Salon Wanderlust | Passages: Won Ton Lust

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Are you more tempted to have a romantic fling while traveling? Bare all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

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Pop goes the cathedral
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New book reveals architectural triumphs
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The Yukon Quest
By Laura Johnston
Mush! Racing 1,000 miles by dog sled
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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
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WON TON LUST | PAGE 2 OF 2
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"The four seas and the eight horizons all gathered into one cloud," wrote the seventh-century poet Du Fu, whose recreated cottage is Chengdu's leading tourist site. "You can't tell an ox coming from a horse going, or the muddy Ching from clear Wei."
Neither can Mei or I on our way to one of the shrines of Chinese cuisine. Suddenly, our taxi's engine starts racing inexplicably. The driver pulls over with a shrug. "Overheated," he tells Mei. Just coincidentally, there's a motorcycle rickshaw waiting on the spot. As soon as we've transferred into the carriage, the taxi pulls away, good as new. Two fares to get us three blocks.
Open to a busy, tree-lined boulevard, Chengdu's Chen Ma Po Dofu Restaurant is dimly lit at noon, with rotating ceiling fans, an old oak bar, a blackboard on which specialties have been scrawled in white chalk and a monstrous charnel house of a kitchen. The level of noise and excessive rudeness of the waitresses augur well. This is the direct descendant of the roadhouse run by Mrs. Chen, a widow with facial scars from a childhood disease who became a legend through her ma po dofu, now appearing on menus throughout the planet but rarely translated in its full meaning of "pockmarked grandma's tofu." Transcending a life of toil following the accidental death of her husband in 1901, she created her signature dish by combining the products of a neighboring lamb butcher and bean-curd maker. Was it back at San Francisco's Hunan Restaurant that I first got hooked on this curious combination of crumbly custard topped with an Oriental ragu?
I can hardly wait to poke my sticks into the original. But impersonal state management and three moves from the original site have done little to maintain quality. The grand creation itself is served in a green plastic bowl that looks to have been recycled a million or two times. This ma po dofu is pretty much like other versions I'll have in Sichuan: a buttery slab of fresh curd plopped deep into red chili oil, topped with a dollop of pork meat, and garnished with numbing peppercorns. A meal in itself, as they say, without any of the West's frivolous scallions or peas.
I try to snap a quick photo back in the kitchen, but an aproned bouncer shoos me out, squawking as though I'm a corporate spy on a raid for Duncan Hines ma po mix. When Mei asks for some tea to rinse down the heat, the answer is Mei you. Pronounced like "mayo," that phrase was the trademark response to all queries during the Mao era, meaning, "We don't have any!" Mei is scandalized. Imagine a Chinese restaurant with no tea!
We get better service, and a heaped plate of smoked duck, from a former center of anti-Kuomintang activities that came to be called the Rat Hole Restaurant. And where will the ginger trail lead us tonight? Our stomachs, our eyes, our hearts demand an answer. Eating is more than necessity, it's the essential adventure, the quest that must be fulfilled most often and therefore offers the surest route to surprise.
Mei keeps asking for a restaurant called Rong Le Yuan and ends up getting pointed down darkened streets reduced to wreckers' rubble. With her accent, the locals think we're looking for a playground. So we settle for a private room in a new hot pot palace where a typically scrambled English brochure "invites gentle persons of all ranks to descend." It is here that I discover my new Sichuanese favorite, the killer shui zhu ro pian -- hunks of steamed pork atop a crunchy variant of cabbage all drenched in chili oil.
Afterward, we poke our heads through hanging beads into a nightspot set glamorously beneath a circular highway rotary. The Casablanca Bar features a torch singer who mumbles her way through the Beatles' "Yesterday." The waitresses ruin the effect of their leopard-skin miniskirts by standing at attention like choir girls with gloved hands clasped together. The real entertainment comes from a back booth where a drunk "unit leader" is haranguing and slapping around a blubbering underling. The other patrons try not to look, but we can't help peeking at this spectacle of obeisance. The less dominant man presents first one side of his face to be chastised, then the other.
"Jesus said to turn the other cheek," Mei whispers. "But here, the god is money." When a Tibetan monk swathed in gold robes exits a nearby cabaret with a glazed grin, we're enticed to pay an exorbitant fee for glasses of lemon tea while the "live fashion show" is replaced by a Madonna video. Apparently, Chengdu hasn't quite got the hang of Western decadence.
For an Eastern touch, Mr. Xie transports us to the Da Fuo, or Big Buddha, carved out of the river cliff to a height of seventy-one meters. Sitting like some beatific lumberjack, hands firmly on its knees, this rather goofy, square-jawed Da Fuo appears to be waiting for the next helping of dofu. Recently, a peasant from Guangdong came up with the remarkable discovery that the entire bluff itself forms the supine body of an even more gigantic Buddha -- with a pagoda erected right where a phallus should rise. Shouldn't a Buddha be contentedly flaccid? This prophet who laughs at the world can be taken home in the form of a battery-powered, rubber doughboy. "Ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho!" goes this zen Santa each time it rocks from side to side in our satchels. The thing sounds just like Mr. Xie.
Of course, the main reason we've come to the grimy river junction of Leshan is for a luncheon laid on by local officials. Our table has been loaded down with such perks as stir-fried venison, deep-fried swallows, and boiled, whole turtle. Every second bite, we have to stand for toasts with fiery rice wines. I have no idea what our provincial hosts could possibly want from us in return, though one bigwig with oddly hazel eyes pulls Mei aside for information about getting a cousin into an American dental college. This food is given for the sake of showing what one can give. Enforced by Confucian ritual or Communist pecking order, that's the highest value in China.
"We have no mother and no father," declares Mr. Xie as he eats and drinks everyone else under the table. "The People's Congress is our family!"
Sounds like the Masons, but I doubt whether their meetings end in a private room made of sparkly foam walls, equipped with the latest karaoke system and projection TV. Mr. Xie is a born ham who joins Mei in a duet of rousing folk tunes from fifties' propaganda films about Chinese army conquests. Tibet's greatest hits. The accompanying "music videos" consist of ruddy-cheeked nomads strolling happily amidst herds of yak.
We don't get in touch with the true spirit of Sichuan until the wife of a local carpet exporter suggests that we have supper with her father-in-law. "He's something of a food expert," she tells Mei, in what turns out to be quite an understatement. Whatever his profession, this occupant's service to the nation has gained him the biggest apartment I've entered in all of China, complete with parquet floors and a solarium. Though his business card is too small to hold all his titles, Mr. Liao Bokang could be anyone's archetypal bow-tie-wearing daddy. With his squared-off crew cut, bottle-thick glasses and salesman's smile, this Chairman of the Sichuan Political Association reminds me of a Chinese Ozzie (as in Harriet). Like many Sichuanese, this former underground fighter and government official is a tiny bundle of energy. Unassuming and highly practical, he embodies the best characteristics found in Sichuan's greatest political officer, China's number one "capitalist roader."
"In 1950, when Deng Xiaoping came to Chongqing and became the local secretary, he saw a bean flour noodle stand," Liao Bokang says of his mentor. "Since he had left the region when he was ten, he missed the food from his childhood so much that he went to try some. When the chief of the Security Police tried to stop him for security reasons, Deng said that the safest thing is to go where no one expects you to go, to eat what no one expects you to eat." The wit and wisdom of our supreme leader, according to Liao Bokang.
Once, Comrade Liao supervised the construction of the first bridge across the Yangtze River. Now he directs drivers, servants, and children with the unshakable confidence that is part of the product of China's unquestioned respect for age. The only query that leaves him stumped is where to find "the one restaurant to present you with the best of Sichuan." Like Mei and I, Comrade Liao is torn between authentic greasy spoons and elaborate, if less tasty, banquet houses. He settles somewhat grudgingly on Longchaoshou, generally acknowledged as Chengdu's premier dining house. We're whisked there in his black limo, then led through a ground-floor noodle house reeking of disinfectant. A table of honor is waiting for us in more exclusive surroundings, beside a traditional Chinese orchestra. As we're seated, Liao Bokang declares, "Food is the point where the material meets the spiritual."
Especially meals like this. Over the next two hours, we will sample eight cold dishes, five variants of dumplings in hot oil, chicken and pork over sizzling rice, chicken with peanuts and chilis, a whole fish, and of course, twice-cooked pork. In this version, the strips of meat are fatty and baconlike from the salty cure of a concentrated bean paste. Instead of cabbage, these are tossed in crunchy, hollow shoots of young garlic.
"There's the dish that won a hundred million hearts!" Liao Bokang swears with his broad grin, speaking for the entire populace of Sichuan. "And it must be made only with bean paste from Pi Country!"
Mr. Liao tries to slow himself with the proverb, "When you eat, you shouldn't speak." But he clearly doesn't believe it. "Still, words cannot convey the best dishes, the true feelings in life," he waxes, turning coyly toward his demure and more wizened wife. "To say 'I love you' to someone, that's too easy."
Still waiting for those words after fifty years, the blushing Mrs. Liao tries to hush him up by joking, "Just tell them about the food!'
Pouring out his heart, the old man explains how everything essential to Chinese culture is connected to eating. After all, "Min yi shi wei tian." Liao Bokang is the first of a hundred sages worldwide who cite this scripture from Confucius. Translations range anywhere from "People consider food uppermost" to "Daily fare is as high as heaven for the common man."
"But don't ask Confucius for the answers," Liao Bokang cautions. "He died two thousand years ago!" Better that I should ask him about the origin of dian xin (dim sum in Cantonese). "These snacks are called 'treasures to touch the heart' because they derive from buns which were easy for soldiers to carry when they left home. During the wars of the Sung Dynasty, these foods were the only reminders of beloved places for men far from home."
His home province has taken their food highly spiced ever since traders brought the chili from India, because "we're in the center of China, and that means everything here has to be more intense." To him, pepper represents the "characteristic of our present time. To do things faster. It's like disco in music." But he corrects the general belief that kung pao chicken comes from the Chinese words "to explode." In fact, the dish was invented by one General Gung Bao, a renaissance man who was both gourmet and dam-builder, a master chef and the executioner of the Empress Ci Xi's favorite eunuch. As for the reason the meat is so lean in the centerpiece of tea-smoked duck, "That's because in Sichuan, to get our birds to market, we make them run a marathon."
With emphatic hand gestures, and a big smile that undercuts all seriousness, Mr. Liao illustrates how our tea cups are narrowed at the base to ensure an even circulation of leaves. To him, "Chopsticks are a perfect example of physics, an application of the lever and the supporting point."
In China, the ultimate reference point is always food. Even Liao Bokang's description of the planet's cultural divide is based on eating. "In the world, one third of the people use chopsticks, one third use forks, and one third use their hands." So he's able to flatter me with the assessment that, "This makes you a one-hundred-percent man."
Liao Bokang is an inexhaustible fount of the Chinese beliefs that Mao's fevered crusades had sought to banish. "Just keep a big heart and your health in balance," he advises, dabbing his mouth with his napkin to suggest that the food orgy is nearly finished. "Try to look at everything that happens from the heights of history."
Which is how this one-time revolutionary can finish out his life surrounded by a table's worth of relatives who dote on his every pronouncement. But this contented cadre envies my work. Offering the best definition of travel, Liao Bokang confesses, "How I'd love to see what one hasn't seen, to hear what one hasn't heard, to taste what one hasn't tasted."
SALON | Dec. 18, 1997
John Krich is the author of "Music in Every Room," "El Beisbol" and "A Totally Free Man." His articles have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur and Salon. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Mei.
Copyright © by John Krich. Reprinted with permission of Kodansha International.
Make reservations to go to China and even pick out a restaurant or two at the Salon Wanderlust Marketplace.
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All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K Are you more tempted to have a romantic fling while traveling? Bare all in the Wanderlust area of 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 \| PAGE 2 OF 2 \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| "The four seas and the eight horizons all gathered into one cloud," wrote the seventh-century poet Du Fu, whose recreated cottage is Chengdu's leading tourist site. "You can't tell an ox coming from a horse going, or the muddy Ching from clear Wei." Neither can Mei or I on our way to one of the shrines of Chinese cuisine. Suddenly, our taxi's engine starts racing inexplicably. The driver pulls over with a shrug. "Overheated," he tells Mei. Just coincidentally, there's a motorcycle rickshaw waiting on the spot. As soon as we've transferred into the carriage, the taxi pulls away, good as new. Two fares to get us three blocks. Open to a busy, tree-lined boulevard, Chengdu's Chen Ma Po Dofu Restaurant is dimly lit at noon, with rotating ceiling fans, an old oak bar, a blackboard on which specialties have been scrawled in white chalk and a monstrous charnel house of a kitchen. The level of noise and excessive rudeness of the waitresses augur well. This is the direct descendant of the roadhouse run by Mrs. Chen, a widow with facial scars from a childhood disease who became a legend through her ma po dofu, now appearing on menus throughout the planet but rarely translated in its full meaning of "pockmarked grandma's tofu." Transcending a life of toil following the accidental death of her husband in 1901, she created her signature dish by combining the products of a neighboring lamb butcher and bean-curd maker. Was it back at San Francisco's Hunan Restaurant that I first got hooked on this curious combination of crumbly custard topped with an Oriental ragu? I can hardly wait to poke my sticks into the original. But impersonal state management and three moves from the original site have done little to maintain quality. The grand creation itself is served in a green plastic bowl that looks to have been recycled a million or two times. This ma po dofu is pretty much like other versions I'll have in Sichuan: a buttery slab of fresh curd plopped deep into red chili oil, topped with a dollop of pork meat, and garnished with numbing peppercorns. A meal in itself, as they say, without any of the West's frivolous scallions or peas. I try to snap a quick photo back in the kitchen, but an aproned bouncer shoos me out, squawking as though I'm a corporate spy on a raid for Duncan Hines ma po mix. When Mei asks for some tea to rinse down the heat, the answer is Mei you. Pronounced like "mayo," that phrase was the trademark response to all queries during the Mao era, meaning, "We don't have any!" Mei is scandalized. Imagine a Chinese restaurant with no tea! We get better service, and a heaped plate of smoked duck, from a former center of anti-Kuomintang activities that came to be called the Rat Hole Restaurant. And where will the ginger trail lead us tonight? Our stomachs, our eyes, our hearts demand an answer. Eating is more than necessity, it's the essential adventure, the quest that must be fulfilled most often and therefore offers the surest route to surprise. Mei keeps asking for a restaurant called Rong Le Yuan and ends up getting pointed down darkened streets reduced to wreckers' rubble. With her accent, the locals think we're looking for a playground. So we settle for a private room in a new hot pot palace where a typically scrambled English brochure "invites gentle persons of all ranks to descend." It is here that I discover my new Sichuanese favorite, the killer shui zhu ro pian -- hunks of steamed pork atop a crunchy variant of cabbage all drenched in chili oil. Afterward, we poke our heads through hanging beads into a nightspot set glamorously beneath a circular highway rotary. The Casablanca Bar features a torch singer who mumbles her way through the Beatles' "Yesterday." The waitresses ruin the effect of their leopard-skin miniskirts by standing at attention like choir girls with gloved hands clasped together. The real entertainment comes from a back booth where a drunk "unit leader" is haranguing and slapping around a blubbering underling. The other patrons try not to look, but we can't help peeking at this spectacle of obeisance. The less dominant man presents first one side of his face to be chastised, then the other. "Jesus said to turn the other cheek," Mei whispers. "But here, the god is money." When a Tibetan monk swathed in gold robes exits a nearby cabaret with a glazed grin, we're enticed to pay an exorbitant fee for glasses of lemon tea while the "live fashion show" is replaced by a Madonna video. Apparently, Chengdu hasn't quite got the hang of Western decadence. For an Eastern touch, Mr. Xie transports us to the Da Fuo, or Big Buddha, carved out of the river cliff to a height of seventy-one meters. Sitting like some beatific lumberjack, hands firmly on its knees, this rather goofy, square-jawed Da Fuo appears to be waiting for the next helping of dofu. Recently, a peasant from Guangdong came up with the remarkable discovery that the entire bluff itself forms the supine body of an even more gigantic Buddha -- with a pagoda erected right where a phallus should rise. Shouldn't a Buddha be contentedly flaccid? This prophet who laughs at the world can be taken home in the form of a battery-powered, rubber doughboy. "Ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho!" goes this zen Santa each time it rocks from side to side in our satchels. The thing sounds just like Mr. Xie. Of course, the main reason we've come to the grimy river junction of Leshan is for a luncheon laid on by local officials. Our table has been loaded down with such perks as stir-fried venison, deep-fried swallows, and boiled, whole turtle. Every second bite, we have to stand for toasts with fiery rice wines. I have no idea what our provincial hosts could possibly want from us in return, though one bigwig with oddly hazel eyes pulls Mei aside for information about getting a cousin into an American dental college. This food is given for the sake of showing what one can give. Enforced by Confucian ritual or Communist pecking order, that's the highest value in China. "We have no mother and no father," declares Mr. Xie as he eats and drinks everyone else under the table. "The People's Congress is our family!" Sounds like the Masons, but I doubt whether their meetings end in a private room made of sparkly foam walls, equipped with the latest karaoke system and projection TV. Mr. Xie is a born ham who joins Mei in a duet of rousing folk tunes from fifties' propaganda films about Chinese army conquests. Tibet's greatest hits. The accompanying "music videos" consist of ruddy-cheeked nomads strolling happily amidst herds of yak. We don't get in touch with the true spirit of Sichuan until the wife of a local carpet exporter suggests that we have supper with her father-in-law. "He's something of a food expert," she tells Mei, in what turns out to be quite an understatement. Whatever his profession, this occupant's service to the nation has gained him the biggest apartment I've entered in all of China, complete with parquet floors and a solarium. Though his business card is too small to hold all his titles, Mr. Liao Bokang could be anyone's archetypal bow-tie-wearing daddy. With his squared-off crew cut, bottle-thick glasses and salesman's smile, this Chairman of the Sichuan Political Association reminds me of a Chinese Ozzie (as in Harriet). Like many Sichuanese, this former underground fighter and government official is a tiny bundle of energy. Unassuming and highly practical, he embodies the best characteristics found in Sichuan's greatest political officer, China's number one "capitalist roader." "In 1950, when Deng Xiaoping came to Chongqing and became the local secretary, he saw a bean flour noodle stand," Liao Bokang says of his mentor. "Since he had left the region when he was ten, he missed the food from his childhood so much that he went to try some. When the chief of the Security Police tried to stop him for security reasons, Deng said that the safest thing is to go where no one expects you to go, to eat what no one expects you to eat." The wit and wisdom of our supreme leader, according to Liao Bokang. Once, Comrade Liao supervised the construction of the first bridge across the Yangtze River. Now he directs drivers, servants, and children with the unshakable confidence that is part of the product of China's unquestioned respect for age. The only query that leaves him stumped is where to find "the one restaurant to present you with the best of Sichuan." Like Mei and I, Comrade Liao is torn between authentic greasy spoons and elaborate, if less tasty, banquet houses. He settles somewhat grudgingly on Longchaoshou, generally acknowledged as Chengdu's premier dining house. We're whisked there in his black limo, then led through a ground-floor noodle house reeking of disinfectant. A table of honor is waiting for us in more exclusive surroundings, beside a traditional Chinese orchestra. As we're seated, Liao Bokang declares, "Food is the point where the material meets the spiritual." Especially meals like this. Over the next two hours, we will sample eight cold dishes, five variants of dumplings in hot oil, chicken and pork over sizzling rice, chicken with peanuts and chilis, a whole fish, and of course, twice-cooked pork. In this version, the strips of meat are fatty and baconlike from the salty cure of a concentrated bean paste. Instead of cabbage, these are tossed in crunchy, hollow shoots of young garlic. "There's the dish that won a hundred million hearts!" Liao Bokang swears with his broad grin, speaking for the entire populace of Sichuan. "And it must be made only with bean paste from Pi Country!" Mr. Liao tries to slow himself with the proverb, "When you eat, you shouldn't speak." But he clearly doesn't believe it. "Still, words cannot convey the best dishes, the true feelings in life," he waxes, turning coyly toward his demure and more wizened wife. "To say 'I love you' to someone, that's too easy." Still waiting for those words after fifty years, the blushing Mrs. Liao tries to hush him up by joking, "Just tell them about the food!' Pouring out his heart, the old man explains how everything essential to Chinese culture is connected to eating. After all, "Min yi shi wei tian." Liao Bokang is the first of a hundred sages worldwide who cite this scripture from Confucius. Translations range anywhere from "People consider food uppermost" to "Daily fare is as high as heaven for the common man." "But don't ask Confucius for the answers," Liao Bokang cautions. "He died two thousand years ago!" Better that I should ask him about the origin of dian xin (dim sum in Cantonese). "These snacks are called 'treasures to touch the heart' because they derive from buns which were easy for soldiers to carry when they left home. During the wars of the Sung Dynasty, these foods were the only reminders of beloved places for men far from home." His home province has taken their food highly spiced ever since traders brought the chili from India, because "we're in the center of China, and that means everything here has to be more intense." To him, pepper represents the "characteristic of our present time. To do things faster. It's like disco in music." But he corrects the general belief that kung pao chicken comes from the Chinese words "to explode." In fact, the dish was invented by one General Gung Bao, a renaissance man who was both gourmet and dam-builder, a master chef and the executioner of the Empress Ci Xi's favorite eunuch. As for the reason the meat is so lean in the centerpiece of tea-smoked duck, "That's because in Sichuan, to get our birds to market, we make them run a marathon." With emphatic hand gestures, and a big smile that undercuts all seriousness, Mr. Liao illustrates how our tea cups are narrowed at the base to ensure an even circulation of leaves. To him, "Chopsticks are a perfect example of physics, an application of the lever and the supporting point." In China, the ultimate reference point is always food. Even Liao Bokang's description of the planet's cultural divide is based on eating. "In the world, one third of the people use chopsticks, one third use forks, and one third use their hands." So he's able to flatter me with the assessment that, "This makes you a one-hundred-percent man." Liao Bokang is an inexhaustible fount of the Chinese beliefs that Mao's fevered crusades had sought to banish. "Just keep a big heart and your health in balance," he advises, dabbing his mouth with his napkin to suggest that the food orgy is nearly finished. "Try to look at everything that happens from the heights of history." Which is how this one-time revolutionary can finish out his life surrounded by a table's worth of relatives who dote on his every pronouncement. But this contented cadre envies my work. Offering the best definition of travel, Liao Bokang confesses, "How I'd love to see what one hasn't seen, to hear what one hasn't heard, to taste what one hasn't tasted." SALON \| Dec. 18, 1997 John Krich is the author of "Music in Every Room," "El Beisbol" and "A Totally Free Man." His articles have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur and Salon. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Mei. Copyright © by John Krich. Reprinted with permission of Kodansha International. Make reservations to go to China and even pick out a restaurant or two at the Salon Wanderlust Marketplace. \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \|