All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K Psychotic flight attendants and bumpy landings: Share your airline horror stories in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Pop goes the cathedral By Laura Miller New book reveals architectural triumphs (12/17/97) The Yukon Quest By Laura Johnston Mush! Racing 1,000 miles by dog sled (12/16/97) Road Warrior By Mary Beth Maslowski Expat's guide: Cost-cutting and culture-exploring in Tokyo (12/15/97) Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Two delicious appetizers for your holiday bash (12/12/97) Passages By Don George "Fifty Years of Europe": Jan Morris on France, England and Germany past and present (12/11/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		______won ton lust | E X C E R P T | By John Krich 370 pages Nonfiction Kodansha | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Editor's note: In his delicious new book, "Won Ton Lust," John Krich recounts his adventures and misadventures journeying around the world with his Chinese wife, Mei, in search of the planet's best Chinese restaurant. In this excerpt, the couple ventures off China's beaten tourist track to the city of Chengdu. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | "When you go to Beijing, you see how small a rank you hold. When you travel to Canton, you realize how little money you've got. But when you come to Chengdu, you find out how big is your appetite." With this contemporary proverb, a sharp-talking deputy from the Sichuan People's Congress welcomes us to "The Storehouse of Heaven." The capital of China's "bread basket" province for a thousand years, Chengdu is less recognizable to Western ears than its home-cooked, chili-laced specialties like twice-cooked pork, tea-smoked duck, dan dan noodles, and ma po dofu. It's said that travel, near or far, is always the shortcut to finding out who we are. But what sort of persons would fly to the western limits of Han China in a whining old Tupelov-154 just to sample a storied bowl of quivering bean curd, most likely too peppery for ingestion? Apparently, we are Very Important People. Thanks to a well-placed friend in Beijing, we're met and led through the airport mobs to a black Nissan limo with siren and bubble-top light. Our lead blocker, Mr. Xie, is no sluggish party hack. His chubby cheeks, button nose, and deep-set eyes instantly suggest an impish koala. His full head of coarse hair stands at attention in uncombed swirls, leaving the impression that he's just got out of bed. Draped uneasily over a buttoned vest, Mr. Xie's standard-issue black, double-breasted jacket serves as a kind of shawl for his broad shoulders. As our limo weaves around horse carts and tractors through a rain-speckled night, our front-seat barker fairly blows a steady stream of chatter in Sichuan's clipped and choppy dialect. This beer-bellied Buddhist's implacable self-confidence has not been the slightest bit sapped by twenty-eight years as a People's Liberation Army soldier stationed in Tibet border posts. By the time we're nearing the center of this heartland hub of six million, we've heard all about Mr. Xie's fluency in Russian and Tibetan, and extensive knowledge of Chinese medicine, including the various uses of pig bones. "As a chef I've mastered at least sixty local dishes. I can teach you the best technique for deep meditation and people say I'm the best fortuneteller. Did you know that Chairman Mao himself used the I Ch'ing to find his safe hideout in Yenan?" As modern as he is traditional, Mr. Xie adds, "By the way, can I facilitate you in any form of economic investment?" Mei and I can only glance at one another in amazement. What does this guy eat for breakfast? Who put the life force known as ch'i in his Cheerios? Or is this our first sampling of Sichuan's self-proclaimed "red pepper spirit"? Instead of depositing us in the usual musty banquet hall, Mr. Xie has our limo pull up alongside a mangy row of white-tiled, open-air stalls. At a four-table affair bathed in butcher-shop pink fluorescence, Mr. Xie barks instructions to several kids in white caps nearly as charcoal-smudged as their cheeks. The woks fire up and by the time you can say cornstarch, we have Sichuan's signature dishes laid before us: soft bean curd drowned in oil and a dollop of minced pork, hot-and-sour duck's blood soup, hand-twisted noodles flecked with pickled cabbage, and last but hardly least, my obligatory fish-flavored shredded pork. This first rendition in the land of its birth, tangy and decidedly fishless, sears my tongue toward Nirvana. Mr. Xie beams with pride. After five minutes in Chengdu, I'm already "finding out the size of my appetite." Fancier isn't necessarily better in the city with China's liveliest street life. And this People's Deputy isn't in it for the luxury, either. Applying his formidable zealousness to the task of finding a bargain for two "humble writers," Mr. Xie escorts us to a backpackers' hotel where teenagers snooze with their heads on the reception counter. So much for free board in some cushy state dacha! This hotel lobby is unadorned but for the obligatory bank of clocks set to numerous time zones, all of them wrong. It's a bad sign when the mattress in our room has no sheets and we're relieved that none of the lights switch on. But Mr. Xie's face is too mischievous to ever lose face. "Come on! My friend is the manager at a much better place!" We hightail it to a high-rise VIP suite hung with gold lamé curtains in what must be the Mildew Wing. The red carpet treatment would work better if the carpet weren't covered with black blotches. We wonder if the heaps of tea leaves have been left in the toilet for us to read our touring futures. Then we're refused the room for failing to show a marriage license, until Mei reaches for her U.S. passport -- that worldwide license to get away with anything! "When the sun comes out in Sichuan," Mr. Xie warns us, "all the dogs begin to bark." In the perpetually shrouded winter clamminess, Mei and I can hardly see the humongous statue of a saluting Chairman Mao, alabaster in his pea coat, rising above one end of the People's Road. Like all Chinese cities, Chengdu's population consists of millions more than you'd imagine and millions less than it seems when you're trying to get anywhere. The usual waves of weary bicyclists churn past this month's massive display of Party exhortation, "Fight Bravely Three Years to Make Chengdu Model Hygienic City!" Fortunately, the ruled boulevards give way to an unhygienic chaos. Chengdu's wooden two-story houses look almost Elizabethan with their boxy overhangs and variations of exposed beam and thatching. Sichuan's famed bounty is showcased by a sidewalk abundance of straw baskets and bamboo bird cages, delicate stacks of budding eggplant, flowers and tobacco, fans and paper cuttings and bonsai trees. Workers hand grind sesame oils in giant woks; old men puff on long-stemmed bamboo pipes. Kung fu epics are projected in converted, flap-covered teahouses -- the only cinemas in the world where the seats are made of bamboo. China finally looks the way foreigners have always imagined it. Along every riverbank, temple courtyard or bamboo grove, there's another teahouse. These are hardly sites for contemplation, but sprawling, noisy affairs where all age groups compete to stretch perpetually stained cups of soaked green tea leaves with composting piles of chewed pumpkin seeds laid beside cigarette butts. On every sidewalk, too, outdoor loungers stick skewers of frog thighs, pig livers and baby sparrows into a sludgy, week-old broth that's divided into spicy and nonspicy sections like the symbol for yin and yang. I've been led to believe that the real popularity of the Sichuan hot pot is due to the opium that's added to addict customers. But Mr. Xie will assure us that any opium in the broth is just the non-narcotic flower known as the keke. Yet another of my Oriental fantasies shot to hell. Mei and I prefer to stop within the calm portals of an immense, luridly painted-up model of a Qing Dynasty mansion that's topped with a huge neon sign saying, "Chengdu Snack City." Around a reflecting pool lined with covered pavilions, a dozen or so restaurants have been grouped together in government-sponsored competition. We get dizzy choosing among the trays of saucer-sized platters loaded with variants of noodle dough soaked in degrees of chili oil. Lounging on silk pillows under eaves covered with fiery dragons, we plow through as many as twenty-four dishes. Slippery folds of wun tun with little or no stuffing look like albino goldfish slithering in a truly red sea. No asterisks or printed peppers warn us of impending spiciness. There are no menus here and every snack is hot stuff. Now my tongue has a true out-of-mouth experience. Or am I in heaven? Chengdu's much-extolled ma la numbness is provided by generous garnishes of ground fagara, a half-sweet and half-deadly peppercorn that was imported along the trade routes some six hundred years back. Judging by its ubiquitous presence atop every dish, it's difficult to imagine what the Sichuan diet might have included before that. According to Chinese medicine, the inner yang fires stoked by the pepper counteracts outer humidity and dampness. And the relative prosperity of the peasants has always made this a province with fewer distinctions between down-home and palace foods. Every dish tastes tugged from the earth. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | N E X T+P A G E+| Everything essential to Chinese culture is connected to eating