Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

by Matt McAllester

  The dog meal was one stop in a two-year journey through the byways of Chinese cuisine that began in Beijing in the autumn of 1973. It had started inauspiciously.

  The first meal I ate in the People’s Republic was served in the cavernous dining hall of the Beijing Languages Institute, at that time the only institute of tertiary education allowed to admit foreigners. China was closed, remote, and suspicious of Western visitors. It was a country full of secrets. A quarrel with Moscow had closed Soviet airspace to flights heading for Beijing, so travelers from Europe were obliged to take the long route across the Middle East to Pakistan before heading north across the Himalaya. It took nineteen hours to reach Beijing.

  Ours was the only international flight to land that evening at Beijing’s airport, and we were greeted by a British diplomat, several uniformed border guards, and a Chinese doctor in an oversize white coat who personified the government’s view that foreigners brought dangerous contagion into the motherland. He offered a physical examination and threatened several injections. Behind the doctor, other servants of the Chinese revolution waited, alert to the dangers of infection from the cultural and political pathogens carried by the arriving foreigners.

  A long bus ride through deserted city streets brought us to the institute’s campus in northwestern Beijing. A giant statue of Chairman Mao dominated the front gate, gazing out across the quiet suburban street to the gates of the college opposite. The campus, like the rest of Beijing, seemed eerily quiet.

  The officials who received us had given some thought to what these exotic new additions to the student body would eat. The meal, which appeared through a narrow hatch and was eaten in one corner of the chilly canteen, consisted of a gray fried egg, three slices of strangely sweet white bread, and a tall glass of sugared, milky tea. It represented the school authorities’ idea of the debased culinary taste of the West, and no matter how disgusting they found it, they were unshakable in their conviction that we would prefer it to any local offering. Since Chinese could not be expected to eat unfamiliar food, they reasoned, foreigners must feel the same profound, if misguided, attachment to their own cuisine. In eating habits, as with other arrangements in Mao’s China, apartheid was the rule.

  Those were austere times. Beijing was dimly lit and subdued, the capital of a nation turned in on itself, its people wary that the wrong word or gesture could trigger devastating political consequences. They rose early and vanished from the streets as dusk fell, as though the rhythms of peasant life had infected the capital. They mimed their participation in the daily rituals of political campaigns; they seemed passive and drained of energy. Their curiosity about us, these aliens who had appeared in their midst, was expressed in mute staring. They would tug at their children’s hands as we passed. If we stopped, they would encircle us, bemused by our odd clothes, the outlandish color of our hair, our large noses, our enviable leather shoes. If we tried to talk to them, they would stare us down or shuffle away.

  The wide city streets were empty of cars except for the occasional official vehicle, its windows curtained to screen the occupants from the street. Freezing winds blew in from the Gobi Desert, carrying a stinging load of dust that sandblasted our faces and seeped through the badly fitted windows of the dormitory. We joined the monochrome drifts of cyclists pedaling slowly along the flat boulevards, skirting occasional camels and frequent mule carts, their drivers dozing on top of tottering loads. The streetlights were dim and the entire town was shuttered by 9:00 P.M. There were no bars or cafés, no nightclubs or discotheques. Cultural life was limited to the handful of films and revolutionary operas deemed politically pure.

  For the visitor, Beijing was a closed city in which every foreigner who was not Albanian was a potential spy. There was no telephone directory and no guide to the city’s many cultural landmarks. A few tourist attractions were open, but most of Beijing’s temples had been destroyed, boarded up, or converted to other uses at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, six years before. Precious statues had been smashed and rare books and paintings burned in an orgy of rage against the past. The great city walls had been pulled down to create a ring road on which few cars ever traveled. Exploration of the city was discouraged. Foreigners would be told what they needed to know; everything else—including news from outside China—was considered a secret not to be shared.

  We were surrounded by people in the world’s most populous country, but a wall of politics separated us from them. The Chinese students were polite, but conversation was limited to a nervous exchange of banalities. Only a few years earlier, any contact with foreigners had been enough to bring down the fury of the Red Guards and charges of treason. Nobody had forgotten the risks, and we were marooned in a virtual isolation ward of political disapproval. Those around us spent hours in political meetings from which we were excluded; when they were not studying the latest party instructions, they bent over their books or disappeared for long stints working in factories and on communes. The prospect of a year without social contact stretched out before us.

  Exploring the rich traditions of Chinese food, we realized, was one of the few recreational possibilities available to us. It also provided the collateral benefit that we could at least share some public space with the local people, whose passion for their own cuisine seemed to have survived even the onslaught of the Maoist revolution. For us, this was a welcome diversion from the bleakness of institutional life. It was only afterward that I fully understood the gulf that separated our recreational indulgence from the preoccupations of the Chinese diners who crowded into the capital’s restaurants.

  Between 1960 and 1962, just over a decade earlier, an unknown number of Chinese had starved to death in what the official record still insists was a three-year stretch of natural disaster. The estimates of the dead vary from 30 million to 80 million. Every adult I encountered back then was a survivor of the worst mass starvation in human history.

  It was a disaster created by politics. In 1958 Mao Zedong, in one of his periodic bouts of reckless hubris, launched China on a course of hectic industrialization that he boasted would bring China’s steel-making capacity up to that of Britain within fifteen years. It was to be done through the collective efforts of the laboring masses, armed with the magic power of his own thought.

  Hundreds of millions of peasants were organized into communes, their possessions—animals, land, and household goods—redesignated collective property overnight. They were to labor at the party’s direction and be paid in kind through the distribution of the annual surplus, if surplus there was, according to how many work points they had earned in the course of the year. On top of their labor in the fields, they “voluntarily” dug irrigation ditches and steep hillside terraces, built roads and dams—many of which were to collapse—and, in fulfillment of Mao’s steel-making ambitions, attempted to forge steel in makeshift backyard furnaces. Millions of people wasted months of effort and untold tons of fuel creating unusable pig iron.

  The magic of Mao’s thoughts extended to agriculture: the peasants must throw off their old conservative habits and harness themselves to the power of revolution. He ordered the grasslands ploughed up for wheat, grain to be planted more densely, rice to be grown where it had never been cultivated before. If his instructions were followed to the letter, he said, China’s harvests would triple.

  It went wrong from the beginning, but who would dare to tell him? To deny the magic was to betray the revolution, and what local official would volunteer for the disgrace of being designated a counterrevolutionary and the likelihood of a slow death in a labor camp? If the chairman ordained that they could triple the grain harvest, that is what would happen. From across China miraculous harvests were reported, yields abundant enough to fill the state granaries to capacity and still leave plenty for export.

  But the magic of Mao’s thought worked only in the minds of party faithful. In the peasants’ fields, the harvests had collapsed; the thin topsoil of the ploughed-up grasslands had blown aw
ay, exposing barren rock; the closely planted grain had shriveled and died. The rice had withered in strange latitudes. Peasants had salvaged what they could, enough perhaps to see them through a lean winter and to give them some seed stock for the following year—provided no grain tax was collected.

  When the magic of Mao’s thought met the desperate reality of the countryside, the result was disaster. The grain tax was set high, in accordance with the miraculous harvests reported from across the country. When the peasants refused to pay it, they were accused of sabotaging the revolution and hoarding grain. State officials seized all they could find. Within a few months people began to go hungry, then to starve. By the time the policy was reversed—and Mao himself sidelined—the manmade famine had raged for three years.

  Fifty years later, the government still prefers to blame the weather. Today, in a country of expanding waistlines, young people are bewildered by rumors of hunger in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. But back in the 1970s, everyone remembered the desperation of just a decade before. Hungry ghosts still thronged the memories of the people we passed in the streets, and a bowl of rice was something that few of the living took for granted.

  There was food, though it was not abundant. Grain, oil, and meat were all rationed, and restaurants required their customers to supply coupons for their meals. The coupons tied people to their home district; they were not valid elsewhere. Scarcity was still the rule. The campus canteen served compacted cubes of stale rice with bowls of thin vegetables. In the Beijing winter, great pyramids of cabbages appeared on the edge of the institute’s playing fields, their bulk slowly dissipating as the cooks loaded wheelbarrows with tired cabbages to haul off to the canteen. Bright red persimmons were left outside to freeze and passed for ice cream. To buy an orange required a medical certificate. But in the parallel reality that foreigners occupied there were no grain coupons, perhaps to maintain the fiction of socialist abundance. We were free to eat where we chose.

  For us, eating our way through China’s gastronomic encyclopedia was an escape from the drab hostility of Mao’s China. It was the only visible trace of the China of my imagination, the China that had first impelled me to climb the steep foothills of the language. I had landed in Beijing just as China’s richly layered imperial past was in retreat. The Tang poetry that I wanted to study, the celadon glazes and gilded, curved roofs that I admired, the shaded courtyards hidden behind high gray walls that I longed to explore were all beyond reach. Traditional culture was banned as reactionary and all beliefs, other than socialism, condemned as superstition.

  The culture of food, though, had stubbornly survived, albeit behind a facade of austere proletarianism. Restaurants were dilapidated and poorly lit, and their clients spat chewed debris freely onto the table or the floor. But behind the kitchen door, old skills had quietly been preserved, waiting for better times.

  In the 1980s Mao’s lifelong rival, the diminutive political survivor Deng Xiaoping, began to dismantle the dead chairman’s legacy in earnest. He had suffered political disgrace twice, and on his third return to power he was a man in a hurry. The reforms he launched would set China on a path of headlong growth that would extinguish Maoist fundamentalism forever. Mao was reduced to the status of revered ancestor as the society that he had transformed into a socialist state turned to the market with enthusiasm.

  By the 1990s, peasants had their collectivized land back under household control, though many would lose it again to rapacious local officials. The managers of state-owned factories operating at a loss abandoned the Maoist idea that everyone should have a job, and the factory workers discovered that there was a dark side to the market economy: they were no longer the proletarian elite, and their safe factory jobs evaporated. The managers grabbed large shareholdings in the new, slimmed-down enterprises, and the workers were left to fend for themselves.

  As the People’s Communes were broken up and the state factories dismantled, setting up in business became the lifeline of the newly redundant. Workers began to revive the skills of petty enterprise, and food production ceased to be a state monopoly. For some, it became a means of survival; for a few, it was the route to riches.

  In Chongqing, a sweltering metropolis on the edge of the Yangtze River in Sichuan, former Red Guard Zhou Wenli and his wife set up a tiny hot pot restaurant. They began with a couple of tables on the pavement outside the family home. In a country in which innovation was still rare and where it was still considered dangerous to be different, one simple invention was to make the Zhous suddenly and fabulously rich. It was a gas-fired hot pot that was set into the table and divided in two sections; one was filled with a fiery, chile-laced version of the local dish, while the other side was blander. It became a sensation. Within five years, the Zhous commanded a chain of large and lavish hot pot restaurants in ever-smarter locations. They added a cabaret of brightly dressed dancers, mostly peasant girls from mountain villages, in tinsel costumes. The colors were electric, as though the Zhous and their customers needed to erase the memory of two decades of monochrome living.

  The restaurant chain did not just make the Zhous rich, it allowed them to retell the story of their lives. Mr. Zhou acquired a white Cadillac and a chauffeur and dressed in tailored Western suits. The couple bought a generous detached house on a raw new estate. On their bedroom wall they hung their wedding photographs—not photographs of the day they had actually married, but photographs of the wedding they now felt they should have had.

  Fifteen years earlier, their marriage had been a low-key affair, in line with the politics of the day. Nobody had dressed up, and the only treats were a handful of sweets and a few cigarettes shared with the local party officials. It had been commemorated in a black-and-white photograph of the couple taken in front of a standard-issue poster of Chairman Mao. They stood staring at the camera, side by side, neither smiling nor touching.

  The couple’s talent for business had allowed them to leave those days far behind, but even their new affluence was not enough to make up for a youth lived in drab austerity. They had the power to carry their wealth into the future, but they also had the capacity to project it into the past, replacing their black-and-white memories with a colorful fantasy biography. They retroactively created the life that politics had denied them, a made-to-order life story in which they played the starring roles.

  On the bedroom wall of their new villa, the utilitarian image of their socialist wedding was replaced with blown-up photographs of a wedding that never was. Mr. Zhou, dressed in a morning suit and top hat, leans toward the camera over the head of his wife, his gaze mimicking in its intensity that of the romantic lead in a Hollywood B movie. His bride is encased in an entire sweet shop of silk and lace, her heavily made-up face framed by a sculpture of black curls, topped with a white veil. The couple gazes out of the frame with the self-absorption of a pair of actors impersonating themselves for an admiring public.

  The Zhous were not the only people who were rewriting their life story. The restaurants they opened were both places to eat and an invitation to share a fantasy of affordable glamour. Food was no longer about survival: across the country it was being reinvented to reflect a different China, a country that was suddenly turning out cheap goods for credit-fueled Western consumers and which, after years of isolation, was hungry to open to the world.

  Ten years ago, a small street in central Beijing that I know well was a quiet, unpaved lane that boasted a greengrocer, a dry cleaner, and a small noodle shop. Now it offers thirty different restaurants, from Indian through Italian to Tibetan. A pair of elderly sisters have opened a tea shop in their living room and dispense homemade sponge cakes and apple tarts. A down-market hotel sells lasagna and chili con carne to passing backpackers. Coffee, which few Chinese used to find palatable—one Chinese teacher once told me it tasted like medicine—is now so ubiquitous that Chinese friends think nothing of spending the equivalent of half a migrant worker’s daily wage on a single Starbucks cappuccino. Tea drinkin
g, too, has become a gourmet pursuit: an artist friend, known in the 1990s for his risqué performance art, recently chose to rendezvous at a teahouse where the brew he selected from the heavily brocaded menu cost thirty pounds for each tiny cup.

  A dairy industry has sprung from nowhere in a country where cheese was once regarded with bewilderment and disgust, and exotic fruits and vegetables are on sale year-round. Kentucky Fried Chicken is now rumored to be China’s biggest restaurant chain, and every city is infested with McDonald’s. Meat eating, once a New Year’s treat for many, has made young generations taller, while diabetes, obesity, and other afflictions of plenty are taking hold.

  The Chinese people have never been so numerous or so well-off, and most can eat their fill, thanks to the thirty years of industrialization and economic growth. Hunger is a remote memory for the newly affluent in China’s cities, but food remains at the center of the sense of well-being. Where once it was hoarded and husbanded, now it is dispensed with lavish extravagance. Wasting food is no longer seen as a sin against the labor of the peasant farmer but as a sign of lavish generosity in a wealthy host; in the competition for face, no animal is too exotic to end its days on the dining table. The rarer the creature, the more it boosts the host’s reputation for good living. Poachers comb the forests and hills of neighboring countries for owls, crocodiles, pangolins, and civet cats to serve on China’s tables. China’s zoos offer visitors the opportunity, for a price, to eat the inmates, and the guardians of China’s nature preserves have been known to celebrate important occasions by serving endangered species to their guests.

  Old superstitions—that eating the corresponding part of an animal will cure an afflicted human organ—drive some of this traffic. In its most banal form, men eat animal penises in an effort to reassure themselves about the performance of their own. In a similar quest for potency, between 30 million and 100 million sharks are mutilated each year for the supposedly aphrodisiac qualities of their fins. Warnings that the elevated levels of mercury they contain might have the opposite physiological effect have not yet dented consumer demand. Nor has the suspicion that the Cantonese habit of eating civet cat contributed to the outbreak of SARS in 2002 had much impact on the popularity of the dish.