Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  Zhang looked at me appreciatively, confusing my intense gaze for intellectual curiosity in his culinary lecture. (I was actually studying how Zhang gripped his chopsticks to support the dumpling without breaking the thin skin. A sad puddle of precious meat broth had pooled in my vinegar dish.) Zhang Wei reinforced his spiritual observation, by noting, “Back when you were worshiping Zeus and Thor and whatever, we Chinese had food.”

  In China food is the first luxury, the Ur-indulgence, and the core of the Chinese pleasure center. All other sources of fun are derivative.

  “Food is the god of the people” comes from History of the Former Han Dynasty, finished in the second century AD.1 The line was meant to be more Machiavellian than culinary, a comment on the importance of keeping the populace well fed to ensure stability.

  Today, food remains the god of the people to at least some degree. On Friday mornings when I would bike to the local wet market, a large collection of stalls that sell fresh meat and produce, I could usually guess the price for half a kilogram of pork (the usual unit of measure in Chinese markets—it’s just over a pound) from the expressions of my neighbors as they walked or stormed into the morning light. “The Pork Index,” as it is sometimes called, is known as one of the best indicators of happiness in China. It is often used as a stand-in for the Consumer Price Index, as China consumes half of all the pigs in the world. Sixty percent of all the meat consumed in China is pork. (Poultry is second at less than 20 percent.) China’s taste for pork has changed its agrarian culture. Since the early 1990s corn production has jumped nearly 125 percent, while rice has increased only 7 percent, according to the World Bank. The spike in corn production is not to feed the people but to feed all of the nation’s pigs.2

  However, the question has since gained a psalm-like status for Chinese foodie academics, serving as historic justification for China’s intensive pancultural commitment to eating.

  Zhang Wei lifted the soup dumpling to his mouth and bit a tiny hole in the noodle, like a vampire bat making its small incision in a victim. With a flourish he added, “And, ‘food is the god of the people’ is written on all the hearts of the Chinese people!” He then placed the dumpling to his lips, tilted his head back like he was taking a shot, slurped the broth from inside, and relished its flavor before fitting the dumpling into his mouth and scouting the next one.

  * * *

  Food is the most basic organizing principle of Chinese culture. Wang Xue Tai, author of the bestseller The Chinese World of Food (2012) and Chinese Culinary Culture (2006), writes, “From a multitude of perspectives, the very soul of Chinese culture is linked to food in a thousand and one different ways.”3 Chinese academics consider the lofty centrality of food to every aspect of Chinese culture a social fact. “If you don’t understand Chinese food,” a philosophy professor from Sichuan University once lectured me as he brandished a well-marbled morsel of pork between his chopsticks, “you don’t understand China.”

  Every culture must ask itself, “What tempts humanity?” The West has the concept of the seven deadly sins, temptations or pitfalls that also tacitly acknowledge how humans are likely to stray.

  China’s temptations are fewer: food and sex. When discussing human nature, Chinese scholarship often reflects on one quote from The Works of Mencius: “Eating food and having sex is the nature of human beings.”4* They are not within human nature; they are human nature itself.

  Within popular Chinese philosophy is a group of scholars who say the fundamental difference between China and the West is merely the difference between food and sex—the West is driven by the desire for sex, whereas China is driven by food. Wang Xue Tai, who also wrote extensively about Chinese humor, explains, “The West is characterized by male-female lust and passion … Here in China, we have food.”5 In Culinary Principles, the Taiwanese professor Zhang Qi Jun explains how comparing the Confucian Classic of Ritual with Western religious and philosophical texts makes clear that people in the West are driven by a desire for sex. Zhang points to original sin as the benchmark. In an interview recording played for me while I was in Taiwan, Zhang explains: In the story of Adam and Eve, the apple is a metaphor for the temptations of the flesh. In the Chinese version, it wouldn’t be symbolic—just food. They’d eat the apple, then eat the snake, too.

  As a nation, China thinks and feels with its stomach. To strain or toil at a task is to “eat strength” (“chī lī”). To be well received in business or by society, you “eat fragrant” (“chī xiāng”), or good-smelling, food. For instance, “People of real learning and strong education eat fragrant wherever they go.” Chinese who had converted to Christianity, beginning in the European Age of Exploration from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, are said to have “eaten foreign teachings” (“chī yáng jiào”). When my friend Xiao Huai tried to hit on a young woman and got shot down, he was made fun of for “eating closed door soup” (“chī bì mén gēng”). When Chinese media admonish the younger generation for being too soft, they call them the Strawberry Generation (“cǎoméi zú”). The critics say that, compared with the older generations, which are hardened by years of “eating bitter,” the young generation can handle only “the sweet tang of privileged fruit.”

  China’s young people have inherited China’s millennia-long deep appreciation of food. Now that the young generation has a bit of disposable income, food is an intuitive outlet for their expanding desires. While China is quickly becoming a more sexual nation, it already is a well-developed gastronome.

  So it should come as no surprise that China is the ultimate food-porn nation. A Bite of China, a documentary TV series about food that is most aptly described as the Planet Earth of Chinese food, earned thirty million views on Youku Tudou, China’s biggest video site, for the first episode alone. The second season has been streamed more than two hundred million times. And that is discounting those who watched when it aired live. Two hundred million views for a program that takes ultrahigh-definition shots of Chinese people harvesting and preparing food. With the ultratight closeups of glistening sauces and gurgling soups, it is difficult to deny that China has eroticized its food better than anywhere else in the world.

  My Chinese uncle* would tell me, “Eating for us Chinese is the closest we get to religious congregation. It is the most sacred part of the day,” as he heaped more wok-fried Fujianese-style bamboo shoots onto my plate.

  Like the Indian parable of the many blind men, each of whom touches only one part of an elephant, such as a tusk or a haunch, and then describes the elephant as something entirely different, I was often left confused by the multitude of meanings in a Chinese meal. Over the years I had learned food could be a tonic, a binding agent, a family therapy session, a warm embrace, an olive branch, or a battlefield.

  Even when I was unable to grasp a meal’s implication, I always felt the weight of its importance. Slowly I learned to eat a second bowl of rice at my friend’s house to show his mother I liked the food, but I also learned not to ask for rice in the early stages of fancier dinners because doing so meant I wanted to fill up and get the meal over with. When a host poured the tea, I learned that tapping with two fingers on the table shows appreciation and never to tap with two knuckles, which is considered grossly overly courteous. I also learned that people in certain provinces, such as Fujian, care far more about tea etiquette than people in other provinces. I learned that a friend who messed up and then invited me to my favorite grilled fish restaurant intended it as an apology, even though he never apologized. Also, offering to split the bill is often an insult, a signal that you don’t want to owe the other person anything and you don’t want them to owe you. Real friends are bound by owing and being owed favors small and large, the exchange of 人情, rénqǐng, “actions done for friends,” the give-take currency of China’s economy of relationships. These small friend debts are essential—they are a commitment to see the person another time to return the favor. I learned that saying thank you is unnecessarily formal; a real fri
end does not need to be thanked. Most important, I learned that sharing everything is the magic in a meal, that the invitation to eat together can turn a hostel room full of strangers into compatriots, and that even—or perhaps especially—in a generation of single children, community is an ideal to be protected and pursued.

  Oddly, China’s reputation abroad can run contrary to its true foodie nature. Chinese are notorious within the travel adviser and hotelier community for not eating local food when they are on the road. It became so bad for their public image as travelers that President Xi Jinping chastised his people in a speech he gave in Singapore in which (in part as a sign of goodwill to Singapore and their increasingly China dependent economy) he instructed the Chinese to “eat less instant noodles and more fresh seafood” while traveling, a reprimand you wouldn’t expect would be necessary for a nation of gourmands. Real foodies travel with their stomachs leading the way.

  The problem with foreign food for many of my Chinese friends is almost always the same—it is too not Chinese. Although young people were being exposed to more food from the outside world, European foods were still not part of their weekly diet. When this generation of Chinese were young, their parents did not stop at the Indian restaurant for lunch or order in Italian on Sundays. They ate Chinese food, most often the food from their own province. In middle-class and wealthier circles, Western food was a trendy luxury and a novelty. The most popular foreign foods continued to originate in Asia—Japanese sushi and Korean barbecue. Although they are tossed together as Asian fusion abroad, they were still foreign to the Chinese palate.

  Zhang Wei, the expert dumpling eater and peddler of food philosophy, had been away studying in France, and when we caught up with each other on his return, the first thing I asked was how he enjoyed the famous French cuisine.

  We sat at our favorite lunch counter, as he prepared to slurp down some soup, meticulously measuring how much vinegar to drop in beforehand.

  “How was the food in France?” I asked him.

  “It was so-so,” he replied courteously. By so-so he meant no good.

  “French food is so-so,” I muttered in disbelief. “What didn’t you like about it?”

  He put down his spoon and thought before replying, “Everything was too … hard.” He considered the question for another few seconds, eyes wandering toward the kitchen behind us before nodding, confirming his answer.

  My puzzled follow-ups yielded no other information; the food was just too hard. It had never occurred to me before, but most Chinese food is soft. Meats are cut in thin, chewable strips; there are no hard rolls; and rice and noodles don’t require much chewing.

  Foreigners eating Chinese food find that texture is the number one problem. Flavor is never the issue. Sautéed tofu tastes great but oozes in the mouth. For foreigners visiting China the number one problem is that the food is too soft.

  So instead of enjoying what many believe to be the finest food destination in the world, my foodie friend Zhang Wei ate instant noodles while in France. Toward the end of his tour of France, he got really desperate and ate local Chinese food that had been adapted for the French palate. “How can a man who has never been to Sichuan Province cook Sichuanese food?” Zhang Wei complained. The vast majority of early emigrants from China to the West came from the southeastern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, which boasted major ports. Most French Chinese chefs come from these two provinces. The same is true in the States. So when they are cooking spicy Sichuanese food, or, as it is often romanized, Szechuanese food, they actually have never eaten the real thing themselves.

  As a Westerner, I thought at first that my Chinese friends lacked interest in foreign food perhaps because they just didn’t like it. But in time I saw that the Chinese image of foreign food is that it is fatally flawed—it is simply too not Chinese.

  * * *

  It sounds simple, but leisure is one of the defining differences between the post-90s generation and their parents. They have it; their parents did not. What we’re witnessing now is a generation that is moving away from bitterness and learning how to play.

  In making a list of all the things young Chinese people like to do, I couldn’t help but feel like I was putting together a Tinder profile or, in the case of China, a Momo or Tantan profile, for an entire generation.

  Hi, I’m 22, single, like eating out with friends, karaoke on the weekend, shopping online, badminton with friends and love, love, love to travel!

  Rob Gordon, one of American millennials’ favorite soliloquizing lonely guys from the movie High Fidelity, says, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films—these things matter. Call me shallow, but it’s the fuckin’ truth.” By the Rob Gordon metric, Chinese young people’s passions, hobbies, interests—how they like to play—reveal something essential about who they are. How does a generation of single children growing up in China’s pressure cooker educational system cut loose? How do young adults living in multigenerational households or in dorms with four roommates create their own space? How do a brutal housing market, low starting wages, and fierce competition for jobs change the way people spend money? How do young people brought up by a generation defined by “eating bitter” search out life’s sweetness?

  Fei Fei, a twenty-two-year-old from Chengdu, explained to me over dinner that the biggest difference between her generation and her parents’ generation is that “we have different Needs,” with a capital N. We were with several of her friends in a fish restaurant in the club district of Chengdu. Fei Fei gestured across the room to the server wheeling our cart of food through the crowd, her frame and the cart silhouetted against the sleek black walls alive with swirls and slashes of multicolored graffiti. “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs talks about filling your stomach and keeping warm before being able to think about other needs,” she noted.

  China’s young generations have become enthusiastic amateur psychologists in an increasingly introspective China. Much of psychology is intuitive for Chinese; for those who have had to maneuver the complex web of guanxi, their network of relationships with government officials and business people, understanding concepts like emotional intelligence is second nature. In an English-language discussion class I taught to thirty-five people at my night school in Suzhou, no one needed an explanation of EQ alongside IQ. It is a cultural imperative.

  Similarly, Chinese young people have tried to understand why they want different things than their parents, an imperative that springs from the cultural mandate to honor their parents. Wanting something different feels like they are being disrespectful, so many have turned to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for an explanation. According to Maslow, humans must satisfy their need for food, water, and shelter before they are motivated to fulfill their need for belongingness, esteem, and, eventually, self-actualization.

  “It makes sense,” Fei Fei continued. “Our grandparents and parents were brought up when China was poor. My grandparents were obsessed with food, finding enough and having enough to be able to survive.” A lock of hair worked free of Fei Fei’s beanie. A heavily ringed hand—rock star chic—brushed it back. Music pulsed in the restaurant. It was 9:00 p.m. The wait for a table was still an hour. “We’re not interested in basic needs—food, water, shelter, right? At what point can we enjoy our lives now? We’re only young once.”

  Amid the pressure and uncertainty of modern China, Fei Fei’s generation is absolutely determined to enjoy themselves. Whereas delayed gratification, the ability to eat bitter, once was the hallmark of Chinese students and workers, an attitude of 活在当下, húo zài dāng xìa, “be here now”—that is, live in the moment—has moved in. China still values the ability to eat bitter. But this young generation insists on enjoying the sweetness of youth while they can. Their parents, for their part, are encouraging their children to enjoy life more as they go, to live a better life and enjoy childhood more than they did when they were young.

  Fei Fei raised her glass of dark
beer. “Today we have booze, so today we are drunk!”*

  Her toast is a line by an unknown Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty (619–907 AD). It is perhaps the classiest way of declaring the millennial battle cry familiar in the West, the generation’s justification for living in the moment: YOLO, You Only Live Once.

  We all clinked glasses, tucked into the fish we had ordered, and, true to our word, proceeded to get drunk.

  * * *

  Community has become a priority in impersonal urban China, so, bolstered by increasingly steady jobs, hobbies have taken a central role in city life.

  My Chinese uncle often pointed out that the defining characteristic of a Chinese meal is that you can’t eat one alone. Sure, some fried rice and noodle dishes are meant to be solo affairs, but a real Chinese meal needs to be enjoyed with a community. Young China, which could have been known as “the lonely generation” because of the one-child policy, has a driving hunger for connectedness.

  Chengdu is brimming with clubs and societies. Every hobby has a citywide group formed around it. These clubs organize on WeChat or even Momo. They have shirts that feature their club logo. They get together and take selfies with the shirts on. They make banners. They get together and take selfies under the banners. Gather, grin, repeat.

  Chinese post-90s also seek a sense of individual identity. China’s rapid urbanization has spawned more than one hundred cities with populations of at least one million people. For a generation that mostly populates crowded urban spaces, finding a sense of self can be challenging. It is hard to feel like an individual during your morning commute in a packed Chinese subway car. The types of communities they choose to be a part of help define who they are as they navigate a foreign city, often far from their hometown.