Topics covered include the uses of describing his birthplace in Shandong as the “Holy Land” of China, the many topics he refused to talk about, chauvinism in the Bronze Age, and the fact that despite dynamiting his grave and desecrating his descendants’ corpses, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution did not turn out to be his worst enemy in the twentieth century!
We finish up by discussing the “new” bits of Confucian scripture that have turned up in recent memory, finds like Several Disciples Asked and the The Essentials, found in the 1970s, and the two “lost” chapters of The Analects, unearthed in a tomb in Nanchang in 2011.
Click here to listen to me talking to Mark Dolan on his Talk Radio show last night about drunken monkeys, innovations in rice production, the primacy of pork products, chopsticks, the desert of desserts, Mao’s melon unpleasantness during the Cultural Revolution, and the looming issue of international food security.
I show up at the 20:30 mark, so you need to click on the second of the four available sections.
Possibly because of the increased prosperity of the Tang era, it is also the first time we see a mention of a particular kind of snack food, intended to be consumed between meals, and increasingly as time wore on, in accompaniment with tea. Named as mere Touches of the Heart (dian xin), which is to say barely enough to fill you up, they are better known abroad by the Tang-era pronunciation preserved in the tea-taking, brunch-munching culture of the Cantonese: dim sum.
There is a curious Australian habit of calling them dim sim, which seems to confuse a topolect variant first recorded in the Melbourne Argus in October 1928 with a large pork dumpling invented in the same city by William Wing Young in the 1940s. As a result, whenever I am among Australians we find ourselves hectoring each other about pronunciation, with me pedantically trying to get them to speak medieval Chinese while they try to get me speak Australian. Another peculiar Australian coinage is to distinguish between Long Soup, which has noodles in it, and Short Soup, which has dumplings in it.
“The Emperor’s Feast, by shining a light on some of the intricacies of Chinese history over more than two millennia, serves as a timely reminder that the country’s modern cuisine is the delicious fruit of a rich, ancient and perhaps surprisingly multicultural tradition.”
A lovely review of The Emperor’s Feast appears in this week’s Spectator magazine, by Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper.
“Pover’s narrative of her Tohoku experiences scales out and out like a Christopher Nolan film, beginning with her first frenzied days handing out supplies to tsunami victims, and then the years that followed as she returned to follow up: a day, a month, a decade. The reader experiences her expanding circle of attention almost in real time – when she first sees Oshika, it is a once-picturesque village in ruins, populated by wary victims and feral children. As she gains the deeper time and perspective to look around her, we get to hear about people’s lives and the long history of the community.
“One Month in Tohoku is that most glorious of prospects: a disaster-movie in reverse, beginning with the awful, grandstanding destruction, and then showing us the village rebuilding, names being put to faces, and storylines unfolding.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Caroline Pover’s memoir of disaster relief in the wake of the 2011 tsunami.
“Maomao is a self-harming teenage wallflower in an institution populated solely by other girls who will literally kill each other over the chance to go to the prom. In that most imperial of Bechdel tests, there is only one man who matters in the whole world, and the women talk about him all the time, but he is literally the master of all he surveys, and anyone who can snare his heart and bear his favourite son and stay alive will be the queen bee.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Natsu Hyuuga’s novel The Apothecary Diaries.
Kaifeng’s bars were riddled with chancers – sing-song girls who would come to the table unbidden, and freelance hawkers who would hand out flowers or treats as if they were complimentary, only to reveal that there was a price to pay. Such hassle was part of the drinking life all over Kaifeng, except at Charcoal Zhang’s and Yoghurt Zhang’s, two higher-end establishments that served only the finest of wines and particular pickles, and chased all the riff-raff from the door.
We see in them, however, the early glimmerings of the Chinese theatre. Although few of their skits have been known to survive, at least in the forms they were originally performed at table-side, we do have a list of some of their names, many of which are immediately evocative of certain set-ups that would not be out of place today.
There are several titles related to ‘wrecking the restaurant’, which were presumably playlets of humorous incompetence. One is called Starting a Fire While Serving the Soup (song geng tang fang huozi), and immediately summons up images in my mind of a Chinese Basil Fawlty losing it with a waiter. Similarly evocative of a timeless routine is one that’s simply called There’s Only a Little Pepper (hujiao sui xiao). Some titles suggest wordplay or a stand-up routine, even a challenge to name a hundred fruits or cooking implements, while others have an interactive element requiring the participation of certain diners as they interact with actors playing the ingénue, the poor student, or the wily official.
Such lost Song-era performances have numerous echoes in modern-day Chinese dining. Skit is almost the wrong word for them – but there are scripted moments of performativity in many a modern-day Chinese restaurant that lays claim to anything more than basic food.
It’s only here, as I type up the forgotten table antics of the medieval Chinese eatery, that I am reminded of the time when I was with a film crew in Luoyang, where my ‘special’ fish dish came with the ringing of a gong, fireworks, and a hooting bunch of waiters dressed as imperial ministers. I remember this only because when I discovered it, I tried to get my attention-shy director to order it the next day without telling her that the whole restaurant would come to a halt when she did.
Similarly, I once endured a seemingly endless five minutes with the ‘Noodle Dancer’ (laomian-shi) at a prestigious hotpot restaurant in Xi’an – a capering madman who would juggle and thrash the dough to create handmade noodles in front of me.
“BEHOLD!” he bellowed. “I AM THE NOODLE DANCER WHO CREATES NOODLES OUT OF NOTHING. SEE AS I WHIRL AND TWIRL. SEE AS I SWIRL AND FURL! LIKE A LASSOO! LIKE A WHIP! I CREATE NOODLES OUT OF RAW DOUGH JUST FOR YOU!”
Unfortunately for me, I had ordered two helpings, so he had to go through the whole ostentatious routine all over again.
It all started at the Tasty Congee & Noodle Wantun Shop, a Hong Kong airport café requiring customers to order at the counter and wait for their number to show up. Online reviews for the chain are extremely complimentary – Yelp is full of comments about some of the best fried noodles and congee to be found, high praise indeed for a food-obsessed place like Hong Kong. There are, however, occasional references to a certain brusqueness of service at the airport branch, a very large menu that is difficult to process in a hurry, and an anxious overcrowding that can cost dawdling customers their table if they don’t keep a watchful eye for their order number.
Some or all of these elements combined for two Mainland ladies in 2018, who had plainly already had a miserable time on their Hong Kong vacation.
“I felt like I was subjected to shame and humiliation,” one had tweeted earlier, as reported in the South China Morning Post by Naomi Ng. “In Hong Kong, if you speak English, people will be polite to you. If you speak Mandarin, they will roll their eyes at you.”
At the café, waiting for their homebound flight, they got into a scuffle with a member of staff. They complained about poor customer service. He told them to stuff it and swore at them. Both sides, according to one witness, started throwing food around, until the man pushed a tray of congee and noodles at them, splashing some on one of the women’s clothes.
Reading between the lines: it was post-Christmas/New Year rush, people had probably been working overtime and covering for winter flu. The café was crowded, and the staff under pressure to keep tables moving. Someone misses their number; someone takes their table; someone gets told to hurry up; someone says they wanted theirs without chili not with it. After some shouting, the women were refunded their bill and left, but a media footprint was already growing – including shots of the incriminating tray, left on the floor for mere minutes afterwards.
Social media magnifies and preserves such incidents in a way not possible in previous generations. The pictures and the online footprint of something that would have otherwise been forgotten in moments provided enough material for newspaper follow-ups. It is a story I can access years later, and part of a narrative that continues Hong Kong’s cross-cultural stand-off of “dogs and locusts.” I remain in two minds about whether this is a good thing, and here’s why.
In 1991, I was witness to a hysterical altercation at a family-run fish restaurant in Kending, Taiwan. As best as I could tell, someone had married someone they shouldn’t, and granny’s inheritance risked being frittered away and someone should have cleaned out the pumps, and in what seemed like mere seconds, a scrum had developed at the front of the restaurant, open to the warm summer-night air and the beach beyond. The old granny grabbed a meat cleaver and smashed its blunt corner into the glass fish tanks, inundating the plaza outside with water and gasping trout. The crabs made a break for it into the street, scuttling through swerving traffic, as the old lady sat sobbing at one of the empty tables. Her children scattered back to the kitchen and rushed to clean up the tables, and everybody pretended there weren’t a dozen huge fish dying on the patio.
I had no idea what was going on. At the time, I lacked the Chinese or the authorial pushiness to really ask. But the only evidence of this is me telling you. I didn’t have a film studio in my pocket that could document it all. Access to the World Wide Web was still a year in my future. I’m sure that the Great Kending Fish Restaurant Fight was an order of magnitude of drama and controversy above a scuffle in an airport café in 2018, but the technology we use in our everyday lives has changed the way that we prioritise and remember. In the 21st century, such technology can be used for the evils of fake news and filler, but it can also be used to swiftly escalate issues in food safety and law. Access, accountability and archives are a feature of modern social media, and the way we talk and think about food and the food industry.
Testing the mash for rice wine in Shaoxing. Photo: Clarissa Zhang for Route Awakening (Nat Geo)
The streaming site BiliBili is currently running several episodes of the TV series Route Awakening (National Geographic), including the shows on the history of Tea and Alcohol in China, in which I taste-test three teas blindfolded, assiduously sample the various varieties of Shaoxing rice wine, and get told off under the hot Fujian sun for picking tea leaves in the wrong manner. These, and many other experiences, all fed into the materials that went into writing The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals.
And for listeners in Ireland (or anywhere else in the world, courtesy of the interwebs), I am appearing on Newstalk FM to talk to Sean Moncrieff about my history of Chinese food, the nature of Irish pubs in China, and the hidden diversity in “Chinese” cuisine. For those that don’t know, a Spice Bag is a recent Dublin invention, mixing chips, fried chicken, Sichuan pepper and Chinese five-spice powder.
The logo below is from one of Xi’an’s Irish pubs, the Green Molly, which as linguists may note, uses a handy pun to call itself lu mouli (“Green Jasmine”) in Chinese. Rather that than a certain establishment in Beijing, which is Paddy’s on the main sign, but Ai’erlan jiugui (the Irish Drunk) in Chinese.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 