possible unless Asian governments reject the consumption-led growth model and adopt instead an approach that makes resources conservation the heart of all policymaking.

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Making Pasta Sauce: My Independence Jennifer 8. Lee

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  my greatest moments of independence took place tonight: making pasta sauce from scratch on Christmas Eve. That’s right, pasta sauce, the kind from tomatoes. It felt more significant than buying my first apartment, backpacking across Tibet or reporting on a fatal hurricane.

It has been months since I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, most of which we lived together. He was basically a carbotarian, with a diet made up of five substances: bread, pasta, cheese, tofu and desserts. Now to clarify.

He ate those in combination, so cheese and bread was pizza. Macaroni and cheese was okay. He ate white-coloured foods and chocolate. White bread, no brown bread. White rice, not brown rice. The only foods with colours that came from the rainbow he allowed himself to eat were essentially pesto and tomato sauce.

People would suggest that I tried to change him, as though the habits of a man in his late 30s could suddenly be amended by sheer force of a woman’s will. I always responded that I thought it was hardwired into him: he had spat meat out even when he was a baby. He went off to camp when he was a kid and his parents told his counsellors not to humour his pickiness. A few weeks later he returned, weighing 30 per cent less. His parents gave up after that.

I never tried to change him. I just bent my culinary life around his. When we were dating, a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal informed us there were others like him. There was even a social network for them. He

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was offended that his reported condition, if it could be called that, was being considered for DSM-V, the official catalogue of mental disorders.

Within this narrow category of foods however, he was an extreme foodie. He could discern the difference between variations of boxed pastas.

De Cecco, I was taught, was the best. My taste buds were nowhere near as refined. In my world there was the good, home-made pasta in restaurants and bad spaghetti in elementary-school cafeterias. Everything else was in a big grey in-between. But because I had written a popular book about Chinese food in America people thought I was a foodie, an assumption that agitated him no end. Clearly he thought he deserved the moniker more than I did.

A consequence of his peculiar diet was that he had learned to cook for himself from an early age. Italian food fit neatly into his dietary constraints, a by-product of which was his magnificent recipe for tomato sauce.

It was a sauce he used to make perhaps once a month in our Dutch oven (which I learned from him was actually a type of pot). It was rich, comforting, satisfying. He made it when he could buy fresh egg pasta from Raffetto’s, a century-old pasta shop in New York’s West Village that ran on a family-friendly schedule: doors closed at 5 pm and were shuttered on Sundays. For long blocks of time during holidays it didn’t open.

Given his schedule, he could buy from Raffetto’s infrequently only. Then he made his excellent sauce, but always in small quantities that would run out just as I was starting to enjoy the pasta. Perhaps it was a quality-control thing, but I couldn’t imagine that the recipe for the sauce couldn’t be scaled to produce multiples of that quantity. After all, Italians, like the Chinese, are known for feeding people in bulk.

Tomato sauce, to me, was a mysterious substance because it was thick but didn’t contain cornstarch, like Chinese sauces. When I was growing up, my mom would try to make it the way she knew how. She would stir-fry chopped tomato with ground beef. For good measure she would add soy sauce and star anise. But it was oily and watery and never measured up even to the stuff that came out of jars, like Prego. I think she might even have added ketchup. The word for ketchup in Mandarin is fanqiejiang, which means, literally, tomato sauce. The Cantonese, ke-tsup – from which the English term is probably derived – translates as tomato juice.

Traditionally, tomatoes were not a key part of the Chinese diet, though one dish – egg stirred with tomatoes – had a huge run and has become a 110

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household favourite in China and Chinese-American households. It may sound like it would be gross over rice but it’s surprisingly good.

New World explorers took the tomato back from South America to Europe and for the next few hundred years folks thought it was poisonous.

Then the Italians took the fruit and ran with it. Their first documentation of tomato sauce with pasta was in 1790, which always makes me wonder what Italians ate before then.

The Italians and Chinese may have been kindred spirits in the pasta/ noodle sphere, but they failed to see eye to eye on tomatoes. So its chemical behaviour was a mystery to Chinese moms everywhere. *** Looking back, I suppose it was a strong statement about my faith in our relationship that I never even tried to learn how to make the tomato sauce.

I assumed he would always be there to make it for me, until one day he was not.

So then it was time for me to make it for myself. If women often confront the psychological challenge of mastering their mother’s secret recipe for comfort food, mine was to master my ex-boyfriend’s tomato sauce. Through the mental equivalent of the corner of my eye I had picked up some facts.

I knew the secret ingredient was butter, a fact he discreetly neglected to mention when he made it for another woman who revealed on their date that she was vegan. I knew it could involve canned tomatoes of a type called San Marzano, because he had once told me to pick some up at the supermarket. And I knew it involved an onion used in the cooking process but later discarded.

After we broke up, I emailed him for the recipe. He promptly sent me a link on his website and I tucked it away for when I was ready. It was not until Christmas Eve, almost four months after we parted, that I had time to be alone, experiment and make the sauce. I had bought the ingredients at Trader Joe’s that day, thinking that sometime during the weekend I would tackle it.

I looked at his recipe online. It listed the ingredients. But his actual instructions were sparse. They basically said put everything together and simmer for 45 minutes. Really? But I needed more guidance than that.

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For example, it told nothing about the temperature at which to keep the heat. Highish? Lowish? What about the onion? How do you know what consistency it should be?

Fuck it, I thought and Googled “pasta sauce butter” on my iPad (which, by the way, will revolutionise cooking if they can figure out how to keep it clean of food smudges). And then there it was, on smittenkitchen.com. His exact recipe. The recipe had attracted more than 600 comments and links to other food blogs that had promoted it, so maybe it wasn’t so secret after all.

The photos of the cooking process even looked the same, with a mound of half-cut onion peeking out of the bubbling red sauce.

So I looked at the ingredients, which were clearer on the website than in his abbreviated form. From what I could discern the recipe essentially was San Marzano plum tomatoes + a stick of butter + onion + salt. That was it.

No basil. No garlic. No sage. None of the mysterious celery or carrot purees shown on the YouTube videos I had watched. It was a simple, simple recipe, one that defied my Chinese nibbly desire to experiment and add pinches and smears of this and that. (Like pine nuts! I discovered bulk pine nuts at Costco and went through a period during which I would add them to everything: salads, Korean barbecues, pad thai).

Many commentators were incredulous that something so simple could taste that amazing. But one blogger assured her audience it was true, emphasising that San Marzano tomatoes could make or break the dish.

Hmm. I didn’t have San Marzano tomatoes. They didn’t have them at Trader Joe’s. Did it matter? I wasn’t even sure what San Marzanos were. Was it a brand, a breed, a saint? Google took me to sanmarzanotomatoes.org, which gave me the low-down on this prized tomato bred from two genetic lines. They had fallen out of favour in the era of big agriculture because of their thin skin, which made them great for sauces but bad for shipping.

I turned the Trader Joe’s can in my hands. Maybe they were like faux San Marzanos, bred from the same plant lines even if not in the same region.

I opened the can. The tomatoes “looked” like the San Marzanos in those YouTube videos. I felt comforted by that. My mom always used beefsteak tomatoes, which I now know were bred for sandwiches and transportability rather than taste.

I peered inside. I don’t think I had ever opened a can of whole, peeled tomatoes in my life. Do you keep the liquid? The recipe didn’t give details.

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And the liquid wasn’t water at all – which is what I had come to expect from canned veggies – but a thin tomato sauce in and of itself.

I hesitated. I decided to keep the liquid, figuring it could always boil off. I took a stick of butter and cut it into neat pats. That is a lot of butter, I thought. At least you can’t see it when you eat it. I chopped the onion in half and dumped the hemispheres into a pot with the tomatoes. I turned on the heat and waited.

I watched the water simmer down. I was fascinated that you didn’t even have to chop the tomatoes: they would naturally disintegrate if you crushed them against the side of the pot. The change from solid to liquid did not resemble anything we had done in chemistry.

After a certain point I smelled a familiar aroma. The fragrance triggered memories of happy moments in our relationship, when all was good and the pasta would be ready soon.

Then I tasted it.

The smell was right, but the taste wasn’t. Hmm. More salt? It said salt to taste. Maybe you needed a lot of salt. But still, the salt would just make it taste not bland, but it didn’t enrich the flavour. If I kept adding salt it would become, well, salty.

Did I have the wrong kind of onion? Mine was red (actually purple), whereas in the photos and in my memories the onion was often white. Did it have to be a Vidalia onion? There was no mention of that anywhere.

My mind started debating. I was tempted to add garlic. Chinese people love garlic + ginger + soy sauce and add those to everything. And I knew the Italians liked garlic too. I couldn’t go wrong by adding garlic, could I? Garlic made everything – even ketchup – taste better. Next time try asking for chopped garlic to mix with your ketchup before dipping in your fries.

But I didn’t want to ruin the main line, which was defiant in its simplicity.

So I did a fork. I siphoned off the sauce into a side pan into which I had thrown some pieces of chopped up garlic and stirred.

The sauce tasted very garlicky. It reminded me of the Italian restaurants in New York City where they give you olive oil instead of butter. It was good enough, different, but clearly not the magic sauce.

I turned my attention back to my original pot. Siphoning off some wouldn’t have messed with the proportions. But as it simmered to the right

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gloopy consistency it stilled tasted very … tomato-y. Not saucy. A very flat taste. It did not taste like his magnificent creation.

What was wrong? Perhaps the San Marzanos did matter after all. Maybe I should add pepper from the pepper mill. I cranked it a few times, tasted the sauce and realised that going in that direction was not going to take me where I wanted to be.

Damn it. What I really wanted was some MSG. Monosodium glutamate would fix this. The stuff was given a bad rap in the 1980s when The New England Journal of Medicine ran a story about Chinese-restaurant syndrome.

But MSG is magic. It adds the “umami” or savoury flavour, the top note, as I like to say. It was the flavour that was familiar in tomatoes, parmesan and mushrooms.

The consistency was reaching the right point, but this was the wrong sauce. Eek. How could you mess up a four-ingredient recipe? I poked at the soft onion and removed half of it. I bit into the outer layer, expecting sweetness but instead tasted a crisp tartness. And then I knew. The onions hadn’t broken down enough to let their juices soak into the sauce. But it had been 45 minutes. I probably needed a higher temperature.

So I turned up the heat and waited. Oops. I smelled the onion browning, then burning. Damn it. Damn it.

I peeked in. The sauce had become dry-ish. All that work and an errant onion could ruin it. A slight charred smell wafted up when I turned it, but then dissipated. There wasn’t that much black. I added some water, kept the heat on medium and watched the onion soften. I poked, poked, poked and tasted, tasted, tasted. Because there wasn’t much sauce to begin with my tasting was making a serious dent in the total volume, which unnerved me.

When I finally put it into my mouth it tasted good. Quite good actually.

The juices from the onion had done their thing, adding the full-bodied taste to my sauce. Success!

So I boiled my pasta, farfalle, which I had selected because I loved the playful bow tie shape. I mixed in the sauce and shredded my Parmesan Reggiano on top. When I rewrapped the cheese I noticed that I had stained it with the pasta sauce. This would have earned me a scolding in my old household, where I was the cause of many a stale block of cheese, even in the fridge (who knew that would happen? Isn’t cheese a form of mould anyway?)

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Now I just put the Saran Wrap on, with the red stains showing through.

Whatever. It’s my cheese.

I nibbled on my farfalle, red thickness clinging to the creases. I have to say it was pretty good. It wasn’t quite the same. But it certainly held its own and was a respectable sauce I could serve to guests. I could eat the whole thing, I realised. Gosh, how many calories are there in a stick of butter anyway? So I stopped.

There. I had done it. I had made my own pasta sauce. I was an independent woman. Hear me roar.

As I chewed a piece of pasta I thought: this would still taste better with MSG.

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Cha Chan Teng, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Poetry Laksmi Pamuntjak

Two Women Sitting at a Window Table in a Cafe First I must tell you, it is not the first for the woman in black. For the record, let’s call her the First Woman.

Just look at her coffee: a tamped single shot on a clean base. Tight, dark stains only halfway up, forgetting, not forgetting.

As for the bundle of nerves in Lady Grey rose – which out of politeness we shall call the Second Woman instead of the Other Woman – come! Surely you recognise a novice: crema in light brown stain swirling around milk, getting, not getting. Nothing but foam at the bottom of a demitasse cup.

And now it is getting on noon and tassels of drapes like eyeliners are fraying.

Cranberry and peach crush, smudged on the rims of the umpteenth cup.

Who says each case is going to be different: each beginning, each ending?

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Is this how it happened? says the First Woman, Over a cup of coffee?

Did he watch you stir your cream in, longing to kiss the sweetness the froth was brought into?

Did he ask you, politely – oh, for he is polite – whether he could?

The thought of cream, of sugar, of anything cloying and cowardly, how it fazes the Second Woman terribly.

She says nothing, and so are the both of them thinned out, by the silence that sells the other out.

And then comes the tightening, the touchless greeting, everything having to come out of breathing.

The Second Woman’s reply, finally, (and inevitable now that they’ve come this far): It’s over.

But is it? Of course, they both know that nothing is ever over, not if it has to be uttered by women like her to women like her.

It’s over. Is it?

Yet what a tall order, to forgive: all that power game and putting in place, so much knottier than “I am sorry,” the girl scout’s easy way out.

For a moment the First Woman was lost in thought.

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For wasn’t there a time, a long time ago, by the hibiscus in the garden of her old home, his face long with the sun pale behind him: This is not about you, he said. I ask you not to forgive me.

How many years now? Neither of them knowing what her silence meant.

Meanwhile, the Second Woman kept to her own silence: they took so little space.

Can there ever be, she thought, enough coffee in a lifetime: that home-breaker, the stuff of satire?

Difficult to tell, with all that crimsoning, between a mature but broken fruit and everything else.

But have I told you: the two women would never meet again.

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Box Supposing – That having opened the box, we find in it sun-dried pineapples, parched lotus roots, pinnate seeds bleeding into puce.

Voodoo dolls, lacquered masks, and a barbecue shrimp mix we know is anything but.

Supposing – that having looked at the box, we can’t decide what it is: a witch’s vasculum, Louisiana tourism ministry’s free-gift box, or site-specific art.

Supposing – that red is not what makes purple, is not the colour of blood or wine, and henceforth is neither sin nor Satan.

Supposing – that the venule is like any other vein, as plebeian as any, a delusional vessel of life; and that its hopes are not even as grand as the turdy smell produced by air which is wedded to a certain strain of jasmine: that feral smell, that mortal sign, that most unheralded of death knells.

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Supposing – that acetone and ambergris do not settle their differences in bed; taking them, instead, to the halls of the divorce court.

Supposing – that a furious absinthe hands a pint of wormwood to Aniseed the Timid, and folk start dying from a sudden plague of the diabolical pastis, having repeatedly ignored the razor glints in the cloudy water.

Supposing – that love is the mind’s doing, not the eyes’, and on which note even the twenty-by-twenty black box downtown has the opalescence of the silkiest sable, depending on what you choose to remember.

Supposing – that a box contains.

Extolling only what it seeks to cloud.

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The Chinese Meal, Uneaten Bernard Cohen

T

  I did not eat comprised chicken fried with onions and a few cashew nuts tinged unevenly with soy sauce. This occupied two-thirds of the plate, the remaining 120-degree segment taken up by white rice.

Someone behind the curtain dividing dining area and kitchen had perhaps measured this with a protractor. The plate sat between cuprous spoon and fork because my then wife and I were, by any glancing judgment, not chopsticks people. To the fork’s left a bread plate was surmounted by four small isosceles triangles of white bread, so smothered in margarine that the only foreseeable purpose to which the faux bronze butter knife could be put was to engineer its removal.

“Triangular,” I commented.

“I don’t know why you chose Chinese,” complained my wife. “Have you ever liked a Chinese meal in your life?”

The meal that my then wife did not eat was the Chef’s Special, Mongolian Lamb. I’m guessing it was about as Mongolian as my wife was, with her fourth-generation Australian whine. Her fried rice certainly appeared to be rice, but considering the quantity of oil still adhering to it in little beads one might have been confused as to whether the frying process had already taken place, or whether the table was a stop-off point on the way to the pan.

“Yes, I have.” I was feeling combative – she brought that out in me – even though she was almost certainly correct. I thought I could recall three other meals in different restaurants in towns along the Hume Highway, which despite being the main route between Melbourne and Sydney and about 123

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550 miles long, was in those days mostly a single lane in each direction and was not famous for its cuisine. I could not recall enjoying any. My memories of the three meals, if there were indeed three, had fused together into a glutinous compound of rice, cornflour and a pale orange-brown substance that was almost certainly not dilute tea.

“Name one Chinese restaurant on Earth where you’ve enjoyed a single mouthful.” The problem with my wife, as I knew at some level from the moment we became engaged, was that she could never disengage. At that time nor could I. Her hissing attracted a look or two from the other patrons – a couple at the table next to us and another couple across the room, early diners hoping to clock up a few more miles before checking into the next cardboard-walled, substandard motel (if heading south) or arriving home (if on the same northerly trajectory as we were).

“That one in Gundagai was good,” I said. “What was it called? The Lantern or something.”

“Rubbish,” she whispered, as loudly as possible.

“You don’t have to eat it,” I said. “We could leave everything and walk across to the pub. The pub looks fine. Just the way you like it. Solid as Australia. Regular as the public service. I read the menu last time.”

She poked at a small strip of lamb with the tip of her spoon. In any ethnic restaurant it was our practice to doubt the provenance and more particularly the species of the meat. This dated to a tour-group holiday three years earlier, in which we had spent a short time in the company of a meat inspector from Darwin.

“What do you think this is?” she asked, in a tone that could almost have suggested a riddle.

“Meat,” I said.

“Aren’t we all?”

The problem with my ex-wife was bluntness and aggressive passivity that would make a cliff seem friendly, from top or bottom. And stubbornness.

She sat there without eating and without rising.

Problems, problems. The problem with me, according to my wife, her family and her allies, was indolence. The problem with indolence was that it had resulted in my lacking employment, a condition that limited my capacity to spend my money on her because all the money we possessed (by process of elimination of the non-earner) was hers.

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“Would you like me to shout you a pub dinner too? And after that maybe some Italian? If that doesn’t work, who knows what we could find: Greek? Fijian? Icelandic?” asked my wife. “We could order and abandon meals at every restaurant in town. I’ll just phone my parents and ask for an advance on my inheritance.”

I’d heard this once or twice before and bit my lip rather than suggest that if one were actually to kill her parents there would be no need for a forward payment. I guessed she would not find this funny. My wife’s parents were not appropriate material for jokes. Her father made clear his dislike of me each time we met, and not so subtly. The employment section of the paper was always open on the table. Lately I had noticed a further downgrade, in that the Casual Work section was now highlighted. He had an inimitable manner.

My wife’s mother simply ignored me, or addressed me through her daughter: “Would he like a cup of coffee? Did he sleep badly?”

The hypothesis came to me that my wife had deliberately brought her parents into the conversation to ensure I lost my appetite completely. I studied the food and concluded that it made no difference.

“So eat up then,” I said, “and stop complaining.”

Among the clumped rice and drying chicken on my plate the cashews glistered like cartoon smiles in the weak lantern light. It was all about as appetising as the thought of our lives together stretching into the future.

A family of four entered the restaurant with a tinkling of the bells tied to the back of the door. The children were already bemoaning the food. I could hear the older one rasping away, “Why do we have to have Chinese Australian food? Why can’t we just have Australian Australian food?”

The mother was responding with gritted-teeth though ineffective patience: “It means they’ve got Chinese and Australian food both.”

Wait ’til they saw it! Mu-um, this is neither. This isn’t food at all. My sour face must have brought the waiter, who had directed the newcomers to a table well away from us and nearer to another couple, still waiting for their meals and now wearing distressed expressions.

“Everything okay?” the waiter asked.

My wife had already started calling him Peter, as he was labelled in black Dymo tape.

“Fine thanks,” I said, despite that being not the case.

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“To be honest not so good, Peter,” said my wife.

Peter stopped. “The lamb?”

“The lamb’s foul and the chicken, well at least I didn’t order the chicken,” she said, “but he is much, much worse.”

“He?” She’d done it perfectly: poor Peter was stuck between the impulse to turn round and attend and that to run away. The sight brought to life a memory of university, where I’d limped my way through a term of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking before dropping out (if shallow limping is conceivable).

Sartre had been inspired to characterise the waiter-qua-waiter as the epitome of living in bad faith: role-playing obsequiousness, exaggerated formality, ostentation. Observing Peter’s response to my wife’s faux honesty, I doubted Sartre had been musing on these most human behaviours in a Chinese restaurant. The fluent nastiness with which my wife had pinned this waiter: it was quite brilliant (brilliant, that is, other than using me as the lever for her trap) and Peter’s face lost its waiterish composure immediately.

“Yes,” she continued. “He’s lazy, rude and he never learns from his errors and misjudgments.”

“Stop it,” I told her. “This is unnecessary. Don’t pay any attention to her, waiter.”

“I’m very sorry to you both. One moment please.” Peter turned and almost ran behind the tasselled curtain. I wasn’t sure where he’d scooted off to – to resign, effective immediately? Out back to reattach his waiter’s persona? Back to his books to compose a quick critique of existentialism?

“That wasn’t very nice of you,” I said. “You’ve upset him.”

“Ha! It’s always nice to introduce a little honest intercourse here and there.”

“No. It’s not always nice at all. Let’s just go. I’m going,” I told her. “You coming with me?”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I’m not finished eating yet,” she said, picking up her fork and prodding a single tine half-heartedly at the lamb.

“You haven’t started.”

I hadn’t moved either. We had one car parked outside and 120 miles to our destination. I could have left her there, abandoned with nothing to sustain her but coloured cornflour; or I could have dropped the keys on

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the table, stormed out and caught a train to somewhere, picturing myself with the cold glass of the carriage windows and the stink of steel friction, an olfactory undertone to the cigarette smoke. I could have ended our marriage there and then, a thought that recurred occasionally during our years together after that moment. If only I had left her back then in 1968, in that Chinese restaurant, what a life I would have lived! But at that moment I did not have the foresight or the purposefulness and I did not move.

Nobody ate.

Peter returned with a thin perspiring man in a stained white apron.

“This is Alfred,” said Peter. “You tell him what you want. He’s the boss.”

“He tells me you’re not happy,” said Alfred. “How can I help you?”

“It’s all okay,” I said (diner-qua-diner).

“Look at this lamb,” said my wife, sawing rapidly and ineffectively at it with the side of her spoon. “Very tough.”

“Bring the lady a knife,” said Alfred, as though he were compelled to speak commandingly. Peter, who had been half-hovering, half-hiding behind Alfred, looked relieved to be sent away from us again. He disappeared into the kitchen.

“And look at him,” she said, pointing at me with her spoon tip. “He’s my husband, you know, and just look at him.”

I feared she would say more, describe the shame I brought to her family or list my various failures and shortcomings, but Alfred didn’t give her the chance.

“He, I cannot help you with,” he said.

A guest at the next table chose that moment to wave his own spoon.

“Excuse me, excuse me. When you have a moment, mate. This soup is not hot.”

“You shouldn’t have ordered vichyssoise, old-timer,” commented my wife for my benefit, sotto voce. After her non-specific venting about me to Alfred my wife seemed to settle into a quieter bitterness. The man and woman at the other table were not in fact old. They were about our age, and my wife must have forgotten that we had also aged. Alfred had taken up one of the soup bowls and was holding it with both hands cupped, presumably to assess its temperature.

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Peter meanwhile was negotiating unsuccessfully with the newcomers.

The two children had already crossed the room once more and stood at the door.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” called the larger of the two, who might have been six or seven. The smaller one, who was at most three years old, turned it into a chant, “Le-et’s go! Le-et’s go,” until the father pulled open the door with some more tinkling and an exaggerated apologetic wave, and they were gone.

Alfred was still holding the small soup bowl. I turned halfway round to look at the neighbours’ meals. The soup must have been a side dish because there was also a plate in front of each of them and a tub of rice. They had no bread and butter. Had they asked for authentic food? If so, it looked disappointing. The meals the couple weren’t eating were something like prawns with carrots and beans for her and a brown gelatinous gloop that I took to be beef with black bean sauce. They had been given both Western cutlery and chopsticks.

The woman was holding a single chopstick. I must have fixed on this more intently than I was aware of because she stopped picking at a carrot with it and stared straight back at me.

“Why don’t you take a damned photograph. It’ll last longer,” she muttered.

“No damned camera,” I said.

“Shhh,” said my wife, which was a bit rich considering her contribution to our enjoyment of the evening up to that point.

“Too late,” I told her. The man stood up. He was about my height though perhaps chunkier, broad in that manner that makes it difficult to tell whether he was strong or just fat.

“Listen here,” he commenced, wagging a thick finger in my direction.

“Siddown, boofhead,” I said.

“Please,” said Alfred. “Gentlemen.”

“You keep a civil tongue, mate. I won’t have you talking to my wife,” the other man grumbled. His posture was threatening to bring him forward, but he stayed where he stood and after a further two or three seconds of gesturing he did as I’d suggested.

“Thank you,” said Alfred. If anything, he was even sweatier than he had been, positively diaphoretic.

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“What a pair of dickheads,” said my wife.

“Yep,” said the carrot eater.

“You’re no better,” said my wife, with exaggerated emphasis. “You actually started it.”

I estimated the number of additional friends she would make by the end of our meal at zero. I did not estimate the length of the meal.

The carrot eater swore. My wife gave three claps of applause.

“Listen,” said Alfred. “You must stop these bad manners or you must leave.”

“Bad manners is the only aspect of this place keeping us here. Otherwise the attractions are pretty limited,” said carrot eater. I laughed for the first time that evening.

Alfred scowled briefly, but controlled his expression and switched to a concerned smile.

Peter returned with a knife for my wife. He crossed to the family’s abandoned table and removed the tablecloth, making himself extremely busy away from my wife’s potential speeches. The four plates of food sat untouched in their places, looking less and less like the photographs in the restaurant window. The only reason my wife stayed put was that I had suggested leaving. Perhaps the other couple stayed so as not to appear to yield the restaurant to us. Interesting how Anglos think of the Chinese as being the ones obsessed with losing face. For a moment I considered explaining this to all present.

“I will bring you new soup,” Alfred offered the other couple and, turning to us, still with his fixed smile, “but you, I won’t offer you anything, the way you make trouble for everyone. You stay or you go, it’s up to you, but no more arguing.”

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, inelegantly took up the soup bowls and exited behind the curtain.

“I wasn’t clear on that. Did that include arguing with each other?” I asked my wife.

“Scene two,” said my wife. “Later the same evening in the same bloody restaurant. All are silent.”

“Scene three,” I said, “in which someone spills sweet and sour sauce and someone else cleans it up.”

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“Shut up, will you,” said Carrot, apropos, as they say, of nothing. Her nuggety husband glared at me, ready to leap to her defence in case I was tempted to respond.

“You see that?” I said to my wife. “You see that? That’s a solid relationship.”

“Just ignore them,” said Nugget, taking up his chopsticks inexpertly. I realised he was no more skilled with chopsticks than I was. He attempted to pick up a bean but it dropped onto the tablecloth.

My wife exaggeratedly waggled her head childishly and repeated, “Just ignore them.”

“Why didn’t we get chopsticks?” I whispered.

“And don’t whisper.”

Nugget gave up on the chopsticks and folded his arms. Alfred, now luminescent with dampness, returned with two soup bowls. The couple across the room were attempting to attract Alfred’s attention: their food had not yet arrived. Each had an arm in the air. Alfred set down the soup on Carrot and Nugget’s table, where the bowls sat steaming and untouched.

After an interminable pause the steam ceased. Peter peered out through the kitchen doorway every now and then in case something had changed.

Perhaps he was hoping the restaurant would have emptied. We stayed, my wife and I, preparing to sleep, to lay down our heads amid the dishes and cutlery, our neighbours in their moods, the lace curtains against the front window shifting with each inexplicable draught.

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Sweet and Sour Fuchsia Dunlop

A

   I loved Chinese food. My family, like most people in England in the 1970s, seldom ate in restaurants and a takeaway – fish and chips, Indian or Chinese – was a rare and thrilling treat. I can’t remember much about the Chinese takeaways we shared. Chicken with tinned bamboo shoots, fried noodles and prawn crackers certainly played a part. But the one dish my little sister and I loved most of all was sweet-and-sour pork. It consisted of a paper bagful of golden, deep-fried balls of batter with pieces of pork tucked inside, served with a polystyrene cup filled with a luminous red sauce. There was never enough of it to satisfy our appetites; it always left a tantalising taste in our mouths, enough to fuel fantasies of the next, distant Chinese takeaway and months of pestering our beleaguered mother, whose delicious and wholesome home-cooked meals never met with quite such a rapturous reception.

Sweet-and-sour pork balls weren’t just a favourite for my sister and me.

They were the archetypal Chinese dish for a whole generation of Britons, the accessible and acceptable face of a cuisine otherwise renowned for its textural weirdness and exotic ingredients. Who could dislike a deep-fried pork ball with sweet-and-sour sauce, a morsel that answered loudly to our primitive evolutionary call for fat, salt and sugar, its cloying sweetness cut by the light, bright strains of rice vinegar? It was a crowd pleaser, childishly irresistible, like cheesy Wotsits and Pringles crisps.

Behind the scenes, the staff of Chinese takeaways despised the British for their barbarian tastes. The novelist Timothy Mo, in a tale set in the 131

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Chinese restaurant world of the 1960s, described the food cooked for nonChinese guests as “total lupsup [rubbish], fit only for foreign devils”. Dishes at a takeaway opened by his main character “bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine … ‘Sweet and sour pork’ was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the customer the next day.”

Yet this confection, disdained as it was by the Chinese, was so adored by foreigners that it became a kind of metonym for Chinese cuisine and even China in general. The title of Timothy Mo’s novel was Sour Sweet. Twentyfive years later I subtitled my own culinary recollections A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. Though the Chinese are not the only producers of sweetsour delicacies – consider Sicilian caponata and English pickles, even mango chutney – anyone might think China was their spiritual home.

When I started visiting China in the 1990s it was a surprise to discover that sweet-and-sour dishes were a rarity on restaurant menus. One might be offered the occasional deep-fried fish in a sweet-and-sour sauce, or perhaps a sweet-and-sour salad, but that was as far as it went. When I lived in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, for a couple of years, one restaurant near the university did, it’s true, serve sweet-and-sour pork, but it bore little resemblance to the pork balls of my childhood memories. There, strips of pork tenderloin, lightly battered and fried, were bathed in a subtle sauce seasoned with not only sugar and vinegar but also garlic, ginger and spring onion. Even so, the dish was singularly unpopular with local diners: it was only foreign students who ordered it, and with hindsight I suspect that it was solely our presence that demanded its inclusion on the menu at all. For the Sichuanese, the sweet-and-sour, or literally “sugar-vinegar”, taste was just one of dozens of flavour combinations and far less exciting than local specialities such as “fish-fragrant”, “scorched chilli” and “numbing-and-hot”.

I have no idea when and how sweet-and-sour pork began to hog the Chinese culinary limelight in Britain. Did it evolve out of some sweet and vinegary dishes that were brought over by early Shanghainese immigrants to the Liverpool docks? Or were the pork balls derived from the Hong Kong version of sweet-and-sour pork, gu lou yuk? The latter did seem more likely.

Gu lou pork is a curious dish with a slightly murky history. It consists of strips of pork with a good streaking of fat that are covered in starch, deepfried and tossed in a wok with tinned pineapple, bamboo shoots or peppers 132

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and a sweet-sour sauce. The name gu lou, an anomaly in Chinese, is an onomatopoeia representing what in English might be called a glugging or rumbling sound.

Chinese culinary sources explain the origins of gu lou pork in various ways. According to the respectable reference work Classic of Food, published in 1999, it may also be known as the similar-sounding gu lao pork, or “pork in the ancient style” and dates back to the late 19th century when, as a result of the punitive conditions of the treaty that ended the First Opium War in 1842, foreigners were allowed to settle in the port of Guangzhou. The foreign residents, so the story goes, loved eating local sweet-and-sour pork ribs, but were unaccustomed to spitting out the bones, so Guangzhou chefs began to make the dish with boneless meat. And because the foreigners struggled with Chinese pronunciation, they often said “gu lou” instead of “gu lao”. Locals noticed that people chewing the springy pork made glugging or rumbling sounds, the account concludes, so the name gu lou was the one that stuck. Another culinary dictionary says foreigners in late Qing Dynasty Guangzhou made these noises because they weren’t used to chewing bones.

Do people eating sweet-and-sour pork or pork ribs really make glugging, rumbling sounds? And, in a country where the origins of many well-known dishes date back hundreds or even thousands of years, did the humble sweetand-sour pork ribs ever really merit the label of “ancient”? Furthermore, since when did Chinese restaurateurs change the names of classic dishes to accommodate the mispronunciations of foreigners? This explanation always sounded fishy to me.

It wasn’t until I leafed through Chen Zhaoyan’s 2002 Complete Book of Common Hong Kong Dishes that I found a much more convincing tale.

According to Chen, the Cantonese originally called this boneless version of their old pork-rib dish foreign devil pork (gweilo pork). Given that some Hong Kong people still call Westerners foreign devils, and that anti-foreign feeling must have been at its peak in the humiliating years after China’s defeat in the First Opium War, gweilo pork could have seemed like the perfect name for some dumbed-down dish invented for those foreign sojourners.

And the Chinese had always given disparaging names to foreign foods. The tomato is still called a barbarian aubergine in many parts of the country, pepper is barbarian pepper and the carrot a barbarian radish.

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from recipe to recipe, but apart from the essential sugar and vinegar they usually include tomato sauce and a few other bottled condiments. One recipe in a Hong Kong cookbook suggests making a brew of sugar, vinegar, tomato sauce, O.K. Fruity Sauce and Worcestershire sauce, with a couple of slices of lemon and a Chinese plum; other versions recommend adding Bird’s custard powder to the marinade. And of course the lurid British version I remember would have relied on artificial colouring.

Although Hong Kong cooks are not above using Western packaged seasonings in dishes for their own consumption, such a riotous assembly of them in a single dish would appal a conservative Cantonese gourmet; presumably, this is the kind of “total lupsup” to which Mo refers in his novel. Yet even if sweet-and-sour pork was originally intended as an insult to our infantile gastronomic sensibilities, foreign devils like me just loved it. And strangely, though China’s opening up in recent years has exposed the world to ever more sophisticated Chinese cooking, the sweet-and-sour genre remains extraordinarily popular. A Google search for sweet and sour generates nearly 13 million hits; for “sweet-and-sour pork” the total is about 800,000, most of them links to recipes.

So Cantonese cooks continue to serve “glugging, rumbling” pork not only to gullible foreigners but also to young, Westernised Chinese, while displaying a certain amnesia about its original cultural meaning. Even Chen, who spills the beans in Hong Kong Dishes, skates tactfully over the subject in another collection of Hong Kong recipes published in his name the same year, merely referring to an old name of “ancient” pork and suggesting that the fruity sweet-and-sour sauce had become part of the dish in the 1950s.

The item has its place in the pantheon of Cantonese classics, even if it has always been more popular with foreigners than native Chinese – and the gweilo connection is rarely mentioned.

Sweet-and-sour pork is no longer something I particularly enjoy. These days I find its sweetness cloying and anyway, it has been eclipsed in my affections by so many more subtle and exquisite dishes. Faced with a choice of sumptuous Dongpo pork, lip-tingling Sichuanese chilli chicken and clearsteamed bass, why would anyone choose foreign devil pork? And sweet-andsour pork balls have largely disappeared, at least from restaurant menus. I did buy a bagful from a takeaway in London a couple of years ago as part of my research for a newspaper article. They were exactly as I remembered and 134

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yet I couldn’t imagine how I had ever eaten them for pleasure. Just one of the stodgy dumplings with its nugget of tough pork in the centre, dipped in the almost fluorescent sauce, was enough to shatter my memories forever.

This year, however, I happened to visit the old city of Chaozhou in southern Guangdong Province, which is renowned for its street snacks and for a cuisine that is a thrilling diversion from the Cantonese mainstream.

In the back alleys market traders were selling the famous spiced goose with its garlic-and-vinegar dip, as well as an assortment of rice-flour dumplings.

And then I came across one stall where a glass cabinet displayed little golden balls of what they called guo rou (guo means fruit, but the people of this region use the word to describe all kinds of dumplings, pastries and noodles; rou is meat). Intrigued, I bought one and it turned out to be a mixture of minced pork and fish, seasoned with spring onion and spices, covered in a thin batter and deep fried. It was served, Chaozhou style, with a dip, which in this case was a sweet-and-sour plum sauce.

It was magnificent, crisp and fragrant, deliciously savoury and perfectly complemented by its light, fruity sauce. For a moment, it seemed as if my tastes as child and adult had been reconciled.

Could it be, I wondered, that this was the true ancestor of the sweetand-sour pork balls that had been served in every Chinese takeaway in Britain, rather than Hong Kong-style sweet-and-sour pork? Had one stray Chaozhou immigrant infiltrated a Cantonese takeaway somewhere in suburban England and tried out a new version of an old family recipe that was eventually copied up and down the country? Somehow, it made me feel better to imagine that my favourite dish had been the bastard offspring of a true Chinese delicacy, rather than the bastard offspring of a dish that had only ever been chucked together for the debased pleasure of foreign devils such as me.

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Cha Chan Teng, To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Poetry Ha Kiet Chau

Lychee Tree and the Other Woman Sorry to the second concubine craving the fruit On a pregnant Guangzhou lychee tree.

First wife crying, her runny eyes, her creased unlucky palm lines, Picking lychees for the younger woman.

Brown old leaf not chlorophyll green in her youth, breathing naively, Hanging like suicide on his jagged branch, nervous of neglect, A woman’s old age dipping to the ground, useless to the Emperor tree.

How invasive flirty honeybees are, poking their busybody mouths into The Emperor’s rotten lychees, old, yet still tempting.

Jealous mottled moth flutters, trembles her parting wings.

To be one of the leaves on the Emperor’s lychee tree And not to be a woman.

What’s the difference?

Suffering for his attention, she is the leaf shrinking to the ground, Drying up his ancient memory As a tantalising new leaf materialises.

Sorry to the second concubine, for a third concubine will take your place.

A green chrysalis opening up, upstaging the leaves.

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All leaves anticipate the other lovely woman, Wait for this banded peacock butterfly To emerge with giant green wingspans, seducing your Emperor, Flaunting her six needle legs in his tree, summoning old leaves To shake lychees into a basket for her.

Four wings doubling to eight monarch wings.

Interlacing. Quaking his twigs.

Seducing his brown bark as his sap drips Leisurely to the yellow grass.

Leaves cannot speak, but still the first leaf senses, Says nothing about the other woman, and the others that will follow her.

A Man Kissing a Woman Kissing Honey Mama, how does it feel to love a man while living inside a moon?

I cried against a lemon tree whose leaves whistled like father did nibbling a yellow egg yolk inside a mooncake, lost in thought about the heart of a lonesome moon-goddess.

Papa, a woodcutter destined never to chop down his cassia tree, a rabbit’s medicine unable to heal the fever of my night-time loneliness.

Mama, did you know I have never loved a man before?

I feel him every mid-autumn when he cries over a caged butterfly whose legs moved like mother did when father kissed her upside down.

Breaking this myth with the woodcutter’s axe in his hand, I watch through a moon’s crater how he fingers the rosebuds of her wings.

She becomes a butterfly suffering through the moon’s metamorphoses.

A moon-goddess does not know how it feels to love a man.

I can taste him on my tongue as I bite into his golden lemon hanging on an eternal tree impossible for an enchanted axe to chop down.

His voice echoes pass mythic meteoroids and colliding comets in space hollering that kissing me is a man kissing a woman kissing honey From a butterfly’s deathless lips.

Inhaling the perfume of his caged butterfly fluttering free to the surface of the harvest moon, a lantern tucked between her legs,

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he pledges to Cassiopeia the rescue of a lonely woman, a rabbit, and a woodcutter trapped tragically inside a full moon.

Mama, did you know I want to fall in love with a man?

He collapses ladder after ladder climbing the night, but can’t save me.

I’m a broken butterfly not liberated to love.

By morning, vanishing behind the gloom of the sun, the moon does not exist.

I belong inside a myth. He belongs inside a reality.

Mama, I know how it feels to love a man while living inside a moon.

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Fideuà Wena Poon

M

  is Elena Maria Gomez Garcia. I go by Mar. I am Chinese, although I did not know that until I was seven years old. A new boy in school pointed at me and said “la niña china”. I looked around the room, eager to see whom he was referring to.

When my Spanish parents adopted me I was already three. I had been at the orphanage in Zhejiang for a long time. I was left outside a government building when I was a baby. I don’t know why I wasn’t adopted quickly – maybe I was sick a lot. All I know is that by the time I was three nobody wanted me, preferring the newborn babies instead. Just like at the pet store.

Once puppies and kittens were more than three months old nobody would buy them. You couldn’t even give them away.

When I first met them my parents were over 50. Such couples were required by the rules to take the older girls. I suppose it’s because they thought older couples wouldn’t live that long, so they were not allowed to adopt newborns. When I left the orphanage mom said I cried and cried in their hotel room. I kept opening the door and wandering into the corridor, looking for a way back home.

I came with all my vaccinations, all my papers. They had red Chinese stamps all over them and many signatures. I had nothing with me except the clothes I was wearing and a pink cartoon backpack, which was empty – it was just for show.

The hotel we were staying at specialised in international adoptions.

Before we left, the woman at the front desk brought out a large case of new 141

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Barbie dolls. There were two kinds: a brunette Spanish Barbie wearing a bolero jacket and a flamenco skirt and a blonde American Barbie wearing a pastel blouse and capri pants. Each Barbie came with a Chinese baby-girl doll. I remember looking into the acrylic window of the pink cardboard box and noticing that because Barbie’s stiff arms could not really hold the smaller doll it was wired tightly to her hands. It looked strange. She was called the Going Home Barbie. She was supposed to help me adjust to life in the West. The lady stuffed a Barbie into my empty backpack. I must have had the Spanish one. I don’t have it now; I think mom didn’t like it and left it behind in China.

My parents took to China an entire suitcase of new girls’ clothing meant for Spanish girls my age, all of which was too large. They forced me to have a bath; I cried. They put a new dress on me; I cried. They gave me back my old clothes to stop me from crying. Going to Spain I ended up wearing the same dirty overalls they had first seen me in.

They told us at the orphanage about airplanes. Fei, fly, is the only Chinese word I remember from that time. Whenever I say the word, even now, I have a vivid image of a woman at the orphanage, her arms outstretched like a bird, her mouth open, while we repeated after her in chorus: “Feiji, fei-ah, fei-ah, fei.”

Mom said I was more beautiful than she had ever dreamed. She could not believe anyone would abandon me. In the airplane she held onto me tightly. I had never been on a plane before. I knew we were high above the ground, higher than birds. The airplane looked so heavy. I couldn’t understand how we could fly. I thought mom held onto me the whole way because if she didn’t we would both fall back to the ground. So, out of selfpreservation, I held onto this strange older woman with orangey-brown hair and a pink-brown face. It was years before I realised that wasn’t necessary for a safe flight.

My parents paid about 10,000 euros for me. Of course, mom and dad have never told me the price. They would rather die. I had to find out by myself. I Googled it. ***

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Fideuà

“You’re the first Chinese guy I’ve ever slept with,” she said.

The fashion photographer hung up his cellphone. “Aren’t you Chinese?”

“Yes.” “How did you get a Spanish name?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m one of those adopted China-girl babies.” She picked her clothes up from the hotel room floor. They were in Madrid.

“I was wondering why you had a funny accent when speaking English,” he said, grinning. “I was too polite to ask. Where did you grow up?”

“Madrid.”

“I thought only Americans adopted China-girl babies.”

“Spain was the other country that took a lot of them.” She zipped up her dress. He helped her. “Us, I mean.”

“So you can’t speak Chinese?”

“No. You?” “ ’Course I can. I’m Canto.” He was from Hong Kong; he did not tiptoe around the subject like the other men did. She had met him only that day, for the shoot, but his direct manner amused her. Nothing seemed to surprise him. He checked his emails on his phone, then looked up. “So have you ever been to Asia?”

“Not really. I stopped over in transit in Singapore once, on the way to an Australian shoot. My agent says I have no cachet there. They have enough Chinese models. They like white girls for the Asian magazines, or biracial girls. I’m nothing special there.”

“They’ll discover you. It’ll just take time.” He pulled on his jeans, hunted for his belt. “Are you going to that awards dinner tonight? Want to share a cab?”

“I was thinking of going home to change.”

“Wear this!” He pulled out the sunflower-yellow silk ball gown from the rack of clothes the stylist had left behind in the room. “It was the best one on you.”

“It’s expensive,” she said. “They’ll kill me if it gets dirty.”

He kissed her. “I’ll explain. C’mon.” ***

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My grandfather is a retired fisherman. The first time we met, he picked me up in his dry, leathery arms and said, “Call me abuelo. Ah-bu-e-lo.”

I couldn’t say it.

“Okay. What about Yayo?”

“Yaya,” I said.

“Ah, no. Yaya is gone. We only have Yayo. Papi, Mami, Yayo, Mar.” The Garcia family used to live by the sea. Dad was the first to go to college, to the University of València. Afterwards he moved to Madrid to teach history and met mom, a lawyer. We became madrileños. In the summer we would go to Gandía to stay with my grandfather in his apartment by the beach. Madrid was beautiful, but being surrounded by dry, ice-capped mountains all winter all you wanted to do was to run into the bright blue ocean when it was warm.

“Mar!” grandpa would cry from the balcony of his apartment. He would be standing there the moment our car turned into the driveway. “Mar!” Mar means “sea” in Spanish. Grandpa was the one who called me Mar. Mom preferred Elena but I couldn’t say it. I could say “Mar” and Mar stuck. *** You learn to make it long before you can spell it.

To make fideuà, said grandpa, you first have to agree on what kind of noodles to use.

You can use something that looks like thin macaroni. It has a very narrow gauge and its hollowness traps the sauces. Or you can use something that looks like whisper-thin, inch-long threads of egg vermicelli. The Garcia family was divided about what kind of noodles to use for the family fideuà.

Half the family liked the macaroni type. The other half liked threads. They fought sometimes. Grandpa and I liked threads. Because grandpa was the cook we always had threads. He always used the same brand. It was from France and the packet said “cheveux d’anges”; there was a golden picture of an egg on it and an angel.

“Are noodles from France?” I asked as a child, puzzled.

“No, no. The great Italian voyager Marco Polo brought these back from

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China,” said grandpa, shaking the noodles out of the plastic bag into the boiling broth. I perched on the kitchen counter and watched him.

“Teacher says I’m from China,” I said.

“Ah, sí? When?” He opened his big eyes wide in astonishment.

“Last week.”

“But how could you be from China, it is so far away!” He looked indignant. “Are you not my favourite grandchild, Mar mi amor?”

I smiled and shrugged in delight.

“And you, mi princesa, are from China? Like noodles?”

I nodded.

“All the best things come from China, no?”

I nodded.

“I love my Mar and I love my fideuà.” He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and kissed me soundly on both cheeks.

Mom came into the kitchen. “Oh dad! Must you smoke in front of her?

Mar, don’t sit so close to the stove please.” She reached for me protectively.

I climbed into her arms, although I was already so big. She liked holding me.

Grandpa winked. “Smoking is essential for cooking! The best fideuà has some cigarette ash in it. It has the smell of the sea in it. It should have some salt spray that came over the side of the boat. They say it was first made by a young cook on a fishing boat, out in the ocean, to feed the crew. Not in this clean little kitchen in a high-rise building! One day, Mar, we shall go out on a boat and make it there. Would you like that?”

“Yes!” “We will cast the net and pull up all kinds of strange animals from the ocean floor and put them in to boil; we will take the salt that has crusted on the ropes on the deck and throw that in, and we will smoke lots of cigarettes and have lots of beer, and we will make a fideuà fit for a king.” *** She had to go to Rio de Janeiro; he to Sydney.

They were in a departure lounge in Madrid-Barajas Airport. Their flights happened to be within 20 minutes of each other, so they went early and had a last glass of wine together.

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On his bag was a gold luggage tag that said Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club.

“Did Marco Polo really bring noodles from China back to the West?” asked Mar suddenly.

“I don’t know.” Victor was checking his emails absent-mindedly.

“Do you really believe an Italian guy could talk to the Chinese in the 13th century?”

“Why not?”

“What language did he speak? Chinese?”

“No way.”

“So what was their common tongue? They wouldn’t be speaking Italian in 13th-century China, would they?”

Victor looked up from his phone thoughtfully. “Perhaps they had translators.”

“But someone still had to learn the other language first. How did they do it?” Her eyes were troubled. “How did the first Italian speak to the first Chinese?”

Victor grinned. “By using English?” He leaned forward and kissed her.

“Are you on Facebook?”

“I don’t really check it.”

“Check it. I’ll message you first. There are a million Victor Cheungs on Facebook. Don’t Friend the wrong one.”

Mar was surprised at the attempt to stay in contact. They usually didn’t.

It was his idea to come to the airport early. “Why do you want to stay in touch?”

“I really enjoyed working with you,” he said. “You’re really beautiful.”

“You say this to every model you fuck.”

“Don’t be cynical. You’ll get wrinkles.”

“I’d better go, we’re boarding soon,” she said, picking up her bags.

“I’ll send you your pictures.” His phone trilled in his back pocket, but for once he didn’t reach for it. “Am I really the first Chinese guy?”

“Why would I lie? It’s not anything to be proud of.”

He was more than a little vain. It came with his job. “Is it different?”

She stared out of the window at a white, red and gold Iberia plane edging up the runway, about to take flight. “It’s different. It’s sad.”

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“Do you think we originally came from the same place in China?”

She smiled. “I don’t know where I came from. The records say Zhejiang; do you know where that is?”

Victor frowned. “No. I’ve never been. I usually just go to Beijing or Shanghai for business.”

Mar shrugged. “Not that it matters. People say the records are usually faked anyway. Who knows?”

“I don’t know where I came from either,” he lied, just to make her feel better.

“Ciao, Victor.”

“Ciao, Mar.” *** Once you have agreed on the type of noodles you have to prepare the fish broth. A fideuà is only as good as its broth. The broth is as complicated as bouillabaisse. People have fights about what kind of aromatic things to put in it: bay leaf, thyme, onion, carrot, peppercorns, saffron. Some people swear by the addition of dry white wine but purists think that is too fanciful.

Fishermen don’t have wine lying around the boat; they drink beer. Well then, put in some beer!

Everyone agrees that a good fish broth must have all kinds of sea creatures in it: it is an ocean menagerie. Lobsters, crayfish, octopuses, squid, prawns, langoustines, white-flesh fish, dark-flesh fish, clams, mussels, scallops, all the bounty of the ocean must be scooped up and emptied into the pot, put on a rolling boil and strained so that only the broth remains. Out of this array you will distil the essential and the essential is all you need. *** Hi Mar, I heard you’ll be in the show in Singapore. I’ll be in Singapore May 2-5. Will we overlap?

Dear Victor, yes. I leave on May 6. Which hotel are you at? *** 147

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Sooner or later you will have to confront the reality that is the paella pan, the paellera.

All kinds of shops around the world sell things that pretend to be paella pans, but there is only one way of obtaining the genuine article.

Go to a town in València Province. Ask for directions to the central market. Make sure you go early, for it shuts down in the afternoon. Follow the old ladies around as they buy their meat, poultry, fish. Sooner or later they will halt at a store run by a grumpy old man who sells all kinds of metal goods: knives, pots, ladles, sieves. He does not accept credit cards.

Find a pan made in Spain, nowhere else. Sneer at the Teflon versions, find a carbon-steel pan and make sure it is not too expensive. If it is expensive, it is for tourists. If it comes with instructions make sure they are in Spanish only: this will indicate its authenticity.

When you take it home, wash it. Then oil it. It will rust instantly every time you use it, which is terrifying if you are accustomed to stainless-steel saucepans. You must keep a special sponge at home just to scrub out the red, furry rust after each use. It is a rite you have to put yourself through every time you cook. Underneath all that rust the metal will still be mirror smooth and dove grey.

People do not make fideuà in small amounts. You need a giant pan for the real thing. Of course, if you believe my grandfather, you should also have a fishing trawler, nets full of shellfish, fishermen, beer, cigarettes and a full moon. Grandpa says that with the right combination of broth, shellfish, saffron, moonlight, cigarette smoke, sea spray and the slightest metallic tang of rust, the humble noodle, this dry, little mousey thing that a Venetian traveller once brought in his satchel across continents to the great seaports of the Mediterranean, transforms itself into a glossy, golden, glorious beast. It shakes its mane. It roars. *** He found her amid potted palms in a corner of the cavernous, sombre lobby of his hotel, shivering in a sleeveless dress.

“Hola Victor.”

“How are you?” He embraced her briefly. “Jesus, you’re a block of ice!”

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“It’s so hot outside, but it’s freezing in here.”

“Welcome to Singapore. Come upstairs.” *** When I was 16 dad received a phone call at his university. Mom was at court, defending a huge case. He waited all day for her to return. He could barely eat at dinner and would not talk to me. It was nearly midnight when we heard her car come up the driveway. He ran out to meet her.

“No,” I heard her say beneath my bedroom window. I peeked outside.

She was sitting on the low stone wall next to the flower bed, crying.

Someone, some helpful soul at the university, had taped for my dad a news segment on television about China-girl babies. An American humanrights organisation was investigating their plight. It had uncovered evidence of widespread human trafficking that had gone on for years. Because there were not enough abandoned Chinese girls to satisfy Western demand, traffickers began to kidnap babies and sell them to orphanages. Orphanage directors in many rural Chinese provinces became rich, built themselves opulent mansions, bought cars. Their wealth attracted the envy of other villagers, who informed the authorities. It was all finally coming to light.

Mom, dad and I watched the video together in our living room. We held onto each other in dread.

A woman in a thick cotton jacket was being interviewed on television.

Her face was puffy and blotchy: it was cold. Her hair was unwashed. She looked simple. She seemed inarticulate. You heard the pain in her voice. The Spanish subtitles said: She was just playing outside our house. A white van came. The men snatched her. I never saw their faces. I never saw her again.

The woman cried. She had other children after that, she said, but she never forgot her first child, her daughter. “Wawa,” she sobbed. “Wawa mei le.” My baby’s gone.

“Turn it off,” said mom. ***

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– Hola, Mar. – Hola Victor. You have learned Spanish.

– Don’t get your hopes up. That’s the only word I know.

– Where are you?

– Tokyo, you?

– London. I can’t sleep.

– I thought you never checked Facebook.

– You made me. My entire family’s on it now. We chat on it when I go abroad.

– We’re scheduled to be part of the same Hong Kong gig in July.

– You’re going to that too?

– I’m your photographer. *** “My family is taking the junk out on Sunday,” said Victor, watching her dress. “Would you like to come?”

“What’s a junk?”

“It’s a boat. A yacht. To be pretentious we call it a junk around these parts.” He added hastily, “Don’t get ideas. It’s a company junk. We have big families; none of it trickles down to me. I live in a paint factory in Williamsburg.”

“Do we get to go out to the ocean?”

“Of course. Hong Kong looks nicer from the ocean. Especially at night.

All the skyscrapers standing in the waves. You forget how crappy it really is.”

Mar considered. “I don’t know if I want to meet your family. I hardly know you.”

“Mar, I’ve never even slept with the same girl twice.”

“Knowing your reputation I am beginning to think this is serious.”

“You’re the only woman I’ve ever turned off my cellphone for when I’m in bed.”

She laughed. ***

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My parents had befriended many American couples through the international adoption network. They were distraught by the investigation. Many of them had adopted out of Christian charity, out of the belief that they were saving babies who would otherwise be left to die. For 15 years these couples had been convinced they were on the right side of God. The investigation changed everything. After the news segment ran the charity set up a website registry and posted photographs of baby girls to reunite them with their Chinese parents.

My parents did not adopt me out of any religious conviction, but the investigation affected us all the same. It was as if someone had struck a match and thrown it into the middle of our living room. For the first few weeks nothing happened, but the dread and doubt gnawed at their waking hours. Mom and dad began fighting a lot. Mom feared every knock on the door was someone coming to take me away. Dad thought we should do the right thing and register me on the website so that my real parents could find me. Mom refused even to look at it for fear of seeing my baby photograph posted by some Chinese couple.

I was on the phone to grandpa.

“Come to Gandía,” he said sadly. “Take shelter from the storm.”

When the school holidays came I packed and went to stay with him. I took my laptop. We looked at the online registry of missing girls.

“This one looks like me,” I said, pointing.

Grandpa put his arthritic fingers on the mouse and clicked through the pages gingerly. “So does this one.”

“What about this one, Yayo?”

“This one too.” Grandpa began to laugh. “Oh God. You’re like peas in a pod, sardines in the sea.”

At the end of two hours of surfing the website grandpa called mom. “We looked at the website of the lost girls. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will come to take Mar away. Because! Because there are thousands of photos. They all look like her! They will never be able to prove it.”

It was high tourist season in Gandía. Every day I swam far out, alone, in the ocean while grandpa sat under a striped umbrella and listened to the radio. One afternoon a French woman came up to us and introduced herself.

She worked for a modelling agency in Paris. She wondered if I wanted a free trip to take part in a contest.

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*** The junk was moored off Sai Kung.

Victor called out to his nephews, “Can you guys stop waterskiing so near the boat, you’re rocking it, we can’t cook properly!”

His mother was watching Mar cook on the portable stove on deck.

“This pan is like our wok,” she said, a little scornfully, a little proudly. “This noodle, come from China. Seafood, same. All same. We call it hoi seen meen. We use same ingredients.”

“Ah, but it’s so different,” said Mar amiably, putting the fish in the paella pan. She had been warned about Victor’s mother.

Victor said in a low voice in Cantonese to her, “Listen mom. When have I ever brought any of my girlfriends home?”

“Never.”

“Exactly. And when was the last time I dated a Chinese girl?”

“Never.”

“And didn’t you always want me to marry a Chinese girl?”

“Not ABC.” “Mar’s not ABC. Mar’s actually CBC. No, PRCBC. Double high honours. She was born in mainland China. That makes her more Chinese than you or me.”

“She can’t speak Chinese.”

“Can you speak Spanish?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Are you gonna behave, mom?”

“Victor,” called Mar, holding up her phone. “I’ve got my grandfather on videophone. He just woke up. Say hello.”

“Hola!” cried Victor.

She held the phone over the pan to show her grandfather the progress.

“He says we should be smoking and having lots of beer or the fideuà will not turn out right.”

“Done!” said Victor, fishing for a packet of cigarettes.

“He asks if we’re fishing.”

“Tell him the fish are toxic here.”

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“Look,” said Mar in Spanish, panning the phone around the ocean.

“Yayo, can you see? This is China. This is the South China Sea.” “What’s he saying?” asked Victor.

“He says I look just like you and your mom. He’s starting to believe all Chinese people are related and it’s upsetting him. He’s just kidding.” Mar blew a kiss at the video screen. “I am flying back to Madrid tomorrow. I’ll see you soon. I’ll call mom now. I love you, Yayo.”

“I love you, Mar,” said the old man in Spanish. “Now turn that thing off. All that bobbing up and down on your boat. I’m getting seasick.”

Victor’s mom stood thoughtfully over the bubbling fideuà, sniffing suspiciously. She was not used to the smell of saffron. When they weren’t looking she found a spoon and took a bite.

Mar leaned over the side of the junk, looking at the green hills and blue waters.

“What’s the word for ‘love’ in Mandarin?” she asked.

Victor said, “Ai.” She wrinkled her brow.

“Why?” “It doesn’t sound nice. It sounds like a little shriek, a squeal, almost like a cry of pain. Not like amor, which sounds like a warm embrace.”

“Why don’t you write them a complaint letter?”

“What’s the word for ‘sea’?”

“Hai.” “High.”

“Not ‘high’. Hai.” “Hai.” She looked out at the ocean. “I like that better. Hai. It sounds like a greeting. Like something about to begin.”

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Cha Chan Teng, Hung Hom, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Cha Chan Teng, Ngau Tau Kok, Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 15cm x 23.5cm

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Scavenging on Gold Mountain: of Food and Poetry Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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  Asia, in wet markets and at street food stalls, they can be found lurking in corners, darting out to pick through rotting onions, yellow outer cabbage leaves, limp, gnarled carrots and other unsellable, perishable foodstuff dumped in smelly rubbish bins. As a young girl I never paused to observe the scavengers, almost neighbours, in my hometown of Malacca. I had already internalised the social politeness that makes me avert my eyes before another’s shame. Beggars insist on being acknowledged. You gain merit when you drop coins into their empty bowls. But these fugitive figures who kept their heads down as if to focus on their scramble for discarded leaves and roots were rendered invisible so as to spare them the degradation of their poverty.

At eight I lost a home that held haunches of Sheffield ham, the best in the British Commonwealth, fresh eggs, fish, chicken, kai lan, kangkong and many other kinds of greens. For years grandfather’s farmer tenants had presented his sons, including my father, with bulging burlap bags of hairy rambutans so fresh their skins almost snapped off when peeled, mangosteen, langsat, duku, small perfumed pineapples, combs of bananas and other tropical fruit. After father declared himself bankrupt, having been caught in a fraudulent investment scheme, we entered years of hunger. Evening meals with never enough rice to fill us; some soup and bits of gristle and skin falling off bony parts of pork or chicken were our daily sustenance. The memory of sudden physical emptiness remains a vivid provocation that years of later surfeit and banquets cannot dull. Before eight I do not remember 157

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giving any thought to food. It was always present, like mother, father and home. That first evening, having to vacate our house and soon to have our mother mysteriously abandon us, hunger arrived in my body, a visitant that, invading abdomen, arms, legs and head, left me light-headed, overtaken by lassitude, feeling fragile and skeletally defined.

I was to remain hungry for many years. So it is now easy for me, unlike millions of other people, to lose weight. I simply stop eating, inviting hunger back into my body and the flesh drops away, like those years of ham haunches and ripe fruit sacks, through a trapdoor to the past. This intimate acquaintance with hunger is dangerous, leading to my present osteoporosis and perhaps anorexia nervosa farther down the road, and I have had to tempt myself back to the seductions of fat, salt, sweet, creamy, smooth, crunchy, spiced and aromatic, to the multiple orgiastic bursts in mouth, nose, ear to regain the robust roundness of health. These two extremes of hunger and satiety represent also the psyche of the United States, where I now live. As with me, the national preoccupation with food appears paramount, hung out to dry and desiccated between the poles of (over)abundance and starvation.

The poor in the US, however, unlike my early waifish self, do not usually go hungry. The American poor fill up instead with cheap carbohydrates the land produces in enormous quantities: silos, containers, freight cars, trailer trucks and warehouses are loaded with corn, wheat and potatoes. The fatmarbled meat patties of McDonald’s golden arches symbolise the cornucopia that transforms the majority of poor Americans into groaning obesity. In the country of Hollywood and beautiful people, diabetes and strokes accompany avoirdupois, sagging bottoms and jiggling bellies, particularly in the inner cities, the Midwest and the rural south.

The near-death anorexics’ story is different. Almost always economically comfortable, their sole territory of pure control is the body, where father and mother are not permitted authority. These ultra-thins count meagre calories in glasses of water, celery and carrot sticks and nibble at whatever holds no fat, sugar or starch, nothing that could add up to adipose tissue, their concave bellies holding a matrix of stories that echo some of my childhood memories.

But I was never a willing hunger artist. Whenever I could I stole bananas and sugar cane from neighbours’ gardens, accepted every invitation to stay for lunch or dinner, spent the few coins that came my way on the most 158

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plentiful of day-old rock buns, twig- and pebble-studded dried dates, or whatever would keep the pangs rumbling through day and night at a low murmur. As a child near starvation I struggled to eat as well as the poor do today in the US. In the 1950s (and even now in most of the world, where billions of people live on less than US$2 a day), to grow fat from fries, donuts and supersized hamburgers would have been a tantalising fantasy (if I were even capable then of dreaming such an impossible dream) devoutly to be wished for. Now it is a fantasy easily realised.

It has been a challenge for me to live on Gam Saan – the original Cantonese name for California – or Gold Mountain, with the history of Chinese mistreatment so close at hand. As recently as the 1960s antimiscegenation laws made it illegal for someone like me, an Asian, to marry someone like my husband, a white American. When we traipsed to New York City Hall to be married in 1972, it was barely three years after such mixed-race marriages were recognised as legal in most of the US. Above all, it has been a challenge to come to terms with the role of food in the nation. Gam Saan referred specifically to the West Coast interiors to which the Chinamen pioneers trekked, to mine and pan for gold. Gold nuggets, they had heard, were to be found lying on streambeds. Outfitted with a few primitive tools – shovel, pick, pan – bearing sharp eyes and muscular arms, a man could return to his village in Guangdong with riches enough to enlarge his ancestral family compound and even maintain a concubine together with his wife and children. California, the Golden State as it is called even today, when billions of dollars in the red and sinking deeper into debt daily, remains in many ways a golden territory. The sun shines on most days, the skies are clear and blue except when smoggy or foggy, and all kinds of flora take root wherever birds drop their seeds and possums or raccoons carry them. Many of the 37 million Californians wait eagerly for spring, to tamp bare-root-balled shrubs, fruit trees and annuals in whatever earth opens up as a yard. Even in a recession, Californians spend gladly on exotics from South Africa, Australia, China, Southeast Asia and South America, from wherever a plant can be stolen. Purist environmentalists may tear out mustard-seed bushes and ice plants that have colonised the Central Coast bluffs; but working on his private property, the gardener recklessly spades in Kaffir lime plantings from Indonesia, mulberry saplings from Iran and whatever else can be found in a global cookbook (and perhaps feathery 159

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strands of marijuana, still illegal and shielded behind high walls and tall, decorative banana stalks).

On the mornings when I wake in my own home instead of in a room in some hotel, university dormitory or stranger’s house – my itinerant schedule dictated by conferences, reading tours and visiting professorships – I strap a cloth bag across my chest, tie my sneaker laces tight and go scavenging in my neighbourhood. California produces 90 per cent of the avocados sold in the US; it is no wonder my neighbours’ yards are shaded by thick-branched trees whose fruit is too plentiful for a family and so heavy that on some cold mornings after a wind storm the fallen fruit would fill the burlap sacks of my childhood. From September to May and later I gather avocados littering the sidewalks. Planted decades ago according to the specials the local plant nurseries offered, the trees drop dark green Hass – the popular, grainy, thick-skinned fruit used universally for making guacamole – and a host of other varieties, some never found even in speciality grocers’ stores: large, elongated Fuerte, long, thin-skinned Zutano, round, well-shaped Bacon and Reed avocados spherical and fat as rubber balls.

Between the avocado trees are all manner of citruses – blood orange, navel, seedy Sunkist types, tangerines and more. Their bright orange, redstreaked globes fall and roll to the road’s edge or land beside driveways, so I do not have to step onto private property to pick and peel before eating them as I walk. A few doors from my home a dwarf lemon tree, almost a bush, flowers with fragrant white blossoms that turn to green pebbles then slowly into smooth, yellow, perfumed Meyer lemons that the retired nursery owner encourages me to pick. “I think of it as the neighbourhood tree,” he tells me.

At the turn from Patterson into adjoining Calle Real, landscapers have planted Eureka trees, whose pimply skinned, nipple-tipped lemons cluster on the ends of branches like produce displayed for sale, waiting for any pedestrian to twist and take home to enliven sangria, tea, salad dressing, ceviche and all sorts of pasta sauces.

The scavenging I practise on my walks is legal and increasingly widely accepted everywhere the American land has been generous. Unlike the shame-faced scavengers among the discard bins in the Malacca Central Market of my childhood, foragers like my university students, who gleefully write of their sorties onto strangers’ front yards after alcoholic nights in 160

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search of their squeezed morning orange juice, have the means to pay for the freshest foodstuff in middle-class supermarkets and expensive boutique stores. Recent news reports note that today’s scavengers are bucking the national habits of waste and have organised to collect excess yard fruit for distribution to food banks and the homeless. Not hunger and destitution but thrift and charity drive these social American collectors.

But I occupy a less easily determined position. Sometimes I think the story of Ruth may serve as mine. The Book of Ruth is one of the shortest books in the Old Testament, yet it made the strongest impression on me when I sat down to read the tissue-thin pages of a King James Bible. Having dealt with puberty by total immersion in books, any book I could find in those still-hungry days, I often joke that as a voracious reader I would have chosen to read rather than eat. Books and food were scarce in the rented shack in which my brothers and I came to adulthood, but through those years I devoured hundreds of books borrowed from the Malacca Public Library. More, I discovered that Bibles were available, free, to whoever wanted to take one home. I read romances from the library and my free copy of the Bible indiscriminately, the stories, to my untutored mind, interchangeable literature, digested and stimulating my appetite for more of whatever imagination could crystallise.

So I focused on the figure of Ruth. Widowed young, committing herself to mother-in-law Naomi’s wise counsel, leaving home to look for ways to feed them both, laboriously gleaning the barley fields of the rich man Boaz after the harvest, Ruth was a woman I understood in my 13-year-old bones.

Leaving Malaysia years later and choosing to marry and remain in the US despite the counter pulls of communal and national identity, I felt I was re-enacting Ruth’s story. Her words to Naomi: “Wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried,” served as allusion to my own exilic condition.

But after a few years of scavenging in America I acknowledge a different narrative to my choices. In choosing the US rather than Malaysia I was intuitively choosing my childhood idyllic vision of a bounteous Malaya instead of the realpolitik of a post-May 13, 1969, racially based, racially divided, socially impoverished, values-famished Malaysia. Yes, the US also has its racial and political problems, but walking through the 6am streets 161

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of Santa Barbara I breathe freely, knowing I can speak and write freely, assemble freely and worship freely. On those mornings I rehearse again the relation between these freedoms and the freedom from want so elegantly borne by Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century vision of a New World he tenderly apotheosised in The Garden: What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.

When I was a child I wandered in my grandparents’ garden, gathering fallen jambu and watching my grandaunt pick bunga telang, the blossoms of the blue pea vine, for her Nyonya kuih and clip the long spikes of screwpine and lemon grass for nasi lemak and pineapple fish curry. So, steeped in poetry as a Malaysian undergraduate, I idealised (in as idyllic a fantasy as the dream behind the whole-food movement) my early whole-family childhood as an Old World landscape’s tropical version of Marvell’s garden, fashioned from English sailors’ yarns about Caribbean islands. I now draw on my Santa Barbara mornings to return to that happy childhood, when the mind “does straight its own resemblance find”.

On my annual return to my brother’s home in Malacca I continue to glory in his garden. Kaffir lime bushes bear innumerable leaves, indispensable for flavouring Malaysian curry pastes, which cost US$5 for five at the Santa Barbara Farmers’ Market on the rare occasions on which

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they can be found; pandan leaves sprout in clumps, ever ready for scenting coconut rice and glutinous rice cakes; and a lush black pepper vine, with tiny green seeds that dry into round peppercorns that blister the tongue, stands by his kitchen window.

For Marvell, the creative mind that finds correspondence everywhere rises in that moment of unity when alignment between the human creature and the natural world is momentarily sensed. In my American present, nasturtium vines spread their carmine-streaked flowers to be picked and thrown into salads, where their sharp, peppery essence almost makes up for the absence of pea flowers in the green-belt wilderness. By the creek where sycamores, which love their feet in water, tower, I pause on the wooden footbridge and pull pungent, oily leaves from the California bay tree, whose branches have sprouted low enough for me to reach even though it is so skyscraping it is almost as stately as the sycamores. Every fifth yard seems to be edged with rosemary bushes, rosemary being the perfect herb for roast chicken and potatoes. Nubby lavender flowers scent the air, waiting to be nipped for herbal teas. Petals fall from wild rose bushes, leaving behind rose hips that will fatten and redden through the summer. Olives rain down, staining sidewalks black; and on one wooden wall grapevines crawl mightily, their leaves – delicious when steamed for wrapping finger-sized dolma – growing larger than my palms.

My neglected garden may not fully match the prodigality of strangers’ yards. Still, I share its bounty throughout the year with my friends and students: Black Mission figs, loquats, Santa Rosa plums, white nectarines, navel and Valencia oranges, lemons and tangerines, as well as lemon grass, thyme, rosemary and mint. In return, Maria gives me bags of pineapple guavas that carpet the grass under the branches, unbruised; together we gleefully search for the most plump kumquats, shining translucent gold in the sun, that glisten among the dozens of trees lining the road to her housing development. I transform plenty into spicy kumquat pickles and marmalades. Bill and Lee from Taiwan leave sheaves of garlic chives, Swiss chard and broccoli rabe by my door. Generous sharing is a corollary of scavenging in this New World.

The dishes for which I scavenge in Gam Saan are Mediterranean in origin and for the moment serve as compensation for the lost Nyonya paradise of

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my innocent, ignorant childhood, perhaps for that lost Malaya when a vision of unity was yet possible for its communities of different races swept along by the Merdeka movement towards an independent, democratic and egalitarian society. Scavenging each morning in Santa Barbara is my way of retrieving momentarily that landscape of Malayan bounty. My walks describe a world ready for memory’s harvesting, replacing the coconut trees with green and brown shiny nuts lying on land covered with dark purple and lilac morning glory flowers, with the California bay trees and the vines climbing over the banks of the creek, crowded with gold and scarlet nasturtium. If poetry is a momentary stay against confusion, as Robert Frost said, then this is how I make myself at home: finding correspondence between past and present, to recover in imagination that transcendence from where creativity comes. To return to the mind that power of belonging that exile and emigration have broken, so I can rightfully claim: “Yet it creates, transcending these, / Far other worlds, and other seas.”

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Hari Kunzru Profile: J.P. O’Malley

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  following passage from Hari Kunzru’s recently published novel Gods Without Men, the Guide, leader of an extraterrestrial-worshipping cult, explains to his followers in the Californian desert the importance of a new piece of technology called the Mux. It is 1958 and the Guide describes how powerful Muxing will become to humans in the dissemination of ideas and eradication of loneliness on Earth.

The principle of muxing, or multiplexing, is … a way of combining multiple messages into a single signal, then sending it over a shared medium. That medium could be a length of wire or even the very air, in the case of wireless transmission of radio waves ... It’s conceivable 165

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that using this technology, a single transmitter could become the mouthpiece for the combined will and power of entire populations, entire planets … The Mux … is a stepping stone to the next level of human consciousness …

As I sit in my front room in southeast London, in the afternoon, I’m using the powers of technology, via a Skype headset and webcam, to communicate with Kunzru, who is drinking a morning coffee in a hotel room in Seattle.

He has always been a big fan of technology: before his incarnation as a novelist he was an associate editor at technology magazine Wired. One of his essays for the publication was titled: You are Cyborg.

Kunzru says that thanks to technological advances human beings sometimes behave like robots. “We are kind of cyborgs already,” he says.

“This is a cyborg operation, two people attached to the international phone network, able to speak to each other as a kind of assemblage of machines.

The networks are also getting quite intimate with our bodies. We’re not too far off a lot of the functions currently in our phone handsets. It was once in a desktop, then it went onto our laps, now it’s in our hands, pretty soon it will be attached to our bodies, then one day maybe in our bodies. At that point we are going to be proper cyborgs.”

And the Mux? “The Mux is supposed to be this mythical communication device that will allow all these superbeings to network together, a kind of cosmic proto internet.”

A complex and intriguing novel, Gods Without Men takes on several grand themes and shifts from the 18th century to 2009. The desert is the force linking seemingly unconnected characters and events in a book that eschews a conventional linear structure.

The main story concerns the desert disappearance of four-year-old autistic boy Raj Matharu in 2008. The novel sweeps back and forth to other characters, including a British rock star on the run from a failed relationship, a former member of the extraterrestrial devotional sect and a desert-wandering, 18th-century Franciscan monk. In the background of this chaotic universe, in which the players are trying to find meaning in their lives, is Coyote, the mythological figure common to many Native American cultures.

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Gods Without Men is a far more complicated novel than Kunzru’s previous book, My Revolutions. Writing a labyrinthine tale that sometimes reads like a book of a philosophy was partly an accident, he says.

“The story started with the Matharu family in the motel and as I carried on with that, travelling out there to the desert in California, I came into contact with a lot of UFO culture and it became clear there were other stories I wanted to be in there. I wasn’t initially sure how they related, but later everything seemed to start resonating and echoing.

“It was a technical challenge to try to hold down all the material in the book. I’m interested in the idea of fragments and stories that aren’t necessarily tied up together, but require the reader to work to put them together. I like the idea of the reader being active.”

Might readers find it frustrating that the stories in Gods Without Men fail to cohere to resolve the problems they initially address?

“I could have given an answer as to why the boy disappeared and I could have had a much more straightforward plot. But in a way the book is about this sort of eruption of the unknowable into people’s lives; it’s about the thing you can’t actually process, the thing that you can’t domesticate into a system of meaning. Most of the questions aren’t really resolved at all, which is in line with the structure and theme of it.”

Conversing with UFO cultists in California gave Kunzru an appreciation of where their stories often originate and of how they made their way into much of the science fiction he grew up reading.

“What I learned from speaking to those people out in the desert was that originally, when the UFO thing really got going in the ’50s, all the stuff that the aliens were supposed to be telling people when they came down was about transcending the divisions of the Cold War. It was about unity, harmony and cosmic communication, because people were suddenly afraid of nuclear war and the East-West division.”

As well as 1950s science fiction, Kunzru says Gods Without Men is also heavily influenced by the idea of the sublime, a philosophical concept expounded by 18th-century British writers such as Edmund Burke and John Dennis.

“The sublime is this idea that there are certain kinds of experiences that are overpowering, that overwhelm your senses and make it impossible for you to pull them back into your normal life. One of the objects that the 167

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theoreticians of the sublime talked about was the desert and its immense emptiness and how inhuman it felt.

“The desert is this massive, pitiless, in some cases extraterrestrial emptiness that resists your attempts to fill it up, but everybody in this book is trying to fill it up. The title is taken from that Balzac quotation, the epigram in answer to the question what is the desert: ‘it is God without man’. So these ideas organise the book; the various people, from the Franciscan monk onwards, are all in their own ways attempting to deal with the lack of meaning.”

To fathom the desert and its existential charisma Kunzru spent months living in motel rooms in Nevada, Arizona, Utah and California, looking at red-sand horizons and becoming a literary gypsy. The writing process was, he admits, different to that of his previous novels.

“I used to have an office in my house and I would be there every morning.

With this book, I ended up sitting in loads of different places writing. The idea of being a nomad in a rental car, going from Motel 6 to Motel 6, does alienate you and you end up as an atomised individual floating around.”

The elements surrounding the desert make you acutely aware of your senses, says Kunzru, almost to the point where you can feel your consciousness slowly ticking away.

“In the desert, as soon as the wind whips up, it goes straight to zero visibility and you’re coated in this flowery, salty dust. You can’t see three feet in front of you. Ten minutes later it’s back to complete clarity; there is this incredibly clear sky. That’s one of those things you can only understand by being there. Silence is another element. When you switch the car engine off and start walking the silence is almost like pressure on your ears. Those things etch themselves on your mind without you having to try.”

Kunzru leaps from such silent solitude to the spotlight with his numerous other projects. Gods Without Men is his fourth novel; in 2005 he published Noise, a short-story collection. He has written and presented several documentaries, including The First War on Terror, a BBC Radio 3 programme about Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian anarchists; and The Great Arc, a BBC4 television documentary about the Survey of India, the attempt to map the country to the nearest inch, begun in 1767.

He has written about travel, politics, technology and cultural evolution (interviewees having included J.G. Ballard, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Michael Moorcock); and he reported on pro-democracy protests in the 168

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Maldives in 2006. Kunzru is a patron of the Refugee Council and deputy president of English PEN. How does he cope with the dichotomy: the long stretches of solitary confinement necessary for the collection of new material for literary fiction, followed by periods of being surrounded by people as he works as a journalist, appears on television and attends literary festivals?

“I like both I guess. I get sick of people sometimes and want to have that concentration to write. Other times I like to get mixed up in stuff and be in the world. I do like journalism partly because it is connected to the wider context. I like partaking in conversations which are shaping ideas more generally, but I also like having the luxury of not being answerable to anyone, not even reality.”

Kunzru was born in London in 1969 to a mixed-raced family: his English mother worked as a nurse and his father is a doctor from Indian Kashmir. He grew up in Essex, northeast of London, left Britain in 2008 and now lives in New York.

His books tend to have a global aspect, with some plots extending to different continents. Debut work The Impressionist is a parody of the great Indian novel, in which protagonist Pran Nath travels to India, England and Africa, changing identity several times and ending with no name. Although My Revolutions is set in London the plot encompasses the South of France and Copenhagen and there are constant references to war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Transmission, his second novel, relates the story of an Indian computer programmer who creates a rampaging virus that infects a worldwide network of computers.

A message running throughout Kunzru’s oeuvre seems to be that country-specific literature is withering away and that he will not be mourning its passing.

“In a globalised culture you’re definitely beginning to see globalised writing and that’s something I’m interested in being part of – getting outside the tradition of the English novel and taking from other places. The idea of a national literature has always been more of a term for critics than for the people actually writing the literature anyway. People get nervous about anything to do with globalisation: that you are going to lose the sense of the specific and you are going to lose the sense of place. But actually good writing always comes out of a specific thing and heads towards the universal.

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You will still have people who are located in one kind of landscape or in one experience, then you will have other people, like me, who are interested in the connections between different places. The sort of thing I’m up to is only one of the available flavours.”

Kunzru does, however, believe the novel occupies an important place in today’s culture – and perhaps a more important position than ever.

“I would come out fighting on that one and say the novel is really well positioned, potentially, to explain the contemporary world. I say that for a number of reasons. First, the novel has a real advantage in that it can show stuff on the surface. But also because it allows you to see people from outside, then you can go inside, look at their motivations, you can deal with complexity and you can deal with multiple points of view. Given that we live in a complex-network world and we need ways of making sense of that in a fluid way, potentially the novel could be a really useful form for us.”

One of the complexities to which Kunzru refers is the role the media play in the Western world, a subject embraced by Gods Without Men. As Raj Matharu becomes a cause for concern, Kunzru focuses on the press’ willingness to do whatever it takes to deliver a good story: Price told them they needed to stay in the Los Angeles area to maximise what he called the “tail” of the coverage. The trick, he said, was to keep selling twists. Each day with no new development meant there was a chance an outlet would pull its reporting staff and put them on another story … But you’ve got a good story, he said.

A very good story.

Kunzru creates disparaging comments on the Matharu disappearance, his internet chatter, in poor English, designed to show how the public are just as reprehensible as the press in their appetite for lurid stories. They include: i some how dont buy their bullshit story, which parents in thier right mind would BRING A DANGEROUS SICKLY ill child to a remote desert

Followed by: … the only thing that will reveal the truth about Raj RITUAL

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SATANIST MURDER is when there is evidence against them, then they’ll try to hide out on some distent island somehwere with all the money they’ve scammed off the public till they die from their greed

Parallels with the Madeleine McCann story, (the notorious case of the disappearance of the three-year-old British girl on a family holiday in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007) seem unavoidable. Her apparent abduction has attracted a torrent of hearsay, bogus sightings and often abusive messages from internet forums and has encouraged moralising by print and broadcast media. Journalists and the public contribute to the circus atmosphere such stories develop, says Kunzru.

“I did draw inspiration from the McCann reports in constructing the Matharu family,” he confirms. “I also researched other child-disappearance stories. I was really interested in the ways that the mothers become targets. A big thing in the McCann case was that Kate McCann [Madeleine’s mother] was deemed not to be reacting appropriately. She wasn’t showing her grief in a way that felt readable to people watching TV and that was one reason why conspiracy theories began to circulate. A weird thing happens to families in such situations: as a story develops the parents come under scrutiny and the whole thing becomes a kind of moral court in which the parents are judged for the terrible things that have happened.

“I’m also really interested in the judgments we all make when we hear these news stories – think about what has happened with [Dominique] Strauss-Kahn recently or the Murdoch phone-hacking story. We are all looking at stuff on TV and feeling pretty confident that we are seeing into their motivations. We feel we kind of get it and it’s a big parlour game. We all sit and throw peanuts at the screen and have our opinions about who’s right and who’s wrong – frankly with very little information – and are often absolutely wrong about what we are saying. I often think about how terrible it must be to be in the middle of one of those media storms, especially if you are vulnerable and fragile.”

Kunzru is frequently regarded as multiculturalism’s poster boy and was anointed by some critics as the heir to Rushdie when The Impressionist appeared in 2002. Being classified by literary commentators as a new voice in post-colonial literature may have its benefits as well as its drawbacks, but Kunzru still feels a duty to interpret the immigrant experience. Despite the 171

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financial rewards Raj’s father Jaz Matharu enjoys in Gods Without Men, he is often without a sense of identity or place of belonging.

Wherever in the world you happened to be, in London or New York or Vancouver or Singapore or Baltimore MD – you really lived in apna Punjab, an international franchise, a mustard field of the mind.

And: Sure, there were the glories of the Khalsa, the Sikh heroes. But what was that to him? India wasn’t his country. He’d only been there once, a family trip when he was 14, three weeks of heat and disorientation and stomach upset.

Kunzru says the prejudices he describes in Gods Without Men are based on the experiences of, if not his family, then friends with whom he grew up in Essex.

“I write about the immigrant experience in a modified way. My family experience isn’t very similar to Jaz’s. My mother is English for one. But it is really common and I know a lot of people who have felt the kind of frustration Jaz feels. Often new immigrant parents aren’t confident about their sons or daughters going into the world and the children are used as an interface between parents and world – especially some of the mothers, who don’t get out and don’t speak English that well.

“Jaz is an extreme case because he has ended up as this wealthy Wall Street guy and he has run away from some of the things in his own background, so I’m interested in how complex those things become and how guilt plays its part for people.”

Having grown up as the son of an immigrant in the suburbs of a predominately white area of Britain, and now residing in an alien city as an immigrant himself, Kunzru is well aware of the segregation that exists in overseas communities in the Anglo-Saxon world.

“Immigrant communities in the US are just as separated from the centre of power as they are in Britain. The story is a bit different because the US [is] this nation of immigrants: the myth written into the story of America is that anybody can jump on a boat and end up as Donald Trump. Actually, class 172

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mobility in the US isn’t very powerful anymore. It’s becoming more difficult for people who start off at the bottom to make it to the top.

“Britain has a colonial relationship with the countries people are coming from. I wouldn’t say the integration of immigrants into society is any worse in Britain than it is in the US. The two countries are both incredibly complicated and have their ups and downs.”

As well as searching for truth or meaning in his novels, Kunzru is also interested in playing with notions of time and how events repeat themselves.

“I’m into the idea of repetition and recurrence,” he says. “I did that with My Revolutions … this idea of cycling around revolutions, meaning cyclical time as much as the idea of revolution itself.”

In the book, protagonist Chris Carver lives under a false name as Michael Frame, a 50-something married to a prosperous businesswoman and pursuing a simple life in a small market town. Carver represents the progressive politics and revolutionary idealism of the 1960s; alter ego Frame symbolises the bland, market-driven politics of the ’90s.

Where did it all go wrong for the New Left after the high hopes of 1968 and how did the politics shift to the right so fundamentally thereafter?

“Well, that’s a big historical question,” answers Kunzru, laughing. “But one reason for the [demise] of the Left in the 1970s in Britain was that it failed to produce economic prosperity. The bureaucratic Labour governments of the ’70s didn’t give people good lives and so they were open to Thatcherite ideas when they came in.

“Thatcherism was as much a child of the ’60s as the New Left was. It was all about individualism, me first, the selfish side of the baby boomers.

So that turned into the Thatcher dream of everyone’s being an entrepreneur, running their own company of one person. I guess the contest is between that selfishness and an ideal of sharing and togetherness, which is another aspect of what the movement in the ’60s wanted.”

All art may be political, but writers must be careful not to shove polemics down the throats of their readers, Kunzru says, something he was conscious of when writing My Revolutions.

“When people think about political novels they tend to think of the idea of a polemic dressed up in a story, that [the writer is] trying to convince you of something. That seems to be the opposite of what a good novelist does,” 173

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adds Kunzru. “A good novelist has to keep things open rather than try to close them down and tell you what to think. A good novelist will create situations and hold them open, letting characters do things that will allow readers to engage with potential political ideas. But people don’t like to be beaten around the head, especially with a thinly disguised allegory. A good political novel is one that sets up political situations rather than attempts to brain you with the author’s point of view.”

Although Kunzru largely keeps polemics from his pages he has no problem speaking out if he feels it is his duty. When the Daily Mail announced in 2003 that he had won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for fiction, for The Impressionist, Kunzru rejected it.

“It was a long-term thing with the Daily Mail. I always felt they hated people like me. They also seemed to target vulnerable people, immigrants and asylum seekers. I didn’t feel in all conscience I could stand up and shake the hand of the editor and make out I felt pleased to do that. On that level it was pretty easy to decide to turn the prize down. What was harder was to choose to do it in a public way and milk the thing for a political point and a lot of people didn’t like that. The prize money was £5,000; I told them I didn’t want it and that the moral thing to do was to give the money to a charity for refugees. Much to my surprise, they did. They became [the Refugee Council’s] biggest donor for the year.”

Against the background of the closure of the right-wing Murdoch publication the News of the World, formerly Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper, Kunzru sees technology leading to more democratic media.

He has signed up for a social experiment with Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex, which is “a start-up building an expertise directory for the social Web”, according to Azhar’s internet profile. Through the medium of social networking Kunzru will attempt to establish how his books can reach expanding audiences if sent to the “right” people connected through online services such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

“There is a public space for debate and discussion being created by something like Twitter,” says Kunzru. “If you assemble a bunch of smart people to follow and participate in a conversation views emerge very quickly, people argue the toss, people are kept up to date, the pressure is kept on people like Rupert Murdoch. Whereas before it would have been one chess move every day with the morning newspaper and the evening news bulletin, 174

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now social media has taken it beyond rolling 24-hour news and into this position where we are all potentially – at least if we care enough – part of this active citizens’ discussion.”

Although Kunzru believes technology is a tool that can power the democratic voice, he is aware that howls of ignorance and hatred are just as prevalent on the web as the language of altruism and intellectual reason.

But we don’t need computers to tell us that human beings are offensive by nature, he says.

“The technology is just revealing what was there already. I think people have always been kind of nasty. If everybody has an outlet they can just go and pour out their bile; people feel incredibly empowered to spew out their nastiest thoughts. It’s not that technology is changing us in that sense – it’s that technology is making it visible.”

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Review: Fionnuala McHugh

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  4 this year, as crowds were heading for the Tiananmen vigil in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman positioned herself outside Victoria Park. Then she hung up a poster that announced she had been subjected to electro-magnetic mind-control experiments conducted by the CIA. When a passer-by stopped for a chat the woman produced a sheaf of leaflets, in English, stating that the 1989 massacre in Beijing had been the work of the CIA – as had the Chernobyl disaster, the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11, Hurricane Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake.

People seek connections in apparently random events. They need to know that some divinity or government agency or alien is responsible for the chaos; if there’s a Plan, life’s pain might be easier to deal with.

Halfway through Hari Kunzru’s new book, Gods Without Men, we make the acquaintance of Walter. Walter is not one of the book’s humans whose 177

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stories jump backwards and forwards through 400 pages and two-and-ahalf centuries. Walter is a computer programme tracking life’s patterns. He’s alarmingly good at it.

“We’re hunting for jokes,” says Walter’s creator, Cy Bachman (“one of the most talented financial engineers on Wall Street”), to Jaz, the brilliant statistician he’s hired. Bachman doesn’t claim to have a theory of everything.

What he has, he declares, is more profound: “A sense of humour”. This will help him find what he’s looking for, which is “the face of God”.

Jokes are rather thin on the Californian desert ground upon which Kunzru lays out this tale. Early on, the author of The Impressionist seems to be having fun with his disparate characters. A pleasantly daffy typist called Joanie is star-struck by a cult called Ashtar Galactic Command whose leader visited a spacecraft in 1947; Joanie assumes his wife’s robotic English is clear proof she’s an extra-terrestrial (though one or two less enlightened followers are of the opinion she’s “just French Canadian”). There is also a British rock star, Nicky Capaldi, who exhibits all the tokens by which that subspecies is recognised (skinniness, tattoos, crooked teeth) and is as alien to the locals as any interplanetary traveller. Capaldi streaks across the firmament like a wayward comet and this reviewer, for one, was sorry when he vanished abruptly from the plot.

Other disappearances are more deliberate, however, and the tone darkens with them. In 1958 Joanie loses her daughter. Fifty years later, near the same spot, Jaz loses his autistic son. The place where these children go missing is the Pinnacles, the three-fingered rocky outcrop around which the book’s events take place.

Like Walter, the alert reader may soon start detecting global echoes – Roswell, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Chariots of the Gods, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Malabar Hills from A Passage to India, Rosemary’s Baby. British readers will be reminded of Madeleine McCann; Australians will recall Lindy Chamberlain and the baby-snatching dingo. There are occasional references to a howling coyote – the book was originally going to be called Coyote – and to a mysterious glowing boy.

And as the title suggests there’s a lot of religion, or at least people who are labelled by their faith. Jaz is Sikh and his wife, Lisa, is Jewish. One of the flashbacks, to 1778, concerns a Catholic missionary, Fray Francisco Garces, who (Kunzru tells us in his acknowledgements) really existed, although how 178

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relevant this is to the reader’s grasp of what’s going on is debatable. In another section, set in 1871, a Mormon miner has a vision near the Pinnacles. Native American death beliefs are studied by one character; there is also a sequence involving Laila, an Iraqi Muslim girl, who is staying in a fake Iraqi town that has been built, close to the Pinnacles, for US Army training.

To Jaz, on a good day religious belief was “something like smoking – a bad habit that society was gradually breaking”. On a bad day, “it seemed more a type of low-level mental illness”. What Kunzru wants us to believe is anyone’s guess: he’s only pointing out the crack in the world’s façade and what you glimpse behind it depends on your paranoia levels. Any clues scattered throughout the book – repeated names and places where stories apparently intersect – will be of zero help in arriving at a pat conclusion.

This is titillating until it becomes frustrating. (Don’t, for example, make the mistake of thinking that the reference to a missing-in-action bombardier, possibly called Mulligan, on page six has anything to do with other fleeting Mulligans later on – exhaustive flicking backwards and forwards through gritted teeth suggests it really is a random event.)

Occasionally, you sense that Kunzru is bored with some of his players.

Bachman is about as realistic as Dr No and Jaz is reduced to describing him as “a cartoon supervillain in his mountain hideaway”; a later character is “a cartoon soldier”. He is a very good storyteller though. His prose can be luminous – indeed, numinous – and his desert has its heart-stopping moments. When Jaz drives past women in sky-blue burqas it is “as if a shard of television had fallen into his eye”. You want to see what these people see, you want to travel with them a fairly long way on their baffling journeys.

Don’t expect any explanations, however – electro-magnetic or otherwise – by the end.

Gods Without Men is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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Cha Chan Teng, Sheung Wan (Upper Lascar Row), Hong Kong (2002) by Rick Martin, silver gelatin print, 9cm x 24cm

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The Neighbourhood Cha Chan Teng

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Poetry Reid Mitchell

Mouth Pursed for a Kiss Her hopes: turnip dumplings dropped in the greasy broth.

In her finest celadon bowl she has mixed ginger, soy, sesame, green onion, a sauce ageing like wine in oak – Start over.

A dumpling floats up.

She spears it and wonders if it will burn her mouth.

The dumpling turns cold.

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Jabberwock Sandwiches The fool left a fresh jabberwock, forest fallen, no pail to catch the blood?

Call your mothers. A mature cock will need a cask of wine, field of onions, bed of garlic for marinade. You don’t cook them overnight.

Tastes like chicken.

Bastard galumphed off with the head.

Wasted on his kind. Makes a fine cheese, with red and black pepper. Spread it on crackers baked from jabberwock bonemeal Pickle the feet to serve giants drinking beer.

Fry the liver with a smoky side of bacon.

Sternum for shelter, ribs for covered wagons.

Slice open the belly. Nine sisters we staked out will crawl forth. We’ll feast on leftovers in our generation.

The glad lads know nothing of village joys.

Fat marrow more filling than honour.

Wise Onion I have grown an onion as white as my face.

I tell the onion: until he is chopped,

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stirred, and fried, he lacks meaning.

He says: we onions have a different point of view.

He sweats milk.

I sweat salt.

He says: salmon climb waterfalls dogs hunt in packs sparrows eat bread in the street and men, their skins almost as brown as my skin, plant onions, solemnly, row on row.

You worship us in barbarous funeral rites, anoint us with oil, spices, wine, sacrifice calves and lobsters, burn our bodies in divine fire.

You need us to give your scant lives meaning.

I say: Truly, this is an onion as wise as a man.

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Review: Victoria Finlay

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  Catherine McKinley won a Fulbright scholarship to research indigo dyeing in Ghana. There was a slight hitch in the arrangement: Ghana was not best known for producing indigo, an honour that goes to Nigeria. But there was political turmoil in Nigeria and Ghana was peaceful, so the Fulbright board sent her there instead.

There is a Middle Eastern parable about the sufi mystic (and joker) Mullah Nasruddin that tells of how he lost a key inside his house, but hours later was found searching outside because of the better light there. There is an element of that in the first half of the book, spent in a small town in Ghana where there is clearly almost no indigo at all, just a few half-forgotten stories, plenty of synthetic dyes and a shopkeeper named Eurama, who teases McKinley and takes her on as an unpaid helper and later as a friend.

Yet this initial absence of indigo scarcely matters. For McKinley – 185

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daughter of a British-Russian-Jewish mother and an African-AmericanNative American father, adopted by Scottish-American naturalists and living as an adult in New York – this extended visit to Africa is not simply a quest for a dye pot or two; it is a search for something of herself.

This is a memoir that starts, as some of the best do, with a lover. He was a professor of post-colonial literature living in a bachelor’s house in upstate New York, the house bare but for books, a few items of furniture and some rare, beautiful indigo cloths from his hometown of Ibadan, Nigeria.

“The cloths were luminescent, ranging in intensity of colour from powder blue to blue-black. Watching them was like moving through layers of sky,” writes McKinley, wondering if it was the cloth that held her there long after she should have left.

If ultimately it was not enough to keep her it was enough to propel her on a long search – almost an obsession, a “kind of drunkenness” – for indigo. It was not just a dye, she understood from the beginning of her search. With its traditional importance in homes, trading systems, rituals and celebrations throughout Africa, indigo can be said to represent “texts, history and expressions of social identity”, she writes. It has been especially important for centuries for women, many of whom might not be articulate when writing or speaking, but who can express themselves in fabric.

Indigo, obtained from the tiny leaves of the plant indigofera tinctoria, has an extensive history. It was named after India, where its seeds can be traced back millennia. But it has been cultivated throughout sub-Saharan Africa since at least the eighth century, when its commercial value as an intense blue dye (and a base for black dyes) became recognised internationally. As well as being a colour for clothing it has also been used as an antiseptic, a contraceptive, a cure for syphilis, a mosquito repellent and a tattoo ink. In the past its roots were prized as a potent aphrodisiac.

When she eventually takes to the road in the second part of the book, McKinley’s pursuit of this colour leads her through West Africa to Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire (just as civil unrest is erupting in 2002), Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo and at last Nigeria.

She finds “witchcraft women” from the Volta who wear indigo cloth because they believe “the blue is what the gods demand” and discovers a host of other vigorous superstitions, including the belief that cloth is spirit, housing a person’s ghost.

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She witnesses funerals where indigo cloth could almost be said to have a role in binding pain and grief. She collects stories of smugglers, slaves (contemporary stories, these) and corporations. And she finds her true indigo vats at last, in Mali, where the dyer, ironically, learned his art from Japan.

“The vats are my children. I name each one, names from our spiritual tradition. You know, there truly is life inside indigo. You have to learn a respect for that life. It depends on faith,” he tells her.

McKinley even finds the home of her former lover’s aunt, who made the cloths that had bewitched her in New York so long before – although curiously she realises it was the right place only after she has left, when she is too far away to return and ask all the questions she has amassed.

In the initial months of enforced contemplation, discovering little about indigo, she develops some vivid insights into what she is actually looking for: “Colour can be a space,” she writes. Or, for African women, “cloth became a skin, not just a covering or an accessory”. Or – and this is a quotation from contemporary Algerian artist Rachid Koraichi – this rare, refulgent, and costly dye was used to express the “supraterrestrial … the path to the infinite”.

McKinley’s book has the charm, ear for dialogue and “Africa-ness” of a real No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. And at times her simple quest to locate this natural colourant (which to her was so elusive) becomes something more important: a mission to define what is ethereal, bright and humble and to glimpse for a moment what “matter”, in the physical sense, really means.

Reading it made me wish I’d looked for indigo in Africa too.

There are a couple of factual errors, however. McKinley calls an indigo revolt in India in 1859 Mahatma Gandhi’s “first civil action”. The peasantled riots in Bengal, ignited by appalling working conditions and punitive taxes visited on indigo cultivators by their colonial landowners, took place almost a decade before Gandhi’s birth.

Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience was indeed linked to indigo but was staged in 1917 in Northern Bihar, where thousands of tenant farmers and indentured labourers were forced to grow indigo and other cash crops instead of food.

I am not sure that the indigo riots of 1859 did bring a final end to mass cultivation, as the author claims. Although the uprisings did contribute to the beginning of a sense of the end of the British Empire in India, the fading 187

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of the natural indigo industry around the world was mostly the result of the invention of petrochemical dyes in England in 1856, which changed forever the international trade in pigments.

It is easy to forgive McKinley for the historical slips because she is so passionate about her subject. And for those who read Indigo as a hardback, rather than an e-book, oh what wonderful, storm-rich indigo endpapers the publisher has provided.

Indigo: In Search of the Colour that Seduced the World is published by Bloomsbury.

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M K  T  …

Party Like it’s 1966 Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Feast

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  dressed as Red Guards descend from the stage and salute Yan Song’an on his 67th birthday. To Yan’s four-year-old granddaughter the men and women appear to be in fancy dress. But to him they bring back surging memories. Burning candles from a cake briefly illuminate the table. The other hundred or so diners in the restaurant swivel to face them, clapping or pointing. And then the moment is over and they turn back to the evening show.

Yan’s daughter has brought him to The East is Red for a special family outing. The revolutionary-themed restaurant – one of a handful in Beijing cashing in on Mao Zedong’s status as national hero and founder of the People’s Republic – stands in a remote alley outside the Fifth Ring Road.

Yan has had a long drive to reach it: beyond the choked city centre with its teeming cars and thrusting skyscrapers, down a dusty, unlit road revealed by an occasional vehicle’s headlights. Here, in an unremarkable, squat grey building, is a Mao-mania orgy. I arrive from central Beijing on a weekday evening a few days before the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, on July 1. It is blistering outside: a hot, dry, Beijing night. Beyond the heat, there is a heady madness condensing in the air. The Party, eager to consolidate its rule by glorifying Mao, is promoting a Red resurgence. State newspapers are stepping up a propaganda campaign lionising the glorious Communist past; Red singing competitions are

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broadcast on Beijing subway television screens; and staff at The East is Red (the name directly translates from the Chinese as Red Classics Theme Restaurant) rehearse a special anniversary performance, for which they expect a full house of more than 600 customers eager to catch a dose of revolutionary fever.

Tonight, however, it is quiet. A friend and I walk up the concrete steps through a vast red star that frames the door, leading into the warehousesized restaurant. Inside, diners are greeted by statues of revolutionary heroes, murals of model workers brandishing Mao’s Little Red Book and slogans in colossal red characters. “Serve the People”, says one; “May Mao Zedong Thought Live Ten Thousand, One Hundred Million Years”, reads another.

We order a bubbling vat of spicy bean curd skin with slices of salty bacon. The restaurant serves, among other things, rustic cuisine from Mao’s home province Hunan, which is famed for its smoked pork and chillies. (“If you are scared of the chillies in your bowl,” Mao once declared, “how on Earth will you dare to fight your enemies?”) The food here, like the decor, is political: for only RMB20 diners can dig into a dish of corncobs and roasted sweet potatoes aptly named The Peasant Family is Happy.

A young waitress in a green Red Guard uniform, her hair braided with red ribbons, a Red Guard band on her left arm and a Mao badge pinned over her heart, smiles bashfully as she takes our order. The bean curd tastes like rubber and is saturated with oil and grease. But people do not come here for the food. They visit to watch the daily performances, a mixture of Cultural Revolution-era drama, song and dance. At intervals the waiting staff break into the Red Guard Dance; many of the older people jump up to join them, waving red flags and swaying with emotion. “Some even cry when they see the show,” our waitress confides.

“I experienced the whole Cultural Revolution from beginning to end,” says Yan, a retired mechanical engineer, as we talk at the end of the evening.

Yan was a college student when the Cultural Revolution kicked off in 1966; a chaotic decade of Red Guard mob rule followed, with systematic violence, hunger and hardship leading to the deaths of anywhere from 750,000 to 1.5 million people.

How times have changed. The East is Red, which opened in 2005, may hark back to an age of wretched poverty, but today only the burgeoning middle classes dine there. Yan’s table heaves with leftover food. His collapsed 190

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cake sits half eaten: the white icing looks plastic, the sponge pasteboard.

Eyeing me up and down, Yan’s daughter, a wealthy white-collar worker, shovels the cake remains back into their box to take home. Despite escalating wealth in the capital, censorship and government crackdowns on dissidents and artists still create an atmosphere of caution.

“My daughter wants to make me happy on my birthday, coming here, to satisfy my preoccupation for the past,” he adds, gesturing towards her. She leans over and whispers, “Careful what you say, you are a Party member, remember?” He waves off her concerns. “Now it has changed, after Deng Xiaoping’s path, the ‘Opening and Reform’. Now we have walked onto the road where ‘all the people get wealthy’. The country is getting stronger and people richer.”

He looks around to check on his granddaughter, a pretty, precocious child in pigtails, who is taunting off-duty performers dressed in blue dungarees and clambering around a fake red tractor that has “crashed” through a wall.

“This place helps us to relive the scenes of the Cultural Revolution.” He smiles. “Thirty-five years have passed. The page of history has been flipped over.”

Like Yan, Huo Jinglin, 68, a buxom and motherly retired teacher, has travelled to The East is Red to reminisce about her youth. She has brought her husband, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. The restaurant, Huo believes, reveals China’s resurgent greatness after a century of humiliation.

“Yes, we brought the whole family to show them how good China has become,” admits Huo with a worldly nod. I am curious about her thoughts on the past she is now celebrating. For some the revived interest in Red culture is a necessary tool to turn a brash, Western-facing Chinese youth, more interested in the latest mobile phones and Apple Macs than Mao, eastwards; for others it is a dark and dangerous throwback to a cruel moment in Chinese history.

Huo turns serious. Her hen-pecked husband stares glumly from his chair. “At that time [of the Great Famine] we didn’t have enough to eat. We will never forget the difficulties in the past. We want to educate the next generation to treasure the good life we have today, not to waste,” she says.

“Back then, we didn’t feel it was hard or tiring. On the contrary, we loved the Party. Now some people who enjoy nice food and clothes are still unsatisfied. I think it is these people who don’t know about history. There 191

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are a lot of young people, young cadres, even some corruptionists, who stir up some unhealthy tendencies. I think they will get educated if they come here.”

And Mao? “We should pay attention to Chairman Mao’s major feats.

But the Cultural Revolution was the biggest mistake he ever made.” Huo stops. “We should judge him 70-30,” she adds resolutely, referring to the conventional Party wisdom that Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.

The Great Helmsman still looms large in Beijing. During the summer Tiananmen Square swarms with domestic Chinese tourists – and Mao continues to stare out at them from his gargantuan portrait hanging over Tiananmen Gate.

Thousands of visitors queue daily for a glimpse of Mao’s embalmed corpse. I am astonished at the reverence still reserved for the Great Leader.

“Hats off!” “Umbrellas down!” “No bags allowed!” bark the guards as our line shuffles past in single file. Despite these orders and the guards’ presence, excited chatter punctuates the air.

As we enter the severe, Soviet-style mausoleum, there is eerie silence.

Young and old clutch bunches of yellow flowers and bow to a towering statue of the Chairman. We are herded into the next room where his body lies and, in a heartbeat, back out again, into the hazy air. Directly outside touts peddle Mao portraits, flashing cigarette lighters and cheap necklaces bearing his face engraved on heart pendants. People shove and shift, jostling for a tacky souvenir. Mao is now a brand, his image a reminder of the New China, the soaring ironic success of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Down a Beijing hutong threatened, like most, by the city’s incessant development, lies another restaurant milking Mao. The Red Capital Club is a Qing Dynasty siheyuan, or courtyard house, restored in the late 1990s to its erstwhile glory by craftsmen from the Forbidden City and painters from the Summer Palace.

The club is dedicated to China’s “burgeoning ‘red capitalists’”, according to the website, and foreign tourists with dollars to spend. Here, the values of revolution celebrated in the 1950s decor are supplemented by cocktails and cigars. It is appropriate, however, that so-called Zhongnanhai state-banquet cuisine, referring to Beijing’s closed compound where Mao and his comrades retreated to plan China’s future, is served.

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Parked outside in the dirty grey alley, where residents shuffle from their homes to the public toilets in pyjamas, or chat on makeshift stools while chewing fatty lamb kebabs known as chuanr, is a handsome Hong Qi, or Red Flag, limousine originally used by Madam Mao and today occasionally fired up for tourist trips around the city. (A second limousine, formerly at the disposal of Mao’s entourage, is provided for guests to lounge in: there, they sip champagne while being blasted with recordings of the Chairman’s speeches). In a neighbouring hutong at the Red Capital Residence, the hotel arm of the business, weighty crimson curtains, which once hung in Mao’s private lodgings, adorn the hotel bar’s windows.

Each dish at the Red Capital Club is served with a story. As well as the Chairman’s Request (tart slices of cold bitter melon) and the Chairman’s Bean-curd Wrap there is the ubiquitous Chairman’s Favourite of hong shao rou or red roasted pork, succulent chunks of soft belly meat simmered with sugar, Shaoxing wine, chillies, anise and ginger. It is a dish served in Shaoshan, Mao’s hometown, in the south-central province of Hunan, which has profited from a surge in Red tourism following a 2005 government drive to generate domestic interest in China’s former “revolutionary” towns. Its restaurants serve the hot, heavy and pungent fare Mao reportedly relished.

The club menu claims that the Great Leader “preferred to eat [hong shao rou] late at night as brain food when writing his many thoughts”; fittingly, an ornate taro carving of his head adorns the dish. Anything, it seems, can be done with Mao. “State banquets tend to be based on Huaiyang cooking, which is delicate and acceptable to most people, so it is seen as being perfect for diplomacy,” says fellow Asia Literary Review contributor Fuchsia Dunlop, author of the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. To conduct research, Dunlop spent time with chef Shi Yinxiang, who cooked for Mao when he visited Hunan. “But Mao loved rustic things like little fire-baked fish with black beans, chilli, corncobs and sweet potatoes, the ‘coarse grains’ regarded as peasant food,” she adds. “He seems to have had an antipathy towards the refinements of Chinese haute cuisine; he loved rough and ready, hearty cooking. His dietary preferences are interesting in light of the attack on elite culture during the Cultural Revolution.”

Today, the circle has turned fully: many Beijing restaurants now offer peasant food, polished and re-dished for the urban palate. The Red Capital 193

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Club serves a Long March Wild Tonic Soup, a dish whose genesis is described on the menu. Mao, it is said, craved his wife’s comforting broth during the arduous journey, from which only 10 per cent of the force that set out returned. Because it was impossible to garner the ingredients, Mao’s cooks foraged for wild mushrooms and uncultivated vegetables. They created a soup so delicious that Mao announced it had to be named after the Long March.

“What you find in these revolutionary-type restaurants is a nostalgia for wild vegetables, wild herbs and things once regarded as poverty foods,” explains Dunlop. “Rice with sweet potatoes in it, corn on the cob – these were eaten only by those who couldn’t afford enough rice. I have stayed in remote Hunan villages where people think it’s hilarious that city dwellers will pay handsomely for wild vegetables, the kind of things they feed to their livestock and eat themselves out of desperation only.”

Beijing’s sophisticated culinary scene rivals that of other international cities and today draws on a number of sources from across the country to create a diverse food culture. In London, foraged foods are now fashionable in high-end eateries such as the famed St. John Bar and Restaurant in Smithfield, which specialises in serving cheap cuts such as pig’s cheek and chitterlings. But in China, restaurants drumming up a “Maoist” experience, combined with unusual food types, offer not just a slick marketing gimmick or peculiar, rediscovered rural ingredients, but an opportunity for the shrewd, urban Chinese to connect with their countryside roots and what they imagine is a purer Communist past.

Famine I meet Frank Dikötter, author of Mao’s Great Famine, in Wangfujing, a soulless, pedestrianised shopping street in Beijing popular with domestic tourists. We slide behind a back table in a drab French restaurant that sits in a mediocre hotel, part of an international chain. Pop music seeps softly from the speakers; one other diner perches alone, picking at a salad.

Mao’s Great Famine, winner of this year’s BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, states that up to 45 million people died during the 1958-62 Great Famine (previous estimates stopped at 30 million). Six to eight per cent of the victims were buried alive, tortured or beaten to death, writes

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Dikötter. As Mao attempted to overtake the world’s industrialised nations in the disastrous Great Leap Forward, officials pursued bloated grainproduction targets by browbeating farmers. In an atmosphere of heightened violence, death could be doled out for stealing a potato, millions of people were sent to labour and re-education camps and the man who wielded the canteen ladle in compulsory communes controlled who starved and who did not. To survive, people resorted to cannibalism or devoured tree bark or mud. And Mao – a crazed dictator who once claimed, “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill” – confiscated grain from farmers to give to Beijing’s allies rather than his own starving people.

“It should be called genocide,” Dikötter says in his clipped Dutch accent, swilling a large glass of red wine. “You think Pol Pot, you think of genocide.

You multiply by 20 and you have close to what happened in this country. It wasn’t just people starving to death of hunger, blandly. No. I was looking at how people survived hunger. I discovered people had to survive violence and not just lack of food, but food being used as a weapon to punish people: the sick being banned from the canteen, the weak being banned, the old being banned. There is something monstrous about that scale of mass murder.”

It is a grim conversation. We both stare out of the window at the moneyed world just beyond us, home to big brands and colossal shopping malls. China’s hunger for luxury, for material goods, I venture, must partly be a reaction to this desperate deprivation in the country’s dark history.

“Oh, definitely,” agrees Dikötter. “Just hunger. Hunger to succeed. To succeed at all costs. Those were the killing fields for the farmers, but the learning fields for the Party: they learned how to bend a rule, how to doctor statistics, how to be corrupt without attracting attention, how to curry favour.” He spits out the words. “How to make your way up the greasy ladder of the Party hierarchy.”

Fat China’s hunger for success has resulted in expanding waistlines and bank accounts. Food waste at banquets, with officials flaunting their power and wealth by walking away at the end of a meal, leaving food on the table, is flagrant. From famine to excess, it is predicted that an estimated 200

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million Chinese will be obese by 2015, most members of the growing urban middle classes.

A few years ago I attended a casual meal for about 10 people hosted by a minor official visiting Beijing from another province. The restaurant, in the embassy neighbourhood, is elegant and serves gourmet European cuisine at New York prices. Starters were ordered to share; expensive French red and white wines were liberally poured to complement the steak tartare and tuna carpaccio.

As a discreet waiter set down my second course of rare rump of beef, I was surprised to see yet another set of main courses lining the middle of the table: our host had demanded double the dishes needed. The food congealed, barely picked at, but nevertheless, unable to resist, I mopped up some juices with a wedge of focaccia. My Chinese friend who had taken me along reddened. He leaned over and whispered loudly: “You look like a peasant!”

I wonder if Yan, decades after the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, would have agreed.

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Contributors

Anne Abad is a graduate of Ateneo de Manila University. Her work has appeared in the Philippines Free Press, Damazine, Expanded Horizons, the Philippines Graphic magazine and Singapore’s Quarterly Literary Review. She will also feature in the forthcoming Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry.

British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the author of numerous acclaimed volumes of non-fiction, including Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food; 1492: The Year Our World Began; Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed; and Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. He is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at Notre Dame University, Indiana.

John Batten is a curator, writer and critic on art, culture and urban planning and a former art gallery owner. Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. He is an organiser of the annual charity event Hong Kong ArtWalk and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian art magazine Broadsheet.

He is Art Editor of the Asia Literary Review.

Ha Kiet Chau, from Sacramento, California, is a writer of poetry and short stories who has been published in Asia and the United States. She is a graduate student at San Francisco State University, studying creative writing with an emphasis on poetry. She was nominated for the Best New Poets anthology of 2011 and is now working on a collection of verse. Ha Kiet teaches art and literature in Oakland.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf and the editor of the anthology India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. He lives in Mumbai.

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Contributors

Bernard Cohen is the author of four novels and a children’s picture book. He has won numerous awards, including the 1996 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for The Blindman’s Hat. In 2006 he founded The Writing Workshop, which runs face-to-face and online writing courses for children. Since establishing the workshop he has taught creative writing to more than 12,000 young people from five to 18.

Lizzie Collingham is the author of The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food and Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors.

Having taught history at Warwick University she became a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is now an independent scholar and writer.

Fuchsia Dunlop, from Oxford, is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She trained as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and is the author of three books, including the award winners Sichuan Cookery and Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She has also written for publications including the Financial Times, The New Yorker, Gourmet and Saveur.

Victoria Finlay is the author of Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox and Jewels: A Secret History. She studied Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews before working at Reuters for three years. She then spent 12 years at newspapers in Hong Kong – five as Arts Editor of the South China Morning Post – where she also co-presented the weekly literary radio programme The Listening Ear. She returned to Britain in 2003.

Paul Fonoroff, from Cleveland, began studying Mandarin at school. After his master’s degree in cinema studies he researched Chinese cinema at Beijing University. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1983 and been a South China Morning Post film critic for 23 years. He has appeared in more than 1,000 television programmes and played cameo roles in 20 movies.

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Contributors

Chrissie Gittins’ prize-winning poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, for which she also writes plays. Her poetry collections are Armature and I’ ll Dress One Night as You. Her short-story collection is titled Family Connections. All three of her children’s poetry collections were Poetry Book Society Choices for the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf. Originally from Lancashire, she now lives in London.

Jennifer 8. Lee is a journalist and the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. She was one of the youngest reporters employed by The New York Times, where she spent nine years. She is on the boards of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Center for Public Integrity. Jennifer graduated from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and Economics and studied international relations at Beijing University.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection, Crossing the Peninsula, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published six other volumes of poetry, three books of short stories, two novels, a collected edition of her fiction and poetry and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, which won an American Book Award. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shirley hails from Malacca.

Photographer Rick Martin is based in Adelaide. His exhibitions have included Golden Palace at Tadu Contemporary Art Gallery, Bangkok; Helpers at the Ayala Museum, Manila; and Breathtaking: A Passage on the Titanic at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. He has been artist in residence at studios around the world. The Cha Chan Teng series evolved from 2000 to 2002 at restaurants throughout Hong Kong.

Fionnuala McHugh was born in England, lived in Northern Ireland for 10 years, began travelling to Asia as a journalist in 1986 and has been based in Hong Kong since 1993. Her work appears in many publications and will also feature in Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper, a Daily Telegraph-commissioned anthology of railway travel for which she ventured from Hong Kong to Lhasa.

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Martin Merz was raised in Australia, studying Chinese Language and Literature at Melbourne University before heading to Asia.

After two decades in China trade he earned an MA in Applied Translation from Hong Kong’s Open University. He has translated folk tale Mulian Rescues His Mother and co-translated, with Jane Weizhen Pan, Wang Gang’s novel English, Li Yu’s opera Ordained

by Heaven and Li Er’s short-story collection The Magician of 1919.

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Reid Mitchell, from New Orleans, has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China. A historian and fiction writer, he has taught at Jiangnan University in Wuxi. His poetry has been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry Macao, Softblow and elsewhere.

Sarah Murray is the author of Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre, How We Dignify the Dead and Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat. She is an established Financial Times contributor. Born in Dorset, Britain, she lives in New York City.

Chandran Nair is the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent social-venture think tank dedicated to increasing awareness of the impact of globalisation. He is the Chairman of Avantage Ventures, an advisory company in the field of social investing. He is also the author of Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet.

J.P. O’Malley, from Dublin, works as a freelance arts journalist in London. He has written for The Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Economist, the Irish Examiner, Sunday Business Post, Verbal Arts Magazine, thequietus.com, culturenorthernireland.org and The Big Issue, among other publications.

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Francois May

Contributors

Laksmi Pamuntjak was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Anagram and Ellipsis; a treatise on violence; the award-winning The Jakarta Good Food Guide series; a collection of short stories titled The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art; and two translations of the works of leading Indonesian poet Goenawan Mohamad, Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things.

Shanti Matulewski

Jane Weizhen Pan, a native speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, holds an MA in translation studies from Monash University and taught translation at RMIT University. She co-translated Wang Gang’s novel English, Li Er’s short-story collection The Magician of 1919 and the Li Yu opera Ordained by Heaven with Martin Merz and is working on Cantonese and Mandarin translations of a puppet-show script of Alice in Wonderland.

Singapore-born American novelist Wena Poon is the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes, Alex y Robert and The Biophilia Omnibus. Her work has been serialised by BBC Radio, performed in a Roman amphitheatre in France and is to be staged by London’s Bush Theatre. She won the 2010 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Singapore Literature Prize.

Hao Qun, from northeast China, studied law before working as a cosmetics company human resources manager. Murong Xuecun was Hao’s pseudonym on the publicly accessible company blog followed by millions of readers. His novel Leave Me Alone: Chengdu was nominated for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.

The Missing Ingredient won the 2010 People’s Literature Prize for exposing pyramid schemes.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, from London, is an Associate Editor and the Books Editor with Time Out Beijing. She has lived in China since 2009, during which time her numerous interviewees have included literary figures from Amitav Ghosh to Yan Lianke. She has written for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman, Prospect and the South China Morning Post.

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Erin Swan is a writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has been published in The Quarterlife Quarterly, The Cuirt Journal and Black Lantern Publishing. The author of nine non-fiction children’s books, she has worked in publishing, taught English in South and Southeast Asia and is now teaching literature and writing in a New York City public high school.

Clarence Tsui is the film editor of the South China Morning Post and a part-time instructor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Journalism and Communication.

Michael Carlo C. Villas teaches language, literature and communication at Leyte Normal University in the Philippines. He is a former fellow of the Visayas Writers’ Workshop, which was then directed by one of the Philippines’ most respected poets, Merlie M. Alunan. Michael’s poetry has appeared in Corpus and the Philippines Free Press and is forthcoming in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry. He is also a literary critic.

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Fiction | Non-Fiction | Opinion | Memoir | Travel | Reviews | Photography | Poetry Food, sometimes less-than-glorious food . . . including: FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO – calibrating history with a measuring spoon MURONG XUECUN – blood, brains and the soup of human kindness CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY – not enough cooks . . .

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